City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

Laika smiled sourly. "Sounds like a Windham Hill duo."

  The pair walked up onto the stage. Kristal carried only a pen and a pad of paper, and the woman had a sheaf of large sheets of white paper and some markers.

  "Good morning, boys," said Kristal. Even through the half-inch mikes concealed behind the plaster, his Teutonic accent came through the monitors loud and clear. "Let's do a dry run, ja?" He stepped to the center of the stage. "All right, I'll take off the robe here. We'll get two men out of the audience, I'll go behind the screen, show them my balls." He chuckled. "Nothing up my ass, shorts back on, come back out.

  "Then I do the part about the guide, he will show me in my mind what the person draws, the people will examine the booth . . . 'Is there any camera, any holes?' They'll get inside, I'll shut the door, 'Do you see any light?' 'No, I don't,' they examine the air tube, not even any light can get in, blah blah blah, I tell them what I'm going to do when Harmony knocks once on the box. Fine, all right, then I let them look at the tablet, the pen, ja, I go inside now, all right?"

  Kristal stepped into the box. "Go ahead, shut me up."

  One of the three men shut the door of the cabinet and the two others took wide black electrical tape and sealed up all four edges of the door. "Kristal?" the woman called Harmony said, "can you see any light at all? Knock once for yes, twice for no."

  Two knocks came from the cabinet.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Harmony said, "may I please have a volunteer from the audience, someone known to others here so that we may be sure there is no possibility of conspiring beforehand." She turned to one of the men. "Theo, stand in for now. Draw whatever you want, make it as complex as you like."

  Theo sat down at the table, picked up a marker, thought for a moment, then began to draw on one of the large white sheets of paper. Harmony watched, relaxed, her hands in her pockets, until he had finished.

  "Thank you, Theo. Now, if you will put the paper on the easel so that the audience may see."

  The man secured it to the easel. "Well, well," Joseph said. "What an unoriginal mind."

  The drawing Theo had done was apparently intended to be the Loch Ness Monster. A straight line intended to represent the surface of the lake ran along the bottom of the paper, and double half circles were the loops of the monster's snakelike body breaking the surface. Its neck and head protruded from the lake near the center of the picture, and the circle of its right eye was staring at a primitive boat in which a stick figure, its arms wide, looked at it in surprise.

  Laika nodded in agreement. "Good old Nessie."

  "I wasn't referring to the drawing," said Joseph. "I meant the trick. Blackburn and Smith did it a hundred years ago."

  "Who were they?" Tony asked, but Joseph waved him into silence and they continued to watch the proceedings.

  Harmony walked to the cabinet, knocked on it once, and returned to the table. They waited for perhaps two minutes, until there was a single answering knock from within the cabinet. Harmony then peeled away the tape from the edges of the door and opened it. Kristal stood there holding the tablet in his hands. On the top sheet, but reduced in scale, was a drawing identical to the one that Theo had made, complete with boat and startled observer.

  "I stagger, I moan slightly with the effort, I triumph!" Kristal said, laughing. "So what you think, Theo?"

  Theo could only shake his head admiringly and spoke some words in German which Laika, Joseph, and Tony all understood: "If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't believe it."

  "And the audience, and the scientists observing, will all be as believing and accepting as Theo," Joseph said, frowning. As they watched, Kristal, Harmony, and the three men left the auditorium.

  "He didn't really do that, did he?" said Tony. "It was a trick, right?"

  "Right as rain."

  "So how'd he do it, then?"

  "I know the principle," Joseph said, staring at the empty auditorium. "But not the exact process . . . yet." He turned to the others. "Leave me alone for a while, okay? Let me play back the tapes a few times, look at it from all three angles."

  "Sure," Tony said. "You can only enhance it so much with the equipment I have here, you know."

  Joseph nodded and started to rewind the three cassettes. Laika and Tony went into the next room, closing the door behind them, and Joseph started to watch. "See it," he whispered to himself. "It's there. See it."

  An hour later, at 1100 hours, he opened the door, stepped into the next room, and smiled at Laika and Tony. "Got it," he said. "Want to see?"

