"So Gandolph was a real threat to her, simply by investigating. But surely Agatha and the professor--"
"Oh, tried and true, each in their own field; but Mangel is up for a prestigious chair and now soft-pedaling his approval of psychic phenomena, which made any possibility of appearing in a Gandolph investigation troublesome. In fact, he hasn't participated in a seance for two years, which makes one wonder why he would come to Las Vegas for such a public stunt just now--"
"Unless he knew Gandolph was living here and expected him to find the Houdini Halloween seance irresistible. Is anyone really that serpentine?"
"Tem-ple," Max rebuked her with great green cat-eyes.
"And Agatha? I'm afraid to ask."
"Simply put: quite crackers. She tried to poison some tea-reading subjects, under the assumption that they would make good contacts in the spirit world if she had sent them there herself. She was ultimately released from the mental hospital, but you know how overcrowding permits premature release of all sorts of people."
Temple sat bolt upright, clutching at her throat.
"Temple?"
"Poison in the tea? Max, I drank her tea, when she did her reading and warned me about a short dark man who was a secret ally. Hey, maybe she meant 'male,' not man. That could have been Midnight Louie!"
"Like all objects of predictions, you're finding ways to justify them. How long ago did you drink tea with Agatha?"
"Two days ago, but--ahh! I feel as if I'd swallowed a bug, or at least a marijuana joint; either way it's a roach."
Max patted her on the shoulders. "Two days? Drink your wine, then, and bless your lucky stars that dear Agatha didn't consider you good spirit fodder."
"Well, they all could have killed Gandolph, then."
Max topped off her glass, and then refilled his own empty one.
"Aren't you hitting that a little heavy?"
"Yes. Yes, I am. You see, there's another means and motive that could have killed Gary. I still suspect human intervention, only I can't prove it, and I doubt any trace will be found. But to explain my theory I can't research dead magicians' lives or their computer files. I can't rely on the spirit world showing me the way. I have to exhume some rather painful parts of my own life."
Max smiled a bit crookedly at Temple. "Want to help me turn over some of the auld sod?"
She just nodded.
Max stared past her, into the opium bed's farthest corner. Temple wondered what ghosts might haunt an artifact like this, what dreams, what nightmares. Maybe that was why Max liked it; it took his mind off his own dreams and nightmares.
"What you call my Interpol summer,' when I was sixteen-going-on-seventeen: our families sent my cousin Sean and me to Ireland our senior summer before college. You know my full roster of given names. Michael Aloysius Xavier. Sean got Patrick Donnell too. Our families were fourth-generation American, but their hearts were still in the homeland.
"Sean and I were best buddies. The summer was to be a last lark before hitting the books for real. I was going to major in communications and earn money on the side with magic shows.
Sean was going to become a history professor. Our families' blessings and a list of a few hundred cousins all over the auld sod accompanied us on our first big trip away from home."
"It must have been a fabulous opportunity."
"It was. Except two teenagers loose in a foreign land will try anything: passing for overage in pubs, dating every colleen that clog-dances, talking passionate politics We were appalled at the oppression in Northern Ireland. Most American sympathies are with the Irish, because so many of us fled here during the Famine.
"It's a long, sad story, so let me boil it down for you. We got to hanging around with the wrong elements; we got caught up in the uncivil war over there. It was all so involving, so eye-opening, so exotic. We didn't know how to walk the thin line between orange and green, we didn't even see it. Sean was blown up in an IRA hit."
"No!"
"I would have been there to be blown up too, except... there was a girl we both met, both flirted with. She was a bit older in years, and decades in experience. I was off with her when Sean died. We'd had a real fight about it, bloody knuckles and everything. Sean stormed off, went to the wrong pub, and that was that."
"Max, that's awful. But how did you end up suspected of being part of the IRA?"
Max swigged the expensive wine as if it were beer. "I joined the IRA, determined to find the ones who had killed Sean. Then I would turn them in."
"What? But you sympathized with the IRA."
