Lovecraft remained seated. "I think I know of whom you are speaking; I can also read newspapers and make deductions. Even if they are mad enough to attempt it, they do not have the means. They would have to take over not one government but many. That project would keep them busy enough, I should think, to distract them from worrying about a few lines here and there in stories that are published as fiction. I can conceive of the next war leading to breakthroughs in rocketry and nuclear energy, but I doubt that even that will lead many people to take my stories seriously, or to see the connections between certain rituals, which I have never described explicitly, and acts which will be construed as the normal excesses of despotism."

"Good day, sir," Drake said formally. "I must be off to New York, and your welfare is really not a major concern in my life."

"Good day," Lovecraft said, rising with Colonial courtesy. "Since you have been so good as to give me a warning, I will return the favor. I do not think your interest in these people is based on a wish to oppose them, but to serve them. I beg you to remember their attitude toward servants."

Back out on the street, Drake experienced a momentary dejection. For nearly twenty years he's been writing about them and they haven't contacted him. I've been rocking the boat on two continents, and they haven't contacted me. What does it take to make them show their hand? And if I don't have an understanding with them, anything I work out with Maldonado and Capone is written on the wind. I just can't afford to deal with the Mafia before I deal with them. What should I do- put an ad in the New York Times: "Will the All-Seeing Eye please look in my direction? R. P. Drake, Boston"?

And a Pontiac (stolen an hour before in Kingsport) pulled away from the curb, several houses back, and started following Drake as he left Benefit Street and walked back toward the downtown area. He wasn't looking back, so he didn't see what happened to it, but he noticed an old man coming toward him stop in his tracks and turn white.

"Jesus on a pogo stick," the old man said weakly.

Drake looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but an empty street. "What is it?" he asked.

"Never mind," the old man replied. "You'd never believe me, mister." And he cut across the sidewalk toward a saloon.

("What do you mean, you lost four soldiers?" Maldonado screamed into the phone.

"Just what I'm saying," Eddie Vitelli, of the Providence gambling, heroin and prostitution Vitellis, said. "We found your Drake at a hotel. Four of the best soldiers we've got followed him. They called in once to say he was at a house on Benefit Street. I told them to pick him up as soon as he comes out. And that's it, period, it's all she wrote. They're all gone, like something picked them off the face of the earth. I've got everybody looking for the car they were in, and that's gone, too.")

Drake canceled his trip to New York and went back to Boston, plunging into bank business and mulling over his next move. Two days later, the janitor came to his desk, hat in hand, and asked, "Could I speak to you, Mr. Drake?"

"Yes, Getty, what is it?" Drake replied testily. His tone was deliberate; the man was probably about to ask for a raise, and it was best to put him on the defensive immediately.

"It's this, sir," the janitor said, laying a card on Drake's desk. Drake looked down impatiently and saw a rainbow of colors- the card was printed on some unknown plastic and created a prismatic effect recalling his mescaline trips in Zurich. Through the rainbow, shimmering and radiant, he saw the outlines of a thirteen-step pyramid, with a red eye at the top. He stared up at the janitor and saw a face without subservience or uncertainty.

"The Grand Master of the Eastern United States is ready to talk to you," the janitor said softly.

"Holy Cleopatra!" Drake cried, and tellers turned to stare at him.

"Kleopatra?" Simon Moon asked, twenty-three years later. "Tell him about Kleopatra."

It was a sunny afternoon in October and the drapes in the living room of the apartment on the seventeenth floor of 2323 Lake Shore Drive were pulled back to reveal a corner window view of Chicago's Loop skyscrapers and the whitecap-dotted blue surface of Lake Michigan. Joe sprawled in a chair facing the lake. Simon and Padre Pederastia were on a couch under an enormous painting titled "Kleopatra." She looked a good deal like Stella Maris and was holding an asp to her bosom. The eye-and-pyramid symbol appeared several times in the hieroglyphs on the tomb wall behind her. Sitting in an armchair opposite the painting was a slender man with sharp, dark features, shoulder-length chestnut hair, a forked brown beard and green eyes.

"Kleopatra," said the man, "was an instant study. Would have made her Polymother of the great globe itself, if she'd lived. She damned near brought down the Roman Empire, and she did shorten its life by centuries. She forced Octavius to bring so much Aneristic power to bear that the Empire went prematurely into the state of bureaucracy."

"What do I call you?" said Joe. "Lucifer? Satan?"

"Call me Malaclypse the Elder," said the fork-bearded man with a smile that seemed to beam through endless shifting veils of warm self-regard.

"I don't get it," said Joe. "The first tune I saw you, we were all terrified out of our minds. Though when you finally showed up looking like Billy Graham, I didn't know whether to laugh or go catto. But I know I was scared."

Padre Pederastia laughed. "You were so terrified, my son, that you were trying to climb right inside our little redhead's big red bird's nest. You were so frightened that that hefty cock of yours"- he licked his lips- "was squirting juice all over the carpet. Oh, you were terrified, all right. Oh, my, yes."

"Well, I wasn't so scared just at that moment you mention," said Joe with a smile. "But a little later, when our friend here was about to appear. You were terrified yourself, Padre Pederastia. You kept hollering, 'Come not in that form! Come not in that form!' Now we're all sitting around the living room behaving like old chums- and this- this being here is reminiscing about the good old days with Kleopatra."

"They were terrible days," said Malaclypse. "Very cruel days, very sad days. Constant wars, tortures, mass murders, crucifixions. Bad times."

"I believe you. And what's worse, I can understand what it means if I believe you, and I can live knowing that you exist. And even sit down in this living room and smoke a cigarette with you."

Two lit cigarettes appeared between Malaclypse's fingers. He passed one to Joe. Joe drew on it; it tasted sweet, with just a hint of marijuana.

"That's a corny trick," said Joe.

"Just so you don't lose your old associations to me too quickly," said Malaclypse. "Too quick to understand, too soon to misunderstand."

Padre Pederastia said, "The night of that Black Mass, I simply had worked myself up to the point where I totally believed. That's what magic is, after all. The people who were here that night relate to left-hand magic, to the Satan myth, to the Faust legend. It's a quick way to get them involved. It worked with you at the time, but we've brought you along fast, because we want more help from you. So now you don't need the trappings."

"You don't have to be a Satanist to love Malaclypse," said Malaclypse.

"In fact, its better if you're not," said Simon. "Satanists are creeps. They skin dogs alive and shit like that."

"Because most Satanists are Christians," said Joe. "Which is a very masochistic religion."

"Now, just a minute-" said Padre Pederastia with some asperity.

"He's right, Pederastia," said Malaclypse. "Nobody knows that better than you- or me, for that matter."

"Did you ever meet Jesus?" Joe asked, awed in spite of his skepticism.