“I’ll say,” Shawn said.
“Usually with these guys, they put up a good front at first,” Fleck says. “They’re trying to sell you like you’re one of the rubes. And then once the contracts are signed and the drinks are poured, they let the mask slip a little. But that never happened with P’tol P’kah. He showed up for every one of his shows. Occasionally we exchanged a couple of syllables, but aside from that he was completely inaccessible.”
“You seemed like you were pretty good buddies last night,” Shawn said. “You didn’t both show up at the Fortress of Magic by accident.”
“I received a phone call that afternoon,” Fleck said. “A woman’s voice told me that he had wearied of the sniping from his fellow magicians, and wanted to put it to a rest for good. That was the way she talked, by the way.”
“Do you think it was the same woman you met in the warehouse?” Gus asked.
“No way to know,” Fleck said. “Whoever she was, she called from a blocked number. I had my internal security people try to track it down via phone records this morning, but they couldn’t do it. And my internal security people are very good. Anyway, as I was walking up the hill to the Fortress, I saw P’tol P’kah standing outside, waiting for me. We entered, and you know the rest.”
“Some of the rest,” Shawn said. “We don’t know what happened to. ..”
“P’tol P’kah,” Gus prompted.
“Yeah, him,” Shawn said. “So, if you could just fill in that little piece, we’d have everything we need to complete our investigation.”
Fleck’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Shawn, trying to decide if what he was hearing was some kind of joke, or a sign of total incompetence. “If I knew what happened to P’tol P’kah,” he said in a growl that made the Fortress of Magic’s electronic hounds sound like kittens, “I wouldn’t have hired you to find out what happened to P’tol P’kah.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Gus said quickly. “That was, um… That was…”
As Gus floundered helplessly, Shawn stepped in. “An investigative technique. Sometimes people know more than they’re aware they know. That knowledge is locked away deep in the subbasement-”
“Subconscious,” Gus corrected.
“But sometimes it can be brought to the surface if we use the elevator of the unexpected question,” Shawn finished.
Fleck considered this for a moment; then the scowl left his face. “I understand that you two are unconventional investigators, and you will employ the occasional unconventional technique. That is one reason I hired you.”
“And the fact that we were there,” Shawn volunteered. This time Gus kicked with all his strength, and despite the short distance between their feet, clearly managed to inflict some pain. “There to assist you in your hour of great need, that is.”
Fleck ignored the interruption. “But if you ever try to trick me again, if you even idly speculate that I am in any way responsible for the disappearance of someone who is not only a brilliant performer, but who has become personally very close to me, I will be displeased. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Gus said quickly. He could see that Shawn was running through a list of possible responses, but a gentle nudge with his foot in the exact spot where his last kick landed persuaded him to supply a simple nod.
“Good,” Fleck said. He thudded his hands together, and the spacegirls returned to whisk the platters away. “This meal is now concluded.”
“What, no dessert?” Shawn said.
Fleck reached into his breast pocket and took out a plastic card. “I do not intend to guide your investigation, but I assume you will want to begin with the suite P’tol P’kah calls home. This key will operate the elevator from his dressing room. My only request is that you leave everything exactly as you found it. If you are able to find my client and he is healthy and able to return, I don’t want him to feel that his privacy has been violated. Is there anything else?”
“Just one question,” Shawn said, moving his leg out of the way in case Gus was planning another assault on his ankle. “What if we find P’nut P’brittle and he doesn’t want to come back?”
Benny Fleck didn’t move. His facial expression didn’t change; his body language wasn’t altered in any way. But Gus somehow got the impression that their lunch host had become much taller than the missing Martian.
“P’tol P’kah has a contract with me,” Fleck said calmly. “I’m sure his only desire in this or any other world is to live up to it. But if you find him and he suggests in any way that he’d prefer not to return, you must do as he wishes. Leave him be and let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” Gus said, a wave of relief washing over him.
“Let me know exactly where he is,” Fleck continued. “My internal security people will do the rest.”
Chapter Ten
“ Shawn, he’s going to kill him.”
Gus stood in the middle of P’tol P’kah’s penthouse suite, still nauseated from the thirty-nine-story ascent in the private elevator from the dressing room. He took a step across the brilliant white carpet to where Shawn stood looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows, but as soon as he did, the room started spinning again. He might not have minded this so much, except that the suite was large enough to house the entire Good-year blimp fleet with room left over for most of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons, and that was a mighty big space to have twirling around his head.
“You’re right,” Shawn said.
At least that was progress. As they had followed yet another silver-suited spacegirl through the employee tunnels that ran from the restaurant’s kitchen to the backstage area of the Starlight Theater, Shawn had refused to acknowledge there was anything ominous in the last part of their meeting with Fleck.
“We’ve got to do something.”
“Absolutely,” Shawn said. “I’m putting twenty bucks on the champ.”
“What champ? What are you talking about?”
“That.” Shawn pointed out the window. Fighting off his wooziness, Gus managed to cross the room and join him, only to see that Shawn was looking out at an enormous sign in front of Caesar’s Palace, advertising tonight’s heavyweight championship. “I know a lot of people have been saying the champ’s past his prime, but Montoya won’t last three rounds.”
Down below, the cars looked no bigger than the Hot Wheels Gus and Shawn used to play with, and Gus turned away quickly before his nausea teamed up with incipient vertigo to make him pass out.
“I don’t care about a fight, Shawn,” Gus said in between deep, heavy, regular breaths. “I care about what’s going to happen if we find P’tol P’kah and he doesn’t want to come back here.”
“Are you kidding?” Shawn waved his arm around the suite. One wall was covered by a flat-screen TV the size of a freeway exit sign. A door on the opposite side led to a closet that seemed to run the entire length of the hotel tower, and it was filled with endless iterations of a custom-made outfit perfect for the stylish Martian-slacks in black and khaki, blazers in blue and black, white shirts, and leather loafers, all in sizes Yao Ming could swim in. And if Yao were a guest and he felt like some actual nonsartorial swimming, another door opened onto an Olympic-sized indoor pool. The steel-and-marble gourmet kitchen was stocked with every kind of snack food Shawn and Gus had ever heard of and many they hadn’t. “Who wouldn’t want to come back here?”
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Maybe someone who gets nauseated in fast elevators. Someone who’s afraid of heights. Or maybe a guy who dissolves in a tank of water, never rematerializes, and leaves a dead guy floating in his place.”
Shawn took a moment to think through what Gus was saying. “You have a theory?”
“Yes,” Gus said. “And it’s the same one you have, because it’s the only one that makes sense.”
“The only theory that makes sense is the one that starts with a Martian dissolving in water?”
“That’s his trick,” Gus said impatiently. “We both know he didn’t really dissolve.”