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BLACK EASTER -- THE FIRST COMMISSION

[In] the legendary wonder-world of Theurgy ... all paradoxes seem to obtain actually, contradictions coexist logically, the effect is greater than the cause and the shadow more than the substance.  Therein the visible melts into the unseen, the invisible is manifested openly, motion from place to place is accomplished without traversing the intervening distance, matter passes through matter .... There life is prolonged, youth renewed, physical immortality secured.  There earth becomes gold, and gold earth.  There words and wishes possess creative power, thoughts are things, desire realizes its object.  There, also, the dead live and the hierarchies of extra-mundane intelligence are within easy communication, and become ministers or tormentors, guides or destroyers, of man. -- A.E. Waite, The Book of Ceremonial Magic

I

The magician said, "No, I can't help you to persuade a woman. Should you want her raped, I can arrange that. If you want to rape her yourself, I can arrange that, too, with more difficulty -- possibly more than you'd have to exert on your own hook. But I can't supply you with any philtres or formulae. My specialty is crimes of violence. Chiefly, murder."

Baines shot a sidelong glance at his special assistant, Jack Ginsberg, who as usual wore no expression whatsoever and had not a crease out of true. It was nice to be able to trust someone. Baines said, "You're very frank."

"I try to leave as little mystery as possible," Theron Ware -- Baines knew that was indeed his real name -- said promptly. "From the client's point of view, black magic is a body of technique, like engineering. The more he knows about it, the easier I find it makes coming to an agreement."

"No trade secrets? Arcane lore, and so on?"

"Some -- mostly the products of my own research, and very few of them of any real importance to you. The main scholium of magic is 'arcane' only because most people don't know what boob to read or where to find them. Given those books -- and sometimes, somebody to translate them for you -- you could learn almost everything important that I know in a year. To make something of the material, of course, you'd have to have the talent, since magic is also an art. With books and the gift, you could become a magician -- either you are or you aren't, there are no bad magicians, any more than there is such a thing as a bad mathematician -- in about twenty years. If it didn't kill you first, of course, in some equivalent of a laboratory accident. It takes that long, give or take a few years, to develop the skills involved. I don't mean to say you wouldn't find it formidable, but the age of secrecy is past. And really the old codes were rather simple-minded, much easier to read than, say, musical notation. If they weren't, well, computers could break them in a hurry."

Most of these generalities were familiar stuff to Baines, as Ware doubtless knew. Baines suspected the magician of offering them in order to allow time for himself to be studied by the client. This suspicion crystallized promptly as a swinging door behind Ware's huge desk chair opened silently, and a short-skirted blond girl in a pageboy coiffure came in with a letter on a small silver tray.

"Thank you, Greta. Excuse me," Ware said, taking the tray. "We wouldn't have been interrupted if this weren't important." The envelope crackled expensively in his hands as he opened it.

Baines watched the girl go out -- a moving object, to be sure, but except that she reminded him vaguely of someone else, nothing at all extraordinary -- and then went openly about inspecting Ware. As usual, he started with the man's chosen surroundings.

The magician's office, brilliant in the afternoon sunlight, might have been the book-lined study of any doctor or lawyer, except that the room and the furniture were outsize. That said very little about Ware, for the house was a rented cliffside palazzo; there were bigger ones available in Positano had Ware been interested in still higher ceilings and worse acoustics. Though most of the books looked old, the office was no mustier than, say, the library of Merton College, and it contained far fewer positively ancient instruments. The only trace in it that might have been attributable to magic was a faint smell of mixed incenses, which the Tyrrhenian air coming in through the opened windows could not entirely dispel; but it was so slight that the nose soon tired of trying to detect it. Besides, it was hardly diagnostic by itself; small Italian churches, for instance, also smelled like that -- and so did the drawing rooms of Egyptian police chiefs.

Ware himself was remarkable, but with only a single exception, only in the sense that all men are unique to the eye of the born captain. A small, spare man he was, dressed in natural Irish tweeds, a French-cuffed shirt linked with what looked like ordinary steel, a narrow, gray, silk four-in-hand tie with a single very small sapphire chessman -- a rook -- tacked to it. His leanness seemed to be held together with cables; Baines was sure that he was physically strong, despite a marked pallor, and that his belt size had not changed since he had been in high school.

His present apparent age was deceptive. His face was seamed, and his bushy gray eyebrows now only slightly suggested that he had once been red-haired. His hair proper could not, for --- herein lay his one marked oddity -- he was tonsured, like a monk, blue veins crawling across his bare white scalp as across the papery backs of his hands. An innocent bystander might have taken him to be in his late sixties. Baines knew him to be exactly his own age, which was forty-eight. Black magic, not surprisingly, was obviously a wearing profession; cerebrotonic types like Ware, as Baines had often observed of the scientists who worked for Consolidated Warfare Service (div. A. 0. LeFebre et Cie.), ordinarily look about forty-five from a real age of thirty until their hair turns white, if a heart attack doesn't knock them off in the interim.

