"Why would Homeland Security be chasing a missing magician?"
"Maybe he really is a Martian," Shawn said. "Or maybe he"s a spy. He uses the magic act as a cover to travel from town to town, stealing secrets and pa.s.sing them to his undercover contacts wherever he goes."
"A brilliant idea," Gus said. "Except that he didn"t travel from city to city. He never left Las Vegas. What kind of secrets can he steal there?"
"Which casino has the best buffet?"
"Couldn"t the undercover contacts just try all the buffets and find out for themselves?"
"Not if they had a small budget," Shawn said. "Despite what you might think, some of those places are really expensive. And then they put a lot of cheap items up front so you"ll fill up on bread before you can get to the good stuff, like the crab legs and lobster tails."
"Let"s come back to this later," Gus said.
"Good. Because I"m suddenly hungry."
They reached the car and Gus fished in his pocket for his keys. "But if she really is from Homeland Security, how did you get her to back off?"
"She didn"t want publicity," Shawn said. "You saw that."
"So why didn"t she just arrest us all?"
"Because whatever she"s doing here, it"s not an official DHS operation," Shawn said.
"And you know that how?"
"The little d on top of her plane ticket," Shawn said. "It"s a fare code. She flew DC to LAX in a full-price business-cla.s.s seat," Shawn said.
"Last I heard the government had lots of money," Gus said. "At least they act like they do."
"Right," Shawn said. "So if this really was a crisis involving national security, she would have taken a DHS jet."
"How do you know they have one?"
"Their budget is like fifty billion dollars," Shawn said. "Can you imagine having fifty billion dollars and not buying at least one jet? And even if they didn"t, they would have sent her on a military transport."
"Maybe it"s not an emergency."
"In which case she would have flown coach," Shawn said. "Federal officials aren"t allowed to fly business cla.s.s."
Gus. .h.i.t the remote on his key fob and the car doors popped open, but he didn"t want to get in until he was sure he understood what Shawn was saying. "They"ll spend millions buying a jet, but they wouldn"t spring for a business-cla.s.s ticket? That doesn"t make any sense."
"Then I must be wrong," Shawn said. "Oh, wait, this is the federal government. I"m right. Can we get out of here now?"
Before Gus could answer, Shawn opened his door and got in. If Gus wanted any more answers, he"d have to get in, too. He buckled himself into his seat, but he didn"t start the car.
"Okay, fine," Gus said. "What else?"
"There"s more?"
Gus waited until Shawn gave in.
"Did you see the upper lip on that agent?" Shawn said. "It was bright white, while the rest of his face was tanned. Which means he had a mustache until a day or so ago."
"And?"
"And another one of the agents had a dragon tattoo running down his arm," Shawn said. "At least, I a.s.sume it ran down his arm. The tip of the tail was sticking out of his sleeve, and it"s hard to imagine anyone having just the tip of a dragon"s tail tattooed on his wrist."
"Which means what?"
"Homeland Security agents can"t have tattoos or facial hair," Shawn said. "These are rental guys she picked up in LA."
"So she"s a phony."
"Not necessarily," Shawn said. "It"s quite possible that Major Voges had some vacation time coming and she decided to spend it interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation."
"That one doesn"t work for me."
"Then how about this?" Shawn said. "There"s something terribly, terribly wrong, and whatever it is, it"s something that Major Voges was supposed to take care of. She probably even told her superiors that she had. But she screwed up, and now it"s worse than either of us could ever possibly imagine."
"Like what?"
"Did you miss the part about it being worse than either of us could ever possibly imagine?" Shawn said. "That means I can"t imagine what it is. But think of everything that Homeland Security has screwed up that no one got fired for. And now imagine that Major Voges is afraid she will be if anyone finds out what she"s done."
Gus thought about it and shuddered. "We"re doomed."
"I think that"s probably right," Shawn said.
"What are we going to do?"
"I"m thinking about a nice game of pin the tail on the donkey."
Chapter Fourteen.
