by Mathew Carr
Lawton had soon discovered that the world outside his family was equally unstable. Twice he had come home from school to find the bailiffs putting his family out on the street because the old man had drunk the rent away. In Belfast he had learned which route to take to avoid the Protestant boys who might overturn his barrow on his way back from the market. He had learned to read the mood of the Orangemen who passed through the neighborhood during the marching season, and take evasive action when the usual insults and shouts of “Taig bastard” gave way to physical attacks. He was the one who woke up first and smelled the kerosene-soaked rag pushed through their mailbox during the Home Rule Bill riots, because even at that age a part of him was already braced for disaster. The same anticipation that had saved him from the Prods had also served him well in other situations. In the ring, he had learned to look out for the wide punch that followed the feint, and keep his eye out for the kick to the shins or the crotch. During the war he had often been the first to spot the little glint or movement that signaled a Boer ambush.
After less than a week in Barcelona he had already begun to sense that something in the atmosphere was changing. It was not just the crowds he saw each day, remonstrating with the soldiers marching down to the port, or the speakers up and down the Ramblas angrily denouncing the king, the government, and the Jesuits, the Marquess of Comillas or the Count Güell and other names he had never heard of. Even the priests and nuns seemed to hurry up and down the Ramblas now, and the police and Civil Guard seemed more watchful and suspicious. On the Thursday evening before Dr. Weygrand’s performance, he spent the afternoon in his hotel room, trying to shake off the headache that neither the nitroglycerin nor the amyl nitrate seemed able to relieve.
The headache was just beginning to recede when he heard the rattle of a drum and the shrill high-pitched squeak of a horn. Outside in the square a small crowd was watching a group of men, women, and children who were holding hands and dancing in a circle. It looked almost like a ceilidh, but the movements of these dancers were more measured and stately. At times they barely seemed to be moving at all as they raised their arms in unison and bobbed up and down. The dancing went on throughout the afternoon and the horns continued to shriek like a chorus of tortured parrots. In the late afternoon the music finally stopped, and he decided to go down to the square to see if some food might have some impact on his headache. On his way out he asked Señor Martínez if he knew where the Edén Concert was.
Martínez looked at him in alarm. “Señor, that is not a place for decent people.”
“And why is that? It’s just a music hall, isn’t it?”
“Not only that sir. Upstairs there is a bor, a bord—” Señor Martínez’s face reddened.
“A bordello?” Despite his headache Lawton could not help feeling amused at the receptionist’s discomfort. “Oh don’t worry about that. I’m not going for the whores. I’m only going to a magic show.”
11
Outside the sun had disappeared behind the rooftops and the shadows were already spreading across the square. Lawton managed to force down an omelette, which made him feel less nauseous, but the pain continued to drill into his head as he followed the receptionist’s directions to the Calle Conde del Asalto on the other side of the Ramblas. A queue was already forming outside the theater by the time he arrived, and as far as he could tell it was there for the performance not the bordello. Soon the line began to stretch out behind him, and he filed forward till he came alongside the poster of the man with the staring eyes, the slicked-down hair, toothbrush moustache, and outstretched palms, above the words, THE GREAT WEYGRAND: THE INFINITE JOURNEY.
The inside of the theater was illuminated by candles, and the stage was also lined with candles on two sides. Lawton immediately noticed a large painted image of what appeared to be a wheel or a black sun on the curtain at the rear of the stage. The design consisted of an outer wheel that was connected to a smaller wheel at the center by twelve jagged spokes that recalled the sig-runes in Foulkes’s study. The stage itself was taken up by two chairs, a shelf unit containing a collection of books and colored bottles, and a table laid with an array of knives and other objects. Lawton took a seat ten rows back from the stage and waited for the performance to begin. Within half an hour the little auditorium was full, and the audience fell silent as the manager came out on stage from behind the curtain.
