"You probably had fifty murders the same day. In any case, I'd like a look at the file."

"Why?"

"C'mon, Garth. I'm on a fishing expedition."

Garth leaned back in his chair and stared at me. His eyes were hard. "You're beginning to take our relationship for granted, Mongo. This is a police station, a public agency, and you're a private citizen. You can't just walk in here and ask to look at a confidential file." He paused. Something moved behind his eyes. "You got a lead on this thing?"

"I'm groping around in the dark, Garth. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't want to talk about it, not yet. And I happen to know that that precious file is buried somewhere. The New York Police Department doesn't have time to investigate the death of some Bowery bum. Sure, you did an autopsy because it's required by law in a murder case, but it's never going to be investigated because you just don't have the manpower. It's not going to hurt to let me look at the file."

Garth's eyes flashed and the bald spot on top of his head reddened. "You've got a lot of lip today, brother."

"It's the truth, and you know it. Besides, you owe me a couple. Let me see the file, Garth."

Garth hesitated a moment, then got up and disappeared into another room. He returned a few moments later with the file. I thanked him, but Garth said nothing. He went back to his typing and I went over to a corner with the file.

The dead man's name was Bayard T. Manning, and his only known address had been a flophouse on the Bowery. Everything was covered in three short paragraphs. The most interesting part was the results of the autopsy, covered in the last paragraph. Manning had been a dedicated alcoholic; cirrhosis of the liver had set in years before, and his brain had been just about pickled. The curious thing was that he'd been off the juice for at least a month, according to the pathologist's report. Not a drop. Bone dry. The texture of his skin indicated that he'd spent a great deal of time in water just before his death. He'd been holding a transistor tube in his hand when he was killed.

Also, his eardrums had been punctured.

Some legwork had been done; a cursory investigation of his usual haunts had turned up the fact that he hadn't been seen in a month.

I had a pretty good idea where he'd been.

I put in a restless Sunday reading the New York Times and trying to watch the Jets. My file on the case was building, spinning a web around Vincent Smathers. If the web got any tighter, Smathers was going to be eaten by some very nasty spiders, the kind that hatch in a man's mind when he has to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That bothered me. Why should a Nobel Prize winner jeopardize his whole reputation and future by enmeshing himself in a set of circumstances that could destroy him? It was easy to pin any possible blame on the shadowy Kee, but Kee was Smathers' responsibility, assuming a crime had been committed. In fact, I wanted to make very sure I knew what I was talking about before I brought in the police or turned Smathers' future over to a pedantic, professional fund-raiser like Barnum.

I made it to half-time in the ball game, then went to the phone and called Fred Haley's home on the outside chance that he might have returned early. There was no answer. I had nothing better to do, so I drove out to the suburban town where Haley lived. I'd wait for him.

Haley's car was in the driveway of his house. I parked my car behind his, went up the flagstone walk in front of the house and knocked at the door. I waited thirty seconds, then knocked again. There was still no answer.

Something cold crawled up my back. I went around to the back of the house and knocked on that door. I got the same response. I got out my skeleton keys and let myself in.

Fred Haley hadn't gone anywhere that weekend. His body lay on the floor of his study, very stiff with rigor mortis. I guessed he'd been dead at least two days. The odd angle of his head told me he'd died of a broken neck.

I spent the next two hours answering questions, avoiding speculation on possible connections between Haley's death and his knowledge of Chiang Kee's background. It could very well be that Haley had been killed by a burglar he'd surprised. The ransacked house pointed to it — except that Fred Haley, as far as I knew, was no slouch at defending himself; and he was supposed to have left on a Friday afternoon, which was a strange time for a burglar to be prowling around.

That much I told the police. The detective in charge dutifully noted my opinions in his notebook and went about his business; Garth showed up later and backed me into a corner. I got him off my back by promising to come in to see him with everything I knew, after I made one more stop. That didn't do much to pacify him, but it gave me time to catch one of the shuttle flights out of Kennedy Airport to Boston.

I knew it was useless trying to talk to any of the officials at Platte. If they talked to me at all, they'd have nothing but glowing reports for Smathers. That was the way the academic game was played; screw up, and you were asked to resign; resign, and nobody has anything but good things to say about you.

I went to the best source of information I could find, the janitor who worked in the Psychology Department.

* * *

I landed back at Kennedy at one the next afternoon and got my car out of the parking lot. It was time to report to Garth, and then to Barnum to warn him about the approaching storm. Instead, I put in a call to Garth's office and left a message for him to meet me at my university office in an hour. Then I drove back to the campus and parked in front of Marten Hall.

Mrs. Pfatt was in her usual good form; she looked as though she'd gained weight during her day off. "I told you before that Dr. Smathers does not see visitors."

"He'll see me this time," I said pointedly. "You tell him I just came back from Platte Institute."

Mrs. Pfatt bridled a bit, but she finally called Smathers on the intercom. Her face went through a series of changes as she talked to him. She hung up the phone and stared at me as though I'd just performed a miracle.

"Dr. Smathers will see you, Dr. Frederickson," she said with a new ring of respect in her voice. "He's in his laboratories upstairs. He'd like you to come up."

I went up. The steel door was unlocked. I opened it and went up the soundproofed stairway. Smathers was in the first office. I made a point of checking to make sure that the other offices and labs were empty, then went in to see him.

"You know," he said without looking at me.

"I know that you got pressured to leave Platte because you insisted on performing experiments that had been legally and medically forbidden to you."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

I showed him a photostat of my license. "Besides being a criminology professor, I'm also a private detective. I was hired to investigate you."

"Who hired you?"

"Sorry. I won't tell you that."

The fire in Smathers' eyes went out as quickly as it had flared. "They were fools," he said hollowly. "I'm surrounded by fools.

I'm on the verge of a very important discovery — a profound medical breakthrough — and they will not leave me alone."

"You've discovered a cure for the common cold?"

"Don't mock me, Dr. Frederickson. I can cure drug addiction and alcoholism, along with a number of other things that plague modern man."

"You do all this by puncturing a man's eardrums?"

His eyes dropped. "You know about that, too?"

"I can guess that Bayard T. Manning was the subject for some of your experiments. Willingly or unwillingly, I don't know. I do know he ended up dead."

"Manning was paid," Smathers said. "You see, I have discovered a cure for alcoholism. Alcoholism, like drug addiction, is primarily a psychological problem, despite the physical changes that take place as a result of dependence. The problem is one of the mind. I can literally remake a mind, erase those problems — "

"By erasing his mind."

"That's simplistic! To begin with, the minds of the people I'm talking about have been rendered worthless anyway. These men and women are no good to themselves, or to anyone else. Don't moralize to me!"

"The thought never crossed my mind."

Smathers took a deep breath. "Sensory deprivation, combined with other forms of therapy, can literally destroy a man's craving for drugs and alcohol. It can remove the root psychological causes and make a man or woman whole again, a rational, intelligent human being." He paused, picked up a pencil and began to roll it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. Guilt was beginning to rise in his voice, like steam from a hot spring. "Manning originally came here of his own accord, in exchange for the money we offered him. Part of our treatment involved sound therapy, the use of certain tones as a therapeutic device. One day while Manning was on the machine he became frightened and touched some controls. The resulting frequencies punctured his eardrums. We would have treated him, but he escaped soon after that. I knew he would probably go to the authorities, so I was getting ready to go myself. When I heard he'd been killed, there didn't seem much point."

"Convenient, wasn't it?"

Smathers' head jerked around. "What does that mean?"

His indignation had the ring of sincerity. I sidestepped. "Did it ever occur to you that the same techniques you use to treat drug addiction could be used to alter a man's political beliefs and behavior?"

"Don't be melodramatic, Frederickson. I'm a scientist, not a politician."

"How did you team up with Dr. Kee?"

"I don't think I have to answer any more of your questions."

"That's right, you don't."

He answered it anyway. "I knew that Dr. Kee had worked for the Chinese Army during the Korean War. That seemed irrelevant now. He is an expert in induced aberrational psychology. He is the only man in the world who knows enough to assist me."

"How did he come to assist you?"

"I was at a conference in Poland and it was made known to me through intermediaries that Kee wished to come to the United States and work with me. I jumped at the chance. He came to me soon after that."

I grunted. "Smathers, your brilliance is matched only by your naivete." I expected him to get angry, but he didn't. Perhaps it was all coming home to him now; his blind passion for his work had pulled him down a long, very dark passageway, and only now was he beginning to see the ugly things at the end. "I'll bet that a little checking would turn up the fact that Kee is in this country illegally, hiding behind your reputation. He's here brushing up on the latest brainwashing techniques so he can go home and use them on his own people."

"You realize, my work is very important. Perhaps you don't fully understand how important."

I gave him the tag line. "I think Kee killed two men."

"Impossible!"

"I think he killed Manning, and I think he killed Fred Haley, an English professor who knew who Kee really was."

Smathers' face suddenly drained of color. "Mr. Haley was here just the other day. I saw him talking to . . ." He let it trail off. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to turn yourself in to the authorities before they come after you. My brother is a detective in the New York Police Department. He's waiting for me right now in my office. He doesn't know anything about this yet. You come and tell him your story. Things may end up easier for you."

"Why should you want to help me?"

"Because I respect any man who's been awarded the Nobel Prize. Also, if your work is as important as you say it is, I'd like to see it continued. If it's true that your only crime is being incredibly stupid, perhaps you can rebuild your career when all the debts have been paid."

I hadn't heard a sound, but the sudden jerk of Smathers' head and the look of alarm on his face was warning enough. I half turned in my seat and glimpsed a very large Chinese poised behind me. His eyes were great pools of darkness set in a field of flesh that might have been fine, yellow porcelain. I didn't get that much time to study him; his hand flicked forward and landed on the nape of my neck. Everything went dark . . .

* * *

It stayed dark. Something was rapping on the inside of my head, not hard or painfully, but persistently, with a sound like a pencil eraser on soft wood. Then I realized it was only the blood pulsing through my veins. I listened for a few moments, and then it was gone, replaced by a voice.

"Dr. Frederickson. Robert. This is Dr. Kee." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It started from somewhere back of my eyes and undulated out, filling my head — or what I thought was my head. There was simply no more head, no toes, no fingers, no body. There was only my mind, and I wondered how long that was going to last; all things disappear when you end up in one of Smathers' fish tanks.

"I am your friend," the voice continued. "There has been a very great misunderstanding on your part. That will be corrected. You will learn to love my voice — and then you will learn to love me. My voice will be your only contact with reality, and you will look forward to hearing it. Soon you will pay careful attention to what I have to say."

I waited for more. There wasn't any more. After a while, I wished there were, just as Kee had predicted. I cursed, slowly, methodically. My voice came back to me muffled, as from a great distance.

I tried to visualize myself: I would be floating in one of the tanks, the saline water warmed exactly to body temperature. My arms and legs would be strapped together, loose enough to allow for circulation, but tight enough to restrict any kind of movement. I imagined my head was encased in some kind of black hood into which oxygen was pumped; naturally, the hood had earphones. There were probably tubes stuck in my body through which I was being fed intravenously.

The next thought that occurred to me was that I'd be there forever, living in absolute darkness. Smathers and Kee would never take me out; they would go away and lock the steel door behind them. I would be left floating . . . floating forever, until I died, and rotted, and my bones sank to the bottom of the tank.

I found I was crying. I could just barely feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. I thought of my mother, a beautiful woman who had loved me as I was and who, with my brother, had kept me whole during the nightmare years of my childhood and adolescence.

I tried to sleep. Maybe I did. It was impossible to tell; sleeping and waking were all the same. Then the voice came again.

"Hello, Robert."

"Go to hell," I said; or maybe I only thought I said it.

"You've been with us for twenty-four hours now, Robert, I know you've missed my voice. I hope you've had time to think about your mistakes, your bad thinking."

I tried to match the voice to the face I'd seen in Smathers' office. The voice was like the face, smooth, unemotional, capable of sudden, unexpected violence.

