“Are you suggesting that P’tol P’kah is actually a Martian?” Gus finally managed to get out without giggling.
“I know how absurd it sounds,” Fleck said. “If anyone had said the same thing to me eight months ago, I would have laughed in his face. But I’ve studied my client for a long time, and I’ve never seen a hint of anything that would contradict his story.”
“How about his Social Security number?” Shawn said. “He must have given it to you at some point, unless Martians don’t care about money.”
“Oh, they care,” Fleck said. “But my deal is with P’tol P’kah’s loan-out corporation, so all I have is his company’s ID number.”
“How about the first time you met him?” Shawn asked. “You didn’t just bump into a seven-foot Martian walking down the Strip.”
“Not at all,” Fleck said. “Our first introduction was as mysterious as everything else about our relationship. One night I was home alone, and he just appeared.”
“What do you mean?” Gus said. “He beamed into your living room like Captain Kirk?”
“No, although I don’t think that would have surprised me any more than what did happen,” Fleck said. “I was watching Jim Cramer on CNBC, the image flickered, and then this seven-foot-tall green man was talking to me directly through the screen.”
“How could you tell the difference?” Shawn said. “Oh wait—was he right about something?”
“At first I thought I was dreaming,” Fleck said. “Then I got a little scared. I tried changing the channel, but he was on every one. I turned off the TV, but it kept coming back on. So finally I decided I had to listen to him.”
“I hope he didn’t try to sell you a panini press,” Shawn said.
“He invited me to come to an abandoned warehouse in Henderson to see a show that was going to change my life.”
“An abandoned warehouse?” Shawn said. “What, he couldn’t find a deserted amusement park?”
“I went with some trepidation. I had no idea what I was walking into, but the green monster on my TV screen had been quite explicit that I had to come alone, and it never even crossed my mind to disobey,” Fleck said. “When I arrived, a young woman met me and led me into the warehouse.”
“Was this Mrs. P’kah?” Shawn asked. “Because maybe we could ask her where her husband went.”
“I never learned her name,” Fleck said. “I never even heard her voice. And her face and head were completely covered with a hood. She led me to a single chair in the darkened warehouse and gestured for me to sit down. Then she left. I never saw her again. Or maybe I’ve seen her every day since. I have no way of knowing.”
“There’s nothing else you can remember about this woman?” Gus asked. “Something about the way she moved, the perfume she wore?”
“Even if there was anything, it would have been knocked out of my consciousness by what happened next,” Fleck said. “The few lights that had been on in the warehouse went out and I was in total darkness. Then a spotlight fell on a glass tank at the other end. And P’tol P’kah stepped into it. He climbed up a set of stairs into the tank, and, well, you saw the Dissolving Man.”
“Most of it,” Shawn said. “I gather that this time he actually did rematerialize?”
“Right in front of me,” Fleck said. “Then he reached out into the darkness and dragged a table over to my chair. On that table were a contract and a fountain pen. He said one word to me: ‘Read.’ Then the lights blinked out for a second, and he had disappeared.”
“Hey, that’s how we were going to present our contract,” Shawn said. “I can’t believe that green giant stole our idea.”
Gus didn’t even bother kicking Shawn under the table. Fleck was so lost in his memory that he didn’t seem to hear him.
“What I read in that contract was outrageous,” Fleck said. “I was to build a special theater to P’tol P’kah’s exact specifications. It would hold no fewer than five thousand people, the seats were to be arranged so that every member of the audience had a clear view of the stage, and—”
“And that they’d all pay two hundred bucks to attend?” Shawn guessed.
“No, that was my call,” Fleck said. “Once I ran the numbers on just how much this was all going to cost me. Because the stage was just the beginning. I needed to provide him with a place to live.”
“Houses aren’t exactly rare around here,” Gus said, remembering the colorful mosaic of real estate signs so closely packed together that they could be seen from the plane on the descent into McCarran Airport.
“P’tol P’kah didn’t want a house,” Fleck said. “He wanted a floor.”
“Well, that’s got to be cheaper than a whole house,” Shawn said. “Because with a house, you not only have the floor, you’ve got all those walls. And ceilings, too.”
“He wanted a floor of this casino for his private residence,” Fleck said. “Or if not an entire floor, then an enormous luxury suite that would be completely walled off from the rest of the hotel. The only entrance would be a private elevator that ran down directly into his dressing room in the theater. There were certain demands about the way the suite had to be furnished, about the level of room service he demanded be provided, the housekeeping that needed to be performed only while he was on stage. There was a long section detailing how much he was to be paid, and how it was to be wired directly into an untraceable offshore bank account. And, of course, there were his key demands—he would grant no interviews, make no public appearances besides his own shows, and meet no people other than me.”
“And when you were done laughing?” Shawn said.
“I signed.”
Gus thought back on all the articles he had read about Fleck’s incredible business acumen, the punishing deals he extracted out of everyone who ever dealt with him, and tried to reconcile that with what he was hearing now. “Just like that?”
“You saw the Dissolving Man,” Fleck said. “In all my years as a promoter, I’d never come across anything so breathtaking. It reminded me of the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil—only with a fraction of the payroll expenses. If the green guy’s schtick seemed a little heavy-handed at the time, I figured that just meant he knew how to work his image.”
