Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 22

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 Dresden arrives at his office, and we get a look at his adorable little pamphlets. He says he wrote some of
them himself, which for me mostly raises the question: who else wrote some of the pamphlets? He takes a very long time to search what doesn't sound like a very large office, and eventually finds Murphy lying on the floor next to his desk, with a horrible scorpion sting on her arm. Harry, quite reasonably, calls 911, and Murphy takes advantage of his distraction to handcuff him to herself. She also accuses him of "setting [her] up", because apparently asking her to stop searching his desk, which she was already in the process of doing, when she had gone to his office without telling him ahead of time, was clearly a clever ploy to get her to look in the desk so she would be stung by the evil scorpion amulet. 

Honestly, I would have preferred almost any approach to making Harry feel appropriately isolated other than Murphy's increasingly unreasonable mistrust and hostility. It's not as though she actually fills the "normal person to whom Harry can explain things" role after the first couple chapters, and there's enough direct address explanation that we didn't rally need someone in that role in the first place. 

Then the scorpion, who has been hiding under the desk, attacks. Harry locks it in his office and runs for the elevators, since he can't really take the stairs with an injured and semiconscious Murphy handcuffed to him at the wrist. They get into the elevator, while the scorpion monster, which be this point he has determined is a construct, meant to slowly absorb power once activated, getting bigger and stronger as it does, starts trying to rip through the outer doors. Managing this kind of construct from all the way out in his evil Lake Providence lair is the kind of thing I'm talking about with Victor having a gift for magic-at-a-distance. We hear a lot about how wizards prefer to operate from as far away as possible, but Victor "Shadowman" sells, the one-off, first book villain, is the only practitioner we see put this into practice for anything other than tracking and summoning. 

There follows what is probably the most memorable scene in this book. The scorpion lands on top of the elevator, which causes it to stop on like, the second floor, so Harry uses a big gust of wind to slam the elevator into the top of the shaft, crushing the scorpion, then puts them in a bouncy shield to survive the crash at the bottom, a trick he will use again to rather more dramatic effect in White Night. This is actually pretty cool, but it's hard to do justice to it without just copying the whole thing here. 

The giant bug defeated, they survived, and Harry takes a moment to loudly celebrate before remembering that this doesn't actually get him any closer to defeating Victor Sells, and now he definitely can't use the scorpion. 

I know this post is both short and late. It' hard to find much to say about the action heavy chapters. Jim Butcher can write an action scene, but I kind of can't, so I don't really have the tool set to talk about what he's doing on a craft level, and they don't usually give me a lot to analyze in the way of plot, characterization, or worldbuilding, so unless there's a serious writing issue, like the pronoun avoidance in Deat Beat, or a bit of cleverness that also reveals character (see again, White Night), I'm sort of at a loss. This should be less of an issue as the series goes on and we start seeing first more magical gadgets, and then more internality, during the mid-book fight scenes. 

The next post should go up on Wednesday as usual. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 21

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Monica has Dresden sit down with her in the kitchen, which is decorated with cartoon cows, and a row of glass bottles on the windowsill. This is basically the energy of every kitchen I've ever liked, so that's kind of nice. The room is described as her refuge, and it's an interesting contrast to Linda's little studio apartment. Linda has her whole own place, with the bathtub, and the candles. It's not necessarily a lot bigger than this kitchen, but it's all hers, in a way that Monica's space can't ever be. 

Monica pretty much immediately confirms that Jennifer Stanton is her sister, and only takes a little longer to also confirm that Victor is the one doing the murders. She talks about Jenny's career as a sex worker in that very 1990s way like it's maybe drug addiction. Ugh. She has a very hard time telling Dresden about Victor, which kind of reinforces my impression that there's some amount of compulsion involved here - especially given that the reasons she gives for not having been straight with him in the first place aren't especially coherent. The body language described is a lot like what we see from Fix when he's trying to get around Titania's orders in Proven Guilty and Small Favor. 

She walks him through Victor's descent into dark spooky magic, although exactly how he got started. It began with strange noises in the attic and accidentally setting the curtains on fire or making things fly off the shelves, along with increasing emotional instability, until one night he woke her up and made her drink the 3-Eye drug. This was not the cleverest thing he ever did - she pretty much immediately wanted more, because 3-Eye is magically addictive, but she could also see him, in the way you see people when you look upon them with the Sight. So in the short term, she was more willing to support his efforts, but she also had a clear picture of what kind of monster he was turning into. The logic of making an addictive magical drug so Monica would see what he saw, in hips that it would get her to Understand, is exactly the same kind of twisted, albeit on a smaller scale, as Aurora in Summer Knight trying to throw the courts out of balance to stop the conflict between them. So full points for consistency there. 

