“Like what?”
“Did you miss the part about it being worse than either of us could ever possibly imagine?” Shawn said. “That means I can’t imagine what it is. But think of everything that Homeland Security has screwed up that no one got fired for. And now imagine that Major Voges is afraid she will be if anyone finds out what she’s done.”
Gus thought about it and shuddered. “We’re doomed.”
“I think that’s probably right,” Shawn said.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m thinking about a nice game of pin the tail on the donkey.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was about the art. About the precision of his movements, the subtlety of his misdirection, the speed of his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t mat-his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t matter whom he was performing for. He had astonished the crowned heads of Europe and amazed the jaded jet-setters of Monte Carlo, but their reaction was no more important to him than that of any other group who sought release in the presence of miracles.
There were those who claimed to pity Barnaby Rudge. He could hear them whispering in the Fortress of Magic. He, the great Rudge, who had traveled to India to meet the guru, if not quite with the Beatles, then at least with Herman’s Hermits. Rudge, who had been painted by Warhol and filmed by Jodorowsky, who had exchanged phone numbers with Anita Pallenberg and Bianca Perez-Mora Macias before losing both beauties to Keith and Mick. Rudge, who would have electrified an entire nation when he performed his greatest illusion, the Groovy Gap, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on April 11, 1969, if only those idiots had shut up about the Vietnam War for one more week instead of getting themselves cancelled.
Now, he had heard the whisperers say, Rudge was so forgotten, people assumed he stole the idea of using a Dickens title for his stage name from David Cop- perfield, when it was so obviously the reverse. He was reduced to playing to tiny crowds for peanuts. He had lost everything.
But Rudge knew he had lost nothing. As long as his fingers could still move, his art was still alive. And his art was all that mattered.
Barnaby Rudge bowed to his audience as he transitioned between illusions. The show had been going superbly. The scarves had flowed out of his sleeves like water down a mountain streambed. The Chinese linking rings had clashed together like armies in the night. There was a small hitch when he reached into the false bottom of his top hat and discovered that he’d left his pint of Cutty inside with the cap partially unscrewed and the dove he’d meant to produce had suffocated on the whiskey fumes. But he had improvised a clever bit of patter to distract the crowd as he disposed of both chapeau and oiseau, and no one seemed to notice the lacuna in the performance. And the rabbit, that irresistible pink-nosed climax to his act, the one that never failed to rouse the audience to a standing cheer, was nestled safely beneath the false bottom of his dove cage. This would be a show for the ages.
With a grand flourish, Rudge produced the cane that in moments he would transform into a bouquet of lovely flowers. The sight of so much color exploding from a simple black stick would elicit awed sighs from his audience, and while they were marveling, he’d use their stunned focus on the blooms to set the switch on the dove cage. It was all going perfectly.
Rudge felt a sticky blob slap against his cheek-avian revenge for the dove’s demise, perhaps. No matter. He would allow no bird to disturb his act when it was nearing its climax. He reached up to wipe it off and his hand came back slimed with green and pink. There was a brown circle in the middle of the blotch, which he realized was most of one of the icing a ’s in “Happy Birthday.”
Rudge glared out into the crowd to see who had flung the frosting at him. The culprit wasn’t hard to find. It was little Jimmy Eisenstein, whose tenth birthday the magician had been hired to help celebrate. Rudge could tell it was Jimmy who had iced him. He still held the frosting catapult-in this case a white plastic spork-aloft, now reloaded for a second assault. But even without the weapon, Rudge would have known who had committed this assault, because while Rudge had been consumed with the details of his performance, the entire audience of second graders had slipped out of their folding chairs and drifted away from the living room, leaving only the birthday boy to appreciate the act.
“Stay that missile, you fine young man,” Rudge boomed out cheerfully. “And I will show you the wonders of the Orient.”
“If you mean the rabbit, it peed in the birdcage and it’s dripping through the bottom,” the lovable young scamp retorted. “And I saw you flip that switch on the back of the cage. What does that do-unhook some door so you can reach through the fake floor?”
