Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  The ghost saw them.

  On her plain, unremarkable little face the joy of Richter’s presence, his existence—the fact of him—leaped up like a flame in dry grass. Seeing this recognition, the tall man took her hands between his, bowed over them, and began to cry, almost soundlessly. She drew her hands free and held him close; but over his shoulder her eyes met Jansen’s, and he actually staggered back a pace, shaken by the depth of the sorrow and sympathy—sorrow specifically for him—that he read there. He heard himself saying aloud, in absurd embarrassment, “Hey, it hasn’t been as bad as all that. Really.” But it had been, it had been, and she knew.

  Then she gently released her son, and knelt down beside Gavrilenko, where he lay on his face, hands covering his eyes. With her own hands on his upper arms, she silently coaxed him to face her. Gavrilenko screamed once—not loudly, but in a tone of pure terror, and of resignation to terror as well, like a rabbit unresisting in the clutches of a horned owl. He scrambled to a sitting position, his hands now flat on the ground beside him, face dazed and alien. The ghost commanded his eyes as she had Jansen’s—how long ago?—holding them in thrall to her own, seeing through them and past them, down into uttermost Gavrilenko, his body shaking with the need to hide his eyes again but unable to do so. He whimpered now and then; and still clung to himself.

  By and by he began to speak. “After first death, really is no other. You and me, Henry—you remember us? Two tired, lonely, nervous boys in uniform, pretending to be men, doing job….” He rose slowly to his feet. “I kill so many people since then—you know? Easy, really. Easy. Killings, I am telling you honestly, but no deaths…. not after her.” He did meet Zinzi Richter’s quiet eyes then, though again Jansen saw the physical shock spread through his body. He said, “Different, you understand?”

  Jansen asked, “You stayed in the army? No…. what, you were KGB?”

  “Oh, please, no KGB anymore,” Gavrilenko reproved him. “In new democratic Russia, FSB—execute you with new democratic pistol. No, Henry, I did my time in private enterprise. Big capitalist, all American values, even before it was common. You would be proud.”

  “The Mafia.” Richter’s voice was tight and thick, for all its evenness. “You worked for the Russian Mafia. You killed people for them.”

  Gavrilenko grinned at him like a skull. “Kill for the Mafia, kill for Mother Russia—what difference? I was an independent contractor, just like American plumber.” He nodded toward Jansen. “I went here, I went there, fix the sink, the toilet, go home, rest tired feet, watch the TV.” He spoke directly to Zinzi Richter now, to no one else in the world. He said, “This is your blessing. You made me so.”

  Something he couldn’t guess at made Jansen look away, and he fancied that he could actually see the darkness moving in around them if he watched it closely enough. From where they stood, nothing was visible now but the tower, the Wall in one direction, and the dark wall itself in the other…. and after studying it, when he looked again on Gavrilenko he saw something that he could not have been expected to recognize, yet felt he should have seen from the moment he and Richter had entered the guardroom. With a sudden surge of wonder and pity, he whispered, “Leonid. You’re like her….” He was trembling, and it was hard to get words out, or to remember what words were.

  Gavrilenko shook his head slowly, heavily. “Not like her. She is long dead, forever young, forever innocent. While Leonid Leonidovich Nikolai Gavrilenko lies in Petersburg hospital, Walther PPK bullet in coward’s brain.” He grimaced in bitter disgust. “So many heads, so many bullets, one to a customer…. only Gavrilenko, pig-drunk, old, sick, shaking with fear, cannot even kill himself decently…. coward, coward, pathetic….” There were a few more words, all Russian.

  The ghost of Zinzi Richter spoke then, without making a sound. Picking up her blue duffel bag, she looked at the three of them and mouthed a single word, rounding it out with great care and precision. Jansen could not read her lips, but Richter nodded. His mother gestured broadly, intensely with her free arm: pointing first toward the crouching, stalking darkness, then toward the Wall, unmistakably inviting them all to run with her while there was still time. She mouthed the silent word a second time.