The parchment crackled and Jack Ginsberg unobtrusively touched his dispatch case, setting going again a tape recorder back in Rome. Baines thought Ware saw this, but chose to take no notice. The magician said:

"Of course, it's also faster if my clients are equally frank with me."

"I should think you'd know all about me by now," Baines said. He felt an inner admiration. The ability to pick up an interrupted conversation exactly where it had been left off is rare in a man. Women do it easily, but seldom to any purpose.

"Oh, Dun and Bradstreet," Ware said, "newspaper morgues, and of course the grapevine -- I have all that, naturally. But I'll still need to ask some questions."

"Why not read my mind?"

"Because it's more work than it's worth. I mean your excellent mind no disrespect, Mr. Baines. But one thing you must understand is that magic is hard work. I don't use it out of laziness, I am not a lazy man, but by the same token I do take the easier ways of getting what I want if easier ways are available."

"You've lost me."

"An example, then. All magic -- I repeat, all magic, with no exceptions whatsoever -- depends upon the control of demons. By demons I mean specifically fallen angels. No lesser class can do a thing for you. Now, I know one such whose earthly form includes a long tongue. You may find the notion comic."

"Not exactly."

"Let that pass for now. In any event, this is also a great prince and president, whose apparition would cost me three days of work and two weeks of subsequent exhaustion. Shall I call him up to lick stamps for me?"

"I see the point," Baines said." All right, ask your questions."

"Thank you. Who sent you to me?"

"A medium in Bel Air -- Los Angeles. She attempted to blackmail me, so nearly successfully that I concluded that she did have some real talent and would know somebody who had more. I threatened her life and she broke."

Ware was taking notes. "I see. And she sent you to the Rosicrucians?"

"She tried, but I already knew that dodge. She sent me to Monte AIbano."

"Ah. That surprises me, a little. I wouldn't have thought that you'd have any need of treasure finders!'

"I do and I don't," Baines said. "I'll explain that, too, but a little later, if you don't mind. Primarily I wanted someone in your specialty -- murder -- and of course the white monks were of no use there. I didn't even broach the subject with them. Frankly, I only wanted to test your reputation, of which I'd had hints. I, too, can use newspaper morgues. Their horror when I mentioned you was enough to convince me that I ought to talk to you, at least."

"Sensible. Then you don't really believe in magic yet only in ESP or some such nonsense."

"I'm not," Baines said guardedly, "a religious man ...

"Precisely put. Hence, you want a demonstration." Did you bring with you the mirror I mentioned on the phone to your assistant?"

Silently, Jack took from his inside jacket pocket a waxed-paper envelope, from which he in turn removed a lady's hand mirror sealed in glassine. He handed it to Baines, who broke the seal.

"Good. Look in it."

Out of the corners of Baines' eyes, two slow thick tears of dark venous blood were crawling down beside his nose. He lowered the mirror and stared at Ware.

"Hypnotism," he said, quite steadily. "I had hoped for better."

"Wipe them off," Ware said, unruffled.

Baines pulled out his immaculate monogrammed handkerchief. On the white-on-white fabric, the red stains turned slowly into butter-yellow gold.

"I suggest you take those to a government metallurgist tomorrow," Ware said. "I could hardly have hypnotized him. Now perhaps we might get down to business."

"I thought you said --"

"That even the simplest trick requires a demon. So I did, and I meant it. He is sitting at your back now, Mr. Baines, and he will be there until day after tomorrow at this hour. Remember that -- day after tomorrow. It will cost me dearly to have turned this little piece of silliness, but I'm used to having to do such things for a skeptical client -- and it will be included in my bill. Now, if you please, Mr. Baines, what do you want?"

Baines handed the handkerchief to Jack, who folded it carefully and put it back in its waxed-paper wrapper. "I," Baines said, "of course want someone killed. Tracelessly."

"Of course, but who?"

"I'll tell you that in a minute. First of all, do you exercise any scruples?"

"Quite a few," Ware said. "For instance, I don't kill my friends, not for any client. And possibly I might balk, at certain strangers. However, in general, I do have strangers sent for, on a regular scale of charges."

"Then we had better explore the possibilities," Baines said. "I've got an ex-wife who's a gross inconvenience to me. Do you balk at that?"

"Has she any children -- by you or anybody else?"

"No, none at all."

"In that case, there's no problem. For that kind of job, my standard fee is fifteen thousand dollars, flat."

Despite himself, Baines stared in astonishment. "Is that all? " he said at last.

"That's all. I suspect that I'm almost as wealthy as you are, Mr. Baines. After all, I can find treasure as handily as the white monks can -- indeed, a good deal better. I use these alimony cases to keep my name before the public. Financially they're a loss to me."

"What kind of fees are you interested in?"

