Cat in a Kiwi Con A Midnight Louie Mystery
, by Douglas, Carole Nelson
- ISBN: 9780812584257 | 0812584252
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 4/15/2001
Midnight Louie, the purring P.I., is a jet-black sleuth making his twelfth outing in Carole Nelson Douglas's Cat in a Kiwi Con. While his human partner, public relations whiz Temple Barr, and her significant other, ex-magician Max Kinsella, are bespelled by murder most magical on a Las Vegas university campus, Louie has followed the lethal and lovely Siamese, Hyacinth, into the world's largest science fiction and fantasy convention, GigantiCon. They're all there: Hercules and Xena, elves and aliens, captains and crew, and Godzillions of fans-both in costume and out. When a prominent player is killed, not only is the method of death perplexing, but the suspects in this case are a very unusual cast of thousands. Soon it becomes clear that none of the investigators are safe in an atmosphere that provides cover not only for an unknown murderer, but for an antagonist in an alien guise who is after the hides of each and every one of them. Joining in the fantasy-in-progress may be their only hope.
Chapter 1
Wake-up Calls
Carmen Molina brushed her heavy dark hair as if she were beating it, heaved a sigh at herself in the mirror, then slammed the brush down on the toilet tank top.
The swamp cooler in the hall made the old house's air dank and faintly chill, and turned her usually straight thick hair into a fright-wig frizz. She scowled at her ungovernable mirror image. All the better to scare you with, you crooks! Who cared that a homicide lieutenant had split ends? Not she.
Still, smearing a streak of Nearly Natural Rose lipstick over her mouth, which acted more as balm than cosmetic, she couldn't help noticing that her recent work schedule showed. Her half-Latina, light-olive skin always looked jaundiced when she was tired or sick. Her brilliant blue eyes only highlighted the tendency.
“Thanks for the off-the-wall genes, Dad,” she muttered to the mirror, fighting the tiny twist-off cap from a pot of the cream blush she used to simulate health. Then she dabbed some stuff the Penney's sales clerk had called concealer under her eyes. The fatigue smudges still leaked through, but less bruisingly. There. Reasonably presentable for another twelve-hour day.
“Mariah!” she yelled into the house's other rooms. “Are you eating breakfast? We've got to get going this morning.”
“Yeah!” came the return yell. “Cereal and skim milk.”
“Good!” Carmen sighed again. Her resolve to lower the tone of domestic life by only talking when in the same room was not working out lately. “Be right in.”
“The cats want the cereal.”
“Let them get their own Special K!”
Carmen rushed through the bedroom, grabbing essentials to stuff into blazer pockets: car keys, ID, wallet, change, file (a ragged nail would nag at her all day), pausing only to unlock the gun safe and move the .38 to her ankle holster. Some detectives-turned-desk-jockeys didn't carry, but she'd patrolled the streets of south L.A. for too long not to prepare for sudden violence anywhere, anytime.
Tabitha and Catarina, the two half-grown tiger-striped cats, were indeed nosing the bowls of milk-drenched cold cereal on the kitchen table. Carmen swept into the room, swept the cats to the floor, and sat herself down.
Mariah leaned against the countertop, slurping soggy cereal into the nooks and crannies of her braces. Off in another year, hallelujah!
“You gonna be late again tonight?” her daughter managed between munches.
“Probably. Why? Got a hot date?”
“Fun-nee.” Mariah made a revolted face that could have been inspired by either the cold breakfast or the maternal crack.
Carmen started mashing her own cud, not too guilty about cold cereal as long as it was fortified with vitamins and fiber. Mariah was in that same mushy stage of development, her body amorphous with baby fat that might melt off (or might not), her glossy dark hair cut in a less-childish bob lately, her green-white-and-navy-plaid school-uniform jumper as loose and unrevealing as the sloppy T-shirts and baggy shorts the public school kids wore as their own uniform. At twelve-wanting-to-go-on-twenty, she was both intrigued and scared green by the boy-girl dance already rearing its preacne head in the sixth grade.
“What about the weekend?” Mariah asked.
“My, I'm in sudden demand around here. What about the weekend?”
“Moth-er. You promised. Will you be off?”
“1 don't know yet. What promise?”
“You know.”
“Not any more.” Carmen chewed amiably, intercepting Catarina as she lofted onto the table top again, and placing the young cat firmly on her lap for a forcible petting.
Mariah sighed, a much bigger and better public production than her mother's smothered private exhalations. “I don't see why I can't go alone.”
“Because you're not old enough,” Carmen answered automatically, running her eyes over the front page. No new murders. Yet. “Go where?”
“How can you forget? The big con.”
“Con?” Carmen frowned. The word meant “scam” to her.
“Convention. You know. At the new hotel. The biggest science fiction convention ever. Everyone will be there, Xena and Hercules and Buffy and those X-Files people you watch and a bunch of kids and actors and writers and artists. ‘TitaniCon. The King of Cons.'”
“King of cons? Oh, don't remind me.…” Carmen shook her head. At least he was out of her life. She'd avoided getting drawn into that wacko Elvis case, although she'd heard about it.
“The biggest ever.” Mariah was still young enough to believe that bigness alone was a convincing recommendation. A true child of Las Vegas.
Carmen shoved aside the empty cereal bowl and crinkled newspaper, then pulled the coffee mug she'd microwaved before dashing into the bedroom, front and center. The contents were still steaming. Ah.
“I'm sorry, honey. You did tell me something about this ‘con' thing. What is it again?”
Now that she had the floor, words seemed to fail Mariah. “It's …everybody goes and some of them dress up, and it's for all the science fiction books and comics and TV shows and movies. You know.”
“Kids go?”
“Sure. Who do you think reads and watches this stuff?”
“Will there be adults present?”
“Who do you think writes and acts in this stuff?”
“But it's not supervised?”
“Well, the hotel is supervising it, I guess.”
“That's not good enough. I'm not going to let a twelve-year-old wander alone through some kind of weird exhibition.”
“It's not weird, it's fun! And it's only this weekend. Ever. It's to open the New Millennium.”
Carmen shook her head, watching frustration evolve into loss on her daughter's face. “This weekend.”
“Starting Thursday. Through Monday. But Saturday and Sunday's the best time to go.”
“Mariah, I just can't promise anything in the next few days. You know how my work runs in frantic streaks. This is one of them.”
“Please!”
And how many times had Carmen wailed that word into the impassive refusal of her mother's face? The two eternal one-word pleas of powerless childhood. ¿Por qué? Why? And por favor. Please. She supposed that she even looked like her mother by now. Actually, those two words were as significant for adults, too.
“Maybe,” she said, wanting to bite her tongue already. “Maybe I can manage something. I'll see today what I can do.”
“But today's Tuesday!”
Carmen stood, dislodging the purring cat. If only kids purred and asked for things with the silent meow. “We have until Thursday, right? Besides, you can't take off from school.”
“It's open in the evening.”
“And you're going to go over there in the evening? Solo? Not you, niña. Now. Did you do the cat box?”
“Oh…right away.” She turned and raced off to handle the chore, sure to be a model kid until she got what she wanted.
Carmen Molina smiled. If only she had this TitaniCon to motivate her child every weekend.
* * *
Matt Devine yawned and checked his watch, then glanced at the phone.
He really should act on the small item in the morning paper. For some eerie reason, while checking out the “Lifestyles” section, his eye had snagged on a small-type name he knew. And that had reminded him of his “homework” assignment.
Not really homework, but part of his journey of personal growth, he pointed out to himself, tongue-in-cheek. Personal growth. Matt winced at the expression. His mouth felt as if he had gargled cod liver oil.
He yawned again. Just a nervous gesture. A delaying tactic.
Swallow your medicine, he told himself. And do it fast, before you taste it.
He picked up the tiny notepad that held the few business and personal phone numbers in the brave new universe of a thirty-something ex-priest-turned-radio-shrink who was wrestling with making a living, making friends, and making time for a social life, maybe even a sexual one.