  Jansen and Richter both sensed Gavrilenko’s decision before he even turned. They clutched at his arms, but he broke free with a frantic, wordless cry and dashed away from them, lunging and stumbling back toward the East Germany of their memories. Richter, quicker off the mark than Jansen, almost caught him at the inner wall; astonishingly, the old Russian hurled himself at it like a gymnast, leaping to catch the top, and was up and over it and straight into the darkness without hesitating. He vanished instantly, like a match-flame blown out, leaving no sound or glance behind him.

  Richter stopped, staring at the edge.

  Jansen joined him, and they stood together in silence for some minutes. The darkness, if it did not retreat, at least advanced no further. Jansen said finally, “You really think it was him that brought us here? It wasn’t your mother?”

  “I have no idea,” Richter said, turning away from the void. “Maybe we all did it.”

  Jansen looked at the ghost of Zinzi Richter, waiting for them by the guard tower, forming for a third time the word he could not understand. “What is that?” he demanded of Richter. “What’s that she’s saying?”

  Richter smiled. “Freiheit. German for freedom.”

  Abruptly Zinzi Richter turned and began to run, heading once again for the Death Strip, and Richter ran after her, his face as bright and determined as the face of any small boy racing with his mother. Jansen came panting in the rear, no better conditioned than the average sixty-six-year-old kitchen remodeler, but resolved not to be left behind in this place, to find his way back to a maternity clinic in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Arl…. Arl…. I’ll be right there….

  The spotlights came on, and the gunfire began.

  Crossing the Death Strip, Jansen placed his feet exactly in Zinzi Richter’s tracks, as her son was doing, and hunched down as low as he could, even as the rifle shots kicked up gravel close enough to sting his face and twitch at his shirt. He tried to shut the awareness out of his consciousness. Real bullets? Memories of bullets? Ghost bullets, fired by ghosts back in 1963—God! And then, despite a sudden blossoming fear of dying where he didn’t belong, a single thought consumed him. It’s not enough to follow. I’ve got to get there first.

  Just as Gavrilenko’s old legs and big old hands had taken him over the inner wall without assistance, so Jansen’s legs, when called upon, somehow responded with speed that did not belong to him, and never had. He passed up a surprised Richter and forcefully crowded past Zinzi Richter as she set her ladder’s hooks, stopping only long enough to pull the wire cutters from her duffel before starting to climb. Up the shaking rungs, atop the Wall, he worked faster than she could have, snapping wires real enough to tear his face and hands in half a dozen places. Then they were there with him, the mother and the son, and he swept them before him through the gap he had created, holding their hands as they eased themselves over the other side. He turned his back on the gunfire, covering both his charges with the width of his own torso, breath pulled deep into his lungs as if he could somehow expand to shield not just these two, but everything in the world. He felt their fingers slip away from his and he smiled.

  The rifle fire kept up, but Jansen didn’t move, thinking shit, if the Krauts didn’t fire in damn platoons, they’d never hit anybody.

  He heard the one sharp crack they say you never hear, and closed his eyes.

  Arl, hugely pregnant and wheezing with the effort, was trying to keep him from falling out of bed in what must be the clinic’s emergency ward. There were half a dozen beds around him, most empty, a couple with curtains drawn around them and nurses coming and going. Jansen caught himself, scrambled crabwise back onto the bed, said, “What the Christ?” and tried to sit up. Arl pushed him back down, hard.

  “No, you don’t—you stay put, old man
.” There was relief in her voice—he caught that, having looked long for such things—but also the same dull rancor and plain dislike that colored their every conversation, even the most casual. “You’re staying right here until Dr. Chaudhry comes.”

  “What happened? The baby?”

  “The baby’s all right. I’m all right too, thanks.” That wasn’t just him, he knew; everybody asked about the baby first, and it was starting to piss her off as she neared her term. She said, “They found you on the floor in the waiting room. They thought it might be a stroke.”

  “Oh, Jesus. I just fell asleep, that’s all. Been staying up too late watching old movies. I’m fine, shit’s sake.” He looked at his hands and wrists, saw no barbed-wire wounds, and started to get up, but she pushed him down again, and he could feel the real fury in her hands.

