Kage by John Donohue

she’s found another way to squeeze money out of her
    guests, I guess.”
    “She’s an evil genius,” I laughed.
    Charlie Fiorella made his way to the car and looked at me
    over the open door. “Hey. That’s my employer you’re talking
    about. I prefer to think of her as a fearsome yet creative pres-
    ence.” He gave me a grin and drove away.
    I spent most of that day getting organized and dreaming up
    a strategy. I had some biographical stuff on Westmann and a
    list of all his book publications. I’d also searched the Internet
    for any related sites that could flesh out his profile. I got into
    some on-line archives that had old reviews of each of his works.
    I did a lot of cutting and pasting and saving stuff to disk.
    But I knew that I was simply dodging the inevitable. Even-
    tually, I was actually going to have to read all the stuff he wrote.
    I had a vague recollection of looking at his books years ago
    when I was young and impressionable. Even then, as naïve as
    I was, I had put Westmann’s work down, convinced that the
    guy was a fraud. And I had seen nothing in the literature from
    the academic community that suggested anything different.
    Yet it was a type of opinion that was widely held even though
    the reasons were not particularly well documented. People had
    suggested that Westmann had recycled excerpts from various
    obscure tomes, fit them together into an outlandish fantasy of
    his own making, and then tried to pass it off as scholarship.
    In some ways it was a beautiful scheme. The world of aca-
    demia is like most other worlds—filled with fine people, but
    also with its share of freaks and phonies. Mainstream schol-
    ars dismissed Westmann, but somewhere in the few thousand
    obscure little colleges around the country you could always
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    find some charlatan with a shaky Ph.D. who’d defend what one
    book dust jacket described as “a groundbreaking exploration
    of a secret world of mystic warriors, penned by a courageous
    scholar.”
    In the post-modern academic world, truth is often alleged
    to be relative. Westmann’s stuff didn’t seem plausible? Who are
    we to denigrate an individual’s unique perspective? Nobody
    seemed to be able to substantiate his claims? Nobody could
    locate the leader of the secret society who was his main infor-
    mant? Easily explained. It’s a secret society.
    It all made me roll my eyes. Serious readers with any famil-
    iarity with the topic would simply dismiss Westmann’s stuff.
    And few people would have the need or the time to do a very
    thorough research job to prove or disprove his veracity. Only a
    nut would devote any time to this.
    Or someone in the pay of Westmann’s daughter.
    I sighed and pulled his books off the shelf, lining up cop-
    ies of reviews for each of them. Then I went back to the Web,
    tried to track the book reviewers down, and e-mailed a message
    outlining my purpose to the ones who were still alive, asking
    whether they could point me in any direction. No sense rein-
    venting the wheel.
    The task was uninspiring and I grew antsy. I looked out
    through the wall of glass at the shifting patterns on the des-
    ert floor below me. I thought about the group from the hotel.
    Maybe a little hike to end the day?
    The van with the tourists was long gone. I headed over to
    the gravel path that led out into the rough terrain around the
    property. A finely-crafted wooden sign with a vaguely Indian
    stick figure pointed the way onward. Who was I to argue?
    The sun was dropping down and the wind, while hot,
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    offered the illusion of relief. I wandered down the track, think-
    ing of nothing in particular, just glad to be moving. I could see
    boot prints from the tourist group in the dust on the path. It
    wound up and down slight inclines. In a few places, it paralleled
    the edge of the ridge to permit panoramic views of the desert
    floor. The rocks around me were awash in the rose-orange glow
    of a setting sun, silent