The man dropped to the floor. Though he was still in shadow, he didn’t look at all like Griffin. He pulled a second pistol from the waist of his trousers. Carter recognized them now: the guns from the bullet-catching bit. They were terribly inaccurate, hard to aim, and only one was loaded with a real bullet. All in all, lucky. But then luck like this was relative.
“Hello, Carter.” The man stepped over the corpse and walked, guns extended, toward Carter and Phoebe.
It was in no way Griffin. Carter didn’t recognize him. Where was the excited command to reach for the sky? The man seemed in no hurry. He wore work pants and a stiff cotton shirt, and a motoring jacket far too small for him that Carter recognized: it was from his own wardrobe. The man was completely bald and had dyed his Vandyke jet black. His skin was weathered like a sundial.
The man looked around the stage, almost smiling. “You must have wondered often whether you’d completely destroyed me.”
Carter put his face up against all the Secret Service agents he knew, and came up blank. He was about to say he had not the faintest clue what he was talking about, which would have been fatal—the man would have shot him for not remembering. But at that moment, Baby made his weak little moan, and the man turned to him and said, “Hello, Baby.”
Carter blinked. The face in front of him came into sudden focus, and he felt chills, and immediate, ancient anger. A dozen years ago. Here, this very stage. Mysterioso. Obnoxious, cretinous, the man who represented to Carter all that was dark and unworthy in magic. But Mysterioso had changed, somehow—something in him seemed harder and wilder; he’d aged like the windward side of a mountain. Still, Carter could handle Mysterioso.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lady?”
“I don’t know her name. She’s blind, she got lost in the theatre, and I’m trying to help her leave.”
“She could have left much faster if you hadn’t insisted on kissing her and philosophizing afterward.” As Carter had no reply—he was remembering that Houdini, not he, had handled Mysterioso—Mysterioso continued, “I believe he called you Phoebe. Phoebe, will you please come out from behind your man?”
She took a broad, sidelong step. She looked quite steady, her mouth a deep frown, arms folded over her stomach. She wasn’t about to say or do anything out of fear.
“Thank you,” Mysterioso said. “You are lovely.”
Something awful bloomed in his chest. “So?” he demanded. “Who are you working for?”
Mysterioso simply looked around the stage. He pushed his lips out, evaluating what he saw. “That levitation you have, is that a Kellar?”
“No, it’s my own design.”
“Oh, please, it’s a Kellar, anyone can see you stole it.”
“I didn’t.” Eyes burning, Carter suddenly felt twenty-three years old again. He had to struggle to stay cool.
“It’s a Kellar,” Mysterioso concluded to his own satisfaction. “Now,” he brought both pistols up, “which of these is loaded?”
“Neither.”
He shook his head. “No. If you’d used them in the act, neither would be loaded. But you didn’t, so one has a live round.”
Phoebe said “Damn” under her breath.
“What was that?” Mysterioso raised his eyebrows.
“They’re both empty,” Carter said.
“Then you won’t mind if I shoot one at each of you. Actually, Miss Phoebe, because your friend says it’s safe, I’m going to shoot both of them at you.”
“No!”
Carter’s moment of panic seemed to delight Mysterioso, who brought the barrel of one gun to his lips, as if kissing it for being such a good boy. “Ah, you do love her. Which gun, Carter? Phoebe, is Carter a good liar?” Old memories percolated icily in the back of Carter’s mind. Mysterioso was playing Blackmail with him, and with live ammunition in the gun.
Carter said, “The pistol with the trigger guard in the shape of a diamond, do you see it?” As long as Carter talked, he could think rapidly, but all that came to him was that he didn’t want Phoebe to be shot, which was exactly what Mysterioso was set on doing. The pistols shot .22 rounds. “Do you see how one has a heart, the other a diamond?” If Mysterioso shot him instead of Phoebe, he could survive and charge the props table, where there were a half-dozen throwing knives. “The diamond is the live round.”
“Oh God,” Phoebe said.
“Thank you, Carter,” Mysterioso said. “But I like my original plan.” Both guns turned to Phoebe. Carter stepped in front of her. Mysterioso pulled the triggers back. Carter gritted his teeth.
