"Agove Royo?"

"Obeah."

"That invitation have anything to do with voodoo?"

"No, no. This is devil worship." Epiphany was pained by my ignorance. "The ram is a sign of the devil. An inverted star means bad luck. Probably also a satanic symbol."

I grabbed Epiphany and wrapped her in my arms. "You are worth your weight in gold, babe. Does Obeah have a devil?"

"Many devils."

She smiled at me, and I patted her bottom. Nice bottom. "It's time to brush up on my black magic. We'll get dressed and go to the library. You can help me with my homework."

It was a beautiful morning, warm enough to go without a coat. Bright sunshine dazzled on the mica specks in the sidewalk. Spring was officially one day off, but we might not see weather this good again until May. Epiphany wore her plaid skirt and sweater and looked invitingly like a schoolgirl. Driving up Fifth where the little golden statuettes of Mercury gleamed atop the traffic lights, I asked how old she was.

"Seventeen, last January sixth."

"Christ, you're not old enough to buy a drink."

"Not true. When I'm dressed up I get served without any problems. They never asked for my I.D. at the Plaza."

I believed her. In her plum-colored suit she looked five years older. "Aren't you a little young to be running the store?"

Epiphany's amused look contained a trace of scorn. "I've been in charge of accounting and inventory since my mama took ill," she said. "I only tend the counter at night. In the daytime I have a staff of two."

"And what do you do in the daytime?"

"Study mostly. Go to class. I'm a freshman at City."

"Good. You should be an old hand in the library. I'll leave the research to you."

I waited in the main reading room while Epiphany sorted through file cards. Scholars of all ages sat in silent rows between the long wooden tables where precisely arranged lampshades wore numbers like convicts on parade. The room had ceilings as high as a train station with huge chandeliers like inverted wedding cakes hanging in the Beaux Arts vastness. Only occasional muffled coughing disturbed the cathedral hush.

I found a vacant seat at the far end of a reading table. The number on the lampshade corresponded to the number engraved on a brass oval countersunk into the tabletop in front of me: 666. I remembered the snotty maitre d' at the Top of the Six's and changed my seat; 724 felt a lot more comfortable.

"Wait'll you see what I've found." Epiphany dropped an armload of books with a dusty thump. Heads turned halfway down the table. "Some of it is trash, but there's an edition of the Grimoire of Pope Honorius privately printed in Paris in 1754."

"I don't read French."

"It's in Latin. I'll translate. Here's a new one that's mostly pictures."

I reached for the oversized coffee-table volume and opened it at random to a full-page medieval painting of a horned monster with lizard scales and talons in place of feet. Flames issued from his ears and between the stalactite rows of tusks accentuating his gaping mouth. It bore the caption: SATAN, PRINCE OF HELL.

I thumbed several pages. An Elizabethan woodcut showed a woman in a farthingale kneeling behind a naked devil with the build of a lifeguard. He had wings, a goat's head, and fingernails like Slovenly Peter. The woman hugged his legs, her nose nestled directly beneath his uplifted tail. She was smiling.

"The abominable kiss," Epiphany said, looking over my shoulder. "That's how a witch traditionally sealed her allegiance to the devil."

"I guess they didn't have notary publics in those days." I turned a few more pages, flipping through a succession of demons and familiars. There were many inverted five-pointed stars in the section on talismans. I came across one with the figure 666 printed at the center and pointed it out to Epiphany. "My least favorite number."

"It's from the Book of Revelations."

"The what?"

"The Bible: 'Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.' "

"Is that a fact?"

Epiphany frowned at me over the tops of her reading glasses. "Don't you know anything?"

"Not a whole lot, but I'm learning fast. Here's a woman named for the restaurant where I ate yesterday." I showed Epiphany the engraving of a plump matron wearing a peasant's cowled hood.

"Voisin is French for 'neighbor,' " she said.

"Those nuns did drum some book learning into you at that. Here, read the caption."

Epiphany took the book and read the small print beneath the engraving in a whisper: "Catherine Deshayes, called La Voisin, a society fortuneteller and sorceress. Arranged Black Masses for the Marquise de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV, as well as for other notables. Arrested, tortured, tried and executed in 1680."

