The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Then the nice cop asked gruffly: “Are you all right, Miss?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” (But I was winded, I’d plummeted right through four days, I’d freefallen straight back to Monday when I’d thought Good riddance and then lain awake all night. I’d pictured them at the crack of dawn, I’d watched them getting into Charlie’s car, I’d followed them getting out of the city before the traffic, heading up the coast road, maybe taking the Brisbane hooker and the Brisbane cop, two old bawds hitching a free ride and necking in the back seat of Charlie’s car, oh yeah, I’d pictured that, I’d been seeing them all week burling along past Newcastle, Taree, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Byron Bay, Tweed Heads, watch out Queensland, here we come, maybe reaching the border Tuesday night, depending on stops. Wednesday, Thursday, and now all day Friday in Brisbane, what did I care that Gabriel hadn’t even phoned? What did I care? Cat’s got their tongue and she can bloody well keep it, was what I thought.)

  What exactly was the nature of your relationship with these two men?

  (Oh, there was a question, and the answer hit me as vertigo.) “They are part of me,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

  The policemen exchanged another look. You had sexual relations with both men? (What they didn’t say, what I could see in their eyes: And a couple of hundred other men besides. Upstairs at The Inferno. We know all about you.)

  “No,” I said, dignified. “Not with both men.”

  You had sexual relations with Gabriel Gray.

  “Yes.”

  On the night of his disappearance?

  “Not on Monday night,” I said wretchedly “No.” (Oh, if only we were given advance notice of which words could become our famous last.)

  The night of his disappearance was Tuesday night. Did you have sexual relations Tuesday night?

  “No.”

  You didn’t see him the night he disappeared?

  “He hasn’t disappeared, he’s gone to Brisbane.”

  You didn’t see him Tuesday night?

  “No.”

  You haven’t seen him since Monday night?

  “That is correct.”

  This is Friday and you haven’t seen him since. You weren’t alarmed?

  “I would be if he hadn’t gone to Brisbane.”

  These all-night junkets in the quarry, you didn’t find them alarming?

  (How much can you explain to the police? What can you say about the kind of dread that seeps into dreams?) “Yes,” I said. “They worried me. It’s not the safest place in the world, is it? But they always did come back.”

  The police produced photographs of the bar at The Shaky Landing. This is where Chang and Gray were on Tuesday night. The camera doesn’t lie.

  I looked at the photographs. “I don’t see them,” I said. “I don’t see Gray or Chang.”

  We have black-and-whites at the station, surveillance stills, a number of frames, we didn’t happen to bring them along. (Oh, right. They just forgot to bring those particular shots.) And we have evidence on videotape. You can take our word for it.

  (I didn’t. Though if Charlie and Gabriel were there, it meant they had needed to see the Brisbane hooker or the Brisbane cop again. Perhaps the hooker or the cop had contacted them. We’ve got more information, they might have said. Or perhaps they said: we’ve arranged a meeting with Cat. She’s not in Brisbane, she’s here, Mr Chang was right, we just wanted free transport up the coast, but we do know where she is, and we’ll take you to her in the quarry for a fee. Or else: she is in Brisbane, but we’ve had a spot of difficulty, we’ve had to do some fancy footwork, it’s been nip and tuck, but now we’ve set up the place and time. And all Tuesday Gabriel would have been obsessed, he would have been much too obsessed to phone, or he could have been still hurt because I’d pulled away from him Monday night, and then by Tuesday night they wouldn’t have wanted to wait, they would have left the minute they had definite word, and then in Brisbane they may have had their hands full with Cat herself …)

  Do you recognise this place? The police fingers jabbed at the black-and-white Shaky Landing stills.

  “Yes.”

  Have you ever at any time visited this place?

  “Once. I was there a couple of weeks ago. We all were.”

  We all?

  “Gabriel and Charlie and Catherine Reed and myself.”

  Catherine Reed? The one with the interview show on TV?

  “Yes.”

  And what was the nature of the business that would take you all to a place such as this?

