The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  "How'd that happen?" Sellitto asked.

  Rhyme: "Ask the guard if he's sure the perp signed. Maybe he faked it."

  She put the question to the placid man.

  "Yeah, he did. I saw it. I don't always look at their faces but I make sure they sign."

  That's all I gotta do. That's my job.

  Sachs shook her head and dug into the cuticle of her thumb with another nail.

  "Well, bring me the sign-in book with everything else and we'll have a look at it here," Rhyme said.

  In the corner of the room a young Asian woman stood hugging herself and looking out the uneven leaded glass. She turned and looked at Sachs. "I heard you talking. You said, I mean, it sounded like you didn't know if he got out of the building after he . . . afterward. You think he's still here?"

  "No, I don't," Sachs said. "I just meant we're not sure how he escaped."

  "But if you don't know that, then it means he could still be hiding here, somewhere. Waiting for somebody else. And you don't have any idea where he is."

  Sachs gave her a reassuring smile. "We'll have plenty of officers around until we get to the bottom of what happened. You don't have to worry."

  Though she was thinking: The girl was absolutely right. Yes, he could be here, waiting for somebody else.

  And, no, we don't have a clue who or where he is.

  Chapter Four

  And now, Revered Audience, we'll take a short intermission.

  Enjoy the memory of the Lazy Hangman . . . and relish the anticipation of what's coming up soon.

  Relax.

  Our next act will begin shortly. . . .

  The man walked along Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When he reached one street corner he stopped, as if he'd forgotten something, and stepped into the shadow of a building. He pulled his cell phone off his belt and lifted it to his ear. As he spoke, smiling from time to time, the way people do on mobiles, he gazed around him casually, also a common practice for cell-phone users.

  He was not, however, actually making a call. He was looking for any sign that he'd been followed from the music school.

  Malerick's present appearance was very different from his incarnation when he'd escaped from the school earlier that morning. He was now blond and beardless and wearing a jogging outfit with a high-necked athletic shirt. Had passersby been looking they might have noticed a few oddities in his physique: leathery scar tissue peeked over the top of his collar and along his neck, and two fingers--little and ring--of his left hand were fused together.

  But no one was looking. Because his gestures and expressions were natural, and--as all illusionists know--acting naturally makes you invisible.

  Finally content that he hadn't been followed, he resumed his casual gait, turning the corner down a cross street, and continued along the tree-lined sidewalk to his apartment. Around him were only a few joggers and two or three locals returning home with the Times and Zabar's bags, looking forward to coffee, a leisurely hour with the newspaper and perhaps some unhurried weekend morning sex.

  Malerick walked up the stairs to the apartment he'd rented here a few months ago, a dark, quiet building very different from his house and workshop in the desert outside Las Vegas. He made his way to the apartment in the back.

  As I was saying, our next act will begin shortly.

  For now, Revered Audience, gossip about the illusion you've just seen, enjoy some conversation with those around you, try to guess what's next on the bill.

  Our second routine will involve very different skills to test our performer but will be, I assure you, every bit as compelling as the Lazy Hangman.

  These words and dozens more looped automatically through Malerick's mind. Revered Audience. . . . He spoke to this imaginary assembly constantly. (He sometimes heard their applause and shouts of laughter and, occasionally, gasps of horror.) A white noise of words, in that broad theatrical intonation a greasepainted ringmaster or a Victorian illusionist would use. Patter, it was called--a monologue directed to the audience to give them information they need to know to make a trick work, to build rapport with the audience. And to disarm and distract them too.

  After the fire, Malerick cut off most contact with fellow human beings, and his imagined Revered Audience slowly replaced them, becoming his constant companions. The patter soon began to fill his waking thoughts and dreams and threatened, he sometimes felt, to drive him completely insane. At the same time, though, it gave him intense comfort, knowing that he hadn't been left completely alone in life after the tragedy three years ago. His revered audience was always with him.

