Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Shangri-La's mandarin nails pantomimed arcane signs.

  "My next illusion requires an assistant from the audience. You, little boy in blue?"

  A forefinger nail lunged toward a six-year-old in the front row who was gazing up at her with the utterly round eyes of innocent belief. His wonder was tinged with fear, and she wisely veered away from him.

  "Someone older and bolder, but. . . not too large."

  Again she strode the breadth of the stage, eerily noiseless despite the clunky-looking platform shoes.

  "You!"

  A curved nail pointed, and two of the ninja figures leaped into the audience. They stopped before Temple.

  "Oh, no . . ."

  Somehow Shangri-La threaded her artificially long fingers together, creating dueling fingernails. "This is not difficult. Will not take long. Will be most amusing. And your hair matches the color of my robe."

  The audience laughed, having spotted Temple's red hair.

  Max was seriously slouching in the seat beside her, giving low profile a new name. He seemed almost in a trance, all observer, rather than actor.

  "Will you not be this magician's assistant for a very short time?" the woman coaxed. Her slightly hoarse voice was all the more enthralling, evoking France Nuyen's huskiness in the spate of fifties films that reflected a postwar fascination with the mysterious East.

  Like anyone singled out from the crowd to perform as the average idiot, Temple felt bullied, and secretly flattered. She would be cool, refuse to let this professional manipulator throw her.

  She wasn't utterly unfamiliar with magical hocus-pocus. She would audition as Max's assistant.

  So she stood, applause encouraging her onward and upward.

  The flanking ninjas grabbed an arm each and rushed her to the stage, lifting her up from the pit as if she were weightless, then jumping up onstage beside her and bowing to her, then Shangri-La, then the audience.

  More applause.

  The dragon lady circled her subject, robes licking like flames at her figure. "Here we have a woman named--?"

  "Temple."

  "Temple. Are you a tourist, Temple?"

  "Oh, no. I live here."

  "Imagine. Someone lives here in Las Vegas. Well, then, Temple, you have no doubt seen many magic shows and know what to expect."

  Temple smothered a smile. Did she ever!

  "That is a lovely ring you are wearing. Show it to the audience, please."

  That she didn't like, not with two particular audience members out there, but anyone hauled on stage for shenanigans can't complain when they come too close for comfort.

  Temple lifted her left hand, facing her, so the audience could see her ring.

  They tittered.

  Temple turned her hand around. Her finger was bare. Every finger was bare. She held up her right hand. It too was bare.

  Another laugh from the audience. She was performing like an automaton, making all the right, befuddled moves. She didn't like that either.

  She glimpsed Matt's blond head at the upper left, amid the overall dark undifferentiated mass of the crowd.

  She looked down for Max. His chair was empty. That's when slight unease began to escalate into fear.

  "So you had a ring, and it is gone. Surely you felt it leave your finger?"

  "No."

  "Perhaps you did not have a ring, and will sue the establishment. Can you prove you ever had a ring?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Then we will get it back for you. But first you must do as the ring did. You will vanish and reappear."

  "The ring hasn't reappeared yet."

  "Was it valuable?"

  "Yes."

  "Of sentimental value as well?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I take this next task very seriously."

  Shangri-La stepped aside, her robes a spotlit flutter. Temple turned to look upstage as the silent lithe ninjas wheeled a gaudy booth to center stage.

  She had seen its like a few dozen times. Not in Max's act. He avoided the predictable. But she knew this trumped-up box into which she was supposed to step and from which she would disappear only to be conjured up again.

  She didn't really know how it was managed, especially with an untrained subject. A back panel that gave, so she was hustled offstage? A bottom escape hatch that opened onto a stage trapdoor through which she would descend? She supposed a friendly neighborhood ninja would lift her down into the lower depths.

  She stepped up into the elaborately painted closet. Shangri-La floated around the prop, her long sleeves and fork-tongued skirt panels making contrails of color and motion.

