The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  And then, the real music of solid instruments had resumed with an intake of breath which emanated from every quarter of the hall, relief from the audience that they were not lost. The music was back and flooding over them, making them all new again as though they had been cleansed, not by fire, nor by water, but by passage through the void.

  The curtain rose and the music had begun again in accompaniment to the magic act. Malakhai had created Louisa on stage as a real presence. Then he sent her out into the audience, and here and there, a gasp was heard as one person and another imagined that Louisa had touched them. The scent of flowers was everywhere for a time, and then it was gone away into the dark of a child’s imagination.

  And this time, in the void, the magic silence where the listeners placed the phantom notes, rather than endure the emptiness, there he had heard a woman screaming.

  Long after the hall had emptied of its audience, and only the concerned stage manager remained, Cousin Max had sat in the front row, holding the hand of a badly frightened child.

  Max had once told him the best of music kept to the natural rhythms of the heart. Louisa’s Concerto had been such a piece. He had the basic structure of it now, and he strained to find the subtle places where Louisa had placed the most delicate constructions. He sat still for an interval of time which might have been an hour or four, and finally, he had recreated the music, note for note, just as he had heard it that first night so long ago. And in that void Louisa’s genius had created within the music, he recreated the scream, just as he had heard it as a child, but not to the same effect. Now he welcomed the sound of another voice, even a scream, to fill the empty space he had come to recognize as loneliness.

  He lit another cigarette to replace the one whose coal had gone dark. The smoke spiraled and wafted around his face without odor or sting to the eyes. He could only smell the roses.

  Perhaps the perfume had been a mistake. The scent in the small gold bottle retrieved from the basement had the life span of all things with living ingredients. It filled his senses with the tainted aroma of decayed blooms which had died long before young Amanda was born.

  The strains of the concerto were in his mind in vivid detail, interior music, corridors of sadness, and then -Amanda.

  She was only the two dimensions of his called-up photographic image, but there was a palpable energy to the woman before him. Expressive eyes could create that illusion in any number of dimensions.

  Now, in the manner of adding pinches of pepper and dashes of salt, he put the liquid and gleam in the soft blue eyes, and he gave her a luster of Mallory’s sun-gold hair which could thieve light from shadow.

  Ready now.

  He leaned forward. ‘Amanda?’

  The photographic image bowed its head in response. It was more like a sheet of paper bending to force, an awkward attempt at animating the flat image of a dead woman.

  ‘Why were you killed, Amanda?’

  She responded with Mallory’s voice. He created it for her with only the silk of Mallory and not the sarcasm, only the soft notes for Amanda, and with this voice Amanda said, ‘He lied to me.’

  Her soft mouth had opened and closed in a succession of jerking photographic images – a poor approximation of life, a bad joke on God.

  There was a wounding to the eyes, as though he had offended her. And he had. His eyes went away from her, and she died off to the side of peripheral vision.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to no one, for there was no one there, not Amanda certainly, nor even her after-image any more. What a grotesque puppet show this had been. How pathetic was he.

  He capped the perfume bottle, but the death of killed roses hung in the air. When he passed into the other rooms, it hung in memory, this smell of death. And when he was in his bed and most vulnerable, hands and feet bound by sleep, floating helpless in the dark – Amanda came back.

  All the night long and all about his dreams, fresh young roses were being killed. Even the small, sleeping buds, still closed in tight balls of soft petals – they were also dying.

  CHAPTER 4

  23 December

  For a full minute, Charles Butler had been standing by the door, listening to the scuffle of shoes in the outer hallway. By the light-footed pacing to and fro, he knew his visitor was a small person. And just now, somewhere between acute hearing and Zen, he detected the sound of someone standing on one leg and then the other. He politely waited until his visitor had resolved the hesitation and the door buzzer sounded.

  Charles opened the door with his smile already in place, a genuine smile, for he liked small children.

  ‘Hello. So you’ve come early.’ A full hour early.

  ‘Yes,’ said Justin Riccalo, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘I’m supposed to meet my parents here. My piano lesson was canceled, and I didn’t know where else to go.’

  Not home? Was it possible he wasn’t welcome there?

  As though the boy had read his mind, he said, ‘I don’t have my own key. I could go somewhere else. I’m sorry – ’

  ‘Don’t apologize. I was just on my way to the basement. I’d be happy to have some company. Do you like magic tricks?’

  Justin’s response was not what he had anticipated. The rocking ceased as though his store of nervous energy had escaped from a hole which had suddenly deflated the boy. He was a slender child and if he deflated any more, he would be altogether gone.

  ‘Do I like tricks? Mr Butler, is this your subtle way of asking me if I can make a pencil fly?’

  ‘Not at all. I think you’ll like the basement.’

  With only the lift of one slight shoulder, the boy made it clear that he didn’t care one way or the other.

  Charles locked the office door, and they walked down the long hall toward the exit sign which led to the staircase. The boy looked back over his shoulder to the elevator, and Charles explained that stairs were the only way to the lowest level, and he hoped that Justin didn’t mind the walk. Justin trudged along at Charles’s side, walking as though his legs weighed fifty pounds, each one.

