“You have no idea whether Cosimo was a traitor or a victim,” the Synth man declares.
“Do you?” is the icy retort.
A silence holds during which you could hear a cat scratching at a flea.
Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise’s constant fishy breath from her high-end Asian cuisine, and my own personal magnetism that repels all vermin as if by magic, have kept us from any such rude personal grooming impulses at the moment.
Obviously, none of the Las Vegas branch of the Synth had considered that Cosimo Sparks could have died a traitor.
“While you lot are examining your consciences,” Vader One says, “and hunting traces of your brains, we will be watching all of you and the case with keen interest.”
“We have kept our eyes too closely on the international situation,” Vader Two further notes, “and left you to your own sorry devices, relying on your self-interest to keep you out of trouble.”
“Alas,” Vader Two purrs again, overdoing it this time in a poor imitation of the real thing, “that approach has not worked. You can count on being the objects of concentrated but hidden observation from now forward.”
“What can we do?” Czarina wails. “Cosimo is dead, and the rest of us might swiftly follow.”
“Consult your crystal ball,” Vader One snarls, sweeping the long cloak back as if brushing them aside so swiftly that the heavy faille material hisses. “Perhaps it has more intelligence than your conjoined brains.”
I am only able to avoid their dramatic exit and accompanying foot stomps by sucking in my stomach and flattening against the black wall.
Another long silence commences, which is unfortunate because I cannot let my breath out until they start yammering again, and the longer they do not, the more certain my breath is to release in an audible windstorm whoosh!
Perishing from self-strangulation is considered pretty kinky these days, and I have no wish to succumb to something the tabloids would have a field day with.
“What nerve!” Carmen finally says, standing up to pace, whipping her own silken cloak around as stylishly as the recently departed Darth Vaders. “They play the long-distance puppet masters for several years, holding us back from our big, uh, reveal, as they say on the extreme-makeover shows, and then dare to blame us for Cosimo’s death.”
“Ah, those extreme make over shows have moved from facial reconstruction to major house renovation,” the Synth man points out.
“I do not care about any of those stupid shows, Hal Herald! Apparently you have no better things to do than watch them. I am thinking about the magic show of the century we were planning for Las Vegas.”
“Last century or this?” Czarina asks dispiritedly, which is a rather sad condition for a medium. “We have been involved with these mysterious money backers almost that long.”
“You did not see this coming,” Hal points out.
“Please,” Czarina urges, “we do not need to quarrel; we need to solve Cosimo’s murder so we can get the foreign investors off our backs.”
“What about the Phantom Mage’s ‘accident’?” Carmen asks. “Or was it murder?”
“Did any of us do it? What about Cosimo?” Hal continues the questions.
“You mean we might have a serial killing going on?” Carmen demands.
“He wasn’t one of us,” Hal notes dismissively. “Just a hokey half-acrobatic magic act that gave a few thrills to the drunken postmidnight crowd. He did no real magic.”
“As if ‘real magic’ is on any of our résumés,” Czarina finally jibes back. “You and Cosimo and the other old-timers, like that Professor Mangel, might have wanted to diddle around tracing magical, mystical schools of history, but we were always a cadre of dreamers and schemers. I happen to think the schemers had the right idea all along. Looks as if Cosimo was more on the schemer side than anyone thought, and maybe the Phantom Mage was too.”
“You are not going back to that old notion that he was Max Kinsella?” Carmen asks.
“Kinsella vanished about the time the Mage crashed, did he not?”
“Yeah, but that was a pattern with him,” Herald points out. “Nothing new.”
“Maybe the reason was new, Hal.”
“That is crazy, Czarina. The Mystifying Max lost his Goliath gig. He may have pretended his contract just expired, but so have all our contracts expired as our venues dried up here in Vegas. Siegfried and Roy were retired by tragedy. Cirque du Soleil kicked the pants out of magic acts, face it. Dumb as the Phantom Mage’s act was, at least he was in the bungee-jumping, costume-wearing vanguard. We’re—” he snaps a flat disk on the mantel into the magnificence of a classic magician’s “topper”—“old hat.”
It is enough to pull a tear out of an aged duct. Not mine, mind you.
“Lance Burton just resigned for several more years at the Monte Carlo,” Hal notes.
“But not thee and me,” Carmen says. “Oh, poor Cosimo. Who’d want the old man dead? And why?”
“We are a threat,” Czarina intones in a dire alto voice almost as spooky as the strangers’ masks.
“So we had hoped,” Hal replies. “I think the Synth was just another Vegas scam. Something to keep us busy and hoping for a second coming, like the millennium nuts. Only we’re magic nuts.”
“You believe the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus was a delusion? It has killed four people so far,” Carmen points out, “maybe five now, including our colleague. The cloak beneath his dead body was spread in the celestial shape.”
“Ophiuchus is a forgotten constellation, Carmen,” Czarina says. “I do not think I can believe in the stars any longer. Unless it was a meteor like the Phantom Mage. He certainly put stars in your eyes.”
“A pose,” Carmen says haughtily. “I am not so easily impressed.”
“There was that intimate parting note from Max Kinsella,” Herald smirks, “before the Phantom Mage fell to his death. Maybe he was leaving you in both personas and you cut his bungee cord. A woman scorned …”
“Silly accusations!” Carmen objects to Herald’s jibes with a shrug and a dramatic spin to the hidden door. “This has not been a productive assembly, except for those foreign Synth members showing up. I wonder what they really want from us. We would be better off going to ground separately, or assuredly we will be pestered whenever we meet here until those interlopers leave Las Vegas. I am not going to accept any masked individual who knows how to breach our club rooms as a Synth member.”
“You did accept Max Kinsella and the Phantom Mage as just that,” Czarina singsongs to Carmen’s departing back.
I leap aside as the woman’s knee nudges the door’s pressure device and she vanishes into the dark beyond.
So I am left with two grumbling Synthettes and Midnight Louise.
Wait! Where is Midnight Louise?
The room is dim, and our kind is adept at the magic of blending into the background so we are not noticed, but even I have not noticed Louise for too long. You would think I would relish a vacation from her constant demands, and of course I do … but not when I do not know her whereabouts after we have dropped in on a sinister cabal of magicians.
Has she been kitnapped to play some moth-eaten top hat’s up-popping bunny rabbit? What a comedown for a born predator.
While I worry, I stir like a vagrant draft along the floor, brushing pant legs and robe hems of the remaining two Synth members. Miss Midnight Louise is not hiding out under anything human or inanimate in the room.
What a puzzle. What a worry.
Did not master magician Mr. Max Kinsella disappear from this very place only a couple months ago? Are not Miss Louise and myself the only investigators who have kept a weather eye on these shady characters? Should I stay to investigate this obvious hotbed of past and future villainy, or rush off and return to the Crystal Phoenix to assist my Miss Temple, who has her hands full with an awkward murder related to this very place and present company and does not even know either one exists?