I looked at the telephone by my bed and checked my wristwatch. I couldn’t call Gail Prentice at this time of night. If she was going to look for me at nine-thirty on the alluring island outside my window, as her letter had said she would with or without confirmation from me, she’d surely be in bed by now. It wouldn’t hurt me to do the same, since I found myself with a rare reason to be up early the next morning. To be sure, my mysterious assignation would almost certainly prove to be mundane: a legal secretary who wanted saxophone lessons or advice on how to break into show business. The crafty Miss Prentice had been cunning enough to omit virtually all pertinent information, and I was allowing myself the fun of conjuring an intrigue from my ignorance.

I shed my clothes and slipped into the bed, which was still warm from Vera’s body and smelled of her perfume. I was uncomfortable being so intimate with Jack’s wife, even at such a safe distance. It made me further uneasy that the scent she wore was, in a word, enticing.

I got up and yanked the linens off the bed, at the foot of which was a neatly folded coverlet that I unfurled and bundled myself within, lying down on the otherwise bare mattress.

I worried that I’d have one of the dreams. These left me in terrible shape come the morning. I stared at the ceiling, dreading what I might see in my sleep.

I was lucky that night. I saw nothing, at least that I could remember.

But in the morning, less than an hour after keeping my appointment on the beckoning island, I would witness Atlantis’s first human sacrifice—bloody, repugnant, and in broad daylight— within the Court of the Moon, beneath the Tower of the Sun.

Chapter 5

5

A Broken Engagement

Larry Vance’s new Nash sedan was a dream to drive, the lofty prow of its narrow hood jutting out like the barrel of a .45 automatic.

The first surprise of the day (there were to be many) was discovering that the exit ramp for the Golden Gate International Exposition was located in the middle of the bridge that spanned San Francisco Bay. The reason such an exit was not the invention of a homicidal architect was because the recently completed transverse really consisted of two bridges: the first stemming from San Francisco, the other from Oakland, both meeting in the middle of the bay on a small shale island called Yerba Buena.