  The door closed on Temple, shutting her in darkness. Then the blackness spun and she felt herself caught in a falling eddy, plunging down into a greater darkness.

  Where were the guardian ninja when she needed them?

  Chapter 43

  Vanishing Act

  When Temple's ring disappeared, Max Kinsella's internal illusion warning system went on red alert. The missing ring or watch trick was laughably common, but that wasn't what had alarmed Max.

  Maybe it was the primal shock of seeing his ring to Temple vanish, but he didn't think he was that possessive.

  It was that the vanishing act happened too soon, like a suspiciously rushed preliminary.

  Usually the canny magician made a big production of the ring being present before making it vanish. This ring might never have existed. Temple might be a planted shill, for all the audience could tell. Not a wise way to run a magic act.

  Max shrugged out of his sport coat. He seized Temple's program from the empty seat beside him, grabbed her half-consumed drink and balanced it atop the horizontal program.

  When the onstage action was drawing all eyes, he stood, stooped at the knees so his height wasn't a distraction. Then he darted waiter like down the row, bending here and there as if delivering a drink. Bewildered show-goers watched phantom drinks hover and disappear as swiftly as departing UFOs.

  Sensing a distracting moment on stage, Max darted forward again, heading for the stairs leading up to the dim-lit apron at stage right.

  The dialogue between Temple and Shangri-La ricocheted like a racquetball through the house, but despite the mike's booming amplification that distorted the everyday into the unreal, Max sensed Temple's dawning unease before even she felt it.

  Beside the stairs he stooped to put down glass and makeshift tray, tearing the elastic from his hair at the same time. He had no ninja mask, but his black turtleneck sweater and pants, and his loose, long dark hair would look sufficiently Oriental, sufficiently sinister, to blend with the ninja assistants for the few moments he needed.

  As the trick box was wheeled on stage with every creaking tradition of distracting ritual, Max rolled up onto the dark stage floor, then sprung instantly to his feet alongside the drawn folds of black velvet stage curtain. He risked a glance at the audience. Their faces were tilted as one to the focal point on stage: Temple in her slim hot-pink jumpsuit, her red hair a flame atop a gaudy birthday-cake candle. Temple looking small and wee inside the painted Oriental scroilery decorating the box inside and out, until Shangri-La swept down like a silk tsunami, and Temple was gone.

  As the ninja contingent spun the now-closed box like a top, Max slipped behind the curtain, hunting the backstage stairs to the lower level.

  ***************

  Hands caught her, held her.

  Silk circled her mouth and drew tight as a hangman's noose. Temple started to struggle, but a quick click bound her hands before her in the harsh metal bangles of handcuffs.

  She was lifted, and then lowered again into darkness, cushioned darkness, and then she heard the darkness shut above her, and her world was spun away. She was dizzy, disoriented, and a fugitive prick at her inner elbow told her that she was also drugged. And that was that.

  ****************

  "Why aren't they making her appear again?" Matt wondered.

  He wasn't asking Molina so mu
ch, as thinking aloud.

  "Maybe it's part of the act," she answered him. "Part of the suspense."

  "It's more suspense than I like."

  "You're ... oversensitive on the subject of seeing more of Temple Barr."

  "Am I? Look down to their first row seats, Lieutenant. I know you marked the spot. Where's Max Kinsella?"

  "Damn!" Molina stood, oblivious to hissing audience members behind her.

  She pressed a hand to one ear, spoke into her palm. "Any sign of the suspect?"

  Matt hadn't realized she was wired. Talk about unobservant. But then his attention had all been on Temple, like the lovesick swain he was. The sick part of the cliched phrase was growing alarmingly concrete in his gut.

  He eyed the elaborate stage scene, a finale of Oriental kites swooping everywhere in silken profusion, like demented paper bats. The eye feasted, but came away empty. Not only was Temple missing, but so was the magician, Shangri-La. Ninjas leaped everywhere, like athletic ants.

