“How did you get in?” a Colonel Mustard type asked from the fireplace.
“Who are you?” Carmen demanded, her strident voice overriding the duffer’s.
Max answered the old fellow first. “I blundered in. I’m a magician. I find a door with no visible hardware, I play with it, looking for the trick. Magic fingers.” Max liftedand waggled his own particular set of those useful appendages. “Every puzzling thing I see is an illusion I have to figure out. It’s my vocation. That’s all there is to it.” He turned to the Spanish rose with thorns. “I was known, at one time, as the Mystifying Max.”
Of course they all knew that. He was a renegade. A true solo artist. Everyone knew of him, and no one knew him. And he was one of them. A professional magician of the old school.
“You vanished,” Carmen observed with an Elvis-like S-curled lip.
“I gave up the art, for a while.” Max paused. “It’s changed. Now it’s more fashionable to mock magic than to practice it.”
That was the party line, of course. Yet he believed it enough to sound sincere. He had grown up in the old traditions. Even if he hadn’t been forced to flee after the murder at the Goliath over a year ago, he had already begun to wonder if he could move fast enough for the shell game that magic in the media age had become. Or if he even wanted to.
Heads were nodding around the room, grizzled, balding heads. One belonged to the man who had interviewed the Phantom Mage and said, Don’t call us; we’ll call you. Apparently Max had not lost his touch for changing his personality, his stance, his mentality with each new role he played. Max winced internally. Problem was, now in his own persona, he wasn’t playing the role as much as he should be. He hadn’t identified with this generation; he had revered it. Now, he wondered, had he joined it?
The older woman’s turbaned head also nodded, as much in sorrow as in agreement. “Magic isn’t what it used to be,” she added in the fruity, post-menopausal tones of an Ethel Mertz.
Max took a deep but shallow breath, so no one would notice. He would be accepted here. He realized that meant they thought he was passé, that they had no reason to think he might not be as disgruntled as they were.
An upsetting thought. Not that he had finessed them into accepting him under false colors, but that they knew his performing persona and found it quite logical that the Mystifying Max should be part of a retrograde magicians’ coven, driven by dissatisfaction and bile, angry at progress, set on preserving the past at any cost.
Could it be that truth was the best disguise?
“Come to the fire,” Colonel Mustard invited.
The invitation triggered a memory. Sparks, the man’s performing name had been. Cosimo Sparks.
“Have some brandy,” suggested the turbaned woman, lilting her thinning eyebrows and a snifter at the same time.
There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite attach it to a time or a place.
“Czarina Catharina,” she introduced herself. “I did a mentalist act.”
He nodded. He had seen the posters in Jeff Mangel’s on-campus art gallery at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and she wasn’t among them, but a mentalist wasn’t quite a magician. The professor had died surrounded by the posters he had preserved, but now Max was surrounded by many of the famous faces immortalized in those very posters, a Who’s Who of … forgotten magicians, bypassed headliners, outmoded prestidigitators.
The potent brandy seared his lips, making him jerk like a false reading on a lie detector test graph.
“Strong stuff,” Carmen noted with a contralto laugh.
“No,” Max muttered. “It’s strong stuff meeting a roster of a World Magicians’ Hall of Fame.” Oddly, he meant it.
His hand shook slightly as he lifted his brandy snifter and inhaled the high-proof perfume of Hennessy XO Special. He had liked to think he had retired, forcibly, from his profession, pushed by an inexplicable murder into flight. He didn’t like to think he had also reached a dead end.
“World Magicians’ Hall of Fame! There’s no such organization.” Sparks barked like a discontented seal. “It’s all commercial tie-ins nowadays. Make a Lear jet disappear on live TV. Make the Seagram Building crumble on cable TV. We might as well be terrorists as illusionists.”
“You were always too subtle,” Czarina noted sadly, “to survive.”
Her words struck a chill like a dagger to Max’s heart. He had consoled himself that he had retired because his primary career, counterterrorism, had finally made his cover profession useless. But the fact was he had been a magician first and foremost, from his preteen years, and now he was among his own kind, who faced his own kind of extinction, and they were his enemies. They were the Synth.
Max couldn’t help it. He took a deep, sighing breath.
Carmen rose and stalked toward him. “You are one of us, aren’t you? However, or why ever you ‘blundered’ in here, it was no accident. You have come home.”
An undercover operative could not have asked for an easier “in.”
A fellow magician could not have imagined a harder task.
He was in like Flynn. Like Errol Flynn, Mr. Swashbuckler, he would have to play many parts, and some of them, he saw now, might break his heart.
Chapter 22
… Playback
Hand it to Leticia, Matt thought. She never fully relinquished the Earth-mother persona of Ambrosia.
She walked Matt out to the parking lot. The 2:00 A.M. sick-green parking-lot lights turned the black asphalt gray and made a knot of female fans waiting for Matt look jaundiced.
“Safety in numbers,” Leticia declared. “Don’t you linger after all the sweet young things get your John Hancock and leave.”
Matt eyed his white Probe, looking pea-green in the lights, and nodded. He could edge over to the car while signing the station photographs and they could all skedaddle without risking a close encounter with Kitty the Cutter.
The slam of Leticia’s car door assured him that she was sealed away from any motorcycle raids. He thanked his gushing fans and signed, moving toward the car.
Sweet young things they were not. More like sweet middle-aged things, women whose faces wore the worry lines of hard work and hard times. People with higher educations and high-paying jobs took their insecurities to psychoanalysts and trendier alternative practitioners. Radio listeners let it all hang out, Matt had discovered, the same phenomenon that drove the tabloid TV show phenomenon and kept Jerry and Ricki and company in clover.
He was just a local phenomenon in a second-tier media. He liked it that way, and hoped that Kathleen’s unfond farewell broadcast on his show meant she was really out of his hair.
He was signing on the Probe’s fender now, straining to keep some light on the photograph so his penmanship was at least recognizable.
There was one last customer, an immensely overweight woman with the optimistic beaming eyes of a child. Seeing such doomed outcasts always made Matt hurt for them. Everybody faces rejection, but not everybody is a walking advertisement for it. She did everything wrong: carried too much weight, wore circus-size polyester, had her brown hair crimped into some shapeless frizz, a bad complexion, thick-lensed glasses in bad frames, and bit her fingernails down to the bloody quick. Did the Almighty have no mercy sometimes? Couldn’t He have given this female equivalent of Red Skelton’s Poor Soul some natural advantage? Just one.
Her smile. She brought the signed photo close to the crooked-framed glasses, read what he’d written, and smiled. Her teeth were perfect: small, even, white as snow.
“Gee, thanks! That’s one thing I’m good at. Devotion. Your ‘devoted listener.’ I just love radio. It lets you imagine anything.”
And off she toddled, happy.
Matt leaned against the car door. There ought to be an Individuals Anonymous group for people who weren’t thin, confident, good-looking, and socially smooth.