"Just the book we need."

"It's entertaining, but the meat and potatoes are in these: Malleus Maleficarum, and Reginald Scott's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, and Aleister Crowley's Magick, and the Secrets of Albertus Magnus, and -"

"Okay, terrific. I want you to go home and curl up on the couch with a good book. Mark any passages you think I should read, especially stuff dealing with the Black Mass."

Epiphany gave me the sort of look a teacher reserves for the class dunce. "This is a reference library. You can't check out any of the books in here."

"Well, I can't stick around. I've got work to do."

"There's a branch library downstairs." Epiphany began piling the books. "I'll check and see how many of these are in general circulation."

"Perfect. You're a champ. Here's the key to my place." I opened my wallet and slipped her a twenty. "That's for cab fare and anything else you think you'll need."

"I've got money of my own."

"Hang on to it. I might have to borrow some."

"I don't want to be alone."

"Keep the chain on the door. You'll be fine."

Epiphany walked me downstairs through the imposing white marble entrance hall and out onto the broad steps leading to Fifth Avenue. She was afraid, and it made her look like a little girl. Our searing, snake-tongued kiss earned contemptuous stares from two passing businessmen and much applause and whistling from a hookey-playing urchin bootblack sitting on the base of the uptown lion.

THIRTY-SIX.

I dropped the Chevy off at the garage and walked back to Broadway on the sunny side of 44th. I was taking my time, enjoying the weather, when I spotted Louis Cyphre coming out of the main entrance to the Astor. He wore a tan beret, tweed Norfolk coat, twill breeches, and tall, polished riding boots. In a gloved hand he carried a scuffed leather travel bag.

I watched him wave off a doorman's offer of a cab. He started downtown past the Paramount Building at a brisk pace. I considered catching up with him but figured he was heading for the Crossroads office and decided to save my breath. I didn't think of it as tailing him; I was much too close. But when he reached the entrance to my building and continued on without a pause, I instinctively fell back and lingered by a shop window, curiosity at full throttle. He crossed 42nd Street and turned west. I watched from the corner, then kept pace with him, following along the opposite side of the street.

Cyphre stood out in the crowd. Not hard to do among the pimps, hustlers, drug addicts, and runaways crowding 42nd Street when you're dressed as if you were going to the Horse Show at the Garden. I guessed his eventual destination to be Port Authority. He surprised me mid-block and ducked into Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus.

I dodged four lanes of two-way traffic like "Crazy Legs" Hirsch evading defensive linemen only to be brought up short by a signboard at the entrance. Glitter-edged letters announced: THE AMAZING DR. CIPHER. Eight-by-ten glossies showed my client wearing a top hat and tails like Mandrake the Magician. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT, it said.

The main floor of Hubert's was a penny arcade; the stage was downstairs. I went in, bought a ticket and found a place in the dark along the chest-high plywood barrier that discouraged audience participation. On the small, brightly lit stage, a buxom belly dancer gyrated to a quavering Arabic lament. I counted five other shadowy spectators besides myself.

What the hell was the elegant Louis Cyphre doing in a low-rent place like this? Flea circus card tricks don't keep a man in limousines and Wall Street lawyers. Maybe he got his kicks performing in public. Or else it was a setup. An act meant for me to catch.

When the scratchy record came to an end, someone backstage picked up the needle and started it over again. The belly dancer looked bored. She stared at the ceiling. Her mind was on other things. Eight bars into the third replay the machine was switched off, and she made a beeline for the wings. No one applauded.

The six of us stared at an empty stage without complaint until an old geezer wearing a red vest and sleeve garters appeared. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he wheezed, "it is with great awe and trepitude that I present to you the amazing, mysterious, unforgettable: Dr. Cipher. Let's give him a nice welcome." The old man was the only one clapping as he shuffled off.

The lights dimmed to blackness. A muffled bumping and whispering backstage as in amateur theatricals was followed by a blinding, phosphorescent flash. The lights came immediately back on, but my eyes took a few moments to refocus. A blurred, blue-green retinal afterimage hovered about the figure on stage, obscuring his features.