  “We were looking for someone,” I said. (What was safe to tell or not tell? Answer: it makes no difference; everything is evidence of guilt.) “There was a woman we thought might be there, a friend of Charlie’s, that’s all. We had some photographs.”

  Are these the photographs? And there were the prints that had so recently disappeared from our burgled flat.

  “Jeez!” I said. “Whew.” This changed things. I thought I knew how to handle this, I could pull those policemen out of their echo chamber now, I could turn their amplifiers off. They were just ordinary human cops again, cruising, off-duty, out for a little provocation and harassment on the side, you scratch my corruption, I’ll scratch yours. Hey, I was an expert. “You blokes take what you want pretty fast, don’t you?” I laughed. I used my teasing let’s make a deal, guys voice. I get on with moonlighting cops very comfortably and always have. The barmaid instinct, the hooker’s stock-in-trade, a skill I picked up from Sheba, I suppose. “You got a warrant to raid his things?” I demanded.

  They grinned at me. “Stroppy little tart, aren’t you? We have got a warrant, as a matter of fact. Whenever there’s evidence of foul play.”

  I blinked then. My heart skipped a few dozen beats. “What evidence of foul play?”

  “A violent brawl at The Shaky Landing late Tuesday night. Around 3 a.m.”

  “But there’s a violent brawl there every night.”

  “Mayhem this time,” the cops said. “Bodies all over the place. Some of them so badly hacked they haven’t been identified yet. Your boyfriend could be one of them. And so could the Chinaman.”

  “Charlies Australian,” I said. One is curiously precise about details when one is in shock.

  “Whatever,” they said. They flashed some very gruesome photographs. “Any identifying marks or signs?”

  “No,” I said, turning away, my hand over my mouth. “I feel sick,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Do you mind if I …?”

  I had to lock myself into the bathroom for a while. But I knew Gabriel’s body intimately, and it was not in the photographs. Nor was Charlie’s. I took some deep breaths and began to feel better. Then I went back.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “The thing is,” they said. “There were bodies that disappeared before we got there, according to witnesses. Whisked away for reasons interesting to speculate on. Any ideas?”

  “No,” I said faintly, feeling sick again.

  “We’d like you to look at some more photographs,” they said. “Know anyone in this one?”

  I stared at it. I felt very calm now, I felt no anxiety at all, I felt as though I’d dreamed the police up, I felt as though this wasn’t really happening at all, which is one of the minor blessings of shock. “Yes,” I said indifferently I could see Charlie and Gabriel at a table with a woman. The woman had her back to the camera. “There,” I said. “Those two. Gabriel and Charlie.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Positive.”

  “That was Tuesday night,” they said. “Just before the fight broke out. We can assume they were there for the big bang.”

  “Oh,” I said in a faint voice, and I felt something like needles reaching me through the buffering pillows of shock, but they went away again and nothing seemed real. It is curious, however, the way a detached analytical part of the mind keeps watching, keeps making c
omments. In fact, stripped of all emotional reaction, details actually seem to take on a sharper edge. “You said you didn’t have this evidence with you.”

  “Interrogation technique,” the nice one shrugged, grinning. “Have to catch you off guard, don’t we, love?”

  And since they had me off guard, they produced the documentation on Cat, the files, the photographs. It is astonishing, the details of a life on film and microchip. I sifted through the folder and they watched me, but it must have been disappointing for them because my gaze was blank, I felt nothing, I had no reactions at all. No doubt the information logged itself somewhere in my brain, willy-nilly, as I’ve read that it does, but it didn’t get through to me.

  They produced a folder with photographs of bones. These were close-ups, showing scars and indentations on the bone. I remember thinking what a sense of drama the body had, how extraordinary its shapes, how I’d never realised before the stunning beauty of bones. “Brutally and viciously stabbed,” they said. “Thirty-six times, to be precise.” They pointed to the nicks and chips in the bone. “Incredible ferocity,” they said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. I could see their logic, the way it coiled itself around femurs and ribs.

