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and everything even remotely pertinent by Freud; he sought out La Fleur Lascivie Orientale and the even rarer English translation of Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de I’Asie Mineure; he dipped into the memoirs of Clara Bow, Charles II, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, Marie Duplessis, Lola Montez and George Sand; he read novelists—Moravia, Gorky, Maupassant, Roth, Cheever and Brossard—but found they knew even less than he.
    He absorbed the thoughts of the aphorists, and believed every utterance; Balzac: “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”; Moliere: “Reason is not what directs love.”; Terence: “It is possible that a man can be so-changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.”; Voltaire: “Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”; La Rochefoucauld: “When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.”
    Yet even nodding his agreement with every contradictory image and representation of love—seen as Nature, God, a bird on the wing, sex, vanity—he knew they had perceived only the barest edge of what True Love was. Not Kierkegaard or Bacon or Goethe or Nietzsche, for all their insight, for all their wisdom, had any better idea of what True Love looked like than the commonest day-laborer.
    The Song of Solomon spurred him on, but did not indicate the proper route to discovery.
    He found the main path on that night in February of 1968. But once found, he was too frightened to set foot upon it.

    Surgat, a subordinate spirit to Sargatanas who, in the Descending Hierarchy from Lucifer to Lucifuge Rofacale, opens all locks, came when Chris Caperton summoned him. He was too insignificant a demon to refuse, no matter how ineptly couched the invocation. But he was less than cooperative.
    Chris used Siri’s blood to draw the pentagram of Solomon on the floor. He didn’t think about what he was doing … that he was dipping his finger in the blood of the woman who lay covered with a sheet on the sofa … that he had to do it repeatedly because it was getting thick … that he had been warned all ten sides of the five-pointed star enclosed in a circle must be without break … he just did it. He did not cry. He just did it.
    Then he set candles at the five points and lighted them. Every apartment in Saigon in those days had a supply of candles.
    Then he stood in the exact center of the runes and lines and read from the dictation he had taken. Siri had assured him if he stayed within the pentagram he would be safe, that Surgat only opened locks and was not really powerful enough to cause him trouble … if he kept his wits about him.
    The words were contained in the Grimorium Verum and Siri had said they need not be spoken precisely, nor need Chris worry about having done the special cleansing necessary when summoning the more powerful Field Marshals of Lucifer’s Infernal Legions.
    He read the words. “I conjure thee, Surgat, by the great living God, the Sovereign Creator of all things, to appear under a comely human form, without noise and without terror, to answer truly unto all questions that I shall ask thee. Hereunto I conjure thee by the virtue of these Holy and Sacred Names. O Surmy †  Delmusan † Atalsloym † Charusihoa † Melany † Liamintho † Colehon † Paron † Madoin † Merloy † Bulerator † Donmeo † Hone † Peloym † Ibasil † Meon…” And on and on, eighteen more names, concluding with, “Come, therefore, quickly and peaceably, by the Names Adonai, Elohim, Tetragrammaton! Come!”
    From across the Saigon River he could hear the sound of the city’s rockets, flattening Charlie’s supposed emplacements. But in the little apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street everything began to shimmer and wash down like the aurora borealis.
    It was an apartment no longer. He stood on the polished