by Gigi Pandian
Sanjay came up behind me at the window and rested his chin on my head. I moved out of the way and let him examine the window.
“Nothing out of the ordinary here,” he said. “Thick stone walls, solid construction.”
“You thought there would be a secret passageway?”
“Not really. But one has to be thorough. Damn. This window doesn’t open, either,” he said, frowning. He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked down, and then up.
“Fifth floor,” he mumbled to himself, staring out the window. “Sprinklers…no fire escape. Even if the thief could have altered one of these windows to open and get out, squeeze through the opening, and slide down a rope—or walk across one to the opposite building, if we want to entertain really outrageous ideas—there wouldn’t have been time. They’d need to replace the window to its present state. No, the only way out of this place is that front door.”
“Which a whole group of German tourists say didn’t happen.”
“Something isn’t right,” Sanjay said. “I don’t like this at all, Jaya.”
ELEVEN
Sanjay locked the suite behind us. We walked back to my hotel room in silence. I left Sanjay in the room while I used the bathroom to change.
“I’ve been thinking about the witnesses,” Sanjay said when I emerged in my bright pink t-shirt and leggings.
“Unless this is an amazingly huge conspiracy we’re stuck in the middle of, the tour group of Germans isn’t lying.”
“But what if they weren’t lying,” Sanjay said. “What if there was a way for the thief to get out of that suite through the door and have the witnesses think they never saw anyone come through the door?”
I eyed Sanjay skeptically. He was again seated in the desk chair, his elbows resting on his knees as he leaned forward and spoke earnestly.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “A diversion.”
“You mean like one of your stage tricks with smoke and mirrors.”
“Something like that,” he said. “Not smoke and mirrors literally, but an illusion of the same kind.”
“You think they all looked away at a cute puppy at the same exact moment, right after an explosion sounded?”
“What if—” he leaned forward even closer and spoke in a reverent whisper. “What if the thief changed the room numbers on the outside of the doors?” He sat back and clasped his hands behind his head. “It’s a magician’s trick. Making you think you’re looking at one door, but then changing the decoration—in this case the room numbers—so you don’t realize it’s a different door.”
I thought about it for a minute. Could the thief have made a simple switch that made him invisible without being invisible?
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Sanjay said.
“You’re forgetting something,” I said. “The Germans didn’t care about the room number—they heard the room the explosion came from and saw the smoke. So unless this thief is a mastermind genius who has figured out how to move the sound of an explosion and the accompanying smoke from one floor to another, that explanation doesn’t work.”
Sanjay dropped his hands and grabbed his bowler hat. He ran his fingers along the rim like he always did when he was thinking.
“I don’t like this,” he said again.
“I don’t either. This whole thing is a big mess for Daniella’s play and Feisal’s business.”
“Not just that,” Sanjay said. He stopped tracing the hat with his fingers. “This isn’t a normal crime. I don’t like that we don’t know what we’re dealing with—and that you’re wrapped up in it.”
“What do you mean? You think I’m in danger?” I hadn’t stopped to consider the possibility. I don’t think of myself as easily frightened, but a wave of mild panic came over me as Sanjay spoke in a more serious tone than I’d ever heard him use before.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to investigate with Daniella and Astrid tonight,” Sanjay said. “Since it seems like Astrid is somehow involved—”
“Weren’t you listening?” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Sanjay. “Astrid was with Daniella during the theft.”
“Your point being?”
“You know what my point is,” I snapped. “That would mean Daniella is lying, too, and that she’s involved. Then why would she ask for our help? We already went through this.”
“I know,” Sanjay said. “But we’re missing something important. Maybe she wanted to throw suspicion off of herself.”
“She already has an alibi of Astrid,” I said. “Why would she risk us figuring out she was involved if she was already in the clear?”
“She could be a dupe,” Sanjay said.
“Of Astrid, you mean? So what do you want to do?”
Sanjay and I stared dumbly at each other for a full minute, neither of us attempting to speak.
“Police?” I said.
“Police,” Sanjay agreed.
“Now?”
“It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”
“Good point.” I yawned. “We can go in the morning. Meet me back here an hour before your show.”
“Not enough time. But that doesn’t matter. I’m sleeping here—on the sofa. Until we know what’s going on, I’d feel a lot better keeping you in my sight.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said that badly. But you know what I mean.”
“Do I? Why don’t you enlighten me?”
Since I only reached five feet tall in thick socks, when I was a teenager my dad made sure I could take care of myself. He drove me in his VW van all around the greater Berkeley area to every kind of martial arts class that existed. I stuck with jiu jitsu the longest, and I was fairly certain I could overpower Sanjay. I hated it when people underestimated me.
Sanjay swallowed hard. “I mean…you’re handy to have around. If we get cornered, I can make myself disappear and you can arm wrestle the bad guy.” He looked at me expectantly.
