Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  But Benji was more stubborn than I expected. He started turning to more dubious sources for his magic. Sketchy 1-800 numbers, dodgy estate sales, even the ads in the back pages of comic books. Our parlor became a magnet for every Sammy Snake Oil and Charlie Charlatan in southern Ontario, each peddling his own unique brand of useless rubbish or dangerously stupid crap, all of which Benji started working into his parts of our show. It was like someone had put a giant flashing neon light on top of our house: Sucker Lives Here.

  Free from your father’s feel-good mediocrity and any responsibility to babysit Benji, my magic grew stronger with every show—a fact that critics and other real magicians were quick to pick up on. Magick Gurrrrl, hot on the trail of a new most eligible bachelor (your father now being married), also started sniffing around. Benji, on the other hand, was becoming more and more of an embarrassment with his gimmicky hokum. I could see the lack of applause was beginning to weigh on him.

  It was early December, the tontine only three weeks away, when I decided to take pity on Benji. The tontine would be a tie. His ego would be spared but everyone who mattered would know the real score. A win-win. Patting myself on the back for this beneficent solution, I headed home from the Fantasticum with a spring in my step. None of Benji’s regular charlatans were in the parlor when I got home, which I took to be a hopeful sign. Until I saw him. Smelled him first, actually. A cold, horrible freezer-burn smell—with the sweet, rotten tang of spoiled meat.

  “Good God, Benjamin,” I spluttered, throwing open the windows. “What did you eat for lunch?” But the smell wasn’t coming from my brother, but rather from an ancient skeleton of a man, his clothes torn like mummy windings, and a ragged white parakeet perched on his shoulder. A teacup was shaking in his palsied hand, and his horrible death-rattle breathing filled the room.

  “Who is our guest?”

  “Not our guest. Mine. You have perhaps heard of Monsieur Paraqueto?”

  Ignatius stopped and gave Balthazar a hard look. “Have you heard of Monsieur Paraqueto?”

  Balthazar shook his head.

  “That’s the thing,” Ignatius said, nodding with grim satisfaction. “Nobody has anymore. Nobody! The most famous bird-magic magician erased from memory. No photographs, no anecdotes. But I will not forget.”

  Rolling up his sleeve, Ignatius revealed the name Paraqueto crudely tattooed into his arm—like he had done it himself with ballpoint pen ink. And beneath it a long list of other names.

  “Who are those others?” Balthazar asked.

  “We’re not talking about those others right now. We’re talking about Monsieur Paraqueto. Like you, the name at first meant nothing to me. But as I stared at the desiccated mummy of a man, it all came flooding back. Of course I knew who Monsieur Paraqueto was. A humble kiddy-party magician who had catapulted to superstardom with his spectacular parakeet magic: parakeets that changed from red to pink to blue to yellow with the snap of a finger, parakeets that popped out of impossibly small pill boxes, magical parakeets that performed stunning aerial Busby Berkeley routines with such precision it was rumored he had sold his soul to the devil to achieve such breathtaking spectacles. Bursting onto the scene out of nowhere to become one of the biggest superstars of his age. The trademark red beret he wore was internationally recognized as a hallmark of top-shelf magical entertainment. Given how famous he had been, it was astounding to think how completely he had been forgotten.”

  “He’s heard of my magic,” Benji continued. “He wanted to meet me.”

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said, although truthfully disgust and revulsion were much closer to the actual sensations this ghastly apparition inspired in me. He raised his teacup in an empty echo of sociability.

  “Look, Benji, I’ve made a decision,” I said. “About the tontine. Let’s make it a tie, shall we?”

  “Scared, are we?” Benji said, a strange cold smile flickering around his lips.

  “Of course I’m not scared.”

  “Scared,” Monsieur Paraqueto echoed mockingly.

  “We’ll go ahead with it, then!” I snapped. “It’s your funeral.”

  “Funeral,” Paraqueto parroted approvingly as Benji poured him another cup of tea.

  “Three weeks until the tontine,” I reminded him as I left them to their tea party. “I give you until then to change your mind.”

