Honest Illusions

by Nora Roberts

  Luke couldn’t have said why the word made him grin.

  He could still hear the music, but it was fainter now. There were fewer people walking along these quieter streets. Some were heading to the action, some away. In the flickering lights of the streetlamps, he caught glimpses of old brick buildings, of flower-drenched balconies, of cabs hurrying by with fares and of figures curled up to sleep in doorways.

  He didn’t see how anyone could sleep with the music, the smells, the unbelievable heat. His own fatigue had vanished, to be replaced by a clenching impatience with the way Mouse was creeping along.

  Luke wanted to get where they were going. Wherever it was.

  “Jesus, Mouse, you go any slower, we’ll be backing up.”

  “No hurry,” Mouse said, then stunned Luke by stopping completely in the middle of the street and getting out.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Luke scrambled out himself to see Mouse standing by an open iron gate. “You can’t leave that thing sitting in the middle of the road. You’ll bring the cops.”

  “Just refreshing my memory.” Mouse stood, stroking his chin. “Gotta back her in.”

  “Back what?” Luke’s eyes popped wide. He did a quick dance of disbelief toward the gate and back to the truck. “Back that thing in here?” Luke scanned the opening between two unforgiving brick walls, then turned to judge the width of the trailer. “No way in hell.”

  Mouse smiled. His eyes glowed like a sinner’s who’d just found religion. “You just stand out here, in case I need you.” He sauntered back to the truck.

  “Can’t be done,” Luke called after him.

  But Mouse was humming again as he began to maneuver the truck and trailer across the narrow street.

  “You’re going to hit. Jesus, Mouse.” Luke braced for the sound of scraping metal. His mouth dropped open when the big black trailer slid into the opening as easily as a hand into a glove. As the truck backed in behind it, Mouse glanced over at Luke. And winked.

  It was a fine thing. For some reason the parking of the truck and trailer struck Luke as an event as fine as Christmas, or the opening day of a new baseball season. His own laughter rocked him back on his heels while he stood blinded by the headlights.

  “Man, you are number one,” Luke shouted as Mouse climbed out of the truck. Then he whirled like a boxer at the ready when a light flashed on in the house beside them. “Who’s that?” he demanded of Mouse as he spotted a figure in the doorway.

  “LeClerc.” Jiggling the keys in his pocket, Mouse moved forward to shut the iron gates to the courtyard.

  “So, you’ve returned.” LeClerc stepped down, and in the backwash of light Luke saw a small man with gray hair and a full beard. He wore a snowy white athletic T-shirt and baggy gray trousers held up with a hunk of rope. His voice was touched with a slight accent, not the fluid drawl of Max’s, but something sharper that seemed to add syllables to words. “And you’re hungry, yes?”

  “Didn’t stop to eat,” Mouse called out.

  “Good you didn’t.” LeClerc came forward, his gait stiff and uneven. Luke saw that he was old, older than Max by a decade or more. The boy’s impression was of an ancient face, a tattered leather map scored with hundreds of deeply traveled roads. The brown eyes were wide-set and shrewd under wiry brows.

  LeClerc saw a slim young boy with a beautiful face dominated by wary eyes. A boy who was poised on the balls of his feet as if to run, or to fight.

  “And who would this be?”

  “This is Luke,” Max said as he stepped out of the trailer with a dozing Roxanne in his arms. “He’s with us now.”

  Something passed between the two men that seemed all the more intimate with being left unsaid.

  “Another one, eh?” LeClerc’s lips curved briefly around the stem of the pipe he kept clenched permanently between his teeth. “We’ll see. And how is my bébé?”

  Heavy-eyed, Roxanne held out her arms and was gathered up to LeClerc. She settled against the bone and sinew as though he were a feather pillow. “Can I have a beignet?”

  “I make just for you, don’t I?” LeClerc pulled the pipe out of his mouth to kiss her cheek. “You are better, oui?”

  “I had the chicken pox forever. I’m never, never getting sick again.”

  “I make you a gris-gris for good health.” He settled her comfortably on his hip as Lily stepped out. She carried a heavy makeup bag over one arm of her flowing negligee. “Ah, Mademoiselle Lily.” LeClerc managed to bow despite the child on his hip. “More beautiful than ever.”

  She giggled and held out a hand for him to kiss, which he did with smooth aplomb. “It’s good to be home, Jean.”

  “Come in, come in. Enjoy the midnight supper I make for you.”

  At the mention of dinner, Max stepped over from the trailer and greeted LeClerc as he led the way across the courtyard, where roses and lilies and begonias bloomed in profusion, up a short flight of steps and through a door that opened into the kitchen. There a light was burning to shine on the polished surfaces of white tile and dark wood.

  There was a small hearth of bricks that had been smoked from red to a comfortable rose gray. Atop it stood a plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Blessed Virgin, and what looked like an Indian rattle dressed with beads and feathers.

  Though it was too miraculously cool inside for Luke to believe the bricked oven had been used, he would have sworn he caught the tantalizing odor of bread just baked.

