I pulled off the lid and looked inside. “Sugar cubes?” I asked.
“I am English,” he said. “I keep the sugar cubes around because I’m required by British law to take teatime. What did you see?”
I took turns between scarfing down the much-needed sugar like a show pony and explaining to the professor just what I had seen. He listened without interruption, giving a wan smile when I finished.
“I was probably around your age then,” the Inspectre said. “Thought a sword cane would be the most inconspicuous weapon, but I don’t think many young men of my time were seen with them.”
I looked down where it lay in my lap still and pulled the blade free from the cane. The metal was worn with age now and well corroded at the end where it had broken off. I rattled the hollow section of cane and the remaining piece of the sword slid out onto my lap. “You never fixed it.”
The Inspectre shook his head, solemn. “Some things are better left as a reminder of what can be broken,” he said. “My friendship with Mason, for one. He was my first partner in the field.” The Inspectre held his hands out. I set the pieces of sword in them, careful to lay the blades down flat. With care, the Inspectre slid them back into the cane, and then placed it back on the rim of the top shelf again. For several moments, he stood there with his back to me until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What happened?” I asked. “After that night.”
The Inspectre turned around, looking a little older. He sat back down in his chair. “Mason simply didn’t come in the next day. Or the day after that. I heard from a colleague who ran into him in the street that he looked different. Happy, if I remember it correctly.”
“So he just walked away from the Order?” I asked, anger creeping into my voice.
“Now, now,” the Inspectre said. “Don’t judge so hastily. Mason simply chose to live his life. . . differently.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked. “Did one of those ghouls actually bite him? He went evil?”
“Oh, heavens no! Surely you saw the look on his face when I pulled him out of that fissure. Mason was stone-cold scared and all too willing to walk away from this life.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if I had seen all that he had seen, I don’t think I could turn away from a life of fighting the dark horrors that haunt this city.”
The Inspectre looked at me over the top of his glasses, his face fixed in a very serious expression. “The Fraternal Order of Goodness is not for everyone, Simon. You have to remember that in the old days, there was barely even a Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Life within F.O.G. is thankless work with long hours and few benefits, even fewer now with these recent budget cuts from downtown. An agent of the Order has to love what they do, I suppose, in some perverse, masochistic way.”
Who was I to try to second-guess Mason Redfield? He was a man I had met only twice—once through a psychometric flash and once as a corpse. “I guess I understand.”
The Inspectre gave me a surprised smile. “Do you, now?”
I nodded. “When I came to the D.E.A., I was searching for something, something greater than a paycheck. Up until that moment, I would have gone on using my psychometry for heists and low-level thieving forever . . .”
“You would have eventually been caught,” the Inspectre corrected.
“That’s my point,” I said. “I chose the D.E.A. and becoming a F.O.G.gie because I almost was caught—caught up in betrayal by the old crowd I ran with. You do recall Mina Saria, don’t you?”
The Inspectre nodded. “That psychotic redhead, yes? Currently missing and in possession of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, I believe.”
“Correct,” I said, shuddering at the thought of her. My encounters with her were harrowing enough to fill a book. “Surviving those near misses in my old criminal life with her woke me up. I wanted control of my life, a sense of purpose. Doing good, as simplistic as it sounds, is a far more rewarding fit. It gave me a better purpose.”
The Inspectre steepled his fingers against his chin as he considered what I said. “That’s what I meant about the Order not being for everyone,” he said. “Mason Redfield had his sense of purpose scared out of him that night. He turned to another purpose that had caught his eye prior to joining the Order—his love of cinema and a desire to teach. Ironically, it was his love of horror films that drove him to the Fraternal Order of Goodness in the first place.”
It was hard to imagine the semifailed swashbuckler at the head of a classroom, but hey, it worked for Indiana Jones. “Turned to teaching film,” I said. “Makes sense. There, the monsters can’t really get you.”
The Inspectre’s face sobered. “I hadn’t really considered that when it happened,” he said. “I was too angry at him. You see, at the time I was new to the game myself. I hated Mason for abandoning what I thought was his true calling. I handled myself. . . poorly.”
“How so?” I asked.
The Inspectre’s face turned red and he shifted in his chair, unable to find comfort in it. “I took his leaving as a personal affront. All I knew was that I was left on my own within the Order. I hated him for abandoning me like that, selfish as I was. Stubbornly, I refused to break in a new partner, insisting on doing everything on my own from then on. Some called me foolish, reckless. . . but to me it only meant I had to work harder and be more careful. I kept myself busy and it made it easy not to get in touch with Mason much once he left the Order. By the time I worked through my foolish anger, too much time had passed. Any thoughts I had of reconciling the situation would only have been too little, too late.”
The Inspectre fell silent.
“So you never talked to him again?”
The Inspectre shook his head. “To what end?” he asked. “To give me closure? Mason walked away from it all, and who was I to come back into his life as a constant reminder of all the evils waiting to be confronted in the world? I kept tabs on him at first, naturally, making sure he was adjusting to the mundane world once again. He settled into the world of academia, and all I had to do was let things lie at that point.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I felt part of what you felt when I was in my vision. I saw the friendship you had with him. You could have still had that—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” the Inspectre snapped, barking at me. “Don’t you think I know what I lost that day?”
I jumped in my seat. Seeing the Inspectre this unnerved rattled me more than I expected.
“It kills me,” he continued, angrier with each word that flew from his lips, “that I should go so many years only to hear about the man’s death and worse, in a paranormal fashion on top of it. Do you know how much that guts me, how asleep on the watch it makes me feel?”
“Sorry,” I said. There was little healing power in the word, but maybe the Inspectre wasn’t looking to heal. Maybe he didn’t want someone to fix it. It had been broken too long for me to think anything I said would actually help. It was like trying to put a Band-Aid on a shark bite. Sometimes people just needed to vent and get it out of their system. I decided on another tack—getting back to business.
“So he was a teacher,” I said. “That’s as good a place to start as any. I should probably ask around and see if any of his students or other faculty noticed anything strange about him over the past few weeks.”
The talk of the Inspectre’s dead friend in an investigative capacity seemed to help him compose himself. His anger faded from his face and he nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I would check his offices over at New York University. Take Connor with you. Mind you, use discretion.”