7.

Friday the seventeenth. I couldn't stop shaking. My tie was crooked. My jacket looked worn. I cursed my pants, my shoes. It was all wrong, bush league, low-cla.s.s. Nothing I could do about it now. I wished I'd had the courage to ask Nigel to come with me. I knew he would be there, but just as certainly, I knew that I couldn't say anything to him, that I was supposed to arrive alone.

2312 Morland Street. I didn't even know what that was. Was it the secret clubhouse? Even Miles, my source of all things creepy and Ivy League, didn't know where the physical heart of the V&D was located. There was no famous landmark, no cryptic house for tourists to photograph. At least, not as far as he knew. And Miles ate this stuff up with the delight of a stamp collector. If he didn't know, who else could I ask?

Yesterday, I told Miles about the invitation. I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to tell someone. He was a huge help. He stroked his wild beard, patted me on the shoulder, and said: "My advice? If they ask you to have s.e.x with a goat, that's where you draw the line."

"Be serious. I have no idea what I'm doing."

"Jeremy, as a philosopher, I deal in ethics and reason. As a hobbyist, I dabble in mythology and campus lore. I can do both from my couch, and I don't have to turn the TV off. As far as reality goes, you've taken this farther than I ever imagined. So, what I'm saying is, you're on your own."

He smiled and shrugged. I thanked him for the help and huffed toward the door.

"Jeremy?" he called after me.

"What?"

"I can tell you one thing."

"Okay," I said. I turned around, a little too eagerly.

"Don't forget to send the goat a thank-you note."

I grabbed the door to slam it behind me. Just before the thud, I heard him yell, "Rich people love thank-you notes."

The door closed to the sound of his booming laugh.

2312 Morland Street turned out to be a pale blue two-story Victorian house, with navy trim, octagonal bay windows, and pointy triangular turrets, nestled on a quiet street of similar houses. The lawn was small and well-kept.

As I walked up, I saw two young women lounging on the stoop. They were about my age, but they didn't look local; they were tan with long legs and teased-up hair that reminded me of bored summer girls from my childhood. One of the girls smiled at me as I walked up the steps. The other was inspecting her nails and didn't look up.

"I'm Jeremy," I said.

"O-kay," said the one who smiled at me, in a perfectly adolescent what's that got to do with me? tone. She stared me down, and I blinked first.

"Am I in the right place?"

The other girl started laughing without looking up from her nails. It was a haughty, bubble-gum-smacking laugh. "Why are you asking us where you're supposed to be?"

It was a fair question. I felt my face flush. I mumbled nevermind and headed for the door. I heard them whispering behind me; one of them said, "I know!" and they both laughed.

I didn't see a doorbell, so I knocked and waited.

Finally, a man answered the door. He looked like a model out of the Brooks Brothers catalog; silver-haired, with a plaid shirt open at the collar and a perfectly tailored blazer. His handsome face was tan and lined.

"Jeremy, please come in. Right on time."

He patted me on the shoulder.

We walked through the foyer into a majestic living room. The house felt larger on the inside than it did on the outside. And the man moved gracefully through it. He was so comfortable in his own skin that I started to feel like an alien in mine. The room was filled with chairs and couches, some gathered around a grand piano. But all the seats were empty now, like a saloon in a frontier town after the mines had caved.

"I'd invite you to sit, but I'm afraid we don't have time," he said.

A woman came through a set of swinging doors and placed an arm around the man. She had a wobbly walk, and as she approached I could smell the cloud of alcohol mixing with her perfume. Her hair was blond with black roots, and it was coiled and springy from a bad perm. She wore a white tank top that exposed a generous stomach. She looked like one of the girls outside dipped in alcohol and baked in the sun for twenty years.

"Hey babe," she drawled to the man, with a Southern tw.a.n.g.

The man didn't flinch when she put her arm around him. What was someone like her doing with someone like him?

