“That’s lesson two. Always watch what the other hand is doing.” Arkansky was smiling wickedly, very happy with himself. “You see, if the Council were to learn your passion for les belles-lettres, you might have to resign for good.”
Brentford tried to look relaxed.
“As little as I know them, I still think they would need more proof than a magician’s word.”
“Let us make this a footnote to lesson one. A proof is what people will believe. Every night, I see people whose will to be deceived is matched only by my will to deceive them. This is precisely why they come and see magicians. And this is why my ballot box trick makes special sense, even if you did not like it, as I noticed.”
“But I thought the blackmail was about Ms. Springfield,” said Brentford, who did not feel like discussing poletics.
“We are coming to that,” Arkansky kept on. “The Greenhouse is one thing. Much to my surprise, and to my displeasure, I must add, I have other matters to discuss with you.”
Arkansky sat back in the armchair, lost in thought for a while, seeming even a bit nervous, though Brentford could not see why, for he had all the cards in his hands. The magician finally spoke.
“How did you like the show, Mr. Orsini?”
“Would you be fishing for compliments, by any chance?”
“Ha! As an artist, I make a living out of compliments. So they are always welcome, I suppose. But let me rephrase my question. Did you think there was anything special in the show tonight?”
“I found everything rather impressive, I admit.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seemed to have been especially, shall we say … troubled by the walking ghost.”
“I was not the only one, I suppose. It is a powerful illusion,” Brentford said diffidently. He still failed to see how any of this could involve Sybil.
“But you are the only one she made a sign to.”
“Because you made it so, I suppose.”
Arkansky leaned toward Brentford.
“Mr. Orsini. Have I, since this conversation began, given you the impression that I deserve to be spoken to as if I were some sort of dimwit?”
“Not really,” admitted Brentford, regretfully.
“Well, then. Let us behave accordingly, if you don’t mind.”
He took a deep breath and went on.
“Who is this girl?”
“Which one? The Princess? The Ghost?”
“The Ghost or God knows what it is.”
“I do not have the slightest idea.”
“You are sure you have never seen her before? Because she had seen you before.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Arkansky got up, took a few steps to and fro, biting his lips, visibly wrestling with some inner dilemma Brentford had no inkling about. Then, he suddenly turned toward Brentford, seemingly pacified, or at least, with his mind made up.
“As much as I regret it, it seems that the best way to deal with this is to be relatively sincere with you. Needless to say, were you to abuse my trust, and inform a third party of what follows, you will place yourself in a rather unenviable predicament.”
“Your secret is as safe with me as my authorship of the book is with you.”
Arkansky pondered this for a moment, and then said, “Let us both believe it. Belief can work wonders. Are you a connoisseur of magic?”
“Not in the least,” admitted Brentford, still at a loss as to what Arkansky had in mind.
“That is a good thing. We magicians have a rather equivocal relationship with connoisseurs. It is the paradoxical nature of magic as an entertainment that it dreads the capacity of its public to understand the tricks, while, to be appreciated as an art, it requires exactly such understanding. However, and frustrating as it can be, I may be one of the rare magicians to be wary of connoisseurs on both accounts. Not because I am a bad magician, but precisely because I am, as you have noticed, and I say this with all objectivity, a little above average. The tricks I did tonight, I admit, are mostly standard, and the stage was as rigged as a three-masted ship, but some of these tricks, frankly, I could not have done in Paris, London, or New York, possibly in front of other magicians.”
Brentford felt it was time for his cue. He sighed and delivered, so as to get more quickly to the point.
“And why is that?”
“Because, Mr. Orsini, a fellow magician would certainly see that such tricks are not really possible.”
“This is, I presume, what every magician would like his audience to suppose.”
“It’s more complicated than that, I’m afraid. There is nothing that is more despised among magicians than a fellow conjuror trying to pass himself off as some sort of sorcerer or magus with supernatural powers. As you know, some of us also make a living by trying to prove such people are frauds. On the other hand …”
“On the other hand?” Brentford forced himself to ask, remembering that he should watch that other hand closely.
