The Eye of Midnight (24 page)

William cocked his head and grinned.

“Well, that's just swell for you,” she said drily. “I guess I shouldn't be surprised—you have the same last name as Grandpa, after all. I'm not sure I'm cut out to play the fearless globe-trotter, though. I was actually kind of excited about spending my summer in the library.”

William handed her the mirror. “Sorry, M, but adventuring's in your blood. Like Nura said, we're family. You're a Battersea, too, you know, whether you have the same last name or not. You've proved it a hundred times.”

“I have?”

“Well, sure. You outfoxed the White Rat with an ashtray, and stared down the whole temple with a shaving mirror, and stuck a Hashashin with a hat pin for good measure.”

“That's a few shy of a hundred….”

“Aw, who's counting, anyways? Besides, you didn't really want to haunt the library all summer long, did you? I mean, books are fine and all, but who wants to spend their whole life living someone else's story?”

Maxine thought about this for a moment, then pushed her cousin aside. Hoisting herself up onto the windowsill, she dropped to the lawn below.

“Where do you think you're going?”

“Come and find out,” she said without looking back.

Maxine walked barefoot down to the water's edge, the long sash of black silk streaming behind her as she went. The mirror was cold and heavy in her hands, and a familiar pall gripped her as her fingers worried the strange eyelets along its outer edge. She sank to the ground, stretching out in the grass and staring up at the night. In the meadow behind, William came trailing after and flopped down beside her so that the tops of their heads were touching, and the fireflies seemed drawn to them and circled like will-o'-wisps round about where they lay.

“Tell us your secret,” Maxine murmured, holding the Eye of Midnight to the sky at arm's length, as if it were a celestial compass, the ancient astrolabe of the Orient magi, pointing always east, and they searched there on its surface for some veiled testimony or clue. But the mirror betrayed no confidences, and in its face they saw only their own faces, ghostly pale and luminous in the moonlight, and through its eyelets, a host of stars that burned and swung above in myriad infinite silence, like the stretching sands of Araby's distant shores.

With certain novels, it is interesting to learn where historical fact has crept in and left its smudgy fingerprints on the fiction. While I suspect my readers would never mistake William and Maxine's encounter with the villainous Hashashin for a history textbook, they might be curious to know which of the details do have their roots in real life.

The truth is, the Hashashin did exist, about a thousand years ago. They were a secret order of trained killers based in a remote hideout near the present-day border of Turkey and Iran, and they carried out the schemes and political plots of a succession of Grandmasters, each of whom went by the colorful title of the Old Man of the Mountain. They were fearless, fanatical, and invisible, and for almost two centuries they were the dread of the Middle Eastern world.

Then, in 1295, a young Italian named Marco Polo returned from an extended vacation to the Far East, bringing back a fascinating and often imaginative narrative of his travels, including one particularly compelling tale involving a desert fortress called Alamut with a hidden garden and a horde of sinister assassins all willing to give their lives unquestionably in the service of their charismatic leader.

Marco Polo's sensational account of the Hashashin quickly captured the imagination of the Western world, but it has raised a multitude of questions from historians: Was there really a secret garden of paradise behind the walls of Alamut? How did the Old Man of the Mountain compel his followers to do his bidding? Were the Hashashin truly villains or simply another faction in the complex fabric of a turbulent time?

When I first read about the legends of the Hashashin, however, my imagination immediately leapt to questions of the “what if” variety. What if the Hashashin were never really stamped out by the Mongols in 1275? What if they only slipped away into the shadows, biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to execute a diabolical plan to conquer the world? And what if, in 1929, they descended, in all their exotic, terrifying,
Arabian Nights
glory, on the unsuspecting populace of New York City?

While the Hashashin and their deadly daggers are no fabrication, the mysterious relic known as the Eye of Midnight is another matter. It is my own invention, and though it has no historical basis, it seems a likely artifact in light of the abundance of magic mirrors in Arabian literature and the Old Man of the Mountain's reputation (among his followers, at least) for mystical powers. The Cafara, the Sons of the Cipher, are a figment of my imagination as well. I found it interesting to suppose that there was another clandestine society—a virtuous fraternity set in opposition to the Hashashin, sworn throughout the centuries to stand against the plots of the ruthless sect.

As for New York City, things have changed a fair amount since the Roaring Twenties. The jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street are gone now. Ellis Island no longer welcomes its huddled masses yearning to breathe free (indeed, even in 1929 this had already become a more seldom occurrence), and alas, that luminous cathedral of Beaux Arts architecture, Old Penn Station, was torn down in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden. Those things were all there, though, once upon a time, and I've done my best to re-create the ambience of old Manhattan with reasonable accuracy. There never was a Knickerbocker Plainsong Cemetery, I'm afraid, but you can still visit Cleopatra's Needle on the east side of Central Park, and if you look carefully, perhaps you will find the bench where Nura's satchel was snatched in Battery Park.

And then, of course, there is Colonel Horatius Battersea, a prime specimen of that peculiar breed of swashbuckling explorer, agent provocateur, travel writer, and spy that seemed to abound at the turn of the twentieth century, an era when adventuring was a bona fide occupation. The colonel was inspired by men and women like Lawrence of Arabia, Freya Stark, Sir Richard Francis Burton, and Gertrude Bell—fascinating figures, all of them, and well worth the effort of tracking down for their own exploits and memoirs.

So there it is. A complicated concoction of factual elements and bald fiction all stirred up in the same cauldron. If I've taken any liberties with history, it was always for the sake of my deep conviction in another truth: that we are all designed for an adventure, that it lies in every young heart, and that losing ourselves in the pages of such things, even for a few hours, may kindle something in our souls that can never be extinguished.