Cat in a White Tie and Tails

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Meanwhile, you can visit Ma Barker at the police substation near the Circle Ritz and see how many likely Cat Pack members she has in her clowder. She always cottons to you better than to me.”

  She does not waste time arguing with me, but turns tail and rockets away. I must admit that the kit has a gift for tailing, whether it is Mr. Max or giving me the brush-off.

  Chapter 35

  Double Down

  Dark of night in Las Vegas, and Max was just where he wanted to be, making like Spider-Man in darkness high above the New Millennium Hotel’s massive stage. He was back to his apparently favorite death-defying persona, undercover high-wire artist.

  Every few seconds, a shifting stage effect or a neon-bright light from the performance below forced him to skid five feet down a four-story ladder or duck behind the bars of rolled-up scenery scrims.

  How do you finagle a private audience with a man advertised as “the world’s most mysterious and reclusive and richest magician”? Max had probably done just that in the recent past. Now … all the shortcuts in his brain were short-circuited. Any magic formulas he’d known had tangled on his tongue. He needed to contact his quarry in the split second between leaving the stage and stepping into the arms of his security forces waiting in the wings just beyond the audience’s line of sight.

  Operating under the radar and slipping past security had proved to be one skill still solidly in place. Just the act of scaling the complicated set pieces put his mind and limbs into motions that should shake loose the blocks of memory loss.

  The noise bouncing off the hard concrete walls up here made his memory synapses jolt as the pulse-pounding music vibrated the metal framework he perched upon. Gigantic light sabers washed the four-story box’s inner walls in rhythm with the approving roar of the crowd.

  Max waited to pounce on his one perfect moment, linked to the height by a thick thread, his favored and always potentially fatal bungee cord. These tensile bundles of elastic nerves made Cirque de Soleil’s many franchised arty acrobat shows—in Vegas and on the road—a billion-dollar business.

  The stage floor below was broken into round elevator platforms that lifted magic effects to different levels, and then sank them below view for set changes. And through this magic mushroom stagescape strode the king of the jungle, his dreadlock mane surrounding a tiger-striped face mask, with a muscular-shouldered leather cloak concealing six-inch platform boots off some seventies’ rock album cover.

  As applause thundered, Max timed the departing magician’s stride length. He pushed off the high framework to land on point beside the moving man, unfastening the bungee cord at the same time his hand crushed the leather cloak shoulder and his mouth spoke against the cat-head’s broad striped cheek, right on the hearing amplifying device.

  “Me Tarzan.” Max’s low, gritty tone would thrum inside the hollow mask. “You in jeopardy.”

  “And you’re a dead man,” came the answering rasp. The Caped Conjuror had flicked off his voice amplifier as quickly as Max had appeared.

  Now his huge gloved paw waved off three security guys a-leaping in front of sixty fans with backstage passes a-pushing. His arm clutched Max’s shoulders in a bear hug, signaling friendship to his hair-trigger crew, and feeling like custody to Max.

  You mess with a big cat, you might catch some claws.

  The hold carried Max along at the center of the exiting cadre, leaving behind a crush of fans and the blinding blinks of cell phone cameras held on high.

  Only yards away was the dressing room door made of heavy metal: big, blank, and bank-vault solid. Once it slammed shut on them, the two men were alone.

  “Lucky I recognize your voice.” CC slung his heavy cloak onto the shoulders of a super-tall mannequin standing in one corner. The base had been bolted to the floor to handle the weight CC carried two shows a day. “So you’re back from the dead.”

  “What made you think I was dead?” Max asked, throwing himself into the cushy leather armchair CC had indicated with a wave of his doffed gauntlets. “That didn’t get out.”

  “I have kept an eye on every magician’s act in and out of this town, especially some new cat calling himself the ‘Phantom Mage.’ That costume and routine treaded awfully close to my franchise, pal.”

  CC stepped off his platforms while holding on to a bathtub bar screwed into the wall. “My security setup doesn’t permit me having a dresser. Too easily bought off. Give me a hand?”

  Max pushed himself upright.