"I begin to exert myself slightly at about five million." If this man was a charlatan, he was a grandiose one. Baines said, "Let's stick to the alimony case for the moment. Or rather, suppose I don't care about the alimony, as in fact I don't. Instead, I might not only want her dead, but I might want her to die badly. To suffer."

"I don't charge extra for that."

"Why not?"

"Mr. Baines," Ware said patiently, "I remind you, please, that I myself am not a killer. I merely summon and direct the agent. I think it very likely -- in fact, I think it beyond doubt -- that any patient I have sent for dies in an access of horror and agony beyond your power to imagine, or even of mine. But you did specify that you wanted your murder done 'tracelessly,' which obviously means that I must have no unusual marks left on the patient. I prefer it that way myself. How then could I prove suffering if you asked for it, in a way inarguable enough to charge you extra for it?

"Or, look at the other side of the shield, Mr. Baines. Every now and then, an unusual divorce client asks that the ex-consort be carried away painlessly, even sweetly, out of some residue of sentiment. I could collect an extra fee for that, on a contingent basis, that is, if the body turns out to show no overt marks of disease or violence. But my agents are demons, and sweetness is not a trait they can be compelled to exhibit, so I never accept that kind of condition from a client, either. Death is what you pay for, and death is what you get. The circumstances are up to the agent, and I don't offer my clients anything that I know I can't deliver."

"All right, I'm answered," Baines said. "Forget Dolores -- actually she's only a minor nuisance, and only one of several, for that matter. Now let's talk about the other end of the spectrum. Suppose instead that I should ask you to ... send for ... a great political figure. Say, the governor of California -- or, if he's a friend of yours, pick a similar figure who isn't."

Ware nodded. "He'll do well enough. But you'll recall that I asked you about children. Had you really turned out to have been an alimony case, I should next have asked you about surviving relatives. My fees rise in direct proportion to the numbers and kinds of people a given death is likely to affect. This is partly what you call scruples, and partly a species of self-defense. Now in the case of a reigning governor, I would charge you one dollar for every vote he got when he was last elected. Plus expenses, of course."

Baines whistled in admiration. "You're the first man I've ever met who's worked out a system to make scruples pay. And I can see why you don't care about alimony cases, Someday, Mr. Ware --"

"Doctor Ware, please. I am a Doctor of Theology."

"Sorry. I only meant to say that someday I'll ask you why you want so much money. You asthenics seldom can think of any good use for it. In the meantime, however, you're hired. Is it all payable in advance?"

"The expenses are payable in advance. The fee is C.O.D. As you'll realize once you stop to think about it, Mr. Baines --"

"Doctor Baines. I am an LL.D."

"Apologies in exchange. I want you to realize, after these courtesies, that I have never, never been bilked."

Baines thought about what was supposed to be at his back until day after tomorrow. Pending the test of the golden tears on the handkerchief, he was willing to believe that he should not try to cheat Ware. Actually, he had never planned to.

"Good," he said, getting up. "By the same token, we don't need a contract. I agree to your terms."

"But what for?"

"Oh," Baines said, "we can use the governor of California for a starter. Jack here will iron out any remaining details with you. I have to get back to Rome by tonight."

"You did say, 'For a starter?"'

Baines nodded shortly. Ware, also rising, said, "Very well I shall ask no questions. But in fairness, Mr. Baines, I should warn you that on your next commission of this kind, I shall ask you what you want."

"By that time," Baines said, holding his excitement tightly bottled, "we'll have to exchange such confidences. Oh, Dr. Ware, will the, uh, demon on my back go away by itself when the time's up, or must I see you again to get it taken off?"

"It isn't on your back," Ware said. "And it will go by itself. Marlowe to the contrary, misery does not love company."

Baring his teeth, Baines said, "We'll see about that."

II

For a moment, Jack Ginsberg felt the same soon-to-be-brief strangeness of the man who does not really know what is going on and hence thinks he might be about to be fired. It was as though something had swallowed him by mistake, and quite without malice was about to throw him up again.

While he waited for the monster's nausea to settle out, Jack went through his rituals, stroking his cheeks for stubble, resettling his creases, running through last week's accounts, and thinking above all, as he usually did most of all in such interims, of what the new girl might look like squatting in her stockings. Nothing special, probably; the reality was almost always hedged around with fleshly inconveniences and piddling little preferences that he could flense away at will from the clean vision.

When the chief had left and Ware had come back to his desk, however, Jack was ready for business and thoroughly on top of it. He prided himself upon an absolute self-control.

"Questions?" Ware said, leaning back easily.

"A few, Dr. Ware. You mentioned expenses. What expenses?"

