The Hawley Book of the Dead (2 page)

Beyond that moment I’d never know what he thought, what he felt. He’d never tell me, after we’d gotten home and the girls were in bed. Not
that night or any night after. Instead, what happened at the theater haunts me, in the dark and in the daylight. Whenever I close my eyes, the images come rushing at me, as crystalline and sharply focused as a movie in 3-D.

This is the way Defying the Bullets works: The magician appears to prepare the gun before volunteer audience members who examine the bullets, testify that they are real. It appears that the magician loads the gun, but he or she palms the bullets, the gun having been previously loaded with blanks. No real shot is ever fired. Unless someone switches the blanks for bullets. That had happened to magicians before. It happened to Chung Ling Soo in 1918. Whether it was an accident or not was never discovered. But Chung Ling Soo was no less dead.

I arrived at the theater early, just after four. I walked under the ladder of a man updating the marquee. The Bijoux was an old theater, and we liked to keep some things a little old-fashioned to match its age. We hadn’t yet gone completely digital, like most of the Strip. The marquee proclaimed
THE GREAT REVELATION AND THE MASKELYNE MIND—THE AMAZING MASKELYNES
’
VENETIAN CARNEVALE—MASCHERARI
.

When Jeremy and I began our act together, we played small houses, just the two of us, sometimes even bars and the occasional wedding. The basis of magic is a good story, and the stories we told at first were simple, like the Something Out of Nothing story, turning thin air into doves or ravens, always adding something a little disruptive, lovely, or large. We worked our way up, and in time the illusions got bigger and more splendid. We built enough of a reputation and audience to justify leasing our own theater. We discovered the Bijoux then, the magical elements still in place after all its incarnations.

The Bijoux’s history mirrored the unsettled nature of our ever-changing
city in the desert. Originally a vaudeville house built in 1913 on Fremont Street, it was revamped for magic when Harry Houdini came through, and trapdoors for every possible purpose were installed. In a fit of nostalgia, its owner moved it to the Strip in the 1960s, when Fremont Street was dying, and the Bijoux was repurposed as a supper club. Then the New York–New York Casino was built around it, and it became a movie palace under the Statue of Liberty. When we leased it for our shows, we added lighting and fly elements. We built a turntable to revolve sets, and a huge lift. But much of the theater remained the way we’d found it, mysterious. The feeling prevailed that at any moment the ghost of Houdini or Al Jolson or Judy Garland might wander by.

An ancient man let us in through the stage door the day we first viewed it. He wore a stained red cardigan, faded overalls, and bedroom slippers. His hair was cropped short, his pink scalp showing through the white stubble. His eyes shone silver, clouded with cataracts. He locked the door behind us and shuffled down the hall without a word. He motioned to us to follow.

He led us backstage, through a maze of fraying curtains. Racks of sequined costumes bloomed with dust, last worn by chorus girls who were now grandmothers. Steamer trunks were stacked or spilled open, revealing the stage props of another age: top hats and bouquets of disintegrating paper flowers. A ventriloquist’s dummy stared at us with his shrewd doll’s eyes. The old man stopped at the edge of the stage but signaled us to walk onto it. Then he threw a switch and we stood blinking out at the candy box house, row upon row of velvet seats, gold balconies.

I jumped when he spoke. “You’re standing on a trapdoor built for Harry Houdini. 1921. Of course, Houdini wasn’t a true magician. Really only an escape artist.” He said it dismissively. “I saw Devant’s ‘Asrah’ here. Now
that
was magic. The lady I fell in love with was his assistant. 1919. And Chung Ling Soo was here, when I was a boy. 1914. Performed one of the greatest illusions I’ve ever seen. The one that finally killed him.”

Jeremy and I glanced at each other, and I knew with the sure knowledge of the married that he was thinking the same thing I was. If this man was telling the truth, he’d have been over a hundred years old.

“Born with the century. December thirty-first, 1899.” Maybe the old guy had a career as a psychic. “Never did see your great-great-grandfather, John Nevil,” he said to Jeremy. “But your great-uncle played this theater. 1923.”

