“Oh, and who told you that?”

“I made enquiries about you. That’s how I traced you here.”

Ernst made a quick introduction of Slootjes, then…

“What is this about a memoir, Mrs. Novak?”

“You can call me Grace. I’ll make this quick. My mother died recently—”

“My condolences,” Slootjes said. Ernst didn’t bother.

“She was the only daughter of a man named Charles Atkinson who left this memoir of his years working with Nikola Tesla in the early nineteen hundreds. She in turn left it to me.”

She placed the envelope on Ernst’s desk. As she rattled on, Slootjes picked it up and removed a thick sheaf of papers from within.

“In it he talks about Tesla’s wireless experiments with his tower at Wardenclyffe out on Long Island and how your Septimus order funded him after J.P. Morgan backed out. He also says the funding was overseen by a Septimus member named Rudolph Drexler who, I gather, was your grandfather.”

“You gather correctly, Mrs. Novak. But what—?”

“This is heavily redacted in certain sections,” said Slootjes who’d been flipping through the pages as the woman was speaking.

“Yes. My mother took a black marker to areas she said were ‘too personal.’”

Too personal…interesting.

Ernst’s grandfather had disappeared in 1906 and was never seen again. The archives contained photos of Rudolph Drexler taken just across the hall from Ernst’s office, posing with the remains of the chew wasps he had killed at Wardenclyffe in the spring of 1904. A dashing figure, grinning as he casually cradled the broomhandle Mauser he’d used to shoot them out of the air. The chew wasps eventually had rotted to dust, but the photos remained. Ernst was sure Slootjes could locate them on a moment’s notice.

Two years later his grandfather vanished without a trace. His car and his silver-headed cane—the very same cane Ernst carried every day—had been found parked in the alley behind this building. His fate had long been one of the Order’s great ongoing mysteries.

“What do you want for this?” Slootjes said.

She blinked in surprise. “Want for what? The memoir? I’m not—”

“Well, you came here to sell it, didn’t you?”

She looked offended. “Not at all. I just thought Mister Drexler would want to learn a piece of his family history that he could not possibly obtain from any other source.” She smiled. “My grandfather talking about your grandfather…it seems only right that you should have a copy, don’t you think?”

The loremaster’s expression and posture radiated skepticism. “You’re giving it to us?”

“Of course. As I said, it’s a copy. The original’s back in Schaumburg. I’m here sightseeing with my husband and thought I’d use the opportunity to drop it off.”

Ernst pointed to the manuscript. “Does it reveal my grandfather’s fate?”

Her expression became uncertain. “I’m not…I’m not sure.”

“Oh? I’d assumed you’ve read it.”

“I have, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

An uneasy feeling began seeping through Ernst. “What do you mean?”

“It’s rather fantastic. But before you read it, I want you to understand something very important: My grandfather was an electrical engineer—a logical man, a practical man, and an honorable one. He was brutally honest about himself in that memoir—the redacted parts—so I cannot conceive of him fabricating other parts. If he wrote it, then he believed it to be the truth.”