"Chiefly travel," Ware said. "I have to see the patient, personally. In the case Dr. Baines posed, that involves a trip to California, which is a vast inconvenience to me, and goes on the bill. It includes air fare, hotels, meals, other out-of-pocket expenses, which I'll itemize when the mission is over. Then there's the question of getting to see the governor. I have colleagues in California, but there's a certain amount of influence I'll have to buy, even with the help of Consolidated Warfare -- munitions and magic are circles that don't intersect very effectively. On the whole, I think a draft for ten thousand would be none too small."

All that for magic. Disgusting. But the chief believed in it, at least provisionally. It made Jack feel very queasy.

"That sounds satisfactory," he said, but he made no move toward the corporate checkbook; he was not about to issue any Valentines to strangers yet, not until there was more love touring about the landscape than he had felt in his crew-cut antennae. "We're naturally a little bit wondering, sir, why all this expense is necessary. We understand that you'd rather not ride a demon when you can fly a jet with less effort --"

"I'm not sure you do," Ware said, but stop simpering about it and ask me about the money."

"Argh ... well, sir, then, just why do you live outside the United States? We know you're still a citizen. And after all, we have freedom of religion in the States still. Why does the chief have to pay to ship you back home for one job?"

"Because I'm not a common gunman," Ware said. "Because I don't care to pay income taxes, or even report my income to anybody. There are two reasons. For the benefit of your ever-attentive dispatch case there -- since you're a deaf ear if ever I saw one -- if I lived in the United States and advertised myself as a magician, I would be charged with fraud, and if I successfully defended myself -- proved I was what I said I was -- I'd wind up in a gas chamber. If I failed to defend myself, I'd be just one more charlatan. In Europe, I can say I'm a magician, and be left alone if I can satisfy my clients -- caveat emptor. Otherwise, I'd have to be constantly killing off petty politicians and accountants, which isn't worth the work, and sooner or later runs into the law of diminishing returns. Now you can turn that thing off."

Aha; there was something wrong with this joker. He was preying upon superstition. As a Reformed Orthodox Agnostic, Jack Ginsberg knew all the ins and outs of that, especially the double-entry sides. He said smoothly:

"I quite understand. But don't you perhaps have almost as much trouble with the Church, here in Italy, as you would with the government back home?"

"No, not under a liberal pontificate. The modern Church discourages what it calls superstition among its adherents. I haven't encountered a prelate in decades who believes in the literal existence of demons -- though of course some of the Orders know better."

"To be sure," Jack said, springing his trap exultantly. "So I think, sir, that you may be overcharging us -- and haven't been quite candid with us. If you do indeed control all these great princes and presidents, you could as easily bring the chief a woman as you could bring him a treasure or a murder."

"So I could," the magician said, a little wearily. "I see you've done a little reading. But I explained to Dr. Baines, and I explain again to you, that I specialize only in crimes of violence. Now, Mr. Ginsberg, I think you were about to write me an expense check."

"So I was." But still he hesitated. At last Ware said with delicate politeness:

"Is there some other doubt I could resolve for you, Mr. Ginsberg? I am, after all, a Doctor of Theology. Or perhaps you have a private commission you wish to broach to me?"

"No," Jack said. "No, not exactly."

"I see no reason why you should be shy. It's clear that you like my lamia. And in fact, she's quite free of the nuisances of human women that so annoy you--"

"Damn you. I thought you read minds! You lied about that, too."

"I don't read minds, and I never lie," Ware said. "But I'm adept at reading faces and somatotypes. It saves me a lot of trouble, and a lot of unnecessary magic. Do you want the creature or don't you? I could have her sent to you invisibly if you like."

"No."

"Not invisibly. I'm sorry for you. Well then, my godless and lustless friend, speak up for yourself. What would you like? Your business is long since done. Spit it out. What is it?"

For a breathless instant, Jack almost said what it was, but the God in which he no longer believed was at his back. He made out the check and handed it over. The girl (no, not a girl) came in and took it away.

"Good-bye," Theron Ware said. He had missed the boat again.

III

Father Domenico read the letter again, hopefully. Father Uccello affected an Augustinian style, after his name saint, full of rare words and outright neologisms imbedded in medieval syntax -- as a stylist, Father Domenico much preferred Roger Bacon, but that eminent anti-magician, not being a Father of the Church, tempted few imitators -- and it was possible that Father Domenico had misread him. But no; involuted though the Latin of the letter was, the sense, this time, was all too plain.

Father Domenico sighed. The practice of Ceremonial magic, at least of the white kind which was the monastery's sole concern, seemed to be becoming increasingly unrewarding. Part of the difficulty, of course, lay in the fact that the chiefest traditional use (for profit) of white magic was the finding of buried treasure; and after centuries of unremitting practice by centuries of sorcerers black and white, plus the irruption into the field of such modem devices as the mine detector, there was very' little buried treasure left to find. Of late, the troves revealed by those under the governments of OCH and BETHOR -- with the former of whom in particular lay the bestowal of "a purse springing with gold" -- had increasingly turned out to be underseas, or in places like Fort Knox or a Swiss bank, making the recovery of them enterprises so colossal and mischancy as to remove all possibility of profit for client and monastery alike.