  Benji spent the entire next week in the attic with horrible old Paraqueto, not coming out to eat or bathe or perform in our shows. Not that there were any complaints from our audience. Frankly, the show was better without him.

  Then, with the tontine only a week away, he showed up at the theater for a Saturday night performance, shivery and bluish around the lips.

  “It’s not too late to call it off,” I reminded him.

  “Still want to back out?” he asked, with that new cold smile of his. The inside of his ear was stained black from the horrible slobbering whispers of his new friend. “Still scared?”

  “Scared for you.”

  On the other side of the curtains, I saw Monsieur Paraqueto had taken a seat in the middle of the theater. Prime orchestra seating. The idiot house manager had allowed him to bring in his ratty bird as well. One member of the audience seated next to him, a wealthy banker and well-known patron of the arts, had a handkerchief out to cover his nose. Two other people had gotten up to request new seats. “Your friend is driving away business.”

  “That’s not all he’s going to drive away.”

  Other than Monsieur Paraqueto’s unpleasant presence, the first act passed uneventfully enough. Benji stuck to his old material for the most part. His execution had improved.

  More of his magic was real now. But the realness felt hollow. At least to me. And it still wasn’t strong enough to win him the tontine. What had he spent all that time up in the attic working on?

  It wasn’t until just before my finale that I found out. Coming back to the stage, I saw two audience volunteers, two strong-looking oaky-dokes from the pulp and paper mill, putting the last concrete blocks in place to form a solid wall.

  “It is very important to me that you know that this is an actual solid wall,” Benji was saying to the audience as he hung sheer curtains over a door-sized patch of wall, “so when I walk through it you understand the truly impressive scope of what I am doing.”

  Those were my lines! My concrete blocks! My big finish!

  “Couldn’t do it if I tried, eh?” he said to me with that ugly barracuda grin of his, then charged the wall.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a stab of satisfaction when he smacked headfirst into the wall, then staggered back, a bloody goose egg swelling up on his head. But I also felt a grudging respect for his even attempting to take on a bit of magic so obviously beyond his capabilities.

  “It’s okay,” I said gruffly as the audience roared with laughter. “I’ll take it from here.”

  But the ungrateful little thief just shook my hand off and rushed the wall again. And again the wall gave him the big concrete slap-down.

  In the audience, Monsieur Paraqueto remained seated, still as a corpse, his death-rattle breathing getting louder and louder. “Awk,” his parakeet squawked, fluttering its filthy wings. “Awk-awk.”

  “Stop,” I said, grabbing Benji up in a big bear hug before he could charge again.

  “I’m not finished!” he cried, struggling to get away.

  “Yeah, let the little guy finish, glory-hogger,” someone shouted from the audience. There were a few boos.

  My little brother had stolen my act, and now I was the bad guy?

  Monsieur Paraqueto’s death rattle filled the theater, drowning out the catcalls of the audience.

  “Go ahead. Humiliate yourself,” I said, letting go.

  “You always underestimated me,” Benji snarled, eyes full of hatred and something else strange I had never seen before—a seething blackness in his pupils. Blacker than black, and with a strange rippling movement.

&n
bsp; And when he ran at the wall again, I swear it was the pure force of his hatred that carried him through it, punching an ugly hole right through the concrete blocks. Way less elegant than the way I did it, but the audience ate it up, applauding, whistling, leaping out of their seats, forgetting about me entirely as Benji took his stolen bows.

  Looking out into the audience, I saw Monsieur Paraqueto was smiling. An empty, cold rictus of a smile.

  “What have you done to my brother?” I demanded, catching him by the arm after the show. The flesh of his arm was soft and tissuey and felt like it might pull off in my hand. And the smell he gave off . . .

  “Grubbit,” he croaked. “Grubbuck, grubb-it . . . ,” like he was trying to talk but couldn’t get his decayed vocal cords to shape the words. The man was half dead. He belonged at the hospital, not at the theater.

