“The depth was the distraction.”
“Everything in magic, and too much in life, is a distraction, Temple.”
“Too much math for me.”
Midnight Louie looked up, intently and made those jaw-tremoring chee-chee-chee chirps cat make when spotting prey.
Max picked up a black remote control Temple hadn’t noticed and aimed it at the interior apex of the Neon Nightmare.
Louie leaped to the lowest liquor shelf, then up to the top one, chirruping steadily.
“This place is a huge cat toy, isn’t it?” Max said. “All those dancing shifting lights. Care to accompany me to the top?”
Temple took a deep, shaky breath. “No.”
“The hidden scaffolding that continues up and behind the Synth’s third-floor clubroom bird’s-nest on the opposite wall, it’s quite safe. You’d have to leave your heels behind, though.”
“I hate heights.”
“You wear high heels every day.”
“That’s on a small scale.”
“Look at Louie.”
His round, intent eyes moved with the circling images. The traditional signs of the Zodiac, crab, goat, scorpion, lion, along with the disputed thirteenth sign.
Max whispered, “A still central core is generating the illusion of movement and depth. Ophiuchus circles his attacking serpent continually. It’s like a clockwork construction, and, like clockwork, has many parts. Game?”
Temple kicked off her heels, which hit the bar side and fell to the floor. “If you can replay your almost fatal fall, I can climb some pathetic…hidden, dark, secret scaffolding.”
Oh yeah. Maybe.
Max was as sure as a mountain goat and he easily wafted Temple from level to level by a firm hand grip. Since his remote control handled the working lights, the backstage structure was well-lit and simple. And the scaffolding was three feet wide and solid, she was relieved to find.
At the building’s pointed apex, a nest of spotlights dueled, creating crossing beams of colorful shimmer. That was when Temple began to lose confidence.
Max left her clinging to two cross bars and climbed higher. His black clothing was soon invisible against the dark, mirrored surfaces and dueling lights. She envisioned the four floors of empty space below, equally dark, and also reflecting crossed sabers of colored lights.
“Max,” she whispered, ashamed of her cold feet.
Something warm and furry brushed her calves.
“Louie,” she whispered again, reassured.
Then Louie’s silhouette vaulted up past her, backlit by the light show. For a moment he seemed as huge as a leaping black panther.
The opposite wall flared with a yellow-lit image of the wrestling man and giant serpent.
Then the circling light show paused. Had Max made the apex of the pyramid go dark for an instant? And stop?
Another click. Only the yellow work lights were on and Temple had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden illumination.
She heard and felt Max and Louie leap down onto the lower scaffold, one large thump that vibrated the boards, followed by a smaller one. Temple teetered, spreading her bare toes for balance and looking down from a sideways squint. Up here the scaffolding was ten feet wide.
It could have accommodated a van.
Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better. There was always getting down.
“Max Kinsella, why I let you talk me into climbing the inside of this magic mountain I will never know, but I am so over you.”
He leapt down beside her. “I wanted you to be the first—and last in this country to see. Look.”
Max’s hands opened the magician’s typical black silken square that produced white rabbits and doves.
Nothing white appeared. His cupped hands held a mini-universe of captive, eye-dazzling red, green, blue, and white…the colors of what she’d taken for gel-tinted theatrical spotlights, now boiled down into large, faceted gemstones.
Louie stretched himself three feet long along her leg, and Max did a knee-dip so he could see too.
Louie’s paw automatically tensed to touch.
“Oh, no, boy,” Max said, “this is a very different kind of kibble than you eat.”
“He doesn’t,” said Temple. “Eat kibble. He just pretends to. He’s in it for the toppings I ladle on it to get him to eat the healthful Free-to-Be-Feline. Which he doesn’t.”
“What a con that cat has going.” Max laughed as the silk square shrunk in his hands and disappeared.
Temple looked around. “This entire building’s lighting system is a spinning gigantic kaleidoscope in the sky,” she realized. “Made from the IRA money Cosimo Sparks found, converted into jewels, and then secretly kept. He was the worst crook and hypocrite ever. He murdered people to maintain a phony scam about Strip-rejected magicians finding Kathleen O’Connor’s stockpile of undelivered IRA support funds, and all along he’d found and converted them to diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds to dazzle night-clubbing tourists right in front of his duped co-conspirators’ eyes. Why?”
“It was a magician-conning-magician scheme, all right,” Max said.
Temple looked down. Plain yellow-white spotlights raked the black mirror walls. The neon glamour was gone. The Plexiglas looked scratched and dull under the unrelenting light.
“How are we going to get back do-o-o-o-own?
“No! No, Max, no-o-o-o!”
Not a bungee cord!
She was not suicidal.
Temple felt the air rush up and her stomach swoop down and then bounce back a tad as she gasped to a stop, hanging a couple inches above the black glass floor and her abandoned shoes.
“Exactly heel height, I believe, Madam.”
Temple pushed her feet into the only kind of height she craved, her high-heeled shoes.
Stable again, she released her death grip on Max’s arms. “Anyone who ever offers me a ride on the Rio’s zip line is going to die the death of a thousand nail file jabs,” she told him.
Turning and looking up to the dizzying apex, she saw Midnight Louie flitting down the scaffolding to the stairs with fluid skill.
She turned back to Max. “And what are you going to do with the jewels?”
He hefted the black silk scarf, now knotted into a jewelry bag. “Return it to those who suffered from not having it.”
“The IRA widows and orphans fund.”
Max’s smile was somehow secret. “Yes, and for other devastated Irish lives.”
“So it’s Ireland again for you. And what will you do with this place afterward?”
He looked up. “The technical apex would make a fine penthouse. I could live here. Redeem the place. Redeem myself. Or—”
“Or?”
“Find another place, over the rainbow.”
“You’re holding a rainbow in your hands,” she pointed out, “only you know you can’t live there.”
“And don’t we all do that sometimes?” He bowed. To her and to the cat sitting beside her. “I give you the Irish wish that you live for your rainbows, not for the rain.”
She did tear up a bit, for all the people she’d met who couldn’t do that, and Irish wishes were always so…infectious.
Louie rubbed on her ankles and she looked down, imagining she was wearing the ruby-red slippers and she’d instantly be back at the Circle Ritz with Matt.
Of course Max was gone. She didn’t have to look up and around to know that, and hoped he got to live his own wish. A trio of jewels—ruby, emerald and sapphire—remained on the black glass. A wedding present, she guessed.
She wondered if the Midnight Louie shoes would do anything other than shed Austrian crystals if she tried to knock the heels together three times.