  Molina abruptly turned to leave. She had forgotten Matt, she heard nothing but the sweet nothings hissing over her hidden receiver. He followed her, their sight-blocking exit drawing more boos and hisses.

  For the first time in his life, Matt didn't give a damn about appearing rude.

  In the tiny lobby there were also lots of milling men in black, but not Shangri-La's serpentine ninjas. These were heavyset men, or maybe men who just looked heavyset because they were armored in vests reading "Drug Enforcement Administration" that probably covered bulletproof vests underneath.

  "They're moving," one said, the moment he spotted Molina. "What's going on in there?"

  "The show isn't over," she protested, then shook her head as if to clear it. "We didn't see the suspect. I'll follow up on what's happening here. You guys take it as far as you have to."

  They split, the men pouring out the front door like a gang, Molina going to dragoon an usher.

  "Get us backstage. Now!" Her ID case was as black as an old stigmata in the palm of her hand.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The teenager in the cheesy Chinese pajama outfit--black satin pants, jacket and boxy Philip Morris cigarette-boy hat (except for the phony pigtail snaking down his quaking back)--raced down some narrow, unlit side stairs and then through a maze of hallways.

  Molina trailed him like a shadow, Matt a doppelganger behind her.

  She stopped the kid as the hallway opened into the stage's shadowed underbelly.

  "Got a flashlight?"

  "Yeah. I mean, yes, ma'am."

  "Out of here."

  The kid's footsteps pattered away like a shuffle off to Buffalo as a rope of yellow light whipped through the darkness.

  Against it, Matt saw Molina seem to scratch her back.

  It took a moment to realize she was now armed and ready.

  He supposed she had forgotten him. She faced a maze of stage props, magical mystery machines lined up for tricks done and not yet done. Upright coffins painted up like tarts.

  Gleaming swords ready for defying the eye and slicing a confined body into mince-meat.

  "You too," she said. "Outa here."

  But he couldn't leave. He said nothing. Did nothing. He stayed.

  ***************

  Temple sensed movement. Never-ending movement.

  Whether it was in her head, or beyond it, she couldn't tell. She was spinning, spinning, spinning. Inside the magic box. Nothing would stop spinning. But the box was moving too, on its ever-ready wheels. Every jolt mashed the metal handcuffs into her tender wrist bones Where was that glamorous handcuff of another sort? Her ring. Stolen. She had let it be stolen so easily.

  Hadn't even felt it sliding away. Surely those long, predatory fingernails would have scratched her flesh. She should have felt something.

  Feel? Only movement, and the bizarre upward tingle of some scary snakebite at her elbow.

  She was like the young Cleopatra in her concealing rug with an iridescent dreamsnake as a hint of the future.

  No! Think! They hadn't wanted her to think, why else the prick of fangs at her inner elbow?

  Her feet were free. She kicked at the edges of her confinement. Soft, upholstered fabric, like the lining of a coffin. Then where were the hyacinths? There should be hyacinths. The-symbolism was all wrong if there weren't hyacinths. Where are the clowns? There ought to be hyacinths.

  Don't worry. Be happy. Kick!

  Spinning again, and then bumping up stairs, up a stairway to heaven lined with blue-purple hyacinths, and Effinger there to greet her, wearing wings. . . water wings.

  Moses in the bulrushes. Temple's coffin became a boat, and lurched forward into rocking motion. She could almost go to sleep. Sleep of the Deep. Deep, deep sleep.

  Where was her ring? That had been the first to go. Why? Petty theft? Or major felony? That sounded like a character from the old board game called "Clue," didn't it? Major Felony. Look here, Major Felony, Miss Crimson is in the funeral parlor with the handcuffs. Won't you find her, please?

  ***************

  The gun cocked like a castanet in the understage darkness.

  "Put up your hands," Molina ordered.

  The flashlight followed a lean dark figure as the arms lifted, and pale, naked palms were crucified with light.

  "I don't think you want that, Lieutenant," Max Kinsella said.

  The light pinioned his face, making his eyelashes flinch.