Lawton thought that he looked like a music hall impresario and he soon began to sound like one as he told the audience they should prepare to be amazed and astonished. For Dr. Franz Weygrand was no ordinary entertainer. He was a scientist who had gone beyond science; a psychologist and hypnotist who had studied the secrets of the ancients; a reader of minds and souls who had traveled to the furthest reaches of the earth from the Pyrenees to Timbuktu, from Samarkand to Mandalay, from the temples of Ceylon to the Gompas of Tibet, in search of the wisdom of the ancients. He had known Dr. Freud and Madame Blavatsky. He had studied with Hindu fakirs and the conjurers of Togo. He had been a guest of kings and queens, the Russian tsar, the shah of Persia, and the Chinese emperor.
The audience seemed impressed by this, but Lawton had heard too many overheated pitches at circuses and fairgrounds to take this melodramatic presentation seriously. During his own fairground days he had lost his virginity to Brenda the Snake Lady in the skimpy leopard-skin dress who once shared a glass cage with two drowsy pythons. To the credulous customers who came to stare at her in lust and wonder, she was Fatima Queen of Serpents, whose ancient kingdom had been discovered somewhere near Lake Victoria. People believed in such things because they wanted to believe in them, and Lawton suspected that the mysterious Dr. Weygrand’s appeal was no different. As always, the manager concluded, Weygrand would be accompanied by the inscrutable, enigmatic and delectable Zorka, one of the world’s true clairvoyants and a direct descendant of the ancient Cathars. Together they would take the audience on a journey that would challenge everything they believed.
Lawton doubted it, and as the manager left the stage, he wondered why a man who had performed for the tsar and the Chinese emperor should have ended up in a brothel-cum-music-hall. A moment later Weygrand stepped out from the curtain and walked slowly toward the audience. He looked much the same as he did on the poster, with his bulbous staring eyes and his curved moustache, except for his long white robes and a black turban that Lawton found faintly comical. He stood in silence for a long time, staring at the audience with a fierce and slightly mad expression, when a woman in a white dress stepped out from the curtain behind him.
There was a murmur of admiration from both male and female members of the audience, and Lawton forgot momentarily about his headache as he contemplated her high cheekbones and curved green eyes, her bare arms and ankles and the long dark hair that fell down her back. Her expression was serious, but also drugged and slightly dreamy, and her slow movements made Lawton think of a somnambulistic cat as she came alongside Weygrand, holding a long piece of cloth. Weygrand looked down at the rows in front of the stage and beckoned with his finger at a middle-aged little man who was sitting with his wife. The man obediently came up the stairs and stood waiting nervously while Zorka tied the cloth around Weygrand’s eyes and turned him gently around so that he was standing with his back to the audience.
“What’s your name, sir?” Weygrand asked, in Spanish.
“Martín,” the man replied.
“Well Martín, I want you to kill someone for me. Will you do that?”
“I don’t think so,” Martín replied nervously.
The audience tittered, and Martín looked even more anxious as Zorka took one of the knives by the blade and placed the handle in his hand. Weygrand still had his back to the audience, and he told Martín to choose someone from the audience and give them the knife, and then return to the stage without saying a word. Martín was grinning now as he descended the stairs and handed the knife to a portly gentleman in the fourth row, before returning to the stage. The audience was absolutely
silent, as Zorka turned Weygrand around so that the two men were facing each other and placed Weygrand’s hand against Martín’s forehead.
“Close your eyes,” Weygrand ordered. “Think of the row and the seat number of your victim. Think of nothing else.”
The two men stood facing each other in silent concentration, until Weygrand began to nod. “Your victim is in the fourth row,” he said. “Seat number two.”
There were gasps of amazement as the portly victim stood up brandishing the knife. Zorka accompanied the hapless murderer to his seat and came back with the knife while Weygrand remained standing in his blindfold and turban and reached out his arms as if in prayer.
“Señoras y señores, where can truth be found in this world? Where do we find mystery in a century where all mysteries have been explained? Where are our lost kingdoms and our buried treasures?” Weygrand tapped his temple with his forefinger. “In here, ladies and gentlemen, in the undiscovered spaces of the human mind, in the mysteries of consciousness. Here we can find virgin territory waiting to be revealed. Shadowlands darker than darkest Africa. Hidden depths that only reveal themselves in our dreams—and our nightmares. Here where even the most distant memories lie buried so deep most of us are not even aware of them. Here, where the known world ends and the borderland begins—this is where we find truth and beauty!”