Rudge let out a hearty laugh, fighting off the urge to throttle the dear lad. Every magician worth his gold lame suit had encountered hecklers, and the worst were the ones who had dabbled in the art themselves. Clearly this boy was planning a career on the stage. Maybe he even hoped to model his act after Rudge’s.
Normally, the magician would have stifled the interloper with one of his special zingers. But there was a keen intelligence in the youngster’s eye, and since there were no other spectators to disillusion, perhaps he could use this as a moment to share his precious secrets.
“If you’d care to approach, young man, I might be persuaded to show you how to make the rabbit appear,” Rudge said.
“I’ll wait until the cage stops dripping pee,” Jimmy said.
“I have other miracles I could teach you,” Rudge said, glancing over to see a stream of rabbit urine dripping out of his dove house and bleaching the blue carpet beneath it a dingy yellow.
“My dad said you could probably make our entire liquor cabinet disappear if someone didn’t keep an eye on you,” Jimmy said.
Rudge glowed at the compliment. It had been many years since he’d practiced the illusion of the vanishing furniture, but it was good to know he was still remembered for it. “That is a particularly advanced glamour,” Rudge said. “Perhaps we should start with a smaller miracle and work our way up.”
“Whatever,” Jimmy said. “Can you tell me what my dad did on his last business trip to Omaha that made my mom so mad?”
“What kind of magic is that?” Rudge said.
“The kind the other guy is doing.”
Jimmy pointed out through the glass sliding door to the far end of the backyard, where the entire troop of ten-year-olds had clustered around a skinny, badly dressed man, who barely looked older than them, and his slightly better-dressed sidekick. As the interloper pressed his fingers deep into his forehead as if in communication with the Great Beyond, Rudge realized where he had seen him before-in the crowd at the Fortress of Magic.
With a shiver of disgust, Rudge realized what he must be dealing with-a pair of those self-styled “bad boys of magic.” Sure they were bad boys, in the same sense that basal cell carcinomas could be considered the “bad boys” of the metabolism. They had no respect for the Art. Their only interest was self-promotion. They froze themselves in ice cubes or buried themselves in glass coffins or hung by their toes for a month over Niagara Falls, and they had the temerity to call those stunts magic. They were acts of endurance, of self-immolation, of stupidity-but there was absolutely nothing magical about them.
These impostors had taken over almost every corner of the business. They sucked up all the increasingly rare TV time dedicated to professional magic. They got the best showroom bookings. They got the covers of all the trade papers. But there was one corner they would not steal from the true artists of the profession. They could not steal away the wonder in the eyes of children. Rudge would not allow it.
Barnaby Rudge marched out of the house and across the yard to where the interlopers stood surrounded by second graders. He pushed through the throng of children and glared at the bad boy with a stare that had paralyzed tigers in Bombay.
It took the bad boy a moment to acknowledge his presence, no doubt trying to figure out how to save face now that he’d been confronted by his su
perior. Instead, he bent down to one of the kids. “Your teacher thinks you’re a genius and your parents want to send you to a special school for advanced students,” he said. “And now you’re terrified because the only reason you’ve done so well on tests is that you found copies of the teachers’ editions of all your books in a thrift store and you’ve been cheating all year.”
The kid gaped up at him. He looked as if he wanted to deny the charges; then he broke down. “What do I do?” he whispered.
“I read auras; I don’t tell futures,” the bad boy said. “But I’m pretty sure the advanced school textbooks have teachers’ editions, too.”
The kid brightened again, and the bad boy searched the crowd for his next victim. Rudge stepped forward.
“Out, fraud,” Rudge boomed, an accusing finger in the bad boy’s face.
The interloper shrank back under the force of Rudge’s disapprobation. “Do not evict me, oh great wizard,” the interloper begged. “I seek only to learn at the feet of the master.”