"Not then."
"There's a name for that."
"Counterespionage. I doubt I could have spelled it then. It was a guilt-offering. I'd gone home for the funeral. Of course we'd each written home all summer, and Sean had written of our romantic triangle. I discovered he'd always taken it more seriously than me. If I'd have known I'd have bowed out, but it seemed like a game, a friendly competition. Anyway, at the funeral it was obvious that Sean's parents blamed me. My folks, of course, were fiercely partisan on my behalf. So the war came back to Wisconsin. My family didn't want me to go back to Ireland, but our two families had always been close. I couldn't stand the carnage, so I left."
"And became a teenage spy."
"There are no teenagers in Ireland, north and south, Temple. At least not in those days, and not for centuries before. Children fight that guerrilla war, and pay for it and die for it. I was in way over my head, but I did finally trace the cadre of men who had bombed that particular pub.
All my magic practice proved to be quite useful, after all. Then I turned them over to the British."
Temple propped her elbows on her thighs and put her face in her hands.
"I know. For the fantasy of avenging Sean and purging myself of guilt I put my entire life into a meat-grinder. I didn't even understand yet that the particular bombers didn't matter, that it was a conflict that had been bigger than anybody in it, including me, for centuries."
"How did you survive?"
"I didn't. I ran, to the Continent, and that wasn't far enough. In some circles what I did was considered an accomplishment, because I was finally found and offered a 'scholarship* by...
another organization."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't say much more. There are those who oppose terrorism in any cause, in any place.
Nations, commercial concerns, individuals. They offered me sanctuary; they offered me an education all over Europe, a chance to become a real magician; they offered me a family, and a more positive career in global espionage. Gary was allied with them. One of my first tutors. He could have been killed for that past, and there would be no trace."
"But he was retired, even from his magician career, wasn't he?"
"There is no retirement. I tried, and you saw what happened."
Temple nodded slowly. "I was your retirement."
He reached for her hand. "You weren't very retiring, though. That's why Gandolph has to have a book out; not just because the subject was dear to his heart, and he deserved a life after his many years of service and risk, but some... elements might fear what he would write. If this rather innocuous book on mediums is published, that will lull their suspicions. They will think that was all that was in his mind and his computer files."
"This is insane! You have to go through the rigmarole of publishing an entire book just to mislead someone?"
"Not for Gary's sake. It's too late. For mine. The more normal I can make the life around me, the more chance I've got of escaping the old life."
"But you were a public person, a performer before."
"And that was tolerated as long as they knew where I was and what I was doing. I wasn't a danger to anyone. You're only dangerous when you drop out. I might have tried for a new identity ultimately. That's why I was so unfair to involve you, but I was tired of life on the run, of being aloof from anybody human, from love. I guess I reverted to being a stupid teenager again when I m
et you, Temple, and that was that."
"No one has ever told me that it takes a stupid teenager to get involved with me."
"You know what I mean. I have no business being with you now. So if you have something...
compelling going on in your life, just tell me, and you'll never hear from me again."
"Oh, fabulous. It's either all or nothing with you. And this noble renunciation doesn't ring very true when you seem fairly obsessed with us getting back to where we used to be ... in bed together."
"Oh, absolutely," he admitted. "In a New Delhi minute. No lies or obfuscations there. I just don't know if I can be there tomorrow, or the next day, or if it's safe for you. I'm tired of other people paying for knowing me."
"And in a way you like it: popping in and out of people's lives like a stage magician, mystifying them, confusing everyone, your friends as well as your enemies."
"Maybe you're right." Max finished his second glass of wine. "We'll find out."
"How?"
"I'm staying this time, Temple. I'm not running again. I may have to lie low. I may have to work some not-so-legal magic, but I'm going to get to the bottom of everything that's worked against me in the past. Do you have any problems with that?"
There was only one possible answer.
"We'll find out," she said.
Chapter 40
The Mother of All Hauntings
I am by no means a fancier of the occult.