  Apparently, stairs were a novelty for a child raised in a luxury highrise. When the door opened on to a spiral staircase of black iron, Justin held on to the rail and leaned far over the side. He seemed hypnotized by the winding metal. Bright lights glared at him from bare bulbs at each floor and twisted the shadows of the curling iron.

  ‘Awesome,’ said Justin, approving the tortured shapes of light and shadow. ‘This is a great old building.’

  ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’

  Charles led the way, and the boy followed, reluctant hesitance gone from his steps.

  ‘So what are we going to do down there, sir? You have some kind of spook meter you want me to stick my finger in?’

  ‘No, nothing that sophisticated. Usually, I just sit around and talk to the subject. Sometimes we do written tests.’

  ‘What kind of subjects do you specialize in? UFOs?’

  ‘Nothing that entertaining. Sorry. In my work, the subject is always a person with a unique gift. I find a way to qualify it, quantify it, and then I find a use for it. Lots of people are overdeveloped in some area of intelligence. Take my partner, Mallory. She has a natural gift for computers.’

  ‘Computers are only mechanical devices.’ Justin’s pronouncement had the peal of middle-aged absolutism, ‘Anyone with a manual can operate one.’

  ‘Well, Mallory doesn’t need manuals. She does things the designers never thought of. You would not believe the things she accomplishes at a computer.’

  Oh, wait. Perhaps Mallory was not such a good role model for a small child.

  ‘But your partner’s gift already has an application.’

  ‘Yes. In most cases, I find people with gifts that have no apparent application, and I project the area they’ll do well in. Then I find them a place in a research project. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But it creates a window for developers of new technology.’

  ‘All right, Mr Butler.
Do you want to start without my parents?’

  ‘Oh, no. This excursion is just for the fun of it. I was on my way down here to look for an old record album that belonged to my cousin. He was a magician – Maximillian Candle. Have you ever heard of him? No, you wouldn’t have. It’s been a very long time since he was on the stage. Are you interested in magic? You didn’t say.’

  They had reached the last floor, and Charles was working the lock on the door. Once inside, he felt at the top of the fuse box for the flashlight. He clicked on the beam and motioned for the boy to follow behind him. They made their way through a canyon of shadowy boxes and crates, old furniture and picture frames. He trained the flashlight beam through a myriad of draped furniture, ghosts of castaway items, boxes and mazes of trunks and cartons.

  The pleated back wall was a paneled screen which ran the length of the basement. Charles inserted a key into another lock and this wall began to fold back on itself, a gigantic, silent accordion.

  The cavernous space beyond was dimly lit by a wide back window high up on the basement wall. The bars on the window were Mallory’s work, as were the pick-proof locks installed throughout the building. She would have put bars on every window if he had allowed it. It had taken a long time to explain to her that he would rather be burgled than jailed in his own house.

  Now the beam of his flashlight shone on a collage of bright satin and silk gleaming through cellophane wrappers. Sequins and rhinestones sparkled through the dust of garment bags which hung in a wardrobe trunk. A portion of the room was obscured by a large fire-breathing dragon on a tall rice-paper screen. A rack of sturdy shelving lined one wall with satin masks, top hats, a silver dove-load, giant playing cards, ornate boxes and small trunks each containing its own magic.

  If it was the boy who made the pencils fly, this might be the outlet. The world could use a little more magic.

  ‘I’ll have a light on in another minute.’ Charles touched one finger to the top of a glass globe and the orb came to life, glowing with eerie pulsations as though light could breathe in and out.

  He turned back to the boy, whose attention was focused elsewhere. ‘Oh, that’s Cousin Max.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said the boy to the severed head which perched on the wardrobe trunk. Justin looked from Charles to the waxwork. ‘It looks like you.’

  ‘I only wish. He died when I was about your age.’

  Charles removed the head from the trunk and held it in one hand. It stared back at him with lifelike eyes and the expression of amazement Max always wore when he lived.

  ‘Cousin Max saved my childhood for me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Magic. He was a wonderful magician. Of course, the greatest magician who ever lived was Malakhai. He did an act with a dead woman, a ghost.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Butler. I think I see her coming now.’

  ‘No, really. Her name was Louisa. She died when she was only nineteen. She was one of those people I was talking about with extraordinary gifts that – ’

  ‘Louisa Malakhai? Louisa’s Concerto!’

  ‘Apparently you’ve learned something at school.’

  ‘No, I try not to learn anything at the Tanner School. It’s too risky. I’m not sure they know what they’re doing. My first stepmother used to play Louisa’s Concerto. Did you know her? Louisa, I mean?’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  ‘Do you know why she named the concerto after herself? Was it like a self-portrait in music?’

  ‘That’s not bad, Justin. In fact, it’s a good theory, but she had given the concerto another title. It was Malakhai who changed it after she died. So you’re familiar with the music.’

