“What about the intruder?” someone interrupted. It was one of the passersby who had watched the window from across the street. “We saw someone just before the explosion.”
“Intruder?” Arnold’s eyes sprang wide. “What are you talking about?”
“We saw him too!” Another voice from the crowd. “A shadow, but someone was there all right.”
“He wasn’t just there—he was attacking him! And what about the shout?”
“What’s yours is mine and always shall be! That’s what he said. I heard it, plain!”
“I heard it too!”
“But what does it mean—”
“An intruder in Herbie’s dressing room?” Wesley butted in, his face white and wobbling. “But that makes the business even worse than I thought… You see, ladies and gentlemen, I was just about to tell you that…” He clutched his pink hat to his chest. “I managed to find my way to Herbie’s dressing room in the end. I stumbled over Arnold here and climbed the stairs to make sure poor Herbie was all right,” Wesley wailed. “But there was no sign of him, ladies and gentlemen. No sign at all! Herbie Lemster…he’s gone!”
The crowd heaved forward. Harry barely managed to keep himself upright as the surging bodies carried him past Wesley, past Arnold, right into the theater itself. A good thing—maybe he could discover something that would tell him what was going on.
Backstage in the theater now and surrounded by pieces of scenery, he lodged himself between one of the enormous seaweed plants from the pearl-diving scene and a collection of ropes and iron hooks hung on the wall. He watched as the crowd swarmed.
“Intruder? But I saw no one!” It was Bruno the Strongman, still wearing his leopard skin, his muscles shaking. “I walked up to Herbie’s dressing room with him after the show, like I do every night—there was no one in there with him then!”
“We didn’t see anyone either!” One of the pearl-diving dancers spoke up, surrounded by a tight crowd of her friends, all in tears. “We were talking in the corridor. We saw Herbie go into his room and close the door—and that’s all. No one visited. The door stayed shut. Until—boom! It knocked us all off our feet!”
“And no one came out of the dressing room after that. I swear it!” The man who told jokes was still dressed as a parrot, but the face among the feathers was pale and he didn’t look like he’d say anything funny for quite some time. “I was at the very far end of the corridor just as it happened. It knocked me back, but I kept staring at Herbie’s door. Sure, it blew open! Sure, there was smoke! But I’d have seen if anyone came out! Particularly if some intruder was tryin’ to carry Herbie off against his will. I’d have seen it, I swear…”
Harry stumbled toward the nearby stairs. He joined the members of the crowd who were racing up them, pushing his way up one flight, then another, and along a corridor until he reached a door on which were painted the letters “H. Lemster.” He toppled through and saw the shattered windows, some scorch marks on the rug, and a few wisps of purple smoke still hanging in the air. But his attention was fixed on one item in particular, leaning against the room’s solitary chair.
Herbie’s walking cane. The stick he had seen in his old friend’s trembling hand less than an hour ago.
Harry started searching. His hands raced over the walls, checking for hidden doors or panels, and he crouched and inspected the floorboards. But there was nothing. He was sure of it, not least because everyone else was also searching. Countless hands raced over every inch of the room, finding nothing. Apart from the door to the corridor, the only other way out was the window, and he had been staring at that and would have seen if anyone tried to get out. What on earth had happened? Harry heard more shouts from outside the room and stumbled down to the theater’s backstage.
“Poor Herbie! What has become of him?” one of the juggling acrobats asked. She was as upset as all the other performers who had gathered in a sobbing, mournful crowd.
“I’m afraid it’s impossible to say.” Wesley Jones wiped at tears with his bloodstained handkerchief. “Somehow, a mysterious intruder found his way into Herbie’s dressing room. An explosion occurred, and the next thing we know, both Herbie and the intruder have vanished into thin air!”
“But who was this intruder? What would he want with ol’ Herbie?” Arnold wheezed. “Herbie doesn’t have an enemy in the world!”