  "I've got two of your suspects by the pigtails," he added.

  A broader sweep of the light revealed paired ninjas, their natural pigtails tied together.

  Molina addressed her hand again. "Backup below-stage. Two to go. One to get ready."

  "Keep your hands up," she ordered Kinsella.

  He obliged, but Matt felt it was more out of form than fear.

  "Where's Temple?" Matt asked anyone who would answer.

  Max turned his face sideways to avoid the interrogative light of the flashlight. "Not here. Not any more. Maybe the lieutenant has an idea."

  "Where's the damn backup?"

  She whisked the flashlight behind them. It picked up hunched-over figures heading toward them.

  "The pigtails secure?" she asked Kinsella.

  "They're not going anywhere."

  "Then we are. Come on."

  They met the three uniformed cops, guns drawn.

  "Two tied up, back there. Approach with caution," she warned them.

  "What about the one to get ready?"

  "He's with me."

  The cops eyed Kinsella and Matt as they followed her and the dancing flashlight beam, not sure which one was the temporarily paroled desperado.

  The usher was quaking in his fallen house when they came up the stairs into the lobby. More uniforms had gathered.

  "Where'd the DEA go?" Molina asked one.

  "Vehicular pursuit."

  "Get me wheels."

  The man nodded. Molina made for the entrance, pausing only to fix Kinsella with a look half-warning, half-challenge. "Follow if you can."

  He sprinted out the door before her and collared a valet in an ersatz Oriental uniform. "The black Taurus. A hundred bucks if you have it here in one minute flat."

  With a screech of brakes, a white Crown Victoria careened slantwise across the street.

  Kinsella swore like a sailor and then he swore like a French legionnaire.

  "I'm going along," Matt squeezed into the backdraft from the obscenities.

  "Watch those taillights as long as they're visible." Kinsella sent a look after the Crown Vic that Matt hoped never to be on the other end of this side of Purgatory.

  The Taurus screeched up in its turn. Matt barely got around to the passenger side before it took off in a squeal of tires and the flutter of a hundred-dollar bill.

  "Left onto ninety-five, in the left lane," Matt said, still straining to see the impossible as he jerked on the seatbelt.

  The Taurus wove through the late-night traffic like a ninja armored in sheet m
etal. They must have been doing seventy.

  Matt glanced at Kinsella, who grinned. "Had it upgraded. They're using a Taurus platform at NASCAR, did you know?"

  "No." Matt cared little about cars.

  "It's what's not visible that counts."

  Matt nodded, straining to spot the right pair of red taillights among a host of beady red beams.

  "There! Is it them?"

  Max nodded. "Look. They're putting the cherry on top. Thanks, Lieutenant."

  "Not for us?"

  "Not for us. For speed. But they won't shake us. We'll run in their wake like Ahab after the white whale."

  Matt couldn't suppress his nervous bark of laughter. The big white Crown Vic was very like the Moby Dick of the automotive world.

  "What's happening?" he asked, hating to ask Kinsella but needing to know more than he needed his pride.

  "Drug bust. That was the principal deal. The rest--you and Molina--were ride-alongs."

  "And Temple?"

  "Unscripted. Wild card."

  "Is she--?"

  Kinsella shook his head. He'd probably forgotten his loosened hair, why ever he'd done it, and didn't realize he resembled a wild man of Borneo. Matt took in his primitive streak, and wondered about Temple. Wondered about himself. Molina he didn't wonder about. She was doing her job. The rest of them were trying to save their own lives. And maybe each other. He had to give even Kinsella credit for that.

  They accelerated like a whip-snake into the on-ramp lane, then were greased lightning on Highway 75, heading north.

  Kinsella eased up on the gas. "Don't want to make the cops paranoid."

  "She knows we're coming."

  "She knows we'll try."

  Suddenly they were "we." It gave Matt chills. What if Temple's death were the one thing that could draw them together?

  "You're sure she's not back there--?"