It was not long before Hermes Trismegistus appeared onstage. He looked very much as one might have expected: a stout but imposing figure in evening dress, dark hair brilliantined to reveal a significantly receded hairline, the requisite carnation in his buttonhole. His lovely assistant Lilly—a different girl from the one outside—wore a white floor-length velvet dress and had her hair up in an elegant manner that Sophie associated, though she couldn’t have sworn to its being the dictionary definition, with the word chignon.
The opening routine did not entirely hold Sophie’s attention, as she was too busy wondering about what sort of facilities were required for housing and transporting the half a dozen white doves featured.
The next bird the mentalist brought out was an altogether more impressive specimen, a parrot of some sort with a hoarse voice and a surprisingly large wingspan. Hermes Trismegistus asked a fellow a few rows ahead of Sophie and Mikael to stand up and hold a ten-kroner note at arm’s length, and the parrot left his perch on the magician’s knuckles and flew directly to the man with the banknote. He took the note carefully in his beak and flew back to the magician onstage, who made a great show of taking out his wallet and putting the note into it before relenting and sending the money back—by bird!—to the fellow in the audience, who was pretending to be a good sport about it but looked immensely relieved at the return of his money.
“This isn’t bad,” Mikael whispered to Sophie, “but I thought he was billing himself as a mentalist! This is just an ordinary magic show with trained animals. . . .”
“Let us wait and see what he does next,” Sophie suggested, and indeed the next thing the magician did was to get a few people up onstage and ask each of them two or three questions before guessing their birthdays—evidently correctly, judging by the look of amazement on each participant’s face, and by the questioning or reproachful glances they directed at their companions once they returned to their seats.
Mikael assured Sophie that this trick could be accomplished by way of a simple algorithm, and she believed him—yet it was hard not to be slightly awed by the performer’s showmanship and by the collective gasps of an appreciative audience.
The strangest thing happened next. Sophie did not attribute psychic powers to Hermes Trismegistus—his show was almost certainly made up of different bits and pieces of trickery attractively combined and packaged, and she was determined to enjoy it for what it was. But she had to credit him with an amazing ability to read an audience, because the following bit involved his lovely assistant being blindfolded securely enough that there could be no suspicion whatsoever, even in the heart of the most inveterate skeptic, that she could receive any visual cues from the mentalist himself—and the person he called up onstage to perform the blindfolding and satisfy the skeptics was Mikael!
Together, Mikael and the mentalist went through a slightly comical pantomime that was admirably readable even from the very back of the amphitheater. The mentalist took out from his seemingly inexhaustible pockets a number of different strips of cloth—first a light-colored gauzy-looking one that Mikael indignantly rejected as too diaphanous, then a strip of gray felt that met with his grudging approval, and after that an old-fashioned blindfold made by rolling up a black silk square into a tight band. Under the magician’s supervision, Mikael fixed each one in turn over the assistant’s eyes, until the upper part of her face was entirely swathed in cloth.
Mikael was growing noticeably restless and irritable, but this was all part of the entertainment, as far as the audience was concerned. Laughter broke out each time he tried to leave the stage and had his hand tugged back by the magician, who finally drew from his pocket an ample black hood and made Mikael try it on.
“Does any light penetrate this barrier?” the magician asked.
Mikael shook his head.
“Can you see anything at all?” the mentalist persisted.
“Nothing whatsoever,” said Mikael, his voice slightly muffled by the hood, but not so much that one could not understand what he was saying.
The magician plucked the hood from Mikael’s head, then handed it back to him so that he could put it on the assistant himself. He had been very careful throughout to make sure that only Mikael secured the materials about the young lady’s head. She was seated on a stool, and the magician spun her around upon it now until she came to rest with her back facing the audience.
“The technique that I am about to demonstrate,” he announced, “was once the exclusive preserve of a coterie of Buddhist monks living and studying in a monastery in remotest Tibet. Their isolation gave them unimaginable freedom from any notion of the mind’s having limits, and they learned over the years to transcend the confines of the body in the most extraordinary ways.”
Mikael had made his way up the steps by now and rejoined Sophie. Meanwhile the strains of the small orchestra in the pit became vaguely Eastern, with some plangent, unfamiliar melody emerging on an oboe, accompanied by a soft drumming and the high-pitched throb of bells and cymbals.
Mikael snorted.
“The mysterious East!” he whispered contemptuously to Sophie.
She kicked him to keep him quiet.
“On my own journey of spiritual inquiry—”
Mikael was groaning, but Sophie did not bother trying to shut him up this time—she was thoroughly enjoying the magician’s implausible but vivid recycling of the clichés of Eastern enlightenment.
“—I found myself on the doorstep of the lamasery. I presented myself as a searcher and a seeker, a man of some spiritual acuity who little dreamed of the secrets to which I would become privy within those walls. . . .”
He proceeded to describe the monastery routine: rising before dawn for hours of prayer, participating in a series of physical and mental exercises of exceptional stringency whose particulars he was forbidden to disclose on pain of death. (It was not clear how the sentence would be executed, but as an enthusiastic sometime reader of the popular fiction of the late nineteenth century, virtually the only light reading to be found on the shelves of the library in Heriot Row, Sophie had a vaguely Orientalist notion of opium-smoking thug assassins dispatched to do the bidding of villainous potentates.)