He paused to consider the bizarre array of phone numbers, another delaying tactic, but it provided a certain self-insight: his fellow-tenant Temple's number, number one. His landlady Electra's. ConTact, the hotline counseling service he had worked for full-time until recently. (Now he only needed to sub occasionally as an unpaid volunteer. He missed the gang, but he was part of another, smaller one.) Next the number for the radio station that paid him so handsomely he felt guilty, WCOO. Also the home phone number of Leticia Brown, his producer and the on-air personality known as Ambrosia. Tony Fortunato, his agent's number. Agent! Homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina's work number. His mother's number in Chicago. Frank's number at the FBI- The ex-priests' group contact number. The 1800 number of the Amanda talk show.
By their phone books ye shall know them.
He laughed to and at himself. This freebie notepad advertising a local pharmacy felt too confining and informal for such a heavy load of whose and wheres and wherefores. Get thee to a stationery store and buy some slick address book.
Or did single men not do that sort of organizing thing? Little black books, that's what bachelors had. Did men of the world keep track of business and pleasure separately: Rolodexes for work and the infamous little black book for play?
Matt looked at the last number listed in his meager litany of friends and acquaintances made in the last year. The offbeat “business” number he was hesitating to punch in had been there for just two weeks.
Might as well get it over with. Maybe no one would answer. Ten A.M. He was just rising after his midnight stint on the radio advice show, but most people would be out and about at this hour.
So…chances were pretty good that he wouldn't connect this time.
Nothing to do but try, no matter how half-heartedly. This would be good for him.
He pressed the numerical sequence, realizing his throat had gone dry and his palms damp. On the third ring, someone answered.
After the opening “hello” and “hi,” he got to the nitty-gritty without preamble. An aftertaste of psychic cod liver oil hovered like halitosis over the mouthpiece.
“I thought,” Matt said, finally coming right out with it, “that we should get together.”
* * *
Max Kinsella contemplated the noble fir tree.
Lots of noble fir trees.
The University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus was infected with them. They cozied up to the bunkerlike architecture the desert climate inspired like arthritic great-aunts and great-uncles braced by the picnic tables at a family reunion. Their roof-high, time-twisted limbs and leaning trunks both depended on and buttressed the buildings. Like most people, they were part clinging vine and part stalwart support.
Max loped along the endless walks between the scattered buildings, nimbly dodging the press of students ambling between classes, feeling the exhilaration of running an informal obstacle course. He didn't get out among crowds often but had always liked them, sensed them as a kinetic flow, himself as a random element avoiding collision and detection, almost as if he could remain invisible by avoiding the accidental contact, as he used to imagine when he had been a child…as he had faithfully practiced both personally and professionally since he had so suddenly become a man in northern Ireland, ages and instants ago.
He always walked like a man in a hurry, unless he wanted to give a different impression; then, he seemed to move so slowly some people mistook him for indolent.
Today he was eager to get where he was going; once there, he would power down into slow motion. A man six-feet-four always needed to make less of himself, especially in his profession.
Although no longer a practicing magician, his biological clock was on performance-schedule time still. After years of late-night gigs, it seemed indecent to be out and about before eleven A.M.
It was too easy to wander into academic buildings. Max found easy entry disappointing. It made him feel he was alone in the world, and the building did seem strangely deserted. He took the stairs two at a time, his rubber-soled shoes hardly making a sound in the echoing space.
Arriving unannounced had become a habit.
Chapter 2
Syn Thesis
Max followed the numbered doors down the empty hall until he arrived at the one he sought.
He entered without knocking, not knowing if the room would be occupied or not. It didn't matter. Either way, he would come away with the information he sought. The only unknown was whether it would be given to him, or if he would take it
As quiet as the grave.
Like any good break-in artist, Max first looked for another way out, and found it: a closed door leading to an adjoining room. Next he looked for signs of recent occupation: a cooling coffee mug, car keys splayed on the paperwork, an open briefcase, an uncapped pen or unretracted ballpoint
Despite a desktop buried beneath an arrangement of papers in the shape of an Aztec step-pyramid, the room seemed decently deserted.
Max riffled through a few steps of the pyramid and scanned the bookshelves. All he found were student papers and dusty Ph.D. theses. The topics were intriguing, from Mayan magicians to shamans in Siberia and Tibet.
But he wasn't interested in ancient magic.
He turned the brushed chrome knob on the exit door as delicately as if it led to a safe.
He sensed a much larger room beyond before he had opened the door a few inches. Maybe it was a hint of chill air. He stepped through into the cool even light of overhead fluorescent lamps.
The space was classic institutional twentieth century. Mottled-beige vinyl tiles turned the floor into a monotone chessboard. A larger-scale chessboard of plastic light grids and acoustical tile stretched above. Distant windows set in aluminum-silver frames let in daylight so transparent it hardly cast a shadow.
But besides more bookshelves and cabinets and files, all in shades of the same bland putty-blond that covered monitors and computer towers and printers these days, the large room offered a man-made forest in its center. Aluminum-framed pegboard uprights held framed posters, forming an oversized book of magic acts of all times and places to page through.
In the lukewarm light, too dim for an exhibition and too bright for any dramatic effects, Houdini's eyes glared like an animal's from his chain-bound form.
Other eyes from this impressive convocation, a magician's Hall of Fame, watched Max from their hand-tinted or printed posters.
What he was looking for was here among the hinged panels. Max edged toward the dead and living magicians as silently as they regarded him. He moved down the line, flipping the huge panels from side to side, never sure whose hypnotic glance would confront him next.
Meeting Gandolph the Great, for instance, only two flips past a section on Blackstone was a shock.
Max stared at a poster image of his now-dead mentor looking as he had before Max had been born. He hadn't recognized him for an instant. The young Gandolph could have played a slight, mischievous Puck pulling back the curtain on a slumbering Bottom. He was not the sedate, heavy-set middle-aged man Max had known.
Then Max focused on the figure he had really been searching for: the girl in the background, smiling like a model in an Ipana ad, and as much ancient history as Gandolph and that vintage brand of toothpaste were. Max couldn't smile back at Gandolph and his long-ago assistant, Gloria Fuentes, both grinning in youthful glory, and both grinning corpses now. Both dead in mysterious, possibly murderous circumstances. Both filed away in unsolved case files.
Max contemplated the gaudy poster and the almost cartoon-quality poses of the figures. When this was made, Gandolph's retreat to Europe was unthinkable, and the pretty girl with the pertly posed bare legs was dreaming of fame and fortune. They had been employer-employee, but also friends. Max remembered Gandolph grinning to recollect his heyday when he worked with the “Girl of Many Parts,” especially in the severed lady illusion. Gloria would wave her graceful, perfectly manicured fingers and wiggle her lively, perfectly painted toes from various apertures. She would fold that perfect 36-24-36 body in hiding places behind and under and between, always unseen while in “plain sight.”
She would have needed to be agile and quick. It made Max wonder how someone had been able to slip up behind her with a garotte many years later. Tricking others made you a harder target to catch off-guard.
He flipped the panel, looking for more posters featuring his dead friend and the more recently dead assistant. One flick of the wrist revealed something unexpected behind the pegboard: a bald, youngish man in thick, black-framed glasses standing on the other side, who produced a grin as wide as Gandolph's upon seeing him.
“I thought I heard someone in here,” the gnome noted.
Max was startled. He refused to show it, but Max was shocked speechless. Adrenaline charged through his synapses. He was used to causing these effects, not suffering them.
“The Mystifying Max, I presume.” The man's impish grin never subsided. “What a surprise. Your posters are on the other side of the row, if that's what you're looking for.”
“I'm not.”
This isn't a vanity call?” the man asked. “You aren't aching to see where you fit in my informal Hall of Fame?”
“Obviously,” Max said, vanishing behind the panel containing Gandolph, “I fit here.”
The man quickly pulled the panel away again, but by men Max was no longer there. The man laughed with delight, then ducked under the panels to the other side.
