Monsters and Magicians Read Online Free PDF

faithfully. Furthermore, he had announced his avowed intent of foiling them all.
    Fitz had heard his partner out, sympathized aloud, and then simply forgotten the matter, figuring that it had been just one more instance of a disgruntled taxpayer blowing off a little steam. Months later, to his sorrow, he discovered that Tolliver had been serious, dead serious, and that his manner of foiling the Internal Revenue Service had tarred them both with the same brush in the mind of one Agent Henry Fowler Blutegel.

    In one corner stood a splendid full suit of fluted, Maximillian-style plate armor, its crossed gauntlets resting atop the pommel of a period bastard-sword. On a stretch of wall not covered by a carpet was h^Pg dog-face bascinet-helm and crossed below it were a medieval battle-sword and a horseman's battle-axe, with a short-hafted, quintrefoil mace hung upright between them. All of these pieces were authentic and of museum quality.
    The furnishings looked every bit as old, though outstandingly well kept, as authentic as the weapons, but they were not, none of them; rather, they were painstaking reproductions of tables, chairs and cabinets of the period—all dark woods, leathers, inlays and black wrought-iron or rich bronze. Nonetheless, it was a chamber in which a Renaissance nobleman or lady would have certainly felt comfortable, almost at home.
    The desk, chair and console were wrought of the same dark woods with similar decorations, but there the similarities ended. The lamps were electric, with variable intensities of brightness. What might have been two small, carven and inlaid chests on either side of the desk actually housed telephone and an intercommunications device, and another on the console held a tape-recorder and its condensor microphone. A fourth, much flatter chest contained a wide selection of hand-rolled cigars, a box of cigarettes and two lighters.
    In the leather swivel-chair behind the desk sat a man who, in period attire, would have matched his archaic surroundings almost perfectly. His hair and moustache were raven's-wing black, his skin-tone sat-

    urnine, the backs of his hands and long, tapering fingers black-haired. Only a close approach to the whipcord-slender figure would have revealed that the eyes beneath the dark brows were a piercing blue.
    As he often did, Pedro Goldfarb found himself working late at his office, so tied up in a case that he had allowed time, partners and employees to depart the offices unheeded.
    Before him, a profusion of thick books lay, some of them open, some of them closed but with scraps of paper marking places in them. One yellow legal-size pad lay aside, filled with his neat, pencilled notes, and a fresh one was already a quarter filled. The stubs of two thin cigars lay among their ashes in a big, bronze tray and a third had smoldered out there. Beside a mug half full of cold, black coffee a crystal goblet of a pale amber liquor sat almost untasted.
    The man did not miss even a stroke of his writing when, after a light knock, one of the pair of doors opened and a woman's voice said, "Talk about smoke-filled rooms. Sorry, Pedro, I'd thought somebody d left the lights on in here. Do you mean to go home at all tonight?"
    "Minute, Danna," replied the man. "Important I get this down now, fresh off my brain."
    Wordlessly she seated herself in the side-chair nearest his desk and sat, silent and unmoving, until at length he completed his scribblings and laid aside his pencil with a whuff
    "Still on Belcher, Pedro?" she asked. "Or is this that new one, McKiernan?"
    He had, as she had been speaking, leaned forward

    to bring the mug to his lips, but after only the briefest of tentative sips, he grimaced and declared, "Cold! Hell, Td rather quaff as much hemlock as cold coffee."
    The woman stood and reached for the mug, saying, "Here, Pedro, I can go out and fire up Doris's Silex and . . ."
    "No, forget it/' He smiled. "Thanks anyway, Danna, really, but if I drink any more