At least that’s what he meant to say, Rudge could tell from the quaver in his voice. The actual words were closer to “Say, how do you get rabbit pee out of gold lame anyway?” but Rudge knew that one question would lead to another, and soon he would be begging for all the secrets of the magician’s art. Rudge’s will began to weaken. The Eisenstein boy was pretty young to take on as an apprentice; this new one was old enough to drive to the liquor store to do Rudge’s shopping when it was necessary. And he came with a sidekick, whom he could turn into a valuable ally if the student ever turned on the master. Best of all, the new-comer was doing a pretty good job of entertaining the children, which meant that Jimmy’s father would have no grounds for cutting Rudge’s negotiated fee for the appearance.
“Your act has promise, young wizard,” Rudge said, and waited for the glow of joy to spread across his incipient assistant’s face. “If you choose, you may study with me. I can teach you to take it to the next level-and all the way to the highest level.”
“Like you did with the Martian Magician?” the young man said, an awestruck tone cleverly hidden under a veneer of stylish cynicism.
Perhaps that was meant as praise. After all, that green thug was the highest-grossing act on the Vegas Strip. But the very thought that he would have anything to do with the villain who was destroying stage magic forever was enough to undo an entire week’s worth of blood pressure medication.
Still, if this young pup was impressed by Marvin the Martian, Rudge could use that to teach him some of the higher skills. Let the kid think he was going to follow the fake’s lead, and meanwhile teach him the real art. By the time class was over, his pupil would understand why the momentarily popular act was such a catastrophe.
“Well, yes,” Rudge said. “Everything he knows, he learned from me.”
The bad boy leaned close to Rudge, his face glowing with admiration. His eyes seemed to take in every inch of the magician’s face, then his body. And then there was some kind of shift that Rudge couldn’t understand, but he seemed to be appraising Rudge’s very soul.
“I knew it,” the youth said. “There was no way that someone could perform a miracle like the Dissolving Man without learning it all at the feet of a master.”
“That is very perspicacious,” Rudge said. “Your mind is strong and clear.”
“And then he rode that illusion he stole from you to the top of the entertainment industry without giving you the credit you so richly deserve,” he continued. “How justifiably enraged you were, how righteous in your fury. Not because you wanted that kind of money and fame for yourself, of course, but because he was damaging the art form.”
“Yes,” Rudge said.
“But you saw one way to stop him before he destroyed the entire world of stage magic,” the youth said. “You would use the very trick he stole from you against him. You would expose him on stage as a fraud and a charlatan, and he would slink off, back into anonymity forever.”
“I, um, what?” Rudge said. This was sounding less and less like an eager acolyte heaping praise on his new master.
“Because only you, Barnaby Rudge, knew the secret of the green man’s water tank. Only you were wizard enough to sabotage it,” he said.
“And what a brilliant way to ruin your rival.” It was the sidekick talking now. “Up on stage in front of every important magician working today. With one little flick of your wrist, you would kill his act forever.”
“Too bad you accidentally killed that chubby guy, too,” the youth said. “That’s even worse than when your pigeon died inside the top hat.”
“The pigeon was just resting,” Rudge said quickly, looking around to see if the goons from the SPCA had started following him again. “I chose not to disturb her sleep, so I moved on to the next illusion.”
“So you didn’t kill your bird, but you admit you killed the chubby man,” the youth said.
“No,” Rudge said. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t even know who he was. I never saw him before.”
“You didn’t have to see him, because it was murder by remote control,” the sidekick said. “While everyone was partying at the Fortress, you slipped into the showroom and sabotaged the tank. Probably just had to fiddle with that latch.”