“I’ll say,” Shawn said.
“Usually with these guys, they put up a good front at first,” Fleck says. “They’re trying to sell you like you’re one of the rubes. And then once the contracts are signed and the drinks are poured, they let the mask slip a little. But that never happened with P’tol P’kah. He showed up for every one of his shows. Occasionally we exchanged a couple of syllables, but aside from that he was completely inaccessible.”
“You seemed like you were pretty good buddies last night,” Shawn said. “You didn’t both show up at the Fortress of Magic by accident.”
“I received a phone call that afternoon,” Fleck said. “A woman’s voice told me that he had wearied of the sniping from his fellow magicians, and wanted to put it to a rest for good. That was the way she talked, by the way.”
“Do you think it was the same woman you met in the warehouse?” Gus asked.
“No way to know,” Fleck said. “Whoever she was, she called from a blocked number. I had my internal security people try to track it down via phone records this morning, but they couldn’t do it. And my internal security people are very good. Anyway, as I was walking up the hill to the Fortress, I saw P’tol P’kah standing outside, waiting for me. We entered, and you know the rest.”
“Some of the rest,” Shawn said. “We don’t know what happened to . . .”
“P’tol P’kah,” Gus prompted.
“Yeah, him,” Shawn said. “So, if you could just fill in that little piece, we’d have everything we need to complete our investigation.”
Fleck’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Shawn, trying to decide if what he was hearing was some kind of joke, or a sign of total incompetence. “If I knew what happened to P’tol P’kah,” he said in a growl that made the Fortress of Magic
’s electronic hounds sound like kittens, “I wouldn’t have hired you to find out what happened to P’tol P’kah.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Gus said quickly. “That was, um . . . That was . . .”
As Gus floundered helplessly, Shawn stepped in. “An investigative technique. Sometimes people know more than they’re aware they know. That knowledge is locked away deep in the subbasement—”
“Subconscious,” Gus corrected.
“But sometimes it can be brought to the surface if we use the elevator of the unexpected question,” Shawn finished.
Fleck considered this for a moment; then the scowl left his face. “I understand that you two are unconventional investigators, and you will employ the occasional unconventional technique. That is one reason I hired you.”
“And the fact that we were there,” Shawn volunteered. This time Gus kicked with all his strength, and despite the short distance between their feet, clearly managed to inflict some pain. “There to assist you in your hour of great need, that is.”
Fleck ignored the interruption. “But if you ever try to trick me again, if you even idly speculate that I am in any way responsible for the disappearance of someone who is not only a brilliant performer, but who has become personally very close to me, I will be displeased. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Gus said quickly. He could see that Shawn was running through a list of possible responses, but a gentle nudge with his foot in the exact spot where his last kick landed persuaded him to supply a simple nod.
“Good,” Fleck said. He thudded his hands together, and the spacegirls returned to whisk the platters away. “This meal is now concluded.”
“What, no dessert?” Shawn said.
Fleck reached into his breast pocket and took out a plastic card. “I do not intend to guide your investigation, but I assume you will want to begin with the suite P’tol P’kah calls home. This key will operate the elevator from his dressing room. My only request is that you leave everything exactly as you found it. If you are able to find my client and he is healthy and able to return, I don’t want him to feel that his privacy has been violated. Is there anything else?”
“Just one question,” Shawn said, moving his leg out of the way in case Gus was planning another assault on his ankle. “What if we find P’nut P’brittle and he doesn’t want to come back?”
Benny Fleck didn’t move. His facial expression didn’t change; his body language wasn’t altered in any way. But Gus somehow got the impression that their lunch host had become much taller than the missing Martian.
“P’tol P’kah has a contract with me,” Fleck said calmly. “I’m sure his only desire in this or any other world is to live up to it. But if you find him and he suggests in any way that he’d prefer not to return, you must do as he wishes. Leave him be and let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” Gus said, a wave of relief washing over him.
“Let me know exactly where he is,” Fleck continued. “My internal security people will do the rest.”
Chapter Ten
“Shawn,he’s going to kill him.”
Gus stood in the middle of P’tol P’kah’s penthouse suite, still nauseated from the thirty-nine-story ascent in the private elevator from the dressing room. He took a step across the brilliant white carpet to where Shawn stood looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows, but as soon as he did, the room started spinning again. He might not have minded this so much, except that the suite was large enough to house the entire Good-year blimp fleet with room left over for most of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons, and that was a mighty big space to have twirling around his head.
“You’re right,” Shawn said.
At least that was progress. As they had followed yet another silver-suited spacegirl through the employee tunnels that ran from the restaurant’s kitchen to the backstage area of the Starlight Theater, Shawn had refused to acknowledge there was anything ominous in the last part of their meeting with Fleck.
“We’ve got to do something.”
“Absolutely,” Shawn said. “I’m putting twenty bucks on the champ.”
“What champ? What are you talking about?”