  The apartment smelled of cheap varnish and a curious meaty aroma rising from the wallpaper and floors. The place had come lightly furnished: inexpensive couches and armchairs, a functional dining room table, currently set for one. The bedrooms, on the other hand, were packed--filled with the tools of the illusionist's trade: props, rigs, ropes, costumes, latex molding equipment, wigs, bolts of cloth, a sewing machine, paints, squibs, makeup, circuit boards, wires, batteries, flash paper and cotton, spools of fuse, woodworking tools . . . a hundred other items.

  He made herbal tea and sat at the dining room table, sipping the weak beverage and eating fruit and a low-fat granola bar. Illusion is a physical art and one's act is only as good as one's body. Eating healthy food and working out were vital to success.

  He was pleased with this morning's act. He'd killed the first performer easily--recalling with shivery pleasure how she'd stiffened with shock when he'd appeared behind her and slipped the rope around her neck. Never a clue he'd been waiting in the corner, under the black silk, for a half hour. The surprise entrance by the police--well, that'd shaken him. But like all good illusionists Malerick had prepared an out, which he'd executed perfectly.

  He finished his breakfast and took the cup into the kitchen, washed it carefully and set it in a rack to dry. He was meticulous in all his ways; his mentor, a fierce, obsessive, humorless illusionist, had beaten discipline into him.

  The man now went into the larger of the bedrooms and put on the videotape he'd made of the site of the next performance. He'd seen this tape a dozen times and, though he virtually had it memorized, he was now going to study it again. (His mentor had also beaten into him--literally sometimes--the importance of the 100:1 rule. You rehearse one hundred minutes for every one minute onstage.)

  As he watched the tape he pulled a velvet-covered performing table toward him. Not watching his hands, Malerick practiced some simple card maneuvers: the False Dovetail Shuffle, the Three-Pile False Cut then some trickier ones: the Reverse Sliparound, the Glide and the Deal-Off Force. He ran through some actual tricks, complicated ones, like Stanley Palm's Ghost Cards, Maldo's famous Six-Card Mystery and several others by the famous card master and actor Ricky Jay, others by Cardini.

  Malerick also did some of the card tricks that had been in Harry Houdini's early repertoire. Most people think of Houdini as an escapist but the performer had actually been a well-rounded magician, who performed illusion--large-scale stage tricks like vanishing assistants and elephants--as well as parlor magic. Houdini had been an important influence in his life. When he first started performing, in his teens, Malerick used as a performing name "Young Houdini." The "erick" portion of his present name was both a remnant of his former life--his life before the fire--and an homage to Houdini himself, who'd been born Ehrich Weisz. As for the prefix "Mal" a magician might suspect that it was taken from another world-famous performer, Max Breit, who performed under the name Malini. But in fact, Malerick had picked the three letters because they came from the Latin root for "evil," which reflected the dark nature of his brand of illusion.

  He now studied the tape, measuring angles, noting windows and the location of possible witnesses, blocking out his positions as all good performers do. And as he watched, the cards in his fingers riffled together in lightning-fast shuffles that hissed like snakes. The kings and jacks and queens and jokers and all the rest of the cards slit
hered onto the black velvet and then seemed to defy gravity as they leaped back into his strong hands, where they vanished from sight. Watching this impromptu performance, an audience would shake their heads, half-convinced that reality had given way to delusion, that a human being couldn't possibly do what they were observing.

  But the truth was the opposite: the card tricks Malerick was now performing absently on the plush black cloth were not miraculous at all; they were merely carefully rehearsed exercises in dexterity and perception, governed by mundane rules of physics.

  Oh, yes, Revered Audience, what you've seen and what you're about to see are very real.

  As real as fire burning flesh.

  As real as a rope knotted around a young girl's white neck.

  As real as the circuit of the clock hands moving slowly toward the horror that our next performer is about to experience.

  *

  "Hey, there."

  The young woman sat down beside the bed where her mother lay. Out the window in the manicured courtyard she saw a tall oak tree on the trunk of which grew a tentacle of ivy in a shape that she'd interpreted a number of ways over the past months. Today the anemic vine wasn't a dragon or a flock of birds or a soldier. It was simply a city plant struggling to survive.

  "So. How you feeling, Mum?" Kara asked.

