Mallory's Oracle (14 page)

Mallory descended the stairs in the wake of Edith Candle's foray into the world beyond her five rooms. They walked down and around the circling stairs, passing the doors marked for the second and first floors, on down to the basement level and the last door. This had to be the only door without a lock in all of New York City. She put out one hand to gently restrain the old woman. She was aware of the heavy gun in her shoulder holster as she pushed through the door and into the darkness. One hand felt along the wall left of the door, seeking and finding the light switch. It didn't work.

“There's a flashlight on top of the fuse box, dear,” said the old woman behind her.

Mallory opened the door wide to admit more light from the stairwell. A fuse box was mounted on the wall to the left of the doorframe. She reached up and touched the flashlight on the top of the box. It lit up at the press of the button, and she turned it on the fuse box. All the fuses were good. She tested a fuse connection, turning the glass knob.

“It's not a fuse, dear,” said Edith, blinking up at her. “That light switch hasn't worked since Max and I bought the building. It was a mystery to three generations of electricians.” She took the flashlight from Mallory. “If I recall, there's another light by that wall. Yes, there.” She picked her way across the floor, skirting boxes and trunks, to an old standing lamp with a frilled shade. She turned the switch and it lit a small area of the cellar with a soft warm glow. “I know where there's a much brighter lamp,” she said, smiling. “Follow me.”

Mallory walked behind her as shadows loomed up on all sides, in a makeshift corridor of shipping trunks piled high with boxes and crates. Old furniture sat under dust covers, and at the end of the aisle, a headless tailor's dummy stood off on its own.

“All of Max's illusions are down here,” said Edith. “We built this storage room—it takes up half the basement.” She fitted a key into a lock and the wall began to accordion, panels shifting, opening onto a cavernous space illuminated only by the light from the wide window at the sidewalk level and above her head. The source of the light was a first-floor window on the other side of the air shaft. There was light enough to see the quick movement of a rat among the garbage cans lined up near the glass.

At the basement level, Mallory could make out the edges of crates and a tall section screen standing on three panels.

“It's been a long time since I was down here,” said Edith, walking in ahead of Mallory and touching a globe, which came to light and glowed dully. Within the small radiant circle of this lamp, light invaded a clear plastic garment bag, rippling through the folds of silks and bouncing off sequins.

“Other magicians have stopped by to offer condolences and ask if they could buy the mechanical devices. But I would never sell Max's secrets. It's a point of honor. Would you like to see one of his most famous illusions? Do you have a strong heart? We only performed this act one time. Too much blood, the theater owner said. Are you frightened easily?”

Mallory looked down at the old woman. “Give it your best shot.”

Edith switched on a footlight at the base of the section screen, which nearly touched the high ceiling of the basement. A dragon, mouth full of fire, was illuminated on three panels of delicate rice paper.

“Wait here,” said the old woman. “I'll just be a moment. I have to test the equipment. It hasn't been used in more than thirty years.” She handed the flashlight to Mallory and disappeared behind the screen.

Mallory felt a prickling sensation on the backs of her hands. All her good instincts made her wary. She took inventory of the shadows on the periphery of the globe lamp. The beam of the flashlight found the eyes she had only felt at her back the moment before.

Charles?

No. She was staring into the eyes of a disembodied head. The flesh had to be wax, she knew, but something icy was leaving a slick trail down her spine as she drew closer. The thing sat on a trunk at her own eye level and stared back at her with eyes entirely too real. The irises had more normal proportions of blue to white, but the wide-eyed stare of a Christmas-morning nine-year-old was definitely genetic. This was Charles's cousin.

Mallory heard her name called. She rounded the screen and walked through a passageway of wardrobe racks, stopping ten feet short of the old woman, who was kneeling at the base of a guillotine fifteen feet high. The white hair was covered by a red turban, and her neck lay between the posts and locked in place by wooden braces with three openings to accommodate head and hands. Above her neck was a wide and wickedly sharp blade hanging high and waiting.

Edith smiled up at Mallory. “Pull on that, dear.” She nodded to an ornate golden lever at the side of the guillotine.

Mallory only shook her head from side to side with rare wonder. Had the old woman gone crazy? This was no waxwork dummy. Edith spoke to her and the body moved, both were real, and the blade was sharp. This was not the work of mirrors.

Mallory heard the sound of metal grinding, and her eyes flashed up. Had the mechanism slipped a gear? Her stomach flipped over. She watched the blade with dark fascination. Was the blade closer now? Was the angle changed?

The blade slipped a notch.

Edith screamed as a bright light washed out the tableau and lit the entire basement with a blazing ball of sun mounted atop the guillotine. Mallory was in motion, moving toward her, eyes blinded by the light, hands reaching out, nearly there, when the blade fell and the turbaned head with its bloody stump of a neck fell from the wooden brace and rolled across the floor awash in brilliant white light. The old woman's feet spasmodically kicked out and then went limp.

Mallory froze. She was shot through with ice and her throat was paralyzed.

The head at her feet was laughing.

No, it was not. Her eyes were adapting, and she could see the head more clearly. It was only another wax mock-up, a younger version of Edith Candle's head. There was no blood. An intact Edith Candle was rising off the floor.

“Oh, your face, your face,” said Edith, breasts heaving, belly shaking. “That's what made the trick so powerful.” She wiped tears from her laughing eyes. “People were convinced that the gears had slipped, that they were witnessing an accident. It was an amazing effect. They screamed and screamed. Most of Max's illusions were life-and-death affairs. It was his trademark.”

Mallory sat down on the floor before her knees could fail and dump her there. “Christ, I hope that was your best shot.”