The description Monica gives of her life with Victor, before and after the magic stuff started, suggests to me that Jim Butcher either is a DV survivor or has talked to one extensively and actually paid attention and tried to understand their perspective. Monica shares her sister's desire to see the best in people, and likely some of her ability to bring it out in them. It was never gonna be enough to make an abusive fuckweasel like Victor Sells not behave like an abusive fuckweasel, but she tried. She quietly withstood more than a decade of mistreatment because she understood what motivated it. The way she keeps coming back to phrases like "it wasn't so bad", while giving a straightforward account of events that were so, so bad, is just - yeah. That's it, that's the thing. 

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As an aside, Dresden observes that Victor must have a serious natural gift, to be throwing around the kind of power he was, both deliberately and accidentally. But usually magic starts manifesting in adolescence, not when you're already married with two kids. This suggests two possibilities, one considerably more alarming than the other. Most likely, Victor had some amount of magical talent that he abandoned or repressed in his youth. (This is kind of supported by the fact that he no longer speaks to his parents). While it's less likely, the second option is that Nemesis can actually give people magic. It'm now ware of any other evidence that this is a thing, but it's unsettling as hell to consider. 

Monica describes how Victor went from using his own anger to using her fear, as a way to power the magic, before realizing lust was more effective for what he was doing. That's when he got Jenny involved, and she brought in Linda, who was probably their connection to the Becketts, and Tommy Thom, although Monica isn't sure why he was willing to betray Marcone. The magic sex parties were apparently pretty great, but Victor started summoning demons, always looking for more power, and eventually h started looking at the kids. So Monica talked to Jenny about how she wanted to leave him, and Jenny confronted Victor, which oh my fucking God why?! Jennifer Stanton worked for Biance, and was apparently, if not precisely involved with Tommy, at least fucking him regularly enough to get him involved in evil schemes. She could have gone to Bianca and said "Hey, I'm on of your best workers, can you please send someone to eat this asshole who's abusing my big sister?", but she didn't. She could have asked Tommy to go with her to Marcone and say, "Hey, you wanna know where the 3-Eye is coming from?" but she didn't do that either. Instead, she confronted Victor all by her fuzzy little self. I'm not saying it's her fault that he killed her - that was definitely his fault - but she had better choices available than the ones she made. 

Monica reiterates that she doesn't think there's anything Dresden can do to save himself, and then pretty much curls up in a ball and cries, and Dresden just kinda awkwardly leaves. He calls a cab, and then sits there thinking through his options. He can't ask Murphy for help, for obvious reasons. He can't call the Council, because they're too busy convening to accuse him of the murders, even though he thinks Victor must have broken every law of magic. This is a slightly exaggeration - by my count, he's only broken the first, third, and fourth laws. I can't rule out the possibility that he's turned someone into an animal, but I am highly confident that he has not travelled through time, raised the dead, or opened the Outer Gates, although I suspect he would have done that last if he'd been given more time. Eventually, Harry remembers the scorpion amulet, and thinks he might be able to use it as a link back to Victor, give himself an edge in the fight to come. On the offchance that he died horribly anyway, he tries to call Murphy, give her a heads-up, so there'll be someone coming after Victor. But Murphy's not at the police station, she;s searching Dresden's office, and blows him off when he tries to tell her it might be dangerous to go through the desk drawers. The chapter ends with clicking, swearing, and gunshots. 

Sorry the post is coming up late - I spent most of the past 48 hours sleeping. Hopefully this is one of those post-inauguration things and I'm not like, getting sick. I'm gonna push to get Chapter 22 posted tomorrow anyway, so stay tuned. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 20

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Monica's house is almost aggressive in its normality, with two trees and a basketball court, and a lawn that's only a little overgrown due to all the rain - perfectly understandable. In contrast, the neighborhood as a whole seems to be kind of...dying. Most of the houses are up for sale, no birds are singing, and the general vibe is wonky and unpleasant. We only see this effect in one other book, Blood Rites, and in that case it's a vampire. Either this is a common phenomenon that we just haven't seen very much because we haven't had that many bad guys with a long-term geographical base of operations, or Victor Sells is extra serious bad news. 

