Superstition

55

It was almost three in the morning when Sam finally closed Joanna's book and set it down on the table by his chair. For a while he didn't move. Then he ran his hands over his face and through his hair, and got up to pour himself a large whiskey.

As she had told him, it was an extraordinary story-the more so for being familiar in all but a handful of its details. It was everything that the group had invented about Adam, but set out now as historical fact and authenticated by a comprehensive index of sources. Even the various pictures of Adam, attributed though they were to portraitists and sketch artists of the period, were unmistakably of the man drawn by Drew Hearst way back at the start of the experiment.

But this version of Adam had become a very different person from the one they had intended to create. This was a man who had betrayed the trust first of his patron, Lafayette, then of his wife, and subsequently almost everyone with whom he had come into contact. In Paris, during the period leading up to revolution, he had consorted with thieves and whores and scoundrels of all kinds. When asked once by the generous though despairing Lafayette why he behaved so badly, he answered insolently, “Joie de vivre!” It was the only explanation he ever gave for any of his actions.

The magician Cagliostro became his ally, and together they conspired to defraud the gullible Cardinal Rohan of a fortune in the Diamond Necklace Affair. When Cagliostro was thrown in jail for his part in the plot, he kept quiet about Adam's involvement because Adam, who still had connections at court through his unfortunate and much abused wife, represented his only chance of getting out.

Cagliostro's silence was rewarded when Adam did in fact secure his release, but in return Adam demanded the magic talisman which had thus far in his life protected Cagliostro against all enemies. It would do so, Adam said, one last time, when he handed it over in return for his freedom and his life and went into exile outside France.

The talisman was shown in one of the book's illustrations. Sam was familiar with the design it bore. It was the design he had first seen indistinctly in the wax impression left on the floor that terrifying night in Adam's room at the lab, then later and more clearly in the book given to Joanna by Barry Hearst.

According to legend, Adam had kept the talisman with him all his life, even having it buried with him in his tomb. Something else he had never abandoned was his strange love of the French term “joie de vivre,” for which no equivalent existed in English, and which he not only had engraved upon his tomb but also had already incorporated into the Wyatt coat of arms-a vanity he had acquired in England, along with a second wealthy and aristocratic wife.

His return to America after her suspicious death had marked the start of the third long period of his life. Rich, and with the acquired airs and graces of a nobleman, he had become an immensely wealthy and successful banker, and finally even a renowned philanthropist. Whenever, as had happened occasionally, some whispered rumor of the dreadful reputation he had left behind in Europe reached across the ocean and threatened the high regard in which he was now held at home, the bearer of such gossip either mysteriously disappeared, or recanted his lies and lived on in comfort as the willing and obedient servant of the all-powerful Adam Wyatt.

Sam found himself gazing out into the night through the very window on which the words “Joie de vivre” had mysteriously appeared only a few days ago-that common phrase which Adam had distorted and so strangely made his own.

“Dear God,” he murmured to himself, and instantly wondered if unconsciously he'd meant it as a prayer.

He decided that perhaps he had.