That’s how influence worked: he had only to ask for what he wanted, and he got it. For a long time, Bradford had thought that was all it was, influence, alliance, friendly meetings, Freemasonry by another name, with people who drank and sometimes sang around the piano, gatherings where women flaunted their heavy jewels and men shared hunting secrets and a taste for old books, meetings where at some point the conversation turned to the differences between the followers of Vishnu and those of Shiva, and where the hundreds of tantric cults were discussed. For a long time, the fact that his family belonged to a Cult of the Shadow, to the Order, meant only that they moved in an international circle of money, privilege, and relationships.

He understood that the Order was different when he was eighteen years old and about to enter college, and his father had taken him to a ritual in the countryside, not at his family’s estate but at Florence Mathers.” La inglesa, as his family called her—strange, as if they weren’t English themselves, but Bradford supposed they weren’t anymore, not really: he’d been born in Buenos Aires and so had his father. They spoke the language, they’d gone to British schools, but they were English no longer. His father was proud: Me, I’m a good ol” mongrel, he used to say. Bradford didn’t care either way. He was a surgeon and a cardiologist: sick bodies were his nation.

After the ritual, his father had told him about mediums. About the lack of mediums. About the existence of many Cults of the Shadow with different interpretations and practices, some of them hostile to each other, others allied. That day in the country, while some men and women were still wandering like sleepwalkers around the estate and its fields, clutching at the air and crying, startling dogs and horses, Jorge Bradford understood that this was no club. That Florence was a priestess. Jorge Bradford had seen things he couldn’t explain. Things that kept him awake many nights and made him return to his father’s books, which he had never scorned, but had studied with a certain disinterest. Now they were as important to him as his seminars, his medical books, his exhausting residency. He decided to spend a few months in London to hone his abilities as a surgeon and to visit the Order’s large library there. Florence, the Englishwoman, who was spending time in Britain between trips, let him read the Book, with its annotations and interpretations contributed by experts. Bradford believed. He had his doubts, but they would soon be dispelled.