Strange turned his head toward Jonathan, his cheek on the back of his hands, and looked at him casually when he asked, "Who is it you visit in Covent Garden?"

Jonathan laughed while he thought quickly. "How long have I been under surveillance?"

"From the evening we met at Tomlinson's. My man lost track of you for a while there. Traffic jam. He waited for you at your apartment."

"Which apartment?"

"Ah, precisely. At that time we didn't know about the Baker Street residence. You use it very seldom. My people waited for some time at your Mayfair flat before further inquiry revealed the existence of the Baker Street penthouse. By the time we arrived there, you had left, but the flat was not empty. There was a man in your bathroom. A dead man. But you had disappeared."

"Hey! Watch it!" Jonathan shouted.

"What's wrong?"

"This steel-clawed son of a bitch is pulling my tendons out."

"Be gentle with the doctor, Claudio. He's a guest. Yes, we quite lost sight of you until, a couple of hours ago, I received a call from Grace. Dear Grace is a colleague of mine. A close and honored friend."

"So?"

"So I would like some explanation that puts these odd bits together. And I do hope it's convincing. I would enjoy an evening of civilized chat."

"Well, I told you I was trying to gain entree to your place here. I had no idea you were also looking for me, so I tried through Amazing Grace."

"Yes, but how did you know about Grace?"

"You said it yourself. I still have some CII connections. Hey! Take it easy, you ham-handed bastard!" Jonathan sat up and pushed the masseur away.

"Oh, very well," Strange said with some irritation. "I'd rather cut my massage short than listen to you complain about yours. But you should really establish a routine for keeping fit. Look at me. I'm ten years older than you, and I look ten years younger."

"We have different life priorities."

Strange led the way into a lavish dressing room, the walls of which were covered with mirrors set in bronze. The reflections of the three men echoed in infinite redundancy, and Jonathan found himself a principal in a finely synchronized sartorial ballet performed by scores of Hemlocks and scores of Stranges, while scores of droopy-lidded Leonards looked on, their faces impassive, their heads tilted back on thick necks.

When he saw his clothes laid out, Jonathan felt a pulse of relief. He had wondered why Strange had not mentioned finding at least one of the revolvers when his men had picked up his clothes. But these came from his Mayfair flat, not the Baker Street one. Luck was with him. But still he was walking a razor's edge, reactive and imbalanced from the start, never sure how much truth he had to surrender to neutralize the facts already in Strange's possession. He had done well enough so far, but he had had to turn the flow of inquisition away from time to time, with inconsequential small talk or complaining about the masseur, to give himself time to collect his balance and pick a direction. So far, he had been plausible, if not overwhelmingly convincing. But there were big holes-like the dead man on his toilet-that Strange would surely probe. And one link was still open. To close it might expose Vanessa Dyke.

"...but it is a terrible mistake not to give the body the work and diet necessary to keep it young and attractive," Strange was saying. "I know the routines are strenuous and the restrictions irritating, but nothing worth having is ever cheap."

"That's funny. I clearly remember being assured by a song of the Depression that the best things in life were free."

"Opiate hogwash. Self-delusions with which the congenital have-nots seek to excuse their life failures and make less of the accomplishments of others. As I recall, that insipid song suggests that Love, in particular, is free. My dear sir, my life's work is founded on the knowledge that love-technically competent and interesting love-is extraordinarily expensive."

"Perhaps the song was using the word differently."

"Oh, I know the kind of love it meant. Fictions of the fourteenth-century jongleur. Friendship run riot. Pointless nestlings; sharings of tacky dreams and tawdry aspirations; promises of emotional dependency that pass for constancy; fumbling manipulations in the backs of cars; the sweat of the connubial bed. Thatkind of love may be thought free, and considered dear at the price. But in fact it is not free at all. One pays endlessly for the shabby amateurism of romantic love. One enters into eternal contractual obligations under the terms of which the partners pledge to erode one another forever with their infinite dullness. Still, I suppose they lack the merit to deserve more, and probably the imagination to desire more. Should I open the doors of The Cloisters to one of this ilk for a night, he would blunder about, asinus ad lyram,until he found, down in the kitchens, some sweating cook or stringy scullery maid who could be a soul mate and who would understand and care for him for all time. There we are! Dressed and civilized. Shall we take a little refreshment?"

"If you wish."

"Good. There are one or two points that want clarifying."

"Personally, I'd like to get around to the topic of the sale of the Marini Horse. Focusing our attention particularly on what profit I can expect from it."

Strange laughed. "In due course. After all, we're still not absolutely sure that you are going to survive this interrogation, are we? Come along."

The center mirror hinged open like a door, swilling the scores of reflected images around the room in a blurred rush. They passed into a small sitting room about the size and shape of a projection booth, dimly lit, its walls made of glass. Three sides looked out onto the principal salon of The Cloisters: a large, brilliantly illuminated room in the Art Deco style. Glass beads, mechanical foliage, repetitious angular motifs, rainbow and sunrise patterns pressed into buffed aluminum wall panels.

The patrons were dressed in extravagant costumes provided by the management; and shepherdesses, devils, inquisitors, cavaliers, and Mickey Mouses lounged about, chatting, drinking, laughing. But all this panoply was in pantomime; the glass walls were soundproof.

Moving among the patrons were half a dozen hostesses dressed in flapper style: long loops of beads, cloche-bobbed hair, bound breasts under silk frocks, rolled-down hose exposing rouged and dimpled knees. With their artificial lashes of the stiff "surprise" style, their beauty spots, and their bee-stung lips, they looked like mannequins in back issues of high fashion magazines as they served drinks and exotic canape's, or bent over patrons in teasing, flirtatious conversation.

One of the patrons, a Catherine de Medici of uncertain years, with face skin tight from cosmetic surgery that had not included her wattle, approached the glass wall and stared in unabashedly. She moistened the tip of her little finger with the tip of her tongue and made a minute adjustment in her eye liner, then she patted the back of her hair, turned and took a long appreciative sideways glance into the room before pivoting away to greet an approaching highwayman with the boneless face, whimpering smile, and lank hair of his class.

"One-way mirrors," Strange said unnecessarily as he settled into a deep leather chair after carefully hitching up the crease of his trousers. "The decor was Grace's idea. There is something fundamentally evil about the New People of the 1920s that seems to liberate our customers."

Jonathan stood near the one-way glass wall and looked out, his arms folded on his chest. "Art Deco was a monstrous moment in art. When the flamboyant decay of Art Nouveau percolated down to the masses, through the intermediary of machine reproduction, it was unavoidable that the half-trained, ungifted, self-indulgent artists would proclaim the resultant hodgepodge a new art form. After all, here was something even theycould do. In my view, the recent revival of interest in Art Deco indicts the modern artist and the modern critic-people who communicate and communicate, yet remain inarticulate."