  “You stay there, damn it. A lot of people think they’re just fine after a stroke, and they get on their feet, take a few steps, and bang, gone for good this time.” Her face was sweaty with effort and anger; but he saw fear there as well, and heard it in her voice. “On good days I can just about stand you, and on the bad ones…. God, do you have any idea?”

  “Yes,” Jansen said. “Matter of fact.”

  Arl drew a long breath. “But when I saw you….” Her voice caught, and she started again. “I realized right there, I am not ready to have you gone, I’m not. Not you too, it’s too damn much, do you understand me? Don’t you dare die on me, not now. Not fucking now.”

  Jansen found her hand on the bed, and put his hand over it. She did not respond, but she did not pull the hand away. “You look like me,” he said. “Gracie’s all Elly, but you’ve got my chin, and my nose, and my cheekbones. Must have really hated that, huh?”

  The smile was thin and elusive, but it was a smile. “I hated my whole face. Most girls do, but I had reasons.” She looked down at their hands together. “I even hated my hands, because they’re too much like yours. I’m okay with them now, though, more or less.”

  Jansen said, “You’re like me. That’s what you hate.” Her eyes widened in outrage, and she jerked away, but he held tightly to her hand. “What I mean, you’re like the good me. The best of me. The me I was supposed to be, before things…. just happened. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Arl was beginning to frown in an odd way, staring at him. “You sure you haven’t had a stroke? I wish the doctor’d get here. You talked while you were out, I couldn’t make anything out of it, except it was really weird. Like you were having a weird dream.”

  “Not a stroke,” Jansen said. “Not a dream.” He did not try to sit up again, but kept his eyes fixed on her. He said, “Just someplace I needed to be. Don’t ask me about it right now, and I won’t ask you about stuff you don’t want to tell me, okay?” She did not reply, but her hand turned slightly under his, and a couple of fingers more or less intertwined. “And I promise I won’t die until you’re finished yelling at me. Fair?”

  Arl nodded. “But this doesn’t mean I actually like you. Just so you know that.”

  “Fair,” Jansen said again. He did withdraw his hand from hers now.

  Dr. Chaudhry came in, a brisk young Bengali with a smile that was not brisk, but thoughtful, almost dreamy. He sat down on the opposite side of the bed from Arl and said, “Well, I hear that you have been frightening your good daughter quite badly. Not very considerate, Mr. Jansen.”

  “I’m not a very considerate person,” Jansen said. “My family could tell you.”

  “This is something you must change right away,” Dr. Chaudhry said, trying to look severe and not succeeding. “You are going to be a grandfather, you know. You will have responsibilities.”

  “Yeah,” Jansen said. He looked up at the lights on the ceiling then, and let Dr. Chaudhry count his pulse.

  THE WOMAN WHO MARRIED THE MAN IN THE MOON

  The title “The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon,” with its natural waltz rhythm, came unbidden into my head a good many years ago. I tried developing something from it a few times, both as story and song lyric, got absolutely nowhere, and set it aside. I was almost to the point of forgetting it forever, until I needed to recreate Schmendrick the Magician as he was before he ever encountered a certain unicorn, or found dubious employment with the Midnight Carnival.

  This is one of three stories that I actually know about Schmendrick’s early life. I’m sure there are others, and perhaps someday I’ll stumble across them.

  Findros had just begun to sniffle, and Mourra was still impatiently denying her own rising fear, when the tall man with the ragged cloak and the funny, pointy hat fell out of a tree in front of them. The children both yelped and recoiled, but only for a moment: there is simply nothing alarming or impressive about a man, whatever his size, wearing a hat that looks like a cross between a dunce cap and a crown. Raised not to stare rudely at strangers, Findros and Mourra nonetheless gaped shamelessly as the man stumbled to his knees, then quickly found his feet. He was certainly the tallest person either of them had ever seen, yet not big, not in a menacing way, like a giant or an ogre. Politely, he was slender, lean; less politely, gangleshanked; rudely, skinny, meager, gaunted-down. His thinness made his hands and feet look bigger than they really were, like those of a puppy yet expected to grow into his floppy paws, while his generous, flaring nose definitely belonged on an older, fiercer face. And if the green eyes were at once deep and distant, his voice was light and warm, a voice that tried not to call attention to itself. The man asked, “Children, are you in trouble? Are you lost?”

