The Devil You Know (2 page)

I read a lot into this little exchange—a whole chronicle of casual cruelty and emotional oppression. You may think that’s stretching an elbow in the ribs a touch too far, but I’m a younger brother myself, so the drill’s not unfamiliar to me. And besides that, I knew one more thing about birthday boy than anybody else here knew.

I took a mental audit. Yes. I was letting myself get a little irritated, and that wasn’t a good thing. I still had twenty minutes to run before the break and the cold beer in the kitchen. And I had one surefire winner, which I’d been meaning to save for the finale, but what the hell. You only live once, as people continue to say in the teeth of all the evidence.

I threw out my arms, squared my shoulders, tugged my cuffs—a pantomime display of preparation intended mainly to get Sebastian off the hook. It worked, as far as that went; all eyes turned to me. “Watch very carefully,” I said, taking a new prop out of one of the cases and putting it on the table in front of me. “An ordinary cereal box. Any of you eat this stuff? No, me neither. I tried them once, but I was mauled by a cartoon tiger.” Not a glimmer; not a sign of mercy in any of the forty or so eyes that were watching me.

“Nothing special about the box. No trapdoors. No false bottoms.” I rotated it through three dimensions, flicked it with a thumbnail to get a hollow
thwack
out of it, and held the open end up to Peter’s face for him to take a look inside. He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe he was being asked to go along with this stuff, then gave me a wave that said he was as satisfied of the box’s emptiness as he was ever going to be.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said with a derisive snort. His friends laughed, too; he was popular enough to get a choric echo whenever he spoke or snickered or made farting noises in his cheek. He had the touch, all right. Give him four, maybe five years, and he was going to grow up into a right bastard.

Unless he took a walk down the Damascus Road one morning and met something big and fast coming the other way.

“O-o-okay,” I said, sweeping the box around in a wide arc so that everyone else could see it. “So it’s an empty box. So who needs it, right? Boxes like this, they’re just landfill waiting to happen.” I stood it on the ground, open end downward, and trod it flat.

That got at least a widened eye and a shift of posture here and there around the room—kids leaning forward to watch, if only to check out how complete and convincing the damage was. I was thorough. You have to be. Like a dominatrix, you find that there’s a direct relationship between the intensity of the stamping and trampling and the scale of the final effect.

When the box was comprehensively flattened, I picked it up and allowed it to dangle flaccidly from my left hand.

“But before you throw this stuff away,” I said, sweeping the cluster of stolid faces with a stern, schoolteacherly gaze, “you’ve got to check for biohazards. Anyone up for that? Anyone want to be an environmental health inspector when they grow up?”

There was an awkward silence, but I let it lengthen. It was Peter’s dime; I only had to entertain him, not pimp for him.

Finally, one of the front-row cronies shrugged and stood up. I stepped a little aside to welcome him into my performance space—broadly speaking, the area between the leather recliner and the running buffet.

“Give a big hand to the volunteer,” I suggested. They razzed him cordially instead—you find out who your friends are.

I straightened the box with a few well-practiced tugs and tucks. This was the crucial part, so of course I kept my face as bland as school custard. The volunteer held his hand out for the box. Instead, I caught his hand in my own and turned it palm up. “And the other one,” I said. “Make a cup.
Verstehen Sie
‘cup’? Like this. Right. Excellent. Good luck, because you never know . . .”

I upended the box over his hands, and a large brown rat smacked right down into the makeshift basket of his fingers. He gurgled like a punctured water bed and jumped back, his hands flying convulsively apart, but I was ready and caught the rat neatly before she could fall.

Then, because I knew her well, I added a small grace note to the trick by stroking her nipples with the ball of my thumb. This made her arch her back and gape her mouth wide open, so that when I brandished her in the faces of the other kids, I got a suitable set of jolts and starts. Of course, it wasn’t a threat display—it was “More, big boy, give me more”—but they couldn’t be expected to know that look at their tender age. Any more than they knew that I’d dropped Rhona into the box when I pretended to straighten it after the trampling.

And bow. And acknowledge the applause. Which would have been fine if there’d been any. But Peter still sat like Patience on a monument, as the volunteer trudged back to his seat with his machismo at half-mast.