I do not wish to see what is not there, and even what is there if it is not readily apparent to the average individual.
I have never been subsumed into the belly of an extraterrestrial vehicle. The only missing time I suffer is when I am snoozing.
I have never walked through walls unless a door or window of some kind had gotten there before me. And I have never walked on water except occasionally in the pursuit of carp, and then only for the tiniest nanosecond.
So I am not enthralled by my recent encounters with things that go bump in the night, apparently having grown myopic in the Afterlife.
Most of all, I am sorry to have been visited by the spirit of the original Maurice. I was really happier not knowing that Maurice is--was--a decent dude I might even have liked in life, with no particular interest in the Divine Yvette, had certain appalling events not come to pass. How am I better off knowing that the yellow-striped dude who struts his stuff on the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy commercials today is a homicidal huckster who has dusted the true spokescat. We are talking a body double with a triple helping of chutzpah.
So, given my distaste for spirit emanations, you will understand that only my great loyalty to Miss Temple Barr could have lured me back to the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead on the occasion of the second stance. In television circles this is called a rerun, plain and simple.
However, I got more than I bargained for, least among them the hyste'rical bats bouncing their high-pitched little screeches off my cranium.
Of course the actual goings-on of that event are hardly known to the human participants, who, as usual, missed the main events.
I arrived before the first of the so-called psychics, ready to scout the territory for any unauthorized spooks. My attention was first drawn to someone big in a black catsuit. At first I took it for my esteemed sire, Three O'Clock Louie, but no such luck. Once the little shop of Halloween horrors was closed for the season, the organizers did not need local color any more.
Three O'Clock was returned to his retirement home on Lake Mead. Besides, this new cat is a more impressive dude than my old man, being kept in a cage ... except that an introductory sniff reveals that this is no dude! Her name, I discover after a few gingerly inquiries, is Kahlua and she does a nightly disappearing act at the Oasis.
"So, who's paying the freight on your ruby collars tonight?"
"Colleague of my boss's," Kahlua answers with a quite unnecessary preliminary snarl. (I think she just likes the sound of her own voice.) Like the coffee-flavored liqueur she is named for, Kahlua is strong, dark and heady. Her big green eyes flash toward the catwalk under the roof.
"He is a long, narrow cat all in black, fast as a mongoose and smooth as a velvet glove. I would go anywhere to work with him."
Naturally, I had spotted the Mystifying Max right away, so I never had any delusions about who was pulling strings in the dark wings above the seance chamber. (I feel the word "chamber"
adds a nice touch of the classy macabre to the scene below.)
"So what is on your program tonight?" I ask the lady, who is obviously a primadonna of in-the-body prestidigitation, unlike Karma, who just projects her meddling ditzy little aura into situations that are none of her business.
"Cameo role." Kahlua touches up her manicure. "Nothing to break a nail over. I do my usual appearing act in a fireplace, look gorgeous, exotic and lethal, then bug out as usual. I could do it in my sleep."
"You might not want to," I warn her. "I did a sudden entrance down that same chimney and it is rigged with enough fish line to bag a barracuda."
'Thanks for the tip, but Mr. Max would never let me go into a situation he had not checked out from top to bottom," Kahlua tells me with a yawn that reveals a maw the size of a pink-velvet cave lined with elephant tusks for teeth.
Well, Midnight Louie does not have a devoted frontman to do his dirty work for him, but I am not about to point this out to Kahlua when she is showing her dentures. Those fangs are probably all capped or bonded or bleached. Show biz!
Bidding this she-panther a distant farewell, I explore the rest of the area. That is when I discover an even bigger population explosion at the fringes of the seance chamber. Eightball, Wild Blue and Spuds of the Glory Hole Gang are posted as guards on all three levels, at Miss Temple's behest, I suspect. I am relieved to know that reinforcements are at hand should revelations during the seance prove too dramatic for a guilty party's nerves.