  It was the word lost that did it—that, and the genuine concern in the tall man’s tone. Findros promptly burst into tears, and Mourra swung a hard little fist at him, hissing, “Stop it, you baby! Don’t you cry!” She herself would have died a silent martyr before ever admitting to any sort of fear or pain; though where that streak in her came from neither her mother Sairey, nor anyone else in the family, could ever have said. Mourra herself had long ago decided that it was a special gift from the father she could barely recall—he had died when she was not quite four—and treasured it accordingly. Findros had no such tradition to keep up.

  “No,” she said loudly to the stranger. “We’re not lost, we’re just going home a different way. I keep telling him.”

  The tall man rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head. He said, “Boy, I’ve mislaid the road myself, all my life. Believe me, it’s not the end of the world.” But Findros howled as loud as ever, pointing a dirty forefinger at his sister. The man raised heavy eyebrows without speaking.

  “He keeps saying I got us lost,” Mourra told him wearily. “But I didn’t, I never did. We went to the picnic, and then on the way home he was the one who just had to pick blackberries, and then we got turned around a little bit, but I still knew right where we were, and then—” her voice faltered for the first time—“then we had to go round through Craighley Wood, because old Mr. Willaby’s turned his bull into the north field, and so then we….”

  “Then you losted us!” Findros seized on her hesitancy, triumphant in terror. “You losted us, and you don’t know the way home, and it’s getting dark—”

  “I do so know how to get home, you liar!” The presence of the strange tall man made Mourra feel much younger than her eleven years, which in turn made her angry. “But I’m not going to move an inch until you stop your baby bawling! Look, I’m sitting down right now, you little baby!” She promptly plopped herself down by the roadside, in a patch of dry grass, folding her arms and grinning mockingly at Findros. “And if you don’t stop that crying, I’ll just sit here until it’s really dark, and the nightfliers will come and eat you, and they won’t leave a thing except your anklebones and your nasty dirty toes—”

  “Enough.” The tall man raised his hands, gesturing them both to silence. He sighed in the unmistakable way of a tired, exasperated grownup. He said, “Well, I had other plans, but never mind. I will see you home.”

  Findros stared, and wen
t back to just sniffling. He eyed the tall man suspiciously. “You don’t live here. You don’t know where we live. You don’t know anything.”

  From another adult, stranger or no, Mourra would have expected anger at such insolence, even braced herself to defend Findros from swift and merited chastisement. But the stranger only smiled. He said, “That is perfectly true. I come from very far away, and I have never been in this country before in my life. But I will still take you home, because I am a magician, and magicians can do things like that. Come.”

  Without another word, he turned and began walking away from them down the narrow little road, still muddy from the rain of two days before. To Mourra’s amazement, Findros—from birth as wary as any wild animal of anyone he didn’t know—ran after him, taking hold of his left hand, exactly as he did with their mother when the three of them went out walking together. Mourra wavered briefly between fascination and distinct annoyance that her brother should have admitted an outsider to the kind of confidence he almost never granted her; then got to her feet and hurried after them, placing herself firmly on the stranger’s right, though without so much as looking at the inviting free hand, easily available. She decided on the spot that she was far too old to need such childish reassurances of protection, and she made the vow stick all the rest of that day.

  “Why were you up in the tree?” she heard Findros questioning the stranger. “Were you doing a trick? Gicians do tricks.”

  “Do they so?” The tall man looked mildly surprised, as though he had never heard of such a thing. “Well, would this count, do you suppose?” In rapid succession, lightly ruffling Findros’s hair, he produced a handful of cowrie shells, along with a turtle egg, a few old coins and a tiny bell, all of which he handed to the boy.

  Findros closed his hand over his new treasures, but his mouth remained slackly open in wonder. Mourra said scornfully, “You put all those things in his hair. You had them in your hand, up your sleeve. I saw.”