“We usually all know by the Death of the Moon. If something seems wrong afterward that can only be accounted for by the presence of another player, the power is then present to do a divinatory operation to determine the person’s identity or location.”
“Don’t you think it might be worth giving it a try?”
“Yes. You’re right. Of course, it’s not really my specialty. Even though I know something about all of the operations, I’m a watcher and I’m a calculator. I’ll get someone else to give it a try, though.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to find out who’s good at it, and then suggest it formally, so that I get to share the results. I’ll share them with you then, of course.”
“What if it’s someone you can’t stand?”
“Doesn’t matter. There are rules, even if you’re trying to kill each other. If you don’t follow them, you don’t last long. I may have something that that person will want, like the ability to do an odd calculation, say, for something other than the center.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, the place where a body will be found. The place where a certain herb can be located. The store that carries a particular ingredient.”
“Really? I never knew about those secondary calculations. How hard are they to perform?”
“Some are very hard. Some are easy.”
We turned and began walking back.
“How hard’s the body-finding one?” he asked as we climbed the hill.
“They’re fairly easy, actually.”
“What if you tried it for the police officer we put in the river?”
“Now _that_ could be tricky, since there are a lot of extra variables involved. If you just misplaced a body, though, or knew that someone had died but didn’t know where, that wouldn’t be too hard.”
“That does sound like a kind of divination,” he said.
“When you talk about being an ‘anticipator,’ of having a pretty good idea of when something’s going to happen, or how, or who will be there, isn’t that a kind of divination?”
“No. I think it’s more a kind of subconscious knack for dealing with statistics, against a fairly well-known field of actions.”
“Well, some of my calculations would probably be a lot closer to doing overtly what you seem to do subconsciously. You may well be an intuitive calculator.”
“That business about finding the body, though. That smacks of divination.”
“It only seems that way to an outsider. Besides, you’ve just seen what can happen to my calculations if I’m missing some key factor. That’s hardly divinatory.”
“Supposing I told you that I’ve had a strong feeling all morning that one of the players has died?”
“That’s a little beyond me, I’m afraid. I’d need to know who it was, and some of the circumstances. I really deal more with facts and probabilities than things like that. Are you serious about your feeling?”
“Yes, it’s a real anticipation.”
“Did you feel it when the Count got staked?”
“No, I didn’t. But then, I don’t believe he’d technically have been considered living, to begin with.”
“Quibble, quibble,” I said, and he caught the smile and smiled back. It takes one to know one, I guess.
“You want to show me Dog’s Nest? You’ve gotten me curious.”
“Come on,” I said, and we went and climbed up to it.
At the top, we walked around a bit, and I showed him the stone we had been sucked through. Its inscription had become barely noticeable scratchings again. He couldn’t make them out either.
“Nice view from here, though,” he said, turning and studying the land about us. “Oh, there’s the manse. I wonder whether Mrs. Enderby’s cuttings are taking?”
There was my opening. I could have seized it right then, I suppose, and told him the whole story, from Soho to here. But, at least, I realized then what was holding me back. He reminded me of someone I once knew: Rocco. Rocco was a big, floppy-eared hound, always happy, bouncing about and slavering over life with such high spirits that some found it annoying, and he was very single-minded. I called to him one day on the street and he just dashed across, not even paying puppy-attention to his surroundings. Got run over by a cart. I rushed to his side, and damned if he still didn’t seem happy to see me in those final minutes. If I’d kept my muzzle shut he could have stayed happy a lot longer. Now. . . . Well, Larry wasn’t stupid like Rocco, but he had a similar capacity for enthusiasm, long frustrated by a big problem, in his case. He seemed on the way to working out some means for dealing with the problem now, and the Great Detective in the guise he had assumed was cheering him up a good deal. Since I didn’t really see him as giving much away, I thought of Rocco and said the hell with it. Later.