“None of the continental powers came out of the war intact,” said Nightingale. “The Nazis rounded up any practitioners they could find in the occupied countries and killed any who refused to be co-opted. Those who didn’t die on their side mostly died fighting against them; same is true of the French and the Italians. We always believed that there was a Scandinavian tradition but they kept it very quiet.”

“What about the Americans?”

“There were volunteers right from the start of the war,” said Nightingale. “The Virtuous Men they called themselves—out of the University of Pennsylvania.” Others had arrived in the years following Pearl Harbor, and Nightingale had always had the impression that there was some deep animosity at work between them and the Virtuous Men. He thought it was doubtful that any of them could have returned to Britain after the war. “They blamed us for Ettersberg,” he said. “And there was an agreement.”

“Well of course there was,” I said. There was always an agreement.

Nightingale claimed he’d have spotted them if they’d started practicing in London. “They were hardly what you’d call subtle,” he said.

I asked about other countries—China, Russia, India, the Middle East, Africa. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t at least some kind of magic. Nightingale admitted that he didn’t really know, but had the good grace to sound embarrassed.

“The world was different before the war,” he said. “We didn’t have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place—we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.”

When all the map was red, I thought. When every boy expected his own adventure and girls had not yet been invented.

Toby barked as we overtook a juggernaut full of God knows what going God knows where.

“After the war it was as if I was waking up from a dream,” said Nightingale. “There were space rockets and computers and jumbo jets and it seemed like a ‘natural’ thing that the magic would go away.”

“You mean you didn’t bother looking,” I said.

“It was just me,” he said. “And I was responsible for the whole of London and the southeast. It never occurred to me that the old days might come back. Besides, we have Dunlop’s books so we know his teacher wasn’t from some foreign tradition—this is a home-grown black magician.”

“You can’t call them black magicians,” I said.

“You realize that we’re using black in its metaphorical sense here,” said Nightingale.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Words change what they mean, don’t they? Some people would call me a black magician.”

“You’re not a magician,” he said. “You’re barely even an apprentice.”

“You’re changing the subject,” I said.

“What should we call them?” he asked patiently.