Night Magic (20 page)

He returned the princess to the sedan chair and lowered a small curtain, hiding her from the audience. There was a puff of smoke, and when he drew the curtain up again the princess was gone from the sedan chair. The doors of the cabinet were flung open, and out she stepped, to more applause. She bowed again: then in broad pantomime she whispered in Wurlitzer’s ear and indicated the audience. He cocked his eyebrow at the suggestion, pondered for a moment, then approached the audience, inquiring if there might be one among them who desired to join him on stage and assist him in a trick or two? He looked—pointedly, Michael felt—to the rear of the hall, but that didn’t stop Michael from volunteering, with arm outstretched, rising at the same time. With a little flick of annoyance the magician suffered him to come up the steps at the side of the stage and join him in the spotlight.

“An eager volunteer, ladies and gentlemen,” the magician said with a hint of sarcasm. Then, in an oilier voice: “Welcome, my young friend.”

Quickly he produced a fresh pack of cards, fanned up the four aces and asked Michael to insert them at random points in the deck, indicating that the four cards that would then appear at his fingertips would be these same four aces. Michael did as he was requested to do, but when the cards appeared there was not one ace among them. The magician threw his assistant a quick look, then turned back to Michael, his confusion only brief, covering the error with patter and a joke, which the audience heartily enjoyed. Next, Michael was asked to select another card, show it to the audience, and then slip it back into the deck, which the magician reshuffled. Giving Michael the pack, he instructed him to deal the cards face down onto the table, announcing that whenever he chose to stop, the card in his hand would be the one he had shown to the audience.

Only it was not.

Michael dealt, stopped, the magician lifted the card, while the audience tittered nervously; it was the wrong card. Hoots and catcalls came from the four boys, and loud foot stompings. The magician shot Michael an admonitory glance, then produced another fresh pack of cards, from which Michael was asked to select two and show them to the audience. The cards were returned to the pack, which was then wrapped in a piece of colored tissue. Michael was offered a knife and told to insert it through the wrapping and into the pack, which when opened would reveal the blade between the two selected cards. But it did not.

While the audience now roared outright at his expense, the magician turned to Michael with a look that gave him pause, though he returned it unflinchingly. This exchange lasted no more than a moment; then, turning again, the magician went to the cabinet, whose doors he opened and with a flourish of his hand invited Michael inside, between comments addressed to the audience. He told Michael merely to stand there with his hands at his sides and to remain relaxed, that he had nothing to fear; all would be well. With these comforting words, he enclosed him in darkness. From inside the cabinet, Michael could hear the whispers in the audience and the magician’s stage patter as he explained that as a matter of scientific experimentation it would be of interest if his young friend could be urged to reappear in the nearby sedan chair, reversing the progress of the Chinese princess.

Michael, who knew a thing or two concerning these cleverly structured stage props, quickly moved his feet, placing them on the stringers at the bottom, one in each corner, and holding on to the ones at the top with each hand, he made his body rigid, bracing his shoulders against the sides, head ducked down, resistant to whatever trick lay in store for him.

Outside, the magician addressed the audience. “He is clever, our young friend, is he not? I suspect he is a magician himself. At least he knows one or two tricks.” He paused, stalked rapidly away from the cabinet, whirled to face the audience, waited. There were restless noises, bodies shifting, feet scraping the floor. The magician glanced at the house over his shoulder, making no sign to interrupt the disturbance. His brows were slightly contracted; a faint frown evidenced some heavy thought on his part. He waited again; then, laying his finger alongside his nose, he drily took the spectators into his confidence.

“I think perhaps we are making too much noise. It may be disturbing to our young friend, heh? One may wonder what he is doing inside there,” he said, nodding toward the cabinet, “or if indeed he is there at all.” His words were offered in the spirit of fun, the lightest hint of suggestion merely, but even as the magician turned upstage again the doors of the cabinet broke open and were flung wide. Michael, with a dazed and stricken expression, his hair in disarray, his shirt yanked out of his pants and all awry, was catapulted onstage in a violent bound. He paused for only a moment, staring frantically at the magician, and then, wheeling, he looked back at the cabinet. He backed away, a strangled cry escaping his lips. With one hand clamped over his mouth he turned again, dashed in terror, blindly, for the stage steps, and with all eyes upon him raced up the aisle and hurled himself through the rear doors.

