The Linking Rings

by John Gaspard

  “So he sold the trick and the gimmick,” I repeated. “At this lecture. This trick he created.”

  “I have to tell you, he was just a so-so magician, but when I saw this trick, I knew I had to have it. We all did,” he added as he turned around. He was sorting through a handful of brochures and pamphlets. “Oh, here it is!”

  He pulled one pamphlet out of the stack and tossed it in front of me. A smiling magician was pictured on the front. At the top of the cover were the words “Lecture Notes.” Under the photo was the name of this so-so magician who was selling my trick as his own.

  The name was Jake North.

  Chapter 13

  “Breathe.”

  “I am breathing.”

  “Honey, I think you think you’re breathing, but to me it looks like you’re hyperventilating.”

  Megan and I were in the midst of a whispered debate about my alleged inhalation and exhalation skills standing behind the last row of seats in The Magic Circle’s small theater. A chaotic rehearsal was taking place on stage, with De Vries overseeing the final touches on the Davis De Vries Catherine Wheel before one lucky magician got to give the trick a spin, as it were.

  That lucky magician was Jake North, and I’d made a point of avoiding him so far. I needed to maintain some distance, as I was unsure what might come out of my mouth when we finally came face-to-face. Sensing my volatile emotional state, Megan had suggested she come along with me to the rehearsal to provide moral support. I thanked her but reminded her she would, during the course of such a rehearsal, likely see how the trick worked, which was something she always hated to discover.

  “Don’t worry,” she cheerfully replied. “Knowing me, I’ll forget the whole thing the next day.”

  I had to admit this was a fair assessment of her retention abilities, at least as it related to magical secrets. And I had to admit I was pleased to have her by my side during these first few moments when I might be encountering Jake. She had been supportive since the moment I had told her about Jake’s latest betrayal.

  “Why would he bother doing a lecture?” Megan had asked after I recounted my experience at Davenport’s Magic Shop.

  That thought had not, until that moment, occurred to me. Leave it to Megan to, once again, find the most pertinent question inside a thorny situation.

  “He certainly doesn’t need the money,” she continued as she mused on the topic.

  “No, he certainly doesn’t,” I agreed.

  “Maybe he does it to make himself feel like a big-shot magician,” she suggested. “I mean, back at home, when you sponsor lectures at the magic store, it’s usually with only the best magicians out there, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said, mentally running down a list of some of the amazing performers who had graced our small back room, offering precious secrets to a handful of local magicians gathered around in folding chairs.

  “So maybe Jake figures if he does a lecture, he must be a big-shot magician,” she concluded, and I found no reason to argue with her logic.

  “Tell me again about the karmic wheel,” I asked.

  “It always turns,” she said warmly, and I immediately felt better, if only a little.

  After learning about the depth of Jake’s deceit at Davenport’s magic shop, I opted to keep the information close to my chest, at least for the time being. I recognized De Vries was counting on making a splash with his new illusion, and I figured I could put off my inevitable confrontation with Jake until after the big premiere on Saturday night. So, for the time being, Megan and I stood in the back of the house and observed the chaos on stage.

  “People, we need to make some progress here,” De Vries said to everyone and no one in particular. “What’s preventing us from running this, top to bottom? What’s the hold up people?” He looked at the two stage hands who had finished positioning the large wheel, the two female assistants who were practicing their handiwork with a large silk, and then at Jake North, who was leaning against a pillar and checking his phone. Jake glanced up and saw the look on De Vries’ face.

  “What’s the hold up, people?” Jake repeated, pocketing his phone and stepping to the center of the stage. His semi-celebrity status seemed to carry more authority than anything De Vries was doing, and everyone snapped to immediate attention. “Are we ready to try this sucker?”

  This was followed by general sounds of assent, and moments later, music began to blast out of the speakers as lights shifted on stage and everyone took his or her place. The volume of the music then jumped up several notches.