“So few credit the magician's truly awesome physical abilities,” he said, looking around.
Of course he saw nothing.
He sighed. “I always admire a good illusion, but I'm afraid it's my delusion that I'd really like to talk to you. If you came here, I can only hope you'd like to talk to me.”
A clap of hands echoed sharply in the exhibition rooms. The man turned, to find Max behind him. He lifted an eyebrow.
“You're right,” Max said. “Mere acrobatics. But I'm a bit rusty.”
The man nodded, sympathetically. “Almost a year, isn't it?” He put out a small, neat hand. “Jefferson Mangel, professor.”
“Mystifying Max, retired.”
“A shame. I won't ask why. It's enough that I should benefit from a…visitation. Look, here's your section.”
“Section?”
“Oh, yes. I'm quite an admirer. I like them all, even the hopelessly hokey, but the truly elegant are a vanishing breed.”
Max bowed, watching the years of his career flash by under the professor's riffling fingers. “Heidelberg?” he interrupted. “You have Heidelberg? I was an apprentice then still.”
Max's control wavered again. He had looked impossibly young in that poster so far in his past. He had never kept scrapbooks; it was too dangerous. Unsettling that this man had scrounged together more shards of his life in magic than he had.
“You were always interesting,” Mangel said. “Most American magicians don't start in Europe. Old World audiences are very demanding.”
“A good place to start then.”
“I guess. Say, would you like a cup of tea? Or there might be some German beer in the fridge.”
“Most professors don't have German beer in the fridge.”
“I'm an unconventional professor. Tolerated, but considered a bit manic on my favorite subject. The only reason I survive in academe is that I stress the metaphysical aspect of magic.”
“The theory that magic is a metaphor.”
“You've heard of my class?”
“I've heard of the theory.” Max followed the professor to a small room off the exhibition area, where kitchen counters surrounded a table and four chairs.
“Tea or beer?” Mangel asked.
“British or German? I'll take the beer, Professor.”
He nodded. “Call me…I was about to say ‘Jefferson,' but lately I've been reminded how stuffy that is.” He smiled in remembrance of some incident. “Call me Jeff.”
“Jeff.” Max sat, looked around, felt oddly at home.
Jeff threw him a happy, nervous glance as he decapitated the metal tops off two tall brown bottles. “I can't tell you how pleased I am to meet you. I've seen your various acts a few times. I'm not surprised that you quit the circuit, but I sure am sorry.”
“Why aren't you surprised? I was.”
“Well.” Jeff sat across from him, grinning like a twelve-year-old. “Every top-drawer magician ends up in Vegas with a shot at a big-money hotel contract. You were one, you were here, and I always felt you were, simply put, too good for Vegas.”
“But you just said Vegas is the pinnacle.”
“For a certain kind of magic. Larger-than-life magic. Inflated magic, I guess, like the stock market. The kind that can crash from its own bloated overweight. Your magic was always…imperially slim.”
“And thus prone to self-destruct. I've read the poem, too.”
“Ah, but to look at it in passing…the envy of all. Why have you come here?”
“Not to look at myself in passing. I'm an admirer of Gandolph.”
“An interesting magician. He turned his back on the art and became obsessed with uncloaking psychic frauds. Too bad.”
“You prefer that psychic frauds remain cloaked?”
“No. I prefer that good magicians practice their art. But they generally grow old, exhaust themselves, and develop a conscience.”
“Is that what you think I've done?” Max took a long swallow of the excellent lager.
“You? No. You had years of performing left in you, perhaps a lifetime. Gandolph, though…”
“You disapprove of his crusade to unmask psychic tricks?”
“I have no right to disapprove of anything. People who fool needy hearts into believing the impossible are uncommon crooks and should do time. I just hate to see good illusionists devote their old age to stripping away illusions.”
“You, and the Synth.”
Jeff choked on his beer. When he could speak again, he asked, “The…what?”
“You heard me. And you've heard of the Synth. Why does it frighten you?”
Jeff's hand ran over his bald head, as if in search of hair mat used to be there to run his fingers through. “The Synth. I've never discussed it with anyone. Just read about it, here and there between the lines, in my magic books.” His bright glance darted away like a minnow. “It's…been mentioned for an impossibly long time. I'm talking Medieval times. Syntheology.”
Max smiled at the coined term. “It was a system? Like alchemy and alchemists?”
“Not like alchemists. People were fascinated by them and what they purported to do. People feared the Synth.”
“It can't have been connected to magic then,” Max suggested.
“Magic is connected to the mysteries of religion and ritual, and both of those were dominant forces then,” Jeff said. “And both inspire fear.”
“Gandolph died last fall,” Max said abruptly. “Did you know that he died in disguise?”
“No. Why would he be in disguise?”
Max shrugged. The mysteries of Gandolph were not his to reveal. “Gloria Fuentes is dead, too,” he added casually, watching.
“Gloria? I didn't hear anything about it.”
“The police don't want you to.”
“Police? Then her death was suspicious, too?”
“Her death was murder, plain and simple.”
Jeff's fingers now riffled into the sides of his nonexistent hair, and ended up cradling his face. “Gandolph. And now Gloria…”
“You know something about her?”
Jeff shook his head over the bottle of beer. “Only that she'd come in a couple of times lately. Come to think of it, she was asking about Gandolph, wondered if I'd acquired any ‘artifacts' from his estate. She seemed more than simply saddened.…I'd say ‘distressed' by his death.”
“She should have been. It was suspicious.”
“How do you know?”
“I'm a magician. Suspicious circumstances are my stock in trade. Both detecting them, and using them.”
“Gloria dead. I can't believe it. Her coming here just a few days ago. And now you.” Jeff looked up, shock turning into suspicion. “And that, that charming PR woman who was so interested in Gloria. Don't tell me she's dead, too.”
“Better not be,” Max said, almost growled, surprised by the thought into anxiety. “What information do you have on the Synth?”
“A few old books and vague references, that's all. You think that—?”
“I think that I'd better see all you've got.”
“How are you involved in this?”
“I'm a retired magician,” Max said. “What else do I have to do but meddle?”
They left their beer bottles half full and withdrew to the professor's office, where he said the oldest books were kept. After they entered, Jeff Mangel turned to lock the door to the exhibition rooms.
“Good idea. Even the display panels may have ears.” Max sat on the small side chair meant for students, feeling like a Swiss army knife confined to a pincushion. He guessed that Jeff's sudden smile was a compact man's reaction to Max's long, angular form overlapping the chair.
The professor turned his back to conceal that smile, then pulled down one narrow-bound title after another from the shelves. “I wish I had a suitably impressive volume for the subject matter.”
“Such as…?”
“Oh, some gigantic tome bound in sharkskin with a water-buffalo-horn clasp studded with Russian cherry amber like drops of blood. All I have are a selection of bound theses.”
Max eyed the half dozen slim volumes. “Not too impressive. Yet they mention the Synth? I'd never heard of it until Gandolph's death last fall.”
“I hadn't heard of it until a couple of years ago. That's when I started hunting down references. Not a single contemporary history of magic mentions the Synth. But the ancient texts do, and these obscure papers started doing so about fifty years ago.”
“Really. Then the…movement, or whatever it is,…is a revival.”
“Possibly.” Jeff was paging through the soft-bound books.
Max glimpsed typescript. These booklets weren't even printed, but were merely bound versions of typed academic papers. “Who wrote these?”
“Mostly communications majors with stage experience. Our proximity to the Strip encourages taking magic as a performance art more seriously than it is elsewhere.”
“Hence your exhibition.”
“No, my exhibition is a personal enthusiasm. My collection was outgrowing my home, so I ‘donated' it to the university.”
“What do you have on Gandolph and Gloria Fuentes?”
