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“I will cook for you. Divine substances. The Creole cuisine of your forebears. We'll send Marie-Frances Claire off with a meal of Catholic splendor and tropical excess.”

Major Notz rose like Zeus and headed for the kitchen, followed closely by his niece. Like the rest of his rooms, the kitchen was partly a museum. Hanging on the brick wall above a large fireplace shone copper and gold sieves from around the world. A collection of ladles was arrayed longitudinally between two narrow windows, and a mahogany bookcase held cookbooks in fifteen languages. The major pulled open a nearly hidden drawer below the range and extracted a stack of papers.

“Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.” After each of these significant “mmm's,” the major made a little note. Finally, he phoned in an order to Langenstein's for a pound of turtle meat, one mild goat cheese, six soft-shell crabs, one can of cucumber relish. This done, he checked a cabinet and concluded that he had sherry and white truffle oil.

Felicity followed his deliberations with interest. From the high stool behind the range she could see down the hall to the major's bedroom. The walls were entirely lined with well-kept bookshelves containing, as she knew, volumes on comparative religion, occultism, philosophy, and manuscript reports of various kinds from one of the hundreds of secret associations Major Notz monitored or belonged to. On the counter in front of her was a red apple. Felicity picked it with a fingernail to make sure it was real (she had bitten into a wax one before) and then took three bites.

The major glanced over. “Always three bites. Why?”

“The first is knowledge, the second shame, the third rage.”

“Well said, bright eyes.”

The major probed the truffle oil with the corkscrew of his thick Swiss army knife. Felicity loved that knife. She remembered the time he had removed the little tweezers and zinged it in her ear. It hummed perfect C, like a tuning fork. Like the other minutiae to which the major attended, this was not without significance. He told her that this perfect C had saved his life when he was held hostage in Lebanon, when he discovered that the chief guerrilla holding him had been a Cal State music student. He also contended that this note was a key element in an occult musical phrase, a Rosicrucian code known only to high initiates.

“You are very special indeed. At this moment of sorrow for you, your life is in fact beginning.” He sniffed the tip of the oiled corkscrew and grunted approvingly. “You remember the grand mission I once predicted for you?”

“Well, I'm still in the dark. Mission impossible. My mysterious benefactor has revealed nothing to me yet.”

“That's true. It's up to you to discover it. However”—the major raised a very fat and very long forefinger above the knife—“you have to begin training intellectually and emotionally.”

Felicity gave a skeptical snort. “Right now I feel like shit. I used to think that one third of me was gone; now I'm sure there is only half.” She clicked her tongue stud against her teeth.

The major disliked vulgarity. “Dirty words are potent. If you trivialize them by casual usage, you deprive yourself of a weapon. In your line of work you need every weapon you can get.”

“Jesus Christ! Grandmère just died. My boyfriend overdosed a year ago almost to the day. My so-called profession has so far earned me about three hundred bucks a month. I took pictures of six guys getting … well, committing adultery in their ten-year-old cars, I found somebody's dog, and I think I solved the great mystery of a twelve-year-old kid breaking into parking meters. If this is my great destiny, I think I'll jump in the river and drown!”

“Things always look darkest just 'fore dawn,” said the major. “As a matter of fact, there is a little job I would like you to do for me.”

“Nepotism, Uncle?”

“It's the way of the world. If you look on my desk you'll find a file. It's an old case. I would like you to go over it again, see if anything was overlooked.”

On the desk, a Louis XIV escritoire, she found a manila file. It contained clippings from the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
.

Felicity remembered the story. Five years before, a young actress named Kashmir Birani disappeared in New Orleans. She had been the hostess of
Kismet Chakkar
, India's
Wheel of Fortune
, and her grandfather Sajat Birani had been India's most popular movie star in the fifties and sixties. Her distraught mother and father came to New Orleans and searched the dives their bohemian-inclined daughter had frequented. They even employed psychics to find her, to no avail. A report that she had drowned in the river turned out to be bogus. She was never found. The police had pursued leads in the French Quarter, where Kashmir had been friendly with the street musicians. She had befriended a trumpet player who called himself Bamajan.