I smiled and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I know that’s not what you were going to say,” I said, “but thank you. Together, I think we’ll be fine. And sure, to save time, that makes the most sense for you to stay here. That’s stupid for you to sleep on the tiny sofa, though. The bed is big enough for both of us.”
“Uh…”
“What? You’re like my brother, Sanjay. Why does it matter?”
“I’ll be fine on the sofa,” he snapped. He stepped into the bathroom and shut the door harder than was necessary.
What was the matter with him?
* * *
The next thing I remembered, something was tugging on my foot. I opened my eyes. It was Sanjay. He stood at the foot of the bed in his tuxedo trousers and a fitted white undershirt, his normally perfect thick black hair standing at all angles like he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. I had assumed Sanjay’s hair—which his fans swooned over—was effortlessly perfect, but clearly that wasn’t the case.
“We overslept,” he said. “I only have half an hour before I’m supposed to be at the theater for the matinee. We’re going to have to go to the police after the show.”
“Damn.”
“Look, I’m going to catch a cab back to my hotel to take a quick shower and grab a new tux—”
“You travel with multiple tuxedos?”
“Of course. At least six. Magic is dangerous business.” He winked at me, then turned serious again as he glanced at the time on his phone. “Catch a cab to my show, okay?”
“But it’s only a few blocks from here.”
“Humor me,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. I had no intention of taking a cab for what would be a five-minute walk, but Sanjay didn’t need to know that and worry for no reason.
Sanjay sighed. “All right. Don’t take a cab. But be careful, okay?”
With that
mind reading, he was out the door. Maybe there really was some magic in the air. If there was, I definitely needed it. I didn’t know what I was doing. This wasn’t the relaxing vacation I’d imagined.
On my walk to the theater I stopped at a take-out fish and chips shop to grab some fried food to placate my growling stomach. The cashier’s accent was so thick that I’m not sure what it was that I ordered, but the fried breading made up the largest percentage of the meal wrapped in newspaper, and it was delicious. The magic show was sold out by the time I got there, but the ticket taker had been left with a note from Sanjay to allow me backstage.
The lights flickered as I entered the theater, the sign that the show would begin shortly and everyone should take their seats. I didn’t walk through the seats to get to backstage, so I couldn’t see the crowd, but I could hear the overlapping excited voices with accents from across the world. I reached the dark backstage area near the stage as the curtain went up.
A solitary stage light illuminated the stage. Or rather, it illuminated a small part of the stage. Sanjay stood at the back of the stage in the shadows, his bowler hat resting on his head. He began to chant in a slow, rhythmic voice. He spoke in Punjabi, so I didn’t understand what he was saying. But one didn’t need to understand the words to feel what he was saying. As he spoke, one more light turned on, and a series of shadows flashed across the back of the stage. He was telling a story with simple cut-out figures that danced along the wall.
“Do you like it?” a soft voice asked in my ear.
Sanjay’s voice. I think I jumped about a foot into the air.
“Jesus, Sanjay,” I whispered back. “I thought you were on stage.”
“What, that voice over? Do you like it? It’s new.” He straightened his bow tie. “That’s just a shadow of me. A little more detailed than the projection of the stick figures, but pretty simple.”
“That’s not even another person up there?” My heart rate slowed closer to normal as I looked between the real Sanjay and the shadow on stage that I could have sworn was him.
“Nope. Just a projection. People see what they want to see. In this context, people assume it’s me. The key to shows at the Fringe is to keep things simple. Things are crazy enough putting on a complex show with bare bones staff. That’s how I came up with this idea. The whisky barrel escape is the most complex of the illusions I’m doing here, but even that one is pretty simple—if you know the trick.”
I gasped. It must have been a bit loud. Sanjay put his finger to his lips.
“Sanjay,” I said. “I know how the thief did it.”
“You do?”
“Sanjay,” another voice whispered. I jumped again. I really hated how dark it was backstage. Ewan, the red-headed stagehand, came up beside us. “Cutting it close, aren’t you?”
Sanjay swore. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said to me.
He turned and took the few steps to the edge of the stage. The stage lights shifted and the shadow I had assumed was Sanjay disappeared a fraction of a second before the real man stepped onto the stage. Applause sounded as I ran further backstage to think.
Just as Sanjay had led the audience to believe he was on that stage, the thief had done the same thing in that hotel room. Sanjay had been on the right track when he suggested a diversion that was an illusion.
The safe exploding was the illusion. By the time the explosion blew open the door of the safe, the chess set was already gone.
That meant the theft was no longer tied to an exact time we knew of. It could have been Astrid. But it could have been any of them. Our list of suspects with alibis was wrong. All wrong.