The upshot, the mentalist continued, was that he had learned—there was no occult component, just the sustained practice of spiritual discipline and the repetition of mental exercises, and in fact anyone who aspired to acquire such skills could purchase his small pamphlet setting forth a program for transforming a mental weakling into a veritable Hercules of the mind—how to transmit a vivid mental picture of anything he saw to another person.
“No trickery,” he said solemnly. “The feat I am about to perform is nothing more or less than a testament to the amazing powers of the human mind!”
“When is he going to start the actual trick?” Mikael muttered under his breath.
“I believe he’s about to,” Sophie whispered. “He has to build up the suspense first, I think, or else there won’t seem to be nearly enough to it. That’s what the blindfold business is all about—this way he’s giving people their money’s worth.”
“Lilly!” the mentalist called out.
“Yes?” she responded.
Her voice could be heard quite clearly despite the layers of cloth covering her face.
“Lilly, on your oath, can you see the slightest thing?” he asked.
“Not the slightest thing,” she said.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing!”
“Not the least little peep of light?”
“Not the least little peep!”
“So that when I ask this lady”—he reached out his hand to a thoroughly respectable-looking middle-aged Danish lady, who let him raise her to her feet; she looked flustered but flattered, hitching her handbag up under her arm for fortitude—“when I ask her to hold up some object she has about her person, so that I can see it and the members of the audience can also see what it is, will you swear by the mysteries of the Eg
yptian pyramids and the sacred temple at Eleusis—”
Mikael snickered, and Sophie could feel, forming in her cheek, the dimple that preceded laughter.
“—that you can see nothing whatsoever?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” said Lilly the assistant.
“Madam,” the magician said to the lady next to him, “pray choose something you have about you and reveal it to us.”
The lady unclasped a bracelet from her wrist and gave it to the magician, who held it up and placed his finger on his lips. He gave it back to the lady, then called out, “Lilly!”
Lilly’s voice assumed a strange tranquillity as she began speaking.
“A silver bracelet, very pretty, with a band of red-and-blue enamelwork around it—is it birds or flowers? I can’t quite see—flowers, I think, though. . . .”
Of course, the bracelet was too small and too far away for Sophie and Mikael to be able to discern all of its particulars, but it was clear from the response of those in the immediate vicinity of the bracelet’s owner that Lilly had described the piece of jewelry to a T.
Hermes Trismegistus proceeded to repeat the same feat with a young man’s engraved cigarette lighter and then an older gentleman’s mustache clippers. “A real stumper, that!” Mikael said sardonically into Sophie’s ear, and she had a difficult time not laughing out loud—gosh, it was awfully unsanitary, someone carrying such a thing around in his pocket, or using it in public!
After several more feats of mentalism—Mikael thought the audience members must be plants, but Sophie wasn’t so sure; wasn’t it genuinely possible that Hermes Trismegistus had learned how to open a quite focused channel of mental communication with his partner in the act?—Hermes Trismegistus unwrapped his lovely assistant and asked the audience to give her a round of applause. He took a few bows himself. Then the lights went out.
When they came back on, both he and his assistant had vanished, and the park’s ushers were quietly but effectively shepherding everyone out of the theater.
Mikael checked his watch, and whistled when he saw the time.
“Good thing that piece of charlatanry didn’t last any longer! Sophie, let’s make tracks; we’re due back at the station in fifteen minutes. . . .”
They picked their way through the crowds and out of the park, Sophie looking regretfully at various wonders she had not had the chance to examine properly and making herself a promise to come back one day and see everything in a more leisurely manner.
Inevitably when they got back to the station Bohr wasn’t at all ready to leave yet. Wittgenstein’s train had been delayed by an hour, and the two men had laid out an extraordinarily complex map of condiments and cutlery and napkins to represent the nuclear reactions with which they were concerned.
Sophie and Mikael found a bench to sit on while they waited. Their attention was arrested shortly thereafter, though, by the sight of a couple in heated argument. The fact of the man and woman’s both being dressed in street clothes and carrying perfectly ordinary-looking luggage could not obscure that they were the mentalist Hermes Trismegistus and his assistant Lilly.
The mentalist looked more or less as debonair and relaxed as he had onstage, but Lilly’s body was gathered up into an angry, self-contained rod of fury.
They came to rest in a spot not very far from Sophie and Mikael’s bench, and it was all too easy to hear what they were saying. They were speaking in English; indeed, Sophie could have sworn they both had Scottish accents (her Danish was certainly not yet good enough to identify a foreign accent in Danish).
“You’re impossible, Sean,” the woman was saying. “I don’t know whether you’ve come to believe all that mystical guff you spout during the show—”
“It’s not guff!” the mentalist interjected, sounding genuinely injured. “Lilly, you know that—”
“The only thing I know,” she snapped, “is that you seem quite incapable of understanding what I’m thinking!”
“You’re being unfair,” said the mentalist. “If you don’t tell me what you want, how am I supposed to intuit it?”
