The shriek rang in Gaby's ears and she sat up, disoriented. In the dimness, nothing looked familiar, not the nightstand beside the bed, not the curtains on the windows; where were her bookshelves? And who screamed?
The door into the bedroom opened, spilling light over her, and Elaine hurried in, clutching her robe close. Blond, frowzy, busy Elaine; Gaby sighed her relief as she remembered where she was. Elaine's guest room, miles and state lines between her and all that craziness in the city.
Elaine sat on the bed beside her and brushed Gaby's bangs out of her eyes. "You okay, honey?"
"Yeah." Gaby shivered and tried to pull the blanket up around her shoulders. "I heard a noise. Like someone shouted."
"That was you, poor thing. You must have been dreaming. You were shouting something about they're coming, get out of there. You must have been remembering, you know, them. This evening."
"I suppose." Gaby frowned. The last faint tendrils of her dream were slipping away from her, but she didn't remember being fearful for herself. It was others she had worried about, others she couldn't remember now.
It must have been Harris. Concern for him ate at her again. "Has there been any word—"
"No, nothing. Still no answer at his apartment."
"Damn."
"Did you get anything figured out? Like why some old guy and his two creeps would . . . "
"Kidnap me? No. It doesn't make any sense." She lay back to stare up at Elaine's sympathetic, weary face. "I don't think they wanted to rape me. I think they wanted to find something out from me. God knows what. I don't know anything. Anything a program manager knows, they could hire a consultant to find out, right?"
"Well, you're safe here. We have a security system, Jim has his guns—"
"I want to learn to shoot."
Elaine looked startled. "You always hated guns."
"Still do. Guess what I hate more."
"Yeah. Okay, I'll tell Jim. He'll be glad to take you out to the range he uses."
"Thanks, Lainie."
Elaine hugged her, then rose and patted her hand. "You try to get some sleep. But if you can't, and you want to talk, knock on our door. Anytime. It's okay."
"I'll do that."
" 'Night, hon." Elaine left, shutting the door and closing out the hallway light, but Gaby was glad to see the faint glow around the edges of the door. Nice to know that light was only a few steps away, Elaine only a few steps beyond that.
But if she didn't get good news from the police soon, she'd have to leave all of it. Deep inside, she knew the old man and his two thugs, including the one she'd described as wearing a Halloween mask when she knew that wasn't the truth, would come looking for her again.
She knew because of the way the old man's face lit up when they caught her. Because of how happy he'd been to have her. He'd be back. She couldn't let Lainie and Jim get caught up in the old man's craziness. And she had to find Harris, make sure he was safe.
The thought kept her awake as she lay alone in the dark.
Twelve men had appeared to attack them. Three surrendered unhurt. Four, including Harris' attackers, were alive but seriously injured. Five more were dead.
Alastair set his submachine gun aside, clucked over the dead and did what he could to bandage the wounded; Jean-Pierre bound the hands of the living and took their weapons away.
Doc gestured at the writhing flame atop the burner as if communicating with it; he frowned, clearly displeased, and closed his fist, a dramatic gesture. The fire snuffed out; the burner beneath continued to hiss until Doc walked up to twist the knob at its base.
Harris dully looked over the scene of carnage.
He'd never seen dead men before. Four of them lay in strange poses, blood slowly spreading from chests, heads, limbs. One of them was burned black in places. The last of them, whose head lay four yards from the rest of him, was worst. Harris felt his stomach lurch. He returned to the safe haven of the television corner, restored the sofa to its wall position, and sprawled on it.
Noriko sat on the sofa opposite, serenely cleaning her blade with a cloth. Her expression was as calm as if she were a statue made of jade. Her weapon—she must have gone straight for it after Gabriela's warning—was a little like the Japanese swords he'd once seen, but much straighter; the sheath lay beside her on the sofa. The sword went from blood-smeared to silvery clean in a couple of minutes, and Harris could see the care Noriko took not to touch its blade. Then she returned it to its sheath and gave him a calm stare. He looked away.
"You did very well," she said.
"I want to throw up."
"Reasonable." She gestured at a small door in the corner. "That is the water closet."
But he didn't really feel the need, not quite yet.
