“Come on, then,” she said hoarsely. “Out with it, you old fool. For twenty-five years, he lies low. Nothing but little black flashes of him: the body of a child beneath the bogs of northern Finland, another washing up out of the bay in Port-au-Prince; a suicide here and there, a symbol scrawled in blood. Then, suddenly, into the limelight, he steps full-blown before all the world. To buy a painting? Clearly, this was too important a matter to delegate.”

The warlock gave her a sullen, sidelong glare. “There are worse things than to die in prison, Harper.” But he was already folding, she could tell. Petulant, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up around his hairy ears. “Anyway, it isn’t just The Magi, is it,” he grumbled. “He wants all of it. Of course he does. It’s no good without the whole Nativity triptych. The Magi, The Madonna, The Christ Child. He wants them all.”

He had slunk away from her to the far side of the fire. The puppy stirred and shifted on her shoulder as she stepped after him.

“All right,” she said. “Why does he want the triptych, then?”

This brought some of the gleam of nastiness back into his eye. He managed a damp, spiteful smile at her.

“You really don’t know, do you? Eh? You’re just stumbling in the dark, aren’t you? You’re walking the same trail he discovered twenty years ago, and you don’t even know that it’s under your feet.”

“Perhaps you could enlighten me,” Harper drawled.

“There, that was always your problem,” he muttered back at her. “If you ask me, it’s the whole flaw in your worldview. You get mired in details. A dead child pops up here, a suicide there, a symbol, a cult in Argentina. You think each thing’s just another thing. But they’re all one thing, Harper. They were all always one thing.”

Harper kept silent, waited. Those who deal in the occult were forever spewing out these grandiose maunderings. She wasn’t interested. Little minds think great thoughts, but great minds proceed in the smallest stages. Harper wanted something specific, something she could go forward on.

Her imperturbability seemed to inflame the warlock. He grew insistent.

“Are you blind or just stupid?” he cried. “Do you think he would come out into the open for nothing? He’s onto it, Harper! He followed the trail and he’s onto it.”

“Onto what, for heaven’s sake?”

“Ach!” He tried again to escape her unbroken gaze. Turned his back on her, waved a hand over his shoulder, walked away. Then whirled on her, cried out angrily, “The secret, woman! The secret! Would he show himself at Sotheby’s for his health? It’s the very secret of the Templars, the secret of the Grail!”

“Oh, come now, Jervis. Really. What’s that supposed to mean?”