“He was born a Sparks, but they disowned him,” Ms. Samuels replied. “Mesmer is considered the father of our art. But those on the inside know he was just another huckster. That kind of behavior might have been acceptable among the Opuses, or the Desais, or even the mysterious Petrocellis. But the Sparkses would never tolerate it.”
Kira raised her hand. “What happened to the Sparks family? Are they still active in the hypnotic community?”
The assistant director shook her head. “Their talents became diluted, and their descendants lost the power. What’s happened to them is anybody’s guess.”
If you’d bothered to check the chiropractic clinics, Jax couldn’t help reflecting, you could have gotten your neck cracked or your spine realigned by one!
Did Ms. Samuels know? Did Dr. Mako?
He thought back to Braintree’s words: Dr. Mako knows everything I know and more. If he’s withholding information, it’s because he doesn’t want you to realize just how special you might be.
Oh, sure. Believe some old geezer with a gray ponytail over a respected scientist.
And yet …
Jax was 99 percent sure Axel Braintree was full of baloney. But 99 wasn’t quite the same as 100.
There was a way to get to the bottom of this. The Sandman’s Guild was meeting tonight. Braintree had written the address on his card.
The two words came to Jax as if in a hypnotic vision: DON’T GO. Hadn’t enough crazy stuff happened already? Did he really think Braintree, of all people, would bring order to the chaos?
Yet on the subway that night, Jax wasn’t even surprised when he abandoned his train in favor of the shuttle to the West Side lines. The 1 would drop him just a few blocks from the address on the card.
Jackson Opus was going to a meeting.
Jax stared from the sign to the business card in his hand, and back again. This was definitely the right address. Inside, customers stuffed bundles of clothes into industrial-size washers and dryers. A few sat on benches, reading magazines and fiddling with phones, waiting impatiently for loads to finish. He checked his watch: 8:10. There was no meeting going on, and definitely no meeting of hypnotists.
Why would Axel Braintree browbeat him into attending a gathering of the Sandman’s Guild and then send him to the wrong place? Was Braintree such a flake that he honestly couldn’t remember the location of his own meeting? Maybe the whole thing was just a joke. But if so, there was nobody around to enjoy the payoff. Jax looked up and down Seventh Avenue. No sign of the old guy with the ponytail.
Jax watched as a young, twitchy man entered E-Z Wash carrying no laundry bag or basket, his hands jammed inside the pouch of his hoodie. Glancing furtively over his shoulder, he lifted the lid and peered inside one of the washers, only to be shouted away by a lady with a toy poodle on her hip. He spun around, raising his arms in a gesture of innocence, and darted down a back hall. He was followed a few minutes later by a very tall woman in a voluminous trench coat. She made no pretense of being a customer, sweeping by the machines and disappearing in the bend of the rear corridor.
Self-consciously, Jax stepped inside and made his way to the back. There was no sign except a small message board that read OF ICE in uneven magnetic letters. There were two doors off the short hall. One provided access to a Stone Age bathroom. Jax could hear muffled voices coming from behind the other. It was open a crack, and he pressed his face to the jamb to peer inside.
He spotted Braintree’s pink face and gray ponytail almost immediately. About fifteen people sat in a circle on folding bridge chairs. Jax wasn’t sure what he’d expected a professional organization of hypnotists to look like — magicians, maybe; psychics, shamans, or even sorcerers. But the collection of individuals in Braintree’s “guild” seemed closer to the crowd you’d encounter hanging out overnight at a bus station than a group that shared a rare and powerful supernatural talent. A few had come straight from work in suits and business attire. There was a mom who carried a sleeping infant in a BabyBjörn. In general, though, this seemed like a scruffy crew. The clothes were ill-matched and ragged; shoes were scuffed and worn. Ripped jeans, unshaven faces.
“… I haven’t bent anyone for seventeen weeks,” a stocky thirty-something man with bright red hair announced to a smattering of applause.
“Excellent, Ivan,” Braintree approved.