Doc and Alastair came clattering in from the hallway. The doctor walked over to Harris and Noriko: "The room just downstairs, where they launched that device, is all clear. Smoke all over the room from the rocket. They sapped Leith in the elevator, but he'll recover."
"The thing that came through the floor was a rocket?" Harris asked.
"I fear so." Alastair looked disturbed. "Not an explosive one. But then, these floors have wards to protect us against explosive attacks from outside. They must have known that."
Doc knelt beside the spike in the floor, studying it without touching it, then moved off a few feet to examine what looked like streaks of black paint on the floor. He gave a whistle that sounded appreciative to Harris. "Very clever," he said. "Alastair, look at this."
The moon-faced doctor wandered over. Doc continued, "This projectile shoots paint out in all directions, very precisely. The paint is so carefully oriented that it forms a continuous circle."
Alastair looked up at him, startled. "A conjuring circle."
"Yes. See here, a few shunts sprayed other patches of paint in recognizable patterns. The required symbols of transference."
Alastair looked at the symbols, and Harris did, too. They appeared to be smeared blobs on the wood, meaningless paint-squiggles. Alastair said, "They're very sloppy, but correct in form. But you have all four floors warded against devisements of transference like that . . . "
Doc nodded, smiling, encouraging him to continue, and Alastair got it. "But they fired the projectile through the wards, got past them physically. I understand. Damned clever."
Doc's smile turned grim. "Which means all my wards are effectively useless. I wonder if they can adapt this device for longer-range attacks. Get through any set of wards. I'll have to prepare some new types. All of this means that whoever they are—I assume the Changeling—have a deviser working with them."
"Hey," said Harris. They all looked at him. "Don't you think it's about time you called the police?"
"The . . . police," Alastair echoed.
"You know. Whoever you call when people break into your house, try to kill you, and get killed. They come, they arrest people, there are trials . . . Police."
Doc nodded and stood. "I have a commission with the Novimagos Guard by special order of the King. By extension, so do my associates. So in a sense, we are the . . . police. Proper forms are being observed."
"That makes me feel so much better."
"Everyone, change for the street. Alastair, get Harris some appropriate clothes. We need to find the place where Harris arrived."
Alastair took Harris up two floors by back stairways to a small, bare bedroom. The room was dusty and had a fan mounted on a swivel bracket on the wall. The anonymity of the furnishings gave the place the feel of a hotel room. However, its closet was stuffed full of men's and women's garments in various sizes, and in a few minutes Alastair had found him an outfit to replace his torn, smoke-stained clothes.
Harris looked dubiously at the black leather shoes, long-sleeved white shirt, silk boxer shorts, and gray two-piece suit with a lace-edged handkerchief in the breast pocket. The clothing was dated, with the jacket's wide lapels and trousers' high waistline, but not too garish, if you overlooked the two-tone red-and-green suspenders and matching tie.
In the attached bathroom, Harris shucked the baggy brown pants they'd given him minutes ago, then stooped to pull on the new pair. He moved carefully; it wouldn't do to make his injury any worse.
Wait a second. He'd kicked the guts out of the man with the submachine gun and hadn't even felt the wound pull. Adrenaline and painkillers could only mask so much; he'd have felt additional injury after he started to wind down. Curious, he unwrapped Alastair's bandage from his thigh.
His wound was gone.
Where Adonis' claws had torn open his flesh, angry red marks remained, like scars left from an injury that had been healing for days. They hurt when he pressed hard on them, but gave him no trouble otherwise.
He sighed. It really was no use getting upset over strange things anymore, so he pulled on his new underwear and trousers. "Alastair?"
The doctor called through the door, "Yes?"
"What exactly did you do to me?"
Alastair's chuckle was faint but unmistakable. "Thatched you, of course. A good mending. You took to it well. Which reminds me, you'll be ravenous in a bell or two. How does it look?"
"Great. Like it's been weeks since I scrapped with something with teeth and claws."
"Good. Don't strain that leg for a few days unless you absolutely have to. Though if you decide you have to `scrap' again with Jean-Pierre, I'll allow it . . . provided you let me watch. Oh, and something else."
"Yes?"
"Don't bring any silver against that wound. You'd hate to see it spring open again."