It was about the art. About the precision of his movements, the subtlety of his misdirection, the speed of his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn"t mat-his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn"t matter whom he was performing for. He had astonished the crowned heads of Europe and amazed the jaded jet-setters of Monte Carlo, but their reaction was no more important to him than that of any other group who sought release in the presence of miracles.
There were those who claimed to pity Barnaby Rudge. He could hear them whispering in the Fortress of Magic. He, the great Rudge, who had traveled to India to meet the guru, if not quite with the Beatles, then at least with Herman"s Hermits. Rudge, who had been painted by Warhol and filmed by Jodorowsky, who had exchanged phone numbers with Anita Pallenberg and Bianca Perez-Mora Macias before losing both beauties to Keith and Mick. Rudge, who would have electrified an entire nation when he performed his greatest illusion, the Groovy Gap, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on April 11, 1969, if only those idiots had shut up about the Vietnam War for one more week instead of getting themselves cancelled.
Now, he had heard the whisperers say, Rudge was so forgotten, people a.s.sumed he stole the idea of using a d.i.c.kens t.i.tle for his stage name from David Cop- perfield, when it was so obviously the reverse. He was reduced to playing to tiny crowds for peanuts. He had lost everything.
But Rudge knew he had lost nothing. As long as his fingers could still move, his art was still alive. And his art was all that mattered.
Barnaby Rudge bowed to his audience as he transitioned between illusions. The show had been going superbly. The scarves had flowed out of his sleeves like water down a mountain streambed. The Chinese linking rings had clashed together like armies in the night. There was a small hitch when he reached into the false bottom of his top hat and discovered that he"d left his pint of Cutty inside with the cap partially unscrewed and the dove he"d meant to produce had suffocated on the whiskey fumes. But he had improvised a clever bit of patter to distract the crowd as he disposed of both chapeau and oiseau, and no one seemed to notice the lacuna in the performance. And the rabbit, that irresistible pink-nosed climax to his act, the one that never failed to rouse the audience to a standing cheer, was nestled safely beneath the false bottom of his dove cage. This would be a show for the ages.
With a grand flourish, Rudge produced the cane that in moments he would transform into a bouquet of lovely flowers. The sight of so much color exploding from a simple black stick would elicit awed sighs from his audience, and while they were marveling, he"d use their stunned focus on the blooms to set the switch on the dove cage. It was all going perfectly.
Rudge felt a sticky blob slap against his cheek-avian revenge for the dove"s demise, perhaps. No matter. He would allow no bird to disturb his act when it was nearing its climax. He reached up to wipe it off and his hand came back slimed with green and pink. There was a brown circle in the middle of the blotch, which he realized was most of one of the icing a"s in "Happy Birthday."
Rudge glared out into the crowd to see who had flung the frosting at him. The culprit wasn"t hard to find. It was little Jimmy Eisenstein, whose tenth birthday the magician had been hired to help celebrate. Rudge could tell it was Jimmy who had iced him. He still held the frosting catapult-in this case a white plastic spork-aloft, now reloaded for a second a.s.sault. But even without the weapon, Rudge would have known who had committed this a.s.sault, because while Rudge had been consumed with the details of his performance, the entire audience of second graders had slipped out of their folding chairs and drifted away from the living room, leaving only the birthday boy to appreciate the act.
"Stay that missile, you fine young man," Rudge boomed out cheerfully. "And I will show you the wonders of the Orient."
"If you mean the rabbit, it peed in the birdcage and it"s dripping through the bottom," the lovable young scamp retorted. "And I saw you flip that switch on the back of the cage. What does that do-unhook some door so you can reach through the fake floor?"
Rudge let out a hearty laugh, fighting off the urge to throttle the dear lad. Every magician worth his gold lame suit had encountered hecklers, and the worst were the ones who had dabbled in the art themselves. Clearly this boy was planning a career on the stage. Maybe he even hoped to model his act after Rudge"s.
Normally, the magician would have stifled the interloper with one of his special zingers. But there was a keen intelligence in the youngster"s eye, and since there were no other spectators to disillusion, perhaps he could use this as a moment to share his precious secrets.
