Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  Ready?

  Oh, I doubt it.

  Born: Edward Lambent Corder. Grade school: Oklahoma. Junior high: Texas. High school: Arkansas. Father a roustabout, field hand, and drunk. Rented shacks, plywood floors, outhouses, dinner brawls. Which accounts for scant to nonexistent school records, rental receipts, bank statements. Living on America’s margins, and yet there could be no truer or deeper American. His myth gets to have it both ways.

  And then, South America. Tanker stowaway. He chose the only place more difficult to track him than the rural United States. Primitive, recordless South America.

  And there, at a certain point, the record ceases. Disappears. Stops like tracks in the middle of the desert. There most would leave it. Most.

  I dig further. I don’t give up. I scrape away the sand and dust from the digital artifacts. I stand at the end of the track, the terminus, the end of the line, look out around me, search for movement, any movement on the horizon.

  And eventually, I stumble across it—something so unpredictable, so out of the ordinary and odd, it’s as if it’s planted there for me. Something too, that is extraordinarily strange to have found its way onto the Internet, into technology’s orbit at all. A trail of clues have led me to old journals, uploaded now as artifacts and mementos, of college kids backpacking through Peru and Bolivia—one of them not too stoned to remember a few names, to make a few coherent notes.

  The name that the college kid jots down is extraordinarily weird. Dos Sequiantos Nas Tas Tasa. With the help of the Internet, I translate crudely from the Indian dialect: Dizzy Blue Fish.

  A shaman.

  Young Eddy Corder—apprenticing to a shaman? Living for months outside his jungle hut, sleeping on the jungle floor? But that’s what I’m able to piece together from one of the journals: There’s this strange kid here from Arkansas I think, been hanging out here forever, talks dialect with the tribe, wears a shaman necklace, gets invited to sleep in the headman’s hut—spooky stuff. A shaman can be a medicine man, a pharmacologist, a hypnotist, a mystic and reader of signs, a semiologist, a sage and a counselor. But most of all, isn’t a shaman a showman? Isn’t he a native tribe’s ancient, traditional version of the Amazing Wallace, astounding with his interior knowledge, his command of the unknown and unseen?

  (And thinking about those college kids, and about the Amazing Wallace’s previous, less layered, more innocent identity, I get a picture—the detective’s vague, amorphous intuition, like my own shamanistic vision floating up from my unconscious—of a young couple traveling through South America at the same time and coming into the orbit of Dizzy Blue Fish and his American apprentice. The presence of both the young Eddy Corder, and this young, attractive couple—all of them with previous names, all in South America together. Possible? Significant? Mere coincidence? Useless speculation?)

  What I find on the Internet knits myth and reality, a peculiar and unique fabric of the deep jungle. But I can’t help thinking of the shaman, and the shamanism, in the context of what the Amazing Wallace does now. Because the shaman is both showman and authentic healer. The shaman’s stunts might be fake—techniques for, a mastery of, group hallucinations? Is that all he has accomplished? But practicing authentic healing arts too. Using ancient ingredients that have made their way into our most effective and powerful modern medicines. The ingredients we have turned to, to study at the molecular level, to reassemble, imitate, duplicate in the lab.

  That’s why my cynicism, my lack of belief, my rational self, hits its greatest challenge in the idea of shamanism. One side of me thinks it is merely sorcerers’ tricks and techniques—of misdirection, stagecraft, group hallucination, perfected over centuries—from which they derive their power. But another side of me looks at the record of healing, the adoption by western science of many of its ingredients and treatments. It leaves me split, and baffled. Does this, after all, add to the myth of my employer? Or does it detract from it, begin to unravel it, begin to reveal the truth behind it? The tribal shaman is in some ways the inverse of Wallace the Amazing—poor, primitive, naked, with none of Wallace’s wealth and sophistication and comfort and modernity (or my technology). And yet they are brother practitioners, engaged in the same sciences and disciplines, as much as I can understand them at least. You would think that the timeless, changeless Amazon jungle and ever-morphing Las Vegas (famous for dynamiting buildings, throwing new billion-dollar projects up like joyously tossed newborns, altering its face, updating its appeal) would have nothing to do with each other. You would think an ancient tribe, fixed in time and place, untouched by modernity, and a modern tribe of extreme transience, devoid of tradition, each generation freshly made, would have no connection. And yet they are expressions, mirrors, of each other. And in that there was, I hoped, a detective’s clue—not a conventional clue, to breaking an individual case, but a broader clue, to understanding human impulses, and needs, and maybe even a little of mankind, and maybe a little of myself.