They returned to the lab just as brown-clothed workmen carried out the last of the dead assassins on a stretcher. The living attackers were already gone, and more men were at work with mops on the bloody patches of floor.
Doc stood in the center of the room, the lead assassin's volt-meter in his hand, and looked up as Harris and Alastair entered. He indicated the volt-meter. "Harris, it's you they wanted. This little device let me follow your movements to within a few paces."
"Oh, great. Does that mean I have a radio on me?" Seeing Doc's blank look, he explained, "Am I carrying some gizmo that this thing can trace?"
"No. It follows you. Probably the charge of energy Alastair sees as an aura around you." He closed his right eye and widened his left to look at Harris. "I can see it a little, too. We'll have to subject you to some tests when we return."
"How do you know Gaby?"
Doc hesitated. "I've actually never met her in the flesh. A few years ago, she started calling me on the talk-box. Always with hints and clues. News about what the crime gangs were doing. Sometimes things they were planning to do to me. She never told me how she learned them. She's never told me about herself." He shrugged. "And now you come with her cameo in your pack . . . and she seems not to recognize you."
"I can't explain that part."
"We'll think on it later. For now, we need to begin our search."
Noriko, a yellow topcoat thrown over her clothes, straightened up from the television set. "Not so. Harris appeared at Six Heinzlin Corners, Brambleton South."
Doc gave her a curious look. "How do you know?"
"I called to Civic Hall on the talk-box and asked if anyone had reported a damaged walkway in a good neighborhood."
Doc looked pained. "Angus Powrie's attack. If I had been thinking . . . "
"They said there was. And that there was blood on the walk not far away. Workmen will fix it all tomorrow."
"After we look at it."
Harris gave Noriko a disbelieving look. "Your city hall is open at this hour?"
"Of course. Why not?"
"Because it would be too convenient?"
Doc's private elevator took them down to floor level and below, to a spacious basement garage filled with cars. All of them were the antiques Harris had come to expect, but they were otherwise of every imaginable type and color: a long, low two-seat roadster in an abusive glowing orange, a slab-sided panel truck in a shade of drab green Harris was already thinking of as comparatively inconspicuous, a pair of matching black-and-silver motorcycles, a long red monstrosity of a car with a decadently comfortable-looking interior, perhaps a dozen more cars in all. They settled on Jean-Pierre's black-and-gold sedan, and the pale-faced, dark-haired mechanic on duty—Jean-Pierre introduced him as Fergus Bootblack—told them that it was fueled and ready.
Jean-Pierre drove them up the ramp out of the garage and onto the still-busy street with a disregard for traffic and the laws of physics that Harris found unsettling.
Ten minutes later, they were parked outside the walled estate Harris had fled earlier that night. There was the hole in the sidewalk made by Angus Powrie; there were the gates . . . hanging open.
And half an hour after that, as the sun began to send tentative shafts of light slanting between the tall buildings, Harris and the others prowled around the estate's mansion. They looked at furniture long stored under dusty sheets and moved through echoingly empty rooms.
"Hasn't been lived in for months," Alastair said. He and Harris, in the kitchen, peered into the empty walk-in pantry and saw nothing but memories of crumbs. "I wager your friends hired it from the homelord, or moved in when he wasn't looking. When you got away, they fled."
"So what's that ex-in-a-circle thing out on the front lawn?"
"A conjurer's circle."
"That's what you called the circle in your lab. The thing with the paint."
Alastair nodded. "Same principle. Same use. There are always two: one here, one there. What starts in one—"
"— ends up in the other. I get it. I did it." Harris paused, worrying briefly about how easy it was for him to speak the language of the impossible when he was confronted with it. "Alastair, the other one of the circle out there is where I'm from, and that's an awful long way away."
"You want to return."
"Right now. No offense. I have to find Gaby."
A smile tugged at Alastair's lip. "I doubt we can help you so soon. We have to know which rituals they used on this circle. But if anyone can help you find your way, it's Doc."
Harris asked, "Why?" Seeing Alastair's blank look, he continued: "Why would he want to help?"
Alastair thought about that for a moment. "I don't know too much about it. He's almost the last of his kind, and he'd like for them to be remembered kindly."