“Except my landlady,” Ivan finished.
The ovation died abruptly.
“Well, I had to. If she doesn’t believe my apartment is rent controlled, I won’t be able to afford to live there anymore.”
“Using your power to pay less for something is the same as using it to swindle or steal,” the old man lectured, ponytail bobbing earnestly.
“I’m not going to Hoboken,” Ivan stated flatly.
“We all have a gift,” Braintree lectured. “But we have to resist the temptation to use our abilities for personal gain. There’s a deeper satisfaction that comes from making an honest living. Look at Evelyn. She’s waitressing now.”
The tall woman in the trench coat stood up. “I got fired,” she admitted, shamefaced. “There were … complaints.”
“Hypnotism isn’t going to keep you from spilling soup on somebody,” Ivan commiserated.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t that. It was my tips. They were … large.”
Braintree sighed. “You didn’t.”
“People are so cheap,” she complained. “I just made a little suggestion. Fifteen percent — is that too much to ask for? It’s not my fault that one guy signed over his life-insurance policy. What kind of idiot tacks a life-insurance policy onto a restaurant tab? What kind of idiot brings life insurance to a restaurant in the first place?”
“There’s no such thing as a little suggestion,” the old man explained patiently. “Hypnotizing for a penny is no different than hypnotizing for millions.”
“In that case,” the mom put in sourly, “I should just go back to Wall Street.”
“Wall Street is the worst hotbed of misguided mesmerism anywhere!” Braintree warned. “Don’t risk it! You have a wonderful family. It’s what you and your husband dreamed of.”
“What he thought he dreamed of, anyway,” she amended.
The old man raised his arms to quell a babble of conversation. “Sandmen —”
“We’re not all sandmen,” Evelyn put in. “I happen to be a sandwoman. In fact, I move that we change our name to the Sandperson’s Guild.”
“We’ve been through this before, Evelyn. We consider everyone — male or female — an equal sandman. Plus, we’re a support group, not the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes. We don’t make motions. We’re just here to help one another grapple with a special ability that can be really tempting to abuse sometimes.”
“And for the free donuts,” added a voice near the back.
“They cut out donuts last November,” the mom said mournfully.
In the groundswell of discontented murmuring, two sandmen got up and headed for the exit.
Braintree watched in exasperation as his numbers dwindled — until he noticed the newcomer outside the door. Jax felt the familiar stirring, soon to become a tugging. The president of the Sandman’s Guild was locked onto his gaze.
“I believe we have a visitor.”
Sheepishly, Jax stepped into the room. “I was in the neighborhood….”
Braintree rushed over and escorted him to an empty seat. “Jackson Opus!” To the others, he put in, “You recognize the name, of course — Opus?”
“Call me Jax. Uh — I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”
“Welcome, welcome! Jax has been working with Dr. Mako uptown. I invited him here so he could see the other side of the manhole cover.”
The other side of the manhole cover was not pretty. While Sentia was a respected organization supported by some of the wealthiest, most accomplished, and most famous figures in the world, the Sandman’s Guild was a ragtag coffee klatch minus the coffee. The contrast could
not have been more obvious. The institute occupied the top three floors of a beautiful building in the most expensive part of New York City. The guild met in the back room of a Laundromat. Dr. Mako and Ms. Samuels could have shared the cover of GQ magazine; Axel Braintree looked like an ex-hippie turned Walmart greeter. Most glaring of all, Sentia was a research lab, dedicated to harnessing mesmeric power for the good of all humanity. The guild was a gaggle of two-bit con artists trying to kick the habit of bending unsuspecting marks into falling for sleazy scams.
That began to sink in as the various members introduced themselves. Ivan Marcinko was a former electronics salesman who was fired for being too good at his job. He had a knack for convincing customers to buy expensive TVs they didn’t want or need. It was the next-day returns that did him in. Evelyn Lolis used to make her living winning beauty contests until her pictures in the newspaper elicited too many letters of complaint accusing the panel of either bias or blurred vision. The judges were easy to hypnotize, but it was impossible to reach everybody who read the paper.