The name rang a bell. Felicity had known someone by that name, a friend and occasional accompanist of Miles's. Someone from the drug side of the scene. Miles had kept quite a few of his friends from her. This one left a chill behind him. She had met him only once, leaving the apartment, though she'd listened to him play beside Miles. He was methodical, with a precise but dark style that complemented perfectly Miles's romantic complexity. The
Times-Picayune
didn't pay him much attention, beyond the brief mention. The articles described the Indian star as a voracious reader and jazz lover who periodically fled her glamorous life with a backpack full of books and her journals. She had been writing a novel at the time of her disappearance, but the manuscript had never been found. One item surprised Felicity so much she nearly dropped the clipping. The bohemian actress had apparently spent some time singing in Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin's First Angels Choir. It was bizarre. Why would a hip girl like Kashmir attend Mullin's tacky, self-righteous Christian tabernacle, where everything she must have enjoyed was denounced?

The copied newspaper photo of Kashmir was bad, but one could still make out large black eyes, pronounced eyebrows, a full mouth. She must have been quite beautiful. Felicity had trouble imagining what had attracted this pampered, upper-class, glamorous girl to the scuzziest dives of New Orleans. She had known a few Indian women of Kashmir's class in college—they were spoiled, argumentative, and witty. They dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes. Kashmir had been made of something else. Felicity could imagine the route by which the girl might have arrived at a love of jazz and Beat books; American hipsterism had circumvented the globe. There were even Samoan beatniks. But Mullin? How had she found him?

Mullin. She'd really love to get Mullin. “Okay, I'll take the job, but what's your interest in this case?”

“It's a long story. I'll tell you over dinner.”

The major introduced the dishes with a flourish. He set them on the damask-covered dining room table and lifted their silver lids one by one.

“Turtle soup with sherry,” he intoned, revealing a satiny broth signed with a squiggle of amber sherry. “Mixed wild greens with warm goat cheese. And the pièce de résistance: soft-shell crabs with wilted greens rémoulade aioli!” The major held the lid up long enough for her to see the perfectly poached soft-shell crabs steaming on their green mounds, swimming in the red rémoulade. “And, of course, bread pudding with whiskey sauce!”

Felicity was moved—the meal was a replica of her sixteenth-birthday dinner at the Grill Room of the Fairmont Hotel. She still had the menu in a cheap frame tacked to her bedroom wall. The major's creation was perfect in every detail. Aromas filled the air as the early winter evening fell over the rooftops of the Vieux Carré, turning the room deep purple. They ate slowly.

“Your interest in the Vanna White of India?” Felicity reminded him between spoonfuls of velvety soup.

“A long time ago …,” began the major.

Damn. One of
those
stories. Despite her impatience, Felicity couldn't help but be charmed. The major's stories were hypnotic.

“A long time ago, a small number of secret societies began to make plans for the future of the human race. And when I say a long time ago, I mean almost directly after the expulsion of the apple-chomping couple from the garden.”

“Major,” Felicity protested weakly.

“Be patient. I won't drag you through the history of the occult network underlying human events. I'm just providing a context, or maybe a metaphor. In this case, Judeo-Christianity is both the context and the metaphor. Some of these secret associations pursued their aims through contacts in the spirit world.… You believe in the spirit world, don't you, darling?”

“No,” Felicity said flatly.

“No matter. I'm using ‘the spirit world' provisionally. Another metaphor. One of these societies, whose name may not mean much to you, was the Knights Templar. High initiates of that order embarked on the study of coincidence, chance, and chaos. Their techniques gave them access to what they called angelic informants.”

“You mean angels?” interrupted Felicity.

“Special angels. Informants. Not all angels inform. Some of them obfuscate. They are a lot like people. May I continue?”

“Sure.” Felicity was beginning to feel grumpy.

