The camera pulled back for a wide shot of two uniformed policemen on top of the platform. One of them held a burlap dummy upright while the other officer manacled its cloth hands to the iron post rings. Then they both knelt on the floorboards to attach leg irons to the wide-spread feet. And now the mannikin was splayed out across the face of the target. Standing below on the floor of the band shell, the newsman was speaking into his microphone, probably giving the history of the Lost Illusion and its long-deceased creator, the great Max Candle.
Malakhai inclined his head toward Louisa’s chair. „I never thought Oliver would be the one to work it out.“
Indeed. The retired carpenter in magician’s silks had once been the most ordinary member of the troupe, a boy from the American heartland, stranded in the middle of a world war and without a clue to get himself home. So Oliver had only made it as far as New York City. Perhaps Paris had spoiled him for the midwestern prairies that spawned him.
And now Malakhai remembered one more thing. He touched the arm of the dead woman’s chair, saying, „Oliver made me promise you’d watch this. He wanted you to see him in his finest hour.“
The camera was panning the plaza. „There might be a thousand people in that park. Millions more are watching this on television. No one in our crowd ever had an audience that size.“
Oliver Tree had surpassed them all.
More lost time was restored to Malakhai as he reached down to the cocktail table and picked up the formal invitation to a magic show in Central Park. He read the words in elegant script, then turned to the woman who wasn’t there. „He’s dedicating this performance to you, Louisa.“
The rest of the text was a bit cryptic for Oliver. A hint of things to come?
Malakhai faced the screen as the two policemen finished cocking the crossbow pistols. The gears of the pedestals were all set in motion, toothy brass wheels slowly turning. A clockwork peg rose to the top of its orbit and touched the trigger of a crossbow. The first arrow was launched and flying too fast for the eye to track it. In the next instant, the burlap dummy was losing stuffing where the metal shaft had torn its throat. The next bow fired, and the next. When every missile had flown, the cloth effigy was pinned to the target by shafts through its neck, both legs and that place where the human heart would be.
The uniformed officers climbed to the top of the platform, unlocked the irons, and the demonstration dummy fell to the floorboards. They picked it up and carried it between them. The sawdust bled down the stairs in their descent. They made one last tour of the pedestals, cocking the weapons, allowing more arrows to drop from the crossbow magazines.
Oliver Tree stood at the base of the stairs and handed his top hat to another magician. Then he donned a scarlet cape and pulled the monk’s hood over his white hair. As he slowly climbed toward the target, the long train of material flowed over the stairs behind him.
When the old man reached the top of the staircase, he stood with his back to the crowd and raised his arms. The cape concealed all but the top of the oval target. The scarlet silk sparkled and gleamed with reflections of camera lights. Then the cape collapsed and fell empty to the wooden floor. In that same instant, as if he had materialized in position, Oliver was revealed facing the crowd, spread-eagle across the target, bound in chains by hand and foot, himself the target of four armed crossbows. The gears of every pedestal were in motion. Soon the arrows would fly.
Malakhai clapped his hands. So far, the timing had been flawless. If the volume had been turned up, he might have heard the first round of applause from the audience in the plaza. Oliver Tree had grown old awaiting this moment.
The magician jerked his head to one side – the wrong side – as the gears on the first pedestal stopped and the bow released its arrow. Oliver’s face contorted in a scream. There was blood on his white tie and collar. His mouth was working frantically, no doubt begging his captors to stop the rest of the crossbows from firing their arrows and killing him. Oliver’s cries for help went ignored by the policemen and the reporter. They had apparently been informed that the great Max Candle had used these same words in the original act – just before dying in every single performance.
Another arrow flew, and another. While Oliver cried out in pain, the young reporter was smiling broadly for the camera, perhaps not understanding that the old man high above him on the platform was mortally wounded. Possibly this grinning child of the television era did not realize that all blood was not fake blood, that the arrows pinning the old man’s legs were quite real.
The crowd was staring agape. Though uninitiated in the art of magic, they knew death when they saw it, when it came with the final arrow swiftly ripping a hole through Oliver’s heart. The old man’s screaming stopped. He dangled from his chains, not struggling anymore. His eyes were wide, unblinking – fixed in fear.
Malakhai had much experience with death. He knew that it never came in an instant. Perhaps, just for one moment, Oliver was aware of a few people in the crowd moving toward the platform, coming to help him – as if they could.
The newsman was laughing and waving these rescuers off, yelling and gesturing, no doubt assuring them that death was part of the show, a special effect for their viewing enjoyment. Then the reporter looked up at the chained corpse, and he lost his professional smile, perhaps realizing that trick photography was not an option here.
This was what death looked like.
The police officers, better acquainted with mortality, had already reached the top of the stairs. They unlocked Oliver’s manacles and gently lowered the body to the wooden floor. Women covered the eyes of their children. The cameraman was ignoring the wild, waving hands of the reporter, who was mouthing the words to make him stop the pictures. But the lens was so in love with its subject, narrowing the focus, closing in on the fear-struck face of the dead magician and his true-to-life blood.
Louisa’s sherry glass fell to the floor, and the dark red liquid spread across the pattern of the carpet.
Malakhai’s hands were rising of their own accord. It was an act of will to keep one from touching the other, so as not to harm Louisa with a sound that aped applause. His lips spread wide with a silent scream, a parody of Oliver, whose volume had been turned off even before his life was ended. Then Malakhai’s hands crashed together, slapping loudly, again and again, madly clapping as tears rolled down his face and ran between his parted lips in warm salty streams.
What a worthy performance – murdering a man while a million pairs of eyes were watching.
Chapter 1
Sometimes he wondered why the children didn’t cry to see such monsters in the world – a giant blue hedgehog, a huge fat worm, a cat the size of a floating building. And there were more fantastic creatures that Detective Sergeant Riker could not identify.
The morning air was freezing cold. All the boys and girls were swaddled in woolen scarves and down coats. They sent up soft choruses of oohs and aaaahs when the cat with a sixteen-foot bow tie emerged from a side street. Its stovepipe hat could house a bodega. The grinning helium balloon was bound to the earth by long ropes in the hands of marching Lilliputian humans. The wind was high as the great looming cat dragged his rope handlers along with him, and it was no longer clear who was tethered to whom.
The balloon was being sandwiched into the parade route between two earthbound attractions, a Conestoga wagon drawn by four live horses and a float pulled by a car and carrying the world’s largest peanut on two legs. Other wildly fanciful floats were backed up to 85th Street. They awaited instructions to alternate with the helium giants held down by sandbags and corralled in the cross streets on either side of the Museum of Natural History.