There was a bank teller who persuaded depositors to leave with a little less money than they’d withdrawn, and a jury consultant who was having entirely too much to do with the outcome of trials. There was a panhandler who was getting diamond rings and Rolex watches tossed into his hat, and a ninety-eight-pound arm wrestler who had never lost a match.
Even Braintree himself was a former abuser of his gift — and not for small potatoes. He had actually spent time in prison for art theft. He would bend museum security into not noticing that he was stuffing paintings and small sculptures under a voluminous raincoat. Even in jail, he’d managed to gain favors and privileges by mesmerizing the guards. At his parole hearing, he’d hypnotized the entire board into granting him early release.
“Don’t you see?” The old man’s face was even pinker than usual in his sincerity. “I thought the rules didn’t apply to me because of my power over people’s minds. Even when I was caught and punished, I found a way to weasel out of it through hypnotism. I was young and foolish, and I was going to go back into society to make the same mistakes all over again.”
“How did you stop yourself?” Jax asked, interested in spite of the discomfort these revelations were bringing him.
“On the bus home from prison, I tried to bend the driver into letting me on without paying. That’s how arrogant I was — I wouldn’t hand over fifty cents to avoid doing what had gotten me arrested in the first place. But it didn’t work. The driver was a fellow sandman — and a powerful one. Before I knew it, I was dropping coins in the fare box happily. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world! When I was back to myself, I asked him how come a guy with his gift was driving a bus. He could be making millions in Vegas or on Wall Street, playing it 99 percent straight, beating the odds with just a little bit of hypnotism. And he clicked two quarters from his coin belt and held them out to me. ‘You want a free ride? You think it’s really free?’
“In that moment,” Braintree went on, “I saw what my future would be if I took that money. Fifty lousy cents, but it was the difference between living a decent life and being a crook forever. It’s been thirty years since that day, and I’m proud to announce that I haven’t bent a penny out of anyone.”
The guild broke into spontaneous applause. Jax couldn’t help noticing that there were a lot of moist eyes in the room, not to mention more than a few shamed expressions. Maybe Axel Braintree had been on the wagon for three decades, but some members could count the time since their last transgressions in hours, and possibly minutes.
“But what does this have to do with Dr. Mako?” Jax probed. “He’s not like that at all. The goal of Sentia is to make the world a better place.”
“That’s what he wants you to think,” Braintree corrected.
“That’s what everybody thinks!” Jax insisted. “Do you have any idea how many big shots and celebrities support Sentia? When my family first met Dr. Mako, guess who was coming out of his office while we were going in: Senator Trey Douglas — a guy who could be our next president! If he trusts Dr. Mako, why don’t you?”
“Senator Douglas is a politician, not a sandman.”
“Look, I get it,” said Jax, becoming annoyed. “If you guys didn’t have your little support-group meetings, you’d be out there bending blackjack dealers and buying iPads for a nickel by hypnotizing the clerks at the Apple store. Well, just because you have to wrestle with the temptation to rip people off doesn’t mean Dr. Mako does!”
The old man sighed heavily. “Let’s assume for a minute that you’re right. That Dr. Mako is telling the truth, and he intends to use the power only for good. What would that ‘good’ be, exactly?”
“Well …” Jax drew a blank. At the institute, the hypnos made their subjects jump, laugh, cry, and scratch nonexistent itches. It was hard to see how humankind would benefit from that. Of course, it was just training, to prepare for the real thing — which no one had ever spoken much about.
Exactly what was the real thing?
“I don’t know,” Jax admitted finally. “But it seems to me that if you can use hypnotism to influence a really bad gangster or an evil dictator into becoming a better person, that would be good for the world, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” Braintree agreed. “If it worked. Which it wouldn’t. There’s no sandman alive who can change what’s in somebody’s heart. You can make a gangster call off a hit. But if you try to convince a violent man that killing is wrong, it may work for a day, a week, even a month. Sooner or later, though, the suggestion will wear off.”