  “Suppose we told you,” they said, “that we are very curious indeed about Chang and Gray’s interest in the woman called Cat. Obsessive interest, I think we could say. What would you say to that?”

  The only thing that came into my mind to say was a little bubble of nonsense. Curiosity killed the cat, I thought, and swallowed the thought in time, and said nothing at all. I could taste the edge of hysteria in the words I had swallowed, I was afraid I would burst into something unstoppable, laughter or sobbing, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Suppose we told you,” they said, “that these are the bones of the woman called Cat.”

  Oh God. That shook the cobwebs in my brain. Was that what Gabriel and Charlie had found out? And was the news unbearable, was that why they hadn’t even phoned? Had they simply fled? People run away from pain, I know that. I bolted from Brisbane once. Catherine fled to London, Charlie to New York.

  Unsolved mystery, the police said. One of her lovers, we think. They went on and on, but all I could hear was the door closing behind Gabriel on Monday night. Obsessive interest on the part of Chang and Gray, I heard, and I struggled to concentrate again. Maybe dead in a tavern brawl, and maybe not, they said. Maybe arrangers of their own “deaths", wouldn’t be a first for that trick, eh? They watched me for a reaction, but I didn’t have one. Or maybe got out of the way by someone else, they said. But why? That was the interesting question. All very curious, they said.

  Wait a minute, I thought dizzily. Wait a minute, what’s going on here? (Interrogation technique. We need to catch you off guard, don’t we, love?)

  Suppose we told you that these are the bones … Suppose they told me the moon was made of green cheese? What proof did I have that the woman was Cat?

  You can’t afford to tip anyone off, Gabriel had warned about notes that he kept under lock and key; notes that had disappeared in a burglary. The network is incredible … you never know who’s hooked in.

  That is Cat in the mirror, Charlie had said of a photograph that was stolen from my place and then shown to me again by the police.

  What proof did I have that the woman in any of the police photographs was Cat? What proof did I have that the photograph of Charlie and Gabriel was taken just before the fight broke out? What proof did I have that it was even taken on Tuesday night? Just what kind of information were the police fishing for?

  I felt a huge swooping upcurrent of relief, and I glided on it straight into happiness. They were on their way up to Brisbane, just as they said. Maybe they’d found Cat, maybe they even had her with them. It wouldn’t be the first time Cat had fled from the police, goaded the law, driven them all to a feral possessive frenzy. What did all this sudden official interest in her mean, anyway? Obsessive interest, I think we could safely say. Oh yes. In my mind’s eye I could see the three of them in a car on the Pacific Highway, heading north. I could see them in Brisbane. I could see them at Cedar Creek.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything,” I said.

  “We’ll get back to you,” the police promised.

  Naturally I thought it was Gabriel. In my dream, the knocking figured as hail on an iron roof, I was back in Queensland, childhood, a tropical thunderstorm. In the dream I was walking down a long dark corridor that branched off on every side. I didn’t know where I was going. The rain and the hail were hammering down and I ran into total darkness and opened a door …

  It was Gabriel’s father.

  “Wha …?” I blinked. “What time is it?”

  He came inside and closed the door behind him. I blinked at my watch. Five a.m.

  “Oh God, what’s happened?” I said.

  “Where is he?” Robinson Gray demanded. He walked down our hallway and into the bedroom. He looked under the bed. He roamed around our apartment as though he owned it. He picked up books of Gabriel’s, he picked up a shirt, he picked up a framed family photograph and put it down. His movements were jerky. “Do you know where he is?”

  I suppose his anxiety brought the smell of harm into the house like fog. It smelled of uncollected garbage, of vinegar, of public toilets long uncleaned. I could feel my heart thumping like a piston, then skipping and doing little butterfly beats. I had to lean against the wall before I could speak. “He’s gone to Brisbane,” I said.

  I don’t think he even heard me. He was like someone going through a house frantically to shut off a burglar alarm he couldn’t find.

  I made myself count to twenty. “I’ll put coffee on,” I said. “Would you like some?”

  He didn’t answer but he followed me into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. “Do you think he’s alive?” he asked.