  “Why does it have to be so loud?” Megan practically yelled in my ear.

  “In magic, music is either loud to help build energy or to cover a sound that might give away how the trick works,” I explained. “Or more often than not, both.”

  Unable to hear me, Megan just shrugged, and I nodded that I, too, thought the music was a tad too loud. I turned back to the stage, to see that Jake had already positioned himself on the wheel and the two female assistants were in the midst of securing him to the structure. I felt a presence to my right and turned to see Angelika had taken a position next to me to observe the rehearsal. She had a scowl on her face, which may have been directed at the large-scale illusion or at the two scantily clad women currently tying a willing magician to it.

  She turned to me and said something I couldn’t quite decipher.

  “What?”

  She must have taken my one-word response as a suitable answer, for she continued on with what appeared to be—without being able to actually hear it—a short but passionate diatribe.

  I didn’t make out most of it, but I did catch “bloody box jumpers” before she turned and headed toward the theater’s rear doors, clearly disgusted by the traditional gender stereotypes being exhibited on stage. She would have made a solid, dramatic exit if someone hadn’t stepped into the theater just as she was attempting to step out. It was Miss Hess, who defiantly did not step aside, forcing the younger woman to snake around her in order to get through the doorway. Once again, I couldn’t hear what Angelika had to say, but the tone of her short exchange with Miss Hess came through loud and clear via body language and harsh facial expressions.

  Miss Hess turned and glared at her and then, perhaps because the object of her scorn was no longer visible, she turned her glare on me. I quickly returned my attention to the stage. A few moments later, when I felt it was safe to sneak a look back at the doorway, I was relieved to discover the scary old woman was no longer standing in the entryway. A cold finger gave my shoulder a hard stab, and I turned to see she was now standing directly behind me. Whatever sound of surprise I made was probably drowned out by the earsplitting music; however, I suspect it was so high that only dogs would have heard it anyway.

  “Have you seen Herr Baxter?” she asked. Surprisingly, her voice cut right through the cacophony and I had no trouble understanding her. Puzzled by the physics of that, I shook my head dumbly.

  “I saw him earlier, backstage,” I shouted. “But not lately.”

  “His presence is requested in the Executive Director’s office,” she said, her voice again cutting directly through the music.

  I shrugged impotently, and she gave me a look that suggested, at least to my mind, she had never before encountered a more incompetent fool. She then turned and moved slowly out the door. If anyone was ever to deserve the title of living ghost, it was Miss Hess. I waited a moment for my gooseflesh to subside and then once again returned my attention to the rehearsal.

  The music had reached a fever pitch and so had the spinning of the Catherine Wheel, sparks flying out of the ends of its spokes. The two box jumpers each climbed on a small step next to the device and, in shaky unison, held up a large, eight-foot-square opaque silk with as much drama and panache as they could muster for this first rehearsal. Jake, who was just a blur now on the spinning wheel, was obscu
red behind the thin silk, disappearing from our view.

  Although I only vaguely understood the principles of the trick, I knew this was when all the action was happening behind the over-sized silk. Somehow, Jake was getting off the wheel, while from the audience’s perspective, it still continued to revolve and spark at a furious rate. The glitzy assistants would soon drop the silk, revealing an empty, spinning disc. And then, moments later, Jake would appear triumphant somewhere else in the theater. I glanced around, curious to see what location they had chosen for this surprise manifestation.

  The spot for Jake’s return turned out to be a surprise to everyone, not the least of whom were the two young ladies holding up the silk. One moment it was parallel to the Catherine Wheel and the next it was ripped from their hands as Jake stumbled face forward, collapsing with a hard thud upon the stage.

  He lay there motionless, the wheel and its flashes of flames spinning crazily behind him as the two assistants stared down in shock at the prone figure sprawled in front of them. Both stagehands rushed toward the body, then stepped back several feet from the crumpled form, clearly unsure of what their responsibilities were in this new situation.