Jeremy was descended from a magical family. Jeremy’s great-great-grandfather, John Nevil Maskelyne, had been one of the few innovators in the long history of magic. He invented magical levitation, and when he retired, he sold that trick and others for an obscene amount of money. Some descendants of John Nevil struggled to make magic pay, squandering their inheritance from the Original Levitating Girl on magic ephemera, on water torture boxes and fancy dress for the stage and hiring the prettiest assistants. But Jeremy’s grandfather and father coddled their share of John Nevil’s profit. They shunned the stage, were bankers both, performed another kind of magic by making money appear. Jeremy didn’t grow up with the magical arts as a kind of second language, touring England and the Continent with magician parents as some of his cousins had. But when he was a boy, in the attic of the family home in Devonshire, he came across an old leather-bound book, scratched and shredding, full of odd symbols and drawings of elaborate machinery, written in code it would take him months to decipher. One of John Nevil’s magic notebooks. It was Jeremy’s start in stage magic, the start of his journey to Las Vegas, to me, and then the Bijoux. John Nevil Maskelyne’s history was the spark to our success as magicians, in the tiny minority who actually made a living from magic. The old man seemed to know all about it.

On that first day in what would become our theater, Jeremy told him, “You have the advantage of us, I’m afraid.”

He extended a gnarled hand for Jeremy to shake. “Pleased to meet you. Wesley Knowles. Otherwise known as one of the Five Chinese Brothers. Not Chinese, not even Asian. Not brothers. Don’t expect you ever heard of us. We were tumblers and jugglers. Minor act. Stopped performing after the Oriental craze went bust with the country. 1929. I stayed on here. Marooned. Before Vegas was even Vegas, only a railroad town. I’m the sole survivor. Now the oldest living authority on theatrical magic of the twentieth century. Last magic act to play this house was Blackstone.
The father, not the son. 1957. Until you, that is. If you stay. Hope you do. Bring the magic back.”

Wesley had a keen knowledge of every trick or illusion ever performed, and often gave us ideas, solving problems we came up against with simple and elegant machinations. For he stayed with us or, rather, with the theater. He had rooms above the stage. As far as we could tell, he never left the building. Wesley was frail but not decrepit, whatever his age. If he was 103 when we met him, he would have been 113 on the day Jeremy died. He was there on that day of the lilacs. He always was.

Dan Liston, the prop master and general technician, worked with Jeremy on a new and improved water escape on the floor below the stage. Dan maintained every prop, from fly mechanisms we relied on to hoist us forty feet in the air, to every coin Jeremy palmed. He was a perfectionist, but I made it a point to go over the props before every performance. It was my old habit to check, clipboard in hand. Before each show I literally checked off every prop used by even the lowliest cast member.

That day, the prop tables were the same as they ever were. The guns we used for Defying the Bullets lay shining in their case when I opened the box.

Dan had outlined and numbered every item so we all knew which prop we needed to pick up for each trick. Wesley shuffled by, saluting me, as if I were a general and he a foot soldier in an army of magicians. Were his eyes bluer than usual, less watery? Did he seem taller? The silvery wisps of his hair combed over his pink scalp darker than usual? Not that I noticed. He seemed the same.

When I examined my conscience later, I could never say for sure. What I did remember was the scent of lilacs perfuming the air near the prop table.

Wesley called ten minutes, then five. I could hear the dancers getting ready in the big green room, the currents of gossip and laughter drifting through my dressing room as they changed into their Carnevale costumes for the second scene. The opening scene, though, was just the two of us, Jeremy and I in a kind of silent passion play that ended in a magician’s duel, our version of Defying the Bullets.

Jeremy played the brilliant Faustian magician, the rival of my dark Mephistopheles. The interplay of darkness and light, God and the devil, was an iconic component of our magic. For Defying the Bullets, we didn’t speak at all. Later in the show, there was plenty of music and banter to set up the tricks, but for that first scene, we’d found that silence was more powerful than speech. We vied for the audience’s applause and love, until I challenged Jeremy to a duel. Two audience members were selected to act as seconds, to examine the guns that were “loaded” before their eyes. Then we would pace off, turn, and fire. I always aimed true, to complete the illusion. Anyone watching from the front row could see the angle of my aim, and its verity. Jeremy would stagger, then fall to his knees pretending to be mortally wounded while I feigned triumph. Then he’d pluck a gleaming bullet from his mouth, hold it up for the audience and the “seconds” to see, and rise to great applause. That was how it was supposed to be.