On the whole, black magicians had an easier time of it -- at least in this life; one must never forget, Father Domenico reminded himself hastily, that they were also damned eternally. It was as mysterious as it had always been that such infernal spirits as LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE should be willing to lend so much power to a mortal whose soul Hell would almost inevitably have won anyhow, considering the character of the average sorcerer, and considering how easily such pacts could be voided at the last instant; and that God would allow so much demonic malice to be vented through the sorcerer upon the innocent.  But that was simply another version of the Problem of Evil, for which the Church had long had the answer (or, the dual answer) of free will and original sin.

It had to be recalled, too, that even the practice of white or Transcendental magic was officially a mortal sin, for the modem Church held that all trafficking with spirits -- including the un-Fallen, since such dealings inevitably assumed the angels to be demiurges and other kabbaIistic semi-deities was an abomination, regardless of intent. Once upon a rime, it had been recognized that (barring the undertaking of an actual pact) only a man of the highest piety, of the highest purpose, and in the highest state of ritual and spiritual purification, could hope to summon and control a demon, let alone an angel; but there had been too many lapses of intent, and then of act, and in both practicality and compassion the Church had declared all Theurgy to be anathema, reserving unto itself only one negative aspect of magic-exorcism -- and that only under the strictest of canonical limitations.

Monte Albano had a special dispensation, to be sure -- partly since the monks had at one time been so spectacularly successful in nourishing the coffers of St. Peter's; partly because the knowledge to be won through the Transcendental rituals might sometimes be said to have nourished the soul of the Rock; and, in small part, because under the rarest of circumstances white magic had been known to prolong the life of the body. But these fountains (to shift the image) were now showing every sign of running dry, and hence the dispensation might be withdrawn at any time -- thus closing out the last sanctuary of white magic in the world.

That would leave the field to the black magicians. There were no black sanctuaries, except for the Parisian Brothers of the Left-Hand Way, who were romantics of the school of EIiphas Levi and were more to be pitied for folly than condemned for evil. But of solitary black sorcerers there were still a disconcerting number -- though even one would be far too many.

Which brought Father Domenico directly back to the problem of the letter. He sighed again, turned away from his lectrum and padded off -- the Brothers of Monte Albano were discalced -- toward the office of the Director, letter in hand. Father Umberto was in (of course he was always physically in, like all the rest of them, since the Mount could not be left, once entered, except by the laity and they only by muleback), and Father Domenico got to the point directly.

"I've had another impassioned screed from our witch smeller," he said. "I am beginning to consider, reluctantly, that the matter is at least as serious as he's been saying all along."

"You mean the matter of Theron Ware, I presume."

"Yes, of course. That American gunmaker we saw went directly from the Mount to Ware, as seemed all too likely even at the time, and Father Uccello says that there's now every sign of another series of sendings being prepared in Positano."

"I wish you could avoid these alliterations. They make it difficult to discover what you're talking about. I often feel that a lapse into alliteration or other grammatical tricks is a sure sign that the speaker isn't himself quite sure of what he means to say, and is trying to blind me to the fact. Never mind. As for the demonolater Ware, we are in no position to interfere with him, whatever he's preparing."

"The style is Father Uccello's. Anyhow, he insists that we must interfere. He has been practicing divination -- so you can see how seriously he takes this, the old purist -- and he says that his principal, whom he takes great pains not to identify, told him that the meeting of Ware and Baines presages something truly monstrous for the world at large. According to his information, all Hell has been waiting for this meeting since the two of them were born."

"I suppose he's sure his principal wasn't in fact a demon, and didn't slip a lie past him, or at least one of their usual brags? As you've just indirectly pointed out, Father Uccello is way out of practice."

Father Domenico spread his hands. "Of course I can't answer that. Though if you wish, Father, I'll try to summon Whatever it was myself, and put the problem to It. But you know how good the chances are that I'll get the wrong one -- and how hard it is to ask the right question. The great Governors seem to have no time sense as we understand the term, and as for demons, well, even when compelled they often really don't seem to know what's going on outside their own jurisdictions."

"Quite so," said the Director, who had not himself practiced in many years. He had been greatly talented once, but the loss of gifted experimenters to administrative posts was the curse of all research organizations. "I think it best that you don't jeopardize your own usefulness, and your own soul, of course, in calling up some spirit you can't name. Father Uccello in turn ought to know that there's nothing we can do about Ware. Or does he have some proposal?"

"He wants us," Father Domenico said in a slightly shaky voice, "to impose an observer on Ware. To send one directly to Positano, someone who'll stick to Ware until we know what the deed is going to be. We're just barely empowered to do this -- whereas, of course, Father Uccello can't. The question is, do we want to?"