  Any fear that he was the latest magician to come to an untimely end was quickly abated, as Jake painfully pushed himself up off the floor onto his elbows, confirming to one and all he was still alive.

  And then, to drive his point home even further, he proceeded to vomit all over the stage. Repeatedly. With great volume and gusto. As performances go, it was one for the record books.

  Megan, always squeamish about this sort of thing, turned to me as the music and the flaming wheel came to a screeching halt. People began to run to his aid, then stepped back, not sure he had finished his impromptu show stopper.

  “Remember what I said about the karmic wheel?” she said.

  “I do.”

  She looked down at the stage and the writhing, sickening and sick mess which was Jake North.

  “It always turns,” she said with a smile the Cheshire Cat would have been proud to call his own.

  Rehearsal was suspended while the stage and Jake were cleaned up. At the same time, a search went out for another eight-foot silk, the current one being considered an utter loss.

  News of the fiasco traveled quickly and soon two of the Magnificent Magi who were hanging out at The Magic Circle—Roy Templeton and Uncle Harry—joined Megan and me in the back of the theater to offer their respective two cents on the recent turn of events. We all looked down the aisle at Davis De Vries, who paced in front of the stage, running and rerunning a hand through his crisp, white head of hair.

  “Poor man can’t catch a break,” Harry muttered.

  “This will definitely hurt sales,” Roy said in a matching somber tone. “I mean, who wants to buy an illusion that requires the front two rows to wear rain ponchos? Although,” he added, brightening, “it worked for that comedian Gallagher back in the ‘80s.”

  “He was sledgehammering watermelons,” Harry said.

  Roy nodded. “Yes, I suppose that’s an easier sell than tossing cookies like Linda Blair.”

  Megan moaned at the image as Roy, now on a roll, stepped forward and spun around, facing the small group. He rubbed his hands together excitedly.

  “I’ve got the solution,” he said. “All he has to do is rebrand it. Instead of the Catherine Wheel, he simply needs to call it The Wheel of Nausea. Wait, strike that,” he said as another idea occurred to him. “It would be the Davis De Vries Wheel of Nausea. It is trademarked, after all.”

  We all said nothing, for experience had taught us there was no stopping Roy once he got going. And the more you tried to stop him, the worse it got. Silence was our only weapon, and we used it.

  “Or The Davis De Vries Vomitorium,” he continued. “That one has a classical ring to it with some nice alliteration. Or the Puke-a-Nator. The Tilt-a-Hurl.” Harry held up a hand and pushed past him, silencing Roy if only for a few moments. Harry extended his hand to De Vries, who was just coming up the aisle.

  “Doctor, how are you holding up?” Harry asked.

  De Vries shook his head. “Doctor, I am at my wit’s end,” he said quietly. “I know the damn thing will work, and it will be brilliant, but roadblocks keep popping up out of nowhere.”

  “That last one looked more like road kill,” Roy said. We all suppressed anything resembling a chuckle, so Roy quickly switched to a more somber attitude. “Sorry, Doctor,” he said, patting De Vries’ back. “Rough business, I know.”

  De Vries sighed and then straightened up, squaring his shoulders and holding his head up high. “I guess the only thing to do is to talk to Baxter about canceling the premier. If what happened this afternoon were to happen in front of a paying audience, can you imagine what those jokesters down there,” he said, gesturing to the meeting room on the main floor, “can you imagine what names they would be calling the Catherine Wheel?”

  “Everyone is sympathetic to what you’re going through,” Harry said, pointedly looking at Roy Templeton, who had suddenly adopted an expression of great contrition. “And it’s not like you to give up. You’ve run into problems with new illusions before, and you’ve always powered through them.”

  “I was younger then,” De Vries said.

  “Nonsense,” Harry said, putting his arm around his old friend’s shoulder. “Who was it who said, ‘The best idea is often the next idea?’”

  “Dai Vernon?” Roy said quickly. “Charlie Miller? No, it was Alex Elmsley. Or maybe Ganson.”