Professor Mangel turned to a computer at right angles to his desk. “More than I have on the Synth. And on you. Your background was always appropriately mysterious. Let's see.…Gandolph is extensively documented, from “Local Boy Waves Wand” in his hometown paper to “Ex-magician Pries into the Paranormal” just a few weeks before his death. Gloria was pretty much a background figure in the posters and photos, and stayed that way after Gandolph retired.”
“Can you print out that list of articles on Gandolph?”
“Sure.” He tapped the appropriate keys. A printer was soon spitting out pages.
Jeff turned back to Max. “Can you enlighten me about your disappearance after the Goliath engagement?”
“Personal business.”
“Somehow I suspect that you're going to tell me the Synth is personal business, too.”
“It is. In fact, I'd appreciate you keeping my…reappearance quiet.”
Jeff shook his head. “This is maddening for a scholar of magic like myself.”
Max relaxed into a smile. “Lend me that pile of Ph.D. papers, and I'll tell you about some of my special effects.”
“But nothing on the Synth.”
“No.”
“Nothing on Gandolph's death.”
“No.”
“Nothing on Gloria Fuente's death, either.”
“No.”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the professor charged in frustration.
“A ‘foolish' consistency,” Max corrected. “A wise consistency is the mark of good magic acts, and a few other things.” Max leaned forward to take the thin volumes, and printout, in one hand.
Professor Mangel stood, too, though the effect was less majestic. His next words, however, had the sound of a formal incantation.
“‘The Magician has characteristics in common with those of the criminal, of the actor, and of the priest.' I wonder in which role you are acting so mysteriously now.”
“‘Wonder.' That's the name of all their games, isn't it? You know you'd hate it if it were too easy. Walk me out and we'll talk.”
They were silent as they left the building, until they were on the now-deserted walks. Class was in session all over campus, and here, perhaps, too.
“Your finale,” the professor began. “A mélange of Cirque du Soleil, Houdini, modern dance, and shell game. An extraordinarily busy ending for a one-man show. How did you manage it?”
Max laughed. “A high price for the rental of a few obscure books, professor. Are you sure you want to ruin the illusion?”
He shrugged. “A dark stage, a strobe light flashing. You illuminated at every flash: high in the air, walking on air. Here, there, everywhere, like the ‘demmed illusive Pimpernel' from the classic swashbuckler. And with every revelation, white cockatoos seeming to perch on your shoulders, until the strobe light finally stopped, and the stage lights came on. You stood alone, in black, against a black curtain, against a tiered living curtain of hundreds of cockatoos on perches of various heights, making a kind of feathered fountain. It was spectacular.”
“Since working solo in Vegas is considered a sign of stinginess, my only choice was to multiply myself.” Max hesitated. “I find myself almost unable to reveal my secrets.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
The two men paused in the absolute open, no building, no tree, no human being near them.
Jeff Mangel smacked his lips, a gesture of considered thought with him.
“I mentioned Houdini. He was a master of the staged event and the meticulously practiced and engineered illusion. Most people think magic is ninety percent tricks. But, like inspiration, with Houdini it was ninety percent perspiration. He was strong beyond belief and acrobatically adept in a way his muscle-mishapen body gave the lie to. I suspect sheer acrobatic mastery accounts for you appearing at such different points on the stage during the split-second flash of a strobe light, and meticulous timing, of course. One missed beat, and you would have been caught in the act of moving, instead of being showcased as having moved at inhuman speed. Every image was a bow of sorts. Did you conceive it all yourself?”
“I work alone,” Max said firmly.
“No man is an island,” Professor Mangel said as firmly. At Max's expression, he grimaced, then gestured to a bench under a towering pine tree. “Sit down. Let me interview you. I have a feeling this is my first, and last, chance.”
“You're not carrying a tape recorder?”
“What a notion! I'm a professor, not a spy. The only tape recorder is here.” He tapped his hairless temple.
“Bad enough,” Max grumbled, but he followed the man to the bench in question. He'd gotten what he wanted; time to give a little. A very little.
Sitting outside was pleasant at this time of year. The granite bench was still a bit chilly, but warmed quickly to the flesh resting on it. The sun was warm, but not blistering. Pansies laid a purple and yellow carpet over a distant hummock of landscaping.
“So,” Jeff began. “You started practicing magic in school? Grade school? High school?”
“Grade school.”
“Were you more curious, or shy? Most magicians were one or the other as boys. Or both.”
“I never was an overtly shy kid. I just discovered young the magic of being a magician: ‘Amaze your friends,' like the hokey magician sets advertised. If I ever was self-conscious, I forgot to be that way fast.”
Revealing himself, in any way, to anyone, violated almost twenty years' discipline. But Max found himself remembering as well as revealing. The role of class prestidigitator had fit him like a magician's white glove. Of course he had been drafted for basketball in high school. All the tall, gangly guys were. And the sport had suited him. What was it but quick moves and feints, dodge and deceive, conceal and then reveal when ready, when everyone else was looking in another direction and you were suddenly under the net, leaping, rebounding the ball off the backboard into a perfect drop through the hoop, as if you'd always been there, in an alternate time zone, while they'd been rushing around chasing your shadow on the mirror-polished wooden floor the color of melted caramel.
They'd joked that he should try out for the Harlem Globe Trotters, who were as much a magic act as an exhibition team. He'd globe-trotted, all right, solo.
Max forgot about the man beside him and surveyed the landscaped campus. It was flat land, offering vistas as formal and remote as a chateau garden. Precious groves of shade dappled a concrete grid seared by almost-year-round sunlight. He stretched his long legs so the light warmed them while his torso remained cool in shadow.
The meeting with Professor Mangel left him feeling oddly discontented. The man's admiration, genuine as it was, felt like a valedictory. “The Mystifying Max” was part of the history books now. His forced disappearance a year ago had given his act a perfect ending. To resume it now would be anticlimactical, the kiss of death for a magician.
Students ambled or scurried by, laden with backpacks and the earnestly distracted expressions of so many late white rabbits.
Here he was, in his mid-thirties, a man without a visible profession, a family, a country even. He didn't even have a college degree, although he could produce a convincing one in several subjects on cue. His haphazard European education was worth as much or more than any formal degree, he knew, but he would always have to manufacture a history and identity to deal with the real world.
For a moment he envied the feckless education and chemistry and communications majors passing before him, pinned like garden-variety butterflies to predictable pursuits and potential professions. They could stop and give name, rank, and serial number at any instant. He, instead, was always in a state of remanufacturing himself to fit the place, the time, and the person.
Right now that person was Professor Jeff Mangel. Max turned on the charm, answered questions without saying anything. Mangel listened as if their roles were reversed: he a student, Max a teacher. Finally, satisfied and even a bit flattered, the man rose to say good-bye. He was probably about Max's age, and from another world.
Max balanced the paper-bound books on one knee after Mangel's figure had faded into the between-class crowd, and thought
He had played one consistent role since high school, since his cousin Sean's death in northern Ireland: guardian angel to the world. Of the two Irish Midwestern cousins holidaying on the “auld sod,” one had died in an IRA pub bombing; one had died inside with a terminal case of survivor's guilt In the U.S., seventeen-year-olds were still boys. In a land savaged by religious and civil strife for five centuries, they were men, able to die a man's death. And so young Max had felt a man's obligation to avenge Sean's death, thereby losing his assumed course of college, his family, and his country.
First he found and fingered the pub bombers; then another secret group found him: a shadowy global antiterrorist organization that trained Max as a magician…and as an undercover agent with an agenda to detect and destroy attempts at international violence. He performed magic tricks through Europe and beyond, his real work unsung and anonymous: these potential bomb victims saved here, those possible kidnap victims protected there.
When he had begun to play the U.S. as both magician and undercover operative, he had met and fallen in love with Temple, drawing her with him from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. Now, in a city that had become his own backyard for too long to be as safe as it should be, his guardian angel duties had become specific and personal: to protect Temple from the dangers of loving him. Temple had no idea of his secret past until his enemies' pursuit forced him to desert her without warning. When he ventured back, an IRA associate from the bombing days surfaced, expanding Max's halo of protection to cover Temple's endangered circle of acquaintances, including his rival for her affections in his absence, Matt Devine. Max's undercover history had finally accrued enough bad karma to make him a sort of Typhoid Mary, contaminating everyone he touched.