  Chapter 8

  By mid-afternoon, the three operatives had checked out of their rooms and were driving south, the loch on their left. Joseph and Laika led in the Peugeot, and Tony followed in the van.

  Joseph had found the reporter from Der Stern with whom he had had a few beers the night before. After several pints, the reporter had told Joseph of his dislike for Kristal ever since the so-called psychic had humiliated him during an exhibition of his purported powers in Bonn, calling him a doubting Thomas (correctly) and telling him (also correctly) that the most prominent thing in his wallet was two condoms left from a pack of three, and that the missing one had been used with a young woman named Gerde. This was also accurate, and he might have found it amusing had his wife (now ex-wife) Sarah not been sitting beside him in the audience.

  Hell, Joseph correctly assumed without psychic aid, hath no fury like a reporter paying alimony, so it was to this man that, the following day, he confided the secret of Kristal's upcoming demonstration of psychic powers, in exchange for which Joseph received a firm promise that the source would not be revealed. "Better," said the reporter gleefully, "to let this charlatan think that one of his own people, how do you say it, spilled his beans!"

  Joseph regretted only slightly, as they drove away from Drumnadrochit, that those beans would be spilled without him. For him, the joy was in figuring out the scam, not necessarily in revealing it. Knowing that Kristal would be debunked was enough. He turned his attention to what was next. "Did the contact say anything else—anything at all—when you called?"

  "No," Laika answered. "He gave me the location, and that was all. God only knows why he wants us to go to the Isle of Skye."

  "Maybe to play ghostbusters at a haunted castle," Joseph said, and smiled when Laika laughed.

  By eight o'clock, they had arrived in the small town of Kyle of Lochalsh, situated on the east side of the bridge that would take them to the large Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast. They stopped for dinner at a pub that had a TV mounted prominently above the bar, so when the image on the screen became similar to that which he had seen on his three monitors, Tony signaled the others. "Check it out," he said. "Our pal Kristal."

  The pub was noisy, but they were able to make out some of Kristal's comments about his "guide" channeling him information. "I am not a psychic," they heard him say, "but merely an instrument for—" The pub noise drowned him out again.

  "Stop the presses," Joseph said dryly. "Kristal speaks the truth, for a change."

  "Hey," Laika said, "look who's one of the volunteers." It was the reporter from Der Stern. Even on the small screen they could detect his anticipation.

  "Screw this," said Tony. "Grab your drinks." He led the way to the bar. There were no stools available, so they stood there and watched the screen as Kristal stripped off his robe, revealing a compact, muscular body in a pair of Speedos. The reporter and another man went behind a screen and came out twenty seconds later. Kristal gave his pen and tablet to one of the volunteers, who examined them and handed them back.

  Then Kristal asked the three men to examine the cabinet, including the corkscrew air hole at the top, the shape of which ensured that no light would come into the cabinet. One of the men was shut inside and when he came out was asked if he could see any light. He replied in the negative.

  Then Kristal went into the cabinet, the door was closed and taped shut, and another volunteer was chosen from the audience, an older French woman who was on a
bus trip with her friends. She sat at the table and drew a picture of a garden with a wall, two trees, and several flowers and birds.

  Harmony set the drawing on the easel so the audience could see, then went over to the cabinet and rapped on it sharply. In just over a minute, Kristal rapped back. The volunteers stripped the tape off the door and opened it. Kristal stepped out, the tablet behind his back. He took a dramatic pause, looked at the picture on the easel, and then showed what he had drawn on the tablet to the audience. The two pictures were nearly identical.

  "What a surprise," said Joseph, as the crowd burst into applause, and even the denizens of the pub murmured their admiration. On the screen the Stern reporter held out his hand with a look of amazement on his face and Kristal graciously gave him the tablet to examine the drawing.

  But instead of looking at the drawing, the reporter flipped the pages of the tablet over, revealing its cardboard backing, and turned toward the audience. "This man is a fraud," he said. "And what you have seen is a simple conjuror's trick, and I can prove it!"

