Renaldo St. Clare looked like he’d just dodged a hail of bullets.
“Excellent, Mr. Seboldt,” he said. “I look forward to working with you and your entire troupe. The show kicks off at sundown tonight with the opening ceremonies. You won’t want to miss that, I promise you. We’ll open the sideshow annex at seven. Should you have any questions or concerns between now and then, you can find me on the midway. Good luck to all of you.”
And he gave a little bow before exiting the annex.
“You?” Milena said immediately. “A barker?”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Bruno said. “He was getting ready to give us the heave.”
“But can you do it, Bruno?” Durga asked. “Can you run the patter?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Bruno said, “come sundown.”
THE INAUGURATION OF this season’s Mach’pella stand seemed to the freaks no different from the kick-off performance of dozens of other circuses they’d witnessed over the years. Professionals, they stood and sat away from the crowds who had flocked in full capacity to turn the midway into a straw house, standing room only, not a remaining ticket to be had. It seemed every man, woman, and babe in the county had come to the opening of the show, their hearts swollen with the promise of premier entertainment and who-knew-what thrills and surprises.
The ceremonies began with a meeting, under the big top and in the center ring, between Renaldo St. Clare, in full spangled costume, and the mayor of Mach’pella, who read a proclamation that officially declared this “Jubilee Week” in the town. The ringmaster enthusiastically thanked the crowd and then began a run of adjective-laden puffery that even Milena had to admit was impressive. Then the band began playing a rousing chorus of the Jubilee theme, written, St. Clare reminded all, by the Bedlam Brothers themselves—those mysterious ministers of modern magic and miracles, who just might be sitting next to you at this very minute!
And as the audience began to look right and left in the hope of spotting one the brothers, the opening processional began, led by a dozen Indian pachyderms, each one bearing a member of the Romero family, fearless trainers who could make any beast do their bidding. The costumes were splendid, trimmed with colored lights and bells, and the family’s boots gleamed with countless layers of French cream.
The acrobats and aerialists came next. Family units from around the globe, and all of them born with a magnificent talent for equilibrium and self-control. They marched with grace and vitality, ran up each other’s back and leaped off shoulders, flying ridiculous distances and landing like statues carved of the coolest marble.
Next followed an amalgam of contortionists, bird trainers, fireeaters, sword swallowers, hand walkers, stilt walkers, glass walkers, a trick pony, and an abundance of jugglers who made airborne everything from pitchforks and babies to fireballs and wagon wheels. The clowns took their turns, causing a very efficient mayhem at the tail end of the parade, driving tiny cars in circles, throwing buckets of water or confetti, honking horns and blowing balloons and running madly from mechanical mice. They proved a sharp contrast to the penultimate parader, the Jubilee’s lone strongman, Chief Micmac Shawnee, billed as “The Brawniest Brave on the Ballyhoo,” according to his bannerline.
“He doesn’t look so tough to me,” said Durga.
“Looks,” reminded Bruno, “can be deceiving.”
The Chief marched defiantly, decked out in tight buckskin pants, barefoot and bare chested, a crow’s feather lodged behind one ear and his bulging chest decorated with war paint tattoos. No one said it aloud, but he reminded all the freaks of the Goldfaden knife thrower, except for the fact that the Chief’s head was shaved clean to the skull. Shawnee glared at the crowd and a few brave souls let fly some good-natured booing. To which the Chief responded by plucking a hatchet from his pants and waving it in the air menacingly. That this brought a round of laughter and cheers did nothing, it seemed, to lighten Micmac’s mood.
“Does anyone find it odd,” asked Milena, getting bored with the preshow festivities, “that we weren’t asked to march in the parade?”
“I told you,” said Bruno, “they had a bad experience with some bogus freaks a few seasons back. Besides, if they see you all in the parade, why would they pay money to see you again in the annex?”
This satisfied everyone but Chick, who decided to keep his unease to himself.
The parade seemed about to conclude when the ringmaster stepped back into a sudden hail of spotlights and the band abruptly played out the last of the Bedlam Brothers’ anthem, “Pandemonium (We Will Astound You).”
“And now,” bellowed St. Clare, projecting out past the farthest seats in the house, “to officially kick off the twenty-seventh visit of the Bedlam Brothers Roving Jubilee to our special friends in Mach’pella, the man you’ve all been waiting to see, a legend of colossal proportions, known and marveled at from the palaces of the Far East to the local grange halls, the wizard who has rewritten all the science books and put the undertaker on the dole, here he is, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to your town and your hearts, the one and only Dr. Lazarus Cole,” and here he screamed out the last two words, “The Resurrectionist!”
An explosion sounded at the entrance to the midway and a cloud of purple smoke mushroomed. The band’s drummer erupted with tympani and the percussion goosed every heart under the big top and focused all eyes onto the gust of vapor, out of which now emerged what seemed to be two creamy, brawny unicorns, pulling an open golden carriage festooned with luminous jewels of every hue. The man within the carriage held the reins with one hand. The other was pointed defiantly up into the air.
He drove the unicorns to the big ring and brought them to a stop. He stared up at the crowd for a long moment, a bemused look on his face, as if he had sized them up and found them all wanting. Then he roused himself, stepped out of the carriage and down onto the midway. He was tall and gaunt, dressed in formal attire, a black tuxedo with long tails, crimson shirt and cummerbund and a narrow black tie. He wore French cuffs and elaborate gold cufflinks and, on his head, an enormous white turban bound by a ruby.
He threw his head back and, into the silence of the crowd, he shouted, “I am Dr. Lazarus Cole,” paused and added, “the Resurrectionist.”
And then he bowed elaborately, one leg propped behind the other, knees bent slightly and the turban tipping close to the ground.
The crowd went berserk. The cheers and screams, the overflow of uncontrolled emotion, was unlike anything that Bruno and his freaks had seen through the course of their travels. The ovation went on for so long that Antoinette became agitated and Milena had to wonder, aloud, what kind of act could warrant such acclaim.
It didn’t take long to find out. And, at least in its early stages, it wasn’t what the hermaphrodite — or any of the others — had expected.
Aziz had pegged the guy as some kind of faith healer, who’d whip the hicks into a frenzy of righteous and woozy belief and then slay a few spirits by laying on those big, milky hands. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Because when the applause finally faded, what the Resurrectionist launched into was a kind of comedy act from hell.
First, he prowled the midway, giving a general introduction—great to be back in your wonderful town, we’ve got a great show for you tonight—taking the audience’s mean temperature, getting a read on the marks, singling out a few probable rubes. But then he went up into the bleachers themselves, like some common clown, and it didn’t take long for things to get ugly after that.
Chick saw that Lazarus Cole was possessed of a first-rate talent, but that it was vicious in nature. A natural insult comic, he raised the tease and the rib to torturous levels, a cruelty inherent in his barbs that the chicken boy had never before witnessed in his short life. It became apparent, quickly, that the Resurrectionist was a miner of outrage. He had a magician’s skill for sizing up the stooges but rather than focusing on the good-natured or the serene, the gullible or the naive, he seemed to be targeting the most aggressive, the most perturbed, and the most choleric individuals in the sizable crowd. And then, once he’d identified these human time bombs, he went to work on them with a daring and an expertise that would have made an abusive parent envious.