“Never mind that—how did it happen?” A voice from the crowd, a slightly panicky one. “How did two men get out of the dressing room without anyone seeing them? Did they just disappear in a puff of smoke?”
“Maybe it was magic!” Another voice, more panicked still. “Maybe one of Herbie’s tricks went wrong. He accidentally summoned this strange intruder and—”
“A demon!” This voice sounded positively hysterical. “Dark forces! That’s what’s behind this. Herbie Lemster has been claimed by his own magical powers!”
Pandemonium was breaking out. Harry was about to give up on hearing anything when one voice managed to cut through, louder, more hysterical than any other.
“Magic? Dark forces? I’ve no idea!” It was Wesley Jones. “Only one thing is clear, and it’s this: ladies and gentlemen, I regret to confirm to you that”—his voice broke with a sob but kept going—“Herbert Lemster, marvelous magician, has…disappeared!”
The pandemonium was complete, the screams blotting each other out. It was impossible to hear anything, and it was becoming impossible to see anything either because the crowd was swarming too fast, too tightly, Wesley and Arnold trying to keep control in the middle. Harry fought his way out. Ducking through the bodies and pushing out through the stage door, he hurried across the street, breathing in the cool night air.
He found a lamppost and steadied himself against it, his hand gripping the iron. He breathed more deeply. The purple smoke had drifted away, so the air was clear, and its coldness was useful too. Harry stood there, sucking in lungful of it as he thought through everything he had discovered about this business so far—and about one piece of information in particular.
The man he had seen just a short time ago as he walked up the theater’s aisle.
“Harry! What’s going on?”
He saw Billie and Arthur racing after him, even as he marched along the street, swung around the corner, and headed toward the theater’s front doors. Had they been backstage in the theater too, somewhere in the crowd? Or had they been out here the whole time, waiting? Harry lifted an arm and waved his friends after him.
“Come on! We’ve got to hurry!”
“Huh?” Billie hurried after him. “What’s happened to Herbie?”
“Tell us!” Arthur cried. “What did you find out?”
“I’ve got to check something.” Harry slammed through the doors, straight into the deserted foyer. Almost immediately, his friends slammed through after him.
“Check what? Slow down, will you?”
“The man we saw…the one with the briefcase…” Into the auditorium and down the aisle. “Maybe there’s some trace of it left behind…some clue…”
“Man? Briefcase? What are you talking about?”
“I’ll explain everything. Just let me…”
He turned and stared at a particular seat. He lunged toward it, and his hands explored its back, its arms, and the floor around it, searching for anything that might have been left behind. Nothing could be seen, but Harry felt his nostrils twitch as he leaned close to the seat’s left arm. He sniffed the arm’s worn upholstery. Faintly, very faintly, he could detect the same chemical odor of the purple smoke that had billowed outside.
“Er…Harry? What are you doing?”
“Since when did you start sniffing chairs?”
Harry looked up. The expression on Arthur’s face was very puzzled, and the corner of Billie’s mouth had curved into a smile. Harry stood up, straightened his jacket, and pointed at the chair
.
“The man who was sitting right there. He’s our only clue.”
And he told them. He told them about those piercing eyes. He told them about the oiled, red mustache and how its ends had curled upward. As his words raced out, he found himself remembering other details—the brooch on the cape, the sinister snake coiled around an upright sword—and he told them about those as well. Finally, he told them about the most important, most sinister detail of all.
The man’s briefcase.
Out of which had spiraled that tiny wisp of purple smoke.
Chapter 7
Harry woke up.
He lay there, listening to the sounds of Mrs. Mack’s boarding house coming to life—the coughs and murmurings of the other lodgers, the scrape of chairs. His nose twitched as he breathed in the smell of Mrs. Mack’s gruel, which he had long ago learned to avoid. Looking up, he saw beads of morning light sliding through the broken roof tiles over his head. He lifted his hand and let the sun play over it, slanting between his fingers, surrounding them.
