Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapters 16 and 17

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Lousvette Munoz on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

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.