The Irish had seen themselves as exiles for centuries. He was of Irish ancestry, but as American as apple pie with Haagen-Dazs ice cream on it, and yet he had managed to turn himself into a pariah in less than twenty years.
Call it the easiest, and hardest trick of his career.
Copyright © 2000 by Carole Nelson Douglas
Wake-up Calls
Carmen Molina brushed her heavy dark hair as if she were beating it, heaved a sigh at herself in the mirror, then slammed the brush down on the toilet tank top.
The swamp cooler in the hall made the old house's air dank and faintly chill, and turned her usually straight thick hair into a fright-wig frizz. She scowled at her ungovernable mirror image. All the better to scare you with, you crooks! Who cared that a homicide lieutenant had split ends? Not she.
Still, smearing a streak of Nearly Natural Rose lipstick over her mouth, which acted more as balm than cosmetic, she couldn't help noticing that her recent work schedule showed. Her half-Latina, light-olive skin always looked jaundiced when she was tired or sick. Her brilliant blue eyes only highlighted the tendency.
“Thanks for the off-the-wall genes, Dad,” she muttered to the mirror, fighting the tiny twist-off cap from a pot of the cream blush she used to simulate health. Then she dabbed some stuff the Penney's sales clerk had called concealer under her eyes. The fatigue smudges still leaked through, but less bruisingly. There. Reasonably presentable for another twelve-hour day.
“Mariah!” she yelled into the house's other rooms. “Are you eating breakfast? We've got to get going this morning.”
“Yeah!” came the return yell. “Cereal and skim milk.”
“Good!” Carmen sighed again. Her resolve to lower the tone of domestic life by only talking when in the same room was not working out lately. “Be right in.”
“The cats want the cereal.”
“Let them get their own Special K!”
Carmen rushed through the bedroom, grabbing essentials to stuff into blazer pockets: car keys, ID, wallet, change, file (a ragged nail would nag at her all day), pausing only to unlock the gun safe and move the .38 to her ankle holster. Some detectives-turned-desk-jockeys didn't carry, but she'd patrolled the streets of south L.A. for too long not to prepare for sudden violence anywhere, anytime.
Tabitha and Catarina, the two half-grown tiger-striped cats, were indeed nosing the bowls of milk-drenched cold cereal on the kitchen table. Carmen swept into the room, swept the cats to the floor, and sat herself down.
Mariah leaned against the countertop, slurping soggy cereal into the nooks and crannies of her braces. Off in another year, hallelujah!
“You gonna be late again tonight?” her daughter managed between munches.
“Probably. Why? Got a hot date?”
“Fun-nee.” Mariah made a revolted face that could have been inspired by either the cold breakfast or the maternal crack.
Carmen started mashing her own cud, not too guilty about cold cereal as long as it was fortified with vitamins and fiber. Mariah was in that same mushy stage of development, her body amorphous with baby fat that might melt off (or might not), her glossy dark hair cut in a less-childish bob lately, her green-white-and-navy-plaid school-uniform jumper as loose and unrevealing as the sloppy T-shirts and baggy shorts the public school kids wore as their own uniform. At twelve-wanting-to-go-on-twenty, she was both intrigued and scared green by the boy-girl dance already rearing its preacne head in the sixth grade.
“What about the weekend?” Mariah asked.
“My, I'm in sudden demand around here. What about the weekend?”
“Moth-er. You promised. Will you be off?”
“1 don't know yet. What promise?”
“You know.”
“Not any more.” Carmen chewed amiably, intercepting Catarina as she lofted onto the table top again, and placing the young cat firmly on her lap for a forcible petting.
Mariah sighed, a much bigger and better public production than her mother's smothered private exhalations. “I don't see why I can't go alone.”
“Because you're not old enough,” Carmen answered automatically, running her eyes over the front page. No new murders. Yet. “Go where?”
“How can you forget? The big con.”
“Con?” Carmen frowned. The word meant “scam” to her.
“Convention. You know. At the new hotel. The biggest science fiction convention ever. Everyone will be there, Xena and Hercules and Buffy and those X-Files people you watch and a bunch of kids and actors and writers and artists. ‘TitaniCon. The King of Cons.'”
“King of cons? Oh, don't remind me.…” Carmen shook her head. At least he was out of her life. She'd avoided getting drawn into that wacko Elvis case, although she'd heard about it.
“The biggest ever.” Mariah was still young enough to believe that bigness alone was a convincing recommendation. A true child of Las Vegas.
Carmen shoved aside the empty cereal bowl and crinkled newspaper, then pulled the coffee mug she'd microwaved before dashing into the bedroom, front and center. The contents were still steaming. Ah.
“I'm sorry, honey. You did tell me something about this ‘con' thing. What is it again?”
Now that she had the floor, words seemed to fail Mariah. “It's …everybody goes and some of them dress up, and it's for all the science fiction books and comics and TV shows and movies. You know.”
“Kids go?”
“Sure. Who do you think reads and watches this stuff?”
“Will there be adults present?”
“Who do you think writes and acts in this stuff?”
“But it's not supervised?”
“Well, the hotel is supervising it, I guess.”
“That's not good enough. I'm not going to let a twelve-year-old wander alone through some kind of weird exhibition.”
“It's not weird, it's fun! And it's only this weekend. Ever. It's to open the New Millennium.”
Carmen shook her head, watching frustration evolve into loss on her daughter's face. “This weekend.”
“Starting Thursday. Through Monday. But Saturday and Sunday's the best time to go.”
“Mariah, I just can't promise anything in the next few days. You know how my work runs in frantic streaks. This is one of them.”
“Please!”
And how many times had Carmen wailed that word into the impassive refusal of her mother's face? The two eternal one-word pleas of powerless childhood. ¿Por qué? Why? And por favor. Please. She supposed that she even looked like her mother by now. Actually, those two words were as significant for adults, too.
“Maybe,” she said, wanting to bite her tongue already. “Maybe I can manage something. I'll see today what I can do.”
“But today's Tuesday!”
Carmen stood, dislodging the purring cat. If only kids purred and asked for things with the silent meow. “We have until Thursday, right? Besides, you can't take off from school.”
“It's open in the evening.”
“And you're going to go over there in the evening? Solo? Not you, niña. Now. Did you do the cat box?”
“Oh…right away.” She turned and raced off to handle the chore, sure to be a model kid until she got what she wanted.
Carmen Molina smiled. If only she had this TitaniCon to motivate her child every weekend.
* * *
Matt Devine yawned and checked his watch, then glanced at the phone.
He really should act on the small item in the morning paper. For some eerie reason, while checking out the “Lifestyles” section, his eye had snagged on a small-type name he knew. And that had reminded him of his “homework” assignment.
Not really homework, but part of his journey of personal growth, he pointed out to himself, tongue-in-cheek. Personal growth. Matt winced at the expression. His mouth felt as if he had gargled cod liver oil.
He yawned again. Just a nervous gesture. A delaying tactic.
Swallow your medicine, he told himself. And do it fast, before you taste it.
He picked up the tiny notepad that held the few business and personal phone numbers in the brave new universe of a thirty-something ex-priest-turned-radio-shrink who was wrestling with making a living, making friends, and making time for a social life, maybe even a sexual one.
He paused to consider the bizarre array of phone numbers, another delaying tactic, but it provided a certain self-insight: his fellow-tenant Temple's number, number one. His landlady Electra's. ConTact, the hotline counseling service he had worked for full-time until recently. (Now he only needed to sub occasionally as an unpaid volunteer. He missed the gang, but he was part of another, smaller one.) Next the number for the radio station that paid him so handsomely he felt guilty, WCOO. Also the home phone number of Leticia Brown, his producer and the on-air personality known as Ambrosia. Tony Fortunato, his agent's number. Agent! Homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina's work number. His mother's number in Chicago. Frank's number at the FBI- The ex-priests' group contact number. The 1800 number of the Amanda talk show.