Flexing his fingers, he tried to move them through the crisscrossing rays without them being touched, and succeeded, apart from a single spot of light just glancing off his thumb. It was a game he had invented back in the slums of Budapest, his faraway Hungarian home, where the roof over his bed had also been broken. He had played it ever since, and he played it now.
His fingers crept through the light. The smell of the gruel sweetened into the warm fragrance of zsemle, the buns his mother used to bake every morning. He breathed the scent in and heard, very faintly, the whispering of his father reciting prayers as the family sat by the fire. Harry’s fingers crept on as the sweet smells and whispers drifted around him, and then, all at once, disappeared.
He saw his parents’ faces—fearful and tightly drawn. He heard his father’s words, but they weren’t prayers now. They were frightened mutterings, talk of money and debts, which Harry hadn’t understood back then, and which seemed even murkier as he tried to recall them now. But he had understood what happened next. “The Scattering,” they had called it.
The family had broken up, his father sending them off across Europe to wherever there might be hope for them, which in Harry’s case had meant ending up in the hold of a ship sailing across the Atlantic. Four weeks the voyage had lasted, four weeks of filth, hunger, and sickness. But even so, nothing had prepared him for his arrival in New York and his new life as a shoeshine boy in this cold, hard city where he knew no one.
Harry stared up at his fingers flashing in the light. These skills, he thought, they are what changed everything. Without them, he would still be that shoeshine boy, nothing more. Without them, he would never have met Billie and Arthur, the two best friends he had ever had. Yes, life in New York would have been grim indeed, he thought, if he hadn’t picked up these extraordinary tricks.
And that was all thanks to Herbie Lemster.
Harry sprang up and slid his feet into his boots. A splash of water and he clattered down the rickety stairs and pushed past the shadows of the other lodgers rising from their beds—laborers, travelers, ne’er-do-wells. Passing a murky mirror by the stairs, he glimpsed himself and saw smudges of shoe polish on his face. But there was no time to rub it clean, not this morning.
Help Herbie.
He shot out through the rickety front door. Heading off through the Manhattan streets, he swung west to Grand Central Station, where men of business were pouring off the morning trains. Here Harry quickly did a couple polishing jobs, crouching over the proffered shoes, wiping them clean, and shining them up. The cold sidewalk hurt his knees and the polish stung his fingers, but he reminded himself he needed to eat to be able to concentrate—today of all days—and so he kept shining until enough coins had dropped into his palm.
Then he hurried to a pastry stall, handed the money over, and stuffed a pie into his mouth. Gathering up any pastry flakes that dangled on his clothes, he ate them too and walked away from the station. He threaded through some alleys, crossed a market square, slanted along another alley, and arrived at a large hulking factory with gray fumes spooling from it.
“Mawkin’s Glue Factory,” a sign said on the front. Harry checked a clock in a nearby shop window and ran to the factory’s front door, which was firmly locked. He listened and could make out raised voices on the other side, one deep and growling, the other high-pitched and familiar. Billie. The voices grew louder, and something smashed—Time to carry out the plan.
Harry hurried around the back of the factory. Spotting a hay cart on the nearby cobblestones, he tugged it across to the factory wall and, with a quick swivel, positioned it correctly. Hearing scrabbling sounds from the other side of the wall, he propped an arm against the cart and tried to look casual in case anyone should pass by, but already something was blurring over the wall’s top. The cart wobbled, bits of hay flew, and Billie landed right in front of him, even more spattered with glue than usual. That deep voice bellowed from inside the factory, but already racing off with his friend down the alley, Harry couldn’t make out the words.
“Guess that’s it for the whole ‘stirring gray gloop for two cents an hour’ racket.” Billie tossed her cap into a bin. “Can’t say I mind.”
“You asked him for the day off, I guess.” Harry glanced back.