"This is Jeremy," the man said to her. Not a trace of awkwardness on his face. "Jeremy, this is my friend Candace. She just flew in this morning."

"Nice to meet you," I said, holding out my hand.

"Ooh, he's cute," she said to the man. She grinned at me. Her makeup was garish, but I could see how she had once been very pretty. "You should meet my daughters," she said. Then she mock-whispered, "The younger one's a virgin."

I coughed and choked at the same time.

"Candy, fix yourself a drink. I'm going to take Jeremy upstairs."

He put his arm around me, and we wound up a grand staircase to a landing on the second floor. I soaked in the beauty of the house. Every detail, every touch was perfect: marble archways with smooth-breasted angels leaning out. Antique clocks and lamps whose shapes echoed the bends and slants of the rooms around them. Like the man himself. That woman was the only outlier, like a toddler slapping her finger down on the perfect wrong note in the middle of a sonata. A sly, crazy thought popped into my head. Were they mocking me? Was she some sort of "white trash" parody, meant to remind me of my place? Or was I just totally paranoid and freaked out by the whole situation? Who knows, maybe she was exactly what this guy liked. After all, Bill Clinton was the most powerful man in the world, and you saw the gaggle of misfits he chased. There would always be senators caught with their pants down at highway rest stops, exploring various flavors of self-destruction. So, which was it: parody or l.u.s.t? Either way it was funny. The only question was: was I laughing at them or were they laughing at me?

We pa.s.sed through a small door into a study. There was an oak desk in the center of the room and bookshelves on all sides. But instead of books, the shelves were lined with relics from all over the world: African masks, Indian idols, Native American totems, and a hundred other artifacts I couldn't place.

On the wall was a giant map, the kind that showed the whole world spread out into two smashed ellipses, side by side. There were hundreds of small pins stuck into it, marking different cities.

"Have you been to all these places?"

"I have." His blue eyes gleamed. "Over many years, obviously."

I inspected a small, tattered map framed on the wall.

"One of the original maps from the search for Bimini. That set me back a bit," he added, chuckling.

He gave me s.p.a.ce and let me stroll around the shelves.

"What's this?" I asked, looking at a small bottle. It reminded me of a beaker from high school chemistry, down to the stopper in the top. It contained a yellow liquid.

"Ah." He crossed over and held it up. "Aqua regia. King's water. It's a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids. Famous for its ability to dissolve gold."

He took a pen from his desk and jotted something down. He tore the page off and handed it to me.

Au + 3 NO3- + 6 H+ - Au3+ + 3 NO2 + 3 H2O Au3+ + 4 Cl- - AuCl4- I nodded, as if this meant anything at all to me.

"Are you a chemist?" I asked.

He laughed. "You sound surprised."

"No, I just . . . I guess I thought you were a lawyer . . ."

He didn't say anything.

I stumbled on. "Because of your connection to . . ."

He watched me curiously. I had to stop talking.

He finally spoke, breaking the tension.

"Chemistry is a hobby of mine. But I didn't mix this myself. This bottle, like all the objects in this room, has historical significance."

He lifted the bottle off the shelf and held it up to the lamp. It sparkled through the light.

"This was recovered from the n.a.z.is. All the failures of the human mind, the n.a.z.is. The l.u.s.t for power, the desire to be led. Delusions of superhumanity, put toward the lowest acts of b.e.s.t.i.a.l murder. Tell me, Jeremy, have you ever seen a n.o.bel Prize?"

"No, sir."

"They're quite beautiful." With his right index finger, he traced a circle the size of his palm. "Two hundred grams of 23-carat gold. The front features an engraving of Alfred n.o.bel and the dates of his birth and death in roman numerals."

He took the sc.r.a.p of paper from my hand and wrote on it: NAT--MDCCCx.x.xIII.

OB--MDCCCXCVI.

"The back displays the prizewinner's name, above a picture representing their field of endeavor. The medals are handed out each year in Sweden by His Majesty the King."