“Maybe that’s the whole point of Sentia,” Jax argued. “To develop a new approach. You look at the power as something that has to be controlled to keep it from being abused. And that’s fine — I can see you’re doing a lot of great things around the — uh — Laundromat. But Dr. Mako sees it as something wonderful, like the invention of the wheel or the discovery of electricity. Something that can revolutionize the world. Just because we haven’t figured out how to do that yet doesn’t mean we should stop trying.”
Braintree regarded him with a new respect. “You’re a smart kid. You’re not going to rejigger what you believe on my say-so. But that should go for Dr. Mako as well. Do you honestly believe that he has no idea that you carry Sparks blood as well as Opus? Why would he keep this from you? Do you think he’s afraid to let you find out how powerful you may be?”
“Me? Compared to Dr. Mako? I don’t even come up to his ankles.”
“My point exactly,” Braintree jumped in. “You don’t have the experience to make sense of everything that’s going on at that institute. Let me be your guide. Tell me everything that’s happening over there, and I can interpret it for you.”
Jax was outraged. “That’s not you being a guide; that’s me being a spy!”
“If you want to put it that way,” the guild leader acknowledged. “But if Mako’s as clean as you say, then he can stand the inspection.”
Jax stood up. “I’m sorry I came here. You’re nothing but a bunch of cheap con men. And you’ve got the nerve to dump all over Dr. Mako, who has devoted his life to New York City education and is an insp —” He caught himself. “Well, he’s a better person than all of you put together!”
He stormed out through the Laundromat into the darkening streets of Greenwich Village.
Kira Kendall recognized the young woman in the surgical scrubs immediately. Miss Ventnor stood in the line of volunteers waiting for the service elevator. She was paying her way through nursing school by volunteering for every focus group and clinical trial in the city. But it was not her life story that rang a bell with the young hypno.
Miss Ventnor was practically impossible to bend.
It was still a painful memory for Kira. She had never failed Dr. Mako before. But the nurse-to-be was a brick wall. No reflected image. No mental link. Zero.
The director had told her not to worry. “Our Miss V. is a very tough nut to crack.”
“Even by you?”
He had smiled. “My gift is quite modest. I consider myself more a scientist than a virtuoso. But a mind-bender must experience subjects of all levels of resistance, since that is what you’ll encounter in the real world.”
Kira hadn’t seen the nursing student around Sentia for months.
“Have any of you guys tried to hypnotize Miss Ventnor?” she asked the others in the lounge.
“You mean Unbendable?” Singh Two asked.
“Has anybody ever reached her?” asked Kira.
“I was close once,” Augie volunteered. “For just a second, I got that flicker of the link. Then it was gone. I came up empty after that.”
“Loser.” Wilson snorted.
“Like you could do better,” Singh One returned. “I’ll bet they never even gave you a crack at her.”
“The doc doesn’t waste my talent on a lost cause,” Wilson growled.
“You might be getting your chance today,” DeRon pointed out. “They didn’t bring her in to shampoo the rugs.”
“Good point,” said Kira. “Who’s she here for?”
The hypnos took stock of themselves. It wasn’t long before they realized who was absent from the lounge.
“Dopus?” sneered Wilson. “No way!”
“I don’t know,” Kira mused aloud. On the surface, Jax was inexperienced and timid. He had a knack for bending subjects quickly, but often lost his way once he had them under. Dr. Mako gave him a lot of attention, which might have been because his last name was Opus. That carried a lot of weight in the hypnotic world. But real talent? The jury was still out.
She left the lounge, letting the door slam shut behind her. What was the point of inviting Miss Ventnor back to Sentia except to face the institute’s latest rising star?
Two experiment rooms were empty; a third was being cleaned. That meant the action was probably in Lab 1, which had a formal viewing gallery. All the important sessions took place there.