"Hmm, hmm," the Director said. "Obviously not. That would bankrupt us -- oh, not financially, of course, though it would be difficult enough. But we couldn't afford to send a novice, or indeed anyone less than the best we have, and after the good Lord only knows how many months in that
infernal atmosphere ... "

The sentence trailed off, as the Director's sentences often did, but Father Domenico no longer had any difficulty in completing them. Obviously the Mount could not afford to have even one of its best operators incapacitated -- the word, in fact, was "contaminated" -- by prolonged contact with the person and effects of Theron Ware. Similarly, Father Domenico was reasonably certain that the Director would in fact send somebody to Positano; otherwise he would not have mounted the obvious objections, but simply dismissed the proposal. For all their usual amusement with Father Uccello, both men knew that there were occasions when one had to take him with the utmost seriousness, and that this was one of them.

"Neverthcless the matter will need to be explored," the Director resumed after a moment, fingering his beads. "I had better give Ware the usual formal notification. We're not obligated to follow up on it, but ..."

"Quite," Father Domenico said. He put the letter into his scrip and arose. "I'll hear from you, then, when a reply's been received from Ware. I'm glad you agree that the matter is serious."

After another exchange of formalities, he left, head bowed. He also knew well enough who the Director would send, without any intervention of false modesty to cloud the issue; and he was well aware that he was terrified.

He went directly to his conjuring room, the cluttered tower chamber that no one else could use -- for magic is intensely sensitive to the personality of the operator -- and which was still faintly redolent of a scent a little like oil of lavender, a trace of his last use of the room. Mansit odor, posses scire duisse deam, he thought, not for the first time; but he had no intention of summoning any Presence now. Instead, he crossed to the chased casket which contained his 1606 copy -- the second edition, but not much corrupted -- of the Enchiridion of Leo III, that odd collection of prayers and other devices "effectual against all the perils to which every sort and condition of men may be made subject on land, on water, from open and secret enemies, from the bites of wild and rabid beasts, from poisons, from fire, from tempests." For greatest effectiveness he was instructed to carry the book on his person, but he had seldom judged himself to be in sufficient peril to risk so rare and valuable an object, and in any event he did always read at least one page daily, chiefly the In principio, a version of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. John.

Now he took the book out and opened it to the Seven Mysterious Orisons, the only section of the work -- without prejudice to the efficacy of the rest of it -- that probably had indeed proceeded from the hand of the Pope of Charlemagne. Kneeling to face the east, Father Domenico, without looking at the page, began the prayer appropriate for Thursday, at the utterance of which, perhaps by no coincidence, it is said that "the demons flee away."

IV

Considerable business awaited Baines in Rome, all the more pressing because Jack Ginsberg was still out of town, and Baines made no special effort to hunt down Jack's report on what the government metallurgist had said about the golden tears amid the mass of other papers. For the time being, at least, Baines regarded the report as personal correspondence, and he had a standing rule never even to open personal letters during office hours, whether he was actually in an office or, as now, working out of a hotel room.

Nevertheless, the report came to the surface the second day that he was back at work; and since he also made it a rule never to lose time to the distractions of an unsatisfied curiosity if an easy remedy was to hand, he read it. The tears on the handkerchief were indeed 24-karat gold; worth about eleven cents, taken together, on the Current market, but to Baines representing an enormous investment (or, looked at another way, a potential investment in enormity).

He put it aside with satisfaction and promptly forgot about it, or very nearly. Investments in enormity were his stock in trade, though of late, he thought again with cold anger, they had been paying less and less -- hence his interest in Ware, which the other directors of Consolidated Warfare Service would have considered simple insanity. But after all, if the business was no longer satisfying, it was only natural to seek analogous satisfactions somewhere else. An insane man, in Baines' view, would be one who tried to substitute some pleasure -- women, philanthropy, art collecting, golf -- that offered no cognate satisfaction at all. Baines was ardent about his trade, which was destruction; golf could no more have sublimated that passion than it could have diluted that of a painter or a lecher.

The current fact, which had to be faced and dealt with, was that nuclear weapons had almost totally spoiled the munitions business. Oh, there was still a thriving trade to be drummed up selling small arms to a few small new nations -- small arms being defined arbitrarily as anything up to the size of a submarine -- but hydrogen fusion and the ballistic missile made the really major achievements of the art, the lubrication of the twenty-year cycle of world wars, entirely too obliterative and self-defeating. These days, Baines' kind of diplomacy consisted chiefly in the fanning of brush fires and civil wars. Even this was a delicate business, for the nationalism game was increasingly an exceedingly confused affair, in which one could never be quite sure whether some emergent African state with a population about the size of Maplewood, N.J., would not turn out to be of absorbing interest to one or more of the nuclear powers. (Some day, of course, they would all be nuclear powers, and then the art would become as formalized and minor as flower arranging.)