  “If you can give me some leg,” he said wryly, absorbing the big guy’s weight while CC stepped over the bulky platforms and dropped down into the upholstered chair at his dressing table. He was shorter than Max, but stockier.

  “I would ask how you can walk on those things,” Max added, eyeing the Klingon-style height-enhancers, “but I have several female friends and Lady Gaga ready to swear it’s no problem.”

  “It’s a problem,” CC said. “This costume is a sweatbox, a molded plastic and felt and fabric prison.”

  Max nodded. “As for ripping you off in my Neon Nightmare persona, a mask and cape aren’t copyrightable wardrobe items. Ask Zorro or Batman. And, as you discovered, those costume bits are the only way to disguise a face and build. What tipped you off to my pseudonymous act?”

  “You were too good for the Neon Nightmare. You were having fun. I recognized the first impish cavorting of working masked. It feels like freedom.”

  “We’ve talked about this before,” Max said. Suspecting.

  “You’re the only magician I’d speak to.” The huge feline mask cocked like an inquisitive dog’s. Max almost laughed at the effect. From skirmishes with Midnight Louie, he knew cats expressed their curiosity with laser eye intensity and pointed paw examinations, not cutely tilted puzzlement.

  “I’d hoped that was the case,” Max told him.

  “Why wouldn’t it be? Don’t you remember?”

  “Not … completely.”

  The Cloaked Conjuror sat up straighter, abandoning the exhausted post-show slouch that Max recognized so well, now that he thought about it.

  “What are you saying?” CC scratched his huge big cat nose, apparently a stock gesture for uncertainty. Max found it both odd and sad that he’d adapted so thoroughly to wearing the mask.

  “I had a ‘brain crash.’” Max shrugged. “Memory loss was a side effect of the two broken legs that came from hitting the Neon Nightmare wall on the swing of a frayed bungee cord.”

  “Damn!” CC’s striking bare fist, large folded fingers with hair-dusted knuckles, made the items on his makeup table, which weren’t makeup, bounce. “Onstage assassination attempt. I figure I’m going to end that way. When you’ve made a career of unmasking other magicians’ hallmark illusions, someone is going to get mad enough and is expert enough to do you in, no matter the guards. Look how close you came today. If you’d wanted to knife me instead of talk to me—”

  “You’d be fine,” Max said. “The cloak is fine-woven chain mail, and the equipment-loaded mask collar puts your neck off-limits. I would have had time to slip a stiletto down your gauntlet, though, and cut your wrist veins.”

  “Damn again! We’ve never thought of that in our security meetings.”

  “You’d probably recover and I’d be dead,” Max said in consolation.

  “Maybe not.” CC sounded morose. “You survived that Neon Nightmare impact. Why are you my friend?”

  “I need one. And I’m nobody’s hired gun.”

  “I’ve always thought we had common ground, Kinsella, that you were in some way imprisoned by your career as much as I am. That you were as really and truly solo as I have to be, not able to trust anyone, or ever let down my guard.”

  “True enough,” Max said.

  “And yet I do with you.” CC braced his armored right forearm on the dressing table, holding up a bare fist as an invitation to arm-wrestle.

  Max hesitated, then braced and flexed his own right arm. His legs were iffy. His arm and
upper body strength were the foundation of his career. He’d win in two seconds. Instead of grasping CC’s fist for a contest, he gave it a bump, the current gesture of camaraderie.

  The man’s laughter sounded faint compared to his supplemented onstage voice. Max guessed he’d never see CC’s face unless he was in a casket. And the Cloaked Conjuror would probably want even that closed.

  “I never exposed your ‘walking on air’ illusion,” CC said thoughtfully. “Of course it wasn’t magic. It was timing and astounding physical discipline. Loved the doves, man. That was a message.”

  Flashback.

  Strobe lights raking an empty stage faster than the blink of an eye. The audience hushing when the first dove flew to its invisible black perch against the stage’s velvet-black backdrop. The next dove flickered onto a different level on the other side of the stage. Then the next landed elsewhere until all you could see were doves fluttering like snowflakes, dozens of them, archangels landing on a cloud, wings lifted, balancing. The audience was now mentally adding the words to the instrumental music playing softly behind the first dove and getting louder. Upbeat. It was the “Believe It or Not” Mike Post theme from The Greatest American Hero TV show about an ordinary Joe becoming a superhero.