“Yes,” said the magician as questioning eyes turned back to him, “he is a very clever young man. He should go far. Very far. Now, if one may ask it, shall we resume?”

M
ICHAEL SAT IN THE
coffee shop across from the Little Cairo Museum of Wonders, watching the entrance and sipping from a shaking cup. It rattled as he set it on his saucer, and to keep his hands busy he smoothed his hair and readjusted his shirt.

What had happened while he stood in the cabinet, braced, he thought, for any eventuality? He tried to recall the exact progression of feelings and events—the magician’s unctuous, mocking invitation, his own confident acceptance, the darkness inside, the waiting. Then the sudden, desperate combat: something, like a pair of human hands, seizing him, pummeling him about the shoulders and neck, not a pair of hands exactly, but some invisible force fastening upon him, an uncontrollable flexion of muscles, a set of purely physical sensations without any accompanying mental processes. How had it been done? How had there been time? Suddenly he’d found himself in the cabinet, wrestling for his life against something dark and powerful, something that buffeted him ruthlessly, flinging him like a sack against the sides of the narrow space, until one vicious, final blow, one last humiliation, like a disdainful kick in the rear from a giant foot, lifted him up bodily from behind and propelled him staggering back onto the stage.

He felt his neck, his arms, shoulders. All the muscles were sore, as if they had been brutally wrenched and pounded. His eye hurt where it had been struck; he thought it might be swelling. And he was convinced that the area from his lower back to his upper thighs was covered by a single deepening bruise. The Queer Duck had got to him again, and again had done it in some unfathomable way. Sitting up as straight as his throbbing body allowed, Michael realized with a thrill of fear that it was going to take more than a thumping in the dark to sway him from his purpose. Now more than ever he was determined to do whatever might be necessary to acquire the skill, the art, the power—it made no difference what you called it—possessed by this uncanny, bumbling, arrogant, absurd, dangerous old man.

The woman, most recently seen as the Chinese princess, was standing calmly outside the coffee shop. Michael saw her through the window, looking once again as she looked when she returned his wallet. He paid for his coffee and went out quickly to her. She smiled a kind smile at him and made a regretful gesture. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she explained. Then she added, in a knowing voice, “I’m sure you could use a few restful minutes.”

Michael made a humphing sound, half laugh, half snort. “I’m all right so far,” he said, and paused, letting his features express an unspoken question.

“He wants to see you,” she said. She was a small woman, and as she looked up at Michael she blinked at the bright sun behind him.

“Lead the way, please,” he said. She turned and crossed the street, he following six feet behind, concentrating on each step and wondering where it was leading him.

The audience was gone. The magician stood on the stage, solitary and spectral under the harsh glare of the worklight overhead. He gave no sign to Michael, but only stood smoking, an elbow cupped in his hand, and leaning back on one leg like a fashion model. The glass eye had been replaced by a black patch, the elastic caught at the back so one tuft of hair reared up like a cowlick. Two gold chairs sat on the bare stage, and with a negligent wave of the hand he indicated that Michael should join him. Michael looked at the woman, who backed away, shutting the auditorium door after her. He turned and walked down the aisle, marched up the steps and onto the stage, keeping a wary distance. The old man, exhaling fumes like dragon’s smoke through dilated nostrils, observed him closely. At last Michael heard not the gaily sardonic stage voice but that bleak, moribund tone that reminded him of dead leaves in the wind.

“I thought I should enjoy a
private
meeting as well, with so
clever
a young man,” the magician said, leaning on adjectives as though they were threats. “You are a
clever
young man, are you not?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I must trust your judgment. Sit.”