"If you"d care to approach, young man, I might be persuaded to show you how to make the rabbit appear," Rudge said.
"I"ll wait until the cage stops dripping pee," Jimmy said.
"I have other miracles I could teach you," Rudge said, glancing over to see a stream of rabbit urine dripping out of his dove house and bleaching the blue carpet beneath it a dingy yellow.
"My dad said you could probably make our entire liquor cabinet disappear if someone didn"t keep an eye on you," Jimmy said.
Rudge glowed at the compliment. It had been many years since he"d practiced the illusion of the vanishing furniture, but it was good to know he was still remembered for it. "That is a particularly advanced glamour," Rudge said. "Perhaps we should start with a smaller miracle and work our way up."
"Whatever," Jimmy said. "Can you tell me what my dad did on his last business trip to Omaha that made my mom so mad?"
"What kind of magic is that?" Rudge said.
"The kind the other guy is doing."
Jimmy pointed out through the gla.s.s sliding door to the far end of the backyard, where the entire troop of ten-year-olds had cl.u.s.tered around a skinny, badly dressed man, who barely looked older than them, and his slightly better-dressed sidekick. As the interloper pressed his fingers deep into his forehead as if in communication with the Great Beyond, Rudge realized where he had seen him before-in the crowd at the Fortress of Magic.
With a shiver of disgust, Rudge realized what he must be dealing with-a pair of those self-styled "bad boys of magic." Sure they were bad boys, in the same sense that basal cell carcinomas could be considered the "bad boys" of the metabolism. They had no respect for the Art. Their only interest was self-promotion. They froze themselves in ice cubes or buried themselves in gla.s.s coffins or hung by their toes for a month over Niagara Falls, and they had the temerity to call those stunts magic. They were acts of endurance, of self-immolation, of stupidity-but there was absolutely nothing magical about them.
These impostors had taken over almost every corner of the business. They sucked up all the increasingly rare TV time dedicated to professional magic. They got the best showroom bookings. They got the covers of all the trade papers. But there was one corner they would not steal from the true artists of the profession. They could not steal away the wonder in the eyes of children. Rudge would not allow it.
Barnaby Rudge marched out of the house and across the yard to where the interlopers stood surrounded by second graders. He pushed through the throng of children and glared at the bad boy with a stare that had paralyzed tigers in Bombay.
It took the bad boy a moment to acknowledge his presence, no doubt trying to figure out how to save face now that he"d been confronted by his superior. Instead, he bent down to one of the kids. "Your teacher thinks you"re a genius and your parents want to send you to a special school for advanced students," he said. "And now you"re terrified because the only reason you"ve done so well on tests is that you found copies of the teachers" editions of all your books in a thrift store and you"ve been cheating all year."
The kid gaped up at him. He looked as if he wanted to deny the charges; then he broke down. "What do I do?" he whispered.
"I read auras; I don"t tell futures," the bad boy said. "But I"m pretty sure the advanced school textbooks have teachers" editions, too."
The kid brightened again, and the bad boy searched the crowd for his next victim. Rudge stepped forward.
"Out, fraud," Rudge boomed, an accusing finger in the bad boy"s face.
The interloper shrank back under the force of Rudge"s disapprobation. "Do not evict me, oh great wizard," the interloper begged. "I seek only to learn at the feet of the master."
At least that"s what he meant to say, Rudge could tell from the quaver in his voice. The actual words were closer to "Say, how do you get rabbit pee out of gold lame anyway?" but Rudge knew that one question would lead to another, and soon he would be begging for all the secrets of the magician"s art. Rudge"s will began to weaken. The Eisenstein boy was pretty young to take on as an apprentice; this new one was old enough to drive to the liquor store to do Rudge"s shopping when it was necessary. And he came with a sidekick, whom he could turn into a valuable ally if the student ever turned on the master. Best of all, the new-comer was doing a pretty good job of entertaining the children, which meant that Jimmy"s father would have no grounds for cutting Rudge"s negotiated fee for the appearance.
