“That’s him, all right.”
Harvey produced a live duck from inside his baggy jacket, then pretended to fall down in amazement as the other clowns pummeled him. He seemed to remember us from that morning and came up a short way into the stands to award Teddy a colorful cardboard medal. Then he returned to the sawdust as another clown batted him with a rubber club.
There was a sudden blare of trumpets from the circus band, and while the clown brigade still held forth the spotlights picked out the five acrobats running into the center ring where a net had been pulled into place. From somewhere unseen, Bigger’s voice boomed over a loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, the stars of our show—the five Flying Lampizi Brothers!”
The five dark-haired young men bowed and gyrated, letting the spotlights catch the glitter of their spangled tights. Each costume was a different color—white, pink, blue, yellow, and green—and the five certainly looked enough alike to be brothers. Bigger went on to introduce them. “That’s Arturo in white, Nunzio in pink, Giuseppe in blue. Ignazio is in green and Pietro in yellow. Let’s give them a great big hand!”
Then the brothers went into their act, briskly climbing the rope ladders to the highest reaches of the great tent and stepping onto the wooden platforms. Arturo was the first to swing, his great leap into space carrying him to a firm grasp of the trapeze. The crowd cheered, and the other brothers followed him with a dazzling display of aerial gymnastics. They seemed so sure of themselves that once during a particularly tricky maneuver when Nunzio and Arturo fell to the net, the spectators laughed and cheered, assuming it was part of the act. Perhaps it was—Harvey and his clowns frolicked around the fallen men as if in a carefully rehearsed routine. Meanwhile, up above, the remaining three brothers kept up their acrobatics without missing a beat.
The spotlight followed Nunzio as he climbed the ladder to rejoin his brothers. The colored lights were dazzling now, shifting around the tent with a maddening irregularity. I watched Giuseppe and Pietro link up on one trapeze, then swing back as Pietro caught Ignazio in midair. Arturo, who seemed to be in charge, was now up and waiting on the platform as the empty trapeze swung back toward him. He caught it easily and launched himself after his brothers.
It took me a few moments to realize that something was wrong, and then the thought only dawned on me gradually. The colored lights, the cheers and gasps of the crowd, the swinging, hurtling bodies—suddenly, instead of five brothers, there seemed to be only four. I counted again, checking the colors. Blue, yellow, white, green. The brother in pink was missing. Nunzio.
“Do you see the brother in pink?” I asked Teddy.
“No. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he fell in the net.” But I knew that wasn’t true. There had only been the one fall.
Now the brothers themselves seemed aware Nunzio was missing. They were huddled in conversation on one of the wooden platforms. Down below, George Bigger had reappeared in his ringmaster’s costume. “Let’s have a great big hand for the Flying Lampizi Brothers!” he shouted.
The four swung out on the trapezes and dropped gracefully into the safety net, one after the other. Giuseppe, Pietro, Arturo, and Ignazio. No mention was made of Nunzio, and as the brothers ran off to the cheers of the crowd the lion and tiger cages were already being wheeled in for the animal-
training act.
“Will you be all right here alone for a few minutes?” I asked Teddy.
“Sure, Dr. Sam. Where you goin’?”
“Just outside. Don’t wander away—stay right here.” I knew Sheriff Lens and his wife could see him from where they sat, so I wasn’t too worried about leaving him.
I made my way down to the sawdust-covered ground and out the wide entryway through which the acts appeared and departed. George Bigger was standing with his hat off, talking heatedly with the four brothers. “What happened?” I asked Arturo. “Where’s your brother?”
“He is gone,” Arturo said simply, spreading his hands wide. “He was there and then he was gone.”
Sheriff Lens had seen me leave my seat and had followed me out. “What’s up here?”
“One of the acrobats seems to have disappeared.”
“I thought there were five at the beginning.”
Bigger’s wife Hilda came running up in her glistening costume. “He’s not in the sleeping wagon.”
“It looks like we’ve got a problem,” Bigger said with a frown.