Peter’s face said I’d have to do a damn sight more than that to impress him.

So I thought about the Damascus Road again. And, like the bastard I am, I reached for the camera.

This isn’t my idea of how a grown man should go about keeping the wolf from the door, I’d like you to know. It was Pen who put me up to it. Pamela Elisa Bruckner—why that shortens to Pen rather than Pam I’ve never been sure, but she’s an old friend of mine, and incidentally the rightful owner of Rhona the rat. She’s also my landlady, for the moment at least, and since I wouldn’t wish that fate on a rabid dog, I count myself lucky that it’s fallen to someone who’s genuinely fond of me. It lets me get away with a hell of a lot.

I should also tell you that I do have a job—a real job that pays the bills, at least occasionally. But at the time currently under discussion, I was taking an extended holiday, not entirely voluntary, and not without its own attendant problems relating to cash flow, professional credibility, and personal self-esteem. In any case, it left Pen with a vested interest in putting alternative work my way. Since she was still a good Catholic girl (when she wasn’t being a Wicca priestess), she went to Mass every Sunday, lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, and prayed to this tune: “Please, Madonna, in your wisdom and mercy, intercede for my mother though she died with many carnal sins weighing on her soul; let the troubled nations of Earth find a road to peace and freedom; and make Castor solvent, amen.”

But usually she left it at that, which was a situation we could both live with. So it was an unpleasant surprise to me when she stopped counting on divine intervention and told me about the kids’ party agency she was setting up with her crazy friend Leona—and the slimy sod of a street magician who’d given her an eleventh-hour stab in the back.

“But you could do this so
easily
, Fix,” she coaxed over coffee laced with cognac in her subterranean sitting room. The smell was making me dizzy—not the smell of the brandy, but the smell of rats and earth and leaf mulch and droppings and Mrs. Amelia Underwood roses—of things growing and things decaying. One of her two ravens—Arthur, I think—was clacking his beak against the top shelf of the bookcase, making it hard for me to stick to a train of thought. This was her den, her center of gravity—the inverted penthouse underneath the three-story monstrosity where her grandmother had lived and died in the days when mammoths still roamed the Earth. She had me at a disadvantage here, which was why she’d asked me in to start with.

“You can do real magic,” Pen pointed out sweetly, “so fake magic ought to be a doddle.”

I blinked a couple of times to clear my eyes, blinded by candles, fuddled by incense. In a lot of ways, the way Pen lives is sort of reminiscent of Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
: she only uses the basement, which means that the rest of the house apart from my bedsitter up in the roof space is frozen in the 1950s, never visited, never revised. Pen herself froze a fair bit later than that, but like Miss Havisham, she wears her heart on her mantelpiece. I try not to look at it.

On this particular occasion, I took refuge in righteous indignation. “I can’t do real magic, Pen, because there’s no such animal. Not the way you mean it, anyway. What do I look like, eh? Just because I can talk to the dead—and whistle up a tune for them—that doesn’t make me Gandalf the bastard Grey. And it doesn’t mean that there are fairies at the bottom of the sodding garden.”

The crude language was a ploy intended to derail the conversation. It didn’t work, though. I got the impression that Pen had worked out her script in advance for this one.

“‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’” she said primly—because she knows that Blake is my main man, and I can’t argue with him. “Okay,” she went on, topping up my cup with about a half-pint of Janneau XO (it was going to be dirty pool on both sides, then), “but you did all that stage-magic stuff when we were in college, didn’t you? You were
wonderful
back then. I bet you could still do it. I bet you wouldn’t even have to practice. And it’s two hundred quid for a day’s work, so you could pay me a bit off last month’s chunk of what you owe me . . .”

It took a lot more persuasion and a fair bit more brandy—so much brandy, in fact, that I made a pass at her on my unsteady way out the door. She slapped off my right hand, steered my left onto the door handle, and kissed me good night on the cheek without breaking stride.

