"Sure," Sabine said.
Sally nudged Bertie and pointed at the stuffed owl perched inside the bookcase. "Go up to the owl and say 'Open Sesame.' That's how you get in."
Bertie looked shy. She didn't want to speak to the dead owl. Sabine herself simply refused to do it. She would always wait and slip in behind someone else. "Go on," Sally said. "It's the only way."
But Bertie just stood there. "I'd really rather not," she said. "Mama, you do it."
So Dot Fetters, without giving it a thought, walked up to the bird and did what needed to be done. If you had to say "Open Sesame" to get through the door, then that's what she would do. The bookcase slid open.
"They really want to give you a job," Dot Fetters said, taking Sabine's arm. "You should be flattered."
All through lunch there was a steady stream of people at the table paying respects, giving condolences, heaping Parsifal's memory with lavish compliments to honor the Fetters. One by one, magicians left their scotch-and-sodas at the bar and came to sit with them for a moment, tell a few stories, as if these women were some leftover Maña wives. The Fetters were overwhelmed by the attention. They let their hands be kissed by showmen. And Sabine was glad to do it, glad to show them how greatly Parsifal was loved, but for herself she felt like the secret panels in the walls were closing in.
"So now I've taken the guy's watch," the magician at the table next to them told the magician he was eating with. "I do a few little tricks for the other people and I'm waiting and waiting for this fellow to notice his watch is missing, until finally I got to move on so I say to him, 'Can you tell me the time?' And the guy looks at his wrist and he says, 'I'm sorry, I'm not wearing a watch.'"
"He doesn't know?" the other magician said.
"No idea. So I say, 'Did you have one on earlier?' I mean, hint, hint, and the guy touches his wrist, like maybe he's double-checking, and his wife pipes up and says, 'He can never remember anything. He'd leave his arms at home if they weren't attached.'"
"Now there's the kind of broad you want to have around. What kind of watch?" the other magician asked.
"It's a Sea Master. It's no Rolex, but still we're talking a grand."
The other magician whistled.
"Well, you know this trick. I got the watch sealed up in an envelope inside a zipper wallet in my pocket. Perfectly done. A sweet trick, if someone misses their watch."
"But in this case…"
"Exactly. I can't just give it to the guy, say, 'Oh, in feet you did put your watch on this morning, you idiot.'"
"So?"
"So I turned it in to the lost-and-found, thinking sooner or later he'd wise up. Stayed there for a month and then they gave it to me." The magician pushed up his shirtsleeve to show the watch. "Omega," he said. "Keeps time like a Swiss train."
Sabine sighed and accepted a refill on her coffee. A magician's assistant was flatly nothing without a magician. There would never be a night when the assistant took the stage alone. "Look how well she holds the hat," they would say as she stood there, hat in hand, her face one bright smile. No one wanted to watch her put herself in a box and take herself out again. No one cared how gracefully she moved, how good the costume was. She held the rabbit tenderly. She caged up the doves. Who cared? They didn't know how often she was the one working like a plow horse while Parsifal fluttered his hands through the spotlight and smiled. Back in the old days, before Parsifal decided the three-part box was an exercise in misogyny, she was sliding around inside a platform on her back, sticking up a leg, popping her seemingly disconnected head into the top box, waving her hand through a trapdoor. And when Parsifal finally reconstructed her, she could not appear sweaty or out of breath. She had to look surprised, grateful. By professional standards, Sabine was much too tall to be an assistant. The little women, like Bess Houdini, could squeeze themselves into anything, while Sabine had to be vigilant to keep herself thin and limber. Still, Parsifal said, better to have an assistant who looked like a stretched-out Audrey Hepburn, and there were plenty of tricks she didn't figure into at all. Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost. Even if Sabine had never loved magic the way she loved Parsifal, she realized that it was one more thing that was over for her. She had been a brightly "painted label, a well-made box, a bottle cap. She was never the reason.
After lunch she took them to the Houdini'séance room, the Dante room, the Palace of Mystery. They went backstage, where Mrs. Fetters tapped her foot suspiciously on the floor. What a night it had been when Parsifal first took Sabine to the Castle, how impossible it was to think that someday they would perform there. Inconceivable that one day they would get tired of performing there.
"Look at this," Bertie said, and touched the figure of Houdini wrapped in chains. His eyes looked as if he suffered from lack of oxygen, or possibly a thyroid condition.
Everything was a prop. Once it had thrilled Sabine, too, now it made her feel abandoned. "Come on," she said. "We need to get to the show if we want a seat."
The meal was the price you had to pay to see some magic. That was the trick of the Castle. You had to make it past the food and drinks, give them a chance to make their money before you got to see the show.
"How often did the two of you perform here?" Mrs. Fetters asked Sabine.
"A week a year, usually, sometimes more if there was a cancellation. It was a lot of work for not a lot of money."
"But it must have been so much fun," Bertie said. "I can't even imagine it, getting to come here every night."
Sabine nodded and turned away, pretending to study the framed caricatures that lined the walls. She focused her eyes on the blank space in between Harry Blackstone, Senior, and Harry Blackstone, Junior. Bertie was right. It had been fun. It was a completely different lifetime, one without sickness, without knowledge of past or future. It was just Parsifal, Sabine, and Rabbit. Fun.
For the lunch crowd there was only close-up magic, mostly card tricks, hoops, and coins, maybe a little mentalism. No one got sawed in half at lunch, no one vanished. Like Parsifal, it was this smaller magic that Sabine had come to prefer, not as showy and, therefore, more difficult. It was always harder when the audience was pressed up against you, the closest row practically pushing on your knees.
"I can't believe you did this," Mrs. Fetters whispered as Monty came out to introduce Sam Spender. "It's so exciting."
Spender was a thin, dark-haired man in his middle thirties. He and Parsifal had only overlapped by a year or two, Parsifal winding down from the business just as Sam was coming up. All that Sabine knew about him was that he was two people, one on the stage and one at the bar after the show. His true self, she believed, was onstage, where he was graceful and nearly handsome. He had what Parsifal used to call bravado. But at the bar after the show he was nobody, a man who could vanish in a crowd without any tricks.
He began the patter, the Ladies-and-gentlemen-I-want-to-welcome-you-to. Dot and Bertie Fetters sat forward in their seats, so thrilled to be entertained that for the moment they forgot that the purpose of their trip was to mourn. But then that was the point of magic, to take people in, make them forget what was real and possible. They were so utterly game that when Sam Spender asked if there was anyone in the audience from out of town, they raised their hands, not knowing that everyone in Los Angeles was from out of town.
Sabine turned her eyes away. She could not imagine how she'd thought that going to the Castle would be a good idea. She felt the pressure of sadness rising up in the back of her throat. She stared at the bandage on her hand, at that damn engagement ring she had forgotten to take off. Think about none of it. She tried to concentrate on the strip mall she was building. She would need to buy some small-grain veneer, some corrugated plastic. She would make a list of what she needed to buy. But even as she concentrated, she could hear it. From someplace far away, the farthest left-hand corner of hell, she heard her name. Dot Fetters touched her wrist.