“Drop your weapons now!” It was a loud voice, one used to shouting. Carter squinted into the shadows. He saw a figure staggering toward the light. Unbelievable!
Agent Griffin, begrimed and greyish black from head to toe. His clothes were torn and, as he walked onto the stage, he left footprints etched in ash.
Mysterioso looked at Griffin, whose Colt .45 was steady and cocked, a round in the chamber. Mysterioso, who had some experience with insane anger, saw it in Griffin’s eyes. “Well,” he whispered. “My my.” He sounded impressed. He took the pistols by their butts and carefully put them on the floor. Griffin kicked them away.
“Are we saved?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes.” Carter waved. “Agent Griffin. Hello!”
“Charles Carter,” Griffin declared, “you are under arrest for the murder of President Warren Gamaliel Harding. Place your hands behind your neck.”
Carter didn’t move. He was so surprised, he couldn’t move. “Excuse me?”
Mysterioso barked, “What are you talking about?” He looked at Carter with a mixture of jealousy and respect. “Carter, did you really kill—”
“Look, you grimp,” Griffin snapped, “I don’t know who you are but if you say another word, I’m going to blow a hole in your chest so big I’ll be able to read the phone book through you.” Griffin glared at him, a thousand-degree stare. Then, in a singsong voice, he added, “‘Yeah, I do have a ticket, thanks for reminding me.’ Asshole.”
Mysterioso intook breath, ready with a reply, and Griffin pointed the gun at his solar plexus.
“Just say it. One word. Just one.”
Mysterioso closed his eyes and let out a disappointed sigh.
Carter put his hands behind his head. “Agent Griffin, may I speak?”
“What?”
“Phoebe here is blind. Do you mind if she sits?”
Griffin shrugged. Carter walked Phoebe to the Gone! chair and helped her sit down. He put her hands on the frame of the chair. When she folded them in her lap, he returned them to the frame and held them there, pressing his fingers into her palms before letting go.
Carter returned to his pose, hands behind his head. “Why are you arresting me?”
Griffin spat soot onto the floor. “The wine bottle.” As soon as he said it, it seemed hopelessly inadequate. A wine bottle. Still, even if it took all night, he’d make Carter confess.
Carter’s response was unexpected. “The wine bottle. That’s amazing. I’m amazed.”
“What’s he talking about?” Phoebe shouted. Mysterioso opened his mouth, then thought again, and closed it.
“Quiet,” Griffin said, though not above feeling proud.
Phoebe said, “Charlie, this is where you tell him you didn’t do it.”
But Carter said nothing. To Griffin, Carter looked pleased, like he was basking in getting caught. But Griffin still hadn’t heard a confession. He had no more evidence than the bottle. So he bluffed. “The only thing I don’t know is who you were working for—the Duchess or one of the politicos.”
“Ahh,” Carter replied. “I see. What can I say about that?”
Phoebe shouted, “What about ‘I’m not guilty’?”
“It’s not that simple,” Carter murmured. “I’m thinking.” He shook something into his hand. A tin. Mysterioso frowned at it.
“What’s that?” Griffin waved his gun.
“I’m h
aving a peppermint. I’m trying to think.” Carter shook the tin. “They’re called PEZ. Would you like one?”
“PEZ!” Griffin exclaimed. “Why you—” He growled, as it dawned on him, “The Germans. Of course.”
“Pardon? No, I’m—”
As this colloquy had taken no small attention away from him, Mysterioso shouted, “Carter, come now, you didn’t really—”
“Hey, Barrymore, I said not another word out of you!” Griffin fished in his jacket. “You’re under arrest, too. Put these on.” He threw a pair of handcuffs at Mysterioso, who caught them with one cool hand.
“What are you doing?” Carter asked.
“Cuffing him. Put ’em on, pal.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“You’re next, so shut your yap.”
“He’ll get right out!”
“Hey, these are government regulation cuffs,” Griffin explained. “You guys can’t dick your way out of them.”
Carter could only stare: he was face to face with ignorance. If he survived, Griffin could someday make an outstanding audience member.
And then, looking at Griffin the whole time, concentration written on his face as if asking for reassurance that he was doing it correctly, Mysterioso secured one wrist, then the other. He extended his hands. He looked toward the floorboards, radiating a luster of schoolboy shame.
