“Bah. Hogwash,” Quincannon said grumpily, straightening. “How can any sane person believe in such hokum?”
“Self-deception is the most powerful kind.”
He made a derisive noise in his throat, a sound Sabina had once likened to the rumbling snarl of a mastiff.
She said, “If you enter growling and wearing that ferocious glare, you’ll give the game away. We’re here as potential devotees, not ardent skeptics.”
“Devotees of claptrap.”
“John, Mr. Buckley is paying us handsomely for this evening’s work. Very handsomely, if you recall.”
Quincannon recalled; his scowl faded and was replaced by a smile only those who knew him well would recognize as greed-based. Money, especially in large sums, was what soothed his savage breast. In fact, it was second only in his admiration to Sabina herself.
He glanced sideways at her. She looked even more fetching than usual this evening, dressed as she was in an outfit of black silk brocade, her raven hair topped by a stylish hat trimmed in white China silk. His mouth watered. A fine figure of a woman, Sabina Carpenter. A man engaged in the time-honored profession of detective couldn’t ask for a more decorous — or a more intelligent and capable — partner. He could, however, ask for more than a straightforward business arrangement and an occasional night on the town followed by a chaste handshake at her door. Not getting it, not even coming close to getting it, was his greatest defeat, his greatest frustration. Why, he had never even been inside Sabina’s Russian Hill flat...
“John.”
“Mmm?”
“Will you please stop staring at me that way.”
“What way, my dear?”
“Like a cat at a bowl of cream. We’ve no time for dallying; we’re late as it is. Mr. Buckley and the others will be waiting to begin the séance.”
Quincannon took her arm, chastely, and led her through the gate. As they mounted the front stairs, he had a clear vision of Cyrus Buckley’s bank check and a clear auditory recollection of the financier’s promise of the check’s twin should they successfully debunk Professor Vargas and his Unified College of the Attuned Impulses.
Buckley was a reluctant follower of spiritualism, in deference to his wife, who believed wholeheartedly in communication with the disembodied essences of the dead and such mediumistic double-talk as “spiritual vibrations of the positive and negative forces of material and astral planes.” She continually sought audiences with their daughter, Bernice, the childhood victim of diphtheria, a quest which had led them to a succession of mediums and cost her husband “a goodly sum.” Professor Vargas was the latest and by far the most financially threatening of these paranormal spirit-summoners. A recent arrival in San Francisco — from Chicago, he claimed — Vargas evidently had a more clever, extensive, and convincing repertoire of “spirit wonders” than any other medium Buckley had encountered, and of course his fees were exorbitant as a result.
The Buckleys had attended one of Vargas’s sittings a few days ago — a dark séance in a locked room in his rented house. The professor had ordered himself securely tied to his chair and then proceeded to invoke a dazzling array of bell-ringing, table-tipping, spirit lights, automatic writings, ectoplasmic manifestations, and other phenomena. As his finale, he announced that he was being unfettered by his friendly spirit guide and guardian, Angkar, and the rope that had bound him was heard to fly through the air just before the lights were turned up; the rope, when examined, was completely free of the more than ten knots which had been tied into it. This supernatural flimflam had so impressed Margaret Buckley that she had returned the next day without her husband’s knowledge and arranged for another sitting — tonight and a series of private audiences at which Vargas promised to establish and maintain contact with the shade of the long-gone Bernice. Mrs. Buckley, in turn and in gratitude, was prepared to place unlimited funds in the medium’s eager hands. “Endow the whole damned Unified College of the Attuned Impulses,” was the way Buckley put it. Nothing he’d said or done could change his wife’s mind. The only thing that would, he was convinced, was a public unmasking of the professor as the knave and charlatan he surely was. Hence, his visit to the Market Street offices of Carpenter & Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.
Quincannon had no doubt he and Sabina could accomplish the task. They had both had dealings with phony psychics before, Sabina when she was with the Pinkertons in Denver and on two occasions since they had opened their joint agency here. But Cyrus Buckley wasn’t half so sanguine. “You’ll not have an easy time of it,” he’d warned them. “Professor Vargas is a rare bird and rare birds are not easily plucked. A medium among mediums.”
Medium rare, is he? Quincannon thought as he twisted the doorbell handle. Not for long. He’ll not only be plucked but done to a turn before this night is over.
The door was opened by a tiny woman of indeterminate age, dressed in a flowing ebon robe. Her skin was very white, her lips a bloody crimson in contrast; sleek brown hair was pulled tight around her head and fastened with a jeweled barrette. Around her neck hung a silver amulet embossed with some sort of cabalistic design. “I am Annabelle,” she said in sepulchral tones. “You are Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn?”
“We are,” Quincannon said, wishing wistfully that it were true. Mr. and Mrs. John Quincannon, not Quinn. But Sabina had refused even to adopt his name for the evening’s play-acting, insisting on the shortened version instead.
Annabelle took his greatcoat and Sabina’s cape, hung them on a coat tree. According to Buckley, she was Professor Vargas’s “psychic assistant.” If she lived here with him, Quincannon mused, she was likely also his wife or mistress. Seeking communion with the afterworld did not preclude indulging in the pleasure of the earthly sphere, evidently; he had never met a medium who professed to be celibate and meant it.
“Follow me, please.”
They trailed her down a murky hallway into a somewhat more brightly lighted parlor. Here they found two men dressed as Quincannon was, in broadcloth and fresh linen, and two women in long fashionable dresses; one of the men was Cyrus Buckley. But it was the room’s fifth occupant who commanded immediate attention.
Even Quincannon, who was seldom impressed by physical stature, had to grudgingly admit that Professor A. Vargas was a rather imposing gent. Tall, dark-complected, with a curling black moustache and piercing, almost hypnotic eyes. Like his psychic assistant, he wore a long flowing black robe and a silver amulet. On the middle fingers of each hand were two enormous glittering rings of intricate design, both of which bore hieroglyphics similar to those which adorned the amulets.
He greeted his new guests effusively, pressing his lips to the back of Sabina’s hand and then pumping Quincannon’s in an iron grip. “I am Professor Vargas. Welcome, New Ones, welcome to the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses.” His voice was rich, stentorian. “Mr. and Mrs. Quinn, is it not? Friends of the good Mr. Buckley? Your first sitting but I pray not your last. You are surrounded by many anxious friends in spirit-life who desire to communicate with you once you have learned more of the laws which govern their actions. Allow your impulses to attune with theirs and your spirit friends will soon identify themselves and speak with you as in earth-life...”
There was more, but Quincannon shut his ears to it.
More introductions followed the medium’s windy come-on. Quincannon shook hands with red-faced, mutton-chopped Cyrus Buckley and his portly, gray-haired wife, Margaret; with Oliver Cobb, a prominent Oakland physician who bore a rather startling resemblance to the “literary hangman,” Ambrose Bierce; and with Grace Cobb, the doctor’s much younger and attractive wife. Attractive, that is, if a man preferred an overly buxom and overly rouged blonde to a svelte brunette of Sabina’s cunning dimensions. The Cobbs, like the Buckleys, had attended the professor’s previous séance.