The Ambitious Card

by John Gaspard

  This stopped him dead in his tracks. He spun around and I saw about seven different emotions move across his face in an instant. “International my ass,” he said finally, breaking into a wide grin. “They ought to be brought up on charges for that name. They are, to be kind, barely domestic, at best.”

  “So that was you?”

  “Indeed it was. You should have come over and joined us. It might have made for a more enlightening conversation. Our friend Mr. Boone is a lover of the monologue, the more lengthy the better. And he can certainly make quick work of a stack of pancakes, let me tell you. Impressive, in a nauseating sort of way.”

  “You were interviewing him for the article?”

  “The book, my friend, the book. However,” Clive said as he slumped back against the wall dramatically, “Mr. Boone, although talkative, says far more than he actually reveals. He mostly spoke in circles, very few of them concentric. The conversation was, in a word, fruitless. Know what I mean?” he added, doing a fair impression of Boone’s verbal tic.

  “Too bad. You were probably one of the last people to talk to him before Arianna’s death.”

  “And don’t think I won’t be playing up that angle to the hilt if our friend Mr. Boone turns out to be our killer, knock wood. Well, must get back to the mines, as they say. No rest for the wicked and all that.” He tossed a wave in my direction and headed again toward the elevator bank.

  “Clive, security is pretty tight up there. I doubt they’ll let you in on the fifth floor.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow, I’m not going to the fifth floor,” he said, pressing the down button and turning back toward me. “Perish the thought. I’m off to the cafeteria and then to the employee smoking lounge. When you want the dish in a hospital or any other large, bureaucratic institution, go to where the lowest-paid workers congregate. That’s where you get the top drawer information.”

  Even though he was across the lobby from me, he chose this moment to lower his voice. “In spite of what you may have been taught, my boy,” he said, taking on the tone of a wise schoolmaster, “a straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points. At least, that’s always been my experience.”

  He punched the down button twice more. “Here we go,” he said as the elevator door opened. “Let the gossiping begin.”

  Stopping at Akashic Records was not the shortest distance between the two points represented by the hospital and my home, but I ended up veering off course and stopping there anyway.

  I wasn’t entirely certain why—another bout of intuition, I assumed, which so far hadn’t done me any real good. In fact, as I thought about it, I realized that my intuition to follow Boone had put me in the hospital and hadn’t helped Arianna one bit. So much for the power of intuition, I concluded as I pulled into the store’s parking lot.

  As with the first time I entered Akashic Records, I was immediately assaulted by the wall of odor that greeted customers at the door. The smell had not abated since my first visit—if anything, it may have grown even more pervasive. However, the thick cloud of sickly candle smells didn’t seem to be hindering business. The store was abuzz with customers.

  Several clerks were interacting with shoppers, but there was one clerk in particular I wanted to speak with. I finally spotted Michael, chatting up a customer in the record area. I crossed the store and stood nearby, casually flipping through one of the used-record bins, waiting for an opening.

  “Actually,” Michael said to the customer, a harried-looking woman in her forties, “our credit policies have recently undergone a change. I know that Arianna used to allow seemingly endless credit, but after some study we’ve determined that policy was fiscally unsound. Consequently, all outstanding balances will need to be settled before we can begin further treatments.”

  I couldn’t hear the woman’s response, due to the ambient noise in the shop and the low tone she was using, but Michael nodded as she spoke, looking like someone who was trying to look sympathetic.

  He couldn’t quite pull it off.

  Michael shifted his weight from one leg to the other and crossed his arms, flexing his biceps and giving his back a stretch while he listened. He obviously spent a lot of time working out, and the tight pants and even tighter shirt that he wore highlighted all his time-consuming efforts. His hair was tousled in a very strategic manner and when he smiled it was clear that the whiteness of his teeth owed more to nurture than nature. His gaze darted around the store while he listened to the woman.

  I put my head down and continued to flip through the records, which consisted of easy-listening vocalists from the seventies and eighties. The woman must have finished her plea, for Michael began speaking again.

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but our policies are our policies and we simply can’t, in good conscience, make the kinds of exceptions that Arianna was so fond of making.” He nodded again while the woman spoke. “Yes, well, we’re sorry to see you go, but I would remind you that your outstanding balance is still your responsibility and we will turn it over to a collection agency if the need arises. Thank you. Goodbye.” These last words were said to the woman’s back as she huffed toward the door, shaking her head.

  Michael flexed his biceps once more for good measure and then surveyed the store again. He stepped over to the nearest counter and began tapping away on a computer keyboard. I pulled the first record out of the bin I was in front of and walked over to the counter. He heard my approach but did not look up.

  “And did you find everything you were looking for today?” he asked, still tapping away at the keyboard. He glanced at the album in my hand and did a double take, which caused me to look at the album for the first time. It was Olivia Newton John’s Have You Never Been Mellow.

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “I’ve been looking for this one for quite a while,” I added.