  “Enjoying your conversation?” Benji smirked, coming up behind us.

  “What game are you playing at?” I said, disgusted. “The poor man can’t even speak.”

  “Not to you,” Benji said. “But he tells me things. Secret things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the Fantasticum will be mine.”

  15. The Bullet Catch

  I didn’t bother waiting for the tontine to show him how wrong he was,” Ignatius continued. “The next night, I opened my first set with Benji’s saltshaker-through-the–solid-glass-table trick. It was his favorite piece of close-up magic—and one of the few he could do one hundred percent real. The cold war was on. But there wasn’t much challenge in copying Benji’s old magic, so I quickly moved on to outclassing him with my own amazing new magic. But whatever devil had gotten into him—jealousy, competition, insanity—had sparked a dormant ability, and soon he wasn’t just poaching my new effects, he was one-upping them as well. The gossip writers that had been following my journey toward becoming Magick Gurrrrl’s new most eligible bachelor shifted gears, and now it was all about our epic rivalry. And we did give them all quite a show.

  “If I floated myself in an armchair reading Robertson Davies over the audience one moment, he levitated himself playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on a grand piano the next. When I made Thirteen-Mile Creek run backward, Benji was right there to walk across the water. And Monsieur Paraqueto was there for all of it, becoming more and more decayed with each passing day.

  “I could have left at that point. Gone solo, gone to Vegas . . . I’d had a few offers. Goods ones. But by then I was as crazy as he was. Which I do not say to excuse why I chose the magic I did for the tontine, but rather to explain it.”

  Ignatius stopped and rubbed his face in his hands.

  “What?” Balthazar asked. “What did you do?”

  “The Bullet Catch,” Ignatius said.

  “Sounds kind of dangerous,” Balthazar said.

  “Kind of dangerous? The Bullet Catch is only the most cursed and deadly trick ever to darken the history of stage magic. It is directly responsible for the deaths of at least fifteen magicians, and has been flat-out banned by the International Brotherhood of Real Stage Magic.”

  “But if it was banned—” Balthazar began.

  “That’s what made it so perfect!” Ignatius retorted. “So what is the first step in creating real magic?”

  “Perfecting the illusion to a point you convince yourself that it is real,” Balthazar replied automatically.

  “And how, do you think, might you create the illusion of catching a bullet fired directly at your face from ten paces away?”

  “Fake bullets?” Balthazar suggested.

  “Easier said than done,” Ignatius said. “You have to get the real bullets out of their casings, create the wax dummy bullets to take their place. Then there’s the matter of figuring out how much explosive charge to pack into the shell. Too little, and the wax bullet wouldn’t have enough force to break the sugar glass I would hold up in front of my face. Too much, and the wax bullet would break not only the glass but also my skull. Many melons were sacrificed, but finally I had the proportions right and was ready to put my own melon in the line of fire.”

  Until that moment I had worked in total secrecy. But the time had come to share the secret with my faithful assistant, Margarita.

  “Here,” I said, putting my old Colt .45 into her delicate but capable hands. “When I give you the signal, shoot me in the face.”

  The poor girl went white as soap. “The Bullet Catch?”

  “It’s going to be fine,” I reassured her, curling her index finger around the trigger.

  Then I walked back ten paces, held up the clear pane of sugar glass in front of my face, and gave the signal for her to shoot.

  Trembling, she raised her arm and—BANG! The gun fired, the glass shattered, and there I was, a bullet (one I’d stashed in my cheek before the trick) clenched between my teeth, alive as ever. Then, as I was reloading the pistol, I caught a movement outside the window. But by the time I got there whoever or whatever it had been was gone.

  I did not return home until the light of the next morning was creeping into the sky, my poor assistant limping behind me, her trigger finger raw with broken blisters.

  Benji was there, sitting in the front parlor—a gun in his lap and a pile of bullets glinting darkly on the side table.

  “I’m premiering it tomorrow,” I said grimly. “You won’t have time to crack it.”