"Which one of us knows how our days shall end? Who can say if tomorrow will come?" Louis Cyphre stood alone, center stage, surrounded by wispy tendrils of smoke and the smell of burnt magnesium. He wore a black Edwardian soup-and-fish with long swallow-tails and a two-button vest. A hinged black case the size of a breadbox stood on a table to one side. "The future is an unwritten text, and he who dares read those blank pages does so at his own peril."

Cyphre removed his white gloves and with a trickster's midair fingersnap, they were gone. He picked a carved ebony wand off the table and gestured toward the wings. The belly dancer made a subdued entrance, her ample body draped in a floor-length velvet cloak.

"Time paints a portrait no man can ignore." Cyphre waved his hand in a small circle above the dancer's head. At this command she began to pirouette. "Which of us would peek at the finished work? It is a different thing to observe the mirror day by day; there the nuance of change goes unnoticed."

The dancer's back turned toward the spectators. The luster of her flowing black hair surged in the spotlight. Cyphre thrust the ebony wand like a sword at his audience of six. "Those who would behold the future, look on me with terror!"

The belly dancer came about full-face: a toothless, haggard crone. Lank strands of ashen hair framed her ruined features. One blind eye caught the light like glazed pottery. I hadn't seen her slip on the mask, and the effect of her transformation was staggering. The drunk beside me gasped himself sober in the dark.

"Flesh is mortal, my friends," Dr. Cipher intoned. "And lust sputters and dies like a candle in the winter wind. Gentlemen, I offer you the pleasures your hot blood so recently imagined."

He gestured with his wand and the belly dancer opened the folds of her heavy cloak. She still wore the tasseled costume, but her wrinkled breasts sagged, deflated behind sequined pasties. A once-sumptuous belly hung slack between angular, skeletal hips. It was another woman entirely. There was no way to fake those swollen arthritic knees and emaciated thighs.

"To what uses shall we come?" Dr. Cipher smiled like a G.P. making a house call. "Thank you, my dear; most enlightening." He dismissed the ancient woman with a wand stroke, and she hobbled offstage. There was a smattering of applause.

Dr. Cipher held up his hand. "Thank you, my friends." He nodded graciously. "The tomb lies at the end of every path. Only the soul is immortal. Guard this treasure well. Your decaying husk is but a temporary vessel on an endless voyage.

"Let me tell you a story: when I was a young man and just beginning my travels, I struck up a conversation with a retired seaman in a waterfront bar in Tangier. My nautical companion was a German, born in Silesia, but spending his last days in the Moroccan sun, wintering in Marrakech and drinking the summers away at whatever seaport suited his fancy.

"I remarked that he had found a comfortable berth.

" 'It has been smooth sailing five-and-forty years now,' he replied.

" 'You are a lucky man,' I said, 'not to have weathered any of life's storms.'

" 'Luck?' the old seafarer laughed, 'luck, you call it? Count yourself lucky, then. This year I must pass it to another.'

"I asked him to explain. He told me the story much as I tell it to you. When he was my age and first shipping out, he encountered an old beachcomber in Samoa who gave him a bottle containing the soul of a Spanish quartermaster who once sailed with King Philip's armada. Any illness or misfortune which might befall him was instead suffered by this tormented prisoner. How the Spaniard's soul came to inhabit the bottle, he knew not, but at the age of seventy, he must give it away to the first young man who would accept it or suffer the consequences of taking the unfortunate conquistador's place within.

"Here the old German looked at me sadly. He had but a month to go before his seventy-first birthday. 'Time,' he said, 'to learn what life is all about.'

"He gave me the bottle. A handblown rum bottle, amber in color, and easily hundreds of years old. It was stoppered with a gold plug."

Dr. Cipher reached behind the black case on the table and produced the bottle. "Behold." He sat it on top of the case. His description had been exact, omitting only the frenzied scuttling shadow inside.

