Mandibole and I sat at either end of the table. Whatever was happening between us was completely and irrevocably on.

Hairless and trembling, an old man in a bathrobe shuffled in and took a chair closer to me. His midnight blue robe was patterned with silvery crescent moons and shooting stars. The way his elbows bowed out from his body lent him an atavistic physiognomy; a Cro-Magnon whose features had gentled and refined down through the eons. His gnarled, shaking hands were far larger than mine. The nails were yellow, stained with bloody filth, and curling back upon themselves. As a kid, I’d seen a black-and-white photo of the man with the world’s longest nails in the Guinness Book of Records. This was nowhere close, but plenty unusual. His eyebrows were tattooed. He was the magician from a tarot deck and his robe was a wizard’s robe. A servant filled his dish with rich burgundy soup. The ancient lifted the dish to his lips and supped. He didn’t introduce himself, nor did Mandibole acknowledge his arrival beyond a disdainful flick of a glance.

“Eat hearty, Isaiah.” Mandibole kicked one shoe up onto the table and clasped his hands over his flat stomach. “A man such as yourself muddles through life as the primitives explored caverns; a torch thrust forth, and terror in his bowels. You never know if this meal is your last. You never know if you’ll be the meal.”

I crunched a celery stick spitefully. I washed it down with half a glass of red wine and glared with smoldering menace in case it might help.

“Upon closer inspection, I fear I might have invited a tiger into the house. Try the lamb. It’s delightful.” He watched me select a chicken dish. “My bodyguards come highly recommended. Do they look tough to you? Could you, a professional cold-blooded killer, take them?”

“They’d be a handful.”

“A handful. Well. ‘Bodyguard’ is too elevated. They’re my toys.”

“Ornaments,” I said. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

“Enough about the Corsican Brothers. I’m curious what your research tells you about me.”

I opted for the bald truth.

“Your dossier is two double-spaced pages. Next to nothing. I can’t find school pictures, old driver’s license photos, zip. All updated records are provided courtesy of the Redlick Group. Birth records put you at thirty-nine, forty-seven, or sixty-five, depending upon whether you were born in Greenland, Manitoba, or the Himalayas. Graduate of a string of private schools and colleges. Multiple degrees. It’s impossible to tell what’s apocryphal and what’s legitimate. The most interesting aspect of your history is that you’re the sole survivor of not one, not two, but three major wrecks. Plane crash; train derailment; ferry capsizing.”

He cleared his throat.

“Those aren’t my only qualifications. The highlights?”

“Sure.”

“I am—was—self-orphaned. My talents include four-star fellatio, because gods know high-end clients are numb to anything less than Hoover suction. Two disciplines of hypnotism; regression is my specialty. Close-up magic; card tricks, sleight of hand, and so forth. Eidetic memory. Ventriloquism. Throwing your voice is so much fun it should be illegal. I can sing, dance, and talk super-fast.”