"Who is `them'?"
"Purebloods from a long time ago." Alastair opened a floor-level cabinet and bent over to peer within it. "Amapershiat itifuwadda—"
"I can't hear you."
"Sorry." Alastair straightened, looking dubious. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't bandy this about. A lot of it is public record, but Doc doesn't care to have it discussed in his presence."
"Sure."
Alastair kept his attention on the door. "There was a bad one a while back. One of the Daoine Sidhe, like Doc. Did a lot of harm in the years leading up to the last war. Made their kind infamous. Doc fought him several times, but the people mostly remembered the bad that one did. If you said `Daoine Sidhe' to the average man on the walk twenty years ago, he'd have bit his thumb and spat."
"Whatever that means."
"Well, it just means that Doc ended up being the heir to a very nasty legacy. That's why the Sidhe Foundation. It's all charities and philanthropies and fixing problems. Nowadays, you say Daoine Sidhe to the man on the walk, and he's just as likely to think of the Foundation. Which is a victory."
"I guess it'd kind of be like growing up with the name Hitler."
"Whatever that means."
The night had brought Gaby very little sleep, so she substituted caffeine for wakefulness and tried to keep her manner pleasant. She'd be dealing with people all day.
She called the police. There was no news about Harris or the old man.
She called work to tell them why she wouldn't be coming in that day, or for the next several. She didn't tell her boss where she'd be staying, and he said he understood. She hoped it was true. It would be monstrously unfair for her to be replaced for something that just wasn't her fault.
She called in the theft of her credit cards to all the issuers.
That afternoon, she went for her first shooting lesson with Elaine's husband Jim.
The directed explosions from the revolver rattled her nerves. Still, he complimented her on learning not to flinch with each pull of the trigger. Soon he was making approving noises at the way her wadcutter rounds punched holes in the paper silhouette of a target. "Not a bad grouping," he said. "And we're talking about self-defense here, not target shooting. That means closer range than this. You'll do just fine . . . if you don't let adrenaline mess up your reactions and your aim. You have to stay controlled."
"Controlled," she repeated, and flipped the switch on the booth to send the new target back on its mechanical rail. She steadied her aim, mentally superimposed the horrible image of Adonis over the target, and prepared to give it a chest full of holes. Then, in tones so low that Jim couldn't hear through the protective earmuffs: "I'll show you controlled."
Through the open door of the bathroom, Harris could see late-afternoon sun angling into the bedroom. He lay in the claw-foot bathtub, legs drawn up—the thing was too short for him; he absently scrubbed at himself as the water cooled.
In spite of his worry and his intermittent nausea, he'd fallen asleep almost as soon as they got back to the Monarch Building.
Endless chiming noises had wakened him long after sunlight spilling over his eyes had failed to do so. Once he understood that the device that looked like a lizard's arm with a balled fist at either end was the handset of a telephone, or "talk-box double," he could answer it. On the other end was Doc, asking him to get ready for a trip in an hour or so.
Sitting in the tub, he reached out a finger and drew it over the cool tile of the bathroom floor, felt the texture, the roughness of the grout between tiles. The air just a little stuffy. Water nearly scalding hot when he'd drawn his bath, merely lukewarm now. It was all there with a level of detail he'd never experienced in a dream.
And it was so big. He'd found somewhere that no one else knew about. The map he'd seen suggested that this . . . place . . . was as big as the entire world he knew.
What the hell was he supposed to do about this? Go home and tell somebody? If he couldn't bring people back—preferably guys with minicams and sound equipment—he couldn't prove anything to other people.
And what if he could prove it? They'd want to come here, of course. There'd be a hell of a lot of press. Naturally, most people back home wouldn't believe it no matter how much press there was. Except big business; they'd be setting up McDonald's restaurants on every block as fast as they could bring in the yellow-arch signs. . . . That bothered him. It just didn't seem that Neckerdam would be improved by an invasion of junk food, tabloids, and grunge rock.
So hard to think about it. Every time he tried to put the scattered pieces of his thoughts together, other things floated up to the forefront of his memory. Gaby telling him good-bye, Gaby running for her life. Gabrielle's gaze flicking away past him as though he were unrecognizable pixels on the TV screen. Sonny Walters' face, the Smile, floating forward on the audience's roar of contempt. Nothing seemed to banish these images.