  Only … blink again and there was the magician, standing upright on nothing, Max standing taller than a straight pin, wearing traditional magician’s garb. Dark hair, dark formal garb with strobe flashes of white tie and flying black tails, holding a slim white-tipped black wand. Wearing a shiny black top hat.

  CC chuckled. “You were something else. Hugh Jackman doing Tommy Tune doing Fred Astaire as even Fred Astaire had never imagined it. I could never do that Lightfoot Harry act.”

  And no matter where onstage Max had appeared, it was among a flutter of those constantly landing white doves. The strobe lights caught him flashing from one impeccably posed position to another, dancing in the dark, never captured striving or moving, walking on air, always the iconic image of the Magician. The Mystifying Max.

  Flashback again:

  “That effect,” he heard himself saying authoritatively, “was the product of years, five bird handlers, a tech crew of seven and a wonderfully calming dove cote only three miles off-Strip, plus the inspection and fiat of animal welfare groups.”

  Max could shut his eyes and hear the doves’ low warbling chorus. Lovely, gentle creatures. Reality pushed him out of the past when his recovering mind flashed a newspaper headline shot of DOVE HUNTING SEASON OPENS. Not on his turf.

  So. Did the Synth have a Cloaked Conjuror–hunting season? They might well, Max believed. He’d found a possible target. Now he had to find the potential perpetrators and figure out what they planned and where and when.

  “Speaking of ‘messages,’” Max said, “that’s why I’m here. You could be closer to ending the way that you fear. Someone cut the Phantom Mage’s cord at Neon Nightmare.”

  “That’s why the act went dark a couple months ago!” CC couldn’t convey expressions, but Max could almost see a lightbulb winking on above his heavy-maned head. “And why you made the remark about your memory.”

  “Right. I could have been killed, and I’m putting the why and who and how together. My mask certainly didn’t keep me safe. What about your mask, any known imitations out there?”

  “I don’t just have one mask, I have three. One to wear, one in the shop, one at the cleaners. They’ve been marketed as Halloween masks, but I don’t really have the kiddie audience.”

  “The full head?”

  “No, just my adorable kisser.”

  “I’m thinking of full head masks, with voice-altering capabilities. That Darth Vader vibe.”

  CC leaned back, folding his arms over his impressive chest. Here, without his boot platforms and gauntlets, the character’s roots in the entertainment wrestling game were more evident. “Nothing commercial. Some of my fans buy pricey kids’ helmets like that, supposed to be Darth Vader or Septimus Prime from the Transformers franchise.”

  “Those would be shiny plastic, mechanical-looking masks, not animalistic strips in flocked stretch velvet dotted with tiny Austrian crystals like yours.”

  “No. The Vegas Strip glitz is subtle and costly. But my fans are cagy and devoted. Craft store adhesive felt and dollar-store glitter work wonders when my fans get a hold of them for a redo. But most of those costly toy helmets have voice mechanisms that are more an echo chamber effect than a real alteration. And you’d be surprised how many adults fit into them and get a kick out of playing a kick-ass character.”

  Flashback.

  Swooping down fifty feet to hover above an awestruck crowd, cape billowing, face masked, while even the air vibrates with the heavy bass beat rocking the triangular-shaped inner space of Neon Nightmare, and neon lights of the zodiac wash every person there with pulsing colors.

  “You’re right. I enjoyed doing the Zorro bit at Neon Nightmare.” Max smiled as he recalled the kick. “But it made me an easy target, as you are every night.”

  “I know it. And you just proved that again tonight. Is there a reason you’re trying to make me insecure?”

  “I’m trying to make you safer.”

  “Why?”

  “I know what it’s like. I made myself a target of professional killers at seventeen.”

  The Cloaked Conjuror whistled in surprise, a common reaction. The mask made the sound into an eerie high-pitched wheeze. “You were a pro at magic that early?”

  “Magicians aren’t usually a target. No, it was because of my naïve ideals.”