The very delicacy of this kind of operation had its satisfactions, in a way, and Baines was good at it. In addition, Consolidated Warfare Service had several thousand man-years of accumulated experience at this sort of thing upon which he could call. One of CWS's chief specialists was in Rome with him now -- Dr. Adolph Hess, famous as the designer of that peculiar all-purpose vehicle called the Hessicopter, but of interest in the present negotiations as the inventor of something nobody was supposed to have heard of -- the land torpedo, a rapidly burrowing device that might show up, commendably anonymous, under any installation within two hundred miles of its launching tunnel, geology permitting. Baines had guessed that it might be especially attractive to at least one of the combatants in the Yemeni insurrection, and had proven to be so right that he was now trying hard not to have to dicker with all four of them. This was all the more difficult because, although the two putative Yemeni factions accounted for very little, Nasser was nearly as shrewd as Baines was, and Faisal inarguably a good deal shrewder.

Nevertheless, Baines was not essentially a minaturist, and he was well aware of it. He had recognized the transformation impending in the trade early on, in fact with the publication in 1950 by the U. S. Government Printing Office of a volume titled The Effects of Atomic Weapons, and as soon as possible had engaged the services of a private firm called the Mamaroneck Research Institute. This was essentially a brainstorming organization, started by an alumnus of the RAND Corporation, which specialized in imagining possible political and military confrontations and their possible outcomes, some of them so outre as to require the subcontracting of free-lance science-fiction writers. From the files of CWS and other sources, Baines fed Mamaroneck materials for its computers, some of which material would have considerably shaken the governments who thought they were sitting on it; and, in return Mamaroneck fed Baines long, neatly lettered and xeroxed reports bearing such titles as "Short-and Long-Term Probabilities Consequent to an Israeli Blockade of the Faeroe Islands."

Baines winnowed out the most obviously absurd of these, but with a care that was the very opposite of conservatism, for some of the strangest proposals could turn out upon second look to be not absurd at all. Those that offered the best combination of surface absurdity with hidden plausibility, he set out to translate into real situations. Hence there was really nothing illogical or even out of character in his interest in Theron Ware, for Baines, too, practiced what was literally an occult art in which the man on the street no longer believed.

The buzzer sounded twice; Ginsberg was back. Baines returned the signal and the door swung open.

"Rogan's dead," Jack said without preamble.

"That was fast. I thought it was going to take Ware a week after he got back from the States."

"It's been a week," Jack reminded him.

"Hmm? So it has. Waiting around for these Ayrabs to get off the dime is hard on the time sense. Well, well. Details?"

"Only what's come over the Reuters ticker, so far. Started as pneumonia, ended as cor pulmonale -- heart failure from too much coughing. It appears that he had a small mitral murmur for years. Only the family knew about it, and his physicians assured them that it wasn't dangerous if he didn't try to run a four-minute mile or something like that. Now the guessing is that the last campaign put a strain on it, and the pneumonia did the rest."

"Very clean," Baines said.

He thought about the matter for a while. He had borne the late governor of California no ill will. He had never met the man, nor had any business conflicts with him, and in fact had, rather admired his brand of medium-right-wing politics, which had been of the articulate but inoffensive sort expectable of an ex-account executive for a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in the touting of cold breakfast cereals. Indeed, Baines recalled suddenly from the file biography, Rogan had been a fraternity brother of his.

Nevertheless he was pleased. Ware had done the job -- Baines was not in the smallest doubt that Ware should have the credit -- with great nicety. After one more such trial run, simply to rule out all possibility of coincidence, he should be ready to tackle something larger; possibly, the biggest job of them all.

Baines wondered how it had been done. Was it possible that a demon could appear to a victim in the form of a pneumococcus? If so, what about the problem of reproduction? Well, there had been the appearances all over medieval Europe of fragments of the True Cross, in numbers quantitatively sufficient to stock a large lumberyard. Contemporary clerical apologists had called that Miraculous Multiplication, which had always seemed to Baines to be a classic example of rationalizing away the obvious; but since magic was real, maybe Miraculous Multiplication was too.

These, however, were merely details of technique, in which he made a practice of taking no interest. That kind of thing was for hirelings. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have somebody in the organization who did know something about the technicalities. It was often dangerous to depend solely on outside experts.

"Make out a check for Ware," he told Jack. "From my personal account. Call it a consultation fee -- medical, preferably. When you send it to him, set up a date for another visit -- let's see -- as soon as I get back from Riyadh. I'll take up all this other business with you in about half an hour. Send Hess in, but wait outside."

Jack nodded and left. A moment later, Hess entered silently. He was a tall, bony man with a slight pod, bushy eyebrows, a bald spot in the back, pepper-and-salt hair, and a narrow jaw that made his face look nearly triangular.

"Any interest in sorcery, Adolph? Personal, I mean?"

"Sorcery? I know something about it.  For all the nonsense involved, it was highly important in the history of science, particularly the alchemical side, and the astrological."