“Magic as a trade would be the best cover for someone with such abilities, don’t you think? Pretending his supernatural feats were but vulgar magical tricks.”
“What would be the point?”
Brentford noticed that Handyside was now levitating about a foot or so above the ground while staring him right in the eyes.
“That could be one of your tricks,” said Brentford.
Arkansky rose another foot, just as if he were full of hydrogen, his quiff almost touching the frosted-glass globes of the ceiling light.
“Yes. But the point would be that … you would not know.”
The magician returned to the ground. Brentford noticed how flushed he was. But it meant nothing. Arkansky was, after all, in the grip of the famous paradox: who would believe a man who calls himself a liar? The magician had paid for his talent to deceive by losing any credibility, whatever he might say or do. That seemed to Brentford like some infernal punishment, the true meaning of selling your soul to the devil.
“You see, Mr. Orsini. There are two sides to what I do. Some of it I admit is trickery, and that’s where some of the beauty lies. Some other things cannot be explained so simply, even by myself. And tonight, something happened that not only can I not explain, but that I could not control at all, even though I pretended to. I swear I do not know who this Ghost Lady was.”
He leaned toward Brentford almost threateningly.
“But she knew you and … you … know … her.”
Brentford saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I’ll tell you when I see Sybil back at home and safe.”
Arkansky sat back.
“Which home? You forget I have only to tell the Council that you wrote the book for you to lose the Greenhouse.”
“You are bluffing. The Council already suspects I wrote the book. What they need is some tangible proof which you do not have. Besides, I remember we have already made a deal about our mutual discretion. Forget about the resignation. Sybil comes back intact and I’ll tell you who the Ghost Lady is.”
“I could still trade Sybil against your resignation.”
“You could,” Brentford bluffed, offering his position as a gambit to protect the information he didn’t have. “But then you won’t learn anything about the lady who comes and goes through your performances as she pleases.”
Arkansky was thinking hard. But it was too late. He had forgotten he wasn’t the only one to have two hands. As Brentford would have bet, the magician’s curiosity, or fear, eventually got the better of his ambition. Well, for the moment, that is, before he plotted a new way to uproot Brentford from the Greenhouse.
“The name, then. But you’d better not trick me, Mr. Orsini.”
“Would I make such a mistake? And I won’t make the mistake of telling you the name before I get Sybil.”
“You will have your Sybil back. But not tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
“Why is that?”
“I doubt you’re interested in this, but another si
nger disappeared today. Apparently the Council seemed to think that it would be a good idea that not all the headlines speak of this incident. Ms. Springfield’s disappearance could not be more welcome in that respect, if you’ll allow me to say so. You will see her a lot on the front page, I suppose.”
“I’m used to it,” said Brentford. He still found it hard to believe that the Council of Seven had had a hand in kidnapping his bride.
“Take advantage of the Greenhouse as long as it lasts, which will not be long. For the rest, let’s clinch the deal,” said Arkansky, offering his hand to Brentford.
“I suppose that if I take it, it will come off and stay in my hand.”
“Do not be mean. Do you think I’m some cheap conjuror for children?”
Brentford took the hand, which stayed in his.
Arkansky chuckled and turned his back to leave.
But then the magician saw something through the open door of the bedroom that made him start. Before Brentford could react, Arkansky strode into the bedroom. Brentford followed quickly and found him standing still in front of the mirror Blankbate had given him and Sybil had stolen from him.
The magician turned toward Brentford and, indicating the mirror, spoke with a hissing voice.
“What is this thing, Mr. Orsini?”
“It’s called a mirror. I thought that as a magician you would be familiar with the notion.”
Arkansky cast a dark look at Brentford and advanced toward the mirror, as if to reach for it. Brentford quickly opened a bedside table and pulled out Sybil’s Browning, which he pointed at Arkansky.