  The appellation grew out of one of the family's many vacations--this one to England. Kara had given them all nicknames: "His Kingness" and the "Queenly Mum" for her parents. She herself had been the "Royal Kid."

  "Just fine, darling. And how's life treating you?"

  "Better than some, not as good as others. Hey, you like?" Kara held up her hand to show off her short, evenly filed fingernails, which were black as a grand piano's finish.

  "Lovely, darling. I was getting a bit tired of the pink. You see it everywhere nowadays. Awfully conventional."

  Kara stood and adjusted the down pillow under her mother's head. Then sat again and sipped from the large Starbucks container; coffee was her sole drug but the addiction was intense, not to mention expensive, and this was her third cup of the morning.

  Her hair was cut in a boyish style, currently colored auburn-purple, having been pretty much every color of the spectrum at some point in her years in New York City. Pixieish, some people said of the cut, a description she hated; Kara herself described the do simply as "convenient." She could be out her door minutes after stepping from the shower--a true benefit for someone who tended not to get to bed before 3:00 A.M. and who was definitely not a morning person.

  Today she wore black stretch pants and, though she was not much over five feet, flat shoes. Her dark purple top was sleeveless and revealed taut, cut muscles. Kara had attended a college where art and politics took precedence over the cult of the physique but after graduating from Sarah Lawrence she'd joined Gold's Gym and was now a regular weight-pumper and treadmill runner. One would expect an eight-year resident of bohemian Greenwich Village, hovering somewhere in her late twenties, to dabble in body art or to sport at least a latent ring or stud but Kara's very white skin was tattoo-free and unpierced.

  "Now, check this out, Mum. I've got a show tomorrow. One of Mr. Balzac's little things. You know."

  "I remember."

  "But this time it's different. This time he's letting me go on solo. I'm warm-up and main bill rolled into one."

  "Really, honey?"

  "True as toast."

  Outside the doorway Mr. Geldter shuffled past. "Hello, there."

  Kara nodded at him. She recalled that when her mother had first come to Stuyvesant Manor, one of the city's best aging facilities, the woman and the widower had caused quite a stir.

  "They think we're shacking up," she'd told her daughter in a whisper.

  "Are you?" Kara had asked, thinking it was about time her mother struck up a relationship with a man after five years of widowhood.

  "Of course not!" her mother had hissed, truly angry. "What a thing to suggest." (The incident defined the woman perfectly: a hint of the bawdy was fine but there was a very clear line--established arbitrarily--past which you would become The Enemy, even if you were her flesh and blood.)

  Kara continued, rocking forward excitedly and telling her mother in an animated way about what she planned for tomorrow. As she spoke she studied her mother closely, the skin oddly smooth for a woman in her mid-seventies and as healthy pink as a crying baby's, hair mostly gray but with plenty of defiant wiry black strands scattered throughout. The staff beautician had done it up in a stylish bun. "Anyway, Mum, some friends'll be there and it'd be great if you could come too."

  "I'll try."

  Kara, now sitting on the very edge of the armchair, realized suddenly that her fists were clenched, her body a knot of tension. Her breath was coming in shallow sibilant gasps.

  I'll try. . . .

  Kara closed her eyes, filling with slivers of tears. Goddamnit!

  I'll try. . . .

  No, no, no, that's all wrong, she thought angrily. Her mother wouldn't say, "I'll try." That wasn't her sort of dialogue. It might be: "I'll be there, hons. In the first row." Or she'd say frostily, "Well, I can't tomorrow. You should've let me know earlier."

  Whatever else about her mother, there was nothing I'll-try about her. Balls-out for you, or hell-to-pay against.

  Except now--when the woman was hardly a human being at all. At most a child, sleeping with her eyes open.

  The conversation Kara had just had with the woman had occurred only in the girl's hopeful imagination. Well, Kara's portion had been real. But her mother's, from the Just fine, darling. And how's life treating you? to the glitch of I'll try, had been ginned up by Kara herself.

  No, her mother hadn't said a single word today. Or during yesterday's visit. Or the one before. She'd lain beside the ivy window in some kind of waking coma. Some days she was like that. On others, the woman might be fully awake but babbling scary nonsense that only attested to the success of the invisible army moving relentlessly through her brain, torching memory and reason.

