The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [78]
“And he’s a midget. Little person—sorry, little person. But way highend little person. He’s so well dressed you don’t even notice he’s a little person. He’s from this old Venetian family, a marchese of whatever whatever. It takes him about an hour just to say his name.
“But after that things go pretty quick. He says he represents somebody who wants to buy the button. I don’t even know how they know about it, but I say who is it. He’s all, I can’t say. I say, how much, and he’s all: one hundred million dollars. And I’m all: two hundred million. Fifty. Two hundred fifty million.
“Right? Check that out! And I want to know who the buyer is. Right? Now who wasted his childhood watching like a million hours of TV? That shit is practically second nature to me.
“So the midget takes out an envelope and inside the envelope is a cashier’s check for two hundred and fifty million. It’s like he knew what I was going to say. And I’m all, and? And he waves me over with his little stubby fingers. I figured he was going to whisper something in my ear, so I stop and bend down, and he’s all, no, and he keeps waving me right up to the edge of the dock, and then he points down into the water. And this face looms up at me.
“It just comes floating up toward the surface of the water. It’s enormous—it looks like the front of a truck coming up at me. I practically shit my pants.”
“What was it?”
“It was a dragon. There’s a dragon that lives in the Grand Canal! That’s who bought the button.”
Quentin knew about dragons, at least in theory. There weren’t many of them, and they mostly lived in rivers, one to a river—they were highly territorial. They hardly ever came out or spoke to anyone. They hardly ever did anything at all, just dreamed away the lifetime of the planet in secret fluvial oblivion. Except one of them had woken up long enough to talk to an aristocratic little person, apparently. And it had bestirred itself to show its face to Josh, and to buy his—their—magic button for two hundred fifty million dollars.
“So we go to the bank, we verify that the check is valid, then we walk back to the dock. I take out the button and hand it to the little guy, who’s put on one white glove, Michael Jackson–style. He looks at the button through a jeweler’s loupe, then he walks to the edge and chucks it in the water. Just like that. Then he gets in his launch and drives away.”
“That is pretty astonishing,” Quentin said. It was hard to even be mad about it. Though not impossible.
“Can you believe a dragon bought our button?” Josh said. “He knows who we are! Or who I am anyway. I don’t even think people knew there was a dragon in the Grand Canal. I mean, it’s salt water. You know that, right? It’s not actually a river, it’s a tidal estuary or whatever. I don’t think people know about saltwater dragons!”
“Josh, how would I go about getting in touch with that dragon?”
That brought him up short.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t think you can.”
“You did.”
“He got in touch with me.”
“Well, how would you try?”
Josh heaved an exasperated sigh.
“All right, there is this one girl I know who knows a lot about dragons. I guess I’d ask her.”
“Okay, good. Listen. This is what’s going to happen.” Quentin focused his will on Josh. Now hear this. He met Josh’s gaze and held it. “All due respect to your being king here, but Julia and I are king and queen of Fillory, and we have to get back there. For all intents and purposes we are on a fucking quest here. You are now on the quest team too. I am deputizing you. We have to get back to Fillory, and we don’t know how we’re going to do it. That’s the problem.”
Josh considered.
“That’s a big problem.”
“Yeah, and you’re the big fixer. Right? So let’s fix it.”
He’d give Josh this: maybe he