Then she pulled off her sweater, socks and sweatpants, stripping down to a white leotard, because the main reason thaumaturgical assistants are usually almost naked is that clothes interfere with what they must do: crawl through tiny holes, make themselves as small as possible, etc., etc. Miranda picked up a large square of velvet and stepped up onto the Substitution Box. She planted her feet firmly and raised the curtain until both she and the trunk were hidden from view.
The moment just hung there, like washing on a line. It lingered for so long that Rudolfo turned away and placed his hand above his eyes, peering through the light into the darkness. “Okay, chief,” he said to the lighting guy. All of a sudden there came the strangest sound, a pop like a fat boy makes with finger and cheek. And there stood Jurgen atop the Substitution Box, grinning like the idiot he seemed intent on becoming. He jumped to the ground, produced a huge key, worked the padlock and pulled open the lid. The canvas sack rose up from inside the Box, its contents visibly shaking. Jurgen pulled at the ropes and the sack fell away from Miranda.
“Wow!” Her cheeks were flushed; indeed, her whole body was flushed, great circles of red bleeding through the whiteness of the leotard. Her hair was messy and her eyes were bleared with tears. “Holy fucking cow!” Miranda virtually leapt out of the Substitution Box; she sprang up and landed some feet away in a defensive crouch, as though terrified beyond reason. She wiped at her nose and eyes as though she were crying, but when she fell over backwards clutching her stomach, her long legs raised heavenward, it became more than clear that she was laughing.
Jurgen was laughing too, a chuckle that might be employed in a church should the pastor attempt a witticism.
Rudolfo stopped short. On talk shows Jurgen could be counted on to heave out a couple of overburdened breaths should the host say something meant to be funny, but beyond that Rudolfo had always believed that Jurgen had no laugh.
Only then did it hit him, the realization that should have come many hours earlier. He had never told the strange dope-sucking cabbie where to take him. He had not said where he lived. He didn’t know why this was connected to Houdini’s ugly old Substitution Box, but it was, the first idea stopping short and the next bumping into it like a hackneyed vaudevillian act.
He looked at his partner and he was afraid.
The only time Rudolfo had been more afraid was when he thought he would be arrested for General Bosco’s murder.
He and Samson had fled into the night.
The one thing Rudolfo had learned in the grim Berufsschule was how to function even when scared senseless. He thought through his predicament logically. How much did die Bullen know about him; how much would they have been told? His fellow circus performers thought his name was Rudy, because that’s what General Bosco had called him and General Bosco was the only one who ever talked to him. No one knew Thielmann and, anyway, Thielmann was not a name entered in any birth certificates or records. So at best the police would be looking for a youth with platinum-blond hair (he quickly stuffed his wig into a trash container) known only as Rudy. He would simply cease to be that person.
Samson remained a larger problem. A fugitive does not benefit from the companionship of an albino leopard. Rudolfo headed for a department store to remedy the situation.
Curiously enough, Jurgen was in that same department store, although this was not the occasion of their first meeting. This was a near-miss, if you will. You could, conceivably, even perceive it as a miscalculation on Someone’s part. You could dismiss it as coincidence. But the fact remains that Jurgen Schubert was standing before a set of mirrors in the men’s department, trying on a suit of improbable colour. Preston the Magnificent, Sr., had been very clear in his instructions that the performer dress “not as a member of the drab and drear citizenry—for from these pedestrian ranks his Art has elevated him—rather as a latter-day Priest of the Sun, a Flamen of Fire, a wondrous robed Magi.” For some reason Jurgen seemed to think that magi had very bad taste, that they favoured the vomity tones of the spectrum. He had located a suit of such a profoundly ill hue, a bile green with little flecks of rust, that its manufacturer likely went out of business immediately following its creation. Jurgen stood before the mirrors and appraised himself, noting that the colour suited his deep plum eyelids. He struck a pose, placing a hand in front of his chest and twisting the fingers upwards. If he’d had a deck of cards, he would have produced a perfect fan; as it was, it merely looked like his hand was suddenly twisted by infirmity, retribution for even trying on the suit.