Rudge felt an odd glow of pride. All he had to do was admit to this charge and he would go down in history as the greatest practitioner of stage magic since Houdini-the man who gave P’tol P’kah his greatest illusion, and then, when he misused it, took it away from him again. But as the glow faded, Rudge remembered that all of Houdini’s great talent couldn’t save him from a ruptured appendix. In fact, it was his immortal reputation that sent him to an early grave, as some drunken college lout felt compelled to test the magician’s claim of a stomach impervious to any blow. If Rudge were sent to prison, there was no doubt what his fate would be. He would be besieged by fellow felons pleading with him to teach them the art of escape. And when they realized that this was not something that could be picked up in an afternoon, but that needed to be studied over decades, their frustration would turn to rage, and that rage would turn against him.
“I couldn’t have,” Rudge said. “I was in the bar all night until P’tol P’kah stomped in.”
“Or you made it appear that you were in the bar.”
Rudge reached into his jacket pockets and pulled out receipt after receipt. He threw them in the youth’s face. “Look at them,” he demanded. “Did I conjure up these bar bills?”
“If you can make a rabbit appear out of thin air, it shouldn’t be hard to conjure up a receipt.”
“You saw me confront him in the main parlor. How could I have been rigging his device if I was right there?”
“Did we see you?” the faux acolyte said. “Or did you perform some particularly cunning illusion to make us think we saw you?”
“Maybe he has a secret twin brother who stood in for him,” the sidekick said. “Or a machine that manufactures clones.”
“I don’t know any cunning illusions!” The words forced their way out of Rudge’s throat before he could stop them. “I do tricks; that’s all. Tricks I buy out of some mail-order catalog! I haven’t come up with a new gag in two decades!”
Rudge was aware that an entire birthday party’s worth of children was staring up at him. He didn’t care. Let them stare. It felt astonishingly good to tell the truth.
But the sidekick didn’t seem to want to accept it. “You taught P’tol P’kah the Vanishing Man.”
“I taught him nothing!” Rudge shouted. “I have no idea how he did that illusion.”
“I find that hard to believe,” the youth said. “A man of your great talent.”
“It’s true,” Rudge said. “I was desperate to know how he did it. I spent a fortune going to his show, studying it from every angle, searching for the tell. You can ask any of the other magicians.”
“How would they know?”
“Because they all did the same thing,” Rudge said. “I use
d to see them at the performances whenever they could scrape together the two-hundred-dollar ticket price. Except for Phlegm, of course.”
“What, you wouldn’t see the show if you were congested?”
“Phlegm is a person,” Rudge said.“At least she claims to be a person. You saw her-that tattooed freak show who sticks knives in her eyeballs.”
“You know,” the sidekick said, “some people might think it odd for a guy in a gold suit stained with rabbit pee to call anyone else a freak show.”
“It’s not an insult; it’s a fact,” Rudge said. “Back in the nineties, she was part of one of those New Vaudeville tours. Her act was Phlegm, the One-Woman Freak Show.”
“So she didn’t go to see the show to figure out how he did it?”
“Are you kidding?” Rudge said. “She was the only one who didn’t buy tickets. She got a job as a cocktail waitress so she could see it twice a night. Still didn’t do her any good.”
The two bad boys exchanged a glance, as if they were trying to decide if he was telling the truth. Rudge decided to nudge them along.
“P’tol P’kah was the best of us,” Rudge pleaded. “I think before he disappeared for good, some of his peers-so-called peers-were beginning to think he actually did have magical powers. Or was really from Mars. Or anything that would explain how he could actually dissolve in a tank of water. Because no one ever saw through the trick.”
“I want to believe you,” the youth said. “I really do. But your talent is so great, I can’t imagine an act you couldn’t duplicate, or even improve on, with just a little effort.”
“No, please, you have to believe me,” Rudge said. “The last time I actually earned my fee was during the Reagan administration.”
The youth and his sidekick seemed to think it over; then they both shrugged. “Nah,” the sidekick said, “we can’t see that. Not after the brilliant show you put on this afternoon.”
“It wasn’t brilliant,” Rudge pleaded. “It couldn’t even keep the attention of a bunch of second graders. My dove died of alcohol poisoning. My rabbit ruined the carpet.”
Psych: Mind Over Magic p-2 Page 13
