Death Mask

exactly him.”

Sissy held Chrissie’s hand between hers, and said, “Don’t worry. You’re never going to see him again. Your palm tells me that you’re going to be happy and healthy and live for a very long time. Oh — and apart from that — you’re going to have at least five children.”

Chrissie opened her mouth in disbelief. “Five children! But I’m not married yet! I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

“You will. You see your mount of Venus here, just below your thumb? It’s very high and rounded, which means that you’re going to have a passionate love life and a very satisfying marriage. And five children, one for each finger.”

Molly stood up. “My motherin-law is never wrong, believe me. Madame Blavatsky had nothing on her.”

Chrissie said, “Thank you. And I really hope you catch this psycho.”

Sissy and Molly glanced at each other. Chrissie hadn’t yet been told that there had been two almost simultaneous attacks in the city center that morning, and that both of them had been carried out by a red-faced man.

“We’ll catch him,” Molly reassured her. “You just worry about getting yourself better.”

They were about to leave the room when Chrissie said, “Oh! There’s one more thing that I remember. The man — he had a piece missing from his ear.”

Molly stopped. “A piece missing from his ear? What do you mean?”

“It was his right ear, like a triangular piece missing from his earlobe.”

“You want to show me on this drawing?”

“Okay.”

Molly kept most of the man’s face covered while Chrissie penciled in a V-shaped nick.

“That’s good,” Molly told her. “That’s very distinctive. That should help the police a lot.”

Chrissie looked across at Sissy. “You’re sure I’m never going to see him again?”

“Never,” said Sissy. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

They managed to talk to one of the teenage boys who had been stabbed in the glass elevator at the Four Days Mall. His name was Ben, and he was seventeen years old and very spotty and skinny, with a mass of black curly hair.

When the red-faced man had started stabbing, Ben had crouched down in one corner of the elevator with his hands covering his face. He had been stabbed through his hands seven times, and his left cheek had been sliced open right to the bone, but he had been lucky that the knives hadn’t penetrated his eyes.

“It was like his face was painted red, you know? He scared the crap out of me, if you must know. This one dude was telling him back off and everything, but he pulled out these knives and nobody stood a chance.”

“Was he tall, medium, or short?”

“He was like humungous.”

“How about his face? Was it squarish, or long, or oval?”

“He looked like the Hulk. Like, if the Hulk was red instead of green, that’s exactly what this dude looked like.”

“Did you notice anything about his ears?”

“His ears? I wasn’t looking at his frickin’ ears, ma’am, excuse my French.”

Sissy said, “Would you do something for me, Ben?”

“Sure, whatever.”

She opened her purse and took out the deck of DeVane cards. Ben watched her, baffled, as she sorted through them. She found l’Apprenti, the Apprentice, which she picked as Ben’s Predictor card. It showed a young man in a long leather apron sawing wood in a carpenter’s workshop. At the far end of the workshop three latticed windows gave out onto a garden. In each window stood a naked girl with braided hair — a brunette covering her eyes, a blonde covering her ears, and a red-head covering her mouth, like the three wise monkeys. They represented the young man’s inexperience.

She laid the card on the bed, and then offered the rest of the pack to Ben. “Choose four cards. Any cards, it doesn’t matter.”

Ben looked up at the Chinese-American nurse who was filling in his notes. She shrugged as if to say, Go ahead. it’s fine by me. A little fortune-telling never hurt anybody.

He picked four cards, which Sissy set around the Predictor card at all four points of the compass.

“This is behind you,” said Sissy, pointing to the card below the Apprentice. “You had a spat with a girl you really care about.”

Ben stared at her. “How do you know that? Have you been talking to my folks?”

Sissy smiled and shook her head. “It’s true, then?”

“I broke up with my girlfriend over the weekend. We kept fighting all the time.”

“All right,” said Sissy, and pointed to the card on the left. “This is your ambition.”

The card was le Violoniste, and showed a young man in a green velvet suit playing the violin in front of an audience of various animals — dogs, goats, llamas, and leopards — all of which were also dressed in human finery.

“You want to be a musician,” Sissy told him. “A rock guitarist, if I’m guessing correctly. And you and your girlfriend used to fight because she was jealous of all the girls who hung around whenever you played.”

“This is incredible,” said Ben.

Sissy pointed to the right-hand card, le Marcheur. A thin man in a triangular hat was walking down a muddy country road. It was teeming with rain, and the man’s only companion was a bedraggled black dog.

“This is what lies ahead of you, Ben. Success won’t come to you easy. You’ll have to travel a long, long way to achieve your ambition, and you’ll get very depressed and frustrated. But you should make it in the end. See this break in the clouds? You’ll get a break one day, when you least expect it.”

Ben said nothing to that but pointed to the last card, at the top. “What does this one mean?”

“Le Temoin, the Witness. That’s you, and what happened to you today.”

“I don’t get it.”

The card showed a man in a pigtailed wig and a frock coat stepping back from a picture frame with one hand raised as if he were trying to shield his eyes. But the picture frame, although it was elaborate, with curlicues and bunches of grapes carved around it, was empty.

Sissy picked it up and scrutinized it carefully. “I’m not so sure that I get it, either.”

Molly said, “Let me see,” and Sissy handed it to her.

“It’s a man looking at nothing,” she said, and handed it back.

“Exactly,” Sissy agreed. “But he’s obviously frightened of it, isn’t he — even if it is nothing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Drawing a Blank

Outside Ben’s room they came across Detective Bellman, talking to a pretty blonde female officer in uniform. Detective Bellman looked very tired. His mussed-up hair was even more chaotic than usual, and his hula-girl necktie was askew.

“Hi, Molly. You got your descriptions?” he asked.

Molly folded back her sketch pad so that he could see the two composites that she had drawn. Detective Bellman flicked from one to the other and said, “Sure looks like we got ourselves two Red Masks, don’t it?”

Sissy said, “You’re absolutely certain that one man wouldn’t have been able to carry out both of these attacks?”