The feeling on these streets was altogether more pleasant. There was more of a family atmosphere, with good smells coming from the windows. And it was nice to see a neighborhood where not everyone had white skin. Harlem was the center of black culture and the best music in the entire world. It was the hottest, most cutting-edge place to be.
Which, he supposed, was why someone had plopped down this grand monstrosity of a hotel. The Dumont didn’t quite fit in with the brownstones and the shops and restaurants, but the Dumont didn’t look like the kind of place that cared if its neighbors liked it or not. It sat back a bit, on a small side street that may very well have been custom-made for it. It had a great colonnaded front with dozens of sash windows, all with drawn curtains. A pair of heavy metal doors were firmly closed.
Magnus sat in the soda fountain across the street and decided to watch and wait. What he was waiting for, he wasn’t sure. Something. Anything. He wasn’t really sure that anything would happen at all, but he was now set on his course. The first hour or so was deadly dull. He read a newspaper to kill time. He ate a sardine sandwich and had some coffee. He used his power to retrieve a lost ball for some kids across the street, who had no idea he was doing so. He was almost ready to give up when a parade of extremely expensive automobiles began to roll up to the front of the hotel. It was like seeing a showing of the grandest cars in the world—a Rolls-Royce, a Packard, a few Pierce-Arrows, an Isotta Fraschini, three Mercedes-Benzes, and a Duesenberg—all polished to such a high degree that Magnus could hardly see them in the dazzling glow of the sunset. He blinked his watering eyes and observed driver after driver opening doors and releasing the cars’ passengers.
These were most certainly wealthy people. The rich bought wonderful clothes you recognized. The richest had their people go to Paris and buy the entire new collection that no one outside of the fashion house had seen. These people belonged to the latter group. They were all, Magnus noted, between forty and sixty years of age. The men were all bearded and hatted, the women not quite young or free enough for the petal-pink Chanels and the ethereal chiffon Vionnets they had acquired. They all walked quickly into the hotel, without conversing or stopping to admire the sunset. They looked sufficiently self-important and grim to suggest that they could probably have come together to try to raise a demon. (People who tried to raise demons always looked like that.) But what troubled Magnus the most was that they were clearly seeking Aldous’s help in this. Aldous had powers and knowledge that Magnus couldn’t even begin to guess at.
And so Magnus waited. About an hour passed. The chauffeurs brought the cars around in a row, and one by one, the group got into them and rolled back into the New York night. There were no demons. Nothing. Magnus left his stool and began walking back down to the Plaza, trying to make sense of it all.
Maybe it had all been nothing. Aldous took a dim view of mundanes. Perhaps he was simply playing with this group of supposedly important people. There were worse amusements than toying with a bunch of deluded and stupid millionaires, taking their money and telling them you were going to do magic for them. You could make a fortune in no time at all and make your way to the French Riviera and not lift a finger again for ten years. Maybe twenty.
But Aldous was not the kind of warlock who played those games, and ten or twenty years—those weren’t even measures of time he counted.
Maybe Aldous had simply gotten weird. It happened. Magnus wondered if, hundreds of years from now, the same thing would happen to him. Maybe he would also hole himself up in a hotel and spend time with some rich people, doing who knew what. Was that really so different from what he was doing now? Hadn’t he spent the morning clearing garbage from his mundane bar?
It was time to go home.
October 1929
Magnus had lost interest in his bar somewhat. His planned closure of a few days stretched into a week, then two, then three. With Mr. Dry’s temporarily closed, a few of Magnus’s regulars found themselves with nowhere to go. So, of course, they simply came to Magnus’s hotel room every night. First it was just one or two, but within a week there was a constant stream of people. This included the hotel management, who politely suggested that Mr. Bane “might like to take his friends and associates elsewhere.” Magnus replied, equally politely, that these were not friends or associates. Usually they were strangers. This did not make the management very happy.
And this wasn’t entirely true, either. Alfie was there from the start, and now had taken up permanent residence on Magnus’s sofa. He had grown only more morose as time wore on. He went off to wherever he worked during the day, came back drunk, and stayed that way. Then he stopped going to work.
“It’s getting bad, Magnus,” he said one afternoon, waking from a whiskey-induced stupor.
“I’m sure it is,” Magnus said, not looking up from his copy of War and Peace.
“I mean it.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Magnus!”
Magnus lifted his head wearily.