"You should give some thought to — "

The voice broke off in midsentence. I strained, listening for the rest, but then I realized that the sudden break was all part of the game. The voice would be my only link with reality, and soon I would be willing to do anything it asked of me. My mind screamed, and I backed away from the terrible need, backed down into myself.

I found myself on a plain, stretching off to nothing. There was no horizon, only a black pit directly in front of me. I backed up, and the pit moved forward. It yawned before me like a dark hole on a silent planet.

There were sounds in die hole, wailing winds, screams, groans; and the hole was myself, the deepest part of me. That was where Kee wanted to push me, to trap me — and then remake me.

I was losing my mind.

The torment ended simply, even ludicrously, with a mouthful of water. My first reaction was that they'd decided to scrap the whole brainwashing business and just drown me. I didn't care; anything was better than the terrible silence. Then somebody was holding my head above the surface, ripping off the black rubber mask. The light hit my eyes like razor blades. I screwed them shut and turned my head away. Hands reached down and loosened the straps on my arms and legs. Needles were pulled from my body. Still keeping my eyes closed, I planted my feet on the bottom of the tank and pushed, propelling myself over the side. I landed hard on my back and the breath whistled out of me. The hands reached down and grabbed me under the armpits.

"Get up, Dr. Frederickson!"

I opened my eyes a crack and the blurred image of Smathers flooded in. He pulled me to my feet and I promptly fell down again. After being held absolutely motionless for twenty-four hours, my legs weren't working, but now my eyes were growing accustomed to the light.

"What's the matter? You have a change of heart?" I asked Smathers.

He was white. His flesh trembled.

"I ... I must have been out of my mind. I don't know what ... I just couldn't let him do this to you. Can you walk?"

"No. Did you have anything to do with the killings of Manning and Haley?"

"No. I swear to you I knew nothing about them."

"But you let Kee talk you into this."

"I saw everything I'd worked for crumbling around me. If you only knew how close I am to controlling the reactions! Dr. Kee convinced me that you could be made to forget everything, perhaps even be made to work for us."

"You were willing to work with a murderer?"

Smathers dropped his eyes. "My work is . . . very important to me. It is possible that many men's lives could be salvaged."

"At the cost of turning me into a vegetable. Forget it, pal. You're no Albert Schweitzer. The first thing you have to learn is that one man's life is the most important thing; one life, many lives, it's all the same thing. It wouldn't have worked anyway. My brother would have eventually tracked me down. He might have been too late, but he'd have been here. And my brother isn't exactly used to hearing me talk like a robot." My legs were beginning to feel slightly more solid than a plate of mashed potatoes. I tried getting up on them. They still weren't ready to carry me to a world record in the hundred-yard dash, but they worked.

I looked around for something to cover my nakedness, didn't see anything, decided that modesty was not an appropriate concern at the moment. "Let's get out of here."

Smathers grabbed my arm and I shook his hand off. I felt almost normal. We started toward the door. A huge electronic monitoring machine off to the right blinked, as if welcoming me back to the real world at last.

I should have taken it as a warning. Kee suddenly appeared in the door. Behind him was the healthy half of the Tong Twins. Kee didn't take long to size up the situation; his eyes flicked back and forth between Smathers and me. Then he made a sound in his throat and put his hand back in the direction of his helper; the helper put a .38 in it. Kee flicked his wrist and fired a bullet through Smathers' forehead. Smathers flipped backward and landed on the floor with the sound that only heavy sacks and dead men make. The bullet continued on through his skull and shattered the tank behind him. A few hundred gallons of water roared out through the ruptured glass and hit me full in the back, sweeping me across the floor and bringing me up hard against the monitor. I cringed, waiting for the next bullet. It didn't come.

Kee had other plans for me — like framing me for Smathers' murder. In a way, it made sense; if he could knock me unconscious and place the gun in my hand, it might just confuse the issue long enough for him to slip back over whatever border he'd crossed in the first place. At least Kee seemed to have it figured that way. He was half smiling as he advanced on me. Brother Tong was waiting in back of him, his hands on his hips like a referee.

In my present condition I was no match for either of them.

Still, it was time to do something — like jump up on the monitor and pull some wires. That's what I did.

The machine whirred and popped, sending up clouds of black, acrid smoke. The live wires in my hand sputtered like Fourth of July sparklers. I spun a mental prayer wheel, something concerning proper insulation in the machine I was standing on, then threw the wires into the water on the floor.

Kee had good reflexes; he leaped at the same time I dropped the wires and managed to land on a dry spot near the wall at the opposite side of the room. Brother Tong wasn't so lucky. He tried walking on water and didn't get far. The scream was burned out of his throat by a few hundred thousand volts of electricity. Already dead, he danced around for a few seconds, then fell on his face. His body gradually stopped twitching as the electricity locked his joints and muscles. There was a smell in the air like fried pork.

The gun had fallen in the middle of the floor, out of everybody's reach. That was fine with me, because Kee had problems of his own; the water was gradually working its way over to his tiny island of dry wood. He was backed up against the wall, his arms stretched out to either side of him, as though trying to claw holes in the plaster. I sat down, crossed my legs and smiled at him.

"Win a few, lose a few," I said.

For the first time, emotion showed in his eyes. There was fear, and there was hate, a lot of hate. I shouldn't have goaded him; it was too inspirational. The main power switch was a good ten feet away, but I'd already seen the strength he had in his legs. He gave a tremendous yell, leaped straight up in the air, planted his feet against the wall and dove for the power switch.

I knew he was going to make it even before he did, and the gun was closer to him than it was to me. His fingertips hit the control switch, plunging the floor into darkness. I heard his body hit the water and I hit the floor at the same time. I raced down the corridor, toward the stairs. I could hear Kee splashing behind me, and there was no doubt in my mind that he had the gun. I caromed off the wall at the end of the corridor, scampered down the stairs and hit the steel door.

Naturally, it was locked. There wasn't going to be any naked dwarf running through the sacred corridors of Marten Hall.

I spun and crouched in the darkness, trying to make myself as small a target as possible. The frame business was finished; there were one too many bodies to explain. That meant Kee would want me out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was going to be like shooting a dwarf in a barrel.

I held my breath and waited for the crash of the gun. All I heard was a dull click. The watered fouled the firing mechanism of the gun. I waited.

I could hear Kee descending the stairs slowly. The job I'd done on his two assistants had given him some respect, but that wasn't enough. Even if I hadn't spent the last twenty-four hours under water, I'd have been no match for Kee. On the other hand, I couldn't just sit and wait for him to beat my brains out.

I waited a few seconds, then lunged upward, sweeping my hand in the general direction where I hoped his ankle would be. I got lucky. I caught his ankle and yanked. He went backward, landing on his back on the stairs. There was no way of getting by him; both his hands were deadly weapons, and he'd have broken every bone in my body by the time I got halfway past. But I had the angle on his midsection. I stiffened my fingers and drove them as hard as I could into his groin. That took the power out of a kick that would have killed me. His heel bounced off my rib cage, and I felt something snap inside.

Kee was doubled over, his shape just barely visible in the darkness. I could go past him now, but that would just mean playing cat and mouse up in the darkness of the laboratories, and that was a game I knew I eventually had to lose. I had to attack.

Trying to ignore the pain in my side, and hoping that the sudden movement wouldn't pierce any of my machinery, I moved around in front of him and clapped my hands over both his ears. He screamed and half rose, which was exactly the position for which I was waiting. He was off balance now, his concentration gone. I grabbed a handful of hair and yanked. Kee plummeted down into the darkness. He came up hard against the steel door, and there was a single, sharp sound. I didn't have to go down to know that Kee was dead, his neck broken.

I tasted blood and I was getting dizzy. I sat down on a step and braced my arm against my broken rib. I stared down into the darkness. Eventually someone would open the door. It would probably be Garth, and he would probably want to know what I was doing sitting naked in the darkness with a dead body.

I strongly suspect that "religious faith," by which I mean a sincere, even profound belief in the supernatural and not just an adherence to form inspired by social or political pressure, may have an actual genetic basis in the human species, and that I'm missing the appropriate genetic marker. I have always been at once intrigued and appalled by the pervasiveness of superstition in our "modern" societies, whether it be represented by a professor of physics praying to a Deity of Choice on Saturday or Sunday, the wife of a president in twentieth-century America seeking advice from an astrologer, or somebody reading runes in a basement. I get the same eerie chill when I pass a church, synagogue, ashram, or any other "house of worship" that I imagine an archaeologist must experience when unearthing some ancient "temple to the gods" in Peru or Mexico.

The notion that"you are what you believe," and should therefore be very careful about what you allow yourself to believe, comes to play an ever-increasing role in my journeys with Mongo, and begins to surface for the first time in the following story. It is a tale I would treat slightly differently if I were writing it today, but it shows the initial interest in a theme that, many years later, I will treat at great length in the three novels I think of as the Valhalla Trilogy (The Beasts of Valhalla, Two Songs This Archangel Sings, The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone), and with what I intended to be a blunderbuss in Second Horseman Out of Eden.

Later, this story will also be incorporated into An Affair of Sorcerers the first novel to grow out of my amazement before the fact that people really will believe the damnedest things — and usually pay the price.

The Healer

The man waiting for me in my downtown office looked like a movie star who didn't want to be recognized. After he took off his hat, dark glasses and leather overcoat he still looked like a movie star. He also looked like a certain famous Southern senator.

"Dr. Frederickson," he said, extending a large, sinewy hand. "I've been doing so much reading about you in the past few days, I feel I already know you. I must say it's a distinct pleasure. I'm Bill Younger."

"Senator," I said, shaking the hand and motioning him toward the chair in front of my desk.

Younger, with his boyish, forty-five-year-old face and full head of brown, neatly cut hair, looked good. Except for the fear in his eyes, he might have been ready to step into a television studio. "Why the background check, Senator?"

He half smiled. "I used to take my daughter to see you perform when you were with the circus."

"That was a long time ago, Senator." It was six years. It seemed a hundred.

The smile faded. "You're famous. I wanted to see if you were also discreet. My sources tell me your credentials are impeccable. You seem to have a penchant for unusual cases."

"Unusual cases seem to have a penchant for me. You'd be amazed how few people feel the need for a dwarf private detective."

Younger didn't seem to be listening. "You've heard of Esteban Morales?"

I said I hadn't. The senator seemed surprised. "I was away for the summer," I added.

The senator nodded absently, then rose and began to pace back and forth in front of the desk. The activity seemed to relax him. "Esteban is one of my constituents, so I'm quite familiar with his work. He's a healer."

"A doctor?"

"No, not a doctor. A psychic healer. He heals with his hands. His mind." He cast a quick look in my direction to gauge my reaction. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he went on. "There are a number of good psychic healers in this country. Those who are familiar with this kind of phenomenon consider Esteban the best, although his work does not receive much publicity. There are considerable . . . pressures."

"Why did you assume I'd heard of him?"

"He spent the past summer at the university where you teach. He'd agreed to participate in a research project."

"What kind of research project?"

"I'm not sure. It was something in microbiology. I think a Dr. Mason was heading the project."

I nodded. Janet Mason is a friend of mine.

"The project was never finished," Younger continued. "Esteban is now in jail awaiting trail for murder." He added almost parenthetically, "Your brother was the arresting officer."

I was beginning to get the notion that it was more than my natural dwarf charm that had attracted Senator Younger. "Who is this Esteban Morales accused of killing?"

"A physician by the name of Robert Edmonston."

"Why?"

The senator suddenly stopped pacing and planted his hands firmly on top of my desk. He seemed extremely agitated. "The papers reported that Edmonston filed a complaint against Esteban. Practicing medicine without a license. The police think Esteban killed him because of it."

"They'd need more than thoughts to book him."

"They . . . found Esteban in the office with the body. Edmonston had been dead only a few minutes. His throat had been cut with a knife they found dissolving in a vial of acid." The first words had come hard for Younger. The rest came easier. "If charges had been filed against Esteban, it wouldn't have been the first time. These are the things Esteban has to put up with. He's always taken the enmity of the medical establishment in stride. Esteban is not a killer — he's a healer. He couldn't kill anyone!" He suddenly straightened up, then slumped into the chair behind him. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I must seem overwrought."