  ‘Not really. I only played the album once after my stepmother died. It was an old record that you played on a turntable like… like…’

  ‘Like in the olden days?’

  ‘Yes. It’s probably on disks now. But what we had was the record. My stepmother – the crazy one who killed herself – she loved that album. She used to listen to it all the time.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I never heard it all the way through. She played it when she was alone. She’d turn it off if anyone else was around, or she’d listen with the earphones. She said the concerto was haunted.’

  ‘Haunting?’

  ‘No, haunted. She said she could hear someone moving around in the music. Crazy, huh? Anyway, after she died, I was playing the record, and Dad ripped it off the turntable and destroyed it with his bare hands. When I backed out of the room, he was breaking the pieces of it into smaller pieces.’

  Was it the screaming both man and wife had heard in the music? In that magic empty space, a different effect was worked on every ear. Once, he had heard Louisa screaming. Another time, after he had fallen into puppy love with the phantom woman, he heard her laughing. But all of that had taken place in the stage-dark atmosphere of a magic act. The air had been primed for the imagination to make whatever it would.

  ‘Louisa died young. The concerto was her only composition, all that Malakhai had with him when he came walking out of the end of the Korean War. He used it as the theme of every performance.’

  ‘Performance with a dead woman.’

  ‘Yes, an invisible dead woman. She handed him objects and did everything an assistant would do. When she handed him a prop, you watched it float from her hand to his. You never saw her hand, yet you believed, that’s how good the floating illusions were.’

  ‘Tricks. Wires and stuff.’

  ‘Ah, but Malakhai also knew how to create terror.’

  Now he had Justin’s full attention.

  ‘He sent Louisa into the crowd. Members of the audience swore they felt her passing by them, the brush of her dress, the rush of air. Some recounted the scent of her perfume.’

  ‘How did he do that? What kind of gadgets did he use?’

  ‘There were no physical devices involved. By the time he sent her out among them, they had come to believe in her.’

  ‘The whole audience?’

  ‘Actually, it’s easier with a lot of people. Mass hypnosis to psychosis, the more the better. You can do quite a lot with that much energy in the room.’

  ‘But no one really saw her?’

  ‘Yes and no. He described her in such great detail, I can see her now. She wore the dress she died in. It was blue but for the red bloodstains.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘No one ever knew. That was part of Louisa’s mystery. Some people said Malakhai had killed her. Other rumors had her shot for a spy. It was all very romantic. When I was your age and younger, I was in love with Louisa.’

  ‘So you were as crazy as Malakhai.’

  ‘I suppose I was. And you’re right – Malakhai had gone insane. It’s truly amazing what people will do for love -to keep it, to kill it, or avenge it. And some people even die for it.’

  In the distraction of his compartmentalized brain, Charles speculated on what Amanda had done. ‘Cut it out of me,’ she had said to the surgeon, she who loved children. She had cut out the child that was barely begun. ‘So I gather,’ said the finished child who stood before him now, ‘that falling in love is not the bright side of growing up.’

  Charles smiled. ‘The love of a child also leads to pretty strange behavior at times. The things people will do for their children.’

  ‘Or to their children.’

  ‘Yes, there’s that too.’

  Amanda, why did you cut your baby away from you? Now he dragged his brain back to the case at hand. Had Justin been abused? Was that the link Mallory saw in the boy? There was something between them.

  And he had his own common cord with the boy: Justin Riccalo did not have the conversation of a child. So he too had been raised among adults and shunned by the children who would have provided him with the bad habits and speech patterns of the normal boy which Charles had never been either.

  He located the old record turntable, leaned down and blew away the worst of the d
ust. Now where were the records?

  Ah, there they are.

  He pulled the crate of old record albums out from under a table, sat down in the dust, and began to sort through them. The boy hovered over him, always in motion even when he was standing still.

  ‘So Justin, when the pencils aren’t flying, how do you get along with your stepmother?’

  ‘I don’t know her very well.’

  ‘I had the idea that your stepmother had known your father for quite a long time.’

  ‘I think they worked together once. I’m not sure. I think my real mother was alive then. I didn’t know her very well either.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I was at school most of the time. I started the usual progressive school crap when I was four. My parents realized that farming me out to after-school programs was more cost-effective than a nanny and less paperwork. Some nights I don’t get home till eight or nine o’clock. How did Malakhai make those people believe Louisa had touched them?’

  ‘The audience did it to themselves. They only had to know she was among them to complete the illusion, right down to imagining the tactile sensations.’

  ‘You think my stepmother is filling in the illusions? But the pencil – ’

  ‘The pencil was not her imagination. But after the trick is done, the imagination takes over. In Malakhai’s act, all the real magic was in Louisa’s music.’

  Charles slid the record out of its ancient cover, and with the practiced handling of the audiophile from the age of dinosaurs and turntables, he slipped it on to the spindle.

  Justin sat down on the backs of his heels. Nervous energy made it seem that he was set to spring, to push off from the cement floor and into flight. ‘You can get that on CD, you know.’