"I'm not interested in either of those. I'm talking about black magic."

"Then, no, I don't know much about it," Hess said.

"Well, you're about to learn. We're going to visit an authentic sorcerer in about two weeks, and I want you to go along and study his methods."

"Are you pulling my leg?" Hess said. "No, you never do that. Are we going into the business of exposing charlatans, then? I'm not sure I'm the best man for that, Baines. A professional stage magician -- a Houdini type -- would be far more likely to catch out a faker than I would."

"No, that's not the issue at all. I'm going to ask this man to do some work for me, in his own line, and I need a close observer to see what he does -- not to see through it, but to form an accurate impression of the procedures, in case something should go sour with the relationship later on."

"But -- well, if you say so, Baines. It does seem rather a waste of time, though."

"Not to me," Baines said. "While you're waiting to talk to the Saudis with me, read up on the subject.  By the end of a year I want you to know as much about the subject as an expert. The man himself has told me that that's possible even for me, so It shouldn't tax you any."

"It's not likely to tax my brains much," Hess said drily, "but it may be a considerable tax on my patience. However, you're the boss."

"Right. Get on it."

Hess nodded distantly to Jack as he went out. The two men did not like each other much; in part, Baines sometimes thought, because in some ways they were much alike. When the door had closed behind the scientist, Jack produced from his pocket the waxed-paper envelope that had contained, and obviously still contained, the handkerchief bearing the two transmuted tears.

"I don't need that," Baines said. "I've got your report. Throw that thing away. I don't want anybody asking what it means."

"I will," Jack said. "But first, you'll remember that Ware said that the demon would leave you after two days."

"Sure. Why?"

"Look at this."

Jack took out the handkerchief and spread it carefully on Baines' desk blotter.

On the Irish linen, where the golden tears had been, were now two dull, inarguable smears of lead.

V

By some untraceable miscalculation, Baines' party arrived in Riyadh precisely at the beginning of Ramadan, during which the Arabs fasted all day and were consequently in too short a temper to do business with; which was followed, after twenty-nine solid days, by a three-day feast during which they were too stuporous to do business with. Once negotiations were properly opened, however, they took no more than the two weeks Baines had anticipated.

Since the Moslem calendar is lunar, Ramadan is a movable festival, which this year fell close to Christmas. Baines half suspected that Theron Ware would refuse to see him in so inauspicious a season for servants of Satan, but Ware made no objection, remarking only (by post), "December 25th is a celebration of great antiquity." Hess, who had been reading dutifully, interpreted Ware to mean that Christ had not actually been born on that date -- "though in this universe of discourse I can't see what difference that makes," he said. "If the word 'superstition' has any of its old meaning left at all by now, it means that the sign has come to replace the thing -- or in other words, that facts come to mean what we say they mean."

"Call it an observer effect," Baines suggested, not entirely jokingly. He was not disposed to argue the point with either of them; Ware would see him, that was what counted.

But if the season was no apparent inconvenience to Ware it was a considerable one to Father Domenico, who at first flatly refused to celebrate it in the very maw of Hell. He was pressed at length and from both sides by the Director and Father Uccello, whose arguments had no less force for being so utterly predictable; and -- to skip over a full week of positively Scholastic disputation -- they prevailed, as again he had been sure they would.

Mustering all his humility, obedience and resignation -- his courage seemed to have evaporated -- he trudged forth from the monastery, excused from sandals, and mounted a mule, the Enchiridion of Leo III swinging from his neck under his cassock in a new leather bag, and a selection of his thaumaturgic tools, newly exorcised, asperged, fumigated and wrapped in silken cloths, in a satchel balanced carefully on the mule's neck. It was a hushed leave-taking -- all the more so in its lack of any formalities or even witnesses, for only the Director knew why he was going, and he had been restrained with difficulty from bruiting it about that Father Domenico actually had been expelled, to make a cover story.

The practical effect of both delays was that Father Domenico and Baines' party arrived at Ware's palazzo on the same day, in the midst of the only snowstorm Positano had seen in seven years. As a spiritual courtesy -- for protocol was all-important in such matters, otherwise neither monk nor sorcerer would have dared to confront the other -- Father Domenico was received first, briefly but punctiliously; but as a client, Baines (and his crew, in descending order) got the best quarters. They also got the only service available, since Ware had no servants who could cross over the invisible line Father Domenico at once ruled at the foot of his apartment door with the point of his bolline.

As was customary in southern Italian towns at this time, three masked kings later came to the gate of the palazzo to bring and ask presents for the children and the Child; but there were no children there and the mummers were turned away, baffled and resentful (for the rich American, who was said to be writing a book about the frescoes of Pompeii, had previously shown himself open-handed), but oddly grateful too; it was a cold night, and the lights in the palazzo were of a grim and distant color.

Then the gates closed. The principals had gathered and were in their places; and the stage was set.

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