Wait. Say that again.
Never mind. Bad example. It’s more like William Blake’s optics. May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! Right?
I wouldn’t know anything about that, Curtis says.
Okay. What do you know about the sephirot? Or gematria?
Curtis gives her a blank look.
What about kabbalah?
Just what Madonna tells me, I guess. Never paid it much mind.
Veronica pulls an ugly face, sips her bourbon.
It’s a Jewish thing, right? Curtis says. Some kind of mysticism?
Originally Jewish. Primarily Jewish. Although goyim have been piggybacking on it since at least the Fifteenth Century. Primarily mystical, too, although it’s also a system of practical magic. That’s what most interested Stanley.
When you say practical magic, Curtis says, I get the feeling you’re not talking about Siegfried and Roy.
No, I’m talking about the practice of using talismans, formulas, and incantations to invoke angelic and demonic entities and to cause them to do your bidding.
Curtis blinks. You have got to be bullshitting me, he says.
I’m not bullshitting. Is Stanley bullshitting? That is the sixty-fucking-four-thousand-dollar question.
Curtis isn’t sure what to say to that. He sets his tumbler on the table. Then he reaches for the book: a paperback octavo, sewn at the spine. Its weathered wraps feel like soft leather, or an old dollar bill, and Curtis knows it belongs to Stanley the moment he touches it. It’s dense in his hand, heavier than he’d have guessed. He loosens his grip, feels the downward tug against his fingers.
Walter’s worried, Curtis says. He seems to think Stanley’s gone off his rocker. You’re saying he’s just getting religion in his old age?
Lots of people get religion in their old age, Curtis. They go to church. They don’t hit the tables at Caesars Palace. This is more complicated.
Veronica’s eyes are locked on the book. Curtis can’t tell how she feels about him holding it, but he’s definitely got her attention. Maybe Walter’s right, she says. Maybe Stanley ought to be locked up. Off playing cribbage in a home someplace. Maybe that’d be the best thing for him.
How long has he been interested in this stuff? Magic. Kabbalah.
Veronica smiles wanly. It’s not totally accurate to say he’s interested in it, she says. I’m interested in it. So I fall back on it to explain Stanley to myself. That’s how I got mixed up with him in the first place. He was one of my regulars when I was a dealer at the Rio. We got to talking. He wanted to know about the post-Pico Hermetic-Cabalist tradition in early-modern thought. I wanted to know how to exploit the gaming industry to pay off my student loans. So we were pretty much thick as thieves right off the fucking bat. Stanley’s never been hung up on specifics, though. The notion of creating a system or being enslaved by another man’s—that’s not what Stanley’s about. He doesn’t give a shit about gematria. He’s only interested in what it can do.
What can it do?
According to the tradition, it can divulge correspondences hidden throughout all of creation, and ultimately reveal the secret names of God. Since the universe was created through the godhead’s utterance of its name, knowing these names theoretically gives you direct access to the divine essence, and the power to transcend space and time. Which comes in pretty handy when you’ve got clients in from out of town and you need a couple dozen tickets to Cirque du Soleil.
You believe in that stuff?
Fuck no, Veronica says. But I am interested in what happens when people do believe it. When I was in grad school, I thought all those people dropped off the face of the planet not long after 1614, when Isaac Casaubon determined the correct date of the Corpus Hermeticum. Now I find myself raiding America’s casinos with one of them.
She sips her drink and watches Curtis’s hands. He tracks her gaze back to the book. Its coffee-brown cover looks blank in the dim light, but Curtis feels imprints in the thick paper, and leans toward the lamp to read what’s stamped there.
THE MIRROR THIEF, it says. The writing must have been filled with something silvery at one time; tilting the book forward, Curtis can make out a few starlike flecks clinging to the edges of the letters. He remembers, or imagines, Stanley’s fingers dusted with that fugitive silver, twinkling in the halflight of a smoky club, some dive in Chelsea or Bensonhurst or Jackson Heights. Stanley laughing, cutting the cards.
You know what you’ve got there? Veronica says.
I’ve seen it before.
That’s Stanley’s favorite book. He’s had it since he was a kid. These past few months he’s been reading it just about all the time.
Funny that he didn’t take it with him.
Yeah. It is.
Curtis opens the book. On the first page, there’s a handwritten message in faded blue ink. Crazy antiquated script.
Stanley—