before Wolf even had time to put his hand up. Wolf climbed in as calmly as if cabs always appeared out of nowhere for him, and soon they were trotting through Central park.
As they neared the East Side, the scene grew more fashionable. Society ladies strolled under the towering elms and chestnuts. Nurses pushed wicker prams full of fat babies. Draft horses gave way to thoroughbreds, and there were even a few long black motorcars gliding among the carriages like sharks prowling through schools of lesser fish.
Sacha forced himself not to stare at the motorcars; he didn’t want to give Lily the satisfaction. But when he caught his first glimpse of Millionaire’s Mile, he couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping.
He felt as if he had fallen out of New York and landed in a book of fairy tales. Roman villas sprawled beside French chateaus and Venetian palazzi. And each mansion was larger and more opulent than the next. New York’s Wall Street Wizards and Robber Barons were determined to outshine their neighbors, and they had the money to do it.
Still, everyone who’d ever read a New York newspaper knew that James Pierpont Morgaunt’s new mansion would be the greatest of them all. It had been under construction for years, not because the work was going slowly — no one who worked for Morgaunt would dare to dawdle — but because Morgaunt kept updating its design to incorporate the latest scientific advances.
Morgaunt had hired Thomas Edison to install every imaginable modern convenience. The kitchen was equipped with automated ovens and automated dish washers. The books in Morgaunt’s vast library were recorded in an automated card catalog. The central heating plant was connected to an exotic-sounding device called a Therm-O-Stat. Even the bathrooms were automated — whatever that meant!
From the outside, the Morgaunt mansion was a crouching Gothic pile that covered a whole city block. But as their cab pulled through the monumental front gate, the illusion of a medieval fortress gave way to the reality of a construction site. The bones and sinews of Edison’s modern conveniences sprawled everywhere like broken clockwork. Half of the courtyard was buried under something that looked like a giant bicycle chain. a group of engineers were puzzling over it like paleontologists trying to put together one of the dinosaurs over at the Museum of Natural History.
“What do you think
“It’s the automated horseless carriage parking system,” she answered promptly. “Morgaunt told us about it last time he came to dinner. You press a button, and the car you want just rolls right off the conveyer belt. He’s already assigned number and letter codes to all his motorcars. He’s even bought the rights to print special numbered license plates from City hall. He says it’s a growth industry. In five years everyone’s going to be building automatic motorcar parks.”
“But who’ll use them?” Sacha asked doubtfully. “You can’t park a horse like that.”
“Horses are history,” Lily scoffed. “Too much pollution.”
Sacha expected a butler to meet them at the door, but instead they were met by a black-eyed, black-haired, olive-skinned woman in a black dress tight enough to make him blush.
“That’s Morgaunt’s librarian,” Lily whispered as they followed her across an echoing marble entrance hall toward a set of double doors that looked as if they were carved out of solid blocks of bronze. “Her name is Bella da Serpa. She says she’s Portuguese, but no one knows the first thing about her. Except that she’s helped Morgaunt gather the greatest collection of magical manuscripts in the world. Not that he
But Sacha hardly heard her, because they had just stepped into the famous room that people were already calling “the” Morgaunt Library.
Sacha’s first thought was that it was the library of a madman. Books ranged along the walls in shelves that rose two, three, four stories overhead. Spindly wrought-iron staircases spiraled up to narrow balconies from which rolling ladders rose, row upon row, to ever narrower balconies. Daylight filtered faintly through soaring Gothic windows, and the oak-paneled walls were decorated with the mounted heads of dead animals. There were white rhinos and Kodiak bears, African lions and Bengal tigers. And they all stared down at Morgaunt’s visitors with their glassy eyes as if to say, What hope do you have of standing up to the man who killed
Two figures waited in front of the immense fireplace. Sacha noticed Commissioner Keegan first because he was standing. But from the moment he saw the man slouched in the big leather wing chair next to Keegan, Sacha knew he was the real power in the room.
Presidents trembled before James Pierpont Morgaunt — and as soon as you met him you knew why. Morgaunt was as tall as Inquisitor Wolf but much broader. His steel-gray eyes bored into you like augers. His steel- gray hair looked sharp enough to cut you. His hands were smooth-skinned and immaculately clean: a rich man’s hands. But when Sacha took a closer look at them, he saw that they were as sinewy and powerful as the hands of the roughest laborer. And there was something about the way he used them — the way he held a glass of Scotch or gestured as he spoke or picked an invisible piece of lint off his immaculate trousers — that made Sacha sure he’d be terrified of Morgaunt even if he weren’t the richest man in America.
“Ye’re late!” Commissioner Keegan snapped before anyone else could get a word in.
“Yes,” Wolf said in his blandest voice. “I’m afraid I was unavoidably detained.”
Keegan glared. “I should have listened to the people who told me to run you out of town with Teddy Roosevelt. They all warned me about you. They said ye’d be a thorn in my side.”
“And have I been?” Wolf asked in the absentminded tones of a man trying to feign polite interest in someone else’s problems.
In the shadows of the wing chair Morgaunt snorted in amusement.
“Don’t sass me, boyo!” Keegan’s Irish brogue got thicker as he got angrier. “I didn’t want to call you at all, but Mr. Morgaunt insisted. Said he needed the best Inquisitor on the force to get to the bottom o’ this.”
“Er … the bottom of what?”
Keegan waved impatiently in Morgaunt’s direction. “Use your eyes, man!”
For the first time, Sacha noticed the leather-upholstered footstool drawn up in front of Morgaunt’s chair — and the silver chafing dish in which Morgaunt was icing his swollen ankle.
“Gout?” Wolf asked in a blandly sympathetic tone.
“No, you prat! He sprained it!”
“Er … condolences. But perhaps in that case a doctor might be more helpful than an Inquisitor?”
Morgaunt smiled. Even his smiles were terrifying. His eyes slid across Wolf in a way that could only be considered insulting. “Hello, Miss astral,” he said to Lily. “Your new employer has an unusual sense of humor. Do you think he would find it entertaining to hear that I sprained my ankle foiling an assassination attempt?”
Lily gasped. Sacha managed to stay silent, but he was shocked too. Morgaunt was no stranger to assassination attempts. A few years ago he’d narrowly escaped death at the hands of bomb-throwing Wiccanists. Sacha remembered the joke that had gone around new York at the time: Morgaunt had died and gone to hell, but he’d been sent straight back home again when the Devil himself turned out to be a Pentacle Industries employee. Sacha had never been sure if the point of the joke was that Morgaunt was meaner than the Devil or richer than the Devil. Either way, it was probably true.
“Can you identify the assassin?” Wolf asked.
Instead of answering, Morgaunt planted both feet on the floor and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees in order to stare at Wolf. He examined him like a collector classifying an exotic beetle. “What are you, Wolf?” he asked abruptly. “Irish? German? What?”
It was a predictable question in a city where most people’s jobs and social status were determined by who their parents were. But Wolf’s reply surprised Sacha.
“No one knows.”
Morgaunt raised one eyebrow in a silent question.
“I was left on the doorstep of the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage.”
“In a basket with a note, no doubt,” Morgaunt scoffed.
“No note.”
“So the nuns named you Maximillian? that’s a pretty fancy name for an orphan.”
Wolf smiled faintly. “the Sisters of Mercy had high hopes for me.”