Edith pulled a low stool out of the clutter of props and sat down beside Mallory. “I can't tell you much about Max's illusions. The magician's code, you know. But the light is the most important element of this trick. You don't see clearly while the eye is adjusting. You see what you expect to see—an accident. I can't tell you more than that. I can't even show you the mechanism that works the light. Trade secret.”

Mallory grappled with previous conceptions of elderly women and made rapid adjustments in her thinking. When she looked up at Edith perched on the stool a head above her, it was with new respect. Yes, she had come to the right place.

“What kind of tricks do mediums do?”

“Well, there's quite a difference between magic and spiritualism, but illusions are all related by the same principles—misdirection, sleight of hand. A client once told me about a medium she visited on Forty-second Street who made things float through the air. I could show you something like that.”

“Wires?”

“No, it's done with black art.”

“Black art?”

“Nothing to do with the occult, dear. Black art is the camouflage of black on black. You need a hand-held mirror and a very dark room. The object only has to levitate a few inches. Too much is ostentatious and smacks of fakery. A few inches of levitation in an angled mirror is more believable and frightening for some reason. Your medium would need an accomplice for that, someone free to move about the room.”

“She has one, a little boy.”

“Well, that widens the field a bit. With a helper she can do quite a number of illusions.”

“She's the high-technology type.”

“Well, don't expect anything too exotic—no holographic imaging, anything like that. The simpler the illusion, the better it works. This medium wouldn't want to take any high-tech devices to a mark's home.”

“She uses her computer to research the victims.”

“Say
mark,
dear.
Victim
makes it sound so sordid, as if the audience isn't having a good time. Max and I created the mind-reading act while he was recuperating from an injury. A dangerous illusion had gone wrong.... But I'm digressing. You wanted to hear about the tricks. Well, I used to guess the object in the mark's hand while wearing a blindfold.”

“How? Microphones?”

“No, dear. Most tricks are very simple. If you put too much credit to complexity, you'll never work them out.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were looking at some middle ground of memory. “Max would cue me with first words. If he said, ‘Concentrate,' it was made of metal. The next word would tell me if it was a coin, a watch, whatever. If he said, ‘Please,' it was paper, money or a photograph. Then, when I took off the blindfold, I would read their faces and all their secrets and worries.”

“You researched the marks?”

“No, dear. Max waited in line with them. We always kept them waiting a long time. People in lines can be very chatty. The audience participation was never by random selection. I know it sounds like a cheat, but every one of those people got full value for the price of admission. It was quite a show.” Her smile ended in a serious afterthought.

“Then I found my true gift. A sheriff caught up to us in another town when one of my visions came true. I had seen a body and the sheriff had found it. My name was made. We went on a new world tour, and this time out, I was the headliner instead of Max. I regretted that gift after Max died. I foresaw his death, you know. You don't believe that. I can feel it. Yet it did happen to me, this terrible gift.”

“Did you foresee Pearl Whitman's death?”

“No, dear. The fugue comes on a few days before the death of someone who's been recently close to me. I haven't seen Pearl in years and years.”

“You don't mind talking about her?”

“No, not at all. Oh, her death was a sad business, wasn't it? She was only sixty-five when I met her. Her father had recently died. He was in his nineties, I believe. She asked me to contact his spirit. I told her I didn't do such things. I'm a clairvoyant. Lumped into the same bag with mediums, I'm afraid, but not quite the same thing.”

“So, what did you do for her?”

“I advised her on stocks and business matters. That's what she wanted to talk to her father about.”

“You advised her by way of a crystal ball?”

“No, dear. May I call you Kathy? ... Good. I'm quite adept at playing the market. I do it with research—I have quite a data base—but I also depend on instinct. I advised Pearl on a merger that made her twice as rich as she had been before.”

“And did you invest, based on that merger?”

“Oh, yes. I'd already amassed quite a bit of money on tour. And then Max and I had made a nice profit on the sale of another property. I built that sum into a rather impressive stock portfolio. I liquidated the lot and put it into Whitman Chemicals stocks. After the merger, my fortune doubled.”

“Did anyone ever suggest that might be illegal?”

“Insider trading, you mean. I did get into a bit of trouble with the government people. They called me an arbitrager because I also had a slender connection to a principal in the other company. They said I was using insider information illegally. They served me with papers and questioned me for hours. In the end, they just tore up the papers. I never heard any more on it. Perhaps the U.S. Attorney would have felt a bit foolish putting an elderly psychic on the witness stand. Then Mr. Milken and the others got all that publicity, and the government people were off on another tangent. I think they just forgot all about me. It's staggering what you can get away with when you're old.”

Mallory smiled, and the old woman brightened, barely suppressing a laugh over her own good joke. Gift or no gift, Mallory decided, this woman could not read her mind, or even read her smile for what it was.

‘I gotcha,' said Mallory's smile.

“So, Edith ... May I call you Edith?”

“Of course, dear.”

“Did Pearl Whitman give up the idea of contacting her father? Or did she try someone else?”

“I don't know, Kathy. She never came back again. There was nothing more I could do for her.”

“How common is it to consult a medium or a psychic about stocks and bonds?”

“Very common. If it isn't love, it's money. And the older one is, the more likely it'll be money.”

“So finance is a stock-in-trade with the psychic business.”

“No, dear. It does require a bit of expertise. Most of the con artists are small-time. They eke out a living, but nothing fancy. And there are truly gifted people who take no money. They work with the police department for free. But a good stock analyst is difficult to find in this world or the next.”

“And you were good. The merger paid off well. Why didn't she come back?”

“Perhaps she thought she had made enough money.”

“You have quite a bit of money, don't you?”

“Between us and the walls, I'm stinking rich.”