Monica answers the door, eventually, although she clearly doesn't want to. Harry says if she calls the police, he'll tell them what Victor's up to, even though he doesn't entirely know yet, and then forces his was into the house. Monica, rather reasonably, tries to taze him. In the resulting tussle, they make eye contact, triggering a soul gaze. Once again, we don't get the kind of detailed symbolic imagery that that becomes characteristic of the soul gaze in later books. Instead, we get told the emotions that drive Monica's decisions, predominantly love of and fear for her children, and the fact that her father abused her, and her husband gave her "more of the same". The fact of this is fairly obvious, although I suppose her twitchiness level in the chapter in which she was introduced could be attributed purely to anxiety about dealing with a wizard. What strikes me, though, is the way it's presented, especially as the first instance of the ways abuse and rape are handled throughout the series. We never see Victor and Monica in a room together, much less see him hurt her. We never see Lily and Lloyd Slate in a room together either. Victor burns to death. So does Justine DuMorne. So do the vampires who "did things" to Harry in Grave Peril. Lloyd is tortured horribly for years, forced repeatedly through a distilled version of the cycle of abuse narrative until Dresden cuts his throat on the stone table in Changes. Hannah Ascher burned her own rapists to death. Maeve gets a tidier end than she might have deserved, but what we've learned about the contagion, and the mantle of the Winter Lady, suggests that the clean mercy of a bullet through the head may have been more warranted than it initially appeared in Cold Days. Lord Raith will live out the rest of his considerable lifespan as a sock puppet for Lara, more thoroughly subjugated even than the lapdog Thomas once said she became in her father's presence. Lara is occasionally in-scene with her father, but the abuse is never shown. The closest we get to "on screen" sexual violence against a female character is the interaction between Murphy and Lord Raith, in the lead-up to the final confrontation in Blood Rites. This is all by way of saying that while Jim Butcher might not show quite the same level of restraint in this area that Robert Jordan does in The Wheel of Time, the influence seems clear (and if Robert Jordan got it from another series from which The Dresden Files might also have drawn, I'm not aware of it). Rape and abuse of women takes place off-screen, where the reader cannot possibly mistake it for something the they're meant to enjoy, and the people who commit those acts meet unpleasant, poetically just ends. 

When the soul gaze resolves, and Harry has hexed the tazer into uselessness by breathing on it, we get a brief glimpse of the kids, Billy and Jenny. Jenny is obviously named after her aunt, Jennifer Stanton, which lads on to wonder if little Billy here might be a hint that the Sellses are familially connected to the Bordens. I have nowhere to go with this theory, and nothing from later in the series to reinforce it, other than the fact that Will Borden's parents are never mentioned, but it's something to keep an eye on. 

At this point, Monica pretty much gives up, and agrees to tell Dresden what she knows about her husband's nefarious plans, with the caveat that she doesn't think it will make any difference. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 19

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Apparently when Dresden broke into an active crime scene to take a nap, he forgot to lock the door behind him, so the newcomer is able to skulk right in, wary but apparently unaware of Dresden's presence. Upon seeing the bloodstains on the bed, he freaks out and starts frantically searching under it, apparently looking for the film canister that dresden found a few moments earlier. Dresden scares the everloving shit out of him, initially allowing Sneaky Man, who introduces himself as Donny Wise, to think he's a cop, and then spooking him again when he gets a proper look at Dresden's consultant's badge by using magic to bar the door. Combined the the fact that Harry has the film, this adds up to a fairly successful intimidation check, and they make a deal. Harry will give Donny the film, if Donny will give him the context around it. 

Linda, whom Donny knew because he's taken pictures for her in the past, when she was trying to get into adult magazines, asked him to take pictures through the windows of Victor Sells's lake house, in exchange for which she would have sex with him. What he saw, and photographed, there, was an orgy involving Linda, two men, and a couple other women, none of whom he recognized. 

This entire interaction, and the chapter it comprises, almost didn't need to happen. If Harry had just had a minute to think after he found the film, he would have been able to come to roughly the same conclusion - that the two cases are connected, and that Monica Sells deliberately maneuvered him to become involved in this - even if he wouldn't have been able to be as sure, or to guess that Linda was planning to try to expose or blackmail Victor, at least until he got the pictures developed, which he would, in this scenario, have been able to do. Watching it play out in dialogue, and being given more of the pieces, does make it feel more plausible, and maybe more interesting, than just watching Dresden stand there and think about it, hence almost unnecessary. 

