Recalling bits and pieces of their first meeting in the graceful sun room of Hancock’s house overlooking the Hudson River always had a tranquilizing effect on Brice Mack. It was a house that was bristling with historic markers and was reputed to have quartered George Washington and his staff during the Battle of Harlem Heights on the several occasions when his headquarters at Jumel Mansion was under British fire.
Mack had brought to that visit the inflexible mind of a skeptic in an attempt to test the old man’s power of persuasion on a jury and was shocked to find himself, after an hour’s worth of niggling questions and patient answers, completely taken in by Hancock’s soft-spoken scholarship, plied with the most delicate of trowels, speaking neither up nor down to his guest, but capturing and keeping the spark of interest at a constant flash point. Mack not only was enraptured, but refused to believe that the morning had long gone and that they had talked clear through the lunch hour.
Reflecting back on the substance of that first meeting, the lawyer attempted to reconstruct those points in Hancock’s talk that had so beguiled him. Instead of belaboring the issue of reincarnation with a scholar’s cudgel, the wise old man had made a game of it, accepting Mack’s skepticism and doubts and, on a number of occasions, seeming himself to be confounded, allowing Mack to help him with the answers.
At one point Mack had asked Hancock about proofs of reincarnation and whether or not he could cite specific examples to substantiate the concept that the soul had lived through many lifetimes. The old man gave the question serious thought before speaking.
“It’s never happened to me, unfortunately, but many people have told me of experiencing fragmentary recollections of former lives—moments of sudden recognition of people or places they had never met or been to before and that yet seemed familiar to them.”
Brice Mack had remembered several such events in his own lifetime and told Hancock how once, when he was a child, be had been sent to a free summer camp up in the Adirondacks and, one day, had become separated from his group during a woodland hike. Hopelessly lost, he had been forced to spend the night in this totally alien environment. He remembered how he had wandered, in tears, through the darkness until sleep overcame him and how, with the coming of dawn, he had awakened cold, frightened, and hungry to a sight that immediately calmed his fears and restored his confidence. It was the sight of a rocky stream vaguely seen through a density of trees, but so familiar a sight as to seem an old friend to him. He was stunned by his firsthand knowledge of the place and was able to describe every rock, rill, and overhanging branch to himself, knowing for certain that somehow he had witnessed the same scene before and not in a picture or a painting, for the very atmosphere, scented with pine pitch and morning dew, was also a distinctly remembered smell.
“Yes, yes.” The old man chuckled in delight. “You no doubt witnessed a scene that awakened memories of a past lying far back in the misty ages of a former lifetime. I am sure, too, that you were able to draw on that former experience to help you retrace your steps to safety?”
“That’s the strangest part of all,” admitted Mack. “At that point the whole woodland seemed familiar to me, and I was able to find my way back to camp without any trouble.”
After a moment’s sober reflection the old man had continued with a question: “Tell me, Brice, was your childhood a happy one?”
“Well—” the attorney grinned—“we were poor.”
“Were your parents gifted or unique in any way?”
Brice shrugged. “Not especially. They weren’t intellectuals, if that’s what you mean. They came from a long line of peasants and were honest, hardworking people.”
“The salt of the earth,” added Hancock with undoubted sincerity. “Isn’t it strange how often we see evidences of the ‘prodigy,’ the ‘youthful genius’ springing from such humble soil? Children possessing tastes, talents, predispositions, qualities that seem to spring from a deeper, richer loam than those of heredity and environment?”
Mack had felt himself blush. “Well,” he allowed, “I’m no genius.”
“And yet how certainly you seemed to gravitate toward a degree of intellectual achievement that neither heredity nor environment can account for. Reincarnationists would say that your work in this life had been preordained by the mental demands of a former life.”
It was at this point in their conversation, Brice Mack recalled, that they had been interrupted by Hancock’s housekeeper, a sprightly lady who seemed every bit as old as Hancock. It was time for his pills, four of them, placed on a freshly pressed linen napkin on a pewter tray alongside a crystal carafe of water and a glass. After she replenished Mack’s coffee cup and left the room with the tray, Mack was reminded of another case that he thought might interest Hancock.
It concerned the six-year-old son of a friend of his, a man he had known since childhood. Neither his friend nor his friend’s wife possessed any particular artistic qualities to set them apart from the normal run of people, yet the boy, at age five, one day sat at a piano and began to play with a skill that was amazing, while he had never had a lesson.
“And what of Pascal,” trilled the old man in a burst of uncontained joy, “who, at the age of twelve, mastered the greater part of plane geometry without instruction, drawing on the floor of his room all the figures in the First Book of Euclid? And Mozart, executing a sonata on the pianoforte with four-year-old fingers and composing an opera at the age of eight? And Rembrandt, drawing with masterly power before he could read? Can you doubt that these ‘old souls’ came to earth with remarkable powers acquired in a former existence?”
No, thought Mack, sucking at the marrow of a spare rib, and neither will the jury. The old boy’s enthusiasm was infectious. He had a way with a word and a con man’s gift for making the outlandish seem perfectly reasonable. The jury would listen to this man and believe him.
Mack glanced at his wristwatch. Twelve forty-seven. At this moment the limousine transporting the sum and substance of his case and the salvation of his professional reputation would be speeding down the southbound lanes of the West Side Drive en route to Foley Square. Gnawing at the rib, which was cold and greasy, Brice Mack reasoned that traffic would not be a problem at this early hour and that even now they might have arrived at their destination.
Had it been possible for the youthful and hopeful attorney to have known that at this very moment, instead of proceeding on a southward course, the limousine, with the aid of a police car’s sirens to clear its path, was speeding eastward toward the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital containing the catatonic and moaning form of a very sick and very old man, certainly the porker whose ribs he had so rudely desecrated would have had its revenge, for Brice Mack would surely have choked on the last mouthful.
Janice got the news at three fifteen.
The phone was ringing as she and Ivy entered the suite at the Candlemas. Handed a number of messages at the desk—all from Bill and all marked “Call back. Urgent! 555-1461”—they had hurried up to the room to comply, but Bill got to them first.
“Where the hell have you been?” he shouted in a wild and hysterical petulance that Janice suspected was as much the result of alcohol as anger.
“Out,” she replied, effecting a calm for Ivy’s sake.
“Out? Damn it, Janice! You were told to stick by the phone!” His voice blasted in the receiver, causing static.