“Do not touch it, unless you’re ready for some bullet catch.”
The gun was uncomfortable to hold with a bandaged hand, but Brentford felt confident that his opponent would get the drift. Arkansky turned toward him, frowning as if to hypnotize him. Brentford staggered under the malevolence of the look, the sheer will power that oozed from the green eyes. But when it comes to mesmerizing, few things rival the barrel of a gun.
“Oh, yes,” Brentford said, “my finger feels really heavy.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” said Arkansky, still trying to force his crowbar stare into Brentford’s brain.
“Perhaps I’ll just shoot your fingers off.”
For a conjuror, this was worse than a death threat. He could see Arkansky take in the blow of the image: the torn, bleeding fingers dangling from the palm, simply held by bits of charred skin and broken bone shards. The magnetic stare went off like a light bulb.
“I’m on my way,” said Arkansky, with a tone that sounded more like “I’ll have my way.”
Brentford took a step back, following Arkansky’s retreat with his gun. He heard his steps cascading down the stairs, like an avalanche of poisoned apples, and the door slammed shut. He bent over the stairwell to make sure the magician was gone for good. At least he would know how Arkansky got out.
He pressed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and went back to the bedroom. He wondered what the magician had seen in the mirror, and moved closer to it.
As he looked inside, he saw the Ghost Lady behind him, wearing an elegant black dress. Smiling. He started and turned around. Of course no one was there. And no one was in the mirror either as he looked into it again, except a tired Brentford in a burgundy smoking jacket holding a gun that had not been loaded, just a waxed pencil moustache short of looking like a second-rate actor in a bad crime phantascopy.
I must be really tired, he thought, an unpleasant shudder tickling and chilling his spine.
But tired as he was, he did not sleep that night.
CHAPTER XX
The Failure of the Feast
“Why,” said he, laughing, “the barbed arrow of Master Cupid, my dear Gabriel, has penetrated quite through all the plates of your philosophy.”
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 1890
Sybil was finally restored the day before the wedding. A party of ice-cutters working off Symmes Spit found her lying unconscious on a small drifting floe, wearing only a fur coat over her party dress. Dropping jaws and saws, they raced her on their sled to their cabin, from whence they sent a flashing balloon message to their headquarters, which immediately called a propelled sled ambulance.
Alerted by pneumatic post a few hours later, Brentford jumped on his Albany cutter sleigh and met her at the Kane Clinic. According to Doctor Playfair she was perfectly safe and healthy. She had obviously been given boiler pills and stokers when she had been abandoned, and this barely a few minutes before her discovery. She showed no signs of frostbite or even hypothermia and could resume a normal life after a simple check-up. Much of Sybil’s disappearence and rescue, then, had been staged, and Brentford had not been surprised to hear that journalists from the Illustrated Arctic News, notorious propagandists for the Council of Seven, had been on the spot under the pretext of taking notes and pictures for a coming series on the ice-cutting industry, “the cutting edge of our economy.” Meanwhile, of course, Lilian Lenton had dropped out of the headlines.
Sybil did not seem to remember anything from the previous days, and, though a bit absent-minded at times, tried to get interested in the wedding plans as if nothing had happened. However, there was actually nothing much left to do in terms of preparation, as Brentford’s mother had taken charge of things in the no-nonsense way that ran in the family. Curiously, the complications this was bound to create did not spin out of control, and except for a little nitpicking, Sybil took in the situation with a surprising coolness that bordered on indifference, and she did not even react when she heard that Handyside’s performance would have to be cancelled.
She had, it soon appeared, other things on her mind. When the Cub-Clubbers came by to discuss the musical program for the wedding, most of the talk revolved instead around their next recording, and the sessions, it appeared, were already booked at the Smith Sound Studio for the day after the ceremony (“I’m soooo sorry, honey”). If Brentford had overheard correctly, the idea was simply to record a copycat of a Lenton song, talk-over and all, with the subversive edges blunted and a few typical Cub-Clubbers jazzy gimmicks thrown in. If this were some sort of commission from above, he would of course never know, but he suspected it strongly. The Council’s way of doing poletics was as inventive as it was pervasive.
