by Jarret Keene
A plane went by overhead. I didn’t dare look up, not with her standing so close. But she couldn’t resist—she glanced at the underbelly. I knew she would and now I had a decision to make with not much time to make it. I opted for the safer of my two choices and stepped in toward her. I closed the distance between us and reached out with my left hand to grab her right arm. Pulling quickly, I spun her around and into me. My right arm wrapped around her chest while my left continued to hold her arm tight behind her back. To anyone walking through the park now, we looked like two lovers enjoying the nighttime amenities of the dark and the grass. I held her and placed my face close to hers, peaking over her shoulder like an evil Jiminy Cricket. We’d held this position many times before under much more pleasant circumstances. I breathed in deeply, letting her scent carry me back in time, just for a moment. My mind wandered old, worn pathways of almost forgotten emotion … but my hands held firm. I resisted the temptation to kiss her. Almost.
“Remy,” she pleaded.
“What did you do?”
“They found out.”
“They were diamonds, for god’s sake. Their diamonds.”
“But that’s all.”
“Those little rocks are money and blood and power and energy. They are never ‘that’s all.’”
She turned her head just enough. Our lips were barely separated. Our cover was a breath away from becoming reality. “Remy.”
My arms instinctively tightened around her, a Pavlovian response to her whispering my name, at least that’s what I told myself.
“You’re hurting me.”
“What did you do, Raven?” She smelled good. I could taste her scent on the back of my tongue. Jasmine and honey and the wetness of the air all mingled as I looked into her eyes. I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want her to stop hurting. I didn’t want her. “Why are you here?” I held her tighter. She clenched. Her body’s weight seemed to rest on my arm. Her eyes flinched but they never left mine.
“I need you. I need your help.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who can make me disappear.”
I faltered and relaxed my grip. She started to fall forward. I caught her and lowered her to the ground. She wasn’t going anywhere and I knew she wasn’t an immediate threat, so I lit another cigarette. She needed time to breathe. My coffin nail would give it to her. The smoke and nicotine I sucked deep into my lungs took her scent with it. She peered up at me and I knew I had to look away. In the distance, a late-night pickup game of basketball was just getting started. I watched the “skins” beat the “shirts” until I had smoked down to the filter.
In the silence, she had decided to tell me everything. I could feel her move around, turning so her back rested against my legs. Neither of us looked at the other anymore, yet I didn’t know if we’d ever been closer. The first time I kissed her had been here, at the park. And the second. It held memories of us in the blades of grass and the pocket knife–carved picnic tables. It felt like the park was reclaiming us for its own.
“They caught me.”
“And sent you to get me.”
“No!”
I turned at the urgency of her denial.
“No,” she continued, softer, still staring off into the distance. “They don’t know about you. They asked but I didn’t tell them.”
“I’m sure they did more than ask.”
“I got away.”
I didn’t want to know what she did to get away or what it cost her. It wasn’t any of my business. What was my business was what she was doing here and why she needed me to make her vanish. Her motives were crystallizing in my mind. She hadn’t told them about me. No matter that by giving them my name, she would have been in the clear. She could have simply looked them in the eye, told them “Regal Remy” had done it, had orchestrated the whole thing, given back the diamonds she stole, and her path would have become miraculously unblocked. Of course, as penance, they could have sent her to get me, which is exactly what I figured had happened.
Evidently, I was wrong.
She stood up and took my hand, leading me toward the trout-stocked lake in the middle of the park. It was a favorite for late-night lovers, consummating passions under the watchful eye of the Easter Island statue ensconced on a spit of land in the center. Our illusion was complete.
“They figured it out a few days ago. I was at work, like you said. I was casual and relaxed, making tips and laying low. Pierre came in. I didn’t think nothing of it. He’s been in before, you know?”
I did know. Pierre Charon was the “personal assistant” to Scott Wyld, hotelier extraordinaire. He was a former enforcer on the local minor league hockey team who found work much more in line with his calling in life after a career-ending fight took him off the ice. He was also well known at the higher end of the local strip club spectrum. I know because we used to go together. We were together at one of those clubs the night I first met Raven.
I’d been hired to work the smaller room in one of Wyld’s casinos. It wasn’t a bad gig and I was mostly filling 250 seats a night, six nights a week. I’d been working with a girl called Catherine, blond and pretty, and she knew how to jiggle when I needed her to distract the audience. But there was nothing there. She was passable as an assistant, but she was a lousy actress. No one bought it when she looked at me lovingly. I was surprised when the audience thought she even liked me. I was a job and nothing more. When she asked for a week off, I gladly let her go. Charon suggested we get Raven to fill in for her. He had a thing for the exotic-looking stripper, and since he worked for my boss, I took his suggestion with a little more seriousness than maybe I should have. He went with me when I asked her to be my assistant.
“Really? I’ve never done that before. I don’t know if I’d be any good.”
“Sure you would, sweetie, it’s easy. Anyone can do it,” explained Pierre.
