He stood up and walked slowly to the door. I thought he might open it on the storm and 
I hunkered my shoulders, ready for the blast. I would not even consider asking him to 
keep it shut. After all he had done, if he wanted to see the snow, I wouldn't deny him 
anything.
  
  But he lifted his arms. And without the door being opened, there came a blast of wind 
and his figure paled, seemed to swirl for a moment, its colors and textures mingled in a 
vortex and then vanished.
  
  Spellbound, I rose from my place by the fire. I held the bowl to my chest in a 
desperate childlike gesture.
  
  The wind died away. He was nowhere to be seen, and then, when the wind came again, it 
was hot: a blast as if from a furnace.
  
  Azriel stood opposite the fire, looking at me. Same white shirt, same black pants. The 
same dark black hair of his chest thick beneath his open collar.
  
  "Will I never be nefeshf" he asked. "That is, body and soul together."
  
  I knew the Hebrew word.
  
  I sat him down. He said he could drink water. He said that all ghosts and spirits could 
drink water, and they drank up the scents of sacrifice and that was why all the ancient 
talk of libations and of incense, of burnt offerings and of smoke rising from the altars. 
He drank the water, and it seemed to relax him again.
  
  He sat back in one of my many cracked and broken leather chairs, oblivious to its worn 
crevices and rips. He put his feet up on the stone hearth, and I saw his shoes were still 
wet.
  
  I finished my meal, cleared it away, and came back with the picture of Esther. At this 
round hearth, six people could have sat in a circle.
  
  We were near to one another, near enough, him with his back to the desk and beyond it 
the door, and I with my back to the warmer, smaller, darker corner of the room in my 
favorite chair, of broken springs and round fat arms, stained from careless wine and 
coffee.  I looked at her. She was half a page, in this the recurrent story of her death 
which had been retold only because of Gregory's downfall.
  
  "He killed her, didn't he?" I said. "It was the first assassination."
  
  "Yes," Azriel answered. I marveled that his eyebrows could be so thick, beautiful and 
brooding, and yet his mouth so gentle as he smiled. There was no double to die in her 
place. He killed his own stepdaughter.
  
  "That's when I came, you see," he went on. "That's when I came out of the darkness as 
if called by the master sorcerer, only there was none. I appeared fully formed and 
hurrying down the New York street, only to witness her death, her cruel death, and to 
kill those who killed her."
  
  "The three men? The men who stabbed Esther Belkin?"  He didn't answer. I remembered. 
The men had been stabbed with their own ice picks only a block and a half away from the 
crime. So thick was the crowd on Fifth Avenue that day that no one even connected the 
deaths of three street toughs with the slaughter of the beautiful girl inside the 
fashionable store of Henri Bendel. Only the next day had the ice picks told the story of 
blood, her blood on three, their blood on the one chosen by someone to do away with them.
  
  "I suppose I thought it was part of his plot, then," I said. "She was killed by 
terrorists, he said, and he had disposed of those henchmen so that he might make the lie 
bigger and bigger."
  
  "No, those henchmen were to get away, so that he could make the lie of the terrorists 
bigger and bigger. But I came there, and I killed them." He looked at me. "She saw me 
through the window before she died, the window of the ambulance that came to take her 
away, and she said my name: 'Azriel.' "
  
  "Then she called you."
  
  "No, she was no sorceress; she didn't know the words. She didn't have the Bones. I was 
the Servant of the Bones." He fell back in the chair. Quiet, looking at the fire, his 
eyes fierce and thick with dark curling eyelashes, the bones of his forehead strong as 
the line of his jaw.
  
  After a long time he cast on me the most bright and innocent boyish smile. "You're well 
now, Jonathan. You're cured of your fever." He laughed.
  
  "Yes," I said. I lay back enjoying the dry warmth of the room, the smell of burning 
oak. I drank the coffee until I tasted the grounds in my teeth, then I put the cup on the 
circular stone hearth. "Will you let me record what you tell me?" I asked.
  
  The light shone bright in his face again. With a boy's enthusiasm, he leant forward in 
the chair, his massive hands on his knees. "Would you do it? Would you write down what I 
tell you?"
  
  "I have a machine," I said, "that will remember every word for us."
  
  "Oh, yes, I know," he said. He smiled contentedly and put his head back. "You mustn't 
think me an addlebrained spirit, Jonathan. The Servant of the Bones was never that.
  
  "I was made a strong spirit, I was made what the Chaldeans would have called a genii. 
When brought forth, I knew all that I should know-of the times, of the language, of the 
ways of the world near and far-all I need to know to serve my Master."
  
  I begged him to wait. "Let me turn on our little recorder," I said.
  
  It felt good to stand up, for my head not to swim, for my chest not to ache, and for 
most of the blur of the fever to have been banished.
  
  I put down two small machines, as all of us do who have lost a tale through one. I