"I have had a long and happy life; but listen -" All six of us craned forward to hear. "Listen ..." Cyphre's voice trailed away to a whisper. Out of the ensuing silence came a tiny, bell-chime complaint, like a chain of paperclips dragged across a crystal goblet. I strained to make out the fragile sound. It seemed to be coming from within the amber bottle.

"'Ay-you-da-may ... ay-you-da-may ..." Over and over, the same haunted, melodic phrase.

I tried to spot Louis Cyphre's lips moving. His smile reached out beyond the footlights. He was gloating with raw, unconcealed pleasure.

"Mysterious fate," he said. "Why should I spend a life free from pain while another human soul is doomed to eternal anguish within a rum bottle?" He withdrew a black velvet sack from his pocket and stuffed the bottle inside. Pulling the drawstrings tight, he placed it on top of his case. His smile reflected the footlights. Without a sound, he spun gracefully and struck the sack a sabre-stroke with the ebony wand. There was no sound of breaking glass. An empty sack was flipped into the air and deftly caught. Louis Cyphre crumpled it into a ball and shoved it into his pocket, acknowledging the applause with a curt nod.

"I want to show you something else," he said. "But before I do, I must emphasize that I am not an animal trainer, merely a collector of exotics."

He tapped the black case with his wand. "I bought the contents of this box in Zurich from an Egyptian merchant I had known years before in Alexandria. He claimed what you are about to see were souls originally enchanted at the court of Pope Leo X. An amusement for his Medici imagination. This seems an impossible claim, does it not?"

Dr. Cipher unsnapped the metal fasteners securing the case and opened it to form a triptych. A miniature theatre unfolded, with scenery and background tableaux painted in the meticulous perspective of the Italian Renaissance. The stage was peopled with white mice, all costumed in tiny silks and brocade as characters from commedia dell'arte. There was Punchinello and Columbina, Scaramouche and Harlequin. Each walked on its hind legs in an elaborate pantomime. The silvery tinkle of a music box accompanied the elaborate acrobatics.

"The Egyptian claimed they would never die," Cyphre said. "An extravagant boast, perhaps. I can only say that I have not lost any in six years' time."

The diminutive performers walked on tightropes and brightly colored balls, brandished matchstick swords and parasols, tumbled and took pratfalls with clockwork precision.

"Presumably, enchanted subjects should require no sustenance." Dr. Cipher leaned over the top of the case and observed the performance with delight. "I provide them with food and water daily. They have incredible appetites, I might add."

"Toys," the man next to me muttered in the dark. "They gotta be toys."

As if on cue, Cyphre reached down and Harlequin scampered up his coat sleeve and perched, sniffing the air, on his shoulder. The spell was broken. It was only a rodent wearing a tiny diamond-patterned outfit. Cyphre pinched the pink tail and lowered a splay-legged Harlequin back to the stage, where it paraded around on its front paws in a totally unmouselike manner.

"As you see, I have no need for television." Dr. Cipher folded the sides of the miniature stage closed and secured the fasteners. There was a handle on top, and he lifted it off the table like a suitcase. "Whenever the box is opened, they perform. Even show business has its Purgatory."

Cyphre tucked the wand under his arm and dropped something on the table. There was a flash of white light, and I was blind in its momentary brilliance. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. The stage was bare. A plain wooden table stood alone and naked in the spotlight.

Cyphre's amplified, disembodied voice issued from an unseen speaker: "Zero, the point intermediate between positive and negative, is a portal through which every man must eventually pass."

The old party in sleeve garters shuffled out and carried the table into the wings as a worn recording of "Night Train" bleated from the hidden loudspeaker. The belly dancer reappeared, plump and pink, and began a bump-and-grind as mechanical as the piston-driven music. I groped my way up the sagging stairs. The prickling dread I felt in the French restaurant had returned. My client was toying with me, playing tricks with my mind like a three-card monte dealer fleecing the suckers.

THIRTY-SEVEN.

Out front, a fat young man wearing a pink shirt, khaki pants, and dirty white bucks removed the glossy photos from the glass-covered signboard. A nervous pill-popper in an army fatigue jacket and tennis shoes looked on.

"Great show," I said to the fat kid. "That Dr. Cipher is a marvel."

"Weird," he said.