That night, we played against each other as usual, producing all kinds of unlikely things from the air, mailboxes and tea sets, fireballs and cascades of water to quench them, until I threw down the gauntlet. We chose our seconds, took up weapons, paced, turned, and fired.

But when I pulled the trigger, a red mist exploded behind Jeremy, spattering the gold curtain. Instead of taking a bullet from between his teeth, after he fell to his knees he kept falling, a look of surprise on his face. A woman screamed. I ran to him, caught him before he dropped to the stage. He fell into my arms, his weight already dead weight. I cradled his head, tried to hold in all the blood and bone and everything that made him my Maskelyne, my love. We were only mortal, after all.

After all the shrieking and running for exits was over, after the EMTs had tried and failed to work their magic, Jeremy’s body was taken away. In the quiet of the nearly empty theater two police officers handcuffed me, led me out.

There was chaos outside the theater. Detectives questioned members of the audience, and our performers in their Carnevale costumes. They all looked wilted by the heat, still fierce in the August night. Even faces I
recognized looked unreal to me, lit by the twirling, flashing firework lights of the Vegas Strip, like mannequins I’d once seen come to life in a
Twilight Zone
episode. At the top of the theater steps I stumbled, my knees buckling. The dark velvet cloak I was wearing was heavy with its own weight and Jeremy’s blood. My body and mind throbbed dully. Nothing was familiar, or whole, or right. When the policemen pulled me to my feet again, my head jerked up, and I thought I saw Wesley Knowles walking away, his blood-red cardigan flapping, his silver hair lit by neon. Leaving the theater, which I’d never known him to do, and walking faster than I’d ever seen him walk. He glanced back once, glanced back and smiled.

Nico, our lawyer, found me in a holding cell that stank of urine and vomit with overtones of Lysol. I was pacing, the same three steps over and over across that cell. I hadn’t spoken. I hadn’t cried, either. The closest I’d come was when one of the woman guards had told another, “Yeah, I’d kill my old man, too, if I had the guts. I wouldn’t do it onstage, though.”

I grabbed at the sleeve of Nico’s pinstriped suit, still perfectly pressed at midnight. “The girls?”

“Marisol is with them.”

“Do they know?”

“Marisol just told them you’d be late at the theater, made them go to bed.” That happened often enough. My girls would have at least one more untroubled night. But the next day I would have to tell them of Jeremy’s death. It would be the worst thing that they’d faced in their young lives. I had shot their father. And now they would be alone, without father or mother. I’d spend their childhoods in jail. With these thoughts running through my head, the next thing Nico said made no sense. “They’re going to release you. You want to change, Dan packed your clothes.”

I only pulled the cloak more tightly around me. Jeremy’s blood had soaked through, and I could feel it drying on my skin. It seemed like the last thing I had of him.

“It doesn’t matter, Nico,” I told him. I started shaking. I thought I’d never be warm again. “I killed him. I belong here. I
shot
him.”

“Shit, Reve, you’re in shock. Listen to me. They’re going to release you
because
you
didn’t kill him. You didn’t have the intent, even if you did pull the trigger. You pulled it every night. It was a trick, an illusion, just part of the show. But it gave somebody an opportunity to switch your gun. Somebody who knew you always used the same one. Jeremy was
his
target, not yours.”

I did always use the same gun. Mine was on the left of the case, Jeremy’s on the right. Nico told me that a different pistol had been exchanged for mine, identical to it but for a hidden chamber that housed one bullet. I hadn’t noticed the difference, it was done so cleverly. I hadn’t noticed it was any heavier or changed at all. If I had, everything would have been different. Jeremy would be alive.

“But why? Why would anyone want to kill Jeremy?”

Nico shook his head. “That’s anybody’s guess right now. But that isn’t all. The old guy who lives in the theater?”

“You mean Wesley?”

“Yeah. Wesley Knowles.”

“What about him?” I couldn’t believe that Wesley had any part in this, but then I remembered the old man’s taunting smile.

“The cops found him tucked in a bathtub at an abandoned motel out on Sahara. They got an anonymous call from a phone booth at the airport. The last thing he remembers was heading to the theater bathroom sometime last night. He woke up duct taped and gagged, no idea who’d taken him there, or how. But from then on, some guy was impersonating him.”