Griffin got out a second pair of cuffs, which he would use to secure Mysterioso to an overhead pipe. He holstered his gun.
“Don’t get near him, Griffin.”
Griffin said, “It’s—” and Mysterioso grabbed Griffin’s wrists and gave them a quick shake. Griffin looked surprised, as that simple motion made the handcuffs jump off Mysterioso’s wrists and onto his own. While Griffin stared at them, Mysterioso’s hand dipped into Griffin’s jacket and pulled out his gun.
Mysterioso said “Pardon,” and shot Griffin in the side.
Carter flinched. The report was awful and with it came a thump across the room. Baby had fallen over. Griffin looked at Mysterioso with an accusatory expression. Poor Griffin, Carter thought. He saw in Griffin’s eyes, before they closed, disappointment with the world. Then the agent collapsed. Mysterioso paid Griffin no mind—instead he looked with interest into the lion’s cage.
Phoebe. Carter took a single step backward and hit the button for the Gone! chair so that Phoebe, with a gasp, was fired upward as if from a slingshot. She vanished.
Mysterioso didn’t notice at first. He was too engaged by the sight of Baby stretched out. He looked away to brush soot off his clothes, and then returned to his curious stare.
This was a moment Carter could have used to engineer Mysterioso’s defeat. Instead he was fixated on Griffin, who writhed on the floor. As he bled, Carter began to float. He’d never seen a man shot before. Suddenly his own rules of conduct, the outcomes he believed in, seemed frail and naive. Mysterioso had gone places Carter could never go. He wasn’t sure how to fight that.
Then it didn’t matter. The gun was pointing at him. “I had one bullet and now I have five,” Mysterioso said, but his mind was elsewhere. “You trained Baby to fall over when there’s a gunshot?”
“Yes, or a loud enough clap.”
“How does he stand up?”
“I clap twice.”
“What if anyone else claps?”
Carter said, “Why don’t you try?”
“No. I’d have to put my gun down, so you do it. Clap.”
“There’s a man dying here.”
“I should hope so. Now clap.”
Carter gave a pair of dispirited claps. Baby lurched onto his haunches. Mysterioso watched him.
“That’s very interesting. Oh, and I see your girl is missing. What was she riding, a de Kolta?”
“Yes.”
He squinted. “I don’t see a trap. But I do see a lift, so maybe it’s a Gone! effect. Finding a blind woman on a catwalk. Yes, that should tax me to no end.” He jerked his chin toward the stage. “I still don’t understand your Kellar device.”
Carter was about to rise to that bait, and then thought, He’s just a bully. Granted, a bully with a gun, but the thought gave him slight comfort. “I’m not telling you how everything works.” As he spoke, he saw Griffin’s mouth tying into a grimace. In the shadows, it was hard for Carter to see how extensive Griffin’s wound was, though the layer of soot on his torn shirt was now sticky with gore. He was on his side, knees bent, his body forming a harbor for a pool of blood.
Mysterioso approached Carter. When he was still a few steps away, he paused. “You’ll try something,” he murmured. With his free hand, he unbuttoned his shirt to the waist, showing off a handmade sort of sling. Sitting in the sling was a dog.
“Oh my God,” Carter murmured. Mysterioso took the dog out of the sling and put him on the floor. The dog stretched his front legs and yawned. “Handsome,” Carter said.
“Handsome III,” Mysterioso corrected. “Who’s my little man? Who’s my little man? Sit, Handsome. Good boy!”
With Handsome sitting at what his master judged was a safe distance from the treacherous Charles Carter, Mysterioso fished in Griffin’s pockets and found a second pair of cuffs. Extracting them, he felt under Griffin’s jaw. He frowned. “No, no,” he chided, and gave Griffin a brutal kick in the back. Griffin groaned, which seemed to relieve Mysterioso.
“Handsome! Go get din-din!” And the little dog bolted from his spot, settling daintily at the edge of the pool of blood, from which he began to drink noisily.
Carter’s stomach turned upside down.
Mysterioso threw the cuffs at him. “Put one cuff on your left wrist. Leave the other one free.”
