He and the boy walked down the hall in the silence of their separate thoughts. Charles looked down on Justin, who was clearly miserable. But not frightened. This time, the boy led the way down the winding staircase to the room below, drawn along by the stored remains of Maximillian Candle’s Traveling Magic Show.
When the wall partition was pulled to one side, Justin was first in, not waiting for the light of the globe to go exploring. The dull light caught up to the wandering boy and cast a fuzzy moving shadow on the trunks of props and costumes.
‘Oh, cool!’ said Justin from the other side of the tall Chinese screen. And he knew the boy had discovered the guillotine. But as Charles rounded the panels of rice paper, he could see it was the knife set that had Justin’s attention. Charles touched another globe and another light came to life as the boy was staring at the rack of knives.
He looked up at Charles and then to the old, much punctured red-and-white bull’s eye which was propped on an antique easel. One hand reached out to the knife rack, hovering tentatively, as his eyes shot up to Charles to ask permission.
He nodded. ‘You will be careful with them, won’t you?’
Justin picked up the first knife and missed the target, though it was large and close.
‘Don’t feel bad. It takes a bit of practise. Max had many years of practise.’
‘I can tell,’ said the boy, approaching the target, which was pocked with scars. His finger traced the outline of a human body surrounding the area free of knife holes. ‘That was where his assistant used to stand, right?’
‘Right.’
‘He cut it close, didn’t he? I can see the holes of the knife points between the fingers. Can you do it?’
‘Yes I can. Once, when I was your age, I stood in the target center. It was a birthday present from Max.’
‘You’re kidding. Weren’t you scared?’
‘No. Then Max gave the knives over to me, and he stood in the center of the target.’
‘So you can really do it. Really?’
‘Really.’
The boy moved into the center of the target and flattened out on the rings of the bull’s eye. ‘Do it. I trust you. Go ahead.’
‘Actually, you would only have to trust me not to let go of the knives. The blades come out of the target, they don’t go into it. You pretend to throw the knife, but you really drop it into this pocket.’
He turned a small table so Justin could see the black velvet bag which hung just below the table top. He pointed to the black lever by one leg, and the wire trailing away from the table and toward the target.
‘The trigger for the knives is in the foot pedal. See? Then the hilt of the blade springs out from inside the target with a springload. But the audience sees what it’s conditioned to see. A knife is thrown, and a knife appears on the target. It would take me a few minutes to set the springs. It’s perfectly safe once you know how the trick is done.’
If Justin was the one who rigged the flying objects, this might be a practical application for his gift. He was wondering how he was going to sell a future in the magic trade to the boy’s father when Justin walked away from the target, all interest in it lost.
The boy looked up to the guillotine. ‘And that’s only a trick too, right?’ as if he were asking if this was only another lie, a cheat.
‘Yes, sorry. It has a failsafe mechanism. It’s wicked looking, but harmless.’
As a child, Charles remembered being enthralled by the trickery, not the danger. Justin was of an opposite bent. He seemed disappointed at the lack of danger. Perhaps the magic trade was not the right area for Justin’s intellect. Whose then? The stepmother? The father?
‘Justin, I know you’ve been told what your IQ is. Have you given any thought to the future, what you might do with it, how you might develop it?’
‘What’s to develop? A brain is a brain. And if you believe me when I tell you I don’t make things fly around the house, then I don’t have any talent either.’
‘Well, you might have a talent for observation and deductive reasoning. That’s something we can test for. And it might even be fun. Suppose I help you figure out how the objects fly. Then you’ll know what to look for. So you work with me for a while, and we’ll help each other. Deal?’ as Mallory would put it.
‘Deal,’ said the boy, his small hand thrust into Charles’s for a handshake.
‘Good.’ He was lifting a black ball with holes in it from a box at his feet. ‘This was one of the few floating illusions in Max’s act. It only takes a few minutes to set it up.’ Where was the fluid container?
He found the bottle he sought in a neighbouring box covered with dust. While Charles pondered the shelf life of chemicals, Justin was examining another box, and apparently he had tripped the spring, for now bright colored scarves exploded from the box, shooting straight up and then billowing out, flowing on to the floor in a loam of silk.
Justin was trying to smash the scarves back into the box as quickly as he could pluck them from the air. He looked over his shoulder to Charles, guilt and apology on his face, and fear was there too. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right, Justin. Just let them be. There’s no harm done, really.’
‘You’re not angry with me?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You know your partner hates me.’
‘Oh, I doubt that.’ He trained the beam to another dark quarter of the basement, searching out a trackline post. Ah, there it was, and it was still set with the running wires. ‘Now why would Mallory hate you?’
‘My father says people hate other people for what they hate in themselves.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s sometimes true. But what might that be in Mallory’s case?’ Matches? Oh, yes. He pulled an old box from the chest of drawers in the open steamer trunk.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know much about her.’
‘Well, she’s a loner, like you,’ said Charles, disappearing into the dark at the edge of the globe’s small circle of light, and then reappearing with empty hands. ‘She doesn’t mix well with people.’
Other qualities in common? He had to wonder. There was something between her and the boy, a mutual understanding he could not understand.
