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individuals with particular…gifts. Most of them turned out to be either delusions or outright fakes, but every so often, a man or woman would come along with, hmm, knacks we couldn’t quite explain. And when that happened, we tended to keep an eye on that person. Still do, for that matter, although I personally have almost nothing to do with research these days.”
    “Okay,” Stuyvesant said.
    “There is one man, currently living in Cornwall, who came to my attention shortly after Armistice. He’d been wounded and was convalescing near London. I interviewed him, supervised a series of tests, and found that, indeed, some of his abilities were verifiable. Unfortunately, his wartime experiences had left him, shall we say, vulnerable to stress, and he proved…unsuitable for our purposes. Still, every so often I take a look at him, to see how he is, and to see if his skills remain. When last I had word, he appeared to be, hmm, recovering nicely.”
    “Shell shock?”
    “Of the worst kind.”
    “I’ve seen a few.” Felt it himself, too, although thanks to the ox-like Stuyvesant constitution and a job to get back to, he’d pulled out of it entirely. Almost entirely: Back-firing engines occasionally found him diving for cover. “What do you mean by ‘abilities’? Mind-reading? Talking to spirits?”
    Carstairs bristled. “Mr. Stuyvesant, do I seem to you like a gullible person?”
    “No,” the American admitted.
    “Then please rest assured that our, hmm, tests of his abilities were thought out with care. This man is not a mind-reader. It is not parlor tricks. He is, as they say, the real thing.”
    As they were talking, the crowd on the corner had continued to grow. Now, one of the speakers, who was either seven feet tall or standing on a soap-box, launched himself into the sea of hats—working-men’s cloth caps, office-workers’ bowlers, and fashionable soft felt—heading in the direction of his rival, thirty feet away. A roar rose up, whistles pierced the air, and the policemen urged their enormous mounts forward. Carstairs stood impatiently.
    “Let us leave this entertainment for the quieter reaches of the park. It’s a pity to waste a fine spring day.”
    It was hardly spring, not going by the thermometer anyway, but Stuyvesant had grown up in New York and he wasn’t going to be intimidated by anything less than knee-deep snow. Carstairs led him into the park, away from the riot, while Stuyvesant’s mind chewed on the possibility that this shady Englishman wasn’t just feeding him a heap of horse crap, for some unguessable reason of his own.
    “What’s this guy’s name? And what is it he can do?”
    “His name is Grey. Captain Bennett Grey.” Carstairs’ oddly sensuous mouth seemed to linger over the name. “As for his abilities, I think the details shall have to wait for a time. Let us say merely that Captain Grey knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people. He can, as it were, tell gold from gilt at a touch.” This phrase seemed to please its speaker; one corner of his mouth curled a fraction.
    Jesus, these Brits, Stuyvesant thought—you ask them a simple question and they give you Shakespeare, or hints to a maze. Were they always as convoluted as he’d found them, or was all this wool-pulling a way of hiding their Strike jitters? Every bureaucrat he’d talked to acted as if he felt solely responsible for holding the working class at bay with a stack of forms.
    “Okay, so Captain Grey has some funny skills. Why should I be interested in him?”
    Carstairs’ cigar had gone out, so he slowed his steps to concentrate on restoring it to a clean, burning end, then resumed. “I needed to tell you about Captain Grey so you would know why Richard Bunsen’s name caught my attention when you brought it up. In fact, I had to go back into the files to refresh my memory, but it turns out that we have been, hmm, aware of Mr. Bunsen as early as 1919, when he was arrested for