A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Morrit was so grateful for this Indian summer to his career in magic that he tended to forget how invaluable he was to Zal, and that was what fuelled the recurring thought in his white-maned head that the younger man ought to be spreading his wings.

  ‘You shouldn’t be stuck on this old tub at your time in life, lad,’ he had said a few months back. ‘You’re too good for this.’

  ‘I like it here,’ Zal replied, neglecting to elaborate by way of indicating that he didn’t wish to discuss why.

  ‘I like it too, but I’m an old man. You’ve got too much more you could achieve. Your name should be in lights somewhere. You could pack ’em in wherever you went: London, New York, Vegas, anywhere.’

  ‘I’m content to just be for a while, Dan,’ he told him.

  Morrit nodded and frowned, understanding that Zal was alluding to things he wouldn’t talk about: ‘Never ask me and I’ll never need to lie to you,’ had been how Zal once closed the subject, way back on the night they conspired to dispose of Fleet.

  ‘Aye,’ Morrit said, sighing, ‘but remember a ship is just a means of transport. It’s only supposed to take you somewhere else. In mythology, a ship usually symbolises a journey between the worlds of the living and the dead. I don’t know what it was happened to you once upon a time, lad – I’ve learned not to ask – but I know you’re not in a hurry to rejoin the land of the living, and I’m just saying: you want to watch you don’t end up lost in transit.’

  Zal couldn’t entirely put this down to Morrit merely transferring the way he used to worry that he was holding back his daughter, as the old man had stated his readiness to follow Zal wherever opportunity might take them. Despite pushing seventy, he had no reluctance about the prospect of, for instance, relocating their show to some air-conditioned oasis in Dubai.

  ‘There’s no retirement for the likes of me. Wife long since passed, Lizzie moved on. Got a few bob put away now, thankfully, but when you retire, it’s supposed to be to do what you like. This is what I like, what I love. It’s all I know. I’ll do it until I die, and if I die doing it, I’ll die happy.’

  Representatives were booking on to single legs of the Spirit of Athene’s route just to watch ‘Maximilian’ perform, and sound him out about future engagements: cruise ships from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, hotels from Dubai to Tokyo. Four years of non-stop work under the tutelage of Daniel Morrit had turned Zal into an excellent magician, and given the money they were offering, those Asian and Arabic reps clearly shared the old man’s belief that he could pack them in wherever he chose to go. Zal reckoned the ‘name in lights’ part of Morrit’s prediction was on the money too, and that had been the problem. He had grown used to the security of alias and anonymity. He had created a small world for himself that he could guard and control. The mere prospect of publicity reawakened old fears. It had been a long time since he saw off Albert Fleet, but if his face ended up in a magazine, a brochure, some TV promo spot, then it increased the risk that his past would once again catch up with him.

  Tonight, though, Morrit’s weariness of tone is misplaced. Zal doesn’t tell him, but he is ready to audition for the Arabs, the Asians or whoever has been asking for him. He’s been ready for a while. He’d enjoyed a rehabilitative period in the comfort zone, and had spent his time both profitably and wisely, but he’d always known he couldn’t remain in permanent stasis. The old man was right: it was time for something more.

  He had first set sail on the cruise ship in order to spare Angelique, but found himself developing an invaluable relationship with Morrit: that was who he now feared they’d go through, like they went through Parnell, his prison-time mentor, like they went through Karl, and like they went through his dad. As long as you cared for somebody, you were vulnerable: if they always hurt who you loved, then either you couldn’t afford to love, or you couldn’t afford to let the world hear your name.

  But who the hell wants to live like that?

  He thinks of Fleet, thinks of the Estobals, thinks of Bud Hannigan. They had all taken him on and lost, then taken him on again and lost more heavily second time around. The bounty hunter still knew where to find him, and yet nobody had come calling in four years. Perhaps the penny had finally fucking dropped. Perhaps the ghosts of his past had more to fear from him than the other way around.

