“Obviously, that he didn’t really dissolve.”
“One of these cases we should really change positions,” Shawn said, opening the car door and slipping into his seat. “Then you can have all the really brilliant insights and I can be wrong all the time.”
Shawn slammed his door closed before Gus could say anything. Gus pulled his own door open and leaned in. “And then you can be helpful and supportive, and I can be a smug jerk. And I can dress badly, too.”
Gus slid behind the wheel, slamming the door behind him.
“You don’t have to take it so personally,” Shawn said.
“I don’t have to, but I choose to,” Gus said. “Just like you choose to be annoying.”
Gus started the car and headed off the country club’s property. He didn’t even waste a glance on Shawn. By the time they were approaching the freeway, Shawn was fidgeting in his seat.
“You still haven’t asked what the solution is,” Shawn said.
“No, I haven’t,” Gus said.
“It’s really good,” Shawn said.
“I’m sure it’s delightful,” Gus said. “I hope you enjoy it.”
Gus drifted onto the on-ramp and merged in with the light midday traffic. He flipped on the radio and found a lite-jazz station. Gus hated lite-jazz, but he knew that to Shawn it had the same pleasing aural effect as a thousand dentists’ drills, so he cranked up the volume.
Shawn reached over and slammed his fist into the radio button, nearly punching it through the dashboard. “Okay, fine, I’ll tell you,” he said.
“Not on my account,” Gus said. “I’m good.”
Gus reached to turn the radio back on, but Shawn batted his hand away.
“Okay, okay,” Shawn said. “Gus, I have a theory about the solution to this case, and it would help me greatly if I could discuss it with you.”
“In that case, Shawn,” Gus said, repressing his grin of triumph, “I would be honored and delighted to hear your theory.”
“Yes, you would,” Shawn said, then quickly corrected himself. “What I mean is this: I’ve been saying all along that the solution to a magic trick is the most obvious one. In this case, we’ve been looking at a magic act and trying to figure out how he made it look like he was dissolving himself in a tank of water when he really wasn’t. But what if we were making the very mistake the green guy needs his audience to fall for?”
“Which is what?”
“Thinking that he didn’t really dissolve himself,” Shawn said.
Gus waited for Shawn to finish, but there didn’t seem to be any more words coming.
“So your theory is that the secret behind the illusion that P’tol P’kah could dissolve himself in a tank of water is that he really could dissolve himself in a tank of water?” Gus said finally.
“You have to admit, it has a certain elegant simplicity,” Shawn said.
“The original Volkswagen Beetle has a certain elegant simplicity,” Gus said. “The Nike Swoosh has a certain elegant simplicity. The ending of the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes has a certain elegant simplicity. Your solution is just plain giving up.”
“Really?” Shawn said. “The statue of Abraham Lin coln with a monkey face? Do you want to explain what that meant? That while the guy from Boogie Nights was escaping from a planet ruled by apes, the simians were busy rebelling on Earth, and they worked so fast they managed to remodel all of Washington DC before he could get home?”
“It makes more sense than your current theory,” Gus said. “People can’t dissolve themselves. And if they could, they can’t reassemble themselves later.”
“That’s where the government comes in,” Shawn said. “What if they could?”
“What, dissolve people?”
“And reassemble them.”
Gus decided to let himself follow Shawn’s reasoning, despite the screaming from the logic centers of his brain. “It would be one of the greatest technological breakthroughs in the history of human civilization. We could effortlessly transport people and goods anywhere on the globe. For the first time in human history, physical distance would not be a factor in our movements. We could go anywhere instantly.”
“As long as we made sure there were no flies going along with us,” Shawn said. “What kind of value would such an invention have to the military?”
Gus thought that through. “I guess the first use would be as some kind of death ray. You could simply dissolve away vast swathes of enemy soldiers and their equipment. But it might be even more useful as an espionage tool. At the very least, you could transport one man into the heart of enemy operations. Imagine how much earlier the Second World War would have ended if we could have teleported one soldier with a bunch of hand grenades into Hitler’s bunker.”
“And in that case, if a fly got mixed in, it would be even better,” Shawn said.
“If the device were larger, you might even be able to get an entire company behind enemy lines,” Gus said. “An army equipped with this kind of technology would be almost completely unstoppable. But if something like that actually did exist, wouldn’t we have heard of it?”
“Not if it was still experimental,” Shawn said. “They wouldn’t want anyone to know they were working on anything like it.”
“So they test it out in a Vegas showroom?”
“Remember what I said about Major Voges being here on her own?” Shawn said. “She had made some kind of terrible mistake and she was trying to fix it before anyone found out?”
“You think she suspected someone had stolen the technology and was using it in a magic act?”
“It would be one way for the thief to give public demonstrations for potential buyers without fear of anyone else realizing what they were seeing,” Shawn said.
“And it also meant he’d never have to reveal himself to buyers who might decide it would be cheaper just to kill him and steal the device,” Gus said. It all made sense, as long as you didn’t dwell too long on the central impossibility of the dissolving ray. “That’s why he went to such great lengths to set up that impenetrable identity.”
