[JJ06] Quicksand

by Gigi Pandian

  “I may have been good, but I didn’t enjoy the stage. Some people, such as Sanjay, they enjoy the adoration. I found it overwhelming. Within a short time, I was...what is the English expression? Burnt out?”

  I nodded. “You decided to help other magicians create illusions instead.”

  “Not right away. I focused on building a clockmaking business for many years. My hobby became acquiring and fixing up old automatons.” He swept his hand across the room.

  I continued a few paces, stopping at a large magic show poster. Though it was an illustration, I again recognized Sébastien. He was with another man. Each flanked the edge of the poster, shown in silhouette as they faced a levitating woman in the center of the poster. A smaller black and white photograph of the two men was next to the poster.

  “That was my partner, Christo.”

  “Nobody asked you to come back to the stage?” I asked.

  He smiled wistfully. “For many years, I didn’t wish to be found. I was contented. Christo and I had a wonderful life in the countryside.”

  “Building automatons together?”

  Sébastien chuckled. “No. Christo was good at sleight of hand, but I was the one interested in how these mechanisms work.”

  “I’m surprised nobody tracked you down for that reason.”

  “It wasn’t as easy to find people in those days. It was years before a young magician found me and asked for my assistance. I agreed, and this is when I found my life’s calling. With young stage magicians, I helped them create set pieces for their performances. Word spread. I have always appreciated my privacy. I think it is for the same reason I also hated the stage. I tried to retire when I turned seventy five, shortly after Christo passed away, but retirement was a living death. I stared at my old creations. They stared back at me. This is when I built Jeeves. Then, several years ago, for the centennial anniversary of the death of author Jules Verne, I was invited to be part of a project that was being developed here in Nantes.”

  He pointed to a poster on the wall showing a mammoth-size mechanical elephant. “It was here I found my calling in retirement. There are many inventors like me here in this city. I stayed on and worked in the workshop of Les Machines de L’Île. There is a shared workspace there, but it is not enough space. Mainly I work here at my own home studio.”

  “How did you build that crazy barn next to the house?”

  “A magician cannot give away all of his secrets! Now, come. I will give you the full tour. Then perhaps you will take me into your confidence and tell me a few secrets of your own.”

  We stepped from the living room area into a den with a freestanding iron furnace in the center. Something warm and soft brushed against my foot. It bit my shoe. I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming.

  “Ah!” Sébastien clapped his hands together once. “Démon! Non!”

  I looked down at a gray lop-eared rabbit that looked suspiciously similar to the one I’d seen outside. “I could have sworn you called that thing a demon.”

  “Yes, that’s his name. Démon. He’s a devilish one. Impossible to train.”

  “You can train rabbits?”

  “Not well. That’s how I ended up with rabbits in the first place. Magicians often think rabbits can be a good addition to their shows. Women love them. But when you’ve been bitten by un lapin so many times…” He shrugged. “This is when a magician I knew gave me his rabbit.”

  “I thought I saw a lot more rabbits than that outside.”

  “The magician told a friend that I had taken his rabbit. Shortly thereafter, I was given another one. Two rabbits quickly became fifty. Most of them are happy to be wild rabbits. They find their own way. But the ones that choose to stay close, I feed and train. It’s nice to have company.”

  I stepped further into the room, careful to step over the fiendish bunny.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Sébastien said. “Jeeves has taught him to get out of the way if he doesn’t want his tail caught.”

  This room was less crowded than the main room. It was large but cozy. Against the far wall was a painted mannequin with a turban on his head, sitting at a desk with a chess set. Why did it look familiar?

  “The Turk!” I said.

  “You recognize him?”

  “The famous chess playing illusion from the eighteenth century.”

  “My version isn’t the original, of course. And,” Sébastien paused and gave me a sly smile, “mine works.”

  The Turk made me think again of Tipu Sultan’s famous tiger, and the similarities between his tiger and the illuminated manuscript painting from the Louvre. Tipu’s impressive automaton was at a museum in London, and it didn’t have anything to do with an elephant. Yet I was sure there was something tying them together. But in Sébastien’s magical house, I didn’t want to think about the stolen treasures of India. I wanted to soak up the wonder.

  I walked closer to Sébastien’s rendering of the chess-playing Turk, who himself wore an enigmatic smile on his plastic face. “Being in this place makes it tempting to turn my back on everything going on around me and ask you if I can be your apprentice. I’d even put up with Démon destroying my shoes. I can’t believe you don’t have people beating down your door.”

  “The world has changed,” he said. “Simple creations like this create so much wonder, but in this modern age we forget that until we experience it firsthand.” He sighed. “Now, are you ready to tell me what you’re running from?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Half an hour later, with the story spilled out of me, we woke up Lane.

  “He knows,” I told him.

  “What do you mean he knows?” Lane looked at me sharply.

  “That’s the trouble with magicians. They see things beyond the obvious.”

  Lane groaned.

  “We can trust him,” I added. “Sanjay trusts him completely.”