"Your act has promise, young wizard," Rudge said, and waited for the glow of joy to spread across his incipient a.s.sistant"s face. "If you choose, you may study with me. I can teach you to take it to the next level-and all the way to the highest level."
"Like you did with the Martian Magician?" the young man said, an awestruck tone cleverly hidden under a veneer of stylish cynicism.
Perhaps that was meant as praise. After all, that green thug was the highest-grossing act on the Vegas Strip. But the very thought that he would have anything to do with the villain who was destroying stage magic forever was enough to undo an entire week"s worth of blood pressure medication.
Still, if this young pup was impressed by Marvin the Martian, Rudge could use that to teach him some of the higher skills. Let the kid think he was going to follow the fake"s lead, and meanwhile teach him the real art. By the time cla.s.s was over, his pupil would understand why the momentarily popular act was such a catastrophe.
"Well, yes," Rudge said. "Everything he knows, he learned from me."
The bad boy leaned close to Rudge, his face glowing with admiration. His eyes seemed to take in every inch of the magician"s face, then his body. And then there was some kind of shift that Rudge couldn"t understand, but he seemed to be appraising Rudge"s very soul.
"I knew it," the youth said. "There was no way that someone could perform a miracle like the Dissolving Man without learning it all at the feet of a master."
"That is very perspicacious," Rudge said. "Your mind is strong and clear."
"And then he rode that illusion he stole from you to the top of the entertainment industry without giving you the credit you so richly deserve," he continued. "How justifiably enraged you were, how righteous in your fury. Not because you wanted that kind of money and fame for yourself, of course, but because he was damaging the art form."
"Yes," Rudge said.
"But you saw one way to stop him before he destroyed the entire world of stage magic," the youth said. "You would use the very trick he stole from you against him. You would expose him on stage as a fraud and a charlatan, and he would slink off, back into anonymity forever."
"I, um, what?" Rudge said. This was sounding less and less like an eager acolyte heaping praise on his new master.
"Because only you, Barnaby Rudge, knew the secret of the green man"s water tank. Only you were wizard enough to sabotage it," he said.
"And what a brilliant way to ruin your rival." It was the sidekick talking now. "Up on stage in front of every important magician working today. With one little flick of your wrist, you would kill his act forever."
"Too bad you accidentally killed that chubby guy, too," the youth said. "That"s even worse than when your pigeon died inside the top hat."
"The pigeon was just resting," Rudge said quickly, looking around to see if the goons from the SPCA had started following him again. "I chose not to disturb her sleep, so I moved on to the next illusion."
"So you didn"t kill your bird, but you admit you killed the chubby man," the youth said.
"No," Rudge said. "I didn"t. I couldn"t. I don"t even know who he was. I never saw him before."
"You didn"t have to see him, because it was murder by remote control," the sidekick said. "While everyone was partying at the Fortress, you slipped into the showroom and sabotaged the tank. Probably just had to fiddle with that latch."
Rudge felt an odd glow of pride. All he had to do was admit to this charge and he would go down in history as the greatest pract.i.tioner of stage magic since Houdini-the man who gave P"tol P"kah his greatest illusion, and then, when he misused it, took it away from him again. But as the glow faded, Rudge remembered that all of Houdini"s great talent couldn"t save him from a ruptured appendix. In fact, it was his immortal reputation that sent him to an early grave, as some drunken college lout felt compelled to test the magician"s claim of a stomach impervious to any blow. If Rudge were sent to prison, there was no doubt what his fate would be. He would be besieged by fellow felons pleading with him to teach them the art of escape. And when they realized that this was not something that could be picked up in an afternoon, but that needed to be studied over decades, their frustration would turn to rage, and that rage would turn against him.
"I couldn"t have," Rudge said. "I was in the bar all night until P"tol P"kah stomped in."
"Or you made it appear that you were in the bar."
Rudge reached into his jacket pockets and pulled out receipt after receipt. He threw them in the youth"s face. "Look at them," he demanded. "Did I conjure up these bar bills?"
"If you can make a rabbit appear out of thin air, it shouldn"t be hard to conjure up a receipt."