"What's the grade?" Temple asked, leaning over to whisper to Max, whose intense surveillance of the onstage and offstage action had turned him into a virtual statue.
"Execution is excellent; originality is pathetic. A very odd combo of strength and weakness.
Disturbing. It's almost as if--," but Max's sentence trailed off, lost in the multitude of interior paths his quick mind was following on a journey of its own.
Still, a magic show is a magic show. Impossibly large objects are made to appear or disappear; people come and go in exotic cabinets like Clark Kent dashing into a phone booth and flying out as Superman.
Temple watched, always tricked, like the rest of the audience, despite her best efforts to see the smoke and mirrors, to watch the hand that wasn't waving the red flag of distraction.
And eventually came another patented magic-show moment.
The enchantress, in her tatter-edged robes of black-and-orange chiffon imprinted with silver chrysanthemums, glided across the stage apron on her incredibly high Chinese platform soles.
Temple squinted to better see a silver-leafed landscape carved into the six-inch-high platforms.
She had never before seen a woman as vertically ambitious.
Shangri-La's mandarin nails pantomimed arcane signs.
"My next illusion requires an assistant from the audience. You, little boy in blue?"
A forefinger nail lunged toward a six-year-old in the front row who was gazing up at her with the utterly round eyes of innocent belief. His wonder was tinged with fear, and she wisely veered away from him.
"Someone older and bolder, but. . . not too large."
Again she strode the breadth of the stage, eerily noiseless despite the clunky-looking platform shoes.
"You!"
A curved nail pointed, and two of the ninja figures leaped into the audience. They stopped before Temple.
"Oh, no . . ."
Somehow Shangri-La threaded her artificially long fingers together, creating dueling fingernails. "This is not difficult. Will not take long. Will be most amusing. And your hair matches the color of my robe."
The audience laughed, having spotted Temple's red hair.
Max was seriously slouching in the seat beside her, giving low profile a new name. He seemed almost in a trance, all observer, rather than actor.
"Will you not be this magician's assistant for a very short time?" the woman coaxed. Her slightly hoarse voice was all the more enthralling, evoking France Nuyen's huskiness in the spate of fifties films that reflected a postwar fascination with the mysterious East.
Like anyone singled out from the crowd to perform as the average idiot, Temple felt bullied, and secretly flattered. She would be cool, refuse to let this professional manipulator throw her.
She wasn't utterly unfamiliar with magical hocus-pocus. She would audition as Max's assistant.
So she stood, applause encouraging her onward and upward.
The flanking ninjas grabbed an arm each and rushed her to the stage, lifting her up from the pit as if she were weightless, then jumping up onstage beside her and bowing to her, then Shangri-La, then the audience.
More applause.
The dragon lady circled her subject, robes licking like flames at her figure. "Here we have a woman named--?"
"Temple."
"Temple. Are you a tourist, Temple?"
"Oh, no. I live here."
"Imagine. Someone lives here in Las Vegas. Well, then, Temple, you have no doubt seen many magic shows and know what to expect."
Temple smothered a smile. Did she ever!
"That is a lovely ring you are wearing. Show it to the audience, please."
That she didn't like, not with two particular audience members out there, but anyone hauled on stage for shenanigans can't complain when they come too close for comfort.
Temple lifted her left hand, facing her, so the audience could see her ring.
They tittered.
Temple turned her hand around. Her finger was bare. Every finger was bare. She held up her right hand. It too was bare.
Another laugh from the audience. She was performing like an automaton, making all the right, befuddled moves. She didn't like that either.
She glimpsed Matt's blond head at the upper left, amid the overall dark undifferentiated mass of the crowd.
She looked down for Max. His chair was empty. That's when slight unease began to escalate into fear.
"So you had a ring, and it is gone. Surely you felt it leave your finger?"
"No."
"Perhaps you did not have a ring, and will sue the establishment. Can you prove you ever had a ring?"
"Yes."
"Good. Then we will get it back for you. But first you must do as the ring did. You will vanish and reappear."
"The ring hasn't reappeared yet."
"Was it valuable?"
"Yes."
"Of sentimental value as well?"
"Yes."
"Then I take this next task very seriously."
Shangri-La stepped aside, her robes a spotlit flutter. Temple turned to look upstage as the silent lithe ninjas wheeled a gaudy booth to center stage.
She had seen its like a few dozen times. Not in Max's act. He avoided the predictable. But she knew this trumped-up box into which she was supposed to step and from which she would disappear only to be conjured up again.
She didn't really know how it was managed, especially with an untrained subject. A back panel that gave, so she was hustled offstage? A bottom escape hatch that opened onto a stage trapdoor through which she would descend? She supposed a friendly neighborhood ninja would lift her down into the lower depths.
She stepped up into the elaborately painted closet. Shangri-La floated around the prop, her long sleeves and fork-tongued skirt panels making contrails of color and motion.
The door closed on Temple, shutting her in darkness. Then the blackness spun and she felt herself caught in a falling eddy, plunging down into a greater darkness.
Where were the guardian ninja when she needed them?
Chapter 43
Vanishing Act
When Temple's ring disappeared, Max Kinsella's internal illusion warning system went on red alert. The missing ring or watch trick was laughably common, but that wasn't what had alarmed Max.
Maybe it was the primal shock of seeing his ring to Temple vanish, but he didn't think he was that possessive.
It was that the vanishing act happened too soon, like a suspiciously rushed preliminary.
Usually the canny magician made a big production of the ring being present before making it vanish. This ring might never have existed. Temple might be a planted shill, for all the audience could tell. Not a wise way to run a magic act.
Max shrugged out of his sport coat. He seized Temple's program from the empty seat beside him, grabbed her half-consumed drink and balanced it atop the horizontal program.
When the onstage action was drawing all eyes, he stood, stooped at the knees so his height wasn't a distraction. Then he darted waiter like down the row, bending here and there as if delivering a drink. Bewildered show-goers watched phantom drinks hover and disappear as swiftly as departing UFOs.
Sensing a distracting moment on stage, Max darted forward again, heading for the stairs leading up to the dim-lit apron at stage right.
The dialogue between Temple and Shangri-La ricocheted like a racquetball through the house, but despite the mike's booming amplification that distorted the everyday into the unreal, Max sensed Temple's dawning unease before even she felt it.
Beside the stairs he stooped to put down glass and makeshift tray, tearing the elastic from his hair at the same time. He had no ninja mask, but his black turtleneck sweater and pants, and his loose, long dark hair would look sufficiently Oriental, sufficiently sinister, to blend with the ninja assistants for the few moments he needed.