* * *
In the fairgrounds and also as a detective Lawton had encountered his fair share of frauds and charlatans. He had known men who collected money for nonexistent missions in Africa or Patagonia; fake gypsies and fortune tellers; convenors of séances who moved tables and letters with magnets and hidden wires to convince grieving widows and parents that they could speak to their dead husbands or children; magicians who planted friends in the audience and pretended they could read their minds. As the evening wore on he had no doubt that Weygrand and his assistant belonged in their company. Some of their tricks were already familiar to him. Audience members were invited to choose cards or numbers and Weygrand told them what they had chosen. One man was given a bouquet of flowers and told to hand it to a beautiful woman in the audience, who Weygrand correctly identified through his blindfold.
All this was cleverly and expertly done. After half an hour Zorka removed Weygrand’s blindfold, and he invited a young man from the audience onstage. Zorka guided him to one of the chairs, and Weygrand sat down directly opposite and passed his hands in front of the man’s face and head. In a soft, soothing voice he told him his eyelids and arms were becoming heavy. Within a few minutes the man’s eyes had begun to close, and Weygrand continued to repeat the same instructions until his subject was clearly in a trance. Weygrand told his subject that only his handclap would wake him, and handed the young man an onion. The audience laughed when Weygrand told him that it was a bouquet of roses and ordered him to sniff them. The subject breathed in the imaginary flowers, and Weygrand told him to get down on his knees and offer them to Zorka as a token of his love.
The audience was roaring with laughter now, as the hypnotized suitor offered the onion to Zorka, who accepted it with a coquettish smile. Finally Weygrand roused the subject with a clap, and the young man looked around him with embarrassment and confusion, as the audience laughed and applauded. Weygrand now summoned other members of the audience and put them in a trance. Some were told to dance, crawl around on all fours, or bark like dogs. One man was ordered to lie on the ground and Weygrand summoned two members of the audience, who hoisted his stiff body between the two chairs. Even when Weygrand sat on his stomach the body remained perfectly rigid.
Lawton could not help finding this foolishness mildly diverting, until Weygrand told one of his hypnotized subjects that he had the falling sickness and ordered him to fall to the ground whenever he clicked his fingers. Once again the audience laughed as Weygrand’s subject fell and got up various times, but Lawton felt as though he were being personally mocked. Zorka continued to regard the proceedings with the same dreamy trancelike expression.
The performance now entered a new phase when Weygrand ordered Zorka to sit in one of the chairs. Once again he sat down and passed his hands over her body with a theatrical flourish and repeated the same soothing instructions. This time Weygrand held his assistant’s hands and Lawton could not help thinking that he sounded more like a seducer than a hypnotist. Lawton sensed the vicarious excitement among the male members of the audience as she sat with her eyes closed and her lips slightly open, as if inviting a kiss. Finally Weygrand turned to the audience.
“Many years ago I met Zorka in Hungary,” he said. “In a town called Kosice. I heard of a woman who could travel back in time. Who spoke the voices of the ancient dead. There were those who said this woman was a witch. But as soon as I heard her speak I knew what she was. A clairvoyant, ladies and gentlemen! A traveler through time and space. And not just hundreds of years! But millennia. To the very dawn of humanity. To the lands of the old Gods. Tell them, my dear. Tell them who your ancestors were.”
“I come from Hyperborea,” Zorka replied in heavily accented Spanish that sounded Russian or Polish.
“Please enlighten us, my dear. Many people won’t be familiar with this place.”
“In the continent of Plaksha. The kingdom beyond the North Winds,” Zorka intoned. “In a temperate land where there is no age or illness or death. Where we spoke with our thoughts, not words.”
“But if there’s no death then why are these gods not here?”
