Chapter One

The Secrets of Dr. Descartes

My name’s Block, John Block. And I’m a P.I. - Private Investigator, that is, officially licensed by the great state of New York. But I don’t often tell people that. If I’m at a party or something, I just say I’m in ‘information processing’. As I see it, my business is processing information... on people. We get it from some; give it to others, the ones who pay. I’m just a middleman.

When I first opened the agency, we took whatever we could get, but as time went by we began to specialize. You have to in this business. You see, it’s important to build your reputation. In the PI business, reputation is everything. And from early on, the reputation I got was for handling, very discretely, those troubling, sometimes nasty things which our high-class clients like to call “intimate matters.” Our agency soon began to specialize in confidential surveillance work -- spying, usually on bored wives with too much time on their hands; or on womanizing husbands who couldn’t keep it in their pants; and once in while sending back reports on some playful girlfriend who liked to kick up her heels and get a little action on the side, maybe when boyfriend is out of town. I’m sure that’s why Descartes wanted to hire me, because of our reputation, although the job he wanted done had a decidedly different spin to it. In fact, it was the strangest job I’d ever had, and that’s saying a lot.

Of course I had seen my share of pretty weird clients in my time. With offices on the upper East Side, I attracted a decidedly wealthy clientele; and not all of them were too well wrapped. I was used to dealing with eccentrics. Rich folks have their little peculiarities, maybe not more than most of us, but the difference is that they can indulge theirs. Even so, the job Descartes offered me absolutely took the cake.

The most important thing Descartes wanted, was someone who could keep his mouth shut. He made that perfectly plain to me the first time we met. It was in a nondescript dive he had somehow picked out. Not the kind of place where you’d expect to run into a man like Dr. Adrian Descartes. In fact, it always puzzled me -- why he should want to meet with the hired help at all, considering he had an army of flunkies to handle such unpleasant tasks. I figured it was because he liked to know the man he was dealing with. Some men are like that; they need to know who they’re dealing with, to look them in the eye. It’s something you can’t do over a telephone.

We met just across the bridge near Fort Lee, along a strip of highway that was typical Jersey -- anonymous clutter. Tucked between a gas station and an outlet selling discount shoes was a little shack with its blue neon “BAR” flickering behind the dirty plate glass window. Descartes’ instructions were, like the man, quite detailed. I liked that. I was to go into the bar at 11:00 and take a booth in the back, and order a beer. When I asked how I’d know him, he said not to worry -- he’d know me.

And so it was that I met the crazy Doctor for the first time, although I didn’t know he was crazy then. In fact, he seemed quite sane: cool, confident, a man in control. He had changed from suit jacket to a blue windbreaker, probably thinking he wouldn’t seem too conspicuous in this workingman’s bar. It didn’t work. He still stood out, looking decidedly out of place with his classy style, those neatly creased, expensive suit trousers he wore; the half-open jacket revealing a fine white shirt and hopelessly regimental tie; the tight knot neatly in place.

The man who sat across the table from me was tall, narrow shouldered, with a high forehead and thinning bu