“Tark, this is some life or death shit,” Flip said. “I ain’t asking you to come out and run no marathon. Have a few words with me and you can go back to sleep.”
The magician seemed to consider this. Then Flip heard the noise of metal latches being undone on the other side of the door. Hinges swung and the caravan opened to reveal a desiccated young man, face down in a chaos of clothing and props. He was small and wiry and about twenty years old. He shrank back when the sunlight hit his face.
“Damn it,” Tark croaked. “What time of day is it?”
With great effort, the magician forced himself to sit upright. He fumbled inside his cloak until he located an old brass pocket watch. He brought it very close to his eyes, then held it to his ear. Shook it. Then held it to his ear again.
“It’s well after noon,” Flip said.
“Shit,” Tark said to himself. “It feels like it’s next week.”
“You got no magic spell for when the drink hangs over from the night before?” Flip asked.
The magician narrowed his eyes to say he was in no mood.
The interior of Tark’s caravan looked like the back of a closet into which items had been thrown willy-nilly for several years. There were layers of costumes and paraphernalia representing earlier eras in the magician’s career.
“It’s too crowded for me to come in there,” Flip said. “Why don’t you come out here and sit? We’ll just talk. I got something to tell you. Gonna sober you right up. Make you feel even better than magic could.”
Tark raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to the side. A cure, any cure, was a cause worth fighting for. O how the magician wanted to believe! He began to inch his skinny, dehydrated body toward the opening.
After a full minute, Tark had managed to exit the caravan and lean himself against a wagon wheel. When Rufus returned from a restaurant, Flip begged a few morsels from him and fed them to the magician. The desired effect was achieved, and the conjurer perked up enough to listen.
Flip told his tale. As he did, a mask of confusion and horror crossed Tark’s face.
When he had finished laying out the details of the final, triple beheading, Flip ended the recitation by saying: “So naturally . . . Tark . . . I thought of you.”
For a moment, the magician did not move. Then, very gradually, he lifted his bloodshot eyes up to meet Flip’s gaze. (Flip towered over the smaller man.) Tark searched Flip’s features carefully—disclosing, admitting nothing.
“I think you understand why,” Flip continued sternly. “But in case you don’t, I’ll put it like this. . . you a policeman and you want to catch a man stealing horses? You ain’t just look around the empty stalls where horses used to be. You watch where there are still more horses to steal.”
“The oldest of those twins was fifteen, you say?” the magician asked. “I see where you’re going with this. But Flip, I’m a grown-”
The policeman cut him off.
“You can pass for twenty-one with makeup on your face, your hat pulled down, and the lighting right. Twenty-one maybe. Other times, Tark—when the lighting ain’t right—you look like I should pick you up for cutting school on a weekday. Why you got to argue with me on this? I’m trying to keep you safe.”
The magician pushed himself up despite the weight of the gin. He leaned against the filthy caravan and stared into Flip’s eyes. His expression said that Flip had better not underestimate him. That he was a professional when it came to being underestimated. That getting others to underestimate him was how he made his living. Tark’s body language invited Flip to do the same.
“What you really here for?” Tark asked. “What do you want from me?”
“How long we known each other?” Flip countered, having long ago mastered the policeman’s secret of answering questions with questions. “How many times I help you out? Help out Mister Singer? How many times you get robbed and I get something back for you? Three times, I can think of. A year ago, another magician—a white magician—stole a trick from you, and I got it back. Remember that? I didn’t even ask how it worked.”
Tark said nothing.
“I ain’t saying I know how you do it,” Flip continued. “You know the one I mean. The one at the close of your act. Where you walk down into the audience, cover yourself up with a cape, and then, two seconds later, you appear all the way across the tent, back up on stage. But I’ve thought about it some, Tark. I’ve also thought how there’s a young man named Ike who works as a roughneck for Mister Singer. Look about your size. Always keep his hat low over his face. Wear that eye patch. Seem to be a little slow, like he got kicked in the head. But you take away that patch and hat? Have him stand up straight? I think he might look just like you. And I might not be the only one to notice it, Tark. That’s all I’m saying.”
Tark wore the expression of a man trying to determine if he should confess or not—and, if so, to what.
“Can. . . can we go somewhere else and talk?” the magician eventually said. “A little ways away from these caravans?”
Flip lifted his eyebrows and looked around. They were already virtually alone. Every member of the circus had to be asleep or close to it. The grounds were quiet and still.
“Trust me,” the magician said. “We won’t go far.”
Ten minutes later, they stood in an alley along 47th Street that ran between a bar and a shuttered mom and pop grocery. Tark had picked his way through the sleeping circus employees and roused a man about his size—one who wore a low hat and an eye patch. The roughneck’s exposed eye seemed to rotate randomly in its socket every few moments, as though it were a constant strain for him to keep it under control.
“Ike’s my brother,” the magician said softly as the three men stood together in the alley. “He ain’t been totally right since we were children. Fell from a high window ledge when he was a baby. I don’t remember it happening, but it made him this way.”
Flip inspected Ike for a moment.
Ike allowed the inspection. Said nothing.