Brentford had to admit to himself that the Handyside episode had somewhat marred their relationship. If she seemed oddly detached, maybe as an aftereffect of the hypnosis that she had gone through, Brentford, on his part, found himself feeling a bit estranged as well, as if unsure of the part she had actually played in the whole affair: the eagerness with which she had run toward the magician at the Trilby Temple had left Brentford with a bitter aftertaste. There was no doubt he would still marry her, but he found that a certain sense of duty was now buttressing his desire to do so. He also found himself equally, if not more, worried by the fits of Arctic Hysteria that were seizing the city. If he had ever in his youth dreamed of being that New Venetian Doge who would throw a golden ring into the Lincoln Sea and pronounce “We wed thee, O Sea, in token of our true and eternal dominion over thee,” he was now aware that the ring would only rebound on the ice with a ridiculous cling of rejection. No ocean in its sound mind would marry a city so totally pillortoq as New Venice now seemed to be.
The very morning when he had been driving Sybil back to the Greenhouse, the streets—already barely passable after the snowstorm—had been blocked because of an incident involving the native employees of the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. Dressed in furs and installed on a platform decorated with mock-igloos in front of the Nothwestern Administration for Native Affairs, in order to give speeches promoting the official opening in two days’ time, they had done quite the contrary, slandering the Palace and distributing leaflets that had a distinct autonomist flavour to them. “Gentlemen” from the crowd had of course “volunteered” to “protect” the Inuit from the angry crowd and “sheltered” them until things cooled off. All of which could of course
have been predicted, given the recent events, and in Brentford’s opinion had been predicted by the Council, who had not only let it happen but had wanted it to happen, because it served their obscure plan to stoke up racial tensions.
The last straw had been the astounding accusation that the snowstorm had taken such proportions in so little time because the Air Architecture had been sabotaged. Though in normal times the Council would have been only too happy to blame the Arctic Administration for such supposed shortcomings in their protection of the city, they had this time designated as culprits four Inuit from Flagler Fjord, who had been jailed and released for petty theft the very same day and had, allegedly, wanted revenge upon New Venice.
This injustice made Brentford want to spew vomit like a fulmar under attack. He knew the Air Architecture very well, as his father, who had designed and run it, had taken him many times for walks along the impressive rows of Astor vibratory disintegrators that heated and relentlessly pumped the methanegas hydrates out of the permafrost. There was no way whatsoever that four Inuit with knives made of “starshit” meteor stone could ever damage that shiny, greasy underground beast. Now the February Freeze Four, as the press was calling them, were on the run, and that was the only news Brentford could mildly rejoice about.
Even the fact that Arkansky had kept his promise to restore Sybil and had left him alone so far was not especially reassuring. As Brentford had yet to reciprocate by disclosing the ghost’s identity, he knew something wicked would sooner or later come his way, and he feared it was going to be during the wedding.
Speaking of which, his best man, Gabriel, seemed to have disappeared. Bah. His friend was right not to care, after all. Brentford felt ashamed and stupid to be getting married when everything, public and private, seemed to be going to the dogs. And then a pneumatic dispatch arrived, informing him that his mother had slipped on the ice and broken her leg.
Gabriel’s nerves had snapped one after the other, like so many strings on a Loar guitar.
Waiting on Stella’s doorstep until three o’clock in the morning in the snowstorm had not helped his health. It was not so much the common cold he’d come away with as the way he had treated it in the following days. A steady diet of opiate pills, Freezeland Fags, Wormwood Star Absinthe, bad coffee, and almost no food had turned his body into a thin, taut, anatomical écorché, with no muscles and all the nerves showing, the whole offering little or no protection against the outer world.
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