“Chubby Dead Guy and Major Voges must have suspected that he was using their stolen toy, but they weren’t quite certain,” Shawn said. “That’s why he went to every performance. And then that one time, the green guy saw him in the crowd and knew he’d been figured out. He needed an escape plan.”
“So he set up the performance at the Fortress of Magic,” Gus said. “And when it was time for the climax, he dissolved himself out of the tank—and dissolved Chubby Dead Guy in. It would have been instantaneous, so he wouldn’t even have had time to hold his breath. That explains why he drowned so fast.”
They were coming up to their exit, but Gus didn’t feel like getting off the freeway. Right now, driving with the sparkling blue ocean outside his window, he could feel the solution to this mystery falling into place. All of it was making sense. But he knew the second he pulled into a parking place and turned off the engine, the part of his brain he needed for driving would rush in to focus on the problem of P’tol P’kah, and it would find all kinds of holes in Shawn’s theories.
But even though oil prices had been falling, Gus was still feeling uncomfortable about the idea of wasting gasoline. And he knew that no matter how far they drove, eventually he’d have to put his entire mind to work on the problem. A quick glance over at Shawn showed him that his partner was having some difficulty with the theory, too.
“It does sound good,” Gus said. “I mean, the internal logic all works out pretty well. But we can’t really go with it until we can reconcile it with reality.”
“That’s not what’s bothering me,” Shawn said.
“What, the fact that what we’re talking about is physically impossible?” Gus said. “That’s not the problem?”
A look at Shawn’s grim face convinced Gus that this was no time for a brain-sucking joyride. He clicked on the signal and drifted across the lanes to his exit.
“That would actu
ally be a good thing,” Shawn said. “Because if I’m actually right . . .”
Shawn let his sentence trail off.
“What?” Gus said finally.
“If I’m actually right, there’s a crazy man wandering around somewhere out there with an unstoppable death ray,” Shawn said. “And we got purple Popsicle on his white carpet.”
Chapter Nineteen
Augie Balustrade stepped into his bathroom and locked the door behind him. There was no reason for him to turn the latch, or even to close the door—Augie had lived alone since his last girlfriend moved out two years ago, and he hadn’t had a single guest over in at least six months—but this was a habit he’d developed in his early teens, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break it.
Checking the knob to make sure the door was secure, Balustrade steepled his fingers together and turned them inside out until they cracked. Then he waggled each one from every joint until they were as loose as they could be. Only then did he produce the deck of cards from his vest pocket.
How many times had he laid out fifty-two cards on the back of the toilet, effortlessly fanning them across the slick white porcelain, flipping them over, expanding and contracting them like an accordion? He’d practiced the basic moves four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for forty-seven years now—sixty-eight thousand four hundred thirty-two hours, two thousand eight hundred fifty-one days. Almost eight full years, nearly a sixth of his life, he had dedicated to this simple set of tasks, and still he knew he could get better.
When Augie was little, his father used to hit him if he caught Augie with a deck of cards. To Martin Balustrade, cards were the tools of hustlers and victims, thieves and suckers, and he hadn’t worked his entire life so that his son could grow up to be a low-life. Martin’s grandfather had been a peasant in the Old Country, his father had worked with his hands building the rails and bridges that made this country strong, and Martin had made the transition into small business with that most traditional of entry-level entrepreneur-ships, the mom-and-pop dry cleaning store. (Although in this case it was only the pop dry cleaning store, since Mom had long since run off with a man who operated a traveling pony ride for small children.) It was more than a cliché; it was Augie’s destiny that he would take the family name one more rung up society’s ladder, finding prominence as a doctor, lawyer, or corporate executive. His future son, in turn, would then climb all the way to the top, so that his own descendants could tumble into decadence. This, Martin would explain nightly in place of a bedtime story, was the American dream, and it was their responsibility to live it out or die trying.
That might have been fine with Augie, had he not sneaked out of his house one Saturday when he was supposed to be doing his chores to see a matinee of some movie all the kids at school were talking about. He didn’t quite get the appeal of watching four singers with weird accents and weirder haircuts be chased around London by a bunch of hysterical girls, but everybody in his class had already seen it, and he was tired of being left out of the conversation. Halfway to the theater, though, he saw something that would change his life forever.
It was only a cardboard box, flipped upside down so that its bottom became a tabletop. And behind that tabletop, an indistinct man in a slick suit was yammering to the passersby as his hands flicked through a small stack of playing cards.
Augie had no idea what the man was saying, and he didn’t understand why he was standing on a street corner, or why people walking by would stop, put down a dollar bill, then walk away without it. All he saw were the three cards the man laid out on his makeshift table, the way they moved, changed, flew, the way the man would put down four cards and make them look like three, the last one disappearing into his palm.
The movie began and ended three times while Augie watched the man’s hands and the cards, and if a beat cop hadn’t ambled by and chased the swindler away, Augie might have stayed there for the week.