  “And you trust Sanjay.”

  “He knows everything,” I said, enunciating the words in hopes Lane would catch my meaning. “He knows about how you were coerced by the associate of your wealthy father’s into being part of a theft, which is why we can’t go to the authorities.”

  Lane didn’t acknowledge the “truth” I’d summarized, which of course left out things I wasn’t ready to trust Sébastien with. Under other circumstances I would have expected Lane to give me a look or a nod, but I was pretty sure he assumed, like me, that Sébastien would have picked up on it. There wouldn’t be any secret glances if we didn’t want Sébastien to know something was up.

  I wasn’t worried about Sébastien thinking we were lying, because we weren’t. We merely left out irrelevant details.

  “It is preferable we make a plan before returning to Le Mont,” Sébastien said.

  Lane and I looked at each other, neither of us sure what to say.

  “I have outlived all the people who meant the most to me,” Sébastien said. “What good is it to be alive for nearly a century if I cannot do the things I wish to do? And today, I wish to help you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  “What we need,” Sébastien said, “is a ruse to create misdirection.”

  “As you may have noticed,” Lane said, “I’m in no shape to create a ruse.”

  “Précisément. It is this condition that has given me the idea for your ruse.”

  Lane and I glanced at each other.

  “You wish this man North to believe that you and Jaya had nothing to do with the minor mudslide that took place at the Mont. You wish him to believe you don’t suspect he had a hand in your friend’s death, and that you do not believe he is searching for a treasure at Mont Saint-Michel. You therefore wish him to believe you are having a romantic holiday to recover from your traumatic experience.” Sébastien paused and l
ooked at us expectantly. “Don’t you see? It’s simplicity itself! You shall give him exactly what he wants.”

  “I thought you didn’t want us to give up,” I said.

  “Young people these days have no imagination. Did you not notice the small bone structure of Mlle. Jacqueline?”

  “The doctor?” Lane said.

  “Oui. Jacqueline will play the part of Jaya while you rest to recover from your injuries. Lane and Jacqueline will book a suite at a Loire Valley chateaux that is also a hotel, using Lane’s credit card. This man who searches for you will be able to find you this way, I presume.”

  “Yes,” Lane said, “which is the whole reason we can’t use any credit cards.”

  “We want him to find you,” Sébastien said. “He’s a busy man, so he will not appear himself. Yet he will check to make sure it’s the two of you at the hotel. A tall American man who speaks to the hotel staff in French while his petite, dark-haired girlfriend remains silent because she does not speak French. The two of them will not emerge from their suite much, but they will indeed be present over a hundred kilometers from Mont Saint-Michel.”

  A smile spread across Lane’s face. “To the outside world, we’re on a romantic getaway, but in reality Jacqueline is there as my doctor. But what makes you think she’ll drop everything and do it?”

  “She’s unemployed. She moved home to care for her father—an old friend of mine—last year. He fell and broke his hip, but he has recovered. She has been doing house calls while she searches for employment.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Lane isn’t that badly hurt. He doesn’t need a doctor. If your idea is to hide somewhere safe until Lane is well enough for—whatever the new plan is—then why wouldn’t I be the one to go with him?”

  “Because,” Sébastien said, “we are not merely waiting. We are acting. You have said time is of the essence. This means we cannot wait. While Jacqueline and Lane create a diversion, Jaya and I will be stealing the treasure from under North’s nose.”

  My mouth fell open, but it took me a few moments to find my voice. Lane must have had the same reaction. We both began to object at once. Lane tried to stand up to object more forcefully, but he faltered and sank back down onto the couch.

  “I was with you until that last part,” Lane said, gripping the cushion.

  “Sébastien’s an engineer,” I said, my eyes sweeping over his ingenious creations. “Unlike the messy job we did at the site, and the unskilled job North’s crew is doing, I bet Sébastien could rig something to find the secret room. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  The lines around Sébastien’s eyes crinkled and his white eyebrows scrunched together as he smiled. “I don’t miss the stage, but I do miss a challenge.”

  “This isn’t a theoretical exercise,” Lane said. “You can’t put Jaya in danger like that.”

  “Nobody is putting me in danger. We already decided it was worth the risk to stop this theft and bring North to justice.”

  “That was before I got hurt. Before we showed our hand. They might already be on to us. That was never part of the plan. We were supposed to make it look like a work crew innocently found the treasure.”

  “With Sébastien,” I said, “that’s still possible. They don’t know him. Since he’s offered—”

  “I don’t like the idea of you going back there,” Lane said. “Not before we know what they think happened last night.”

  “I’ll be careful. I learned from the best.” I realized, too late, that I was saying too much in front of Sébastien.

  “What are we going to tell Jacqueline?” Lane asked. His face was impassive, but I knew he would have shot me a withering look if not for Sébastien looking on. Instead, he’d changed the subject. Classic misdirection.

  “What did you tell her already?” Sébastien asked.

  “The same thing I told you, that I was in an accident involving motorbikes.”