"How do you feel I can help you, Senator?"

"You must clear Esteban," Younger said. His voice was steady but intense. "Either prove he didn't do it,~or that someone else did."

I looked at him to see if he might, just possibly, be joking. He wasn't. "That's a pretty tall order, Senator. And it could get expensive. On the other hand, you've got the whole New York City Police Department set up to do that work for free."

The senator shook his head. "I want one man — you — to devote himself to nothing but this case. You work at the university. You have contacts. You may be able to find out something the police couldn't, or didn't care to look for. After all, the police have other things besides Esteban's case to occupy their attention."

"I wouldn't argue with that."

"This is most important to me, Dr. Frederickson," the senator said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. "I will double your usual fee."

"That won't be nec — "

"At the least, I must have access to Esteban if you fail. Perhaps your brother could arrange that. I am willing to donate ten thousand dollars to any cause your brother deems worthy."

"Hold on, Senator. Overwrought or not, I wouldn't mention that kind of arrangement to Garth. He might interpret it as a bribe offer. Very embarrassing."

"It will be a bribe offer!"

I thought about that for a few seconds, then said, "You certainly do a lot for your constituents, Senator. I'm surprised you're not president."

I must have sounded snide. The flesh on the senator's face blanched bone-white, then filled with blood. His eyes flashed. Still, somewhere in their depths, the fear remained. His words came out in a forced whisper. "If Esteban Morales is not released, my daughter will die."

I felt a chill, and wasn't sure whether it was because I believed him or because of the possibility that a United States senator and -presidential hopeful was a madman. I settled for something in between and tried to regulate my tone of voice accordingly. "I don't understand, Senator."

"Really? I thought I was making myself perfectly clear. My daughter's life is totally dependent on Esteban Morales." He took a deep breath. "My daughter Linda has cystic fibrosis, Dr. Frederickson. As you may know, medical doctors consider cystic fibrosis incurable. The normal pattern is for a sufferer to die in his or her early teens — usually from pulmonary complications. Esteban has been treating my daughter all her life, and she is now twenty-four. But Linda needs him again. Her lungs are filling with fluid."

I was beginning to understand how the medical establishment might get a litde nervous at Esteban Morales' activities, and a psychic warning light was flashing in my brain. Senator or no, this didn't sound like the kind of case in which I liked to get involved. If Morales were a hoaxer — or a killer — I had no desire to be the bearer of bad tidings to a man with the senator's emotional investment.

"How does Morales treat your daughter? With drugs?"

Younger shook his head. "He just . . . touches her. He moves his hands up and down her body. Sometimes he looks like he's in a trance, but he isn't. It's . . . very hard to explain. You have to see him do it."

"How much does he charge for these treatments?"

The senator looked surprised. "Esteban doesn't charge anything. Most psychic healers — the real ones — won't take money. They feel it interferes with whatever it is they do." He laughed shortly, without humor. "Esteban prefers to live simply, off Social Security, a pension check, and a few gifts — small ones — from his friends. He's a retired metal shop foreman."

Esteban Morales didn't exactly fit the mental picture I'd drawn of him, and my picture of the senator was still hazy. "Senator," I said, tapping my fingers lightly on the desk, "why don't you hold a press conference and describe what you feel Esteban Morales has done for your daughter? It could do you more good than hiring a private detective. Coming from you, I guarantee it will get the police moving."

Younger smiled thinly. "Or get me locked up in Bellevue. At the least, I would be voted out of office, perhaps recalled. My state is in the so-called Bible Belt, and there would be a great deal of misunderstanding. Esteban is not a religious man in my constituents' sense of the word. He does not claim to receive his powers from God. Even if he did, it wouldn't make much difference." The smile got thinner. "I've found that most religious people prefer their miracles well aged. You'll forgive me if I sound selfish, but I would like to try to save Linda's life without demolishing my career. If all else fails, I will hold a press conference. Will you take the job?"

I told him I'd see what I could find out.

* * *

It looked like a large photographic negative. In its center was a dark outline of a hand with the fingers outstretched. The tips of the fingers were surrounded by waves of color — pink, red and violet — undulating outward to a distance of an inch or two from the hand itself. The effect was oddly beautiful and very mysterious.

"What the hell is it?"

"It's a Kirlian photograph," Dr. Janet Mason said. She seemed pleased with my reaction. "The technique is named after a Russian who invented it about thirty years ago. The Russians, by the way, are far ahead of us in this field."

I looked at her. Janet Mason is a handsome woman in her early fifties. Her shiny gray hair was drawn back into a severe bun, highlighting the fine features of her face. You didn't need a special technique to be aware of her sex appeal. She is a tough-minded scientist who, rumor has it, had gone through a long string of lab-assistant lovers. Her work left her little time for anything else. Janet Mason has been liberated a long time. I like her.

"Uh, what field?"

"Psychic research: healing, ESP, clairvoyance, that sort of thing. Kirlian photography, for example, purports to record what is known as the human aura, part of the energy that all living things radiate. The technique itself is quite simple. You put an individual into a circuit with an unexposed photographic plate and have the person touch the plate with some part of his body." She pointed to the print I was holding. "That's what you end up with."

"Morales'?"

"Mine. That's an 'average' aura, if you will." She reached into the drawer of her desk and took out another set of photographs. She looked through them, then handed one to me. "This is Esteban's."

I glanced at the print. It looked the same as the first one, and I told her so.

"That's Esteban at rest, you might say. He's not thinking about healing." She handed me another photograph. "Here he is with his batteries charged."

The print startled me. The bands of color were erupting out from the fingers, especially the index and middle fingers. The apogee of the waves was somewhere off the print; they looked like sun storms.

"You won't find that in the others," Janet continued. "With most people, thinking about healing makes very little difference."

"So what does it mean?"

She smiled disarmingly. "Mongo, I'm a scientist. I deal in facts. The fact of the matter is that Esteban Morales takes one hell of a Kirlian photograph. The implication is that he can literally radiate extra amounts of energy at will."

"Do you think he can heal people?"

She took a long time to answer. "There's no doubt in my mind that he can," she said at last. I considered it a rather startling confession. "And he's not dealing with psychosomatic disorders. Esteban has been involved in other research projects, at different universities. In one, a strip of skin was removed surgically from the backs of monkeys. The monkeys were divided into two groups. Esteban simply handled the monkeys in one group. Those monkeys healed twice as fast as the ones he didn't handle." She smiled wanly. "Plants are supposed to grow faster when he waters them."

"What did you have him working on?"

"Enzymes," Janet said with a hint of pride. "The perfect research model; no personalities involved. You see, enzymes are the basic chemicals of the body. If Esteban could heal, the reasoning went, he should be able to affect pure enzymes. He can."

"The results were good?"

She laughed lightly. "Spectacular. Irradiated — 'injured' — enzymes break down at specific rates in certain chemical solutions. The less damaged they are, the slower their rate of breakdown. What we did was to take test tubes full of enzymes — supplied by a commercial lab — and irradiate them. Then we gave Esteban half of the samples to handle. The samples he handled broke down at a statistically significant lesser rate then the ones he didn't handle." She paused again, then said, "Ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the population can't affect the enzymes one way or the other. On the other hand, a very few people can make the enzymes break down faster."

"'Negative' healers?"

"Right. Pretty hairy, huh?"

I laughed. "It's incredible. Why haven't I heard anything about it? I mean, here's a man who may be able to heal people with his hands, and nobody's heard of him. I would think Morales would make headlines in every newspaper in the country."

Janet gave me the kind of smile I suspected she normally reserved for some particularly naive student. "It's next to impossible just to get funding for this kind of research, what's more publicity. Psychic healing is thought of as, well, occult."

"You mean like acupuncture?"

It was Janet's turn to laugh. "You make my point. You know how long it took Western scientists and doctors to get around to taking acupuncture seriously. Psychic healing just doesn't fit into the currently accepted pattern of scientific thinking. When you do get a study done, none of the journals want to publish it."

"I understand that Dr. Edmonston filed a complaint against Morales. Is that true?"

"That's what the police said. I have no reason to doubt it. Edmonston was never happy about his part in the project. Now I'm beginning to wonder about Dr. Johnson. I'm still waiting for his anecdotal reports."

"What project? What reports? What Dr. Johnson?"

Janet looked surprised. "You don't know about that?"

"I got all my information from my client. Obviously, he didn't know. Was there some kind of tie-in between Morales and Edmonston?"

"I would say so." She replaced the Kirlian photographs in her desk drawer. "We actually needed Esteban only about an hour or so a day, when he handled samples. The rest of the time we were involved in computer analysis. We decided it might be interesting to see what Esteban could do with some real patients, under medical supervision. We wanted to get a physician's point of view. We put some feelers out into the medical community and got a cold shoulder — except for Dr. Johnson, who incidentally happened to be Robert Edmonston's partner. I get the impression the two of them had a big argument over using Esteban, and Rolfe Johnson eventually won. We worked out a plan where Esteban would go to their offices after finishing here. They would refer certain patients — who volunteered — to him. These particular patients were in no immediate danger, but they would eventually require hospitalization. These patients would report how they felt to Edmonston and Johnson after their sessions with Esteban. The two doctors would then make up anecdotal reports. Not very scientific, but we thought it might make an interesting footnote to the main study."

"And you haven't seen these reports?"

"No. I think Dr. Johnson is stalling."

"Why would he do that after he agreed to participate in the project?"

"I don't know. Maybe he's had second thoughts after the murder. Or maybe he's simply afraid his colleagues will laugh at him."

I wondered. It still seemed a curious shift in attitude. It also occurred to me that I would like to see the list of patients that had been referred to Morales. It just might contain the name of someone with a motive to kill Edmonston — and try to pin it on Esteban Morales. "Tell me some more about Edmonston and Johnson," I said. "You mentioned the fact they were partners."

Janet took a cigarette from her purse, and I supplied a match. She studied me through a cloud of smoke. "Is this confidential?"

"If you say so."

"Johnson and Edmonston were very much into the modern big-business aspect of medicine. It's what a lot of doctors are doing these days: labs, ancillary patient centers, private, profit-making hospitals. Dr. Johnson's skills seemed to be more in the area of administration of their enterprises. As a matter of fact, he'd be about the last person I'd expect to be interested in psychic healing. There were rumors to the effect they were going public in a few months."

"Doctors go public?"

"Sure. They build up a network of the types of facilities I mentioned, incorporate, then sell stocks."

"How'd they get along?"

"Who knows? I assume they got along as well as any other business partners. They were different, though."

"How so?"

"Edmonston was the older of the two men. I suspect he was attracted to Johnson because of Johnson's ideas in the areas I mentioned. Edmonston was rumored to be a good doctor, but he was brooding. No sense of humor. Johnson had a lighter, happy-go-lucky side. Obviously, he was also the more adventurous of the two."

"What was the basis of Edmonston's complaint?"

"Dr. Edmonston claimed that Esteban was giving his patients drugs."

I thought about that. It certainly didn't fit in with what the senator had told me. "Janet, doesn't it strike you as odd that two doctors like Johnson and Edmonston would agree to work with a psychic healer? Aside from philosophic differences, they sound like busy men."

"Oh, yes. I really can't explain Dr. Johnson's enthusiasm. As I told you, Dr. Edmonston was against the project from the beginning. He didn't want to waste his time on what he considered to be superstitious nonsense." She paused, then added, "He must have given off some bad vibrations."

"Why do you say that?"

"I'm not sure. Toward the end of the experiment something was affecting Esteban's concentration. He wasn't getting the same results he had earlier. And before you ask, I don't know why he was upset. I broached the subject once and he made it clear he didn't want to discuss it."

"Do you think he killed Edmonston?"

She laughed shortly, without humor. "Uh-uh, Mongo. That's your department. I deal in enzymes; they're much simpler than people."

