Tristan had collected himself enough to play the polite West Point cadet card. “We’d love to relieve your boredom, ma’am. Let’s step outside and you can tell us the whole story, how about that?” he said. “Do we have to sign you out or something?”
“Pft,” she harrumphed, with a dismissive gesture toward the reception desk. “Nurse Ratched has given up trying to control me.”
“Which one is she?” Tristan glanced toward the desk.
“Tristan!” I said. “Come on. My not knowing DARPA pales compared to your not knowing Nurse Ratched.”
“I call all of them Nurse Ratched since the movie came out,” Erszebet was meanwhile saying. “It amuses me.”
“You’ve been here since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out?” I asked.
“Yes. Do you see why I want to leave? Boring.”
“Let’s get her outside,” muttered Tristan.
It was cool outside, and nobody else was out there. The uninspired landscaped path wended its way around groupings of wrought iron benches, at which the residents might have a modicum of privacy with guests. Erszebet, with a remarkable grace of movement, seated herself in the center of one bench, leaving me and Tristan to share the one across from her, squinting into the bright spring sunlight.
“This is where people argue with their children about their inheritance,” she informed us. “I have no children, so I do not have this problem.”
“If you will, ma’am, let’s start from the top,” suggested Tristan. “Name, date of birth, place of birth, basic background.”
She sat pertly upright and gave him a self-important look. “You will take notes?”
He tapped his head. “Mental notes, for now. Begin, please.”
“I am Erszebet Karpathy,” she said. “I was born in Budapest in 1832.”
“No,” said Tristan. “No you weren’t, ma’am. That’s absurd.”
She glared at him, and seemed to relish doing so. “Do not disrespect me. I am a witch. When magic was fading from the world, Melisande warned me that it would end soon, and the last magic I ever knew was a spell to slow my aging by as much as possible so that I would still be here, now, when we could be useful to each other. I did not want to do that, you know,” she went on, directly to me. “I could have just grown old and died. Death would have been less boring than surviving this last century. This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You should all be shot. Nevertheless,” she pressed on, when we failed to agree or even respond, “here I am. And here you are. So put me in your automobile and take me to the ODEC. I am very eager to do magic again.”
Tristan rubbed his face with both hands as if he were suddenly very tired. “Give me a moment, ma’am,” he said. He pulled out his phone. “How do you spell your name?”
“If you Google me, you will be disappointed,” she said. “I know how to keep my profile low, as you say.”
“I use a different search engine,” he said. “You’ll be on it. Just spell your name, please.”
The only Erszebet Karpathy in Tristan’s secret search engine was a thirty-seven-year-old aerialist turned legal clerk, currently living in Montreal. There was an Erszebet Karpaty living in Rome, but she was a madam, and anyhow our interlocutor sneered that the name without an h was Ukrainian, which she most certainly wasn’t.
“Then maybe Erszebet Karpathy is not your real name,” said Tristan. “Ma’am.”
“Can we go now?” she said, standing up. “I have been thinking about my first spell for decades, and I am very eager to perform it. And then I want to go roller-skating. They won’t allow that here, those toads.”
Tristan remained seated, and leaned against me to signal me to do likewise. “And what spell might that be?”
She grinned at him. “You’ll just have to see. It’s entirely beneficent, if that’s what you’re worried about. We go.”
“The ODEC doesn’t work yet,” he said, studying her face carefully. “Since you claim to know about it, maybe you can help with that.”
“You need to up the sampling rate on the internal sensors,” recited Erszebet smugly, in a triumphant tone, as if she’d just won a spelling bee.
Wow, I thought.
Testing her, Tristan replied, “It’s going to be hard pushing that much data down the leads.”
“Swap the twisted pair out for fiber,” she rejoined promptly. It was a recitation; something she had memorized the way a child memorizes “indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
“All right, let’s go,” said Tristan, standing up and again putting his large hand around her tiny arm. “The car’s right there, and you are not leaving my sight until I understand what you’re up to.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Finally.”
She did not say a word on the twenty-minute drive from Belmont to Central Square, merely stared out the window with the bored rapture of a dog or a baby. I used the silence to recollect myself. Everything this woman claimed seemed insane, and yet . . . she knew me by sight, she knew Tristan by name, she knew about the ODEC . . .
To accept her claims meant . . . it meant we were about to witness genuine magic performed for the first time in at least one hundred and seventy years. That rocks! I thought. That was much more exciting than going to New Orleans. I glanced at Tristan as he drove, but he was lost in his own thoughts, which seemed grumpier than mine.
When we pulled up in front of the building, Erszebet sighed heavily. “This is it? Pah, I thought it might be a nice place,” she said from the backseat. “This is worse than where I have been living.”
“It won’t be as boring,” I promised.
“That’s true,” she said with a sudden grin, and leaned forward to tap my shoulder. “I am very much looking forward to this.” Then to Tristan: “I think you will be pleased with the results, Mr. Tristan Lyons.”
“I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, ma’am,” he said tersely.
I realized he was nervous. For what would happen if after all this, we found the world’s only surviving witch and she was a dud? He still wouldn’t tell me who he was answering to, but his derriere was on the line in a way mine wasn’t.
When we entered the building, I walked toward the professor and his wife, gesturing for Erszebet to join me, but she spared them only a brief glance, then waved dismissively in their direction and gazed at the large contraption taking up most of the space.
“Is this it?” she asked Tristan, sounding offended. “But it’s so ugly.”
“She’s a little preoccupied,” I said apologetically to Oda-sensei and Rebecca. They, in turn, were so fascinated by her appearance that they hardly noticed my speaking to them. Likewise, the Maxes stopped their sundry duties and paused to look at her sideways, nudging each other’s shoulders and murmuring between themselves. She took no interest in any of that.
“This?” she demanded again. “I go in here and I can do magic? Just like that?”
“Hang on a moment,” said Tristan, pulling out his phone. “I need to document you, since there’s no record of your existence. I need your signature and a photo.” Before she could object or even notice, he snapped a photo of her on his phone.
“You don’t need my signature,” she said. She stared at the ODEC with a rapture greater even than Oda-sensei’s, face aglow with anticipation. “I forgive its ugliness if it does its job well. I just go in and start doing spells again?”