“You have fifteen seconds.” The other man flashed his wrist to show the sickly green luminescent dial beneath his pushed-up matte-black sleeve. “Where can we meet privately?”
“Here? Now?”
“Eleven seconds.”
“Damn you…my dressing room. Go now! I’ll keep the bodyguards out. If anyone sees you—”
“They won’t. Six seconds.”
“This whole stage section turns. How will you—?”
“Not your problem.”
The mechanism beneath them jerked into action.
“My act—”
The magician turned to face his audience as his simple hiding place spun into view. He was literally beside himself. He glanced at his unwanted doppelgänger. Gone!
Underneath the mask, his jaw tightened. This interlude had been the real magic trick.
His pulse still staccato, he stepped aside, swept a dark arm to indicate the false wall, bowed as applause hit him like a tidal wave.
Sweat trickled under the spandex false face he wore.
Below the stage, Max amused himself after he had wiped off the camouflage paint by trying on the Cloaked Conjuror’s spare mask. He spoke softly through the tiny built-in microphone. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
He sounded like a robot gargling tinfoil. He contemplated resuming his performing career in some exotic disguise. But he liked performing magic with a bare face. A magician deceived to the degree that he was able to seem sincere. Since the Cloaked Conjuror’s whole shtick was revealing the devices behind magical illusions, he didn’t need to show his face. He wasn’t there to convince but to debunk.
It was magical deconstructionism, like an artistic or literary movement. What had the art of legerdemain come to, feeding on its own destruction? Entropy as entertainment.
Or was he just jealous? Max regarded his masked, expressionless feline face in the mirror. His own cover was blown, his career lost. Magic had been his first passion; revenge his second. Temple his third. The first was history now. The second was strangely dormant after eighteen years. Eighteen years, longer than Sean had lived…As for Temple, their passion was bound and gagged by the fallout from the second.
Through a tinny speaker mounted under the ceiling, he could hear the music, the Cloaked Conjuror’s disguised vocal croakings, the applause that sounded as mechanical and distorted as the magician’s voice.
It was like eavesdropping on another, unreal world. One he had once lived in intimately.
Was he just jealous? Not if dreams are only in your head.
He wasn’t used to being confined alone with his own thoughts. It felt like being penned in a well-lit confessional, waiting eternally for some unknown person in the other confessional to finish his business and the small window beyond the pleated white linen to slide open so the man hidden behind the curtain could wait for Max to say “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Lord! He was going back to his earliest childhood at his grandmother’s church. The Catholic Church did open-air confessions now, in large, well-lighted rooms with no hint of claustrophobia.
Max had to wonder if his childish hunger to escape the small dark room where he enumerated his failings to the hidden listener had first interested him in escapology and magic tricks. Yet the king of escapology, Houdini, hadn’t been Catholic but Jewish. Escape that fact.
The dressing room door creaked. Max leaped up to confront his visitor with his borrowed face.
“I’m fine,” the husky computer-disguised voice of the Cloaked Conjuror rasped from outside the open door. “Just keep anyone from entering, okay?”
The door opened only enough to admit his muscular form. He was a bit too thickset to perform the most agile illusions, one reason he’d turned to unmasking unreality, probably.
He knew what the magical community said of the debunkers: failed magicians. Those who can, do; those who can’t, criticize.
The Cloaked Conjuror turned on Max the moment the door was shut and dead-bolted.
“I can’t believe you! Right onstage. You could have ruined my act. Are you crazy? My bodyguards could have thought you were an assassin. Are you suicidal?”
“I can’t believe you,” Max charged back in an eerie, altered, amplified tone of voice. “Right in the public print. Telling the world that death threats forced my retirement. That’s not true. Why in the name of Harry Houdini would you mention me at all in that interview? Are you crazy? Suicidal?”
Their masks glared at each other, then Max pulled his off.
“How did you get offstage so fast?”
“Jumped up and was assumed into the wings on the curtain pulleys.”
“My bodyguards—”
“Never look up. They watch you, and you stay with your feet on the ground.”
“That was a nervy thing to do.”
“It was a nervy thing to drag me into your interview. I vanished for a reason, and I’d prefer the public, and everybody else, to forget about me entirely. You’ve just blown a year’s worth of invisibility.”
The Cloaked Conjuror lifted his arms and dropped them to indicate helpless regret. The mechanical voice forced him to rely on gesture rather than speech even in private. He resembled a mute Phantom of the Opera.
Max stopped being envious, if he ever had been.
The magician sat at his dressing table, where Max had warmed the seat only moments before. He didn’t remove his mask.
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.” Even the mechanical voice sounded weary. “I figured if I mentioned your name you might contact me. But not onstage in the middle of my act! My bodyguards are all over that backstage. Man, you are crazy.”
“No. I just know that the safest place to be when a man is under constant guard is right next to him. Even if they had noticed my brief visit, they weren’t about to shoot until they knew which man in black was who.”
The Cloaked Conjuror shook his head. “Whatever you are, you’re the only one who tumbled to the fact that my assistant was killed at the TitaniCon weekend. I’ve got a new problem, but it might be from an old source.”
Max pulled a chair closer to the mirror and sat beside the magician. “The Synth?”
“Maybe. I’ve been working with a new cat. Going to reveal the old cat into woman trick. Add a little femme pheromones to the act, you know? Somebody’s swiped the animal.”
“Big cat? Leopard, I suppose?”
The leopard-spotted mask nodded. “Cost a bundle. And a fine, mature animal. Worth…a bundle.”
“You blew my cover over a cat-napping?”
“A note was left, signed ‘the Synth.’”
“You’ve contacted the police?”
“Would you?”
“No. What’s the ransom?”
“The note didn’t mention a ransom.”
“Any calls?”
“Not for money. Not about the leopard.”
Max pondered the sense of announcing you’re the kidnapper without demanding ransom. “Do you think they’ll ask for money after you sweat a little, or do they really want the animal? Or is this a nuisance attack? Harassment.”
“I don’t know. I do know my security force is pretty teed off about someone breaching the perimeter and taking the cat. Either way, it’s a message.”
Max nodded again. “A major message. So the leopard was taken from your residence. I suppose you’re not about to share the location of that with me.”
“Not unless you convince me that you absolutely need it.”
“It’s near Las Vegas, though?”
“Yeah. Near enough.”
“Obviously, there are several messages here: one, they know where you are. Two, you aren’t as secure as you think. Three, they know what you’re planning for the act. Four, they can extort your money from you, or maybe they think they deserve it and you don’t, since you’re an antimagician. So why do you think I can do anything for you? Especially after you’ve irritated the hell out of me.”
The Cloaked Conjuror kept silent for a good minute, his masked face as still as a corpse’s. “I’ve seen tapes of your show. You’re the real thing. Man, you nearly gave me a heart attack when you showed up backstage. See, no one’s supposed to be able to do that. I figure if anyone can go up against the Synth, you can. I’ll pay you whatever you need to get the cat back and find out the who, what, and why behind this whole thing.”