At that moment Rudolfo was skulking behind the racks of jackets and trousers, sneaking toward the hosiery. He glanced over, saw Jurgen and laughed. Jurgen spun around with darkened eyes. He saw a strange white hairless creature looking at him from behind some clothes. This monster shook its head and then disappeared from sight.
Jurgen turned around and inspected himself once more. He decided not to buy that particular suit.
Meanwhile, Rudolfo had picked up and paid for a pair of black socks, shoe polish, a dark blue watch cap, three belts and a pair of sunglasses. He and Samson then took to an alley and awaited nightfall.
Some hours later they emerged, the watch cap covering the greater part of Rudolfo’s baldness, the sunglasses balanced on his nose. He walked in a stiff, awkward manner, his shoulders pulled back and his chin tucked into his neck. In his right hand he clutched the loop of a buckled belt; this belt was attached to and through the others, so as to form an odd kind of harness; this jerry-rigging girded young Samson’s chest and belly. It was Rudolfo’s inspiration that he should disguise himself as a blind man, and Samson as his Seeing Eye dog. Toward that end, he had blackened the albino leopard’s body with the shoe polish. It was impossible to do more than impart a kind of sootiness to Samson, but it was enough to cut the glare. The other problem, the animal’s pointed ears, Rudolfo solved in a clever manner, pulling the black socks over them to dangle with canine goofiness.
They hadn’t gone more than fifty feet before a passerby pressed a banknote into Rudolfo’s palm. He had found a new career.
Chapter Eleven
Jurgen Schubert was buying a new suit because he had just gotten his first engagement at a nightclub. He was a veteran of birthday parties, corporate luncheons and county fairs, but this was his first proper job, a full month contracted with more promised. So he was using his savings to buy himself a suit, a fine and expensive suit, even though he was going to tear out the lining and bulk up the sleeves with hidden pockets. A small pouch would be sewn into the back vent, a place to keep the doves, which wouldn’t do much for his broadbeamed silhouette. The trousers would be eviscerated too, so that he could put his hands into his pockets and gain immediate access to a modified machinist’s apron full of little rigs, gags and decks of cards. The legs would be too long, and he’d turn the cuffs up once only; he needed very deep cuffs because many things came from, or ended up, there. People might think Jurgen had found his suit in a trash heap, though at least he’d selected a nice colour, a gun-metal grey that rippled light with every movement.
A few days later, he went down to the club with his gear—two huge suitcases, a birdcage, a small rabbit pen and a collapsible presentation table—to prepare for his debut. The door was locked—not that he’d expected the club to be open so early—so he knocked. There was no response. He began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t too early. It was, after all, only eight-thirty in the morning. Still, he was buoyed by the fact that pedestrians were scurrying around behind him.
He raised his knuckles and then paused, making certain that he was at the right address. There was nothing to distinguish it from the other houses on the street except for a small sign, very crudely painted, that read “MISS JOE’S.”
He pounded on the door. “Hello?” he called. There was nothing but a deep and still silence from within. He considered going back to the crowded apartment, returning later in the afternoon. But the sun was up and Münich was singing. “Hello!” he shouted o
nce more.
At last there came a muffled response. “Who is it?”
“It is I,” Jurgen answered uncertainly. “The Great Schuberto.”
“The magician?”
“The magician.”
“Do me a big favour, okay, Mr. Magic?”
“Yes?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Jurgen smiled stupidly at the door and saw that there was a small peephole drilled into the middle of it. Not knowing what else to do, he took a step to his right so that his face would be framed within the circle. “It is I,” he repeated quietly, “the Great Schuberto.” His eyelids were flickering.
“Why don’t you come back in a few hours?” demanded the voice. It occurred to Jurgen that he couldn’t determine whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman. “The nurse hasn’t even made her morning rounds,” the voice continued. “She hasn’t given us our medication or emptied the pisspots. It’s too fucking depressing in here. This is no place for a strapping young, um, youth, such as yourself. So please go away and come back in a little while. Okay?”
