Barnaby Rudge bowed to his audience as he transitioned between illusions. The show had been going superbly. The scarves had flowed out of his sleeves like water down a mountain streambed. The Chinese linking rings had clashed together like armies in the night. There was a small hitch when he reached into the false bottom of his top hat and discovered that he’d left his pint of Cutty inside with the cap partially unscrewed and the dove he’d meant to produce had suffocated on the whiskey fumes. But he had improvised a clever bit of patter to distract the crowd as he disposed of both chapeau and oiseau, and no one seemed to notice the lacuna in the performance. And the rabbit, that irresistible pink-nosed climax to his act, the one that never failed to rouse the audience to a standing cheer, was nestled safely beneath the false bottom of his dove cage. This would be a show for the ages.
With a grand flourish, Rudge produced the cane that in moments he would transform into a bouquet of lovely flowers. The sight of so much color exploding from a simple black stick would elicit awed sighs from his audience, and while they were marveling, he’d use their stunned focus on the blooms to set the switch on the dove cage. It was all going perfectly.
Rudge felt a sticky blob slap against his cheek-avian revenge for the dove’s demise, perhaps. No matter. He would allow no bird to disturb his act when it was nearing its climax. He reached up to wipe it off and his hand came back slimed with green and pink. There was a brown circle in the middle of the blotch, which he realized was most of one of the icing a ’s in “Happy Birthday.”
Rudge glared out into the crowd to see who had flung the frosting at him. The culprit wasn’t hard to find. It was little Jimmy Eisenstein, whose tenth birthday the magician had been hired to help celebrate. Rudge could tell it was Jimmy who had iced him. He still held the frosting catapult-in this case a white plastic spork-aloft, now reloaded for a second assault. But even without the weapon, Rudge would have known who had committed this assault, because while Rudge had been consumed with the details of his performance, the entire audience of second graders had slipped out of their folding chairs and drifted away from the living room, leaving only the birthday boy to appreciate the act.
“Stay that missile, you fine young man,” Rudge boomed out cheerfully. “And I will show you the wonders of the Orient.”
“If you mean the rabbit, it peed in the birdcage and it’s dripping through the bottom,” the lovable young scamp retorted. “And I saw you flip that switch on the back of the cage. What does that do-unhook some door so you can reach through the fake floor?”
Rudge let out a hearty laugh, fighting off the urge to throttle the dear lad. Every magician worth his gold lame suit had encountered hecklers, and the worst were the ones who had dabbled in the art themselves. Clearly this boy was planning a career on the stage. Maybe he even hoped to model his act after Rudge’s.
Normally, the magician would have stifled the interloper with one of his special zingers. But there was a keen intelligence in the youngster’s eye, and since there were no other spectators to disillusion, perhaps he could use this as a moment to share his precious secrets.
“If you’d care to approach, young man, I might be persuaded to show you how to make the rabbit appear,” Rudge said.
“I’ll wait until the cage stops dripping pee,” Jimmy said.
“I have other miracles I could teach you,” Rudge said, glancing over to see a stream of rabbit urine dripping out of his dove house and bleaching the blue carpet beneath it a dingy yellow.
“My dad said you could probably make our entire liquor cabinet disappear if someone didn’t keep an eye on you,” Jimmy said.
Rudge glowed at the compliment. It had been many years since he’d practiced the illusion of the vanishing furniture, but it was good to know he was still remembered for it. “That is a particularly advanced glamour,” Rudge said. “Perhaps we should start with a smaller miracle and work our way up.”
“Whatever,” Jimmy said. “Can you tell me what my dad did on his last business trip to Omaha that made my mom so mad?”
“What kind of magic is that?” Rudge said.
“The kind the other guy is doing.”
Jimmy pointed out through the glass sliding door to the far end of the backyard, where the entire troop of ten-year-olds had clustered around a skinny, badly dressed man, who barely looked older than them, and his slightly better-dressed sidekick. As the interloper pressed his fingers deep into his forehead as if in communication with the Great Beyond, Rudge realized where he had seen him before-in the crowd at the Fortress of Magic.
With a shiver of disgust, Rudge realized what he must be dealing with-a pair of those self-styled “bad boys of magic.” Sure they were bad boys, in the same sense that basal cell carcinomas could be considered the “bad boys” of the metabolism. They had no respect for the Art. Their only interest was self-promotion. They froze themselves in ice cubes or buried themselves in glass coffins or hung by their toes for a month over Niagara Falls, and they had the temerity to call those stunts magic. They were acts of endurance, of self-immolation, of stupidity-but there was absolutely nothing magical about them.
These impostors had taken over almost every corner of the business. They sucked up all the increasingly rare TV time dedicated to professional magic. They got the best showroom bookings. They got the covers of all the trade papers. But there was one corner they would not steal from the true artists of the profession. They could not steal away the wonder in the eyes of children. Rudge would not allow it.
Barnaby Rudge marched out of the house and across the yard to where the interlopers stood surrounded by second graders. He pushed through the throng of children and glared at the bad boy with a stare that had paralyzed tigers in Bombay.
It took the bad boy a moment to acknowledge his presence, no doubt trying to figure out how to save face now that he’d been confronted by his superior. Instead, he bent down to one of the kids. “Your teacher thinks you’re a genius and your parents want to send you to a special school for advanced students,” he said. “And now you’re terrified because the only reason you’ve done so well on tests is that you found copies of the teachers’ editions of all your books in a thrift store and you’ve been cheating all year.”
The kid gaped up at him. He looked as if he wanted to deny the charges; then he broke down. “What do I do?” he whispered.
“I read auras; I don’t tell futures,” the bad boy said. “But I’m pretty sure the advanced school textbooks have teachers’ editions, too.”
The kid brightened again, and the bad boy searched the crowd for his next victim. Rudge stepped forward.
“Out, fraud,” Rudge boomed, an accusing finger in the bad boy’s face.
The interloper shrank back under the force of Rudge’s disapprobation. “Do not evict me, oh great wizard,” the interloper begged. “I seek only to learn at the feet of the master.”
At least that’s what he meant to say, Rudge could tell from the quaver in his voice. The actual words were closer to “Say, how do you get rabbit pee out of gold lame anyway?” but Rudge knew that one question would lead to another, and soon he would be begging for all the secrets of the magician’s art. Rudge’s will began to weaken. The Eisenstein boy was pretty young to take on as an apprentice; this new one was old enough to drive to the liquor store to do Rudge’s shopping when it was necessary. And he came with a sidekick, whom he could turn into a valuable ally if the student ever turned on the master. Best of all, the new-comer was doing a pretty good job of entertaining the children, which meant that Jimmy’s father would have no grounds for cutting Rudge’s negotiated fee for the appearance.
“Your act has promise, young wizard,” Rudge said, and waited for the glow of joy to spread across his incipient assistant’s face. “If you choose, you may study with me. I can teach you to take it to the next level-and all the way to the highest level.”