I was profoundly grateful for that when I woke up in the morning, with my tongue stuck to my soft palate and my head full of unusable fuzz. Sexy, sweet, uninhibited, nineteen-year-old Pen, with her autumn bonfire of hair, her pistachio eyes, and her probably illegal smile would have been one thing; thirty-something Earth Mother Pen in her sibyl’s cave, tended by rats and ravens and Christ only knew what other familiar spirits, and still waiting for her prince to come even though she knew exactly where he was and what he’d turned into—there was too much blood under the bridge now. Leave it at that.

Then I remembered that I’d agreed to do the party just before I made the pass, and I cursed like a longshoreman. Game, set, and match to Pen and Monsieur Janneau. I hadn’t even known we were playing doubles.

So there was a reason, anyway, even if it wasn’t good or sufficient, why I now found myself facing down these arrogant little shits and prostituting my God-given talents for the paltry sum of two hundred quid. There was a reason why I’d put myself in the way of temptation. And there was a reason why I fell.

“Now,” I said, with a smile as wide as a Halloween pumpkin, “for my last and most ambitious trick before you all go off and feed your faces, I need another volunteer from the audience.” I pointed at Sebastian. “You, sir, in the second row. Would you be so good?” Sebastian looked hangdog, intensely reluctant. Stepping into the spotlight meant certain humiliation and possibly much worse. But the older boys were whistling and catcalling, and Peter was telling him to get the hell up there and do it. So he stood up and worked his way along the row, tripping a couple of times over the outstretched feet that were planted in his path.

This was going to be cruel, but not to stepbrother Sebastian. No, my un-birthday gift to him was a loaded gun that he could use in any way he wanted to. And for Peter . . . well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there’s a limit to what you can get away with.

Sebastian had made his way around to my side of the trestle table now, and he was standing awkwardly next to me. I picked up the Autographic and slipped the hooks on either side, wheeling the bellows out fully into its working position. With its red leather and dark wood, it looked like a pretty impressive piece of kit; when I gave it to Sebastian to hold, he took it gingerly.

“Please examine the camera,” I told him. “Make sure it’s okay. Fully functional, fully intact.” He glanced at it cursorily, without enthusiasm, nodded, and tried to hand it back to me.

I didn’t take it. “Sorry,” I said, “you’re my cameraman now. You have to do the job properly, because I’m relying on you.”

He looked again, and this time he noticed what was staring him in the face.

“Well—there’s black tape,” he said. “Over the lens.”

I affected to be surprised and took a look for myself. “Gentlemen,” I said to the room at large. “Ladies.” A five-second pause for howls of mocking laughter, nudges, and pointing fingers. “My assistant has just brought something very alarming to my attention. This camera has black masking tape over the lens, and it can’t therefore take photographs”—I let the pause lengthen—”in the normal way. We’re going to have to try to take a
spirit
photo.”

Peter and Peter’s friends looked pained and scornful at this suggestion; it sounded to them like a pretty lame finale.

“Spirit photographs are among the most difficult feats for the magician to encompass,” I told them gravely, paying no attention to the sounds of derision. “Think of an escapologist freeing himself from a mailbag suspended upside down from a hook in a cage that has been dumped out of a jet plane flying about two miles up. Well, this trick is a little like that. Less visually spectacular, but just as flamboyantly pointless.”

I gestured to the birthday boy. “We’re going to take your picture, Peter,” I told him. “So why don’t you go and stand over there, by the wall. A plain background works best for this.”

Peter obeyed with a great show of heavy resignation.

“You have another brother?” I asked Sebastian, quietly.

He glanced up at me, startled. “No,” he said.

“Or a cousin or something—someone your own age who used to live here with you?”

He shook his head.

“You know how to use a camera?”

Sebastian was on firmer ground here, and he looked relieved. “Yeah. I’ve got one upstairs. But it’s just point and shoot, it doesn’t have any . . . focus thing, or . . .”

I dismissed these objections with a shake of the head, giving him a reassuring half smile. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “This one focuses manually, but we’re not going to bother with that anyway. Because we’re not using either the lens or ordinary light to form the image. But the thing you’re going to be clicking is this.” I gave him the air bulb—sitting at the end of a coil of rubber tubing, it was the only part of the camera that I’d had to replace. “You squeeze it hard, and it opens the shutter. When I say, okay?”