  But there was a more pernicious part of the tragedy. Once in a rare while, there'd be a fragile moment of clarity, which, brief though it was, perfectly negated her despair. Just when Kara had come to accept the worst--that the mother she knew was gone forever--the woman would return, just like in the days before the cerebral hemorrhage. And Kara's defenses vanished, the same way an abused woman forgives her slugging husband at the slightest hint of contrition. At moments like that she'd convince herself that her mother was improving.

  The doctors said that there was virtually no hope for this, of course. Still, the doctors hadn't been at her mother's bedside when, several months ago, the woman woke up and turned suddenly to Kara. "Hi there, hons. I ate those cookies you brought me yesterday. You put in extra pecans the way I like them. And heck with the calories." A girlish smile. "Oh, I'm glad you're here. I wanted to tell you what Mrs. Brandon did last night. With the remote control."

  Kara had blinked, stunned. Because, damn, she had brought her mother pecan sandies the day before and had stocked them with extra nuts. And, yes, crazy Mrs. Brandon from the fifth floor had copped a remote and bounced the signal off the windows next door into the nursing home's lounge, confounding the residents for a half hour by changing channels and volume like a poltergeist.

  There! Who needed better evidence than this that her vibrant mother, her real mother remained within the injured shell of a body and could someday escape.

  But the next day Kara had found the woman staring at her daughter suspiciously, asking why she was there and what she wanted. If this was about the electric bill for twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents she'd paid it and had the canceled check for proof. Since the pecan-sandy/remote-control performance there'd been no encores.

  Kara now touched her mother's arm, warm, wrinkle-free, baby pink. Sensing what she always did here on her daily visits: the numbing trilogy of wishing that the woman would mercifully die, wishing that she'd come back to her vibra
nt life--and wishing that Kara herself could escape from the terrible burden of wanting both of those irreconcilable choices.

  A glance at her watch. Late for work, as always. Mr. Balzac would not be happy. Saturday was their busiest day. She drained the coffee cup, pitched it out and walked into the hallway.

  A large black woman in a white uniform lifted a hand in greeting. "Kara! How long you been here?" A broad smile in a broad face.

  "Twenty minutes."

  "I would've come by and visited," Jaynene said. "She still awake?"

  "No. She was out when I got here."

  "Oh, I'm sorry."

  "Was she talking before?" Kara asked.

  "Yep. Just little things. Couldn't tell if she was with us or not. Seemed like it. . . . This is some gorgeous day, hm? Sephie and me, we're gonna take her walking in the courtyard later if she's awake. She likes it. She always does better after that."

  "I've gotta get to work," Kara told the nurse. "Hey, I'm doing a show tomorrow. At the store. Remember where it is?"

  "Sure do. What time?"

  "Four. Come on by."

  "I'm off early tomorrow. I'll be there. We'll drink some more of those peach margaritas after. Like last time."

  "That'll work," Kara replied. "Hey, bring Pete."

  The woman scowled. "Girl, nothing personal, but th'only way that man'll see you on Sunday is if you're playing the halftime show for the Knicks or the Lakers an' it's on network TV."

  Kara said, "From your mouth to God's ear."

  Chapter Five

  One hundred years ago a moderately successful financier might've called this place home.

  Or the owner of a small haberdashery in the luxurious shopping neighborhood of Fourteenth Street.

  Or possibly a politician connected with Tammany Hall, savvy in the timeless art of growing rich through public office.

  The present owner of the Central Park West town house, however, didn't know, or care, about its provenance. Nor would the Victorian furnishings or subdued fin de siecle objets d'art that had once graced these rooms appeal to Lincoln Rhyme at all. He enjoyed what surrounded him now: a disarray of sturdy tables, swivel stools, computers, scientific devices--a density gradient rack, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, microscopes, plastic boxes in myriad colors, beakers, jars, thermometers, propane tanks, goggles, latched black or gray cases of odd shapes, which suggested they contained esoteric musical instruments.