  “A lot of pressure,” he said mockingly, his strange new eyes writhing blackly. “I mean, who wants a big, black hole blown right through their brain?”

  I stared at him, stunned. When you’re getting ready to take magic live, the one thing you never do, ever, is put a worst-case-scenario picture in your head.

  “You’ve as good as shot us both in the foot with that pretty picture,” I snapped.

  “Foot’s not what you should be worried about.” Benji smirked as he slid bullets into his gun’s chamber and slammed it closed.

  Sleep carried me off before my head even hit the pillow. But my dreams came with visions of a bullet blasting through a bloodied skull. And I woke up the next morning more tired than ever.

  By the time I arrived at the Fantasticum that evening, I was a total wreck. The once-in-a-generation Fabuloso tontine always drew a big crowd, but that night broke all records. The line of gawkers and last-minute ticket seekers, sweltering in their Sunday-best suits and dresses, snaked all the way down the front drive and around the block. Someone (Benji, I suspected) had leaked rumors of the Bullet Catch to the press, and while nobody wants a man to fall to his death, they all want to be there when it happens.

  I did not expect to see Benji before the show, but when I came into my dressing room there he was, waiting for me with cigars and champagne.

  BANG! The cork exploded from the bottle.

  “To tonight!” he said, filling two flutes with bubbly.

  “You’ve done it?” I choked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I’ve seen it. In here.” He pointed to his forehead, thumb cocked like the hammer on a pistol.

  “Get the hell out of my dressing room,” I replied.

  I sleepwalked through the first part of the show, making a dozen sloppy mistakes, but nobody even noticed. The Bullet Catch had obliterated the point of anything else.

  Benji and I drew straws to see who would go first. I got the short stick. We shook hands and he left the stage.

  Margarita looked at me, naked fear in her large, clear eyes. I stood there, frozen for a moment, hands in my pockets, real bullets in the right, wax ones in the left. Closing my eyes, I looked for the image of the perfect catch. But all I saw was that same bloody skull.

  Pulling a wax bullet from the pocket of fakes, I began the trick. And the well-oiled machine rolled into motion. An audience member checked the bullet, initialed it and loaded it into the barrel as I, unwatched, secretly forged the guy’s initials on a second real bullet, which I then hid in my cheek. Gun loaded, Margarita took ten steps back. Ready, aim and . . . BAM! The gun fired, the
wax bullet shattered the sugar glass, and there I was, grinning widely, real bullet clenched in my teeth.

  It was a good fake-out. Correction: a great fake-out. It more than earned the whoops and applause. But after the applause stopped, expectation still charged the air.

  “My brother!” Benji said, striding back onstage with the generosity of a champion praising the runner-up. “Wasn’t he fantastic?”

  Until then, I had not noticed Monsieur Paraqueto in the audience. But then I saw him—squeezed into a row of rabid fans behind the judges’ table, all of them so intent on the unfolding spectacle that they didn’t even seem to notice the smell.

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “Now he asks me,” Benji joked, but I caught the flicker of fear in his writhing black eyes.

  “Boo!” the audience heckled.

  “Don’t listen to those boobs,” I pleaded with him.

  “How come all of these people believe in me and you don’t?”

  “You honestly think they’re here to see you pull it off?” I demanded. “Wake up. They’re here to watch you blast your brains out.”

  “You would see it that way.”

  “Please. For me . . .”

  “Well,” Benji said with a nervous grin, “let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  The audience’s cheer rattled the stained-glass windows like a storm.

  “I’m going to need some volunteers to help verify the gun is real and also the bullets. Not,” he added with a wink, “the wax fakey ones you-know-who favors.”

  Benji popped a fake bullet into his mouth and chewed. “Mmm, candy-coated.”

  Blood rushed to my face. Never, even at the height of our rivalry, would I have exposed him like that. As the audience yipped and howled their approval, something darker and duller settled over me like a black velvet cloth. And suddenly I just couldn’t be bothered anymore—not about him or about what was going to happen or about any of it.

  “I’m out of here,” I said. “I wash my hands.”