His eyes drifted off, as if he were picturing a king clasping his shoulder and pressing the medal down into his palm.

"Do you know what the poet Yeats said when he accepted his medal?"

"No," I answered, for the fiftieth time that night.

"He saw his engraving: a young man listening to a beautiful woman stroking a lyre. And he said, 'I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young.'

"Now," he smiled, "to answer your question. In 1940, the n.a.z.is invaded Denmark. Until that point, the Inst.i.tute for Theoretical Physics had been a haven for German scientists fleeing the n.a.z.is, including the n.o.bel Prize winners James Franck and Max von Laue. Suddenly, they had just hours to hide their medals before the n.a.z.is stormed the inst.i.tute. They had to hide the gold, or the n.a.z.is would use it to fund their horrors. But where to hide it? The Hungarian chemist de Hevesy suggested burying the medals, but Neils Bohr argued that the n.a.z.is would just dig them up. Then de Hevesy came up with a brilliant idea: he would quickly mix together some aqua regia. He dissolved the medals into a beaker--this beaker, actually--and placed it on his shelf among hundreds of identical beakers.

"The n.a.z.is raided the laboratory and walked right by the beaker, G.o.d knows how many times, over the years. When the war was over, de Hevesy returned to Denmark and found the beaker untouched. He distilled the gold, and in 1952, the n.o.bel committee presented Professor Franck with a new medal."

He paused and smiled at me kindly.

"That's amazing," I said. "How did you find the beaker?"

"I purchased it at an auction in Copenhagen. I had to have it. What a magic trick! Good dissolves itself, pa.s.ses right through evil, and reforms on the other side. Flawless. Come. I don't want you to be late."

Late for what?

We walked through a door behind his desk, into a dimly lit room. All at once I smelled a clean, pungent, hollow smell. The first thing I noticed was the strange chandelier hanging above me, and in a moment of revulsion I realized that its twisting, interlocking shapes were bones, tied and fixed together. It swayed gently as fresher air breezed in from the study. Candles rose from the empty sockets, spilling wax over the bones and illuminating the room with a dull amber glow. The shadows flickered and revealed other shapes in the room: above me, cloaked angels made from skeletons were suspended from the ceiling, giving the impression of flight; bony wings b.u.t.terflied out from their spines. The walls and ceiling were covered with hideous designs: lines and circles of leg bones, wrists, vertebrae. Then I saw the worst thing of all--a fireplace composed entirely of hundreds of skulls, stacked into a macabre mantel.

"It's a reproduction," he said from behind me. "The Capuchin Crypt, in Rome, under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione."

"What is it?"

"An underground tomb, decorated with the remains of four thousand monks who died between 1500 and 1870. Five rooms, all filled with bones. And when you leave, they hit you with the kicker."

He pointed to the far wall, where a sign was illuminated over a row of skulls. It read: What you are now, we once were.

What we are now, you will be.

"Anytime I start taking life for granted, I come sit in here for a while."

"Oh," I mumbled. I wondered how any sane person could sit in here without being chained down.

"Come," he said.

He placed his hand on my back and led me into a long hallway. On both walls, I saw tall gla.s.s cases filled with knives, rifles, swords, spears, clubs, maces, crossbows, tomahawks, battle-axes--all mounted to the wall and illuminated with bright lights.

"What's the story here?" I asked.

"No story," he said pleasantly. "I just like weapons."

We came to the end of the hallway. He turned to me, and there was a black cloth in his hands.

"I need to ask your permission to blindfold you."

"Really?" All of a sudden, Miles's goat seemed a few steps closer to being a frightening possibility. "Are you serious?"

He half-shrugged.

"I'm afraid so, if you'd like to go further."

Something told me he wasn't kidding.

Well, I thought, I've come this far.

I nodded.

He moved behind me, and the world went black.

I was suddenly aware of my other senses. I heard the dragging of a heavy door and felt a draft of air.

"One or two steps more," he said quietly.