The Great Schuberto pulled back his eyelids and stared into the peephole. He could understand that he’d come too early, been too anxious, but he could not stem the anger. He disliked being turned away. He hated being counted as third-rate, even if he himself suspected that’s what he was. “I have to prepare,” he said firmly. “Let me in.”
Tumblers fell and latches loosened. The door creaked open with a horrible sound. Jurgen peered into the shadows and could see nothing. “Okay, Mr. Magic. Come in.” Using the voice as a guide, Jurgen finally found, some six feet in the air, a face. That is, he recognized it after a moment as a face, although originally he’d thought it was just a nose. A huge nose, crooked and hooked. Then he noticed two small eyes attached on either side, dark irises floating in stagnant yellow pools, and he was able to infer the existence of a mouth, because there was a smoking cigarette suspended up there.
The creature withdrew and Jurgen stepped over the threshold, dragging the presentation table and the heavier of the two suitcases with him. “It is necessary for me to prepare the stage,” he said once again. “That is why I have come.”
“What the fuck is this?” The creature was staring at the ground a few feet away. There were no clues as to gender. It was impossible to say whether the hair was long or short, because it was contained in a stocking, a black nylon that clung to a bullet-shaped skull. Emaciated and draped in a housecoat, a drab checked thing with a feathery fringe, the body gave no clues. The hand and forearm that poked out one of the sleeves were nothing but skin and bone, and precious little skin at that, thought Jurgen. The hand and forearm pointed toward the ground and trembled with disease or fury. “What is that? I’ll tell you what that is, my young Magic Man. Someone has puked up an internal organ. You tell these people to go easy on the sauce, but will they listen?”
Jurgen nodded and went back outside for the the rest of his stuff.
“Oh, little fuzzies!” The creature—Jurgen guessed this was Miss Joe—bent over to peer into the birdcage, and Jurgen noticed the residue of makeup, patches of powder, lipstick packed into the crevices of chapped lips. “What do you do?” the creature wondered. “Bite their heads off?”
“Oh, no,” responded Jurgen earnestly. “I make them appear and disappear.”
“Hmmm! Well, aren’t we all looking forward to that!” Miss Joe spun around and marched off into the shadows, this time with a very exaggerated sashay. “Let there be light,” Miss Joe intoned, reaching out a bony finger and stabbing at a control box mounted on the wall. Light bulbs flickered, for some reason accompanied by the sound of groaning pipes. There were flashes of great illumination, as though lightning forked from the ceiling, but when the lights finally burst into being they barely sliced through the gloom. Jurgen could make out a small stage, several round tables, a few disparate chairs and countless articles of discarded clothing.
By Jurgen’s foot there did indeed appear to be an internal organ. Miss Joe returned with a dustpan and broom, hunkering down to sweep the thing away. The housecoat fell away from the bony knees; Jurgen stared but could see nothing. “That’s cheating,” said Miss Joe, without looking up from her labour. (The broom was not equal to the task; Miss Joe now scraped at the thing with the blade of the dustpan.) “You’re going to have to find out the hard way.”
Jurgen spun around, took a few steps away. “The stage,” he called over his shoulder, “is inadequate.”
“Hmmm?” Miss Joe finally picked the thing up with her hands, throwing it onto the galvanized scoop, then came to stand beside him. Like the rest of the nightclub, the stage was littered with discarded clothing, but these were smaller pieces, items that Jurgen was able to classify as “underwear” in a very broad sense.
“The stage is too small.”
“Hey, Mr. Magic, I’ve had forty-one people on that stage doing the African Cluster Fuck. There’s plenty enough room for you.”
“We could take away these tables; I could use all this space here at the front.”
“Look, Schuberto. I don’t like to burst your little bubble, but you are the Chaser.”
“Chaser?” The word sounded like English. Jurgen had only a smattering of the language, perhaps nine or ten words. This wasn’t one of them.