  “It was you,” Harry said emphatically to De Vries, but even he couldn’t help crack a smile at the antics of the old jokester. And then Harry’s smile helped coax a smile out of De Vries, and soon the old friends were laughing about the situation and offering ways to put a positive spin on it.

  “Look pal, just because that Hollywood hack has a sensitive tum-tum is no reason to put a fork in the Catherine Wheel,” Roy said, giving De Vries a playful punch on the arm. “It’s frickin’ brilliant, and the world needs to see it! You can’t give up after one untimely barf.”

  “You and I both know this city is teeming with magicians who would give their eye teeth for a chance to be the first to publicly perform a Davis De Vries illusion,” Harry said. “You don’t need a, quote, unquote, ‘big name’ on your device,” he added, gesturing toward the gleaming disc on stage.

  “That’s right, because there already is a big name on the wheel,” Roy said, picking up Harry’s pep-talk tone. “And that big name is Davis De Vries. Cue the orchestra!”

  Roy held up De Vries’ arms and waved them from side to side while making the sound of a cheering crowd. To help out, I offered some audio back-up, producing a quick series of whistles and cheers. Our general boisterousness seemed to be pulling De Vries out of his funk. Harry and Megan couldn’t help but be drawn into the spirited mix, adding their own laughter and applause.

  Then, one by one, they each grew quiet. I was the last to realize something was up by the looks on everyone else’s faces. I turned to where they were looking, and my last shout was cut off in mid yelp.

  Laurence Baxter was standing just inside the theater’s main entry, Gareth MacKenzie at his side. Behind them I recognized Detective Inspector Matthews and two other similarly dressed and serious men.

  De Vries lowered his arms and straightened his suit coat, running a quick hand through his unruffled hair. The rest of us stood frozen, waiting for the announcement Baxter was clearly poised to make. Megan took my hand and squeezed it, and I wrapped my other hand around hers.

  “I’m sorry to report,” Baxter said, his voice not coming out as strongly as he thought it would, “there is more bad news, I’m afraid.” He turned to Detective Inspector Matthews and then back to us.

  “There’s been another death,” he finally said, although by that point the pronouncement was hardly a surprise. “And
there is a thought I may, in some way, be involved. I am leaving with these fine folks, for some questioning. Sorry to miss the rest of the rehearsal.”

  With that Baxter turned and was escorted out of the theater by the police.

  “Baxter a murderer? Impossible!” Davis De Vries spat out the words. “You might as well say Harry is a murderer.”

  Harry smiled wryly. “Actually, the police hold that same suspicion,” he replied quietly. “Makes me wonder why they took Baxter this time and not me.”

  Although I didn’t say it out loud, I had wondered that same thought. I was not proud of the relief I was taking now that Baxter was apparently the focus of the investigation, if only because it took some of the interest off of my uncle.

  The rehearsal had been abandoned, at least for the time being, and there appeared to be no immediate answers available on who had been killed or why Baxter had been taken in for questioning. So our small group made its way down the block and around the corner to Shah Tandori, an Indian restaurant much beloved by members of The Magic Circle. We were early for lunch and appeared to have the restaurant to ourselves. At the sound of the door opening, the waiter peered out at us from the kitchen, surprised to see customers arriving so soon.

  Moments after we were seated, Roy Templeton, who had been pacing in front of the restaurant, rejoined us, holding up his cell phone triumphantly.

  “Got ahold of Roxanne,” he said, relief evident in his voice. “She’s alive and well out at Baxter’s Folly. She said she’d do a quick head count to see who may be missing out there on the Heath.”

  At that moment I realized how nervous he must have been, given the open-ended nature of Baxter’s pronouncement. I had not gone down the same mental path about my own loved ones, as both had been with me all morning. And, for that matter, both were seated on either side of me—Megan looking through the large menu and Harry checking a text on his phone.