"C'mon, Janet. You spent an entire summer working with him.

He must have left some kind of impression. Do you think Esteban Morales is the kind of man who would slit somebody's throat?"

She looked at me a long time. Finally she said, "Esteban Morales is probably the gentlest, most loving person I've ever met. And that's all you're going to get from me. Except that I wish you luck."

I nodded my thanks, then rose and started for the door.

"Mongo?"

I turned with my hand on the doorknob. Janet was now sitting on the edge of her desk, exposing a generous portion of her very shapely legs. They were the best looking fifty-year-old legs I'd ever seen — and on a very pretty woman.

"You have to come and see me more often," she continued evenly. "I don't have that many dwarf colleagues."

I winked broadly. "See you, kid."

* * *

"Of course I was curious," Dr. Rolfe Johnson said. "That's why I was so anxious to participate in the project in the first place. I like to consider myself open-minded."

I studied Johnson. He was a boyish thirty-seven, outrageously good-looking, with Nordic blue eyes and a full head of blond hair. I was impressed by his enthusiasm, somewhat puzzled by his agreeing to see me within twenty minutes of my phone call. For a busy doctor-businessman he seemed very free with his time — or very anxious to nail the lid on Esteban Morales. He was just a little too eager to please me.

"Dr. Edmonston wasn't?"

Johnson cleared his throat. "Well, I didn't mean that. Robert was a . . . traditionalist. You will find that most doctors are just not that curious. He considered working with Mr. Morales an unnecessary drain on our time. I thought it was worth it."

"Why? What was in it for you?"

He looked slightly hurt. "I considered it a purely scientific inquiry. After all, no doctor ever actually heals anyone. Nor does any medicine. The body heals itself, and all any doctor can do is to try to stimulate the body to do its job. From his advance publicity, Esteban Morales was a man who could do that without benefit of drugs or scalpels. I wanted to see if it was true."

"Was it?"

Johnson snorted. "Of course not. It was all mumbo jumbo. Oh, he certainly had a psychosomatic effect on some people — but they had to believe in him. From what I could see. the effects of what he was doing were at most ephemeral, and extremely short-lived. I suppose that's why he panicked."

"Panicked?"

Johnson's eyebrows lifted. "The police haven't told you?"

"I'm running ahead of myself. I haven't talked to the police yet. I assume you're talking about the drugs Morales is supposed to have administered."

"Oh, not supposed to. I saw him, and it was reported to me by the patient."

"What patient?"

He clucked his tongue. "Surely you can appreciate the fact that I can't give out patients' names."

"Sure. You told Edmonston?"

"It was his patient. And he insisted on filing the complaint himself." He shook his head. "Dr. Mason would have been doing everyone a favor if she hadn't insisted on having the university bail him out."

"Uh-huh. Can you tell me what happened the night Dr. Edmonston died? What you know."

He thought about it for a while. At least he looked like he was thinking about it. "Dr. Edmonston and I always met on Thursday nights. There were records to be kept, decisions to be made, and there just wasn't enough time during the week. On that night I was a few minutes late." He shook his head. "Those few minutes may have cost Robert his life."

"Maybe. What was Morales doing there?"

"I'm sure I don't know. Obviously, he was enraged with Robert. He must have found out about the Thursday night meetings while he was working with us, and decided that would be a good time to kill Dr. Edmonston."

"But if he knew about the meetings, he'd know you'd be there."

Johnson glanced impatiently at his watch. "I am not privy to what went on in Esteban Morales' mind. After all, as you must know, he is almost completely illiterate. A stupid man. Perhaps he simply wasn't thinking straight . . . if he ever does." He rose abruptly. "I'm afraid I've given you all the time I can afford. I've talked to you in the interests of obtaining justice for Dr. Edmonston. I'd hoped you would see that you were wasting your time investigating the matter."

The interview was obviously over.

* * *

Johnson's story stunk. The problem was how to get someone else to sniff around it. With a prime suspect like Morales in the net, the New York police weren't about to complicate matters for themselves before they had to, meaning before the senator either got Morales a good lawyer or laid his own career on the line. My job was to prevent that necessity, which meant, at the least, getting Morales out on bail. To do that I was going to have to start raising some doubts.

It was time to talk to Morales.

I stopped off at a drive-in for dinner, took out three hamburgers and a chocolate milk shake intended as a bribe for my outrageously oversized brother. The food wasn't enough. A half hour later, after threats, shouts and appeals to familial loyalty, I was transformed from a dwarf private detective to a dwarf lawyer and taken to see Esteban Morales. The guard assigned to me thought it was funny as hell.

Esteban Morales looked like an abandoned extra from Viva Zapata. He wore a battered, broad-brimmed straw hat to cover a full head of long, matted gray hair. He wore shapeless corduroy pants and a bulky, torn red sweater. Squatting down on the cell's dirty cot, his back to the wall, he looked forlorn and lonely. He looked up as I entered. His eyes were a deep, wet brown. Something moved in their depths as he looked at me. Whatever it was — curiosity, perhaps — quickly passed.

I went over to him and held out my hand. "Hello, Mr. Morales. My name is Robert Frederickson. My friends call me Mongo."

Morales shook for my hand. For an old man, his grip was surprisingly firm. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Mongo," he said in a thickly accented voice. "You lawyer?"

"No. A private detective. I'd like to try to help you."

"Who hire you?"

"A friend of yours." I mouthed the word "senator" so the guard wouldn't hear me. Morales' eyes lit up. "Your friend feels that his daughter needs you. I'm going to try to get you out, at least on bail."

Morales lifted his large hands slowly and studied the palms. I remembered Janet Mason's Kirlian photographs; I wondered what mysterious force was in those hands, and what its source was. "I help Linda if I can get to see her," he said quietly. "I must touch." He suddenly looked up. "I no kill anybody, Mr. Mongo. I never hurt anybody."

"What happened that night?"

The hands pressed together, dropped between his knees. "Dr. Edmonston no like me. I can tell that. He think I phony. Still he let me help his patients, and I grateful to him for that."

"Do you think you actually helped any of them?"

Morales smiled disarmingly, like a child who has done something of which he is proud. "I know I did. And the patients, they know. They tell me, and they tell Dr. Edmonston and Dr. Johnson."

"Did you give drugs to anybody?"

"No, Mr. Mongo." He lifted his hands. "My power is here, in my hands. All drugs bad for body."

"Why do you think Dr. Edmonston said you did?"

He shook his head in obvious bewilderment. "One day the police pick me up at university. They say I under arrest for pretending to be doctor. I no understand. Dr. Mason get me out. Then I get message same day — "

"A Thursday?"

"I think so. The message say that Dr. Edmonston want to see me that night at seven-thirty. I want to know why he mad at me, so I decide to go. I come in and find him dead. Somebody cut throat. Dr. Johnson come in a few minutes later. He think I do it. He call police . . ." His voice trailed off, punctuated by a gesture that included the cell and the unseen world outside. It was an elegant gesture.

"How did you get into the office, Esteban?"

"The lights are on and door open. When nobody answer knock, I walk in."

I nodded. Esteban Morales was either a monumental acting talent or a man impossible not to believe. "Do you have any idea why Dr. Edmonston wanted to talk to you?"

"No, Mr. Mongo. I thought maybe he sorry he call police."

"How do you do what you do, Esteban?" The question was meant to surprise him. It didn't. He simply smiled.

"You think I play tricks, Mr. Mongo?"

"What I think doesn't matter."

"They why you ask?"

"I'm curious."

"Then I answer." Again he lifted his hands, stared at them. "The body make music, Mr. Mongo. A healthy body make good music. I can hear through my hands. A sick body make bad music. My hands ... I can make music good, make it sound like I know it should." He paused, shook his head. "Not easy to explain, Mr. Mongo."

"Why were you upset near the end of the project, Esteban?"

"Who told you I upset?"

"Dr. Mason. She said you were having a difficult time affecting the enzymes."

He took a long time to answer. "I don't think it right to talk about it."

"Talk about what, Esteban? How can I help you if you won't level with me?"

"I know many things about people, but I don't speak about them," he said almost to himself. "What make me unhappy have nothing to do with my trouble."

"Why don't you let me decide that?"

Again, it took him a long time to answer. "I guess it no make difference any longer."

"What doesn't make a difference any longer, Esteban?"

He looked up at me. "Dr. Edmonston was dying. Of cancer."

"Dr. Edmonston told you that?"

"Oh, no. Dr. Edmonston no tell anyone. He not want anyone to know. But I know."

"How, Esteban? How did you know?"

He pointed to his eyes. "I see, Mr. Mongo. I see the aura. Dr. Edmonston's aura brown-black. Flicker. Fie dying of cancer. I know he have five, maybe six more months to live." He lowered his eyes and shook his head. "I tell him I know. I tell him I want to help. He get very mad at me. He tell me to mind my own business. That upset me. It upset me to be around people in pain who no want my help."

My mouth was suddenly very dry. I swallowed hard. "You say you saw this aura?" I remembered the Kirlian photographs Janet Mason had shown me and I could feel a prickling at the back of my neck.

"Yes," Morales said simply. "I see aura."

"Can you see anybody's aura?" I had raised my voice a few notches so that the guard could hear. I shot a quick glance in his direction. He was smirking, which meant we were coming in loud and clear. That was good . . . maybe.

"Usually. Mostly I see sick people's aura because that what I look for."

"Can you see mine?" I asked.

His eyes slowly came up and met mine. They held. It was a moment of unexpected, embarrassing intimacy, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

Esteban Morales didn't smile. "I can see yours, Mr. Mongo," he said softly.

He was going to say something else but I cut him off. I was feeling a little light-headed and I wanted to get the next part of the production over as quickly as possible. I could sympathize with Dr. Edmonston.

I pressed the guard and he reluctantly admitted he'd overheard the last part of our conversation. Then I asked him to get Garth.

Garth arrived looking suspicious. Garth always looks suspicious when I send for him. He nodded briefly at Esteban, then looked at me. "What's up, Mongo?"

"I just want you to sit here for a minute and listen to something."

"Mongo, I've got reports!"

I ignored him and he leaned back against the bars of the cell and began to tap his foot impatiently. I turned to Esteban Morales. "Esteban," I said quietly, "will you tell my brother what an aura is?"

Morales described the human aura, and I followed up by describing the Kirlian photographs Janet Mason had shown me: what they were, and what they purported to show. Garth's foot continued its monotonous tapping. Once he glanced at his watch.

"Esteban," I said, "how does my brother look? I mean his aura."

"Oh, he fine," Esteban said, puzzled. "Aura a good, healthy pink."

"What about me?"

Morales dropped his eyes and shook his head mutely.

The foot-tapping in the corner had stopped. Suddenly Garth was beside me, gripping my arm. "Mongo, what the hell is this all about?"

"Just listen, Garth. I need a witness." I took a deep breath, then started in again on Morales. "Esteban," I whispered, "I asked you a question. Can you see my aura? Can you see my aura, Esteban? Damn it, if you can, say so! I may be able to help you. If you can see my aura you have to say so!"

Esteban Morales slowly lifted his head. His eyes were filled with pain. "I cannot help you, Mr. Mongo."

Garth gripped my arm even tighter. "Mongo — "

"I'm all right, Garth. Esteban, tell me what it is you see."

The healer took a long, shuddering breath. "You are dying, Mr. Mongo. Your mind is sharp, but your body is — " He gestured toward me. "Your body is the way it is. It is the same inside. I cannot change that. I cannot help. I am sorry."

"Don't be," I said. I was caught between conflicting emotions, exultation at coming up a winner and bitterness at what Morales' statement was costing me. I decided to spin the wheel again. "Can you tell about how many years I have left, Esteban?"

"I cannot say," Morales said in a choked voice. "And if I could, I would not. No human should suffer the burden of knowing the time of his death. Why you make me say those things about you dying?"

I spun on Garth. I hoped I had my smile on straight. "Well, brother, how does Esteban's opinion compare with the medical authorities'?"

