“What doesn’t he have something to do with?” I replied. “Six months ago, it was the Drake Plan to Outlaw War; he tried to take over UN singlehanded. Two months ago he announced he was setting up a fifteen-million dollar research foundation to find a cancer cure in six months. ‘Polish it off like we did the atom bomb,’ he says. ‘Put in enough money, and you can accomplishing anything.’ Now he’s head over heels in ESP with some Yogi mixed in. ‘Unleash the power of the human mind and solve all our problems.’ Just like that.”

“So that’s what he’s up to,” Merlini said as we came out on to Forty-second Street, half a block from Times Square, to face a bitterly cold January wind. “I wondered.”

Then, as he followed Gavigan into the official car that waited and left me shivering on the curb, he threw a last cryptic sentence over his shoulder.

“When Drake mentions Rosa Rhys,” he said, “you might warn him that he’s heading for trouble.”

Merlini didn’t know how right he was. If any of us had had any clairvoyant ability at all, I wouldn’t have taken a cab up to Drake’s; all three of us would have gone—in Gavigan’s car and with the siren going full blast.

As it was, I stepped out all alone in front of the big Ninety-eighth Street house just off Riverside Drive. It was a sixty-year-old mansion built in the tortured style that had been the height of architectural fashion in the 80’s but was now a smoke-blackened monstrosity as coldly depressing as the weather.

I nearly froze both ears just getting across the pavement and up the steps where I found a doctor with his finger glued—or frozen perhaps—to the bell push. A doctor? No, it wasn’t ESP; a copy of the A.M.A. Journal stuck out his overcoat pocket, and his left hand carried the customary small black case. But he didn’t have the medical man’s usual clinical detachment. This doctor was jumpy as hell.

When I asked, “Anything wrong?” his head jerked around, and his pale blue eyes gave me a startled look. He was a thin, well-dressed man in his early forties.

“Yes,” he said crisply. “I’m afraid so.” He jabbed a long forefinger at the bell again just as the door opened.

At first I didn’t recognize the girl who looked out at us. When I saw her by daylight earlier in the week, I had tagged her as in the brainy-but-a-bit-plain category, a judgment I revised somewhat now, considering what the Charles hair-do and Hattie Carnegie dress did for her.

“Oh, hello, doctor,” she said. “Come in.”

The doctor began talking even before he crossed the threshold. “Your father, Elinor—is he still in the study?”

“Yes, I think so. But what—”