  The houselights go down and he takes the stage. He’s buzzing, sensing that tingle in his fingers as he touches the cards. He feels supreme, determined to give his best performance but not remotely nervous about the stakes. Four years of this, of learning, practising, improving. He is at absolutely the top of his game, exhilaratingly so, and nothing, nothing whatsoever, could faze Zal Innez right now.

  Apart from seeing Angelique de Xavia sitting in the front row.

  The magician’s hands suddenly spasm as he grips the pack. The cards explode from the collapsing cradle of his fingers, spraying, spinning, fluttering about the stage like crisp autumn leaves stirred from the gutter by a sudden gust. It is not a flourish but a fumble, a moment of startlement. A trick derailed, an unscripted incompetence. Some members of the audience gasp, others fail to stifle giggles. The muted laughter is horrible: a cringing combination of being embarrassed on the faltering magician’s behalf and being embarrassed by being present at such a tawdry spectacle. But can he recover, that’s the question? Does he have an out?

  Does he hell.

  Should maybe have worn her jeans

  ‘You were godawful,’ Morrit tells him when he comes offstage. Zal reckons he is being a little harsh, but decides to consider it a compliment regarding the standards he’s set himself.

  He had been forced to laugh off the involuntary card scramble precipitated by seeing who this supposed Asian talent agent really was, referring to the calamity as ‘an old trick known as the fifty-two-card pick-up’. After that, he didn’t actually blow anything, but though it would have taken an eye such as Morrit’s to detect precisely how below-par he was, his performance was undoubtedly lacking in spark. It wasn’t that he was simply going through the motions of his act because his mind was on other things; rather, it felt like going through the motions of his act was the only thing he knew how to do right then, because inside his head was one huge fifty-two-card pick-up. There was a moment, only a glimpse, during which he almost connected to the buzz he should have been getting from doing this act in front of Angelique, but it was immediately swamped amid questions, fears, doubts and confusion, just one card in the wildly buffeting pack.

  ‘Not exactly what I’d call an audition performance,’ Morrit goes on. ‘I’d say I hoped it didn’t bugger up your chances of any offers if it wasn’t that it only took me about ten seconds to deduce that the young lady seated at table four most probably wasn’t here on the business of talent recruitment after all.’

  ‘Fair to say her specialty is less recruitment than . . .’ Zal cuts himself off. ‘No. She ain’t here about a job. Not a new one, anyway.’

  ‘That wasn’t all I was able to deduce. Your picture is finally starting to take a more recognisable shape, with that particular piece slotted into the jigsaw.’

  ‘There’s still a lot of holes, Dan, and believe me, the end result’s an optical illusion.’

  ‘You think there’s an illusion ever been constructed that I can’t see through? Don’t kid yourself, lad. She’s why you’re here, and why you stayed here. She’s why you never got involved with anybody all these years, more than the odd casual fling.’

  ‘We don’t get a lot of hen parties sailing with us,’ Zal suggests, but that was never going to head Morrit off. Zal had been made, big-time, in front of a full-house.

  ‘I’ve watched you closer than you think, especially since Lizzie moved on, as I’ve had nowt else to fuss about,’ Morrit tells him, helping Zal off with his jacket and delicately removing the aluminium card-pull apparatus from his back. ‘There’s a big crew on this tub, lot of shipboard romances, but not for you. A one-night stand here and there maybe, but nobod
y gets allowed any closer than that. This boat’s your Foreign Legion, lad, the good ship Beau Geste. Who is she?’

  Zal sighs, turning to look his partner in the eye.

  ‘You remember when I said never ask me and I won’t need to lie to you? Well, she’s everything I’d have to lie about.’

  Morrit holds his gaze for a moment, weighing this up with piercing scrutiny. His face softens and he nods. ‘Just like always, lad: you’ve told me everything and nothing.’

  ‘Best I can do right now,’ Zal says sincerely, to which Morrit nods again. ‘Where is she? Did she leave for the bar, or...?’