Garth shook his head. His voice was hollow. "Your clients get a lot for their money, Mongo."

"How about getting hold of a lawyer and arranging a bail hearing for Esteban. Like tomorrow?"

"I can get a public defender in here, Mongo," Garth said in the same tone. "But you haven't proved anything."

"Was there an autopsy done on Edmonston?"

"Yeah. The report is probably filed away by now. What about it?"

"Well, that autopsy will show that Edmonston was dying of cancer, and I can prove that Esteban knew it. I just gave you a demonstration of what he can do."

"It still doesn't prove anything," Garth said tightly. "Mongo, I wish it did."

"All I want is Esteban out on bail — and the cops dusting a few more corners. All I want to show is that Esteban knew Edmonston was dying, fast. It wouldn't have made any sense for Esteban to kill him. And I think I can bring a surprise character witness. A heavy. Will you talk to the judged"

"Yeah, I'll talk to the judge." Again, Garth gripped my arm. "You sure you're all right? You're white as chalk."

"I'm all right. Hell, we're all dying, aren't we?" My laugh turned short and bitter. "When you've been dying as long as I have, you get used to it. I need a phone."

I didn't wait for an answer. I walked quickly out of the cell and used the first phone I found to call the senator. Then I hurried outside and lit a cigarette. It tasted lousy.

* * *

Two days later Garth popped his head into my office. "He confessed. I thought you'd want to know."

I pushed aside the criminology lecture on which I'd been working. "Who confessed?"

Garth came in and closed the door. "Johnson, of course. He came into his office this morning and found us searching through his records. He just managed to ask to see the warrant before he folded. Told the whole story twice, once for us and once for the DA. What an amateur!"

I was vaguely surprised to find myself monumentally uninterested. My job had been finished the day before when the senator and I had walked in a back door of the courthouse to meet with Garth and the sitting judge. Forty-five minutes later Esteban Morales had been out on bail and on his way to meet with Linda Younger. Rolfe Johnson had been my prime suspect five minutes after I'd begun to talk to him, and there'd been no doubt in my mind that the police would nail him, once they decided to go to the bother.

"What was his motive?" I asked.

"Johnson's forte was business. No question about it. He just couldn't cut it as a murderer ... or a doctor. He had at least a dozen malpractice suits filed against him. Edmonston was getting tired of having a flunky as a partner. Johnson was becoming an increasing embarrassment and was hurting the medical side of the business. Patients, after all, are the bottom line. Edmonston had the original practice and a controlling interest in their corporation. He was going to cut Johnson adrift, and Johnson found out about it.

"Johnson, with all his troubles, knew that he was finished if Edmonston dissolved the partnership. When Dr. Mason told him about Morales, Johnson had a notion that he just might be able to use the situation to his own advantage. After all, what better patsy than an illiterate psychic healer?"

"Johnson sent the message to Esteban, didn't he?"

"Sure. First, he admitted lying to Edmonston about Esteban giving drugs to one of Edmonston's patients, then he told how he maneuvered Edmonston into filing a complaint. He figured the university would bail Esteban out, and a motive would have been established. It wasn't much, but Johnson didn't figure he needed much. After all, he assumed Esteban was crazy and that any jury would know he was crazy. He picked his day, then left a message in the name of Edmonston for Esteban to come to the offices that night. He asked Edmonston to come forty-five minutes early, and he killed him, then waited for Esteban to show up to take the rap. Pretty crude, but then Johnson isn't that imaginative."

"Didn't the feedback from the patients give him any pause?"

Garth laughed. "From what I can gather from his statement, Johnson never paid any attention to the reports. Edmonston did most of the interviewing."

"There seems to be a touch of irony there," I said dryly.

"There seems to be. Well, I've got a car running downstairs. Like I said, I thought you'd want to know."

"Thanks, Garth."

He paused with his hand on the knob and looked at me for a long time. I knew we were thinking about the same thing, words spoken in a jail cell, a very private family secret shared by two brothers. For a moment I was afraid he was going to say something that would embarrass both of us. He didn't.

"See you," Garth said.

"See you."

That Theme again — and another story I would treat slightly differently if I were writing it today. This piece, too, was eventually to be incorporated into An Affair of Sorcerers.

The idea for ^"Falling Star," and for most of the occult pieces in this collection, grew out of my friendship with a man who was, and still is, a very successful and highly influential tarot reader and palmist. I liked the man very much, considered his choice of profession absurd. Other people didn't find his work so ridiculous. On a wall in the foyer of his brownstone were framed palm prints of the rich and famous, names virtually anyone would recognize, who came to him on a regular basis for palm and tarot readings and advice on how to lead their lives — rock stars, heiresses, politicians, and the wives of politicians. These people believed that the answers to their problems could be found in the lines of their hands, the layout of the tarot cards, and my friend's interpretation of these things. These powerful people acted on his advice, just as Nancy Reagan heeded the strictures of her astrologer.

Now, my friend is a kind, sensitive, and responsible person who wields his considerable power with great care. But as I studied the palm prints of the people on the wall, I couldn't help but reflect on the havoc he could wreak in people's lives if he were not so kind and responsible. Now I wish I had been more ambitious and come up with the idea of an astrologer able to reach directly into the White House in order to influence a president's behavior, but at the time I would have dismissed the idea as patently ridiculous.

Falling Star

I don't usually get clients walking into my university office, but I wasn't complaining. That's the kind of attitude somebody in my position develops after a while.

My visitor was a big man with a swarthy complexion, wearing expensive shoes and suit, diamond pinkie rings, and show biz written all over him. He had red hair and milky blue eyes that did a double take between me and the nameplate on my desk.

"I'm looking for Dr. Frederickson."

"I'm Frederickson."

"You're a dwarf."

"You've got something against dwarfs?" I must have sounded nasty.

He flushed and extended his hand. "Sorry," he said. "My name is Sandor Peth. I need a private detective. Your brother suggested I come and talk to you."

That raised a mental eyebrow. I wondered what business Peth had had with Garth. I shook Peth's hand and motioned him to a chair.

Peth reached into his suit jacket and took out a neatly folded piece of paper. He unfolded it, handed it across the desk to me, and said, "I brought this along for what it's worth. I think it could be important."

I studied the paper. There were two concentric circles divided into twelve sections by intersecting lines. The sections were filled with symbols and notes that were meaningless to me.

I placed the paper to one side. "What is it?"

"A horoscope."

I didn't say anything. The thought crossed my mind that Garth might be having a little fun with me.

Peth cleared his throat. "Have you ever heard of Harley Davidson?" "Sure. He's a famous motorcycle."

Peth smiled. "He's a rock star. At least he used to be."

"Used to be?"

The smile faded. "Harley's in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Peth lighted a cigar and stared at me through the smoke. His milky eyes fascinated me; they were like mirrors, reflecting all and revealing nothing. "I want you to know that I don't believe in none of this stuff, but Harley does. That's the point."

"What does Harley believe in, and what's the point?"

"Astrology, witchcraft, all sorts of occult nonsense. Harley's no different from lots of people in the business who won't get out of bed in the morning unless their astrologer tells them it's okay. But Harley got into it a lot deeper. He got mixed up with a bad-news astrologer by the name of Borrn. Borrn's the one who cast that horoscope. Whatever's in it scared the hell out of Harley, messed his mind. So far, he's missed two recording dates and one concert. No promoter's going to put up with that stuff for long. Harley's on his way out."

"What's your interest in Harley?" I asked.

"I was Harley's manager up to a week ago," Peth said evenly. "He fired me."

"On Borrn's advice?"

"Probably."

"A neutral observer might call your interest sour grapes."

"I don't need Harley. If you don't believe me, check with my accountants. I've got a whole stable of rock stars. I like Harley and I hate to see him get messed up like this. He's made me a bundle, and I figure maybe I owe him some."

I nodded. It seemed a sincere enough statement. "How do you think I can help, Mr. Peth?"

"I want to nail Borrn. It may be the only way to save Harley from himself."

"Harley may not want to be saved."

"I just want to make sure he has all the facts. I don't think he does now."

"I'm not in the business of 'nailing' people. I just investigate. If you think Borrn's into something illegal, you should go to the police."

"I did. That's how I met your brother. He said that as far as he knew Borrn was clean. He told me he couldn't do anything unless there was a complaint, which there hasn't been. I want to find out if there's a basis for a complaint. I can afford to tilt at a few windmills. How about it? Will you take the job?"

I took another look at the expensive shoes and diamond pinkie rings. "I get one hundred fifty dollars a day, plus expenses. You don't get charged for the time I'm teaching."

Peth took out a wad of bills and lightened it enough to keep me busy for a few days. "Borrn operates out of a store-front down on the Lower East Side," Peth said, handing me the money. "That's about all I know, except for what I've already told you." He rose and started to leave.

"Just a minute," I said. Peth turned and looked at me inquiringly. "You said Garth told you he thought Borrn was clean. Did he say how he knew that? Astrologers aren't his usual meat and potatoes."

Something that might have been amusement glinted in Peth's eyes. "They are now," he said. "Didn't you know? He's been assigned to a special unit keeping tabs on the New York occult underground."

I hadn't known. For some reason I found the notion enormously funny, but I waited for Peth to leave before I laughed out loud.

Peth had left the horoscope behind. I picked it up and stuffed it into my pocket along with my newfound wealth.

* * *

At the precinct station house I found Garth torturing a typewriter in the cubicle he called an office. He looked tired. Garth always looks tired. He is a cop who takes his work seriously.

"Abracadabra!" I cried, jumping out from behind one of the partitions and flinging my arms wide.

Garth managed to hide his amusement very well. He stopped typing and looked up at me. "I see Peth found you."

"Yeah. Thanks for the business."

"Why don't you say it a little louder? Maybe you can get me brought up on departmental charges."

I sat down on the edge of his desk and grinned. "I understand you're using the taxpayers' money to chase witches."

"Witches, warlocks, Satanists and sacrificial murderers," Garth said evenly. "As a matter of fact, the man Peth wants you to investigate is a witch as well as an astrologer."

I'd been kidding. Garth wasn't. "You mean 'warlock,' don't you?"

"No, I mean a witch. A witch is a witch, male or female. The term 'warlock' has a bad connotation among the knowledgeable. A warlock is a traitor, or a loner. Like a magus or ceremonial magician."

"A who?"

"Never mind. You don't want to hear about it."

What Garth meant was that he didn't want to talk about it. I asked him why.

"I'm not prepared to talk about it," Garth said quietly, staring at the backs of his hands. "At least not yet. I'll tell you, Mongo, you and I come from a background with a certain set of preconceptions that we call 'reality.' It's hard giving up those notions."

"Hey, brother, you sound like you're starting to take this stuff pretty seriously. Are the practitioners of the Black Arts getting to you?"

"What do you know about magic?"

"I'm allergic to rabbits."

"It isn't all black," Garth said, ignoring my crack. "Witchcraft, or Wicca, is recognized as an organized religion in New York State. The parent organization is called Friends of the Craft."

"I'm not sure I get the point."

Garth pressed his hands flat on the desk in front of him. He continued to stare at them. "I'm not sure there is a point."

I was growing a little impatient. "What can you tell me about this Borrn character?"

"He's supposed to be a good astrologer, and there aren't that many good ones around. I don't know anything else, except that he's never been involved in any of our investigations. That's why I sent Peth to you."

"What about a bunko angle? It's possible that Borrn could be milking Davidson. If he's using scare tactics, that's extortion."

Garth threw up his hands. "Then Davidson will just have to file a complaint. We're not running a baby-sitting service." He thought about what I'd said for a few moments, then added, "It's true that some of these guys arc bunko artists, con men. They get an impressionable type, come up with a few shrewd insights, scare the hell out of him with a lot of mumbo jumbo, then start giving bad advice."

"Do any of them give good advice?"

Garth looked at me strangely. "I've seen some things that are hard to explain, and I've heard of things that are impossible to explain. I know very little because I get told very little. The occult underground is a very secret society. Secrecy is part of the Witch's Pyramid."