With a defeated sigh, he rose, toweled himself dry and set about dressing in his new clothes.
He tried to let the view from his window distract him. The ninety-third floor of the Monarch Building afforded him an amazing panorama of tall, bizarre buildings and tiny cars moving along the tree-lined avenues.
He loosely knotted his tie and reminded himself that it was not the ninety-third floor. It was "up ninety-two." If he were to take the elevator down to the twenty-fifth floor, that would be "up twenty-four," even if he started out above that floor. The ground floor was "down," the basement was "down one." It didn't make much sense, he didn't like it, and he knew he'd never remember it; but trying to figure out all the differences was a helpful distraction.
Differences. Like the skyscrapers all around the Monarch Building. Half of them were cylindrical towers, capped with pointed cones for roofs or with battlements like the tops of medieval castles. The other half tended to be more like the skyscrapers he was used to, comforting in their squareness, though they all had the kind of art-deco-era architecture he associated with the Empire State and the Chrysler Building.
Some of these were odd, all bright and garish. The one opposite the Monarch Building was a checkerboard of alternating squares of white and green marble; back home, no one could have found investors to build something so ghastly. He hoped not, anyway.
The Monarch Building itself took up a city block, without the setbacks that characterized the Empire State Building and other skyscrapers from its era. It was an unsettling black and had broad ledges every twenty stories; he couldn't see the next one down, but had given them a good look on their return last night. On each ledge was a line of white marble statues of monsters like griffins and rampant dragons, men and women in medieval dress, odd symbols he could not recognize.
A single sharp rap on his door interrupted his thoughts. "Come in."
Doc entered. He wore the same clothes as last night, and though no sign of lack of sleep marred his face, Harris thought he could see a certain weariness in the man's posture. "Are you ready to go?" Doc asked.
"I guess. Where are we going?"
"A construction site. I'm looking for someone who can help us. I want him to see you, to convince him that the gap between the two worlds has indeed been bridged."
In the elevator down, Doc handed him a paper bag and a strange ceramic cup—it was capped by a hinged top like a beer stein. In the bag was a pastry something like an eclair, but the filling was meat and the breading reminded him of a bagel. The stein was filled with a thick, hot liquid as bitter as bad coffee, but tasting like unsweetened chocolate. Harris grimaced over the flavor but guessed that it was strong with the caffeine he needed.
In the basement garage, Fergus slid out from underneath Doc's top-down two-seat roadster and cheerfully told him, "It's ready, sir; all patched. Try not to drive over the potted plants next time." Harris wondered if the mechanic ever slept.
This car, lower than Jean-Pierre's but just as long, had a different sound to its engine, a throaty growl that told Harris that it was a different class of vehicle. As he and Doc roared out of the basement garage, it sounded like a leashed lion. Harris washed that thought away with the last of the bitter chocolate. "Did you get any sleep?"
"No."
"Well, thanks for driving, then. Did you get anything figured out?"
"Yes." Doc turned right onto the main street the Monarch Building faced and blasted his way into the southbound traffic. Harris estimated that this would be somewhere near Fifth Avenue if he were home. But the real Fifth Avenue would be southbound only instead of having two directions of traffic separated by a tree-filled median. It wouldn't be thick with the antique autos he was growing used to. There would be lanes painted on asphalt instead of a brick surface with metal tracks set into it for the frequent rail-bound red buses they passed. Taxis wouldn't be Christmas green. One vehicle in twenty wouldn't be a horse-drawn cart, for Christ's sake.
"Well, what?"
"First, unfortunately, none of the men we took has talked. I doubt they will; they are a very confident lot. They're in the prison of the Neckerdam Guard now.
"Second, though, I do have results from your valence tests of this morning."
Harris grimaced. The last thing Doc and Alastair had done before he'd been allowed to go up to his room was take him into a small side laboratory and load him into a preposterous upright glass cylinder capped with electrical apparatus. Harris hadn't been alarmed until the two men drew on thick goggles with lenses that were almost black.
