The Linking Rings

by John Gaspard

  “Right. But after he died, when they were going through his things, they found several poisoned tea bags mixed in with the other tea in his stash.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “Which took some of the heat off the household staff, because it was clear Borys had come into the house already possessing poisoned teabags.”

  “That’s what Miss Hess wanted them to think,” Harry said. “The new theory is it was actually Hess who dropped the poison in the tea kettle. And then she was the one who put the poisoned teabags into his secret stash. But she did it after he died.”

  “So she did put the poison in the water the night before?” I said.

  “Which killed Borys,” Harry replied. “Then, at some point, she went into his room and maneuvered the teabag switch. Might have been in the middle of the night, or it might have been during the hubbub when the body was discovered. Either way, it was magnificent because it confirmed—wrongly—that he possessed poisoned teabags when he came into the house. Which, subsequently, took suspicion off the household staff.”

  “And off of her, presumably.”

  “Presumably,” he repeated. “It was brilliant. It’s exactly Ascanio’s Last Action Clean concept, but instead of using cards or coins, she used poisoned teabags.”

  Harry then did a quick imitation of possible police dialog.

  “‘Did someone in this house poison this man?’ ‘Why no, look, he had poisoned teabags with him when he arrived,’” Harry said with a laugh. “And the household staff—including Miss Hess—is completely clean at the end of the trick. Brilliant, just brilliant.”

  I couldn’t confirm Harry’s claim the Warren Street station was the best one to use when heading to The Magic Circle, but as we made our way along the route, it seemed pretty straightforward to me. For my part, I was still thinking about Miss Hess and the events of the last few days.

  “Remember the other night, after Jake’s play, when you talked about how unsatisfying that mystery was?” I asked as we crossed Euston Road.

  “I do indeed,” he said. “And, for the record, it’s several days later, and I still find it unsatisfying.”

  I was tempted to explain that a good part of his dissatisfaction may have been the result of one actor’s unwillingness to learn lines and penchant for adding nonsensical clues to a mystery play while performing it. However, I decided not to go down that path.

  “Well, I’m having trouble with some of the elements of the case against Miss Hess,” I said as I hurried to keep up with Harry. He took a right once we had crossed the street, and I actually had to break into a trot to keep up with him.

  “Such as?”

  “Well, if you had asked me before, I would have said there was no way she could hold Angus Bishop’s head under water for any length of time,” I began. “But after going one round with her on the roof, I have reassessed my original appraisal. She easily could have held him under for thirty minutes or more without breaking a sweat.”

  “Yes, the old bird was a lot stronger than any of us guessed.”

  “And,” I continued, “the explanation of how she poisoned Borys is completely plausible.”

  “Brilliant,” Harry said again. “She walked away clean on that one. As I’ve always told you, Eli,” he said, coming to a complete stop and turning to me. “When doing a trick, I would far rather start dirty and end clean. I don’t care if I’m concealing a chicken in my coat for forty-five minutes, I absolutely prefer to end clean.”

  With his proclamation made, Harry turned and continued walking. I tried to think of a performing situation which would require stowing a chicken for forty-five minutes, couldn’t come up with one, and then had to nearly run to catch up with him.

  “The one event that doesn’t ring true for me,” I said when I finally got alongside him, “was the murder of Hector Hechizo. Someone had to lure him to the hotel room in order to subdue him and inflict the thousand cuts which did him in. Everybody knew he was a ladies man, but I don’t think Miss Hess has the drawing power she might have had back in the day.”

  “Well, while we’re discussing elements which don’t ring quite true,” Harry said as we turned down Stephenson Way, which is more like a wide alley than an actual street. “There’s something about the first murder—with the knife in the chair poor old Oskar sat in—which just doesn’t gel for me. I was backstage for nearly an hour before the show started. And I didn’t see Miss Hess back there once.”

  The Magic Circle building was visible at the end of the block. Harry was walking on the narrow sidewalk, so I strode alongside him in the street, watching my step to ensure I didn’t trip on any of the uneven cobblestones.

  “According to Megan, who showed up at the last minute, Miss Hess was in the coat check until right before the show. Maybe she got it all set up earlier in the day,” I suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Harry said with a shrug. “But I don’t know. The way McHugh has described it to me, that chair was like a mousetrap. It had to be set. And experience has taught me once you set a mousetrap, you don’t move it for fear of taking off your finger. So I’m not quite sure how she pulled that trick off.”

  The front door was ajar, and we walked in, expecting to see the traditional bustle of members in the Club Room just off the front door. However, the first floor was strangely vacant and quiet.

  “They all must be up in the theater,” Harry said. I began to move toward the spiral staircase, but he shook his head. “We’ll take the lift; it’s easier on my knees.”

  I followed him into the lift and continued to think about the events from the last few days, which weren’t gelling for either one of us. I also kept thinking back to my English breakfast—the nightmare one, not the lovely one served at Baxter’s house—although I couldn’t figure out why it kept popping up in my brain.