"There you go again."

"Never mind again. If you want to know more you should talk to one of your colleagues at the university."

I tried to think of one of my colleagues who might know something about the occult. I came up zero. "Who would that be?"

"Dr. Jones."

"Uranus Jones?"

"That's the one."

Uranus was more than a colleague; she was a friend. She was also one of the most levelheaded, together people I'd ever met. I shook my head. "You must have your signals crossed. Uranus isn't an astrologer, she's an astronomer. And one of the best in the business."

Garth grunted. "You may know her as an astronomer. In the circles I travel in lately, she's a living legend. She's cut an awful lot of corners for me, helping to track lost kids who get involved in the occult, that kind of thing. She's opened doors I wouldn't even be able to find on my own. Or wouldn't know existed. You wouldn't believe her reputation." He stared off into space for a few moments, as though considering his next words. "She's supposed to be psychic, and a materializing medium."

"There you go — "

"You know what a psychic is. A materializing medium is a person who can make objects appear in another person's hand — by willing it."

I found Uranus in her offices in the university's Hall of Sciences. The rooms were cluttered with charts, telescope parts, and other astronomical paraphernalia. Uranus was bent over a blowup of a new star cluster she had discovered. Her hair, strawberry blond in old photographs she had shared with me, was now a burnished silver. I knew she was fifty, but she had the face and body of a woman in her early thirties, and the eyes of a teenager.

She glanced up and smiled when I entered. "Mongo! How nice to see you!"

"Hello, darlin'." I went over to her desk and looked at the photograph. "How do you think those stars are going to affect my behavior this year?"

Uranus casually pushed the photo to one side, leaned back in her chair, folded her hands in her lap and stared at me. "Who have you been talking to?"

"A certain cop who's a little in awe of you. Didn't you know Garth is my brother?" "I did." '

"Well, how come you never talked to me about any of these hidden talents of yours? Heaven knows we've sat through enough boring faculty parties together."

"What would have been your reaction?"

I envisioned myself choking on a Scotch sour. She had a point, and I decided not to pursue it. "Uranus, I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"As a criminologist or private detective?"

"Private detective. I need some help."

"All right. What do you want to know?"

"For openers, darlin', what's a nice astrologer like you doing in a place like this?"

That caught her off guard and she laughed. "Astronomy evolved from astrology," she said, pointing to the charts and photographs strewn around her office. "The one is much older than the other."

"I'm not sure what that means."

"It may mean," Uranus said easily, "that any man who rejects out-of-hand the tools that other men have found useful for thousands of years is a fool." She paused, then slowly drew a circle in the air with her index finger. "We live in a circle of light that we call Science. Obviously, I believe in science. But I also know that the circle of light expands slowly, illuminating things that are in the surrounding darkness. The atom, the force of gravity, the fact that the earth is round — all were very 'unscientific' concepts at one time. There are still unbelievably powerful forces out in that darkness we temporarily call the Occult, Mongo. The ancients knew about and used these forces instinctively. Most modern men — at least in the West — are not so wise. Science can be thought of as a means of getting things done. But there are other ways. For example, taking an airplane is a perfectly reasonable and efficient means of getting to, say, Europe. There are men and women alive today who can make the same journey — and report their observations — without ever leaving their living rooms. It's called astral projection."

"Are you one of those people?"

Uranus ignored the question. "The Magi mentioned in the Bible were astrologers," she said. "Our word 'magician' comes from magi. The 'star' they saw in the east was actually an astrological configuration that they knew how to interpret. And look where it led them. Jesus may have been the greatest ceremonial magician who's ever lived. He — with his disciples — numbered thirteen, the classic number of the witch's coven. Each of the disciples displays the characteristics of one of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The sign of the early Christians was the fish. Pisces is symbolized by fish, and Jesus lived in the age of Pisces."

I meant to laugh; it came out a nervous chuckle. I remembered Garth's comment on preconceptions. "You'd better not let your friendly neighborhood clergy hear you talking like that."

Uranus smiled. "Everything I've said is common knowledge to anyone who's done his theological homework. It's a matter of difference of opinion over interpretation." She paused and touched my hand. "In any case, you can no longer claim that I don't discuss these things with you. What did you want to see me about, Mongo?"

I took out the horoscope Peth had given me and handed it to her. "I'd like you to read this for me."

Uranus smoothed the paper flat on the desk and studied it. After a few moments she looked up at me. "Is this yours, Mongo?"

I shook my head.

"I'm glad. I don't have time to do a thorough reading, but at a glance I'd say this person is in trouble."

"How do you know that?"

Uranus motioned me closer to the desk and pointed to the two circles. "The inner circle is the natal horoscope," she said, "the position of the sun, moon and planets in the sky at this person's birth. There are no severe afflictions — bad signs — in it. He or she probably has a marked talent in art or music, although that talent is used rather superficially, in a popular vein. But the chart indicates considerable success."

I swallowed hard and found that my mouth was dry. "Where does the trouble come in?"

"The outer circle is a synthesis — the horoscope projected up to the present time. Saturn — an evil, constricting influence — is in very bad conjunction with the other planets. There is a bad grouping in Scorpio, the sign of the occult. There are a number of other afflictions indicated, including a bad conjunction in the house of the secret enemy. I would say that whoever this is has reached a most important crossroad in his life, and the situation is fraught with danger. May I ask whose horoscope this is?"

I felt light-headed. I wrenched my brain back into gear. "A rock star by the name of Harley Davidson."

Uranus choked off a cry as her hand flew to her mouth.

"You know him?"

Uranus shuddered. "His real name is Bob Greenfield. Bob was one of my students a few years back. Tall, likable boy. Black hair, angular features. Maybe you remember him."

I didn't, which wasn't unusual. The university is a big place. I briefly told Uranus the story Peth had given me.

Uranus' eyes clouded and her face aged perceptibly. "Borrn is an evil man," she said quietly. "Bob would be no match for him."

"His ex-manager seems to think the same thing. He hired me to try to get something on Borrn."

Uranus shook her head. "You'll fail. And you'll be running a great personal risk if you try. Borrn is exceedingly dangerous."

"If he's criminal, maybe I can prove it."

"No. Evil is not necessarily criminal. There's a difference."

I didn't argue the point. I understood it all too well.

"Borrn is a gifted astrologer and palmist," Uranus continued. "There's also a rumor to the effect that he's a member of a supersecret coven of witches."

"Garth mentioned that."

"Garth must be developing some other good contacts; or someone is deliberately trying to mislead him. I'm not sure if the rumor is true, but it probably is. If so, it could explain a lot of things."

"Like what?"

"The influence you claim Borrn has over Bob. It could be the coven's cone of power acting on him."

"Cone of power?"

"An influence coming from a powerful collective will. That's the purpose of a coven: to form a collective will. There's no telling what they want with Bob. It could be a homosexual angle — Bob's a handsome boy — or it could simply be money."

I cleared my throat. "I'm sorry, Uranus, but I don't believe that 'cone of power' number."

Uranus seemed distracted, and I couldn't tell whether she hadn't heard or was merely ignoring my comment. "We should go and talk to Bob," she said at last.

"We?"

"He wouldn't talk to you. He would to me. I know the language."

I considered it for a moment, then reached for the phone, intending to call Peth. "I'll find out where he lives."

Uranus was already halfway to the door. "I know where he lives; we kept in touch up until a few months ago." She paused and stared at me. I was still standing by her desk, trying to sort things out. The urgency in her eyes hummed in her voice. "I really think we should hurry, Mongo."

* * *

The place where Harley Davidson had once lived was a three-story brownstone in a fashionable section of Greenwich

Village. Nobody answered the bell, and it took me half an hour to work my way through the double lock on the door.

Harley Davidson was out, and he wouldn't be back. He'd left his body behind on the floor of his bedroom, filled with sleeping pills.

I picked my way through the empty plastic vials on the floor and called Garth. Uranus sat down on the edge of Davidson's bed and began to cry softly. I began to poke around. The first thing that caught my attention was what appeared to be a notebook on a night stand. It had metal covers and was inscribed with strange symbols. I used a handkerchief to pick it up and carry it over to where Uranus was sitting. Her sobbing had subsided and she was staring off into space, beyond a young man's corpse, at what was and what might have been.

I touched her gently on the shoulder and showed her the notebook. "Darlin', do you know what this is?"

She glanced at the notebook. "It's a witch's diary," she said distantly. Her voice had the quality of an echo. "All initiates start one, and fill it the rest of their lives. It usually contains personal experiences, spells, and coven secrets."

I grunted, opened the book and started to leaf through it. There wasn't much in it that made any sense to me; I decided the obfuscation was probably intentional, designed to preserve its contents from prying eyes like my own. Borrn's name was mentioned a number of times, along with a list of various ceremonies in which Davidson had participated.

"Borrn seems to be the coven leader, judging by all this," I said.

Uranus said nothing, nor did she exhibit any interest in the notebook. I didn't press her on it. I asked a question instead. "What's 'scrying'?"

"Is that mentioned in there?"

"A number of times."

"Scrying is a method of divination," Uranus said hollowly, "of looking into the future or discovering secrets. It usually involves crystal gazing, but flame or water can also be used. Bob would have been nowhere near the point where he could scry."

"Who is at that point?"

I must have made a face, or the tone of my voice wasn't right. Uranus suddenly snapped, "Don't mock what you don't understand! I do it all the time!'' She punctuated the outburst with a long sigh; it was an apology, unasked for and unneeded. "With the locked door and empty pill bottles, it's an obvious suicide. It's finished, Mongo. What's your interest now?"

It was a good question, one I'd been asking myself. Maybe it was the fact that a lot of Sandor Peth's money was still rustling around in my pocket. It seemed a shame to give it back, and if I were going to keep it I had to work for it.

"There's a point of law called psychological coercion," I said. "If it can be shown that Borrn or any other member of his coven influenced Davidson to take his own life, it's a criminal offense. Probably impossible to prove, but worth looking into."

"Leave it, Mongo. Please. No good will come out of your investigating Borrn. I know you don't believe this, but you can't imagine the misery he could cause you."

I didn't say anything. I was tired of warnings, tired of unwanted glimpses into the dark attics of men's minds. There was the body of the boy on the floor, shot out of the tree of life by invisible bullets of what had to be superstition. Those bullets had found their mark in a bright, talented and rich boy who had exploded under their impact, plunging from the rarefied atmosphere of celebrity to end as a cold, graying hulk, like a falling star.

Uranus suddenly gripped my arm. "Bob shouldn't have had something like this."

I looked at her. The grief in her eyes had been replaced by something else. She looked as if she had just waked from sleep, passing from a nightmare into something worse.

"Why not? You told me Borrn was a witch. Under the circumstances, wouldn't it have been natural for Davidson to become a member of Borrn's coven?"

"No. It would have been virtually impossible. I told you that a coven is made up of thirteen members. Thirteen is a magic number of sorts. No coven would take in a fourteenth member."

"Maybe somebody died or decided to join the Elks instead."

Uranus shook her head. "Not at the level at which this coven operated. You don't just 'leave' a coven like that. And, even if a member had died, they would never choose a boy like Bob to take his place. Borrn's coven is highly skilled. They would never accept an initiate."

"Maybe the book belongs to somebody else."

"I doubt it. A witch's diary is his most precious possession. He almost never lets it out of his sight."

I put the book back in its place and started for the door. "Garth should be here in a few minutes," I said. "You fill him in. I'll talk to him later."

"Where will I tell him you've gone?"

"Tell him I've gone to have my fortune told."

* * *

It took a bit of looking, but I finally found Borrn's store-front operation. It was the only open door in a narrow alley bounded on both sides by crumbling warehouses with boarded-up windows. I went through it.