‘All right, Justin. Ready?’
The boy nodded.
Now there was a bright flash of light, and a glowing ball of flames was hurtling straight toward them. It stopped three feet short of its targets, man and boy, and then rose over their heads and was extinguished in the darkness beyond them.
Justin whistled and clapped his hands.
‘Now that’s a flying object,’ said Charles. ‘And miles more fun than pencils, don’t you think? It runs on a track of wire. It’s the only floating illusion I know, but there are crates full of books on magic if you want to look through them.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the less I know about this stuff the better off I am. Why did everyone assume I made the pencils fly?’
‘Well, when teams go out to investigate the odd ghost story or some other instance of paranormal activity, they usually discover the origin of the event behind a neighbor’s garage in the form of three small children laughing their tails off.’
‘But this isn’t funny. Sally’s gone nuts. I can’t sit in the same room with her, she’s such a basket case. And she’s always staring at me. It just never lets up. Every time something happens, we’re all together, but I get the blame.’ Justin kicked at a box. ‘It isn’t fair. I need somebody on my side. Somebody has to listen to me.’
As Charles was facing the boy, they both heard the noise to the left. Charles turned to see the knife sticking out of the target, the blade still wafting with the vibration.
Justin’s eyes were wide this time. This was no flying pencil, no ball on a wire.
‘Now you’ll never believe me,’ said the boy. He turned and ran in an uncoordinated jagged stagger, out of the circle of light and into the dark, hitting against cartons and tr
unks in his mad flight, his wild search for a way out, for the light of an exit. His thin, flailing arms were poor versions of moth wings.
Memory guided Charles through the darkness and swiftly to the door. He opened it to a rectangle of bright light. In a moment, the boy was through it and flying up the stairs, shoes slapdashing the iron work. On the top landing, Justin fell. Charles lifted him to an upright stand and held him by the shoulders.
‘Are you all right?’ No, he could see that the boy was not all right. Justin’s eyes were filling up with tears. The child slumped against his chest, and Charles held him until the racking stopped.
Captain Judd Thomas of the West Side precinct sat dead center in the hierarchy of arranged chairs in Jack Coffey’s office. The captain was wearing his diplomatic smile, just enough teeth showing to say he wanted to keep this meeting friendly, no blood drawn, not today.
‘Palanski wants in on this case.’
‘I don’t think so, Judd,’ said Jack Coffey, who was overworked, understaffed, and only wanted the meeting done with. All of this was in his face, the shadows of too little sleep, the lines of too much stress.
‘Palanski has a way of getting information from these people.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ said Mallory.
Captain Thomas’s tiny eyes became even smaller as he turned on her. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
Mallory rose from her chair and left the room so quickly, there was no time for Coffey to threaten her with a look that promised charges of insubordination, charges which would have meant nothing to her.
Riker smiled.
Coffey was looking at Captain Thomas with something approaching temper in his eyes, but not crossing the line with the words.
‘Who told Palanski she was working that building?’
‘He’s got sources in that crowd.’
Riker leaned forward. ‘And I’ll bet his sources don’t stop with the doorman. He can work those wealthy people like street weasels. Is it just me? Am I the only one in this room that finds that interesting?’
Coffey shot Riker a look that said, Shut up.
Captain Thomas ignored him and looked at Coffey with raised eyebrows, clearly asking if Riker was housebroken and leash trained. ‘Palanski is one of the best detectives I have. He’d be an asset to any investigation.’
‘It’s Mallory’s case, Judd. You don’t get squat. That’s it.’
‘Commissioner Beale and I go back a long ways, Jack.’
‘As far as Beale is concerned, the sun only shines on Kathy Mallory this week. The little bastard’s grinning like a ghoul. She’s the only cop ever commended by the Civilian Review Board for shooting a citizen. She can do no wrong.’
‘But what about you, Jack? You’re in line for promotion. This is a high-profile case – big money, big names in that building. Palanski’s got sixteen years’ experience. Mallory’s a kid. You don’t want her to blow that promotion out of the water, do you?’
‘Judd, if I thought you were threatening me, I’d have Mallory blow you out of the water, ’cause I just really hate that.‘
Riker sat back in his chair. If Coffey kept up this insubordination with superiors, then one day he might have to stop ragging the kid and show him a little respect. Then what would he do for fun?
‘Tell Palanski to back off, Judd.’
The captain sighed. ‘You know, Jack, with all the moonlighting and the free food and discounts for cops, all the little fiddles getting worked all over town, if we ever enforced the rules, we wouldn’t – ’
‘I don’t know where you think you’re going with this, Judd,’ said Coffey. ‘You got something on one of mine, you spit it out! Now!’
Thomas put up his hands to say, Okay, enough, and he lifted his bulk out of the chair and left the room.
And Riker knew that was too damn easy. He was wondering what the captain’s own fiddle might be when Coffey turned on him, angry.
‘Do you know what Mallory has on Palanski?’
‘No idea. She’d never rat out another cop. She might shoot him if he gets in her way, but she’ll never rat on him.’
‘You went too far with Judd Thomas.’