  Dried bouquets of spices and herbs hung from the ceiling, along with dangling ropes of onion and garlic. Gleaming copper pots were suspended from iron hooks above the stove. Another pot, with steam puffing out, sat on the back burner. Whatever was simmering inside smelled like paradise.

  A long butcher-block table had already been set with bowls and plates and brightly checked linen napkins. Still carrying Roxanne, LeClerc reached inside a cupboard for another place setting.

  “Gumbo.” Lily sighed as she slipped an arm around Luke’s shoulders. She wanted badly to welcome him home. “No one cooks like Jean, honey. Just wait until you taste. If I don’t watch myself, I’ll be popping right out of my costume within a week.”

  “Tonight you don’t worry, you just eat.” LeClerc set Roxanne down in a chair, then picking up two thick cloths, hefted the pot from the stove.

  Luke watched, fascinated, as the tattoo which wound from bony wrist to bony shoulder rippled and danced. They were snakes, Luke realized. A nest of vipers in faded blue and red that twisted and twined over the leathered skin.

  They all but hissed.

  “You like?” LeClerc’s eyes were merry as he studied Luke. “Snakes, they are quick, and cunning. Good luck for me.” He made a sibilant sound as he darted his arm toward Luke. “Snakes won’t do for you, boy.” He chuckled to himself as he dished up the thick, spicy gumbo. “You bring me a young wolf, Max. He’ll bite first.”

  “A wolf needs a pack.” Casually, Max lifted a basket from the table and uncovered a golden loaf of bread. He offered the basket to Lily.

  “What am I, LeClerc?” Wide awake now, Roxanne was spooning up her gumbo.

  “You.” The leathery, lined face softened as he passed his wide, gnarled hand over her hair. “My little kitten.”

  “Just a kitten?”

  “Ah, but kittens are clever and brave and wise, and some grow to be tigers.”

  That brightened her look. She slanted her eyes toward Luke. “Tigers can eat wolves.”

  When the moon had begun to set, and even the echoes of music from Bourbon Street had faded, LeClerc sat on a marble bench in the courtyard, surrounded by the flowers he loved.

  It was Max who owned the house, but it was Jean LeClerc who had made it a home. He’d taken long-ago memories of a cabin in the bayou, and flowers that had run wild, blossoms his mother had tamed in plastic pots, the smells of potpourri and spice, of colored cloths and polished woods, and had mixed them together with Max’s need for elegance.

  LeClerc would have been ha
ppy back in the swamp, but he wouldn’t have been happy without Max, and the family Max had given him.

  He smoked his pipe and listened to the night. The faintest breeze rustled the magnolia leaves, stirring the heat and promising rain much as a teasing woman might promise a kiss. The dampness that was gradually wearing away the brick and stone of the French Quarter hung like a mist in the air.

  He didn’t see Max approach, nor did he hear him, though his hearing was keen. He felt him.

  “So.” He puffed on his pipe and studied the stars. “What will you do with the boy?”

  “Give him a chance,” Max said. “The same as you gave me a lifetime ago.”

  “His eyes want to swallow everything he sees. Such appetites can be difficult.”

  “So I’ll feed him.” There was a hint of impatience in Max’s voice as he joined LeClerc on the bench. “Would you have me send him away?”

  “It’s too late to be practical now that your heart’s involved.”

  “Lily’s attached,” Max began and was cut off by LeClerc’s rumbling laugh.

  “Only Lily, mon ami?”

  Max took time to light a cigar, draw in smoke. “I’m fond of the boy.”

  “You love the boy,” LeClerc corrected. “And how could it be otherwise, when you look and see yourself? He makes you remember.”

  It was difficult to admit it. Max knew when you loved you could also hurt and be hurt. “He makes me remember not to forget. If you forget all the pain, the loneliness, the despair, you forget to be grateful for the lack of it. You taught me that, Jean.”

  “So good, my student is now the master. This contents me.” LeClerc turned his head and his dark eyes gleamed through the shadows. “Will it content you when he outreaches what you are?”

  “I don’t know.” Max looked down at his hands. They were good ones, agile, quick and clever. He was afraid what it would do to his heart when they slowed. “I’ve begun to teach him magic. I haven’t decided if I’ll teach him the rest.”

  “You won’t keep secrets from those eyes for long. What was he doing when you found him?”

  Max had to smile. “Picking pockets.”

  “Ah.” LeClerc chuckled over his pipe. “So, he is already one of us. Is he as good as you were?”

  “Every bit as good,” Max admitted. “Perhaps better than I at that age. Less fear of reprisal, more ruthless. But there is a long leap between lifting wallets at a carnival and picking locks at grand houses and fine hotels.”

  “A leap you made gracefully. Regrets, mon ami?”

  “None.” Max laughed again. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You were born to steal,” LeClerc said with a shrug. “Just as you were to pull rabbits out of hats. And, apparently, as you were to take in strays. It’s good to have you home.”