That wasn’t exactly true, but the reality wasn’t far off. It took looks, the ability to move and smile and point in the right direction at the right time—this was the heart of helping out a magician. Sure, there were others, partners, who did more, who knew more, but what I was asking this girl to do was climb in a box and wiggle her toes at the right time. It wasn’t brain surgery. She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and smiled my approval.
“Yeah, I think you’d be perfect,” I said. She never looked at Pierre again.
We met up the next day to rehearse. After an hour I knew she’d be able to handle the gig. After two I left a message on Catherine’s machine telling her not to come back. Raven and I played it big. Her looks and my magic had us turning ’em away at the door.
Eventually, though, things went the way they’ve always gone with me. I found myself spending a little too much of my paycheck on the tables before I could get out the door. Then it was more than my paycheck and I found myself doing odd jobs for Wyld himself, paying him back by using sleight-of-hand skills honed in years of practice to fuck with big casino winners or illusions to make people believe things which couldn’t possibly be true. And through it all Pierre was there, protecting his boss’s interest. Evidently, those interests included going to see Raven at the club the night before last.
Raven was still talking, still putting the whole story together for me. I guess she thought she owed me that much. “So he comes in and I see him and smile, right? Like always. I was hustling a little bit, over by the bar. I figured I’d wait a few songs and then go say hi. When I looked back, though, he’d been taken to a table in the back, away from the stage.”
I shook my head. “He always likes to be close to the action.”
“That’s what I thought. But Cinnamon took him to the back table and then she came over and whispered in my ear that he really wants to see me. The way she said it, I knew he meant now. So I went over.”
“Those are dark tables. Anything can happen back there.”
Raven smiled. She’d been part and party to a few of thos
e anythings.
My first thought, however, was anything but sexy. Those back tables were the strip club equivalent of a dark alley. You never knew what was waiting for you. Usually you had the bouncers to watch your back, but when those guys worked for the guy who wanted to see you, you had no outs.
And yet she was here, walking and talking.
“I went up to him. I could barely see him, sitting all the way back in the booth. He asked me what I was doing there, now that I was rich.”
I would have expected that. It wasn’t in his nature to waste time. She continued her story. I stopped listening to generalities. I just wanted to know the details. Charon knew about the diamonds. He took her out the back door of the club, cutting her shift short. She ended up in the rear of a van, sucking on a .45 while good ol’ Pierre told her they knew she was in on it. They knew she wasn’t alone, that she couldn’t have done it alone. She was hurt at the insinuation but couldn’t refute it. He never explained how they had pinched her and she never told them it was me.
According to her, my name was on a laundry list of possible masterminds, all minor operators and petty thieves, and she didn’t give up anyone. There was only one other name on that list, besides mine, that was of any concern. I figured that name was the reason I was still alive. Paul Robbins was a thief, and a damn good one. He worked all sorts of odd jobs. I only met him once and he stuck me for the bill. I didn’t think he knew Raven, but then, I wasn’t sure who she knew. All his name told me was they didn’t know for sure I was in on it and there was no profitability in taking out one of your best on a hunch.
“How did you get away?”
“He threw me out the back of the van.”
“Just like that?”
She paused. “He fucked me first, gun still in my mouth.”
That also sounded like him.
“While he did it, he said he was going to do the same thing to whoever helped me.”
I thought about it. I had to ask the question. “And you decided to come to me? They already think I’m guilty, why put me in the thick?”
“They don’t think you’re guilty. They think it was Paul. They just threw your name in to scare me. Pierre never liked you.”
“He liked me fine.”
“Not after we started working together.”
“That why he fucked you?”
“That’s why he didn’t like you.”
I let it sink in. According to her, I was in the clear. I could keep working like nothing ever happened. “So what do you need from me?”
“I told you, I need you to make me disappear. Just because they let me go doesn’t make me free.”
She had a point.
“You make me vanish and I’m gone for good. No one’s the wiser.”
I turned around.
“Remy?”
I could hear the shake in her voice, the need.
“Remy, please.”
“Not here.” I started walking away. I could feel her scamper up behind me. “The warehouse.”
The warehouse was in an industrial area about a quarter-mile from Sunset Park. We shared a block with a custom furniture place, a photographer, and an Internet porn company. I opened the plain front door and let Raven in first. She turned on the lights. I locked the door behind us.
After David Copperfield built Butchy’s Lingerie, the false storefront to mask his warehouse, all the magicians in town wanted to do the same. Unfortunately, we didn’t have Cop-perfield’s money. I shared the warehouse with two other magicians, both of whom used it primarily as a storage facility. It helped pay the rent. The front office at our place looked like a fabric shop, but that was because it was where we did all the sewing. No hidden doors or electrified toilet seats here. We had the front office, complete with conference/cutting table, a ratty green couch along the wall, and a mini-fridge that was almost never stocked with anything Raven wanted. She looked anyway.
“Still drinking that crap, I see.”
“Help yourself.” She took out a bottle and tossed it to me. It was an old ritual, one we fell back into easily.