  "Did you help him with his lines?" Laika asked. Joseph shrugged. "I made a few suggestions."

  "Turn out the lights—all the lights!" the reporter went on, "and you shall see!"

  "This is preposterous," Kristal said. "This man is ridiculous; he wishes only to lie about me, he—"

  "Turn off the lights!" the reporter insisted. "If your powers are real, what do you have to fear?"

  The mob scented blood then, and some started shouting in agreement. One of the volunteers, who from his bearing might have been a "scientific" observer, nodded in agreement and signaled to the back of the house for the lights to be extinguished. Kristal protested vigorously, and Harmony looked around as though disoriented, but first the lights on the stage went off, then the house lights, leaving everything, including the cameras, in utter darkness.

  Though they could not make it out on the screen, the three operatives knew from the cries of outrage that the audience was seeing the glow of the luminous powder that had been rubbed into the surface of the tablet's cardboard backing. "Turn them back on!" came the reporter's voice, and the lights returned, blinding the video lenses for a second, making the TV screen blaze with whiteness before recapturing the images on the stage.

  "Now," said the reporter, "if the confederate will turn out her pockets—those spacious pockets in those spacious pants where she drew on a cigarette paper whatever she saw the volunteer drawing on her sheet. Kommen sie! Empty your pocket, bitte! The left one only!"

  "The one," Joseph explained, "that was turned away from the audience. Not that it mattered much. Considering the size of those harem pants, she could've played pool in there and not attracted any notice."

  The scientific gentleman pointed to Harmony and nodded. "If you please, madam."

  The crowd roared again, and again Kristal protested. When Harmony reached into her pocket, he had had enough. "I will not be subjected to this inquisition!" he roared, and strode off the stage.

  "He should have grabbed the girl," Joseph said.

  The crowd was in an uproar now, shouting at Harmony to empty her pocket. Pale and shaking, she did, and from the folds of her voluminous pants brought forth a pen and a two-inch square of laminate to which was secured an equally small piece of either India or cigarette paper. The reporter snatched them away from her.

  "You see?" he crowed triumphantly to the suddenly spell-bound crowd. "She copied the drawing as the woman did it, then rolled the little paper into a tiny ball." He demonstrated as he spoke. "She palmed the ball, and when she knocked on the cabinet, she simply flipped it onto the top, where it rolled into and down the corkscrew airhole, right into Kristal's hands. He unfolded it and held it against the luminous tablet back; the paper was so thin he could see right through it and see the picture. Then he copied it, slightly larger, onto the tablet itself."

  "What did he do with the paper, then?" someone called out.

  "Either put it in his shorts, or—" The reporter rolled up the paper, popped the tiny ball into his mouth, and swallowed. "Either way, I wouldn't care to search for the evidence." The crowd laughed. "Especially after what I saw behind that screen!" The crowd laughed louder, and in it the three of them heard the end of Kristal's career.

  "That," Joseph said, "was not one of my lines."

  Chapter 9

  After dinner, they crossed over the high, arching bridge to the Isle of Skye. Jagged hills rose darkly on either side of them.

  "I just don't see," Joseph mused, "why the hell he would use such an old trick. Blackburn and Smith did the same thing over a hundred years ago. Only Smith did it under a blanket and blindfolded. Blackburn drew it on cigarette paper, but rolled up the paper and put it in a hollow pencil. Then Smith would pretend he'd lost his pencil, stick his hand out, and Blackburn would give it to him. Smith had a luminous slate in his waistcoat, and presto, there you were."

  "Didn't it get a little obvious when Smith kept forgetting his pencil?" Laika asked.

  "Apparently not. The scientists who observed this amazing phenomenon never even mentioned the pencil in their reports. The truth finally came out when Blackburn wrote about it years later. Guess he felt guilty."

  "An emotion," Laika suggested, "totally foreign to Kristal, I suspect. You think he'll survive this?"

  "Frankly, yes. He'll never be as big as he might have been without it, but people need so much to believe in this kind of junk that they'll assume Kristal's enemies conspired to frame him, or some such bullshit."