‘It’s her life on the line. You know Palanski is dirty and I know it. He’s responsible for all the damn leaks. One of those leaks could get her killed.’
‘You went too far, Riker. Thomas finds Palanski useful the way I find Mallory useful. If all she’s got on him is flashy clothes and fifty-dollar haircuts – Mallory’s clothes are tailor-made, for Christ’s sake, and she doesn’t cut her hair over the bathroom sink, does she? Right now, we’re real lucky the captain got his new job with politics instead of brains. But let’s not count him a complete moron. Let’s not push our luck, okay?’
Riker hated it when Coffey was right. ‘You want me to see what I can turn up on Palanski?’
‘No. I’ve got someone else working Palanski undercover. So just table that, okay? No more speculation, even if your lips don’t move.’
‘You didn’t put it through Internal Affairs?’
‘No, no IA men. I want to keep this one in the family. When you see Mallory, tell her to get her ass back in here. I think it would be nice if she went through the formality of handing in reports – just to be polite.’
‘You know, this might be her version of professional courtesy. Maybe she thinks you’d rather not know what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. She might have something there. Think about your pension.’
‘I’ve already got a problem with the way she’s handling the case. She’s trying to cover three suspects by herself. It’s a scattergun approach for one cop. If she doesn’t get him soon, she’ll lose him.’
‘Oh, I think she knows which one it is. If she tells you she has three suspects, you can figure two of them for smoke. She thinks you don’t trust her to run her own investigation, and that’s wise on your part. I haven’t trusted her since she was ten.’
‘It’s nothing supernatural, I promise you,’ said Charles.
Justin was deathly quiet, his small face turned to the cab window, to the fall of snowflakes silently crashing against the glass.
‘When I get home, I’ll go back down to the cellar and have a close look at the target. I’ll find that the old mechanism was triggered by accident. You probably jostled it when you leaned on the target. It’s that simple. In fact, I don’t even need to look. And I won’t look, that’s how much faith I have in you. There’s no other explanation, Justin. The knife came from the other side of the target. No one made it fly through the air. All right?’
The boy turned to him. In that small face, there was clearly a will to smile.
When they exited the cab in front of the school on the Upper East Side, Charles stayed awhile to watch Justin join the other boys who were standing about the yard in groups of threes and fours. But Justin did not join them. Hands in his pockets, head down, he stood alone by tacit agreement of the yard.
Charles winced, for he was watching a living memory of his own school days. Now a bell called the boys back into the building, two by two, and three by three, and Justin on his own.
Charles unfurled his umbrella against the hard drive of snow and stared at the park on the other side of the wide street. Mallory would be a straight shot across the park and a jog in the road north. Perhaps he would visit her if she was at the Rosens’ apartment. Also just the other side of the park was the crime scene.
Cabs passed by him, empty of passengers and ripe for the hailing, but he liked to walk in the snow. Over the years, he had acquired a taste for all the solitary occupations. And so would young Justin.
On his foul-weather meanderings closer to home, Charles would frequently encounter others in this select club. He was on a nodding acquaintance with fellow rain walkers and snow walkers, and they would smile at one another in passing, recognizing the secret sign – the gait of no pressing business, while all the other pedestrians were hurrying along, anxious to be out of the wet and
the cold.
He crossed the street and took a path that wound down from the sidewalk and into a pristine valley of new snow. Only his footsteps marked the way until he came to the road which led through the park. He walked along the road, wondering what Mallory was up to, wondering if he would actually want to know that.
Now a horse-drawn carriage approached him. The snow ploffed on his umbrella, and it suddenly occurred to him that his shoes were not meant for snow. It crossed his mind to hail the carriage driver. But no. He let the carriage pass unhailed. New shoes could be got, new snow was not so easy to come by. He continued his solitary tracking.
What would Markowitz have said about Mallory’s negligence in failing to visit the crime scene? What might she have missed? Nothing, probably. Her refusal was most likely only an overreaction to Riker’s lecture on procedure.
Suppose he visited the scene himself, and possibly noticed something useful? How would she react to that? Well, they were partners, weren’t they?
‘You’re living in a fool’s paradise,’ said a voice which had come to shelter under Charles’s umbrella. ‘Behold a pale horse,’ said the man who materialized at his side to hold a conversation with a third person who was not visible to the naked mind.
Charles felt an involuntary shudder. He looked down to a shiny bald spot in the center of the smaller man’s matted swirls of gray hair. The old man’s coat was dirty, but good wool. A scarf was wrapped around his neck and trailed behind him on the ground. It was the longest scarf Charles had ever seen, and with all the colors of an unwashed, unkempt, unraveling rainbow. The man continued to walk along with him, accepting the shelter of the umbrella as though it were his due.
Charles knew he could never look on madness in the same way again. He had done his own time with one who was not there. And he had to wonder how often Malakhai had done that trick before the damage became permanent, before it became impossible to send Louisa away. Each thought changed the configurations of the very brain itself.
‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.’
‘I’m Charles Butler. Good day.’ He moved the umbrella to one side, the better to protect his gray-haired companion from the driving snow which dusted the old man’s sloping shoulders.
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 19