  ‘Still in her seat, last I looked. They’ll be ushering her out in a minute, if they haven’t already.’

  ‘Love to see them try,’ Zal mutters. ‘Can you go get her? Bring her here?’

  ‘Inside the sanctuary, sir?’ Morrit jokes, putting on a Hammer Horror voice.

  ‘Access all areas,’ he confirms.

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘She’s had that since day one,’ Zal says quietly to himself, after Morrit has exited.

  It takes Morrit an age to retrieve her: maybe as much as ninety seconds. Time enough to revisit several years’ worth of conflicted thoughts, and to reflect on the reality that while he may once have made a decision, there has never been a resolution. He needs more than ninety seconds to prepare for this, but if five years hasn’t been enough, then maybe it is as well there isn’t any longer to worry about it.

  He couldn’t see her closely from onstage: merely close enough to have no doubt that it was she. The old man leads her inside, holding open the dressing-room door, saying nothing. Christ, what could the guy say by way of introduction, on behalf of either of them? Morrit then withdraws from the dressing room with the delicacy of some eighteenth-century servant, stepping backwards with his head low, but breaking below-stairs protocol at the last to snatch a parting look at Zal. What perhaps started as curiosity is now bordering on concern. Zal returns a neutral look as Morrit closes the door. Then, finally, after five years, Zal Innez and Angelique de Xavia are alone together once again.

  Zal is leaning against the table-top that sits hard against the wall below a bulb-rimmed mirror. Angelique stands just inside the door, clasping her hands in front of her dress. There is something supplicant about it: she looks like she wants to fold her arms but is resisting, trying to appear more open.

  They just stare at each other for a moment or two, both mouths open a little but no words finding their way forth. He takes her in, close up and in full light. She looks thinner, shorter, delicate. Smaller than he remembers, but that’s because his mind can’t accept how so much – all the things she came to mean to him, all the memories of who she was, all the women he imagined her now to be – could possibly fit inside this one female frame. She seems sharper-featured, though this also could merely be the effect of the reality suddenly superseding the memory and the ideal; it could also reflect that few of her days since he last saw her have been spent tending baby lambs in an Alpine glade. She looks tired and uncharacteristically vulnerable. They’re standing here in the civility of a cruise-ship performers’ dressing room, and yet she looks less sure of herself than when she was being held at gunpoint. (By him, he feels a little ashamed to recall.)

  Zal speaks first, forces himself to come up with something to say. He’s the host here, for one thing, but for another, he has this crazy feeling like if he doesn’t reach out and make contact somehow, then whatever spell summoned her here will be broken and she’ll vanish before his eyes.

  ‘I have to compliment you on your timing. I think I finally got over you about eighteen minutes before I went onstage.’

  That was the first thing that came into his head; just a line, but borne of too much truth and sincerity for its thus jarring flippancy to get past his tact filters. He doesn’t say it. The look in her eyes didn’t suggest she was in the mood for sparring: her deflector shields were definitely down.

  What issues from his mouth instead, at shorter notice, but with even more truth, and even more sincerity, is simply this:

  ‘I missed you.’

  She still says nothing, her mouth remaining slightly open and a look of uncertainty persisting in her eyes. The moment endures without her forming any kind of response. Zal wonders, for just a flash, if she’s looking so conflicted because she’s here on Judas duty and she’s just about to arrest him. His words on her doorstep that last night, when he effectively put himself at her mercy, repeat in his mind: You can make make this my Gethsemane if you want. It would be worth it for the kiss. He realises right then that he still feels the same as he did then: that he wants that kiss, wants to be with her more than he fears for what he has to lose. He only ever rationalised otherwise because she wasn’t there.

  He hears a sound of her breath, a cut-off sigh which he realises was her abortive attempt to speak the word ‘I . . .’ She closes her mouth, swallows. He thinks she’s about to give it another shot, but she doesn’t. Instead she takes a pace forward, her eyes filling, and throws her arms around him.

