Black Easter Read online

  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 Éliphas Lévi 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 – towards 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. The 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 would 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 practising 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 practised 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 vouce, ‘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.

  ‘Nevertheless 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 whom 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.’

  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 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-carat 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 substitu
te 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’s 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 US 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 outré 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 titles as ‘Short- and Long-Term Probabilities Consequent to an Israeli Blockade of the Faeröe 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, practised 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 cheque 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.’

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p; ‘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’s desk blotter.

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

  By some untraceable miscalculation, Baines’s 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 negotations were properly opened, however, they took no more than the two weeks Baines had anticipated.