  "You mean, maybe Harmony put the luminous stuff on the tablet, and carried the pen and paper in her pocket, but Kristal didn't really use it?"

  "Right," Joseph said. "Maybe she was in cahoots with the reporter to discredit him. Remember, the only proof actually found on Kristal was the tablet, and if it was a frame-up, he might not have noticed even that."

  "He would have if he was psychic."

  Just before they reached the village of Ashaig, they saw the sign for the bed-and-breakfast to which they had been told to go. The Peugeot, the van behind it, pulled into the stone driveway that led them to a small car park behind the house. It was a long building with white plaster walls and a multitude of gables and pitched roofs. The path to the front door led through a colorless garden whose spring flowers had not yet begun to appear.

  A woman in her forties answered their knock. Though she was slightly stout and had a face like a cherub, Laika could see a tiredness in her eyes that betrayed her field experience, and wondered what countersurveillance work she had done for the Company before being rewarded with the management of a safe house.

  "I'm Laika Harris," Laika said, having been instructed by the dossier to give her real name.

  "I know who you are," the woman said. "All of you. Mr. Skye is expecting you."

  Laika was surprised. "He's here, then?"

  "He was. We watched . . . some television together. Then he went out for a walk. If you came, I was to tell you to join him."

  "Where is he?" Tony asked.

  "Go out the lane, and turn the way you came. Three hundred yards down the road there's a dirt road to your right, toward the bay, that leads through some fields. You'll come over a rise and see the bay. There's a graveyard there. That's where Mr. Skye will be."

  "Okay," Tony said, "let's take the car. I'll leave the van here."

  "Mr. Skye wished you to walk," their hostess said.

  "Walk? It's almost dark."

  "We're in the northern latitudes," said Laika, remembering that Tony had slept through the previous evening. "It'll stay this light for another two hours, anyway."

  As they started back to the car, Tony asked Laika and Joseph, "Are you two carrying?" They both nodded, and Tony whispered, "Good," under his breath.

  They didn't talk as they walked down the lane to the road. The only sounds were those of the stones shifting under their feet and the occasional car passing by them.

  When they came over the rise, the graveyard wa
s visible another hundred yards away across a pasture where cows lay sleeping or chewing their cud in the chill Scottish evening. The graveyard was surrounded by a low stone wall, undoubtedly hand laid hundreds of years before. As they grew closer, Laika could see a figure sitting on the far wall overlooking the bay, its back to them.

  "Cloudy?" Tony said softly, but Laika could only shrug. It was light enough to see the figure, but too dark to make out any details.

  The cemetery was larger than she had first thought, and as they passed by it, she saw very Old stones side by side with more recent ones. Mossy Celtic crosses rubbed up against a group of a dozen Royal Navy casualties of World War II, while a bas-relief angel in profile held a garland of flowers for the dead.

  The figure on the wall had not moved, and Laika could almost fancy that it, too, was a sculpture. They stopped ten yards away from it, and Laika spoke softly. "Mr. Skye."

  The voice came before the figure moved. "Good evening, Ms. Harris. Mr. Luciano. Mr. Stein." Then the man slowly turned, and a familiar face smiled at her from under a brown oilcloth hat with a wide brim. "Very nicely done. My compliments."

  Richard Skye got down from the wall with a swift economy of motion and faced the trio. Laika was startled once more to see how short the man was. "I doubt if Mr. Kristal will be plying his pseudo-psychic wares before many national audiences after this. If he's lucky, he might play a few clubs in Hamburg before he's forced to declare bankruptcy. I'm very pleased. All in all, this was an excellent, if noncritical, case for you three to get acquainted over, and, shall we say, cut your psychic teeth on before you move on to . . . greater matters. And you acquitted yourselves admirably.

  "In fact, I'm so pleased that I'm sending you under the very deepest cover so that you can continue to do just this kind of work. As of today, you three no longer exist. You will be shadow operatives performing shadow operations." He smiled. "Ironic, isn't it? Shadows . . . bringing other shadows into the light."