  Should maybe have worn jeans, she muses to herself with a slightly embarrassed giggle. That it’s the first giggle she has emitted in weeks tells her that, actually, maybe the dress was right.

  She joins the ship at Barcelona, where it is docking overnight. As soon as she boards, she goes directly to the ballroom where ‘Maximilian’ is billed to appear, not even stopping at her cabin on the way. She is told by a mercurial-looking older man that ‘Mr McMillan’ is in preparation and cannot be disturbed until after the show. She suppresses a smile at the mention of this new alias, Zal’s middle name, given him by his Rangers-daft exiled father in tribute to his favourite player. The older man’s name is Morrit, and she deduces immediately that he is no mere shipboard functionary, even though he is using precisely that posture to make out he is powerless to assist. Even over a brief exchange, she can tell he and Zal are in league somehow. Like with Zal, she gets the impression there are several discrete but interconnected levels of activity going on behind this guy’s eyes: secrets, schemes and mysteries that would continue getting on with themselves quite independently while his external manners dealt with the mundanities of the here and now.

  It would thus not, she reckons, be worth getting pushy.

  Instead, she accepts it as for the best. She will go back to her cabin, unpack her bag, freshen up and go along to the show. That way she can take him in gradually, from a safe distance, like an immunising dose, before confronting him point blank.

  She’s travelled light, only thrown a few things together in hand luggage. Barcelona is warm, below decks on the ship warmer still. She opts for the dress because it is light and lets the air get around her, whereas her jeans were starting to feel that heavy and clingy way. She only realises once she has showered and slipped the dress over her head that she hadn’t even been thinking about which outfit she looks better in. It is a strangely jarring occurrence: the single-minded and pragmatic motives that are both driving her and guiding her have suppressed such considerations as unhelpful and distracting, but just this one thought seems to shatter the seal. Thus far it has all been arrangements and logistics: the ship’s schedule, onboard entertainment programmes, flight timetables, the pursuit and practicalities of putting herself and Zal together in the same room. How she is going to feel about that and how she is going to conduct herself when it finally happens have been subconsciously deferred as not of immediate concern, like they were arriving on a later flight. That plane has landed now, and she is glad Morrit sent her away and gave her time to prepare.

  She looks at herself in the mirror and begins wondering, for the first time, what Zal will see. She appears tired, worn-down, fraught, like she’s barely slept in weeks, which is about right. Does the dress make her look like a scrawny waif? She has a spare top, one with long sleeves. Maybe in that and the jeans she would look... No. The pragmatic drive kicks back in. She can’t afford this. Go with what’s phy
sically comfortable. The show’s starting in half an hour, and you want a table near the front.

  When the houselights dim, Angelique is more anxiously expectant than she remembers feeling at any teenage rock concert. She feels a surge throughout her whole torso, something horribly involuntary, a reminder of how much we are hostage to the physiology of our animal selves. Jesus, she’s never felt this helpless entering the line of fire on Dougnac’s team, but that’s because under those circumstances, she’s always known what she was doing. Then all of it is suddenly dispelled and forgotten as Zal Innez takes the stage, dressed in a sober but semi-formal dark-coloured suit and bow-tie.

  He looks more mature, rather than simply older. The lighting and a bit of make-up are no doubt contributing to this effect, but it’s the fact that he’s lost the long locks and the peroxide that is giving him an upscale elegance that is almost impossible to equate with the prison-tattooed Californian surf punk who stole from her bed as she slept on Christmas Eve 2002. Some things can’t change, however: the blue eyes are still two piercing laser-beams, and even from the rear of the stage, she’s well within their range.

  She had imagined he’d go for a magician-as-rock-star look, though hopefully not including a David Copperfield retro-nineteen eighties mullet. Instead, he’s closer to retro-eighteen-eighties, and looks quite disarmingly respectable for it. The whole set, in fact, looks defiantly old-school and unashamedly low-tech. She interprets it as a statement of embracing the past, though that might just be an optimistic personal spin.