The curt abruptness of this order caused Michael to regard the indicated chair; then, to his own surprise, he crossed to it and sat. The old man folded himself into the other one, smoking wordlessly and staring through his single, narrowed eye. Michael found this long scrutiny disconcerting; the magician seemed to be examining him, like a careful buyer appraising a possible purchase. Michael was determined to break the uncomfortable silence, though he had not yet decided how to do so when the old man finally spoke.

“Yes, I suppose we must begin,” he said, almost reluctantly. “First of all, satisfy my curiosity: what made you try to spoil my act?”

Michael dropped his head, contemplated the undone lace of his sneaker. “I suppose I wanted to impress you.”

“You try to impress me by ruining my performance? When the audience laughs at me, you think I am impressed?” There was woefulness in the voice, and self-pity, but the magician’s bearing belied them. Even his sham attempt to conceal his irony was ironic, a complicated charade carried out for some undisclosed effect.

“The laugh was on me, I think,” Michael said. Though he felt foolish and guilty for having tried to show up the old man, he couldn’t bring himself to regard the other as the injured party, not when his eye was swelling painfully and his battered body ached. “How did you do that?” he asked, his voice earnest, almost pleading. “In the cabinet, I mean. What did you use on me?”

Wurlitzer snorted in an unpleasantly liquid way. “You have a vivid imagination, my young friend. I ‘used’ nothing. Whether through clumsiness or claustrophobia, you lost your footing and bumped your eye. Then you burst out and ruined another trick. You seem quite incorrigible.”

Michael almost smiled at this bland, carelessly insincere rationalization. Trying to justify himself, he said, softly,
“You
spoiled
my
act, remember?”

“I? You mean your little street pantomime?” The voice was mildly reproving, that of an innocent man unjustly accused, but the eye was hard and cold. “You do not know how to cut your material. Your frog impersonation went on much too long. It is a matter of timing, merely.” Wurlitzer rose abruptly to his feet and leaned toward Michael, who for a single terrible moment felt again the swooning helplessness, the blank surrender he had experienced once before when this strange figure loomed over him. But no compulsive hopping ensued; the moment passed, the magician merely ground out his cigarette under his heel and continued speaking. “Of course, timing is a skill that is learned. It comes with experience. You have had some stage experience?”

“A little.” Michael admired the way the old man had finessed his questions about cabinet-thrashing and frog-horror, as though he knew nothing of such matters.

“Acting?” Wurlitzer asked in a prodding tone as he resumed his seat.

“Yes.”

“And a conjuror as well. A man of parts.” He brought a deck of cards from a pocket. “Show me.”

Michael, though tempted, shook his head in refusal.

“Very well.” Wurlitzer’s look was cunning, as if Michael’s weak defiance provided him some trifling amusement. “It is not necessary. I know what you can do”—he paused significantly—“and what you cannot.” A noise made them both glance toward the wings, where the woman was padding about industriously, gathering costumes from where they had been flung during the magician’s quick changes and putting them on hangers on a wheeled rack.

The old man returned his attention to Michael, looking him up and down as though taking his measure. “So where do you come from?” he asked. “Surely not New York.”

“I grew up in Genesee, Ohio.”

Wurlitzer repeated the unfamiliar names with questioning annoyance. Then he said—it was more a statement than a question—“But you enjoy living in New York.”

“Yes,” Michael said, sensing that short answers were being called for. “I like it.”

The magician cocked his head oddly to one side before he spoke. “A young man is very brave to live in New York these days, I think. Criminals are everywhere.”

“I’m not brave, I just smile a lot.”

“Yes-s-s, you do.” Wurlitzer released the words in an aspirated sibilance, squinting his eye sardonically, as if assessing a potential enemy or ally. “Your smile is most charming, but you use it too much. Smiles should be only for the fond, or for the wonders of the world. You are perhaps one of those wonders, heh?” His lips sketched the wisp of a smile as he laid his long finger against his long nose, a gesture Michael found precious, something an actor might use to convey roguishness. He decided that there was much of the actor about the Great Wurlitzer.

He resumed the conversation, again in his mocking tone. “You gave little shows in your hometown, correct? For the Rotary Club, perhaps?”