“The Knights Templar knew the hidden symmetry that underlies existence, just as atomic structure does matter. They knew that nothing is unrelated, that creation is a cosmic wheel, and the wheel is subject to the laws of chaos.”

“Does it matter?”

“Darling, how do you like the soup? Too much sherry?”

“Not at all.” The soup was divine. “These knights, what did they do? Bring sherry to Louisiana?”

“They were warriors and scholars. They insured the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land, established the world's first banking system, and were seemingly wiped out of existence by the pope and the French king. In reality, they retreated to secret hideouts until recently.”

“And now they are bringing sherry to the Third World!”

The major ignored her. “They are now waging a great battle, perhaps
the
final battle, against a host of enemies relaying their messages through television. One of these evil forces may be deploying the power of the Language Crystal, a sophisticated linguistic mechanism that reprograms the left-right brain. Based in Sanskrit, the Language Crystal can operate in all Indo-European languages, which is but one reason why I wanted you to study languages.”

This mild reproach, delivered without rancor, stung Felicity. “Well, Uncle, I can find your Vanna without speaking Sanskrit. I'm sure her English is quite adequate.” She ripped a leg off her crab and bit into it. The crunchy, peppery snap was satisfying and resonant. The forces and spirits were far from such immediacy.

“I don't think I shall ever grasp a spirit as fleshy as this crab,” improvised Felicity, with her mouth full.

The major smiled; improvising parodies was one of his mannerisms. Felicity had picked it up when she'd been about ten. But now he was attempting to teach her something extremely important, and her flippancy was inappropriate.

“Darling, please try to concentrate. Forget about what is in front of your nose for a moment. There is a symphony going on within the din of our daily noise. We speak words that contain divine sounds, we write words within which lie hidden meanings. You can puzzle out the true nature of your life by simply hearing or seeing common words. Take your name, ‘Felicity.' It means ‘happiness.'”

“Yeah, right.”

“But within it,” continued the major without hearing her, “there is also a ‘city' and ‘fel.' You might say that ‘a city fell' to bring about the ‘happiness' you embody. What city? When? You see, the simple act of breaking your name into syllables has already yielded a mystery. This is a only a bit of light from the Language Crystal. Now imagine the brilliant power of the crystal brought to bear on our sacred texts, on our officials' speeches, as well as on our daily talk. The hidden meanings will be revealed at once! The Language Crystal, which has passed through many hands in the past, may be active again.”

“Whoa,” exclaimed Felicity. “You mean this crystal is an actual thing, like the Grail? A real gem?”

“Possibly.”

“Wait a minute, Uncle. What you just did with my name is in anyone's power to do. Everybody's got a crystal like that in their own brain. All you need is to squint a little, or mishear.”

The major put up his immense white palms in a gesture of peace.

“I won't argue this. A small piece of the crystal probably does lodge in everyone. But the Language Crystal itself is a much greater force, an unparalleled object. Suffice it to say that its uses seem to have been forgotten until now. This Indian Vanna, as you call her, may have inadvertently produced sound combinations in Sanskrit that proved to be quite potent, and she activated the old sound machine.”

“But television is a visual medium,” Felicity argued, sensibly.

“That's exactly it! Everyone is looking for significance in the images, but the visual is only a cover. Humming beneath it is the Language Crystal.”

Felicity was only too familiar with the major's contention that conspiratorial groups were working to influence events in preparation for a cataclysm that would end human history. Now he was insisting on a new element of the story, and Felicity was quite put off. Her world was in pieces, and the thought of the worldwide conspiracy did little to soothe her.

She spoke sharply: “Which am I supposed to find? The crystal, or the girl? Is the disappearance of this unfortunate girl cosmically significant?”

Notz said tersely: “We must do everything in our power to recover the crystal.”

“Anything? Loosen the plagues? Nuke the metaphors?”

“Maybe. The crystal is no metaphor.”

A brief silence filled with sherry, crab, and poetry passed.

“Oh, Uncle!”