By their phone books ye shall know them.
He laughed to and at himself. This freebie notepad advertising a local pharmacy felt too confining and informal for such a heavy load of whose and wheres and wherefores. Get thee to a stationery store and buy some slick address book.
Or did single men not do that sort of organizing thing? Little black books, that's what bachelors had. Did men of the world keep track of business and pleasure separately: Rolodexes for work and the infamous little black book for play?
Matt looked at the last number listed in his meager litany of friends and acquaintances made in the last year. The offbeat “business” number he was hesitating to punch in had been there for just two weeks.
Might as well get it over with. Maybe no one would answer. Ten A.M. He was just rising after his midnight stint on the radio advice show, but most people would be out and about at this hour.
So…chances were pretty good that he wouldn't connect this time.
Nothing to do but try, no matter how half-heartedly. This would be good for him.
He pressed the numerical sequence, realizing his throat had gone dry and his palms damp. On the third ring, someone answered.
After the opening “hello” and “hi,” he got to the nitty-gritty without preamble. An aftertaste of psychic cod liver oil hovered like halitosis over the mouthpiece.
“I thought,” Matt said, finally coming right out with it, “that we should get together.”
* * *
Max Kinsella contemplated the noble fir tree.
Lots of noble fir trees.
The University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus was infected with them. They cozied up to the bunkerlike architecture the desert climate inspired like arthritic great-aunts and great-uncles braced by the picnic tables at a family reunion. Their roof-high, time-twisted limbs and leaning trunks both depended on and buttressed the buildings. Like most people, they were part clinging vine and part stalwart support.
Max loped along the endless walks between the scattered buildings, nimbly dodging the press of students ambling between classes, feeling the exhilaration of running an informal obstacle course. He didn't get out among crowds often but had always liked them, sensed them as a kinetic flow, himself as a random element avoiding collision and detection, almost as if he could remain invisible by avoiding the accidental contact, as he used to imagine when he had been a child…as he had faithfully practiced both personally and professionally since he had so suddenly become a man in northern Ireland, ages and instants ago.
He always walked like a man in a hurry, unless he wanted to give a different impression; then, he seemed to move so slowly some people mistook him for indolent.
Today he was eager to get where he was going; once there, he would power down into slow motion. A man six-feet-four always needed to make less of himself, especially in his profession.
Although no longer a practicing magician, his biological clock was on performance-schedule time still. After years of late-night gigs, it seemed indecent to be out and about before eleven A.M.
It was too easy to wander into academic buildings. Max found easy entry disappointing. It made him feel he was alone in the world, and the building did seem strangely deserted. He took the stairs two at a time, his rubber-soled shoes hardly making a sound in the echoing space.
Arriving unannounced had become a habit.
Chapter 2
Syn Thesis
Max followed the numbered doors down the empty hall until he arrived at the one he sought.
He entered without knocking, not knowing if the room would be occupied or not. It didn't matter. Either way, he would come away with the information he sought. The only unknown was whether it would be given to him, or if he would take it
As quiet as the grave.
Like any good break-in artist, Max first looked for another way out, and found it: a closed door leading to an adjoining room. Next he looked for signs of recent occupation: a cooling coffee mug, car keys splayed on the paperwork, an open briefcase, an uncapped pen or unretracted ballpoint
Despite a desktop buried beneath an arrangement of papers in the shape of an Aztec step-pyramid, the room seemed decently deserted.
Max riffled through a few steps of the pyramid and scanned the bookshelves. All he found were student papers and dusty Ph.D. theses. The topics were intriguing, from Mayan magicians to shamans in Siberia and Tibet.
But he wasn't interested in ancient magic.
He turned the brushed chrome knob on the exit door as delicately as if it led to a safe.
He sensed a much larger room beyond before he had opened the door a few inches. Maybe it was a hint of chill air. He stepped through into the cool even light of overhead fluorescent lamps.
The space was classic institutional twentieth century. Mottled-beige vinyl tiles turned the floor into a monotone chessboard. A larger-scale chessboard of plastic light grids and acoustical tile stretched above. Distant windows set in aluminum-silver frames let in daylight so transparent it hardly cast a shadow.
But besides more bookshelves and cabinets and files, all in shades of the same bland putty-blond that covered monitors and computer towers and printers these days, the large room offered a man-made forest in its center. Aluminum-framed pegboard uprights held framed posters, forming an oversized book of magic acts of all times and places to page through.
In the lukewarm light, too dim for an exhibition and too bright for any dramatic effects, Houdini's eyes glared like an animal's from his chain-bound form.
Other eyes from this impressive convocation, a magician's Hall of Fame, watched Max from their hand-tinted or printed posters.
What he was looking for was here among the hinged panels. Max edged toward the dead and living magicians as silently as they regarded him. He moved down the line, flipping the huge panels from side to side, never sure whose hypnotic glance would confront him next.
Meeting Gandolph the Great, for instance, only two flips past a section on Blackstone was a shock.
Max stared at a poster image of his now-dead mentor looking as he had before Max had been born. He hadn't recognized him for an instant. The young Gandolph could have played a slight, mischievous Puck pulling back the curtain on a slumbering Bottom. He was not the sedate, heavy-set middle-aged man Max had known.
Then Max focused on the figure he had really been searching for: the girl in the background, smiling like a model in an Ipana ad, and as much ancient history as Gandolph and that vintage brand of toothpaste were. Max couldn't smile back at Gandolph and his long-ago assistant, Gloria Fuentes, both grinning in youthful glory, and both grinning corpses now. Both dead in mysterious, possibly murderous circumstances. Both filed away in unsolved case files.
Max contemplated the gaudy poster and the almost cartoon-quality poses of the figures. When this was made, Gandolph's retreat to Europe was unthinkable, and the pretty girl with the pertly posed bare legs was dreaming of fame and fortune. They had been employer-employee, but also friends. Max remembered Gandolph grinning to recollect his heyday when he worked with the “Girl of Many Parts,” especially in the severed lady illusion. Gloria would wave her graceful, perfectly manicured fingers and wiggle her lively, perfectly painted toes from various apertures. She would fold that perfect 36-24-36 body in hiding places behind and under and between, always unseen while in “plain sight.”
She would have needed to be agile and quick. It made Max wonder how someone had been able to slip up behind her with a garotte many years later. Tricking others made you a harder target to catch off-guard.
He flipped the panel, looking for more posters featuring his dead friend and the more recently dead assistant. One flick of the wrist revealed something unexpected behind the pegboard: a bald, youngish man in thick, black-framed glasses standing on the other side, who produced a grin as wide as Gandolph's upon seeing him.
“I thought I heard someone in here,” the gnome noted.
Max was startled. He refused to show it, but Max was shocked speechless. Adrenaline charged through his synapses. He was used to causing these effects, not suffering them.
“The Mystifying Max, I presume.” The man's impish grin never subsided. “What a surprise. Your posters are on the other side of the row, if that's what you're looking for.”
“I'm not.”
This isn't a vanity call?” the man asked. “You aren't aching to see where you fit in my informal Hall of Fame?”
“Obviously,” Max said, vanishing behind the panel containing Gandolph, “I fit here.”
The man quickly pulled the panel away again, but by men Max was no longer there. The man laughed with delight, then ducked under the panels to the other side.
“So few credit the magician's truly awesome physical abilities,” he said, looking around.
Of course he saw nothing.
He sighed. “I always admire a good illusion, but I'm afraid it's my delusion that I'd really like to talk to you. If you came here, I can only hope you'd like to talk to me.”
A clap of hands echoed sharply in the exhibition rooms. The man turned, to find Max behind him. He lifted an eyebrow.
“You're right,” Max said. “Mere acrobatics. But I'm a bit rusty.”