At gunpoint, Mysterioso led Carter to the wooden backdrop he had used for the knife-throwing act. Carter could smell him now, cheap cologne over dark earthen smells, like a man who’d slept in barns and ditches. “Twelve years,” Mysterioso said. “Twelve years of you using my act and living the high life.”
“Like hell.”
“Oh, I’m sure you had many troubles,” he yawned. His black eyes focused on Carter. Twelve years ago, Carter had seen in them contempt and ego. But now, unexpectedly, he was looking into a void. There was nothing in those eyes. “Do you know what I did? I left the country. And where did I go? Go on, guess.”
“I don’t know.” Carter swallowed. He was feeling oddly lost, like the emptiness was spreading from Mysterioso’s eyes, and was obliterating all that he knew for certain.
“Really. The most obvious place.” Mysterioso grabbed the free end of the handcuffs and fastened it to a squat metal U-bar that jutted from the flat around waist level. “Guess.”
“India,” Carter said blankly.
“Exactly. I did exactly what all of us pretend to do. I went to India to learn magic at the feet of holy men. I went there for years, Carter, and while you were riding high, having the easy life, five thousand a week—”
“I never—”
“Be quiet.” Mysterioso pointed the Colt at his throat. Carter knew he would pull the trigger whenever he felt like it. Carter had a hand free, but his mind was foggy with images of ancient maps he’d seen of a flat world, with arrows to the edges and “here be dragons” promised for those who left the known behind. Mysterioso had gone beyond. There was no predicate to that, simply that no matter the map, geographic or psychic, Mysterioso had gone beyond any known point. “I traveled by donkey to the obscure cesspools, the vermin-infested caves and slums, and you know what the holy men taught? Do you? Inner peace. Enlightenment. Can you imagine? I just wanted one bloody, miserable thing no one else knew, anything, teach me to carve a boy to pieces and restore him, show me the real Indian rope trick, but no! Yoga! Come on!”
The gun went level with Carter’s solar plexus; with his other hand, Mysterioso grabbed Carter’s right hand and held it far over his head, against the backdrop. That sickly cologne made Carter choke. “Go on! Stand up straight, up on your tippy-toes,” he spat. “Stretch!”
>
It was an odd request. There was really no way for one magician to detain another. No one was sure what someone else could escape from. So Carter went willingly, not nearly as afraid as he should have been. He’d had years of experience doing one thing while observing another, so he pressed his back against the flat, and stretched up on his toes, his hand directly overhead, and he saw Griffin lift his head slightly, then drop it. Griffin had another pair of handcuffs. Perhaps Griffin had a second gun. Carter looked for signs of movement where the Gone! chair had parked and saw none. All this observation while at the same time figuring when he could best slip the cuffs. Mysterioso dug the gun into Carter’s gut. “Do you know what this gun is good for?”
“No,” Carter whispered.
“Misdirection,” Mysterioso said, which caused Carter to look down. It was no longer the gun pressed against him—it was the handle of one of his throwing knives. The moment this substitution registered, Mysterioso brought it up and out into an arc and then drove it, blade first, through Carter’s hand. Mysterioso stepped back to admire the sight.
Carter never even heard the sound it must have made. A mild vibration traveled up his wrist, a sensation that trembled and widened as it found his mouth, which went taut in surprise. His hand was pinned over his head like he was the brightest student in the class. He stared without a thought in his head. The world became very wobbly, a poorly threaded projector, his vision skipping with each heartbeat.
There was some kind of motion around him but he had no clue what it was, as he was being poured out of his body. A memory, a fragment: a winter evening at the library, Thacher School, bare tree branches shaking outside in the rain, which poured down the windows, wind whistling past the building, him huddled over Gray’s Anatomy until the electric lights flickered once, twice, and then out, casting into darkness the etching of the transverse section of the carpus. He’d seen, snugly fit together like a cross-section of a cell, the skin, the tendons, vessels and nerves, the ligaments, flexors, muscles and bones cozied together, and then, when the lights went out, all that mortal power fizzled, just as he had once imagined shaking Horace Goldin’s portrait until the accoutrements of magic—the doves, the scarves, the coins and imps—spilled out and left an empty man.
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