Having put the puzzle together, Dresden sets off to confront Monica Sells. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 18

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Dresden leaves the Varsity and goes on a long walk, because apparently that's what he does when he's sad
and feels like the problem facing him is unsolvable. I think we only actually see him do this one other time, in Skin Game, but that may simply be because he doesn't often simultaneously have occasion to despair and the freedom of movement necessary to go for a lengthy stroll. He makes an offhand reference to how walking around "in Chicago" at night, without really looking where he's going, is probably a bad idea, so I guess now is when we need to talk about the thing. In real life, Chicago is not in the top 10 most violent major cities in the US. It is 10th of the ten most murdery. (St. Louis, Missouri, holds first place in both categories, but you notice Laurell K. Hamilton was able to set an entire series there without constantly going on about the crime rate). Keep in mind that that's only major cities, and those are not always the most dangerous places. We're not gonna get into the fact that random violence by strangers isn't all that common in any context. It's not a place where a 6'8" white dude walking by himself needs to feel all that anxious. Obviously he'd be safe if he were a woman, but he's hardly taking his life into his hands here. There are basically two possible explanations for the disconnect. One is that Dresden drastically overestimates how dangerous Chicago is. That's totally possible. White people living in or near cities often have these kinds of fears. (Like, I might actually scream if I hear another person describe the boring middle-class suburb of Baltimore in which I currently live as "not the best neighborhood"). Typically though, this is tied to a certain amount of racism, and the Chicago Dresden experiences doesn't seem to contain very many people of color. The other, widely fan-theorized, option is that The Dresden Files is set in a slightly different Chicago from ours, one where there's a lot more crime and a lot fewer black people, and where Wrigley Field has a large parking lot. Never really having been to Chicago (once, but I was little-little), I'm not well situated to spot all the differences that can't be found on Wikipedia, but for the sake of not constantly wanting to yell at both Harry Dresden and Jim Butcher, this is the interpretation we're going with. Differences between real!Chicago and Dresdenverse!Chicago will be noted as I notice them. 

While Harry's walking, we get initial backstory on his parents, how how his mother died in childbirth, and his father died of an aneurism when he was 6, leaving him at the mercy of the foster care system. We find out that his father was a stage magician, and was responsible for his utterly unreasonable name. (Seriously, how even his Social Security Card? I have two middle names, which between the both of them only have as many many letters as "Copperfield", and the whole thing still doesn't fit on mine). He mentions that his father talked about his mother enough that he felt like he knew her, but what his father actually told him is... conspicuous in its absence. The fact that people whose older or only child is 6 are usually too young to randomly die of an aneurism is sufficient to provoke a certain amount of "heeeeey..." if you're paying attention, but for the most part there's very little here that hints as the true, flowchart-necessitating clusterfuckedness that is Harry's familial situation. 

His Long Walk of Sad eventually takes him to Linda Randall's house. Which, okay, but then he goes into her house, which is still very much an active crime scene, lies down on her bed, and takes. a. nap. This turns out to be a pretty solid call, and I guess everyone deals with grief differently, but...dude. 

When Dresden wakes up, he has an argument with himself about whether he's going to get up and try to deal with this, or just lie there and wait to die. I think this might actually be the first occurrence of the "dark" Inner Harry that we meet in later books. The side of the conversation that argues for continued survival certainly sounds like Inner Dresden, and like, who else would he be talking to?

Eventually, he wins the argument and gets up, feeling like maybe he can find a way out of this after all. This feeling is pretty much immediately validated when he spots a film canister, identical to the one he found in the yard at at the Sells's lake house. Dresden has about 5 seconds to be excited about this, and no time to think through the implications, before he notices that there's someone at the door. 

(Correction: In the post about Chapter 6, I discussed Harry not noticing that the film canister he found wasn't empty. I forgot that that one was empty, and this is the one with the important photos. Sorry about that.) 

That's what we've got for this chapter. We'll be doing Chapter 19 on Saturday, unless something even more apocalyptic happens between now and then, in which case we will do our best. Until then - Be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapters 16 and 17

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We're doing Chapters 16 and 17 together, because Chapter 16 is really short, almost all action, and mostly exists to set up Chapter 17. Sometimes you need a chapter like that, but it leaves one without much to say other than "Yes, this happened."