The man nodded, sympathetically. “Almost a year, isn't it?” He put out a small, neat hand. “Jefferson Mangel, professor.”
“Mystifying Max, retired.”
“A shame. I won't ask why. It's enough that I should benefit from a…visitation. Look, here's your section.”
“Section?”
“Oh, yes. I'm quite an admirer. I like them all, even the hopelessly hokey, but the truly elegant are a vanishing breed.”
Max bowed, watching the years of his career flash by under the professor's riffling fingers. “Heidelberg?” he interrupted. “You have Heidelberg? I was an apprentice then still.”
Max's control wavered again. He had looked impossibly young in that poster so far in his past. He had never kept scrapbooks; it was too dangerous. Unsettling that this man had scrounged together more shards of his life in magic than he had.
“You were always interesting,” Mangel said. “Most American magicians don't start in Europe. Old World audiences are very demanding.”
“A good place to start then.”
“I guess. Say, would you like a cup of tea? Or there might be some German beer in the fridge.”
“Most professors don't have German beer in the fridge.”
“I'm an unconventional professor. Tolerated, but considered a bit manic on my favorite subject. The only reason I survive in academe is that I stress the metaphysical aspect of magic.”
“The theory that magic is a metaphor.”
“You've heard of my class?”
“I've heard of the theory.” Max followed the professor to a small room off the exhibition area, where kitchen counters surrounded a table and four chairs.
“Tea or beer?” Mangel asked.
“British or German? I'll take the beer, Professor.”
He nodded. “Call me…I was about to say ‘Jefferson,' but lately I've been reminded how stuffy that is.” He smiled in remembrance of some incident. “Call me Jeff.”
“Jeff.” Max sat, looked around, felt oddly at home.
Jeff threw him a happy, nervous glance as he decapitated the metal tops off two tall brown bottles. “I can't tell you how pleased I am to meet you. I've seen your various acts a few times. I'm not surprised that you quit the circuit, but I sure am sorry.”
“Why aren't you surprised? I was.”
“Well.” Jeff sat across from him, grinning like a twelve-year-old. “Every top-drawer magician ends up in Vegas with a shot at a big-money hotel contract. You were one, you were here, and I always felt you were, simply put, too good for Vegas.”
“But you just said Vegas is the pinnacle.”
“For a certain kind of magic. Larger-than-life magic. Inflated magic, I guess, like the stock market. The kind that can crash from its own bloated overweight. Your magic was always…imperially slim.”
“And thus prone to self-destruct. I've read the poem, too.”
“Ah, but to look at it in passing…the envy of all. Why have you come here?”
“Not to look at myself in passing. I'm an admirer of Gandolph.”
“An interesting magician. He turned his back on the art and became obsessed with uncloaking psychic frauds. Too bad.”
“You prefer that psychic frauds remain cloaked?”
“No. I prefer that good magicians practice their art. But they generally grow old, exhaust themselves, and develop a conscience.”
“Is that what you think I've done?” Max took a long swallow of the excellent lager.
“You? No. You had years of performing left in you, perhaps a lifetime. Gandolph, though…”
“You disapprove of his crusade to unmask psychic tricks?”
“I have no right to disapprove of anything. People who fool needy hearts into believing the impossible are uncommon crooks and should do time. I just hate to see good illusionists devote their old age to stripping away illusions.”
“You, and the Synth.”
Jeff choked on his beer. When he could speak again, he asked, “The…what?”
“You heard me. And you've heard of the Synth. Why does it frighten you?”
Jeff's hand ran over his bald head, as if in search of hair mat used to be there to run his fingers through. “The Synth. I've never discussed it with anyone. Just read about it, here and there between the lines, in my magic books.” His bright glance darted away like a minnow. “It's…been mentioned for an impossibly long time. I'm talking Medieval times. Syntheology.”
Max smiled at the coined term. “It was a system? Like alchemy and alchemists?”
“Not like alchemists. People were fascinated by them and what they purported to do. People feared the Synth.”
“It can't have been connected to magic then,” Max suggested.
“Magic is connected to the mysteries of religion and ritual, and both of those were dominant forces then,” Jeff said. “And both inspire fear.”
“Gandolph died last fall,” Max said abruptly. “Did you know that he died in disguise?”
“No. Why would he be in disguise?”
Max shrugged. The mysteries of Gandolph were not his to reveal. “Gloria Fuentes is dead, too,” he added casually, watching.
“Gloria? I didn't hear anything about it.”
“The police don't want you to.”
“Police? Then her death was suspicious, too?”
“Her death was murder, plain and simple.”
Jeff's fingers now riffled into the sides of his nonexistent hair, and ended up cradling his face. “Gandolph. And now Gloria…”
“You know something about her?”
Jeff shook his head over the bottle of beer. “Only that she'd come in a couple of times lately. Come to think of it, she was asking about Gandolph, wondered if I'd acquired any ‘artifacts' from his estate. She seemed more than simply saddened.…I'd say ‘distressed' by his death.”
“She should have been. It was suspicious.”
“How do you know?”
“I'm a magician. Suspicious circumstances are my stock in trade. Both detecting them, and using them.”
“Gloria dead. I can't believe it. Her coming here just a few days ago. And now you.” Jeff looked up, shock turning into suspicion. “And that, that charming PR woman who was so interested in Gloria. Don't tell me she's dead, too.”
“Better not be,” Max said, almost growled, surprised by the thought into anxiety. “What information do you have on the Synth?”
“A few old books and vague references, that's all. You think that—?”
“I think that I'd better see all you've got.”
“How are you involved in this?”
“I'm a retired magician,” Max said. “What else do I have to do but meddle?”
They left their beer bottles half full and withdrew to the professor's office, where he said the oldest books were kept. After they entered, Jeff Mangel turned to lock the door to the exhibition rooms.
“Good idea. Even the display panels may have ears.” Max sat on the small side chair meant for students, feeling like a Swiss army knife confined to a pincushion. He guessed that Jeff's sudden smile was a compact man's reaction to Max's long, angular form overlapping the chair.
The professor turned his back to conceal that smile, then pulled down one narrow-bound title after another from the shelves. “I wish I had a suitably impressive volume for the subject matter.”
“Such as…?”
“Oh, some gigantic tome bound in sharkskin with a water-buffalo-horn clasp studded with Russian cherry amber like drops of blood. All I have are a selection of bound theses.”
Max eyed the half dozen slim volumes. “Not too impressive. Yet they mention the Synth? I'd never heard of it until Gandolph's death last fall.”
“I hadn't heard of it until a couple of years ago. That's when I started hunting down references. Not a single contemporary history of magic mentions the Synth. But the ancient texts do, and these obscure papers started doing so about fifty years ago.”
“Really. Then the…movement, or whatever it is,…is a revival.”
“Possibly.” Jeff was paging through the soft-bound books.
Max glimpsed typescript. These booklets weren't even printed, but were merely bound versions of typed academic papers. “Who wrote these?”
“Mostly communications majors with stage experience. Our proximity to the Strip encourages taking magic as a performance art more seriously than it is elsewhere.”
“Hence your exhibition.”
“No, my exhibition is a personal enthusiasm. My collection was outgrowing my home, so I ‘donated' it to the university.”
“What do you have on Gandolph and Gloria Fuentes?”
Professor Mangel turned to a computer at right angles to his desk. “More than I have on the Synth. And on you. Your background was always appropriately mysterious. Let's see.…Gandolph is extensively documented, from “Local Boy Waves Wand” in his hometown paper to “Ex-magician Pries into the Paranormal” just a few weeks before his death. Gloria was pretty much a background figure in the posters and photos, and stayed that way after Gandolph retired.”
“Can you print out that list of articles on Gandolph?”
“Sure.” He tapped the appropriate keys. A printer was soon spitting out pages.
Jeff turned back to Max. “Can you enlighten me about your disappearance after the Goliath engagement?”
“Personal business.”
“Somehow I suspect that you're going to tell me the Synth is personal business, too.”
