“He isn’t — not in the least.”
Cedric frowned, “If you’d told me you felt that way, I wouldn’t have booked you both for the same night.”
“It doesn’t matter. As I said, he is a fine performer.”
“Just what is it that you find so objectionable about Boltan?” I asked as Steele sat down.
“He’s a ruthless egomaniac,” Steele said. “Those in the psychological professions would call him a sociopath. If you stand in his way, he’ll walk over you without hesitation.”
“A fairly common trait among performers.”
“Not in Boltan’s case. Back in the 40s, for example, he worked with a man named Granger—”
“The Four-Men-in-a-Trunk Illusion,” Ardis said immediately.
“Right. The Granger Four-Men-in-a-Trunk Illusion premiered at the Palladium before George the Fifth. That was before Bolton’s time, of course. At any rate, Granger was getting old, but he had a beautiful young wife named Cecily and an infant son; he also had Phil Boltan as an assistant.
“So one morning Granger awoke to find that Boltan had run off with Cecily and several trunks of his effects. He was left with the infant son and a load of bitterness he wasn’t able to handle. As a result, he put his head in a plastic bag one evening and suffocated himself. Tragic — very tragic.”
“What happened to the son?” Cedric asked.
“I don’t know. Granger had no close relatives, so I imagine the boy went to a foster home.”
Ardis asked, “Did Boltan marry Cecily?”
“No. Of course not. He’s never married any of his conquests.”
“Nice guy,” I said.
Steele nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Enough about Phil Boltan,” he said. “Matthew, did you have any problem setting up for my show?”
“No,” I told him. “All your properties are ready in the wings.”
“Sound equipment?”
“In place.”
“Ultraviolet bulbs?”
“Check,” I said. The u.v. bulbs were to illuminate the special paint on the gauze and balloons and other “spook” effects for Steele’s midnight séance show. “It’s a good thing I did a precheck; one of the Carter posters fluoresced blue around the border, and I had to take it down. Otherwise it would have been a conspicuous distraction.”
Cedric looked at me reproachfully. “I suppose you’d have removed the Iron Maiden if that had fluoresced,” he said, meaning the half-ton iron torture box in one comer.
“Sure,” I said. “Dedication is dedication.”
We made small talk for a time, and then Cedric excused himself to take his usual place behind the bar; it was twenty past ten. I sipped my drink and looked idly around the Cellar. It was stuffed with the paraphernalia and memorabilia of Carter the Great, a world-famous illusionist in the ’20s and ’30s. His gaudy posters covered the walls.
The stage was rather small, but of professional quality; it even had a trapdoor, which led to a small tunnel, which in turn came up in the coatroom adjacent to the bar. The only other exits from the stage, aside from the proscenium, were curtains on the right and left sides, leading to small dressing rooms. Both rooms had curtained second exits to the house, on the right beyond the Davenport Brothers Spirit Cabinet — a privy-sized cubicle in which a tarot reader now did her thing — and on the left behind a half-moon table used for close-up card tricks.
At 10:30 the voice of Cedric’s wife Jan came over the loudspeaker, announcing the beginning of Boltan’s act. The lights dimmed, and the conversational roar died to a murmur. Steele swiveled his chair to face the stage, the glass of brandy he had ordered in one hand. He cupped the glass like a fragile relic, staring over its lip at the stage as the curtain went up.
“Oh, for a muse of fire...” he said softly, when The Amazing Boltan made his entrance.
“What was that?” I whispered, but Steele merely gave me one of his amused looks and waved me to silence.
The Amazing Boltan was an impressive man. Something over six feet tall and ever so slightly portly, he had the impeccable grooming and manners of what would have been described fifty years ago as a “born gentleman.” His tuxedo didn’t seem like a stage costume, but like a part of his personality. It went with the gold cufflinks and cigar case, and the carefully tonsured, white-striped black hair. He looked elegant, but to my eyes it was the elegance of a con man or a head waiter.
Bolton’s act was showy, designed to impress you with his power and control. He put a rabbit into a box, then waved his hands and collapsed the box, and the rabbit was gone. He took two empty bowls and produced rice from them until it overran the little table he was working on and spilled in heaps onto the stage floor. He did a beautiful version of an effect called the Miser’s Dream. Gold coins were plucked out of the air and thrown into a bucket until it rattled with them; then he switched to paper money and filled the rest of the bucket with fives and tens. All the while he kept up a steady flow of patter about “The Gold of Genies” and “The Transmutations of the Ancients of Lhassa.”
When he was finished with this effect, Boltan said to the audience, “I shall now require an assistant. A young lady, perhaps. What about you, miss? That’s it — don’t be afraid. Step right up here on stage with me.” He helped a young, winsome-looking blonde across the footlights, and proceeded to amaze her and the rest of the audience by causing sponge balls to multiply in her closed hand and appear and disappear from his.
He excused the girl finally and asked for another volunteer: “A young man, perhaps, this time.” I could tell by the pacing of the act that he was headed toward some impressive finale.
A bulky bearded man who had just pushed himself to a table at the front, and was therefore still standing, allowed himself to be talked into climbing onto the stage. He was dressed somewhere between college casual and sloppy: a denim jacket, jeans, and glossy black shoes. He appeared to be in his late twenties, though it wasn’t easy to tell through his medium-length facial hair.
“Thank you for coming up to help me,” Boltan said in his deep stage voice. “Don’t be nervous. Now, if you’ll just hold your two hands outstretched in front of you, palms up...”
The bearded man, instead of complying with this request, took a sudden step backward and pulled a small automatic from his jacket pocket.
The audience leaned forward expectantly, thinking that this was part of the act; but Steele, who apparently felt that it wasn’t, jumped to his feet and started toward the stage. I pushed my own chair back, frowning, and went after him.
Boltan retreated a couple of steps, a look of bewilderment crossing his elegant features. The bearded man leveled the gun at him, and I heard him say distinctly, “I’m going to kill you, Boltan, just as someone should have done years ago.”
Steele shouted something, but his words were lost in the deafening explosion of three shots.
Boltan, staggering, put a hand to his chest. Blood welled through his fingers, and he slowly crumpled. A woman screamed. The uniformed police cadets and their officers were on their feet, some of them starting for the stage. Steele had reached the first row of tables, and was trying to push between two chairs to get to the stage. The bearded man dropped his weapon and ran off stage right, disappearing behind the curtain leading to the dressing room on that side.
The entire audience knew now that the shooting wasn’t part of the show; another woman screamed, and people began milling about, several of them rushing in panic toward the Cellar’s two street exits. Blue uniforms converged on the stage, shoving tables and civilians out of the way, leaping up onto it. Steele had made it up the steps by this time, with me at his heels, but his path to the stage right curtain was hampered by the cadets. Over the bedlam I heard a voice shout authoritatively, “Everyone remain calm and stay where you are! Don’t try to leave these premises!”