(Author's Note: This was not actually a great idea. I think I would have done better to just let the chapter 16 post be short. The result of trying to do them together was not dissimilar from when you use all 6 carrots when riding your horse in Ocarina of Time). 

After telling Murphy that he can't give her more information, Dresden goes to a nearby gas station and calls a cab. He's standing there brooding when Lawrence, one of the men who followed him and made him get into Marcone's car near the beginning, comes up to him, punches him a few times, and cuts off some of his hair. There's a bit of a scuffle while Dresden tries to get it back, but a pair of joggers intervene, and the hair thief escapes. 

(Dresden consistently refers to this character as "Gimpy", because he has a bad knee. Since that's weird and ableist, we will be using his actual surname, Lawrence, which is mentioned in Chapter 17. I make a not of it here only because a substantial portion of Dresden Files readers might validly not have the first clue who "Lawrence" is supposed to be.)

Dresden actually stops for a minute to think through his options, which we haven't seen hum do much prior to this. He considers calling Murphy to see if she can give him an idea of where Lawrence might have gone, but he's concerned that she won't help, and worse, that she might try to put him in protective custody "or something equally ridiculous". I really want to be upset at him for that,  but honestly he's probably right, based on Murphy's attitude in the previous chapter, and if she put him in protective custody or arrested him now, he'd die the next time a storm came in. One does notice, though, that if he had gone with her down to the station to answer questions, he would not have been in a position to get his hair taken in the first place. Moreover, prior to the hair theft, Victor Sells had not way to track Dresden. Odds are good that half the reason Linda was murdered was to get Harry to go somewhere they could plan for, so that they'd be able to find him and get the materials to kill him with a spell. 

Dresden knows that Lawrence works for Marcone, and naturally his first thought is that it's Marcone who wanted the hair, but that theory gets moved down the list pretty quickly, because it's far more likely to be, y'know, the as-yet-nameless bad guy who's been killing people with thaumaturgy, and we have every reason to believe that that's not Marcone. But the pressing issue isn't who sent Lawrence, it's how to find him and get the hair back, or destroy it, before the next storm comes. He considers trying reverse sympathetic magic, using himself as a focus to track the hair, or even burn it up. I'm almost sure the latter would require setting himself on fire, but he doesn't get as far as that, because he would need Bob for the magic math, and Bob isn't available to help. 

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Dresden realizes he has Lawrence's blood and skin under his nails, and can thus put together a tracking
spell. It requires that he follow by scent, because that's how he designed it originally, and he doesn't feel up to tweaking it. In a later book, possibly White Night, we are told that Harry originally developed his basic tracking spell to find the house keys he kept losing when he was a teenager. This would seem to suggest that teenage Dresden had a scented keychain, which is just unreasonably cute. Was it Charmkins? Strawberry Shortcake? It probably wasn't one of the McDonalds ones, since Harry is a firm Burger Kind loyalist. We may never know, unless either Harry or Ebenezer still has the jacked he was wearing the night he ran away from DuMorne's house, with his keys somehow still in the pocket, but I just... scented keychain. 

It's genuinely remarkable how much better Harry is at like, everything when he actually takes time to plan and prepare. A couple of times times, including earlier in this book, Dresden has a thing about how preparation is important to successful wizarding, but I'm starting to wonder how much of that is just that Harry, specifically, makes bad decisions when he has to react on the fly. After a quick stop at his apartment to get some gear, he arrives at the Varsity, a restaurant owned by Marcone, where he uses magic to blow the doors out (not in), making a splashy entrance without injuring anyone inside. Which is the kind of thing I'm talking about. 

Dresden demands his hair back from Marcone, who is like "???". I feel this, because I thought Dresden very reasonably concluded that Marcone almost certainly didn't take his hair, so I guess thinking things through time is over. Marcone asks for proof, Harry points out the scratches on Lawrence's wrist, Lawrence panics and pulls a gun, so Hendricks shoots him. 

Dresden is understandably freaked out by watching a dude get shot to death right in front of him, although the context in which he puts it, that the death of this one random guy that he's nicknamed with an ableist slur somehow makes it "real" in a way that the three murders earlier in the book did not is... uncomfortable. I do also though notice that while Harry in the later books is more principled, he also becomes kinda desensitized to violence. Not necessarily to an inappropriate degree - if he got this upset every time someone died, he wouldn't have survived the series up to the current point. (I mean technically he doesn't, but.) It's something to keep an eye on. 

