Dr. Walid was too good a scientist to just accept the word of a natural philosopher from the early nineteenth century but he conceded that the evidence indicated it was a possibility. Really, you’d expect a cryptopathologist to be a bit more credulous. Still, I wasn’t going to let a little bit of skepticism get in the way of a perfectly good theory.

“Let’s say for the moment that I’m right,” I said. “Is it possible that all the creatures with extended lives, the genii locorum, Nightingale, Molly, the vampires—isn’t it possible that they’re all drawing magic from the environment to keep themselves from aging?”

“Life protects itself,” said Dr. Walid. “As far as we know, vampires are the only creatures that can take life—magic, whatever—directly from people.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Let’s forget about the gods, Molly, and the other weirdos for a moment and concentrate on the vampires. Would it be possible for there to be a vampire-like creature that fed off musicians—that the act of making music made them uniquely vulnerable?”

“You think there are vampires that feed off jazz?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Jazz vampires?”

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …,” I said.

“Why jazz?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My dad would’ve had an answer. He would have said it had to be jazz because that was the only proper music there was. “I suppose we could line up different kinds of musicians, expose them to our vampire, and see which ones suffer brain damage.”

“I’m not sure that would meet the BMA’s ethical guidelines on human experimentation,” he said. “Not to mention the difficulty of finding volunteers to be guinea pigs.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Musicians? If you offered them money. Free beer, even.”

“So this is your hypothesis for what happened to Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I think I may have stumbled upon a sort of trigger event.” I explained about Peggy and Snakehips Johnson and the Café de Paris and it all sounded thinner and thinner even as I was laying it out.

Dr. Walid finished his tea as I wound down.

“We need to find this Peggy,” I said.

“That much is certain,” said Dr. Walid.

I DIDN’T feel like doing data entry and I still couldn’t get Leslie on the phone. So I cropped a high-resolution image of Peggy in 1941 and printed out a dozen copies on the laser printer. Armed with those, I headed into Soho to see if I could find anyone who remembered her. Starting with Alexander Smith. After all, Peggy and Henry Bellrush were one of his top acts.