Then they'd fired up the equipment, the noise of transformers and discharging electricity striking fear into Harris' heart. That was only the start; things got worse when a continuous chain of green lightning poured into the cylinder and washed over him, rattling Harris' teeth and standing every hair of his body on end.
But that had been over soon, and they'd sent the shocked (and, he suspected, smoking) Harris up to his room immediately after.
Doc continued, "The Firbolg Valence was zero. Meaning that you're not Gifted. You can't influence your surroundings except through normal means."
"You mean, not like Alastair does with his medicine."
Doc nodded. "But you have a Tallysin Aura like none I've ever seen. That's what Alastair sees around you. With normal people—" he ignored Harris' bark of laughter "—it shows up among the Gifted. In your case, when I subjected your aura to analysis, it indicated that you were . . . from somewhere else." They roared by another red rail-bus, and Harris barely glimpsed the man dancing merrily atop the vehicle.
Harris glared. "I told you that last night. So tell me, where is this `somewhere else' of yours?"
There was a stoplight on the median ahead. It was different from the ones Harris was used to. It didn't change colors; a black-and-white sign swung out of the pole's summit, reading "Halt." Doc's car and the other traffic slowed to a stop at the corner.
Doc took his time answering, not speaking until long after the "Halt" sign snapped back into the pole and was replaced by "Go."
They left one cluster of skyscrapers and too-tall round towers behind and headed into a second one, near what should have been the financial district. Harris looked around to see if he could spot any familiar landmark, but there was nothing until a side street gave him a glimpse of the distant Brook—the Island Bridge.
"Some of the old stories say that there used to be two worlds," Doc said; his voice sounded as though he were reciting. "The fair world and the grim world. On one lived the fair folk, on the other the grim folk. And it was easy to go from one to the other.
"The fair folk were our ancestors, in our thousand clans: light, dark, and dusky. Smaller than people today, of course, and knowing many things that modern man has forgotten. Ignorant of many things modern man has learned.
"The grim folk were barbarians. They were bigger than our ancestors, stronger, more constant in size and form, but savage. Bloodthirsty men who preferred killing to lovemaking or anything else.
"And the grim men were entirely immune to iron and iron's daughter metals."
Harris frowned as what Doc was saying sank home. "Hey, wait a minute."
"Some of the men and women of the grim folk were better than others. More beautiful, more tolerable. They came to live on the fair world. And they were more prolific than the fair folk, more fertile. Those of our ancestors who wanted to have larger, healthier families found it no hardship to bring some of the grim folk into their bloodlines. And while this was going on, while these crosses were taking place, it became harder and harder to move between the grim place and the fair place."
"You think I'm from this grim world."
Doc nodded. "I've been rooting around in antique records and collections of legends, calling to experts on the talk-box, since you went to sleep. A lot of them put credence I never would have imagined into this twin-world idea."
"So I'm a savage." Harris felt himself get mad.
Doc cracked one of his rare smiles. "And most of us are the descendants of you savages, too. Caster Roundcap, an arcanologist I talked to this morning, who takes this sort of thing seriously, suspects that most modern men owe a quarter or more of their ancestry to the grim men. It explains a lot. A greater resistance than our ancestors had to iron poisoning. Increasing uniformity in the size and physical nature of people over the last three thousand years, something that still confuses arcanologists."
Harris sat back, his thoughts running around in circles. They thought he was a caveman. Some sort of Neanderthal.
But, wait. If his people were the ancestral boogey-men of the fair world folk, what were their ancestors to his people? He shot Doc another glance, looking again at the sharp-pointed ear revealed by the wind whipping at Doc's hair.
Then another thought occurred to him. "Wait a minute. There's no way."
"Why not?"
"Something I learned in college. I was a theater major. That accounts for my glittering job prospects. When people move apart and live in isolated communities, their language changes. That's where dialects come from. After long enough, the languages are almost completely different. It takes a scholar to figure out that they're related."
"True."
"But you're speaking English. Weird English, maybe. But I understand it."
"We are speaking Low Cretanis."
"I don't speak Low Cretinish at home."
Doc shrugged. "Perhaps your speech adapted itself when you came here, a mystical transformation. It's something I admit I hadn't considered. It's a good question. But you're speaking the vulgar speech of the Islands, regardless of what you spoke on the grim world."