It is while I wander--small (relatively speaking), silent and the same color as the vast darkness that surrounds the seance chamber--that I become aware of disquieting influences.
For there are again Uninvited Guests. I am still seeing much more than I should be. Not a glimpse of Elvis and Amelia and Mae, sadly (to them I could sell tickets), but faint flickers of the phantoms seen before, like photo stills from old black-and-white films. The boy in the Little Lord Flauntleroy suit dangles from a rollercoaster scaffold. The fat old man in black sits in empty air, hunched under a bandit's hat and over a cane--or is that what's left of Edwina May-fair, animated by the spirit of Gandolph the Great? Even Old Doyly, the hearty-looking (for a ghost) chap with pipe who seemed to be urging on Houdini's apparition flickers in and out of view near the baronial fireplace in the seance chamber. As for the reputed Houdini himself, what a fizzle! I do not see even a mote of his previous image, crouched in his seine of chains, a bare pale gray blot on the darkness. Why do all these ghost guys turn up in shades of gray? I wonder. They are a sober-sided lot, unlike Elvis. It is nice to know the King is having a blast even in the Beyond. I hope that when my lives have run their course, I will have as much joie de vivre in the Afterlife too.
I finally find a concealed niche where I can get an overview of the action below without coming into the purview of the Mystifying Max or the Glory Hole Boys. With my natural advantages of coat and color, I am part of the scenery at this scene of the crime ... or crime to be confessed.
And I like the setup: the seance chamber has no roof, which makes sleight-of-hand easy to perform, and easy to oversee. I am not deceived for one moment by the stuffed figure that looks like it escaped from a taxidermist's shop; I have seen soft-sculpture people, and animals, before, and much prefer them to the real things. One by one the dramatis personae arrive. My little doll and Karma's Madame Electra are the last to assemble.
Above me, I can see the Mystifying Max moving like some giant spider to set strands of his hidden web in motion. So I am not distracted by the usual spooky effects below. Neither fog nor knives nor sniff of chlorine will d
eter Midnight Louie from his appointed duty: to seek out the wrong elements of the bigger picture. I do not know what I expect to spy from my cozy point of view. Another murder attempt, perhaps? A guilty party reacting to the evening's entertainment?
Alas, all of the Mystifying Max's wonders--and they are much more chilling than the previous tricks--do not smoke out the lurking menace we all search for. Kahlua, her throaty voice a symphony of danger and disdain, makes a much more prepossessing apparition in the hearth than yours truly, I fear. The Houdini image actually moves. The dancing cutlery whirls like ninja wheels. And the gathered attendees regard the effects with a certain nervous stoicism that does not bode well for an instant confession.
Then my sharp eyes notice something. Miss Temple Barr and Mr. Crawford Buchanan have gamely joined hands with the dummy in their midst. Call her Edwina Sophie Gandolph. I see her head nodding under its large veiled hat and cannot blame even a stuffed lump for losing interest at this point.
Then I see the figure jerk. Perhaps in the heat of the seance Miss Temple (or more likely Mr.
Crawford Buchanan, the cowardly weasel) is wringing the gloved hand. No one notices the dummy dance, however, and no one notices when the slumped figures straightens and the head turns slightly from right to left, as if by itself.
Oh, come on! We are talking a literal sit-in here. So much fiber-fill and fabric.
Still ... I hear a disembodied voice drift through the chamber and then up to my perch.
"Son," it breathes, whispers, sighs.
Son. Okay. Midnight Louie is bursting with theories to explain the inexplicable. Maybe Gandolph's late mother, the bilked patroness of spirit mediums, has finally been rewarded with a genuine manifestation from the Afterlife: herself. Or maybe Houdini's mater familias has found an empty body into which to pour her frustration with the many failed attempts to reach her darling boy. Or-- hey!--maybe this animated piece of stocking stuffing is really Mrs. Bates of Psycho fame. Maybe our gathered psychics are more psycho than anyone thought.
Cat with an Emerald Eye Page 36