The room was small and cramped, permeated by the smell of incense. Borrn sat in the middle of it like a spider in the middle of an invisible web that was no less deadly for the fact that I couldn't see it. In front of him was a plain wooden table on which was a crystal ball. It was the only exotica in the room; the rest consisted of bookshelves filled with books, most of which looked well-worn. I wondered whether he actually read them, or had picked them up in a secondhand bookstore. Borrn himself was dressed in a very unmystical outfit consisting of faded denims and dungaree jacket. I felt vaguely disappointed, like a boy who'd peeked into a clown's dressing room.

Borrn rose as I entered. He was not a big man, but he had presence, the kind of self-assurance that comes from being able to make a living doing what you like and being good at it. He was short and stocky, with brown hair and piercing black eyes.

"Can I help you?" His voice was soft, almost lilting, like the swish of a garrote before it bites into flesh.

I gave him a phony name. Business or no, I didn't want my name popping up at a later date on some astrologer's list of clients. "I hear you tell fortunes."

I'd offended him. Borrn sat back down and crossed his arms over his chest. "I do not 'tell fortunes,' as you put it. I advise you to look on Forty-second Street."

"What do you do?"

"If you are serious, I will read your palm. I charge twenty-five dollars for a one-hour consultation. However, I do not think you are serious. You would have known that I am not a fortuneteller."

"What do you call palm reading?"

"The palm is a map of your past and an indication of what your future may hold. It does not tell your destiny; you decide your destiny."

"It still sounds like the same thing."

"It is not. If I tell you there is a red light two blocks from here, that does not affect your freedom to decide to stop for it or to run it."

"It sounds a little complicated to me. How about doing my horoscope?"

He motioned me to sit down. I did.

"I believe your horoscope would be useless to you," he said in the tone of a doctor criticizing a medication. "I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you to be told that you're a dwarf. Your horoscope would probably show a great affliction in the physical area, but the rest might not necessarily hold true. A horoscope is like an insurance company's actuary tables. You differ markedly from the norm; your dwarfism — the immediacy of it — would consistently influence your life far more than the planets."

"All right," I said, holding out my hand, "see what you can do with that."

"Are you right-handed?"

"Yes."

"Then this hand is the record of what you have done with your natural talents. The left is your subconscious, your potential. Later we will compare the two."

He took my right hand and began to manipulate it, bending the fingers back and forth, pressing the mounds of flesh at the base of the palm and fingers. He had a soft, delicate touch. To this point he had been rather pleasant, a natural psychologist; I had to remind myself that the worst evil often comes in the nicest packages.

"Were you once in the circus?"

The question startled me, until I reflected on the logic of it. "Sure," I said evenly. "We call it 'Dwarfs' Heaven.'"

Borrn shook his head. He seemed puzzled. "But you weren't there in the capacity of a clown, or a freak. You were important, had a wonderful reputation and considerable publicity. I . . . see great coordination and drive. I would have to say that you were an acrobat. Or a tumbler." He looked up at me. "Is that right?"

I decided Borrn had one hell of an act. I resisted the impulse to look at my own hand. "What else does it say?"

Borrn turned his attention back to my hand. "The head line is very long and complex. I would say that you have — or once had — multiple careers. You have a great deal of intelligence, and may be a teacher, probably at an advanced level, as your hand shows that you are impatient with stupidity. Also, you are dying."

The last went through me like a jolt of electricity. I yanked my hand away. "It comes with the package," I said tightly. "That's why you don't see many dwarfs in old-age homes. Did Harley Davidson's hand say the same thing?"

That gave Borrn a little jolt of his own, but he had remarkable control. Something flashed in his eyes, then went out, leaving his eyes looking like two cold lumps of coal. The effect was startling, as though he had suddenly contracted and was watching me from somewhere deep inside himself, far behind the dull eyes I was watching. "Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want?"

"Davidson was one of your clients. Did you know that he's dead?"

"I do not discuss my clients," Borrn said in a voice that was so low it was barely audible. "Get out."

"You may have to discuss Davidson with the police. I think you may have had something to do with his death. What did you tell him that would make him want to take his own life?"

I expected some kind of reaction and got none. I knew instinctively that Borrn was not going to say more. He sat very still, like some kind of statue executed in perfect detail, but still without life. Again, I had the impression that he had retreated to somewhere deep within himself to a trancelike state where, as far as I was concerned, he had left the room and would not be coming back. I swallowed hard. His eyes were blank, looking at and beyond me. I suddenly knew that he could stay that way for hours if he chose to do so. Nothing I could say or do would have the slightest impact on him.

It was the most effective brush-off I'd ever seen. I got up and left.

I didn't go far. It had been a long day, and I'd covered a lot of territory, geographic and emotional; but there was still a way to go, and I was anxious to get to the end of whatever road it was I was traveling on. Borrn had gotten to me in a way he probably hadn't anticipated. He'd known too much about me. That meant one of two things: He had actually seen things in my palm, or he had a dossier. To me it was no contest. I wanted to find the dossier, then find out who had given it to him, and why.

I killed what remained of the afternoon in a local bar over beer and a steak sandwich. Then I went out and bought a penlight and a navy blue sheet. Finally I went back to the alley. It was dark.

It took me all of thirty seconds to burgle my way into the store-front. I shrouded myself with the sheet to hide the light from the penlight and began to go through Borrn's rather extensive library. I wasn't sure what I was looking for; whatever it was, I didn't find it. Most of the books were highly technical treatises on astrology, replete with countless charts and tables that made my eyes water. That was it, except for a crumbling copy of something called the Kabala and other books on mysticism. There were no personal papers or records of any kind.

I sat down in Borrn's chair and tried to think. I'd apparently struck out in Borrn's office, and I doubted strongly that I would find any "Borrn" listed in the telephone directory. Besides, judging from what Uranus and Garth had said, I wasn't going to get any information from people in the neighborhood who might have any.

I raised a good dwarf chuckle by reflecting on the fact that I might just have to "scry" up some answers. I reached out and touched the crystal ball in front of me. It was heavy leaded glass. I absently pushed at it and heard a soft click behind me. I turned and whistled softly.

A section of one of the bookcases had slid open to reveal a short corridor leading to what appeared to be a large chamber.

Light from the secret chamber was pouring out into the storefront and splashing onto the street. I quickly rose from the chair and went through the opening.

I'd been worried about getting the door shut, and I realized too late that I'd confused my priorities. The heavy steel door sighed shut as I passed through the opening. It came up flush against the wall with a very solid and ominous click. I looked for some way to get the door open and couldn't find it. It was a double-security system, primarily designed to keep intruders out but, failing that, designed to insure that they stayed in. Since there seemed to be no way out, I went in.

The setup inside was impressive. The interior of the warehouse behind Borrn's store-front had been gutted and reconstructed to form a huge, circular chamber. The walls and ceiling were solid and soundproofed; the floor was concrete. I estimated the construction costs to be in excess of a half million dollars. Borrn didn't get that kind of money from doing mystical manicures.

The job wasn't completed yet. There was a gaping hole high on the north wall, with ropes and scaffolding hanging down from it. That would be the conduit for the building supplies.

There was a large crater in the middle of the floor, about twenty feet in diameter. I walked over and looked in. It was perhaps six feet deep, covered at the bottom with large gas jets. The ceiling above was blackened, and there were air vents placed at strategic points around the chamber to allow for circulation. The whole thing reminded me of a crematorium.

There were twelve cubicles built around the perimeter of the chamber, and I could see from where I was standing that they were living quarters of sorts, complete with cots, small libraries and black-draped, candle-covered altars; but it was the thirteenth cubicle built into the north wall in which I was interested. It was at least twice as large as the others, and was draped in red: that would be Borrn's. I walked in.

I was a slow learner. The cubicle was rigged in the same manner as the store-front; I had no sooner stepped over the threshold than a steel door dropped from a hidden receptacle in the ceiling. Obviously, arrangements for walking out had to be made before walking in. I decided that didn't bode well for my immediate future.

I began a systematic search of the room. It didn't take me long to strike pay dirt. This time there were personal notes and correspondence written in a language I could understand.

Two things became very clear: Borrn was not the leader of the coven, and Harley Davidson had, indeed, had a "secret enemy."

The door sighed open an hour or so later. Sandor Peth stood in the doorway, staring down at me where I sat on the bed. Borrn and the rest of the coven stood slightly behind him. All were dressed in crimson, hooded robes adorned with mystic symbols. The lights had been turned out in the large chamber, and there was a loud hissing sound; firelight flickered and danced like heat lightning.

I looked at Peth. "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Peth's milky blue eyes didn't change. "You are a very persistent man, Dr. Frederickson," he said evenly. "And fast. I'm afraid I seriously underestimated you."

I motioned to the firelight behind him. "Rather newfangled, isn't it?"

"One of the exigencies of living in New York City."

"You want to tell me what this is all about?"

"Like in the movies?"

"Like in the movies."

Peth motioned to Borrn, who came forward and searched me. I didn't put up any resistance. It wasn't the time. I wanted to find out what Peth had to say — if anything. Also, I thought resistance might be offensive to the thirteen of them.

"All right," Peth said when Borrn had finished with me and stepped back into the group. He entered the room and sat down on a chair across from me. "First, why don't you tell me what you've surmised so far?"

"You killed Davidson, and you were trying to cover your tracks."

"The second part of your statement is correct. But I — or we — did not kill Davidson; we caused him to die."

"An interesting legal point."

"Yes. I suppose it is."

"How'd you do it?"

Peth motioned to himself and the others, as though the answer were obvious. There was a faint ringing in my ears.

"You're telling me you put a spell on him?" I decided he was crazy, and I told him so.

Peth shrugged. "You asked me what this was all about, and I am trying to tell you. Of course, the fact that we caused Harley to take his own life is unprovable. However, the papers in this room, which I'm sure you've seen, do prove intent to do harm, and could prove embarrassing in a courtroom. I'm truly sorry you proved to be so conscientious."

"Why did Davidson have to die?"

"We depend on people — you would probably call them 'victims' — for our financial resources. All of us, in one way or another, are involved with people, and these people unwittingly provide financial support for our activities."

"What activities?"

"Simply put, the accumulation of power that will enable us to control even more people. As you know, fame and fortune in the rock-music business is ephemeral. Harley was at the peak of his earning powers. The power which you scoffed at had enabled me to secure Harley's power of attorney and convince him to sign a will leaving all of his rather large list of investments to me. Also, I had managed to buy a million dollars' worth of insurance, without a suicide clause, on Harley's life. Very expensive, but I knew I wouldn't have that many premiums to pay. At that point Harley became more valuable to us dead than alive."

"And that's when Borrn went to work on his head?"

"We all participated in the process. We knew that Harley would eventually kill himself, but we did not know when or how. If I had known he would do it the way he did — by swallowing pills inside a locked house, as reported on the radio — I would not have proceeded the way I did. However, I knew that I, as the beneficiary of very large sums of money, would come under a great deal of suspicion. That's why I went to your brother. I anticipated his reaction and thought that would be the end of it, with my innocence established in his mind. However, when he suggested that I come to you, I felt I had to take the suggestion."

"You did some pretty thorough research on me first."

Peth looked surprised. "No. As a matter of fact, I didn't. I should have. If I had, Borrn would have been prepared for your visit, and you would not be in the position you find yourself. As it was, Borrn did not know you were a dwarf — I hadn't had a chance to tell him — and you gave him a false name."

"You're lying. Why? It's a small point."

Again, Peth looked surprised. Suddenly he laughed. "Borrn gave you a reading, didn't he?"

Something was stirring deep inside my mind; it was blind, soft and furry, with sharp teeth. I ran away from it. "You took Davidson into your coven, right?"

"Borrn made Davidson think he was a part of the coven — in which I, obviously, was the missing member. Of course he was never really a part. All of the ceremonies he took part in were actually part of a magical attack on his deep mind."

I'd heard enough to convince me that some kind of legal case could be made against Peth, Borrn and the others, and the papers I'd hidden inside my shirt would give me a shot at proving it. At the least, New York City would be rid of one particular supercoven composed of thirteen megalomaniac cranks. There remained only the slight difficulty of finding a way to get past thirteen men, and out of a sealed room. I tried not to let that depress me.

"What happens now?"