"The hell you say." Harris thought furiously, then recited: " `The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.' There, did that rhyme?"
Doc looked startled. "Yes." His lips began moving silently as though he were reciting to himself.
"What are the odds of a random rhyme surviving some sort of hocus-pocus translation like you were suggesting?"
Doc didn't answer. For the first time since Harris had met him, he looked stunned. "That was William Shakespeare."
"Yes!"
"Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Act Two, Scene Two."
"Yes, goddammit, yes! How do you know that?"
"There's no need to curse . . . Shakespeare was an insane fabulator several centuries ago. He wrote plays about places that never existed. They've survived as classical examples of fantastic literature. There has never been any proof that he himself really existed; it's long been suspected that Shakespeare was a quill name for Lord Conn MaqqMann, the poet who `discovered' his work."
"No, he was real. Where I come from. And Denmark was real, and Richard the Third was real, and England was real, and William Shakespeare wrote about them." Harris blinked. "Okay. So there are some people who think somebody else wrote the plays for him. But they don't deny he existed. And we're speaking the modern version of his language, English, whether you like it or not."
Doc pulled over and parked beside a high, rickety wooden fence and looked closely at Harris. "Of all the things I have seen since you arrived, I think that disturbs me most. For everything else there is a reason. Not for this . . . duplication."
"Sorry." Harris waited a long moment. "Shouldn't we get going again?"
"No. We are there."
Harris looked up. Over the fencetop, he saw the metal girder framework of a skyscraper under construction.
Phipps entered the Manhattan office of his employer and cursed to himself as he felt his armpits go suddenly damp. The air-conditioning never seemed to help. He didn't know why his employer affected him this way. The old man might be murder on those who stood in his way, but he was always solicitous of his own people. Fixing their ties, inquiring after their families, giving them little gifts and big bonuses. And yet there was something about him, as though he were a hooded cobra hiding inside a teddy bear.
The old man sat in his leather-bound throne of an office chair behind his gleaming desk and smiled. "Bill. How's the arm?"
Phipps, rueful, gestured with his right arm. He didn't move it much; in its cast, hampered by the sling, it wasn't very mobile and still gave him shooting pains. "Could be worse. I can't wait to catch up to the guy who kicked me. He got his lucky shot in. Next time I kill the son of a bitch."
"No need to curse, Bill. But, yes, you'll get that chance. Do you have some news?"
"We found her." Phipps set the manila folder in front of the old man. His employer flipped it open and peered at the files and photographs it contained.
"The woman is Elaine Carpenter, born Elaine Johnson, one of her friends from high school. The man is James Carpenter, her husband. She works with a suicide hotline part-time. He's a tax lawyer. They live in Connecticut, and this Donohue girl is staying with them."
"Good, good. How did you find out?"
"I had Costigan make up some of those instant business cards out of a machine. General Carpentry. Gave one to every apartment manager on the block and quoted nice high rates. But for the manager of the girl's building, he had a special offer. A low, low introductory rate. And—surprise!—it turns out the manager had a door he wanted repaired. We gave it to him dirt cheap . . . and while Costigan was doing the repairs, he asked the manager how the door got broken." Phipps smiled in rich appreciation. "The manager told him the story. Also, how he had to collect the girl's mail and send it to her, since her keys were lost. Costigan got him alone and asked him a few questions."
"And?"
"And then he finished fixing the door."
"No, I mean—the manager?"
"Oh. He's gone on a river cruise. He may pop up in a few months."
The old man crinkled a smile at Phipps' word-play. "Good. We'll visit Miss Donohue again tonight, after the house is asleep. Do you have a man in place?"
"Naturally. I'll have the device out to him within the hour."
"Excellent." The old man waved him away. But as Phipps reached the door, he called, "Bill?"
"Yes?"
"If you had the choice, would you lead an army, rule a nation, or retire to a life of decadent self-gratification?"
Phipps smiled. He never knew whether the old man were testing or taunting, so he always answered honestly. "I'd take the army."
"I knew it. Go on, then. Get someone who is good at intrusion. And make yourself ready at moonrise."