  What has Wallace the Amazing taken from the jungle and brought to the desert? And what are the Stewartsons actually after?

  Once you have the thinnest thread, you can follow it. You are like a child in the woods, following a piece of string—diligent, preoccupied, focused.

  So I’m eventually able to piece together his travels. The point being, there were numerous stops first. By all indications, with other shamans. Questos Ayee Terracoatl. Bonduto Pen Losoviostandododoah. “The Mud Man Who Sings.” “The Stooping Triple Ghost.” Brief stops, compared with the months he eventually spent with Dizzy Blue Fish. Which tells me these others, these initial shamans, weren’t satisfactory. That they were false in some way, cons and scams that ultimately had the curtain lifted, that ultimately revealed their powerlessness.

  Which tells me he was looking for some level of authenticity. For something deeper. He was—as only a young, brilliant, dispossessed youth can be—a searcher after truth. Ironic, that the search for truth had led him to tricks, to a complex, compelling scam. A dark notion floats above me, half-formed: Is that irony, that paradox, part and parcel of the truth he found?

  FOURTEEN

  And now, out of the South American jungle, and back to blackmail. A golden age of blackmail, really. E-mail, cell phone text, Twitter, Facebook—the communication is instantaneous, the levels of identity protection multiple and safe. A blackmailer can hide behind a wall of passwords and screen names, deploy an arsenal of hacking expertise. Proving at the same time that he knows your most personal information and movements and that he can reach you anytime—with a frightening aggressiveness that is this era’s version of a pointed gun.

  And now, thanks to sweet Amanda, the next e-mail message to the Amazing Wallace has force. Its every word will be searched, analyzed, internally and externally debated, examined for clues to more information, parsed for more comprehension, like the faithful searching their Lord’s utterances.

  We have your daughter. Our strong advice: please accept and presume that we do, so we don’t have to start sending tips of ears or sections of fingers or slices of toe.

  Here is what we want. Ten million, deposited to an offshore account we have just opened expressly for the purpose. Yes, they’re cracking down on offshore accounts, but we’ll have the money in and out of it before it’s an issue, before the authorities even know what happened. At least, you better hope so—that’s the only way you’re getting your daughter back.

  Ten million. A nice, clean, round, nearly symbolic sum. Of course, a ransom, or any sum for that matter, must be placed in the context of its time and place. Ten million was enough to radically change lives. It was a sum that covered, made possible, an invisible Caribbean or Malaysian or South Seas off-the-radar pirate life. It was also a sum on the fine line between a man of Wallace’s assets trying to retrieve it—insulted, vengeful, furious—and just as easily, just as foreseeably, leaving it alone, paying the ransom to get his daughter back, eating the
cost, accepting and declaring the loss, and then trying to forget about it, and eventually all but succeeding. Ten million. It was not too little to ask of Wallace; it was not too much. A sum that provides initial shock, literally breathtaking at first, and then, as the payer immerses in the practicality of cobbling it together, it loses its shock value. Like a charitable request to a big donor. The donor is initially stunned and appalled, but then begins to think it through, to sort through the mechanics of actually doing it, of putting those assets to work, of seeing tangible results for those assets.

  Ten million. A sensible sum. But for me, problematic. Because if the Stewartsons were going to respect our deal, their $5 million promise, that meant they were splitting the proceeds with me fifty-fifty. That was absurdly fair-minded on their part. That is not who they are. It signaled to me—strongly—that they had no intention of splitting the money with me. Their gentlemanly fifty-fifty was practically a mockery, a duplicitous smile, before they dropped me in a gutter somewhere.