  “It’s good to be home.”

  For a moment they sat in silence, enjoying the night. Then LeClerc got down to business.

  “The diamonds you sent from Boston were exceptional.”

  “I preferred the pearls from Charleston.”

  “Ah, yes.” LeClerc sighed out smoke. “They were elegant, but the diamonds had such fire. It pained me to take money for them.”

  “And you got . . . ?”

  “Ten thousand, only five for the pearls, despite their elegance.”

  “The pleasure of holding them outweighs the profit.” He remembered, with pleasure, how they had looked against Lily’s skin for one glorious evening. “And the painting?”

  “Twenty-two thousand. Me, I thought it a clumsy work. Those English painters had no passion,” he added, dismissing the Turner landscape with a shrug. “The Chinese vase I hold awhile longer. Did you bring the coin collection with you?”

  “No, I didn’t get it. When Roxanne took sick, I canceled that engagement.”

  “Best.” LeClerc nodded and smoked. “Worry for her would have distracted you.”

  “I would hardly have been at my best. So, until the vase is placed, that makes the tithe . . . thirty-seven hundred.” A glance at LeClerc’s scowl made Max smile. “So little to resent so much.”

  “By the end of the year, you’ll have thrown fifteen thousand away at least. Add this to each year you’ve been taking ten percent to ease your conscience—”

  “A gift to charity,” Max interrupted, amused. “I don’t do it to ease my conscience, but to appease my soul. I’m a thief, Jean, an excellent one who thinks nothing of the people from whom I steal, but quite a bit about those I see who have nothing worth stealing.” He studied the glowing tip of his cigar. “I may not be able to live with the morality of others, but I must live with my own.”

  “The churches you give your tithe to would damn you to hell.”

  “I’ve escaped from worse places than the hell priests imagine for us.”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  Max smothered a smile as he rose. He knew that LeClerc’s religion ran the gamut from Catholicism to voodoo, and any handy superstition in between. “Then think of it as insurance. Perhaps my foolish generosity will ensure us both a cooler place in the hereafter. Let’s get some sleep.” He laid a hand on LeClerc’s shoulder. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you what I’ve planned for the next few months.”

  Luke knew he’d found heaven. There was no list of chores the next day so he was free to wander the house, which he did gobbling beignets he’d snatched from the kitchen. The trail of powdered sugar in his wake dribbled through the first floor, up the stairs, onto one of the long flower-twined balconies and back again.

  He couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  He’d been given a room of his own, and had spent a great deal of a wakeful night looking, touching. The high, carved headboard had fascinated him, as had the soft sheen of the wallpaper and the muted pattern of the rug. There was a huge cupboard that Max had called an armoire. Luke figured it would hold more clothes than any one person would need in a lifetime.

  And there were flowers. A tall blue vase was filled with them. He’d never had flowers in his room before, and though he knew he should dismiss them as sissy, their fragrance brought him a deep and secret pleasure.

  Luke drifted through the house as soundlessly as smoke. He wasn’t sure of LeClerc as yet and easily avoided the man while he made his explorations.

  The furnishings reflected Max’s elegance. It gave Luke a sense of his mentor, though he didn’t recognize the French and British antiques. What he saw were graceful gleaming tables, curvy sofas, pretty china lamps and peaceful landscapes.

  As much as he liked the house, Luke found his favorite spot on the balcony outside his room. From there he could smell the heat of the flowers and the street. He could watch people snapping pictures and searching for souvenirs.

  He couldn’t help but notice how careless people were with their wallets. Women with their shoulder bags dangling, men with their cash tucked into the back pocket of their bell-bottoms. A pickpocket’s paradise. If Miami didn’t pan out, Luke decided he could do very well here, supplementing his salary as a sorcerer’s apprentice.

  “You got sugar all over,” Roxanne said from behind him.

  Luke tensed. He snuck a look down at his hands and saw with disgust that the evidence was all over his fingers. Hastily, he wiped them on his jeans. “So?”

  “LeClerc’ll get mad. Sugar draws bugs.”

  He wiped his hands again, because they’d grown damp. “I’ll clean it up.”

  She joined him at the rail, looking pretty and prim in a yellow shorts set. “What’re you doing?”

  “Just looking.”

  “Daddy says we can take the whole day off. Tomorrow we have to start rehearsing the new cabaret act for the club.”

  “What club?”

  “The Magic Door. We work there.” She began to play with the flowers that twined along the rail. “We can do bigger illusions there than at the carnival, and sometimes Daddy goes over during the day and does close-up work for some of the customers.”

 
LeClerc’s annoyance and any possible reprisals shifted to the back of Luke’s mind. He didn’t know what his place would be in a cabaret act, but he was going to make sure he had one. “How many shows a night?”

  “Two.” After plucking a clematis bloom, she tried to wind the slim stem around her ear. “Eight and eleven. We’re the headliners.” She wrinkled her nose. “I have to take a nap after school every day. Like a baby.”