“The man couldn’t just vanish,” I insisted. I’d known a few who had, over the years, but not without the assistance of some elaborate trickery. “When did you notice he was gone?”
“I’d just done my flying double somersault,” Ignazio said. “Nunzio was supposed to follow me. I looked around on the platform and he wasn’t there.”
“Could he have fallen into the net?” I asked.
Arturo, the senior brother, replied. “He did fall, earlier. I fell with him. But we both climbed back up.”
“I know. I saw him.” I turned to Sheriff Lens. “You must have seen him climb back up, too, Sheriff.”
“I remember seeing this fella going up the ladder,” he replied, nodding to Arturo. “Don’t know about the other one.”
“Well, I saw him. I saw him go up, but I can’t be certain I saw him afterward. The trapeze area is fairly dim when the lights aren’t on it.”
“There’s nowhere he could have gone,” Bigger insisted. “Unless he climbed through the top of the tent.”
“Might he have done that?” I walked far enough outside the tent so I could see the top. There was certainly no one on it now.
“No, I just said that,” Bigger explained. “The canvas fits snugly around the poles supporting it. You don’t want water coming in if it rains. Besides, the acrobat platforms are about ten feet below the canvas. He couldn’t have climbed higher without someone noticing.”
“Whatever happened to him, somebody musta seen it,” the sheriff said. “You got several hundred people inside there.”
“He’ll turn up.” Hilda didn’t sound too certain.
They were all standing there, not knowing what to do, so I decided to go back to Teddy. Sheriff Lens followed along. “Circus people are odd ones,” he said. “I remember once—”
“Sheriff!” I stopped.
“What is it?”
His eyes were on the cage where a lion tamer with whip and gun was keeping the big cats on their pedestals. But I was looking upward, toward the top of the tent. There was no one to be seen up among the ropes and pulleys, and no one on the platforms, but an empty trapeze was swinging back and forth, as if supporting the weight of an invisible acrobat.
Giuseppe and Pietro climbed the rope ladder to investigate the swinging trapeze, but when they returned to the ground they could tell us nothing. “Perhaps a little breeze,” Pietro speculated.
“I don’t think so. It was too regular for a breeze. Besides, I just heard how tightly the canvas fits.” I had checked to see that Teddy was all right and then come back outside with the four Lampizi Brothers. Harvey and the other clowns had appeared from somewhere, ready to make a reappearance as the animal act ended.
“Did you see anything of Nunzio?” Bigger asked Harvey. The sad-faced clown shook his head. I still didn’t know whether he was actually able to talk or not.
Sheriff Lens had gone back to his seat, mumbling that there was nothing to investigate, but the strange disappearance of Nunzio Lampizi bothered me. “Enjoying the circus?” I asked Teddy as I returned to my seat.
“It’s super, Dr. Sam! That lion tamer had a tiger jumping through a hoop! And then he set the hoop on fire and the tiger jumped through it again—right through the flames!”
My eyes had wandered back to the trapeze overhead. It seemed to be moving again. A few moments later, when the brothers reappeared for the final part of their act, I could see they noticed it, too. As Arturo led the way up the ladder, perhaps not as briskly this time, he turned to watch the errant trapeze. Fo
r most of the spectators, those who noticed it at all, this seemed to be part of the show. But I knew something weird was happening.
Then Pietro swung out on one of the other trapezes, transferring to the ghostly, swinging one without mishap, and from then on the act proceeded normally. When it ended, with no mention of the missing Nunzio, Hilda reappeared on horseback to lead the show’s finale, a noisy charge of cowboys firing blank cartridges into the air.
Then George Bigger’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling us that the performance was over and to spread the word about it. The show had run barely one hour and forty minutes, some twenty minutes shy of the promised two hours, and I wondered if that much had been cut because of Nunzio’s disappearance.
