“Why the Faust play, David? Am I Mephistopheles?” I asked. “Are you Faust?”

He shook his head. “I may be Faust,” he said finally, taking another drink of the Scotch, “but you’re not the devil, that’s perfectly clear.” He gave a sigh.

“I have wrecked things for you, though, haven’t I? I knew it in Amsterdam. You don’t stay in the Motherhouse unless you have to. I’m not driving you mad, but I’ve had a very bad effect, have I not?”

Again, he didn’t answer right away. He was looking at me with his large prominent black eyes, and obviously considering the question from all angles. The deep lines of his face—the creases in his forehead, the lines at the corners of his eyes and around the edges of his mouth—reinforced his genial and open expression. There was not a sour note to this being, but there was unhappiness beneath the surface, and it was tangled with deep considerations, going back through a long life.

“Would have happened anyway, Lestat,” he said finally. “There are reasons why I’m no longer so good at being the Superior General. Would have happened anyway, I’m relatively certain of that.”

“Explain it to me. I thought you were in the very womb of the order, that it was your life.”

He shook his head. “I was always an unlikely candidate for the Talamasca. I’ve mentioned how I spent my youth in India. I could have lived my life that way. I’m no scholar in the conventional sense, never was. Nevertheless I am like Faust in the play. I’m old, and I haven’t cracked the secrets of the universe. Not at all. I thought I had when I was young. The first time I saw … a vision. The first time I knew a witch, the first time I heard the voice of a spirit, the first time I called up a spirit and made it do my bidding. I thought I had! But that was nothing. Those are earthbound things … earthbound mysteries. Or mysteries I’ll never solve, at any rate.”

He paused, as if he wanted to say something more, something in particular. But then he merely lifted the glass and drank almost absently, and this time without the grimace, for that obviously had been for the first drink of the night. He stared at the glass, and refilled it from the decanter.

I hated it that I couldn’t read his thoughts, that I caught not the slightest flickering emanations behind his words.

“You know why I became a member of the Talamasca?” he asked. “It had nothing to do with scholarship at all. Never dreamed I’d be confined to the Motherhouse, wading through papers, and typing files into the computer, and sending faxes off all over the world. Nothing like that at all. It started with another hunting expedition, a new frontier, so to speak, a trip to far-off Brazil. That’s where I discovered the occult, you might say, in the little crooked streets of old Rio, and it seemed every bit as exciting and dangerous as my old tiger hunts had ever been. That’s what drew me—the danger. And how I came to be so far from it, I don’t know.”