“He can do work around the circus,” the magician added. “Mister Singer likes him very much. Says he has a strong back and never complains. Plus, in addition to set up and tear down, there’s one more thing Ike helps with.”
Tark leaned in close and whispered into his brother’s ear. Ike’s eye flit nervously around the alley, then settled on Flip. “It’s okay,” the magician assured his brother gently. “We can trust this man. Go ahead.”
Obviously still uneasy, Ike removed his hat and coat. Then he took off the patch too, revealing an eye beneath that seemed perfectly functional, if also a bit spastic. Ike straightened his posture. He held a single finger to his nose, then slowly drew it away. As the finger moved, Ike’s eyes followed. And as they did, they both became uncrossed and still.
And this man, so revealed, was a dead ringer for Drextel Tark.
Ike cleared his throat.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” Ike said in a carefully practiced voice. “You have been a wonderful audience. I am the Amazing Drextel Tark. Good night!”
Ike did a dramatic wave with his arm—manipulating an invisible cape, Flip guessed—and turned around. Then he began to walk back down the alley in measured, practiced steps.
“That’s him heading offstage,” the magician explained to Flip.
Tark intercepted his brother before he got too far, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder. Ike smiled. He relaxed and his eyes crossed again, resuming their random spastic ticking like the exposed guts of two separate clocks.
“You have no idea how long it took me to teach him that,” the magician said, walking his brother back over to Flip.
“Can he talk normally?” Flip asked. “Like if I put some questions to him?”
“Sometimes,” the magician said with a shrug.
Flip watched as Ike carefully replaced his hat, coat, and patch.
“Do you like working for the circus, Ike?” Flip said, leaning close to the man.
Ike said nothin
g. He tilted his head like a cat that had been addressed—noticing, but not caring.
“He takes good orders from Mister Singer,” the magician insisted. “Ask him what he likes to eat, or his favorite color, and he won’t say much. But give him a task, and he does it just right. He can dig a ditch. Put up a tent. Shovel shit. When it comes time, he knows how to do his work. He ain’t mean to be rude to you, Flip. He just ain’t know how to be around people.”
Flip nodded thoughtfully.
“So you are identical twins,” Flip said matter-of-factly, turning back to Tark. “And that’s how you appear back across the tent so fast.”
“Except for Ike’s eyes,” Tark agreed. “He can keep them still for about ten seconds. We practice. And ten seconds is all it takes to finish the show.”
“How many people you think know?” the police officer asked. “Out of all the folks who work for the circus. . . how many really know?”
“You’d count ‘em on one hand,” Tark said after thinking on it. “Mister Singer, he know. A couple of the crew who work with Ike might have puzzled it out. . . . How he always goes missing when it’s time for my act. But that’s it. You’d be surprised by what people don’t see when they’re not looking for it.”
Flip was not surprised at all.
“What about audience members?” Flip pressed. “People who come to see the show? Any of them ever talk to you afterwards, tell you they figured out your trick?”
“We don’t have many regulars,” said Tark. “Circus is based here in Chicago because it’s a rail hub. The trains take us everywhere. We do homestands now and then, but not for long. If anybody besides you ever guessed how I do it, they never told me.”
Flip nodded. Tark sat down on a dented metal trash can, staggering anew under the weight of his hangover. His brother toed the wall of a building aimlessly. Both men clearly wanted to get back to the circus grounds to sleep.
“And you’ve never heard of someone wanting to kill twins?” Flip asked.
Tark shook his head vigorously no, then winced from the pain of it.
“Never,” he managed.
“And nobody’s threatened you—or your brother—in recent weeks?” Flip pressed.
“Naw,” the magician said. “Nothin’ like that. Do I need to worry?”
Flip put his hands into his jacket pockets and sighed.
“Not as long as you keep your secret a secret, I ’spect. You’re the only identical twins left on the South Side that I’m aware of. There’s no chance you know others, is there?”
Tark shook his head, more gently this time.
“I ain’t seen many others, ever,” he told Flip. “We played with a circus from New York City once. They had acrobats from China—two sisters who were identical—but they back east now. So beautiful, they were.”
Tark smiled at the memory of the women. He stared up into the clouds and seemed to daydream. His grin grew wider.
Flip turned away from Tark and fingered the envelope inside his coat. The smaller one. He opened it and found a single hundred-dollar bill. Then he hesitated, and slipped a second bill between his fingers.
When he turned around, Flip saw that Tark was watching him closely. There was caution in his eyes. The magician was wondering if Flip might be about to do a trick of his own. One involving a gun.
In Chicago, all things were possible.
Instead, Flip withdrew the bills. Tark looked back and forth between the twin Benjamin Franklins, then up into Flip’s eyes. They had crossed into territory that Tark had not been expecting. Flip was a straight shooter—maybe the straightest—but no straight police officer had that kind of scratch to throw.
Flip stepped forward and tucked the bills into the front pocket of the magician’s shirt.
“This is for you,” Flip said. “No conditions to it . . . save for one. You hear anything strange, you see anything strange—you even smell anything strange—you come and find me. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely,” the magician said. “You can count on me.”
Tark took the two bills out of his shirt pocket. He looked at them carefully, holding them up to the sunlight. Then, with a flick of his wrist and snap of his finger, he vanished them into the air.