“It is. In fact, I'd appreciate you keeping my…reappearance quiet.”
Jeff shook his head. “This is maddening for a scholar of magic like myself.”
Max relaxed into a smile. “Lend me that pile of Ph.D. papers, and I'll tell you about some of my special effects.”
“But nothing on the Synth.”
“No.”
“Nothing on Gandolph's death.”
“No.”
“Nothing on Gloria Fuente's death, either.”
“No.”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the professor charged in frustration.
“A ‘foolish' consistency,” Max corrected. “A wise consistency is the mark of good magic acts, and a few other things.” Max leaned forward to take the thin volumes, and printout, in one hand.
Professor Mangel stood, too, though the effect was less majestic. His next words, however, had the sound of a formal incantation.
“‘The Magician has characteristics in common with those of the criminal, of the actor, and of the priest.' I wonder in which role you are acting so mysteriously now.”
“‘Wonder.' That's the name of all their games, isn't it? You know you'd hate it if it were too easy. Walk me out and we'll talk.”
They were silent as they left the building, until they were on the now-deserted walks. Class was in session all over campus, and here, perhaps, too.
“Your finale,” the professor began. “A mélange of Cirque du Soleil, Houdini, modern dance, and shell game. An extraordinarily busy ending for a one-man show. How did you manage it?”
Max laughed. “A high price for the rental of a few obscure books, professor. Are you sure you want to ruin the illusion?”
He shrugged. “A dark stage, a strobe light flashing. You illuminated at every flash: high in the air, walking on air. Here, there, everywhere, like the ‘demmed illusive Pimpernel' from the classic swashbuckler. And with every revelation, white cockatoos seeming to perch on your shoulders, until the strobe light finally stopped, and the stage lights came on. You stood alone, in black, against a black curtain, against a tiered living curtain of hundreds of cockatoos on perches of various heights, making a kind of feathered fountain. It was spectacular.”
“Since working solo in Vegas is considered a sign of stinginess, my only choice was to multiply myself.” Max hesitated. “I find myself almost unable to reveal my secrets.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
The two men paused in the absolute open, no building, no tree, no human being near them.
Jeff Mangel smacked his lips, a gesture of considered thought with him.
“I mentioned Houdini. He was a master of the staged event and the meticulously practiced and engineered illusion. Most people think magic is ninety percent tricks. But, like inspiration, with Houdini it was ninety percent perspiration. He was strong beyond belief and acrobatically adept in a way his muscle-mishapen body gave the lie to. I suspect sheer acrobatic mastery accounts for you appearing at such different points on the stage during the split-second flash of a strobe light, and meticulous timing, of course. One missed beat, and you would have been caught in the act of moving, instead of being showcased as having moved at inhuman speed. Every image was a bow of sorts. Did you conceive it all yourself?”
“I work alone,” Max said firmly.
“No man is an island,” Professor Mangel said as firmly. At Max's expression, he grimaced, then gestured to a bench under a towering pine tree. “Sit down. Let me interview you. I have a feeling this is my first, and last, chance.”
“You're not carrying a tape recorder?”
“What a notion! I'm a professor, not a spy. The only tape recorder is here.” He tapped his hairless temple.
“Bad enough,” Max grumbled, but he followed the man to the bench in question. He'd gotten what he wanted; time to give a little. A very little.
Sitting outside was pleasant at this time of year. The granite bench was still a bit chilly, but warmed quickly to the flesh resting on it. The sun was warm, but not blistering. Pansies laid a purple and yellow carpet over a distant hummock of landscaping.
“So,” Jeff began. “You started practicing magic in school? Grade school? High school?”
“Grade school.”
“Were you more curious, or shy? Most magicians were one or the other as boys. Or both.”
“I never was an overtly shy kid. I just discovered young the magic of being a magician: ‘Amaze your friends,' like the hokey magician sets advertised. If I ever was self-conscious, I forgot to be that way fast.”
Revealing himself, in any way, to anyone, violated almost twenty years' discipline. But Max found himself remembering as well as revealing. The role of class prestidigitator had fit him like a magician's white glove. Of course he had been drafted for basketball in high school. All the tall, gangly guys were. And the sport had suited him. What was it but quick moves and feints, dodge and deceive, conceal and then reveal when ready, when everyone else was looking in another direction and you were suddenly under the net, leaping, rebounding the ball off the backboard into a perfect drop through the hoop, as if you'd always been there, in an alternate time zone, while they'd been rushing around chasing your shadow on the mirror-polished wooden floor the color of melted caramel.
They'd joked that he should try out for the Harlem Globe Trotters, who were as much a magic act as an exhibition team. He'd globe-trotted, all right, solo.
Max forgot about the man beside him and surveyed the landscaped campus. It was flat land, offering vistas as formal and remote as a chateau garden. Precious groves of shade dappled a concrete grid seared by almost-year-round sunlight. He stretched his long legs so the light warmed them while his torso remained cool in shadow.
The meeting with Professor Mangel left him feeling oddly discontented. The man's admiration, genuine as it was, felt like a valedictory. “The Mystifying Max” was part of the history books now. His forced disappearance a year ago had given his act a perfect ending. To resume it now would be anticlimactical, the kiss of death for a magician.
Students ambled or scurried by, laden with backpacks and the earnestly distracted expressions of so many late white rabbits.
Here he was, in his mid-thirties, a man without a visible profession, a family, a country even. He didn't even have a college degree, although he could produce a convincing one in several subjects on cue. His haphazard European education was worth as much or more than any formal degree, he knew, but he would always have to manufacture a history and identity to deal with the real world.
For a moment he envied the feckless education and chemistry and communications majors passing before him, pinned like garden-variety butterflies to predictable pursuits and potential professions. They could stop and give name, rank, and serial number at any instant. He, instead, was always in a state of remanufacturing himself to fit the place, the time, and the person.
Right now that person was Professor Jeff Mangel. Max turned on the charm, answered questions without saying anything. Mangel listened as if their roles were reversed: he a student, Max a teacher. Finally, satisfied and even a bit flattered, the man rose to say good-bye. He was probably about Max's age, and from another world.
Max balanced the paper-bound books on one knee after Mangel's figure had faded into the between-class crowd, and thought
He had played one consistent role since high school, since his cousin Sean's death in northern Ireland: guardian angel to the world. Of the two Irish Midwestern cousins holidaying on the “auld sod,” one had died in an IRA pub bombing; one had died inside with a terminal case of survivor's guilt In the U.S., seventeen-year-olds were still boys. In a land savaged by religious and civil strife for five centuries, they were men, able to die a man's death. And so young Max had felt a man's obligation to avenge Sean's death, thereby losing his assumed course of college, his family, and his country.
First he found and fingered the pub bombers; then another secret group found him: a shadowy global antiterrorist organization that trained Max as a magician…and as an undercover agent with an agenda to detect and destroy attempts at international violence. He performed magic tricks through Europe and beyond, his real work unsung and anonymous: these potential bomb victims saved here, those possible kidnap victims protected there.
When he had begun to play the U.S. as both magician and undercover operative, he had met and fallen in love with Temple, drawing her with him from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. Now, in a city that had become his own backyard for too long to be as safe as it should be, his guardian angel duties had become specific and personal: to protect Temple from the dangers of loving him. Temple had no idea of his secret past until his enemies' pursuit forced him to desert her without warning. When he ventured back, an IRA associate from the bombing days surfaced, expanding Max's halo of protection to cover Temple's endangered circle of acquaintances, including his rival for her affections in his absence, Matt Devine. Max's undercover history had finally accrued enough bad karma to make him a sort of Typhoid Mary, contaminating everyone he touched.
The Irish had seen themselves as exiles for centuries. He was of Irish ancestry, but as American as apple pie with Haagen-Dazs ice cream on it, and yet he had managed to turn himself into a pariah in less than twenty years.
Call it the easiest, and hardest trick of his career.
Copyright © 2000 by Carole Nelson Douglas
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