As we left, I spoke to some of the people around Teddy and me, trying to confirm what I had seen. Yes, there had been five brothers at the beginning and no one seemed certain what had happened to the fifth one. Everyone noticed he’d disappeared along the way, and expressed curiosity about it. One woman suggested he’d injured himself when he fell into the net, but an older man assured her he’d climbed back up after that. Several people agreed that the one in the pink tights had climbed back up to the platform after falling.
And Sheriff Lens and Vera both swore that Arturo had gone back up, too. They’d had an excellent view from their seats at the end of the tent.
I pondered over it and came to no real conclusion. “Five brothers went up originally. Two fell down into the net, but those two both went back up. Three were still up there, and two joined them. Three plus two equal—four?”
“It’s some sort of publicity stunt,” Sheriff Lens grumbled. “Let’s just forget about it.”
As the four of us walked across the dusty parking lot toward my roadster and the sheriff’s sedan, I saw a man in clown makeup heading away from the circus grounds, out across the field toward the Wharton house. “Look at that,” I told the sheriff. “Seems a bit odd.”
“Stop there a minute!” Sheriff Lens bellowed. “Come back here!”
The clown broke into a fast run and I was after him. I was still in my mid-thirties back then, and in pretty good shape. Over the rough ground I caught him quickly, knocking him off-balance so that we both went down. “What’s your hurry?” I asked, keeping a grip on him.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” he said. “Lemme go!”
Sheriff Lens came running up. “Are you one of the circus clowns?”
He stood up, brushing himself off. “No, I ain’t.”
“Then you can be arrested for trespassing.”
“Like hell I can!” he shot back, and suddenly I realized who was beneath the clown makeup. “I’m Mike Wharton. My dad owns this land.”
Sheriff Lens gaped in genuine amazement. “Suppose you explain what you’re doing here in a clown getup,” I suggested. Although I knew his father, I didn’t know young Wharton very well.
His shoulders drooped a bit as he pulled off the red-rubber nose and wiped some of the greasepaint from his face with a cloth from his pocket. “I—I don’t know. It’s something I always wanted to do. I told Bigger I’d lease him the farm for a week on the condition that he let me perform as a clown with the circus.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” the sheriff muttered.
“I suppose clowning is a noble calling,” I said to Mike Wharton. “But why were you running away just now?”
“I didn’t want to get involved,” he said.
“Involved in what?”
“That acrobat who disappeared. I figured the cops would be questioning people. I seen Sheriff Lens here nosin’ around already. I didn’t want my old man to find out I was bein’ a clown. He’d say it was stupid.”
“How’d you know about the acrobat?”
“I heard Harvey tellin’ about it.”
“I’m glad to know he can talk when he wants to.”
“So I just lit out before anyone questioned me.”
“Did you know Nunzio, the missing man?”
Wharton shrugged. “They all look alike to me. I seen ’em all. I talked to ’em, but I don’t know which is which.” He was obviously eager to get away.
“Go on,” Sheriff Lens said. “We know where to find you if we got any more questions.”
“Okay,” Wharton said and ran off across the field like a fox suddenly freed from a trap.
“Do you think he knows anything about it?” I asked the sheriff.
“Naw, the kid barely knows the time of day. Pop Wharton sure got blessed with a pair of losers.” I knew he was referring to the Wharton daughter, Isabelle, who’d run off years before with a bootlegger and was never heard from again.
I stared across the field at the vacant farmhouse, wondering whether anyone would ever live there again. Mike had taken a room in town months ago, apparently not wanting the burden of the farm once his father was hospitalized. Now the old place stood empty, with no one inside to hear the circus music or the laughter of children.
I went back to the house with the sheriff, Vera, and Teddy and was persuaded to stay for a light supper. Teddy was full of talk about the circus, unaware that he’d seen anything out of the ordinary. I was beginning to think I hadn’t, either. The missing Nunzio would probably reappear in the next town. For all I knew, he might repeat his vanishing stunt at each performance.