This is also the first time we really get to see how Marcone operates. And it pretty much reflects in microcosm how he behaves throughout the rest of the series, both overly, in his interactions with Dresden here, and more subtly in his handling of his employees. 

Let's talk about Marcone as a leader and manager of his people first. Hendricks killed Lawrence, when Marcone would have preferred he didn't. Marcone reprimands Hendricks, Hendricks apologizes, and then upon a moment's reflection, Marcone essentially retracts the reprimand, acknowledging that there wasn't really another option in the moment. No part of this exchange is all that remarkable on the face of it, but how many supervisors have you had who would retract a criticism on their own initiative, much less do so in front of both another employee and a hostile outsider. Hell, how many have you had who would accept a quick "Sorry, boss." when you made a mistake, without feeling the need to lecture or threaten. Say what you will about Marcone's industry, he is apparently an absolutely A+ employer. He treats his bodyguards with more care and respect than Murphy displays towards Carmichael, who is nominally her partner. 

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There is also Lawrence to be considered. He's physically disabled, (not severely, as these things go, but it genuinely interferes with his work), and according to Marcone, wasn't all that bright. Now, from a writing perspective, I have serious issues with the fact that the three of Marcone's employees who betray him at various point in the series are this guy, Torelli, who is a drug addict and is also described as "not all that bright", and Hellen Beckett, who is severely traumatized, but leaving aside the troubling betrayal demographics, which as far as I can tell are Jim Butcher's fault, not Marcone's... he hired Lawrence. Lawrence who, in addition to being disabled, is disloyal to the organization, and probably a domestic abuser. (He tries to claim that the scratches on his wrist are from his "girl" - allowing for all possible exceptions, that's not a common place for the fun kind of scratches). Looking at this in the context of Marcone's other named employees, possibly excepting Hendricks, there's kind of a pattern here: Torelli, Demeter... Marcone takes "giving people a chance when no one else would" to an almost pathological extreme. I'm reminded of Sophie Vargas in Tricks for Free by Seanan McGuire, talking about how there's no employee more dedicated or hardworking than someone who's already been rejected by somebody else. If you are qualified (and don't hurt children), Marcone will hire you, no matter how shitty a person you are or what difficulties you have in other areas of life, or whether, before coming to work for him, you were involved in the murder of one of his employees and an attempt to destroy his entire operation. Further narrowing of the candidate pool seems to be based on how badly you need the job. 

To be clear, I bring up Lawrence's disability not because knee problems and possibly some intellectual disability should in any way make someone unqualified to threaten people and beat them up with a baseball bat, with or without reasonable accommodation, but because many legitimate employers, ones who are meaningfully subject to anti-discrimination laws (in a way that Marcone isn't), would not have hired him. Hiring discrimination is common because it's hard to fight, unless the employer literally says it's because of a protected status (which they do in a remarkable number of disability discrimination cases, but that's another story). I'm also not saying that Marcone deserves a cookie for hiring Lawrence. It's not such a great thing. But it does represent a deliberate decision to act against prevailing societal norms. It's noteworthy. 

Then we've got Marcone's interaction with Dresden, which is more illustrative of of Marcone's strategy-level thinking and forward-facing behavior. He's calm and forthright, even after Dresden blew the doors off his establishment. They have a mostly pleasant conversation, during which Marcone initially asserts that he cannot help Dresden after such a blatant challenge to his authority - but that should Dresden defeat the "Shadowman" and survive, he will put the word out that it was on his orders. In addition to displaying for Dresden (and the readers), how he approaches thinking through contingencies, he is also forewarning Dresden of a plan that could potentially affect his work with the police and his reputation in private practice as an investigator, thereby giving him the opportunity to do damage control ahead of time, or to like, leave town or fake his own death or something, if he thinks that's a better option. And then here again we see Marcone openly retract a decision that he made a minute earlier. Having, I guess, worked through while they were talking that nothing in his plan to manage Dresden's defiance is actually hindered by sharing what little he knows about the Shadowman. Which is interesting as shit because the fact that he didn't do it immediately, that he had to think it through, would very much seem to suggest that part of his initial reaction to being challenged was emotional, or at least not purely pragmatic, but since disliking admitting error, even by implication, is basically the same emotional response as not liking to be challenged, and Marcone reflects and then changes his position twice in this scene, that would suggest that Marcone is aware of this tendency within himself and has worked on it. It's fantastically subtle characterization.