"Must I state the obvious?"

"You'd be a fool to kill me."

"Really? Why is that? I think we would be fools not to kill you. The fire is very hot. It will leave no trace of you. You will simply have disappeared."

"My brother knows I'm investigating Borrn. He'll find this place."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"Somebody's building it."

"Haitians, who appreciate our powers. They are afraid of voodoo spells. They would tear their own tongues out before they told anybody about this place. It's true that Borrn will be investigated, but I have no doubt that he will come out of it clean."

"People know he's a witch."

That shook him. "How is that?"

I decided against mentioning Garth or Uranus. "It's in his witch's diary. Davidson's."

Peth was silent for a long time. Whatever he'd finally decided wasn't going to be shared with me. He rose from his chair and gave a slight nod of his head. As one, the twelve figures outside the door entered the room and began to fan out around me. Their movements were slow, almost mechanical; it was like seeing a guillotine blade descend in slow motion.

I smiled in what I hoped was a disarming manner, and gathered my legs beneath me. I focused my gaze on Peth's solar plexus. I couldn't fight thirteen men, but a few of them were going to discover that I was one deadly dwarf. Peth would be my first candidate for instruction.

^"O Pentacle of Might, be thou fortress and defense to Robert Frederickson against all enemies, seen and unseen, in every magical work."

Uranus' voice drifted down from the darkness in the outer chamber. Before all the lights went out I caught the looks of utter astonishment on the faces of the coven members. I was a little surprised myself, but not so much that I forgot the way out of the room. I lunged forward in the darkness, caromed off a few sheeted bodies and landed on my face on the concrete outside. I got back up on my feet and raced off to my left, taking cover in the darkness, beyond the firelight. Pd traded in one trap for a new, slightly larger one; as long as the lights remained out, a few people were going to pay a heavy price for trying to find me.

That left me to meditate on the question of what Uranus was doing in the building.

Peth and the others seemed to be preoccupied by the same question. I watched as they slowly emerged from the darkness to spread out in a circle around the raging fire. Peth stood at their head, gazing up toward the spot where the hole in the north wall would be.

"Who are you?" Peth asked in a whisper that carried throughout the chamber.

"All wise Great One, Great Ruler of Storms, Master of the Heavenly Chamber, Great King of the Powers of the Sky, be here, we pray thee, and guard this place from all dangers approaching from the west?"

Peth and the others knew a few rhymes of their own. There was no visible signal of any kind, but their voices rose in a chorus that made chills ripple through my body:

"Amodeus, Calamitor, Usor! Tou who sow confusion, where are you? You who infuse fear and hate and enmity, I command you by the power of Disalone and Her Horned Consort to go!"

"So mote it be!"

"So mote it be!"

There was a pause, then Uranus' voice again, soft, drifting like a sonic feather:

"Four corners in this house for Holy Angels. Christ Jesus be in our midst. God be in this place and keep us safe."

The response was a blast of psychic hate:

"It is not our hands which do this deed, but that of Amodeus the Horned One!"

"The trespasser must die!"

"So mote it be!"

"So mote it be!"

I was watching a duel of sorcerers, and I felt thrown back in time a thousand years, thrown to the ground at the mouth of a cave in which moved dark, strange shapes.

There was a long silence. Peth made a motion with his hand and the other members of the coven turned and started to fan out. It was dwarf-hunting time.

"Stop!" Uranus' voice was weaker, ragged, as though she were short of breath. The movement of the coven members stopped. "I am Uranus Jones, and Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You have heard of me and know of my powers."

Peth's voice drifted softly through the room, waxing and waning like some invisible moon. "I have heard of you, Uranus Jones. You are a member of our family, a unit of the Universal Mind. Respect our wishes. This is not your concern. Leave us. So mote it be."

Again, the faint, muted tones: "I repeat that Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You harm him at your own peril."

Her voice drifted off strangely. The muscles in my stomach began to flutter uncontrollably. There was movement to my left.

"Mongo! Shoot the leader if anyone moves again!"

Uranus' voice seemed stronger now, as though she had successfully passed through some great ordeal. I liked her suggestion, except that I didn't have a gun, and Peth knew it.

"He doesn't have a gun," Peth said, underlining my thoughts. I wondered why he sounded so uncertain.

"He does now," Uranus said. "Open the doors and let him pass."

It was the beginning of an argument between two other parties that I was going to lose. It seemed a good time to excuse myself from the debate.

I remembered the scaffolding hanging from the hole in the north wall, and tried to picture in my mind exactly where it would be. I knew it was about ten feet off the ground, and I would need tremendous momentum if I hoped to reach it.

Circus time. I shoved off the wall and sprinted across the floor, getting up a good head of steam. Somebody reached out for me and missed. Twenty feet from where I judged the wall to be I launched into a series of cartwheels, then, on the last turn, planted my feet on the floor and hurled myself up into the air.

At the apogee of my leap my hands touched wood. I gripped the edge of the scaffold; I scrambled up onto the platform, shinnied up the rope and dropped over the concrete cornice onto a pile of building supplies.

The entire escape had taken less than fifteen seconds.

I could see Uranus now in the glow of the firelight reflected off the walls. She was slumped against a girder, next to a large circuit breaker; her appearance frightened me more than anything that had happened previously. She appeared to have aged into an old woman, devoid of energy; her beautiful, silver hair hung in wisps from her head.

I ran over to her and grabbed her around the waist.

"Fire exit," she gasped. "Off to the left."

I started to my left, pulling Uranus after me. I'd expected to hear a furor from below or, at the least, a few well-chosen curses. There was silence.

"Why the hell didn't you tell me about this place?" I whispered through clenched teeth. "It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble."

"Scry," Uranus sighed in the same broken voice that had so frightened me before. "Knew . . . felt . . . you in trouble. Called Garth but afraid . . . there wasn't . . . time."

She seemed to be regaining her strength. I released her and she scrambled along beside me. I found the window she had come through. We both went out, then started down the fire escape.

"The gun," Uranus said. "Do you have it? They may try to come after us."

"I don't have a gun."

Uranus said nothing. I could hear the sirens of Garth's cavalry coming to the rescue. Judging from the sound, they were closing fast.

"Let's go watch the show," I said, starting down the alley leading to the front of the building.

Uranus grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the darkness beside the building. She looked herself again, though still pale; it was as though she had passed through a near-fatal illness in a matter of only a few minutes.

"I can't go with you," she said.

"Why the hell not? Knowing Garth, he'll have an army of cops with him."

"That's not the point. I don't want to answer questions. I don't want anyone to know exactly what happened in that building tonight."

"Peth will tell them."

"No, he won't. And none of the others will either. I must beg you not to speak, Mongo, for the sake of our friendship. When I called Garth I told him simply that I had a hunch about you and the warehouse. Garth has learned to trust my hunches."

"This is no time for games," I said impatiently. "How did you know where I was?"

She ignored my question. "There will be reporters out there, questions that I'm not prepared to answer. I would no longer be able to carry on my work at the university, and you know how important that is to me. It's my link with the . . . rest of the world. Please, Mongo. Don't take that away from me."

She turned and ran off into the darkness without waiting for an answer. I walked slowly toward the flashing lights at the front of the building.

The proverbial mop-up of Peth and his crew was decidedly anticlimactic. When Garth and the other policemen broke down the secret door the members of the coven were waiting calmly.

Their robes and, presumably, all of the records had been consigned to the gas-fed bonfire still roaring from the pit in the center of the floor. They offered no resistance.

As Uranus had predicted, no one mentioned her presence in the building earlier. For some reason I didn't fully understand, I didn't either.

I was exhausted, and my head felt as though it had been stuffed with rotting cotton. Still, I managed to drag myself down to the police station, where I turned over the papers I had taken and made some kind of statement. Then I went home and poured myself a tumbler of Scotch. I wanted desperately to sleep, but there were still a lot of things on my mind.

There was nothing that had happened which could not be explained by a few good guesses and a lot of abnormal psychology emanating from some very sick minds. I needed the Scotch because I realized that Uranus possessed one of those sick minds. A woman I loved was, in my opinion, desperately ill, and I had to find the courage to confront her with this opinion, to suggest that she see a psychiatrist.

Having resolved this, I slipped off my jacket and threw it toward the bed. Only at the last moment did I realize that it somehow seemed heavier than it should. The jacket slid across the smooth bedspread and fell to the floor on the opposite side with a heavy, metallic clunk. The sound shrieked in my ears, echoing down to the very roots of my soul.

Whatever was in the jacket, I didn't want to know about it. I raced around the bed, picked up the jacket and in the same motion sent it hurtling toward the window. The weighted cloth shattered the glass and dropped from sight.

I stood, shaking uncontrollably and breathing hard as the cool wind whistled through the broken pane. Even as a tremendous surge of relief flowed through me, I knew that throwing away the jacket was no answer. If, indeed, there were the forces outside the "circle of light" Uranus had mentioned, it would do no good for me to deny it: I would merely remain ignorant of their existence. If the jacket was lost, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering what had been in the pocket — and how it had gotten there.

I drained off the Scotch, then went back into the night.

This story, also incorporated into An Affair of Sorcerers., is the one I would approach most differently if I were writing the piece now instead of this introduction to it. This is the closest I ever came to acceding to the possibility that there "might be something there," when all that is there is our fear and ignorance. Today I would like to believe, and perhaps even argue, that the story is really about how fear alone can most definitely kill, and about the tendency of superstitious people who insist on "taking things on faith" — even when all objective evidence points to the contrary — to be their own executioners intellectually, spiritually, and often physically. The naked text is there, but I would still like to believe that I was writing about the terrible cost of the dues for membership in some belief systems.

Book of Shadows

It had been a long day with absolutely nothing accomplished. I'd spent most of it grading a depressing set of mid-term papers that led me to wonder what I'd been teaching all semester in my graduate criminology seminar. After that I'd needed a drink.

Instead of doing the perfectly sensible thing and repairing to the local pub, I'd made the mistake of calling my answering service, which informed me there was a real live client waiting for me in my downtown office. The Yellow Pages the man had picked my name out of didn't mention the fact that this particular private detective was a dwarf: One look at me and the man decided he didn't really need a private detective after all.

With my sensitive ego in psychic shreds, I headed home. I planned to quickly make up for my past sobriety and spend an electronically lobotomized evening in front of the television.

I perked up when I saw the little girl waiting for me outside my apartment. Kathy Marsten was a small friend of mine from 4D, down the hall. With her blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a frilly white dress and holding a bright red patent leather purse, she looked positively beatific. I laughed to myself as I recalled that it had taken me two of her seven years to convince her that I wasn't a potential playmate.

"Kathy, Kathy, Kathy!" I said, picking her up and setting her down in a manner usually guaranteed to produce Instant Giggle. "How's my girl today?"

"Hello, Mr. Mongo," she said very seriously.

"Why the good clothes? You look beautiful, but I'd think you'd be out playing with your friends by this time."

"I came here right after school, Mr. Mongo. I've been waiting for you. I was getting afraid I wouldn't see you before my daddy came home. I wanted to ask you something."

Now the tears came. I reached down and brushed them away, suddenly realizing that this was no child's game. "What did you want to ask me, Kathy?"

She sniffled, then regained control of herself in a manner that reminded me of someone much older. "My daddy says that you sometimes help people for money."

"That's right, Kathy. Can I help you?"

Her words came in a rush. "I want you to get my daddy's book of shadows back from Daniel so Daddy will be happy again. But you mustn't tell Daddy. He'd be awful mad at me if he knew I told anybody. But he just has to get it back or something terrible will happen. I just know it."

"Kathy, slow down and tell me what a 'book of shadows' is. Who's Daniel?"

But she wasn't listening. Kathy was crying again, fumbling in her red purse. "I've got money for you," she stammered. "I've been saving my allowance and milk money."

Before I could say anything the little girl had taken out a handful of small change and pressed it into my palm. I started to give it back, then stopped when I heard footsteps come up behind me.

"Kathy!" a thin voice said. "There you are!"