  “She suspected nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Alors, then we can keep it that way. I will merely tell her that her services are required to nurse you back to health while Jaya attends to urgent business.”

  I didn’t like the sound of a woman who looked superficially like me nursing Lane back to health, but that was the least of my concerns about this plan. “She only speaks French,” I pointed out, “so if North follows up on Lane’s credit card charge, he’ll find out Lane is with a French woman, not me.”

  “I’ll tell her I want to practice my French,” Lane said. “Then it’ll make perfect sense for me to be the one speaking to the hotel staff.”

  “I thought you didn’t like this plan!”

  “It’s growing on me.”

  I threw my hands in the air and lay down on the couch opposite Lane and Sébastien. “While you two are living it up at a fancy hotel, Sébastien and I will be conducting reconnaissance at Mont Saint-Michel to see what North knows and for Sébastien to figure out how to rig something to get to the treasure. Is that the plan?”

  They both nodded at me.

  “Since I need to stay out of sight, what’s the point of me being there at all?”

  “We don’t know how quickly we’ll need to act,” Lane said. “I need to be far away for North to not be suspicious. We can use the burner phones to be in touch without North knowing what we’re up to. But that gives me another idea. In case North doesn’t find me right away through my credit card, we’ll make it easy for him. You can call Sanjay on your own phone.”

  “To feed him the line about you and me going on a romantic trip together. While the reality is that I’ll be stuck inside a hotel room somewhere near Mont Saint-Michel.”

  Lane reached into his pocket and pulled out an object smaller than the tip of his pinkie finger. “You won’t be blind. Sébastien can wear this on his collar.”

  “This is the camera you used at—”

  “Yes,” Lane cut me off. “You know I love my gadgets.”

  Lane handed the tiny camera to Sébastien.

  “C’est magnifique,” Sébastien said softly. “I have never seen a camera so small. This would be perfect for a magician...Jaya will see and hear what the camera picks up?”

  “Only see it, I’m afraid,” Lane said.

  “No matter. This is better that I imagined would be possible. She won’t let me forget anything I see when I report back.”

  “This is the only way she’ll stay in the room,” Lane said.

  “I’m right here, you know.”

  “Shall we call Sanjay and Jacqueline?” Sébastien asked. “I was led to believe you were in a rush.”

  Sébastien called Jacqueline first, to make sure the plan would work. She was happy to accept the job of personal doctor for a few days, especially since it involved accommodation at a luxury chateaux.

  Calling Sanjay was more complicated. Lane decided we would put the sim card back into my own phone for me to do so, figuring North was still tracking it. But he insisted on waiting until we left Nantes, just in case North’s spyware also had location-tracking that could pinpoint our location.

  “Do we need to call a cab?” Lane asked.

  “I can drive,” Sébastien said.

  “Uh...” Lane began. We’d both seen the mud-covered VW van in front of the house that looked like it hadn’t been driven in decades.

  “Follow me,” Sébastien said.

  We had to run to keep up as Sébastien led us around the house. Behind the main house was a half-covered garage. In it sat two silver cars. Unlike the mud-encrusted van in front, these two sports cars had been polished so brightly I could see myself in the reflection.

  “Wow,” I said. I hadn’t appreciated cars before I’d inherited my Roadster. But after driving a car with such an engine, I’d come to understand why people en
joy fast cars.

  “Which one do you prefer?” Sébastien asked. “The Porsche Boxter or the Porsche Panamera? Ah, how thoughtless of me! The decision makes itself. We are four. We will take the four-seated Panamera.”

  “This car looks brand new,” I said.

  “As I said, what good is it to live so long if one cannot do what one pleases? I appreciate nice cars. My skills have been sought out by many magicians, enabling me to buy my toys.”

  I ran my hand over the side mirror, not realizing I was doing it until I saw a grin on Sébastien’s face. I shoved my hands into the pocket of my jeans.

  “Once this is over, you must drive her,” Sébastien said. “For now, I know where we’re going. I’ll drive. Grab your bags. It’s time.”

  CHAPTER 34

  On the way to the train station, we stopped to buy an additional prepaid cell phone for Sébastien.

  I called Sanjay from the train station in Rennes, on my old phone. Jacqueline waited in the car while Lane and Sébastien hovered around me. Storm clouds gathered above, and a rumble of thunder filled the air.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said when Sanjay picked up, realizing it was six or seven o’clock in the morning in San Francisco.

  “I’m up, but this isn’t a good time. Can you call me back in a few?”

  “Who is it?” a female voice asked.

  “It’s Jaya,” Sanjay said. “Give me a minute, Tempest.”

  “Tempest is over there?”

  “We’re practicing a new illusion.”

  “At seven o’ clock in the morning?”

  “It’s only six, actually. You know I hate to go to bed until I get something right. And you know Tempest. She’s even more of a perfectionist than I am. We haven’t gotten it right yet.”

  “Sanjay!” I heard Tempest’s voice in the background.

  “You told me Tempest doesn’t play well with others. Why did she agree to help you?”