  “You at least had some. I always just wanted to be a magician, but I wasn’t very good at it.”

  “So you became good at debunking it.” Max smiled. He wondered how often the Cloaked Conjuror saw that ordinary expression off a stage. Perhaps he had call girls in. “Proves the axiom. ‘Those who can do; those who can’t … criticize.”

  “I thought the old saw went, ‘Those who can’t … teach.’”

  “Not in this Internet age.”

  “Yeah, the threats on my life are up four hundred percent with my name out there for ‘instant feedback’ on hundreds of sites.”

  This time Max whistled, and it worked so well, the dressing room door banged open. Two musclemen bearing major small arms filled the doorway and scanned the room, weapons at the ready.

  From the glowers they gave Max, his magical aerial entrance next to their boss rankled mightily. It must rankle even more that Max had turned out to be a bosom buddy, so to speak.

  “That’s okay,” CC’s weirdly emotionless voice said. “Old friend. Get a couple drinks in here.”

  CC rested his booted feet on an unoccupied chair drawn up to the dressing table. For him, this must be an unexpected but pleasant social occasion.

  “Thanks for shaking up my guards, Kinsella. I owe you. In fact, I should put you on my payroll to test my security regularly.”

  “Don’t need the money, but, sure, I can do that anytime you want a drinking partner.” Max hoped CC’s invisible grin match his own. Meanwhile, he was getting an outside-in look on his own life.

  They remained silent until a New Millennium sexy robot girl waitress in silver body paint sashayed in with a tray, a bottle, and two crystal low-ball glasses. She deposited the burden on the dressing table as CC pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his palm and let it waft down to the empty tray.

  “Thank you, Tiger,” she said with a very nonrobotic wiggle and a smile, and bustled out again.

  “Irish whiskey all right?” CC asked, opening the bottle and pouring.

  “Slainte,” Max said, painfully aware of his last pub visits on Irish soil, of solid but not spectacular ale, of pursuit and death. “To your health.”

  With CC, that was always a sincere toast.

  CC picked up a flexible aluminum straw and inserted it in the drink before he sipped whiskey through the mask’s mouth slit.

  “Is it worth it?” Max asked.

  “I don’t know. I
thought so when I was younger. I can retire. And may soon, in a flash of fire.”

  “Not literally, I hope.”

  “Not at the hands of enemies, I hope. No, I want to go the way you exited the Goliath Hotel gig. Finish the contract one night and be gone the next. People always wondering … where I went … who I was … how I’m spending all my money.”

  “And then you’ll return as your own self to Vegas and play the high roller at all the casinos, still gaming the odds.”

  CC laughed, the only sound the mask made that seemed happy, as if it came from a mechanical Santa.

  Flashback.

  Max crawling through the Goliath air duct system, having spied an anomaly in the cameras above the gaming tables. Max and his double, old and new Max, crawling like an infant in a rut through the same hidden paths two years apart.

  “I had to leave that way,” he told CC, told himself. “I had assassins on my trail.”

  “Well? Am I different?”

  “You aren’t. We aren’t.”

  CC thrust his expensive glass forward for a rough toast. Max made the gesture but avoided the close contact of breakable glass. He wondered if that described his life.

  “If you want me to save you,” he told CC, “you’ll have to show your hand, and heart, if not your face.”

  CC lifted and wriggled his bare fingers. “Most people think I’m a gauntlet, not flesh. And heart, it’s all in my work.”

  “One of your men died, during that science fiction convention held here at the New Millennium.”

  “TitaniCon,” CC said promptly, not showing much heart.

  “One of your assistants fell, or was beaten and fell, or was pushed from the upper reaches of the stage mechanisms. He was wearing a costume that mimicked yours, that also suggested a ‘Khatlord’ from an insanely popular science fiction TV show.”

  “Silliness.” CC sucked hard on his straw of Irish whiskey before continuing. “Those costumed TV characters were supposedly from an alien race that was a cross between a Star Trek Klingon warrior and … me and my mask. The hotel PR department wanted to play up the similarities. I went along. It seemed harmless at first blush.”