“You’re the thought reader, not me!” she shouted.
“Such skills of which I am possessed,” he said, “do not enable me to disentangle the confused jumble of desires and fears making up the average female psyche. . . .”
“Ouch!” Mikael whispered to Sophie. They were both mesmerized by the exchange, which had become loud enough that others in the station had begun to attend to it also.
“If you knew what you wanted, Lilly,” the mentalist added portentously, “I might be able to help you to it. As it is, my hands are tied.”
“I do know what I want!” Lilly said.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to want to marry me!” she shouted, and then burst into tears.
The mentalist put his arm around her and whisked a beautiful and gleamingly white silk handkerchief out of his pocket, but it was painfully obvious what he did not say.
At this juncture Bohr and Wittgenstein emerged from the buffet and began moving in Mikael and Sophie’s direction. Their path took them quite close by the theatrical couple; Lilly’s head was buried in the mentalist’s breast, but Sophie saw the mentalist himself do a small double take when he saw Bohr.
Of course, Bohr was very celebrated, so it was hardly surprising that he should be often recognized. But as the magician followed the scientists with his eyes, he did a quite evident second double take when his gaze fell on Mikael and Sophie.
Had he recognized them from the show earlier?
Some large proportion of the Tivoli audience, though, must have passed through the train station afterward; the two locations were just across the road from each other, and the train was by far the most obvious way to get home after an evening out. It certainly did not explain the way that the mentalist’s arm had dropped away from Lilly’s shoulders as he looked back and forth between Bohr and Sophie, a speculative gleam lighting his eyes. . . .
Wittgenstein was grumbling about not having a detective story to read on the train and seemed unable to concentrate on anything Bohr was saying. He barely responded to Bohr’s warm farewell, and went off to his train with nary a backward glance.
“I hope you had a good conversation with Wittgenstein, Professor Bohr,” Mikael said mischievously.
“Yes, yes, most productive,” Bohr said. “Mikael, I don’t suppose you can identify this gentleman who is making his way toward us, can you?”
“I don’t know him personally,” Mikael said, surprised, “but Sophie and I saw his show just now at the Tivoli Gardens, and I can tell you that he is a self-described mentalist who performs under the name Hermes Trismegistus.”
“Hermes Trismegistus?” Bohr said, his attention distracted for a moment despite the imminence of the mentalist’s arrival. “Delightful! When I was a boy, I once came across an old book of alchemical texts—I spent an entire term convinced that I might discover the technique for transmuting lead into gold! Lead, of course, is a beautiful element in its own right, with quite magical properties. Let us see what this fellow wants, but if he detains us too long, Mikael, you must help me detach myself. . . .”
The mentalist was by now hard upon them. Sophie half expected him to greet Bohr with a showy low bow, but he shook hands in a fashion that even Great-aunt Tabitha might have deemed reasonably couth.
“Sean Kelly, at your service,” he said.
“My name is Niels Bohr,” the Danish scientist said politely, even though the other man obviously already knew who he was. “This is Mikael Petersen, and the young lady is Sophie Hunter.”
“Sophie Hunter!” Kelly exclaimed, the Hermes Trismegistus self flickering showily in and out of his manner as he spoke. “Indeed, I thought it must be so—I never forget a face. I saw a photograph of the young lady earlier this year; her features stayed with me.”
“What do you want?” Bohr asked, his voice neutral, but he was usually so warm that even neutrality felt to S
ophie like a kind of hostility toward the interloper.
“I feel certain the three of you will find this odd—you do not know me from Adam, as they say—but I have taken the liberty of introducing myself, at this inconveniently late hour and in a public place where Professor Bohr would doubtless prefer to pass unmolested, though it be by one of his most devoted admirers—”
Bohr looked at his watch, and the mentalist caught himself up short.
“I will cut to the chase,” he said. “I believe myself to be in possession of some information that may prove interesting to Miss Hunter.”
Bohr looked puzzled, and Mikael had already interposed himself physically between Sophie and the mentalist.
“Sophie,” Mikael said, glaring at the performer, “tell me if you want me to make this fellow go away!”
Instead Sophie stepped forward. In her boldest voice, though she could hear it shaking a little, she asked, “What sort of information?”
“You might rather ask, information concerning what?” the mentalist said, the staginess very strongly peppering his manner.
“What, then?” Mikael asked irritably.
“It is something I heard from a woman we both knew—the woman who had Sophie’s picture and named her for me.”
Suddenly Sophie knew what he would say next.
“You must be talking about Mrs. Tansy!” she exclaimed. “She called her cat after you—I wondered earlier, but now I’m sure of it. Was she terribly impressed with your stage name?”
“Strict honesty compels me to admit,” said the mentalist—and it really did seem to pain him to say the words—“that the cat had the name first.”
Sophie tried to keep her face grave, but she could not quite maintain her expression, and the mentalist coughed.
“I consider myself honored, I might add, to share the denomination with so distinguished a member of the species worshiped by the ancient Egyptians.”
Mikael did not actually say, “Stuff it!” but his thought was almost as clear to Sophie as if he had spoken the words.
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