  Moments later we were deposited in a back service corridor just outside the theater on the third floor. We made our way past a couple of empty dressing rooms and then pushed open a door which took us into the auditorium. Harry, who really knew his way around the building, moved confidently through the door and then came to a dead stop.

  “Doctor!” he yelped, and at that moment, in a flash, I understood what had been odd about the text from Davis De Vries I had read to Harry at breakfast. I realized the two old friends began every communication with the letters “DR,” followed by their message. This was true of all of the texts, with the exception of the one that had lured us to The Magic Circle.

  There was no time to pass this realization along to Harry, as the cause for his sudden outburst was before us on the stage. Davis De Vries was slumped next to his illusion, the Catherine Wheel. He was either unconscious or dead; from this distance it wasn’t apparent. But what was clear was he had been tightly shackled to the machine; lengths of chain encircled him and bound him firmly to the large metal illusion.

  I heard a sound and turned to my right.

  And for the second time in as many days, I found myself facing someone aiming a gun at me.

  Chapter 21

  “You should see the looks on your faces, luv,” she said with a grin. “Classic, just classic.”

  It was Angelika, standing in the main aisle near the front row of seats, looking over at us as Harry and I stood frozen in the doorway. She wasn’t alone. The kid from Davenport’s magic shop, Liam, was hovering next to her, looking pained and uncomfortable. It may have been due to the situation, or it might just have been traditional teenage angst.

  I had only seen the two of them side by side once before, when I was rushing backstage after the onstage stabbing of Oskar Korhonen. So I think I can be excused for not having seen the family resemblance at the time, but it was clearly evident as they stood before me. And it may have been my imagination or the adrenaline (or both), but I thought I also saw a resemblance to Miss Hess.

  And suddenly the recurrence of the nightmar
e English breakfast image made sense—I wasn’t remembering the breakfast, I was remembering the family I had seen while eating that monstrosity. The family at one of the other tables—the ones I thought might be Russian—who were squirreling away food for a missing family member. I was eating that horrible English breakfast while they conversed.

  “Etta dyedooshkye,” the old Russian grandmother had said to her offspring.

  “It’s for PopPop,” had been her daughter’s translation to her child.

  They were doing it for their father and their grandfather!

  I looked over at Angelika and Liam and realized I must have a sort of idiotic and not particularly helpful superpower—the rare ability to put together all the clues in a life-threatening situation, but always about ten seconds too late. It had happened before and clearly had just happened again.

  “Looks like we’re here just in time for an Archie Banks’ family reunion,” I said with far more bravado than I actually felt. “It’s a shame Dad’s still dead and Mom’s on her way to a long spell in prison.”

  “I’m sorry?” Harry said, looking from his friend chained to the illusion to the woman holding the gun on us. “What family reunion?”

  “Harry, unless I’m very much mistaken, the woman pointing the gun at us is the daughter of Archie Banks and Miss Hess. And the kid is her son. Archie’s grandson.”

  “Just so,” Angelika said.

  “Etta dyedooshkye,” I said to no one in particular.

  “So we were wrong about Archie having no heirs,” Harry said quietly.

  “By a generation or two,” I agreed. “And I think the addition of these two players neatly explains the issues we were having with this so-called mystery. It was Angelika who lured Hector to his death at that nearby hotel. He certainly would have been open to following her there.”

  “Or anywhere, for that matter, knowing Hector,” Harry added.

  “My mistake was forgetting she mentioned being trained as a nurse. That would have given her the skills she needed to drug and intubate him.”

  “And I had thought my education was a bloody waste of time,” she said with a wry smile. “How wrong I was.”

  “And I’m guessing young Liam here was the one in charge of moving the chair on stage for that first night’s show,” I continued. “My guess is he was also responsible for setting the trap for whoever was unlucky enough to take a seat on the chair.”

  He scowled up at us. “Just did what I was told,” he said with an insolent growl. “Didn’t want to be part of this rubbish plan from the start.”

  With her free hand, Angelika gave him a quick rap across the back of the head. “Enough of your whining, ya spotty git. Take the cuffs and lock them to the wheel.”

  She pointed to a small pile of handcuffs on the front of the stage. Liam meandered over and picked them up, then headed toward us, gesturing we should move over to the Catherine Wheel.

  “I only saw you interact with Miss Hess a couple of times,” I said to Angelika, who kept the gun aimed at us as we moved across the stage. “You were both so mean and disagreeable to each other. I should have recognized immediately you could only be related.”

  “Family. Ya gotta love ‘em,” Angelika said with a sardonic smile.

  And then Liam got to work.

  I didn’t do any escape illusions in my act—besides an occasionally funny but no longer PC routine with a Chinese finger trap—but I’d been around enough of them to distinguish the difference between real handcuffs and the gaffed variety. Sadly, the cuffs Liam was using on us were decidedly genuine.

  Davis De Vries was slumped on the floor on one side of the wheel, but I could now see he was still breathing, which was currently the only good news we had. Liam made Harry sit on the opposite side of the illusion and locked him in tightly, with his arms positioned between two of the large metal spokes.