I opened the door to the rest of the building. The back area held a decent-sized space filled with props, illusions, some tools, and, tucked away in a far corner, a stage for rehearsals. It was crowded but not packed. The walls were covered with show posters, autographed pictures, and pin-ups. It made the place look smaller than it really was. I turned on the stage lights rather than the work floods. No need to really light the place.
Raven walked around as if reacquainting herself with an old friend. “It’s been awhile.”
She looked good, slipping in and out of shadows amongst the illusions. It had indeed been awhile. Too long. She walked up to the “Artist’s Dream” and stopped. I sipped my beer and watched her. It was a simple illusion, a way to produce an assistant. On the front panel was a picture of the girl. It was briefly covered and then, just like that, the girl was standing there and only a silhouette remained on the panel. Very Galatea … or My Fair Lady. Either way, the artist was bringing to life the girl of his dreams. I smiled as she pulled down the front panel. It was still set with her photograph. I hadn’t done the trick since she left. I think that pleased her.
Raven and I had stopped working together, professionally, about a year and a half earlier. The jobs dried up for the big shows in town and I really didn’t want to work the ships. They weren’t my kind of crowds. They were looking for safe and I equated that with boring. At least doing what I was doing, hustling tourists to give them the “street magic experience,” gave me the opportunity to keep my close-up chops. Doing nothing but boxes on a cruise was death to me. Besides, the ships didn’t really approve of you laying a week’s salary on red. So I didn’t go and Raven quit being my assistant. We stopped seeing each other personally not long after. Seems I wasn’t fulfilling potential, was only hurting myself, and she was tired of supporting me and my bad habits.
That’s the thing about habits, though, everyone has them. And I was Raven’s. Just because we’d stopped dating didn’t mean she wasn’t available for a quick fuck whenever I was in the mood. We had something together neither of us had alone, and for her it was a driving force.
“Do you have an idea?” she asked without looking at me. She had made her way to the stage. It was the first time I’d seen her completely lit in months. She still took my breath away. Did I have an idea? There was a mattress propped against the wall behind the stage. It wasn’t clean but it was more comfortable than the floor.
“I might.”
Maybe she could hear my thoughts in my voice. Maybe she knew me as well as I thought I knew her. Maybe it was all part of the game we were both playing, but she turned and stared across the room at me. She smiled. A sad smile. “I like fresh sheets these days, remember? It’s not like it was.”
We’d been on that mattress more times than I could count. It was what we did during rehearsals, after shows, before breakfast. But she was right. It wasn’t like it was. She was in trouble and I was here to help. She wanted me to be her white knight, but I was rusty. I drained my beer. The right lubrication can ease any passage.
“Did you give back the diamonds?”
She looked at me like I was a black man at a Klan meeting.
Of course. Charon pegged her for the body, not the brains. I wanted to laugh. The layman realizes how little the illusionist actually does, though. The magician dances out his choreography while the assistant does all the work, squeezing and running and hiding while the props move around them. One false move and it’s the girl in the box who’s getting impaled while the magician wields the blade. “Charon didn’t know you took them.” It was the only explanation. “And he didn’t know anything else was gone.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handmade velvet bag. I’d seen it before. She got it when she bought a necklace from a beach vendor in Santa Monica. She used it to keep her valuables.
“And now he knows either me or Paul has ’em
and I’m sending you away?”
“You can have half.”
“I’m covered, thanks. I got what I was after.”
She turned toward the back door. “This was a mistake.”
I could have let her go. I could have let her walk out the door and face whatever was beyond it. That would have been the smart thing to do. “Wait.” I was never that smart.
She turned back, grateful. I didn’t move. She crossed the floor and into my arms, hugging me hard. I didn’t want to but I hugged back. It was a reflex. “Oh, Remy,” she whispered in my ear. “Thank you. I was so scared …” The words trailed off as I turned my head. Her fears melted into passion. Just another emotional outlet.
I lifted her up, her lips still locked with mine, and set her on the “Impaled” table. The floor would have been more comfortable. The bottom half of “Impaled” was the receptacle. Perched above it, Murphy-bed style, was a rack of sharp metal spikes. Real ones. It was part of the gag. The magician would prove the spikes were real while the assistant was being chained to the table. A light would be positioned behind her and a thin curtain in front, so the audience could see her struggling. There was a time limit, artificially imposed, something to add more drama to the situation. When the clock ran out, the spikes would fall, and if the girl was still there, well …
At just the right time, though, the light went out, the spikes fell, and the girl reappeared someplace else, safe and sound. It was foolproof. There was a safety catch so the spikes couldn’t fall if the girl was still chained up, and she had a foot switch to release the spikes when she was in position. It looked dangerous and evil. It was the kind of illusion I could never perform on a cruise.
It was a new prop in the warehouse and I’d never before used it for this purpose. It supported our combined weight nicely, creaking and groaning along as if it were an active participant in our lovemaking.
Afterwards, we lay there in each other’s arms, slowly becoming aware of the cold metal table beneath us. She laughed as I shivered.
