Free The Mona Lisa Sacrifice by Peter Roman

the other one. I think running all those armies and torturing all those people is getting to you.”
    “I can only imagine,” I said.
    I once found Alice by reading an article in a magazine about multiple universes. When I finished the article, Alice was sitting in the chair beside me, wearing a bridal gown and knitting a hat for someone who had a head at least three times the size of mine.
    “They have it all wrong,” she’d said that time. “There aren’t any other universes. There are only other books.”
    Make of that what you will.
    Now she stepped back and twirled her hair with a finger. “So,” she said, “what brings you here?” She looked around. “Where are we anyway?” she asked.
    “Paris,” I told her, and then I added the year. Just in case.
    “Ohhh, I like Paris,” she said and smiled. “You should see the things people do in the stacks sometimes.”
    “I need to find out something,” I told her and pulled her into one of those stacks.
    “Me too,” she said, nodding. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. That was Alice. So I carried on.
    “I don’t suppose you know where Judas is?” I asked.
    “Of course I do,” she said, pulling some of her hair out of her head with that same finger. “He’s where he always is.”
    “And where’s that?” I asked. I tried not to get my hopes up.
    She tapped me on the forehead. “In here, of course,” she said. Then she noticed the hair wrapped around her finger. She stared at it like she didn’t know where it came from.
    I always asked Alice about Judas, and she always gave me an answer like that. Maybe she was trying to be philosophical. And you thought the
Wonderland
books were hard to read.
    Right, next.
    “You know the gorgon in the Louvre?” I asked her.
    She nodded again. “I’ve read everything about her,” she said. “Even her diaries. She just needs to find the right man.”
    “That could be tricky,” I said. “And it’s not my problem. But I do need to find her head.”
    “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “It’s where it’s always been. Well, not always of course. Because once upon a time it was on her neck and shoulders.”
    I waited. Patience is a virtue and all that, especially with Alice.
    “And after that, of course, it was at the bottom of the sea until the kraken found it and wore it as a charm for one of its tentacles. But then Ahab cut that tentacle off when he fought the kraken. So I guess it wasn’t that good of a charm.”
    “I thought all the krakens were dead,” I said.
    “Not the ghost krakens,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.
    “Of course,” I said. “Pardon me.”
    “And then what happened to it?” she asked, scrunching her eyes tight. “Hmm, let me see.”
    I watched a mother try to pull her son into the children’s section, but he screamed and ran away at the sight of Alice.
    “Oh yes,” Alice said. “Then a sea diver found it and took it back to his tribe. They all thought it was the skull of one of their gods, but she’s not really a god, you know, she’s—”
    “Condensed version?” I suggested.
    Alice pouted at me. “What will you give me for my library?” she asked.
    I’d already figured that one out. “A memory of Xanadu,” I said. “Back before the phoenix destroyed it.”
    Alice made a face. She brushed the hair from her hand. She pulled off her hat and looked inside it, then pulled out the bones of some small creature.
    “I already have memories of it,” she said, dropping the bones behind some of the children’s books on the shelf. “There was a man with a secret library who used to make me the
best
tea. It tasted like spider webs. Do you have anything better?”
    I thought of Penelope, of our kiss in the Montparnasse cemetery, but I didn’t want to offer Alice that memory.
    It was too late though.
    “That’s a nice one,” Alice said. “I’ll take it.” I tried not to cry out and wail like the children. And just like that, as what felt like a