  He got more dramatic with my binding, cuffing me with my arms outstretched, like I was in midst of performing the illusion. Unfortunately, he was using very solid (and very real) handcuffs, as opposed to the leather break-away straps which were part of the trick. To complete the effect, he also cuffed my ankles to the apparatus.

  “As interesting as all this might be,” I said to Angelika, who had kept her pistol trained on us the whole time, “I’m not really sure how tethering us to the Catherine Wheel completes the revenge plot your crazy old mother hatched. I don’t remember anything in your dad’s wacked-out suicide note about ‘you tied me up and gave me annoying welts on my wrists.’”

  “I don’t think that’s where she’s headed on this one, Eli,” Harry said quietly.

  “Right you are, dearie,” Angelika said with surprising warmth. “We’ll be sticking to both the spirit and the letter of the old man’s note on this, our final performance.”

  I wracked my brain, trying to remember what the final statement in Archie Banks’ suicide note had been, but I was coming up empty.

  “Let me give you a hint,” she said, sensing the blank I was drawing. “What do you think of when I say The Magic Castle? And Halloween?”

  I knew there was a connection, but it wasn’t coming to me. Then I heard a slight gasp from Harry.

  “The Halloween fire at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles,” he said slowly. “It was a few years back. No one was hurt, but it did plenty of damage.”

  “It did indeed,” she said. “But it will be a mere footnote compared to The Magic Circle fire we’re creating today. This will be one for the history books.”

  The phrasing from Archie Banks’ suicide note came back to me. “‘While my career goes up in flames, you ride high on success,’” I recited, “‘fueled by the failure you heaped upon me.’”

  “That’s my old dad, always had a way with words. And,” she added, seeing a thought cross my face as I glanced up at the ceiling, “don’t be thinking the sprinkler system you just took a gander at is going to do you a bit of good. My smart boy here has hacked the security system and shut them off, along with all the fire alerts.”

  Liam was just finishing attaching the final handcuff to my leg. “It was dead easy,” he said, both proud and annoyed. “A toddler could have pulled it off.” He stood up and stepped back, assessing his work. “There, these three gents aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “The same cannot be said for us,” Angelika said, waving her son off the stage with the pistol. “We have some burning issues to attend to downstairs in the library. Don’t worry, though. You will see—and feel—the results of our handiwork soon enough.”

  They both headed up the aisle together, and then Angelika turned back.

  “I meant to tell you, by the way,” she said, “I really enjoyed that card trick of yours. The Ambitious Dog. Nice stuff, a solid fooler.”

  “What, were you another happy attendee of Jake North’s bogus magic lecture?” I said, for just a moment feeling more annoyed about that whole kerfuffle than my current critical situation.

  “No, the lecture notes,” she said.

  “Well, I hate to burst your balloon about Jake North,” I said, using the only weapon at my disposal, “but he didn’t write those notes. He couldn’t have.”

  “I know that, luv,” she said, opening her purse and sliding the pistol into it. “That’s because I wrote those bloody lecture notes. He paid me. By the way, that bloke is a complete wanker.”

  “How nice,” I said, my voice dripping in sarcasm, “that in our final moments together, we were able to find some common ground.”

  “Yes, I believe there’s hope for humanity yet,” she said.

  And then she and her son disappeared up the aisle and out of the theater.

  We were silent for several long moments, while the gravity of our situation settled over us.

  “Well, here’s another fine mess,” I said. From my shackled position, I could look down ou
t of the corner of my eye and barely see Harry, bound to one side of the machine. However, I was able to hear him chuckle at my attempt at humor.

  “Well, I died on this stage on many occasions years ago,” he said. “This morning will just be one more time.”

  “And what was it that did you in the last time?”

  He chuckled again. “It was an ill-advised attempt at a sub-trunk transposition,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “With an assistant who was less than agile, shall we say.”

  “Not Aunt Alice?”

  “Oh, no, this was before I met your Aunt,” he said. “You’ve seen The Pendragons’ version of the substitution trunk, right? Metamorphosis?”

  “Seen it? I’ve studied it. Obsessively. I’ve gone through it frame by frame on YouTube, like it was the Zapruder film,” I said. The trick was one of the closest things to a miracle I had ever seen, in which magician and assistant switch places—from inside a trunk to out—in the blink of an eye. Or actually less than that.

  “Well, in our version, I believe there was enough time during the transposition to boil a three-minute egg,” Harry said. “That girl moved like molasses, only slower.”

  “Where is she today?”

  “Probably still trying to get out of that damned trunk,” Harry said.

  I looked around the empty theater, thinking about the fire Angelika and Liam were setting elsewhere in the building.

  “A lot of flammable stuff downstairs, is there?” I asked.

  “Oh my, yes,” Harry said. “The library is down there. Hundreds of books, maybe thousands. Not to mention all the ephemera—posters, handbills, that sort of thing. A real tinderbox, really.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, not really sure how to respond to this news. “Well, if nothing else, this settles a discussion Megan and I had earlier this week.”

  “About?”

  It was sort of bizarre, really—Harry and I were just chatting about this and that, as if nothing dire was happening.