But a bit later that evening, when I returned to my apartment, a reporter named Jeff Slattery was parked outside waiting for me. “I’m from the Springfield paper,” he explained, showing his press card. “Someone called in a report that one of the circus acrobats disappeared during the performance of the Bigger & Brothers Circus here today.”
“Why are you coming to me about it?” I asked.
“I already spoke to George Bigger at the circus. He confirmed that it happened and gave me your name as a witness. He says the sheriff saw it, too.”
I studied the young man more closely. He wore his fedora back on his head and his tie was loose at the knot, probably in imitation of the way big-city reporters were supposed to dress. I was surprised there wasn’t a press pass tucked into his hatband. I started to tell him what I had seen.
“Bigger says the empty trapeze was actually swinging, as if the missing acrobat was still there, but invisible. Did you see that?”
“Yes, I saw it. A stiff breeze might have caused it.”
“The air was pretty calm today.”
I shrugged. “Look, go ahead and write the story any way you want.”
“They say you’ve had some experience solving mysteries.”
“A little.”
“You gonna solve this one?”
“I haven’t been asked. And I’m not sure it is a mystery.”
“Seems pretty mysterious to me.”
As he was leaving, I thought of a question for him. “Who phoned in the story? Did they give a name?”
“Nope. Just said they were at the circus and saw it happen. A man’s voice. I figured it was worth a trip down here.”
“Was it?”
“Well, this fellow Nunzio Lampizi sure is missing. That’s good enough for me.”
I left him and went in the house, thinking that whatever was going on, it needn’t concern me.
The telephone was ringing as I entered the apartment. It was my nurse, April, wondering how my day had been. “Did Teddy enjoy the animals?”
“The animals and the clowns and everything. He was delighted with it all. Were there any emergencies?”
“Nothing important. Mrs. Mitchell has her usual trouble. I told her you’d be out to see her in the morning.”
“Fine.”
“Sam—”
“What?”
“On the way home tonight, I passed the Wharton place just as it was getting dark. There was a light in Pop Wharton’s bedroom.”
“Isn’t he still in the hospital?”
“Of course. That’s why the light struck me as odd.”
“Probably that son of his. Maybe he’s letting some
of the circus people use the house or he’s using it himself while the circus is here.”
“Will you be going right out to Mrs. Mitchell’s in the morning or stopping by the office first?”
“I’ll come in first. Thanks for calling, April.”
“Good night, Sam.”
I hung up, trying to remember when it was she’d stopped calling me Doctor Sam.
In the morning I was up early. I decided to swing by the Wharton farm, for no good reason except curiosity. When I reached the old frame house, I could see a light still burning in the upstairs bedroom. Even in the morning brightness the naked glow of the ceiling bulb could be seen through the lace curtains. Beyond the house, across the fields, the circus tents stood like desert sentinals. I thought I heard the distant trumpeting of a bull elephant, but here all was quiet.
Too quiet, I decided.
People in Northmont didn’t leave bedroom lights burning all night.
The knob of the front door turned at my touch and I pushed it open. “Mike!” I called out. “Mike Wharton! Are you here? It’s Dr. Hawthorne.”
There was something red lying on the stairs to the second floor. It was Mike’s rubber nose. No answer had come to my shouts. I picked up the nose and started up the stairs. The lighted master bedroom was empty, the smooth spread on the bed untouched. I moved down the hall to the next room and opened the door.
As I snapped on the light I was assaulted by a rainbow of garish color. The pink walls were covered with paintings and photographs, many clipped from magazines, all of them of clowns—circus clowns, movie clowns, even a picture of Caruso in his role as Punchinello. And on the floor in the center of it was what I first thought was a crumpled dummy in a clown costume—but then I saw it was a man, lying face down on a large stain of dried blood.
“Mike,” I heard myself say and I bent to turn over the body, searching instinctively for any sign of life.
But it wasn’t Mike Wharton in the clown costume this time. I was pretty certain it was someone I’d only seen at a distance before—the missing acrobat, Nunzio Lampizi.
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 10