From that moment on, his life was set. He began to study up on what his father called “card tricks,” but what he quickly learned was called “sleight of hand.” And then he began to lock himself in the bathroom. For the first few months, his father would hammer on the bathroom door and scream for him to come out, and for Augie, that was some of the best training he ever received. He learned early how to ignore the loudest heckler. And if he finally had to submit to weekly sessions with a therapist to discuss what his father assumed was the real reason he spent four hours at a time behind a locked bathroom door, that merely taught him more about the art of dissembling.
From that moment on the street corner, Augie never doubted that he would spend his life performing up close magic with playing cards. What didn’t occur to him then, or for many years, was that the marketplace for such an act was extremely limited. The thing that Augie loved so much about his art form—the close, personal nature of one man, two hands, and fifty-two cards—also severely limited its commercial possibilities. If you planned to make an elephant disappear, you could do it in a theater that would accommodate thousands. But if all you wanted was to make a certain card appear in the glove compartment of a locked car belonging to a man you’d never met, there was simply no way to sell a lot of tickets. Fortunately, making money was never among Augie’s chief concerns. Even when Ricky Jay, the preeminent, up-close magician of the age, did figure out a way to make a healthy living from his work, Augie didn’t waste a moment cursing himself for missing the opportunity. His father had willed him the tiny bungalow where he’d grown up. The sale of what had grown to be an empire of three dry cleaning establishments and a half dozen coin-op Laundromats provided a small nest egg, and as long as he could buy a case of Bicycles for less than twenty dollars, he didn’t need anything else.
Except an audience—and that had become increasingly difficult over the last few years as stage magic had reentered the mainstream of pop culture. Magic had become show business, and Augie couldn’t compete with the expectations of the spectacle-sated crowds. He didn’t object to Siegfried and Roy or David Cop perfield when they took their illusions to a ludicrously large scale, because he knew they were at heart master craftsmen, and the tricks they performed were based on the same set of skills they all shared.
But then there was P’tol P’kah, whose act, he was certain, was designed to destroy everything Augie loved about his art. Because what Augie did—and what every one of his predecessors had done for generations before him—was based on precise technical skill. Uncountable hours of practice went into the tiniest movement. This was the real secret of the professional magician. The genius of the act lay not in the trick, no matter how clever, but in the huge amount of work it took to master it.
The so-called Martian Magician was something else entirely, Augie was sure. This dissolving man trick really was just that—a trick. He didn’t know how the green guy was pulling it off, but he could tell that the secret was technological, not manual. And if all it took to be considered a great magician was access to the most expensive toys, then his art would be reduced to the level of the pop music industry, where computers could turn any moderately talented teenage girl into the next singing sensation.
Augie was not going to let that happen. He’d been studying P’tol P’kah’s act for months, and he was almost certain he would have figured it out if he could have seen the Dissolving Man just once or twice more. That, he knew, was why the green giant had vanished after his aborted performance at the Fortress of Magic. He must have known he was going to be exposed. He must have known he was going to be exposed by Augie Balustrade.
But if this fraud thought that simply dropping out of sight was going to protect his secret, Augie was going to make sure he learned just how wrong he was. Let the others chatter on about what a terrific exit they had seen. Let them scramble for the opportunity to take over the enormous showroom. Augie was going to expose him.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but nearly drowning in the Martian’s tank at the Fortress performance
had finally given Augie an idea of what the trick’s secret might have been. He hadn’t been able to see much when he was upside down and underwater, but as he looked out at the audience, he was pretty sure he could see a tight grid of tiny wires running through the glass walls. The most likely explanation was that these were merely reinforcements to keep the tank from exploding over the audience, but Augie thought they might have another purpose, as well.
It was still just a theory, but he was chasing hard after further evidence and hoping for some real information soon. If he could have had a few uninterrupted minutes with the dissolving tank, he was sure that what he’d find would match up with what he was assuming. But since that wasn’t going to happen in this or any lifetime, Augie had begun to make some phone calls. He wasn’t asking specific questions yet, just grounding himself in basic theory. But every bit he learned made him more confident that he was on the right track.
Augie scooped the cards up in his left hand and with a graceful wave arced them through the air so they landed facedown in his right palm. He twitched the muscles of his right hand, and the cards flew up again, this time landing in his left, the faces alternating up and down. One more twitch and the deck disappeared from sight. He reached into his jacket pocket—Augie always dressed for business before practice—and pulled out the cards, which were now arranged by suit.
He was about to fan them across the toilet tank again, when he heard a hissing noise. That was nothing new for the bungalow his father had left him; Augie spent almost as much time jiggling the toilet handle to stop it from running as he did working with the cards. His hand was halfway to the lever when he realized that the sound was both higher and louder than any running water he’d ever heard.
And it was coming from outside the bathroom door.
Maybe a pipe broke and there’s water spewing all over the kitchen, Augie thought. But before he could visualize the location of the main valve, he heard something else outside the bathroom.
Psych: Mind Over Magic Page 18