“Yeah, right.” Miss Joe lit a cigarette, then spit out a puff of smoke that drifted over top of the little stage and loomed there like a rain cloud.
“What does this mean?”
Miss Joe spun around and stared at Jurgen for what seemed like a full minute. “Oh, well,” she said quietly. “The Chaser is the big star.”
“So I must have more room.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Miss Joe glanced around the nightclub. “I guess I don’t need all these fucking tables.”
Rudolfo meanwhile had staked his claim on Bayerstrasse. His career as a blind beggar was going exceptionally well, although he couldn’t have said exactly why. Every day he made refinements that added Deutschmarks to the battered tin cup he clutched between his fingers (tilting his head at an angle, pointing his toes inward, hunching over even more). But as to why he was successful and not Peter Bloch, the sightless man three storefronts away, Rudolfo couldn’t say. He didn’t realize that in large part it was his hairlessness, which lent him an unearthly sheen. And he didn’t know, because his head was always snapped forward, that Samson, hanging back and adopting the posture of an old hound dog, would often glance up at the pedestrians and pull the corners of his mouth back sharply, exhibiting, for a brief moment, a furious snarl. The passersby would quickly dig into their pockets and hurl coins into the tin cup.
“Danke, mein Herr,” Rudolfo would intone.
As successful as the disguise seemed to be, Rudolfo still expected to be arrested at any moment, taken away and charged with the murder of General Bosco. Sometimes the fear was so intense that his skin spotted with sickly sweat. He’d rented a tiny squalid room—he could afford better, but few innkeepers wanted his bizarre dog—but his nights were as sleepless as his days. So certain was he of arrest (and then what, probably execution) that he didn’t even bother making idle plans. He stood on the corner and, despite the wheel of weather, wind to warmth to wind once more, existed in a state of timelessness.
Until the day he recognized some people.
That statement warrants some clarification. Rudolfo didn’t know these people; he was certain that he had never seen or met them. But he knew, instantly, what they were.
There were two, a man and a woman. Or so it seemed. The man was fat, with a tiny pointed head, so that his silhouette was that of a huge teardrop. He sported a goatee. A fringe of wispy hair encircled the point of his skull, shaven like a monk’s tonsure. He wore sunglasses and a scarf; the rest of his habit was less easy to classify—maybe drapery and carpets hacked apart with a dull knife and placed willy-nilly on the fat body. Great grey billows of smoke exploded from him, more than could be accounted for by the thin bl
ack cheroot in the ebony holder.
The woman, too ridiculously feminine to really be a woman, pranced down the street as though she were the front half of a clown-horse and didn’t realize that she lacked both the costume and her partner. Her mission in life seemed to be relocating her outlandishly large breasts from one place to another. Everything else—the flaming red hair, the glistening purple lips—seemed as inconsequential as the mudflaps on a transport truck.
These were the people, Rudolfo realized, who had come to his mother’s Salon. The freakish and the misfit. The people who lived in the shadows. And these particular people moved, if not with determination, at least with purpose. Rudolfo understood suddenly that they had a harbour and a haven.
He whistled sharply. Young Samson uncoiled himself from his sitting position and caught himself short halfway through a tight, feline circling. The beast wet its lips—the tongue showing up dazzling white against the sooted fur—and let loose a passable arf. “Ja, Rover,” said Rudolfo. “Come, boy.” The two fell in behind the strange couple.
At night, Miss Joe’s was more conspicuous. Signs had appeared throughout the day, hastily written, the characters childlike and awkward. These were stuck to the edifice with masking tape, most at eye level, some higher, some so low they seemed designed to attract only the attention of people lounging in the gutters, JOACHIM’S GOING TO DO HIS THING, IF YOU THOUGHT LAST NIGHT WAS BAD, JUST WAIT, COME ON IN, BOYS AND GIRLS. One of the signs—better lettered than most, as if the creator had laboured at it with a touch more care—read THE GREAT SCHUBERTO, THE MAGIC MAN, PERFORMS NIGHTLY.
The Spirit Cabinet Page 13