“Asked him at eight o’clock exactly, just like we agreed. And obviously he said no. Not even when I said it was an emergency, which helping poor Herbie most surely is. Said it was his right to make me work the rest of the day, in return for having given me paid work and a bed for so long! And when I told him his pay was nothing and his bed stank of poisonous glue—well, that’s when he started chasing me with the broom. So I decided to go for our little plan and ran for the back wall, tipping a pot of slippery boiled-up bones in his path as I went.” She jerked a thumb back toward the factory, which was already far behind. “Crummy job.”
“Crummier than all the others?” Harry asked.
“Well now, that’s a good question.” Billie slowed down and a frown appeared on her face, just for a few seconds. “It’s true, I’ve ended up doing a fair number of tough jobs on the way up from New Orleans. Cleaning drains, sweeping floors, picking through garbage heaps, you name it.” She looked back again.
“Can’t say that was the crummiest boss I’ve had or the first broom I’ve had to dodge. Still, it’s not the sticky situations you get into; it’s how you get out of them, that’s what I say.” She shrugged and ducked around a corner. “Somehow or other, I’ve managed to get myself unstuck—one way or another. Why, I even managed to get unstuck from a glue factory, didn’t I?” Her smile was back. “Not a bad escape. The Glue Pot Scramble, that’s what I’ll call it. You did well with that cart business too.”
“Thanks, Billie.”
“Sort of makes up for you being so crazy last night.”
Harry felt his face grow warm, even though they were no longer running, just walking along. He looked away and tried to think of different ways of putting it but decided in the end just to say what he had before.
“I’m sorry. I just needed to help Herbie—couldn’t think of anything apart from that. And it happens sometimes, you know that. When I—”
“Get swept up in stuff, can’t think of anything else. It’s how you do your tricks. I know, I know.” Billie speeded up, burst out of the alley, and looked around. “The thing is, this isn’t just a trick, is it? It’s way more important than that! And we’re all friends with Herbie, so we’re in this together, yeah?”
“Of course.” Harry’s pace quickened.
“Anyway, there’s Artie. Come on!”
She jumped over some railings and ran across the park. The bright white house towered nearby, and Harry followed Billie to the same rhododendron bush as the day before. Waiting behind it stood Artie, his pocket watch ticking in his hand. He looked up at them, jerked his head toward the house,
and nodded.
“Thanks, guys. Head over there now. You’ll be right on time.”
Harry and Billie set off. They left the park, crossed the street, and reached the sidewalk just as the front door of Arthur’s house opened. A servant trod down the stone steps. He wasn’t as tall as Lord Trilby-Roberts but every bit as stiff and with a stare every bit as cold. That stare was fixed on the small iron mailbox a few yards down the sidewalk, and he headed toward it, a collection of letters fluttering in his hand. But he never managed to deliver them because Harry had let himself be pushed by Billie, straight into the servant’s path.
“Watch out!”
Harry toppled into the servant. The letters flew everywhere, but Harry snatched them out of the air and, with a swoop of his arm, helpfully posted them in the mailbox.
“Ever so sorry, sir! My friend, she’s always doing that… Come back here!”
He ran after Billie before the servant could reply. But a flash of his hand had done the trick. As the letters spun in the air, he had spotted one with a particular address, and it had slid into his jacket as the others vanished into the mailbox. It rustled there now as he followed Billie down the street, back into the park, and behind a tree. They waited until the servant had vanished back into the house and slid across to the rhododendron bush again.
“Nice work,” Arthur said, taking the letter.
“We just did the snatch.” Harry shrugged as they walked off. “How’d you know the servants would be posting the letter to the school at that exact moment?”
“Father gave them instructions yesterday, and they always act immediately. They always post the day’s mail at ten o’clock, so it stood to reason the letter to the school would be in with it.” He turned and looked back at the house. “Father left for Chicago at dawn, by the way. Obviously, he didn’t bother to say good-bye.”
Magician's Fire Page 4