TWELVE
By the time Sanjay found me backstage in the green room after the show, I’d filled several pages of notepaper with thoughts about what was going on. Most of it was scratched out. My revelation meant we knew less than before.
“Not cool,” Sanjay said, closing the door behind us and tossing his bowler hat onto the hook behind the door. “I need full concentration for my performance. Which I didn’t have today.”
Sanjay’s tuxedo did look more wrinkled than usual. A couple beads of sweat ran down the side of his face. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d ever seen Sanjay look that disheveled.
“Did anything go wrong?” I asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Then what—”
“Never mind. The audience may not have been as wowed by the flaming whisky barrel as they should have been, but I know what my illusions made you realize: the timing of the theft was wrong. When the explosion occurred, the chess set was already gone.”
I nodded. “That’s what I realized too. The explosion was a clever way to create the impression that that’s when the chess set had been stolen. Just like you were never the shadow on that stage, and you were already gone from the whisky barrel by the time it caught fire. I bet you were gone just as soon as I closed the lid of the barrel.”
“I admit nothing,” Sanjay said. “But I should have thought of it before this.” He shook his head. “It must be the jet lag.”
I rolled my eyes as Sanjay picked me up by the elbow.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Sanjay led me through the maze of the backstage area and out a back door leading to an alley. My eyes had grown accustomed to the backstage light, and I’d forgotten it was only early afternoon. I shielded my eyes from the sun on this cloudless summer day. We cut through the alley to the front of the theater. Theatergoers streamed out of the main doors, and we cut through them, heading to the box office. But instead of a ticket taker, someone else was waiting for us.
“Astrid,” Sanjay said. “I’m glad you could use the complementary ticket I left for you.”
“How could I resist your message?” she said.
I glared at Sanjay.
“I didn’t have time to tell you,” he said to me before turning back to Astrid. “I thought the three of us could take a trip to the police station together.”
Astrid’s eyes darted angrily between us. Beyond the anger, there was fear. She wasn’t her normally composed self.
“You conveniently forgot your boyfriend last night,” I began. “The one you went to call the morning of the theft.”
“Yes, so what?” Astrid said. “Men. They aren’t worth remembering.” She sneered at Sanjay.
“Some of them are,” Sanjay said. “Like the police officers who are going to check your phone records.”
Astrid’s thin body began to tremble. She looked between us like a cornered animal.
“We know you stole the chess set before the explosion,” I said. “When you weren’t with Daniella.”
“How do you—” Astrid stopped herself.
“As soon as the police learn they have the timing of the theft wrong,” I said, “they’ll know your alibi doesn’t hold up.”
“I didn’t do it!” Astrid cried. “I only helped.”
Sanjay and I glanced at each other. Sanjay’s face mirrored the surprise I felt.
“I’m sure the police will be lenient if you tell them who stole the chess set,” Sanjay said.
“Don’t you see?” Astrid said. “I don’t know where the chess set is. I don’t even know who I’m working for!”
“But you—”
“I was supposed to leave the key,” Astrid said, “and to create a small security problem at the theater, something that Izzy would have to fix—to set him up. Simple! It was supposed to be so simple. Those two little tasks…I’m turning forty this year, you know. Who wants to hire a forty-year-old model?”
“Come on,” Sanjay said, trying to grab Astrid’s elbow.
She pulled her arm away. “I won’t tell them anything,” she said, spitting out the words. “You have no proof, do you? Even though I don’t have an alibi, it’s not a crime to lie ab
out who I called on the phone.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I wonder if the police would be interested in hearing this?” I pulled my phone out. The “record” button was on.
Astrid’s eyes grew wide. She lurched for the phone. Sanjay stepped to my side as I leaped backward away from Astrid’s reach. Astrid tripped and fell forward, landing hard on the box office floor. Sanjay took the phone from my hand and slipped it into a hidden pocket of his tuxedo.
At the police station, Astrid was led away for questioning, and I had to leave my phone with the police as evidence. I filled out some paperwork to get it back later. While I was filling out a form, a uniformed constable came up to us.
“Funny case,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked
“Why would the thief return half of the chess men?”
“What?”
“You didn’t hear?” he said.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and forgetting all about the form in front of me.
“The silver half of the chess set was dropped off by courier earlier this morning.”
THIRTEEN
I stretched my legs over the back of a theater seat, a borrowed laptop from Daniella in my hands. I was hooked up to the Wi-Fi from the Pizza Hut next door to the theater, where I’d eaten several pieces of pizza.
Daniella was rehearsing Izzy, who had told her he’d watched her show enough times that he knew Astrid’s part by heart and could play the part of Alexis as Alex. But even with Izzy filling in, they still didn’t have the chess set.
“I can’t concentrate with you back there!” Sanjay called out from the stage.
“I thought you wanted me to stay,” I called back.