  Or, they weren’t actually interested in the money at all. That fifty-fifty was fine, since it wasn’t really about the money. Which raised all kinds of new questions. Even more problematic.

  Within minutes of the e-mail, I get a message from Wallace the Amazing—coded, virtually untraceable, through our usual back channels of staged financial statements and skein of protective websites. An inverse communication, a mirror, a corollary.

  Help me find her. Please help me find her.

  The father, the human behind the mask.

  You’re the best detective. You prove it every night. You saved me from Big Eddie and his thugs. I’ll do anything, give you anything in return. Name your price. She is everything to me. And of course, she is everything, even more, to you. Help me find her. For me. For you. For us.

  “You’re the best detective.” Careful. Intuitive. “If I know you, Chas, you probably even have an idea of where she is already.”

  Of course, I feel awful, worthless, contemptible, that he has turned to me in his hour of need, turned to my faithfulness and loyalty, which is apparently still unquestioned. And yet look how I have treated it the past few days, how I’ve turned on him after a lifetime of support. After he has provided a life to me.

  (A life he deceived me into, securing the deception by taking my mother from me, erasing her—and for good measure, taking me from her.)

  And of course, I see that I could have his eternal thanks in the form of a reward. “Name your price.” And it occurs to me that I may now be in a position to collect on both ends—as perpetrator and rescuer; as criminal and hero; snake and saint. Take my cut of the ransom, and my cut of the reward. (But how exactly? If there’s a ransom paid, there won’t be a reward. And if there’s a reward, then there won’t be a ransom. But that’s a conventional view. I am starting to imagine scenarios that have both—the ransom, then the rescue.)

  This is Wallace the Amazing, however. Not to be underestimated. Is he turning to me in ignorance, or does he suspect that I am involved, that I have a hand in this? Someone waltzed into and out of his home, after all, someone that Sasha and Alison have presumably now described to him, though as you know, I am unremarkable, nondescript, usefully generic. There wasn’t much they could say beyond height and build and race, and there was no photograph he could show them—“This guy here?” He is giving me a chance to redeem myself, to set it right, and sending me the implicit message: no harm, no foul. Showing his love. Giving me another chance. Or demonstrating his absolute faith in me. Like a god of forgiveness.

  But he took away my family . . . why shouldn’t I take away his? (Or take mine back?) Why shouldn’t there be biblical justice? An unforgiving Old Testament God would be quite at home here in the desert. Amid the rigidity of the slot machines and cards and games. You win or you lose. Xs and Os. Digital, antipodal, polar, Manichaean. Vegas think, I call it. All or nothing, winner take all, winners and losers. Blistering hot or freezing cold, like the desert itself. Bright day or black night. No subtlety. No shades of gray. No nuance. People come here to avoid nuance. To escape nuance. To get away from the unclarity, the anxiety, the fog of gray. That’s the Vegas way.

  Wallace sends me his private plea but delivers no response to the Stewartsons’ e-blackmail. They had expected it within moments; we have his daughter. But the hours drift by, and nothing. That’s how I would have played it too, if I were Wallace. It is annoying, frustrating for the Stewartsons. Did he get the e-mail? How could he not respond? What’s he working on instead of responding? Is it possible he doesn’t care about his daughter? That he’s willing to let her go? Be exposed for the fraud he is, give up his career? They pace, they quarrel, they second-guess. They check their watches nervously. They regard each other accusatorily. Wasn’t this your idea?

  We watch the show that night. To see if there is any hint from him. To see if he’s distracted, or off. To see if there’s any indication of what’s happened to his daughter, to his family.

  Oh yes, there is.

  The act proceeds normally. Elicits its usual quota of oohs and aahs, its audience swooning. It picks up pitch as it proceeds, as the hour rolls powerfully, ineluctably, to its climax, an entertainment freight train gathering momentum. And then . . .

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special night. Not a special night I relish, but a special night nonetheless. Because you, this audience, will bear witness to my most spectacular demonstration ever. My most important demonstration ever. The one closest to my heart and my soul. A demonstration that has to come out right.”

  A buzzing murmur rises, then falls to a hush.

  Wallace hangs his head, looks at the audience as if at a friend across a cocktail table in a dark bar.