Zorka looked mournful. “We mixed our blood with mortals. We mingled with the third root-race, with Lemurians from the land of Mu. Over time we lost our powers. We became weak.”
“And what powers are those?”
Zorka turned her head and stared at the table, and there were gasps all around the auditorium as it began to wobble and shake. Lawton looked for ropes or wires, as the knives fell to the floor one by one, but there was no obvious sign of trickery. Finally the table stopped moving and Weygrand held up his hand to quiet the commotion.
“As you see ladies and gentlemen, some of us are only truly awake when we sleep. May I have a volunteer?” Weygrand walked to the front of the stage and picked out a young woman a few rows behind Lawton. “You, Señora. Will you come up please?”
The woman looked reluctant, and then came onto the stage, where Weygrand guided her to the empty chair and told her to take Zorka’s hands. There was an entirely different mood in the theater now. The laughter and hilarity were absent, and the attention of the audience was entirely focused on the pale beauty who was sitting with her eyes closed as if she were straining to hear something in the distance. Suddenly Zorka jerked upright, as if she were in pain. Still holding the woman’s hands, she shifted her body as though she were trying to shake off a heavy weight.
To Lawton’s amazement she began to speak in a strange language that was not like anything he had ever heard. At first he was not even sure if it was a language or an incantation, as the tone of her voice became deeper, as though someone was speaking through her. The voice sounded like a complaint or a protest and then Lawton heard a more pleading tone, as though someone else was trying to speak, and she said, in a sweet, childlike voice, “Don’t worry, mama, I’m here. I’m always here.”
The woman stared at Zorka in dismay and let out a heartfelt sob, while Zorka repeated in the same plaintive voice, “Don’t cry mama.”
Weygrand raised his hand and Zorka fell silent. In the same moment one of the bottles on the shelf shattered and burst into flames. Some men from the audience were on their feet and shouting as Weygrand rushed over toward it and swatted at the flames with his turban to put them out. He returned to the woman and gave her a handkerchief and asked her in a gentle, sympathetic voice why she was crying. There was a collective gasp from the audience when the woman replied that she had lost a child in childbirth ten years before. Weygrand gave the audience a meaningful look, like a lawyer who had just proven a point to a jury, and laid a consoling hand on her shoulder. Zorka han
ded the woman a tissue and escorted her back to her seat, before Weygrand proceeded to summon other members of the audience. Each time Zorka spoke to them in the voices of dead or absent people that they seemed to recognize or that touched some chord in them.
With each intervention Zorka become more agitated, as if the effort of looking into their minds was taking its physical and mental toll. All this only added to the audience’s fascination. Lawton did not know how these tricks had been achieved, but the more he observed this performance, the more he was convinced that he was looking at Marie Babineaux, and it seemed obvious to him how Foulkes had been induced to give away his money. Suddenly Zorka let out a gasp and her head slumped forward. Weygrand reached out to stop her from falling and roused her from her trance. Zorka sat limply in the chair, while Weygrand announced in an apologetic voice that the performance had placed too great a strain on her fragile health and that it was too dangerous to continue. The audience rose from their seats in one motion to applaud as Weygrand bowed, and escorted his ailing assistant to the rear of the stage.
Lawton was also on his feet, intending to go backstage, but even as he applauded he felt the tingling in his fingers and the tightening in his chest as he looked at the stagehands putting out the candles on stage and the burning red sun behind them. His head was screaming now, as though a long sliver of hot metal was being thrust into this brain as he pushed his way through the crowd, ignoring the protests and angry faces. By the time he reached the street he felt able to breathe again. He was still standing there when Weygrand and Zorka came out of a side entrance and climbed into a waiting carriage that already had a male passenger. Lawton was just about to walk toward it when he noticed a red-haired man in a black sailor’s hat moving through the crowd on the other side of the street. Even as he watched the head bobbing up above the pedestrians moving toward the Ramblas, a part of him knew it could not be who he thought it was, and yet the sailor looked so much like his father that he could not dismiss the possibility, and when he turned into a side street, Lawton knew there was no choice but to follow him.