He smiled proudly. Then he collected his brother and proceeded back across 47th and into the circus grounds.
To sleep.
FOUR
Flip caught a streetcar south as far as it would go. Then he walked until the roads ceased to be paved and there was no longer electricity or gaslight in the buildings. The men here were mostly white immigrants from Eastern Europe. There were Negroes too, but only here and there, and not many. Dust blew across the roads.
Flip found a corner saloon with swinging door. He dipped inside, flashed his star and gun at the barman, and asked where he could hire a horse. The barman rented Flip his own, and they went out back to get it. The horse looked rotten and sick, but Flip did not want to go searching for a better one. He paid the barman twice what he should have, and rode the beast southeast to the camp where the canal was being dug.
The sunlight was still bright as Flip approached the outskirts of the massive project. So many men and so much machine settled among the swampy edges of the water. Some workers lived in the city, or down in Indiana, but it was clear most had chosen simply to reside in nearby tents and makeshift hovels for the duration of the dig. Flip rode the wheezing horse to the top of a sandy dune and looked down, surveying the diggers. It looked like miserable work. The men were dusty and tired.
As they began to knock off for the day, some workingmen headed straight for the clusters of tents and outbuildings where they were camped. Some headed north, back to town. Others lingered to chat or relax. A few looked as though they would go and have an impromptu bath in Lake Michigan before they retired for the night.
Flip tied up his horse and walked toward the nearest mass of men. He heard many languages that he could not understand. Flip looked for a supervisor. Eventually, he found a bald, broad-shouldered white man in grease-blackened overalls handing out what might have been pay slips. Flip joined the crowd and waited his turn.
When he got to Flip, the bald man said: “We hire through O’Malley. You got a letter?”
Flip had some things that were even better than a letter.
“I’m here about the twin boys from Arkansas,” Flip said, opening his coat. “They were called Horner. Might have had an uncle around by that name?”
The bald man just scowled.
“That’s a Chicago badge,” he said. “You and your horse crossed out of the city limits a ways back there.”
The man folded his arms, as though he would not be of help. The men around him stared and smiled derisively. It was a pleasure for them to see their boss standing up to an officer of the law.
“These Horner boys, maybe they lived in Chicago,” Flip tried. “That makes it a Chicago matter.”
“Maybe anybody lived in Chicago,” the bald man said, laughing. “That ain’t no kind of answer.”
The workmen laughed as well.
Flip knew effective ways of dealing with these types, but they were not quick . . . or else were not cheap. Flip remembered the mayor’s request. An update in a week. Progress. And the mayor was apparently more than willing to pay.
So Flip figured it must be all right to do what now occurred to him.
Even as it churned his stomach, Flip looked into the bully’s eyes and said: “Now that I think on it, I did bring a letter to show you.”
The bald man raised a hairy eyebrow.
“It’s something best kept private. You want to come see? I left it over by my horse.”
“What?” said the man angrily.
Flip winked at him and nodded to the horse.
The man—still smiling contemptuously—left his workers and walked with the exaggerated pantomime steps of a clown to where Flip had tied the horse, lampooning him all the way. The workmen guffawed loudly.
When
they reached the horse, Flip was all business.
“They lookin’,” Flip said low, gesturing back to the throng, “so I’m a just shake your hand.”
Flip shook the bald man’s hand and left a $100 bill in it.
The man closed his fist around the dough, and was immediately transformed. He gazed up at Flip as though they were long lost relatives, reunited after ages apart. His expression said that now they were forging new bonds that would never be broken.
Even as the man smiled at Flip like they were literally related, he also tilted his head to the side. The tilt asked if anybody throwing around hundred dollar bills really gave a fuck about two dead Negro boys from Arkansas. Was there not something else? Something more important he could do for his wealthy new friend? Wine, women, or song, perhaps? All were to be had along the dusty banks of the Cal-Sag.
“Yes,” Flip confirmed, reading the expression. “The two boys name of Horner. That’s my aim entirely. Show me whatever you got, even if you think it’s nothing.”
The bald man returned to his group and called aloud for a person named Salazar. Salazar—muscular, stooped, and dirty all over—soon appeared from one of the tents. Salazar squinted and rocked back and forth on his heels, wondering what was happening.
“Salazar found them,” the bald man announced.
The bald man explained to Salazar that this was a police officer who wanted to know about the crime.
“Ahh,” said Salazar. “You mean the-”
Salazar drew his finger across his throat and made the noise of a death rattle. Then he mimicked removing his own head. Then he laughed uproariously. The men watching laughed as well.
“Yes,” Flip said. “That. Can you take me to where you found them?”
Salazar said he could.
The land was flat and swampy, with sand dunes every so often. They walked past the last of the diggers leaving the worksite—a final trickle of the exhausted, the lame, or the simply slowmoving. At a spot where the excavation had long since been completed, Salazar pointed to a small tin shed used to store equipment. On the ground at the back of a shed was an oil stain. Salazar looked down at it. Flip looked too. (The bald supervisor looked only at Flip, hoping desperately that his wealthy guest was getting what he wanted.)
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