  “Last night, my daughter was kidnapped.” Gasps. Mutters of incomprehension, until he nods. “Taken from our home.” He lowers his voice a little, removes the showmanship from it for a moment. “In my world of goods and possessions, a world you’ve seen I’m sure in magazines, a world of wealth and amusements, my daughters are my only true treasure.

  “I did not call the police, because these kidnappers are professionals. They are professional extortionists, who, of course, want money for her return. They warned me not to get the police involved, and now of course the police will know, but the police will not be able to make any progress in finding her. These people are polished pros. It is obvious to me that the police, though well intentioned, will be powerless.

  “So here’s my chance. Instead of predicting driver’s license numbers and the amount of change in pockets, and telling a dog’s or an aunt’s name or the color of your car or your curtains, here is the ultimate test of the mentalist. To find his own daughter. I can’t say whether the anxiety and stress of the situation will inhibit my process, will block me. I confess I fear that enormously, as I have been concentrating as you can imagine for the hours since the kidnapping and have gotten nowhere. But I must learn in these next hours to put that aside, to somehow focus. I may have only my own powers of mind to call on. I will need, in these next twenty-four hours, to call on every scrap and crease and corner of them.

  “And that is why I am enlisting you. Every one of you in this theater tonight. Because while I have struggled over the years to convey anything comprehensible about my gift, my process, how I work, what precisely is going on in my mind, I have conveyed one fundamental element of it: the notion of connection. You know at least that I work by some version of connection. And I need that connection now. I need you all to visualize, to imagine, to empathize, to not only picture my beautiful daughter but to feel, to absorb, my love for her. To feel my connection. Because it is the power of all of us together, the allied, multiplied, manifold power of your concern, your anger, your sympathy, your focus, that I will tap into to see her, to find her, to connect with her.

  “So I want this audience, need this audience—this exact audience, every one of you—to reappear here
tomorrow night, when, I swear, my daughter will join me onstage. I will produce her here.”

  Momentarily fragile, bitter, human . . . “I have always vowed to keep my family separate from my working life, but this kidnapping has forced my hand.”

  Quickly casting it off, finding his familiar register of intensity, clarity, power . . . “To the kidnappers, yes, I know you have her, yes, I know what you want, but I’m not giving you the satisfaction of following your instructions, dropping a black case of cash at the intersection you designate. I’m not doing it . . .”

  A wild response from the audience. Unbridled, unleashed endorsement. A wild stampede of pure will, defiant support and brotherhood. The troops roar their loyalty to their general.

  The lights on the stage black out. A photograph appears—the backlit image huge, a hundred feet high—of Amanda, smiling. A thousand acolytes in the live audience take in her deep-brown eyes, her pretty face. Plus the millions watching at home. Maybe someone has just seen her. Not a bad move, Wallace.

  “Her name is Amanda. She’s everything to me. And the question—not a rhetorical question, not a stage question in a Vegas stage act, but a real question—is whether my powers will work when I need them most.”

  The familiar voice, no longer bathed in light, but materializing out of the darkness: “Amanda, I’m coming for you.”

  Here in the motel room, as we watch, it is hushed and stunned.

  Except for Amanda, who looks at me and smiles.

  Incorporating his daughter’s kidnapping into the act. Cold-blooded and risky, but maybe ingenious in ways I hadn’t ascertained yet.

  Turning the kidnapping into a tent show. Into an occasion of faith. A religious experience. A noble moment of community.

  The message to me couldn’t have been more explicit. Somewhere between a plea and a boss’s order. Clearly, I was on it. Maybe he had put Dom on it too, but maybe he deliberately hadn’t, making this a pure and undiluted test of my loyalty, of where I stood. It was his challenge, his all-or-nothing Vegas bet laid on the table. Really need you on this, partner. Don’t know anymore if you’re with me or against me—obviously someone waltzed into my home with the codes, and you’re the only one who could do that, so I obviously suspect you. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll put it aside. Let’s seize the opportunity together. Name your price—you can return to my payroll after this if you want, or not, up to you. A mentalist victory like this will put Wallace the Amazing over the top.