  I spilled ground coffee all over the counter and had to wipe it down. I couldn’t answer. I turned to look at him, but he wasn’t listening for answers anyway. He had his hands on the side of his head in a curious way, like claws, his thumbs against his cheek bones, his fingers like cages over his eyes, the fingertips on the temples.

  “It’s full of borers,” he said. “I can feel them tunnelling and boring and blasting inside my head. They never stop. They never stop. I know what they’re after, they’re digging me out.”

  I watched him nervously.

  “I keep having this nightmare,” he said.

  They wait just beyond the borders of sleep and every night he walks the streets to stave them off. He prowls through back alleys, he watches the figures in doorways, he goes into phoneboxes and dials a number and listens when a voice answers. He says nothing, he inserts no coin, he pushes no button, he listens, he waits.

  Sometimes he keeps sleep at bay for several nights in succession, but they always get him in the end.

  They start in his head, chip chipping away at his skull, but they are everywhere, they have taken over his arteries, his veins, his capillaries, he has been invaded, he has been quarried, the Mole People have set up camp in his intestines, they are photographing him from the inside out, making flowcharts, keeping notes. He is mapped and drawn and quartered. He is known. He has become the quarry.

  He writhes and beats off their maggoty advance and wakes.

  (I have seen this nightmare on Charlie’s wall. Has he? Which came first, Charlie’s photograph or Robinson Gray’s black dream?)

  Robinson Gray shook himself as though he were sloughing off the effects of a drug. He looked at me and asked me quite lucidly, “Do you think he’s alive?”

  I swallowed. “Of course he is,” I said. Once I had spoken, I felt calmer. “They’ve gone to Brisbane. They were looking for someone, something” - I corrected myself quickly, delicately — “and they had to check something out.”

  “Check what out?” he asked sharply. “What did he tell you?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “Not really.
He just said they had to check something out.”

  I poured the water into the top of the coffee maker.

  “Poor Gabriel,” he said at last. “Poor Gabriel. He couldn’t finish anything. Maybe it was my fault, I don’t know. There just seemed to be some sort of fatal flaw. He couldn’t stick at jobs, he couldn’t stay settled, he couldn’t finish his degree, he couldn’t stay still. Bartending, for God’s sake,” he said bitterly. “Pub crawling! The only thing he could stick at was trying to upset me. He hated me.”

  He put his head down on his hands, against the table.

  “No, he didn’t hate you. He doesn’t.” The past tense bothered me. “He doesn’t hate you.”

  “I loved them,” he said, jumping up again, pacing, his face twisted with baffled pain. “I loved them, and they turned on me.”

  Them. Cat and Gabriel, I thought. Such a forcefield of grief and pain came off him, that I went to him and put my hand on his. Then: shock. Something happened as it happened once before, in The Shamrock in Brisbane. When I looked into his eyes, I had the sense of looking into black and bottomless wells. I don’t mean that as a simple metaphor. I don’t quite know what I mean, but it was more than metaphor. I wouldn’t know what to call it, I wouldn’t know if that is what a vision is, or a premonition, or what the psychological explanation would be. All I know is that I had a dizzy sensation, that I felt as though I were standing on the lip of a pit looking down twin craters that opened out vertiginously into nothingness. Howl, howl, howl, howl, I thought. Something has happened to Gabriel, I thought, and in some fearful prescient way our bodies know it. Something has happened to Gabriel and Charlie and Cat.

  I felt such anxiety that I recoiled. And when he registered my recoiling, I felt such pity that I simply held him, and we stood there (I have no idea for how long, it could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been one) and then without saying a word, he left.

  Catherine sat in her office in the television studios and stared at nothing.

  “Catherine,” I said. “There’s every reason to believe they’ll turn up, and they’ll have Cat with them. It’s tracking her down that’s taking so long, they won’t give up. Would they stay on her trail this long if it didn’t go anywhere? If they didn’t think it was worthwhile? You know they wouldn’t. Four weeks, that’s nothing really.”