  He glanced up at me for the first time and it took a moment for a look of recognition to settle in on his face. “Mr. Marks, isn’t it?” he said, taking the album from me and ringing it up on the cash register. “You were in here the other day, right?”

  “Yes, I was talking to Arianna. So sorry to hear what happened to her.”

  “Yes, a tragedy,” he agreed. “We were all devastated. But we must pick up and move on. That’s the way she would have wanted it.”

  I was about to say something, but we were interrupted by another employee, a too-thin girl with stringy bleached-blonde hair and a designer tie-dyed t-shirt. “The ten o’clock reading is here, and the ten-fifteen aura photo is early,” she said, glancing at the album in Michael’s hand and then over at me.

  Apparently I wasn’t enough to hold her interest, because she immediately looked back to Michael for instructions. He looked at his watch.

  “Serena’s late, so you should do the reading. And if Andre isn’t here by ten after, I’ll do the photo.” She nodded and walked away, guiding a customer through the beaded curtain and into the back room.

  “Sorry about that,” Michael said to me as he continued to ring up my purchase. “We’re having some minor staffing issues that still need to be resolved.”

  “Arianna left some mighty big shoes to fill, I’d imagine,” I said.

  Michael gave a short laugh that ended up as a nearly silent snort.

  “Literally,” he said, suppressing a smile. Then his businesslike tone returned. “Arianna always insisted on doing everything, the aura photos, the readings, all that, herself. She never let anyone else help. Since her passing, I’ve instituted a new schedule, which allows us to fully utilize our treatment space, which in the past was woefully underused. Now we do full-body healings in the treatment room at the same time we’re doing aura photos in the studio. I’ve even got someone back there cleaning and repairing jewelry full-time, which in the past only got done when Arianna had a few spare minutes. Much more efficient use of people, resources, and space.”

  “And more profitable, as well, I would imagine.”

  “The albu
m was three ninety-nine, so with sales tax your total is four thirty,” he said.

  I handed him a five and he opened the drawer for my change.

  “Yes, to answer your question, it is more profitable. Arianna had her way of doing business; I have mine. To each his own,” he said, handing me two quarters and two dimes.

  “So, are you officially the new owner of Akashic Records?” I asked, pocketing the coins.

  He put the album into a slim brown paper bag and handed it to me. “Nothing’s official, yet,” he said. “But I know that was Arianna’s wish. We just need her will to go through probate before we can finalize everything. Can I help you with anything else today?”

  A thesis occurred to me and I decided to test a few of its elements. I stepped back and looked him over. “Michael, you’re in terrific shape. Do you work out?”

  He smiled and unconsciously puffed his chest and flexed his biceps. “Every day. You should try it sometime,” he added with a fake laugh, giving me a critical once-over as he pulled a cell phone from his pocket.

  “I don’t know. Ever since Jim Fixx dropped dead while jogging, I’ve been very skeptical of exercise,” I said.

  “That was a long time ago. You must have been an impressionable youth.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, I know this much,” Michael continued as he started tapping out a text on the phone. “He would have dropped dead a lot sooner without exercise.”

  “Yeah, but either way he ended up dead, so what’s the point?” This twisted logic brought him up short for a second and he stopped texting, if only for a moment. “So,” I continued as he mentally scratched his head, “how much can you bench press?”

  “Three fifty, three seventy-five on a good day,” he said, resuming his miniscule typing.

  “That’s a lot of weight to pick up. How much do you suppose Arianna weighed?”

  He narrowed his eyes, looking up from the phone’s keypad. “I don’t exactly know. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Yes, you mentioned that you do jewelry cleaning and repair?”

  He sighed and dropped his phone arm to his side to dramatically demonstrate the degree to which I was boring him. “Yes we do. Is there a particular piece we can help you with?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing right now. I was just wondering, they still use cyanide for cleaning jewelry these days, don’t they?”

  This got less of a reaction from him than I would have liked. “We use a number of different chemicals. Cyanide may be one of them. Would you like me to check?” he asked.

  “No, that’s fine. One last question.”

  “Yes?” he hissed, making no effort to cover his exasperation as he returned to his texting.

  “Do you agree that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “I have no idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, it’s a little fuzzy for me as well, but I’m working on it. Thanks for your help.”

  I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I was humming Have You Never Been Mellow as I walked out of the store.

  Chapter 18

  As intriguing as my conversation with Michael had been, I soon discovered that I had more daunting issues at hand. I had a kid’s magic show to get ready for, and although it was my intention to simply glance through the material that afternoon—in advance of the show the following day—as soon as I looked at what Nathan had left me, everything changed. And not for the better.

  Nathan had brought over all of his props in a grocery sack, which had been stashed, unopened, in a corner of my apartment since his most recent visit to the shop.

  It was only upon opening the prop bag and seeing the mysterious paraphernalia within and then reading his instructions for the first time that it dawned on me that I was in trouble.

  Serious trouble.