“That.” Shawn pointed out the window. Fighting off his wooziness, Gus managed to cross the room and join him, only to see that Shawn was looking out at an enormous sign in front of Caesar’s Palace, advertising tonight’s heavyweight championship. “I know a lot of people have been saying the champ’s past his prime, but Montoya won’t last three rounds.”
Down below, the cars looked no bigger than the Hot Wheels Gus and Shawn used to play with, and Gus turned away quickly before his nausea teamed up with incipient vertigo to make him pass out.
“I don’t care about a fight, Shawn,” Gus said in between deep, heavy, regular breaths. “I care about what’s going to happen if we find P’tol P’kah and he doesn’t want to come back here.”
“Are you kidding?” Shawn waved his arm around the suite. One wall was covered by a flat-screen TV the size of a freeway exit sign. A door on the opposite side led to a closet that seemed to run the entire length of the hotel tower, and it was filled with endless iterations of a custom-made outfit perfect for the stylish Martian—slacks in black and khaki, blazers in blue and black, white shirts, and leather loafers, all in sizes Yao Ming could swim in. And if Yao were a guest and he felt like some actual nonsartorial swimming, another door opened onto an Olympic-sized indoor pool. The steel-and-marble gourmet kitchen was stocked with every kind of snack food Shawn and Gus had ever heard of and many they hadn’t. “Who wouldn’t want to come back here?”
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Maybe someone who gets nauseated in fast elevators. Someone who’s afraid of heights. Or maybe a guy who dissolves in a tank of water, never rematerializes, and leaves a dead guy floating in his place.”
Shawn took a moment to think through what Gus was saying. “You have a theory?”
“Yes,” Gus said. “And it’s the same one you have, because it’s the only one that makes sense.”
“The only theory that makes sense is the one that starts with a Martian dissolving in water?”
“That’s his trick,” Gus said impatiently. “We both know he didn’t really dissolve.”
“You were the one who thought it was so impressive.”
“Shawn!”
“Okay, fine,” Shawn said, plopping himself on a plush, down-filled leather sofa. “Let’s assume that P’tato P’tahto isn’t really a Martian. He’s just another stage magician. What do we know?”
“That the Dissolving Man is a trick.”
“And?”
“And the reason we can’t figure it out is because the solution is too obvious,” Gus said, settling down in an overstuffed armchair.
“So if we take away all the razzle-dazzle, the basic illusion is that the magician is locked into some kind of cabinet, the lights go out, and he slips out through some secret exit. Meanwhile, he’s got a device that instantly clones him and delivers the clone wherever the beam is pointed.”
“That’s the solution that’s so obvious, no one would ever figure it out?” Gus said.
“It is to anyone who saw that Hugh Jackman movie,” Shawn said. “Although it’s also possible he has a twin brother who hides out in the audience. But do Martians even come in twins? There’s a lot of basic research that hasn’t been done on that issue.”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s the cloning machine,” Gus said. “You’ve nailed this one. Except for one thing—the lights never went out.”
“Sure they did,” Shawn said. “Remember that blast of light at the very end? It blinded us all for a few seconds—plenty of time.”
Gus thought back and realized that anything could have happened in that time and he never would have known—he was not only blind, but the roaring sound could easily have covered just about any noise.
“So P’tol P’kah did his trick as usual. Then instead of appearing in the audience, he ran,” Gus s
aid. “That’s what I was saying. He wanted to get away from this gilded cage, and he set up the entire Fortress of Magic show as a ruse to allow him out. But where did he go? And more to the point, who’s the dead guy in the tank and how did he get there?”
“I have an idea on that,” Shawn said. “But let’s hold off on the dead guy for a minute. Instead we should—”
“Let’s not,” Gus interrupted.
“What do you mean, ‘Let’s not’?” Shawn said. “This is my theory, and I get to lay it out however I want to.”
“Sure, when you’re talking to Lassiter or to Chief Vick or to a client,” Gus said. “Then you can lay out your explanation step by step, making sure every piece is in the perfect place to build audience expectation. Then you hit them with the big finale, and everyone’s left thinking you’re a genius. But you don’t need to sell me, so why don’t you just say who the dead guy is now?”
“In the time it took you to lay out that objection, I could have explained everything.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Gus said. “You couldn’t explain a cheese sandwich in less than five minutes.” Gus pressed his fingertips to his forehead and scrunched up his eyes as if he’d been hit with a migraine. “I’m sensing something. It’s a condominium. No, wait, it’s a comic book. No, close to a comic book. It’s—it’s a condiment! Yes, I’m sensing mayonnaise. It’s saying, ‘Put me next to the lettuce.’ ”
“Those explanations are what brings in the lettuce for both of us,” Shawn said. “And why are you getting so irritable, anyway?”
Gus got up from the couch and stalked to the refrigerator. He opened the freezer and put his head next to the ice tray, trying to cool down.
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Maybe it’s that we’ve promised a dangerous man we’d find his client, and now we realize that the client was actually trying to get away from him, and our client only wants us to find him because he wants to kill him.”
“And you think that puts us in an awkward position morally?” Shawn managed to excavate himself from the sofa cushion he’d sunk into and walked over to the refrigerator. Gently he pulled Gus back from the freezer and closed the door.
Psych: Mind Over Magic Page 9