  To say that his notes were less than copious would be an understatement. On a small slip of paper, in his neat, legible scrawl, he had written the following:

  Intro—set character, parrot bit—four minutes

  Dinosaur story—confetti or rubber bands as needed—three minutes

  SpongeBob take-off—three minutes (remote controls, etc. Add extra streamers.)

  Balloon animals/song parody—three minutes (adapt verses for birthday kid)

  Monkey camp story, with bananas—three minutes (11 plastic, one real)

  Balloon finale—four minutes

  Encore—rest of balloons

  The only thing on the list that I completely understood was that it added up to twenty minutes plus an encore. Somehow, in my naiveté, I had assumed that he was giving me, you know, his act, including a script and specific instructions for each effect. Instead I got a random list of words, some of which I recognized, but most of which made no sense as a structured magic act for kids.

  Granted, he was my friend and I had certainly seen him perform, but not recently and certainly not with the idea of duplicating what I was seeing.

  I made several semi-frantic, unanswered calls to his cell phone and then settled into some serious fretting. Then I realized that panicking would get me nowhere, so I sat in the middle of my living room floor and went through all the items in the bag.

  There were two bags of balloons. One was the bag I gave him for the special helium balloon gag, so the others, I assumed, were suitable for balloon animals. I hadn’t made balloon animals since I was a teenage magician, and as I quickly discovered, it is nothing like riding a bike.

  Despite my best efforts, every one that I attempted resembled a sickly boa constrictor in the midst of devouring an anvil.

  The bag also included several electronic devices that I didn’t recognize, a bag of confetti, some plastic bananas—one which opened to reveal three smaller bananas within, a stuffed monkey that had some sort of remote-control mouth that I couldn’t quite figure out, an inflatable version of the cartoon character SpongeBob, and several unopened packages of batteries. Stuffed at the bottom were a pirate coat, a pirate hat, and an eye patch.

  I looked at the truly random collection of materials in front of me and swore, at first quietly and then at a greater volume. I was screwed. I realized that I would have to look elsewhere for inspiration, as I wasn’t finding it in Nathan’s accursed shopping bag.

  I then spent a fruitless hour digging through my own act, pulling out those pieces that might be suitable for an audience of youngsters.

  My act is not particularly adult, but it does ask the audience to be hip to certain cultural references. It also requires the people who volunteer to be able to do grown-up things, like follow instructions and care about the outcome.

  From my hour-long act I was able to find about three minutes of material that I felt would be suitable for a young audience.

  The next hour was spent downstairs in the shop, examining each and every item for its likely kid’s show potential. After rummaging through all the stock in the store, as well as numerous discontinued items that had long-since been relegated to the far corner of the basement, I found several possible candidates and carried them up the stairs to my apartment.

  Harry, who must have heard me banging around, swung open his door in time to see me passing by, my arms overflowing with a bizarre and sundry collection of objects. He was naturally curious and asked why I had taken to shoplifting at such a late age. I explained my predicament and he nodded sympathetically throughout my recitation of what Nathan had done to me and what I planned to do to him upon his return.

  “Not to worry,” Harry said, opening his apartment door wider and gesturing that I should come in. “Help has arrived.”

  “Of course, Buster, you wouldn’t know this,” Harry said to me once he had persuaded me to put down the armload of junk I had lifted from the store, and take a seat on his worn and lumpy couch, “but I spent the first six or seven years of my career as a children’s magician. Loved it, absolutely loved it. But a fellow couldn’t
make a living at it, at least not back then. So I switched gears and went into stage work, with your aunt. Not that there was all that much more money in stage work, but it was better than the small change I had been making before.”

  I nodded patiently, waiting for the point of his story, which in typical Harry fashion could be just around the corner or several torturous miles down the road. My face must have betrayed my thoughts, because he winked at me and headed toward the closet.

  “Anyway,” he said as he opened the door and began to dig through the heavy winter clothes hanging there, all wool and corduroy, “I was a pretty darned good kid’s magician, if I do say so myself. And, being the pack rat that Alice always accused me of being, I hung onto all the pieces for that act. At least, I think I did.”

  He banged around in the closet for a few more moments before I heard a muffled “Aha!” and then he emerged, dragging a worn black suitcase behind him. He set the case on its side and then went to his record collection, flipping through the albums for several seconds before finding the desired selection. He placed the vinyl disc on his beloved stereo, set the stylus on the disc and returned once more to the black suitcase on the floor.

  What followed then was nothing short of astonishing.

  To the strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Harry opened and unfolded the suitcase, which magically transformed into a waist-high table on a stand.

  He then proceeded to perform a magic routine of such minimalism and beauty that I was literally awed, sitting on the edge of the sofa, my mouth slack.

  Using the simplest of materials—a spool of thread, two coins, three thimbles, a ball of yarn, a balloon, a hatpin, three jumbo playing cards, some flash paper, a single white plastic rose, and a fez—he created a story that could only be called epic.