The Mak Collection (167 page)

Mak was finding it hard to reconcile the image of that bronzed beach Aussie with the introvert his mother spoke of.
She wondered if Adam was still not coping well with the split. Or with the death of his father.

‘For a while Adam wanted to get back together with Patrice. I try not to interfere in these things,’ Glenise said, clearly awkward with the subject.

‘And shortly before they broke up, that’s when he disappeared the first time?’ Mak asked, straight-faced. She sipped her tea.

This bombshell hung in the air for a while. ‘Uh. Yes. He left without telling me.’

So he
had
disappeared before and you didn’t tell me.

‘Do you think he might have done something similar this time?’ Mak asked, without directly challenging why Mrs Hart had withheld this vital information. She didn’t need to. The woman knew she should have told Mak.

‘Absolutely not,’ Glenise said. ‘That girl is out of his life.’

She blamed Patrice for the transgression. Of course.

‘You can’t think of anyone else important in Adam’s life? Or any other reason he might have left again?’

‘No.’ She was adamant.

‘Well, if you think of anything, please do let me know,’ Mak said. ‘Anything at all. Any little bit of information could help me find him for you. And on the off-chance, I recommend that you keep an eye on that credit card. Check the transactions daily, if you can.’ Glenise sat with her arms crossed, half defiant, half dejected. ‘I’ll get him home to you as soon as I can, Mrs Hart,’ Mak said soothingly. ‘Now, I’d like to have another look in his room to see if I missed anything.’

They stood.

Mak walked up the staircase to Adam’s bedroom, noticing that Glenise Hart did not follow her this time. Mak was glad for the space.

Makedde began her search of the room again, this time concentrating on hiding places she might have missed. Fake soft-drink cans with drugs stashed inside. Hollowed-out books. As clean as it was, there had to be some trace of Adam Hart in that room, some clue as to who he was and where he might be.

She felt a little guilty and destructive as she lifted the mattress off the bed, flipped it over and went through Adam’s drawers like a cop on a raid. Mak thought of the fake Bible from the magic store, and returned to the bed where she had seen a thick, innocuous-looking dictionary. She pulled it out, took a breath and opened it.
Damn.
No hollowed-out middle containing vitally important clues, or even an old flask of whisky. It was just a dictionary. So far her search had yielded nothing new. But then there was his bookshelf. It was so neat. So perfect. She cocked her head to one side, and began pulling each book out one by one, flipping through the pages to see if any notes might fall out. There was a slim volume at the end of one shelf, heavily worn and probably loved.
THE ACTOR’S BOOK OF MONOLOGUES.
Mak pulled it out, once more hoping for private notes or letters.
Was Adam interested in acting as well as magic?
Instead, she found a thin, stiff manual nestled inside.
Magic City Library of Magic, Volume 6
, it declared.
Folding Coin. ‘A Beginning in Magic’.
Mak opened the thin tome, and a DVD fell out.
Wild Card
, the sleeve declared, above an illustration of a magician in a turban and bejewelled costume gazing intensely into a crystal ball, surrounded by
flying cards, nymphs, bats and dancing figures, all in the style of the early twentieth-century posters of the great magicians Houdini, Thurston and Kellar, and most specifically the turban-wearing illusionist Carter the Great.

T
HE
W
ORLD’S
W
EIRDEST AND
M
OST
W
ONDERFUL
C
ARD
T
RICK
, it declared in smaller type.

So Adam was, or once was, interested in magic and performance. Patrice said his mother tried to stifle his creative urges. Perhaps there were more hints about his interests here? Perhaps there was some link between these interests and his current whereabouts?

She next pulled out a thick hardcover copy of the book
Shantaram
, another tome that seemed to give an insight to Adam’s interests and desires, and noticed that the glossy dust jacket did not quite fit.

‘Yes!’ she muttered under her breath.

It was a journal.

Adam Hart
did
keep a diary, and finally Mak had it in her hands.

She shook her head, delighted, as she flipped through the pages and saw just how in-depth the entries were, though she noted the last one, on the final page, was dated some months earlier. Still, the smell of well-used paper filled her nostrils, and she smiled. Ink. Felt pen. Pencil. This boy was a writer. He had written down
everything
he thought. She would be amazed if the diary did not reveal some valuable clues as to his whereabouts. Marian—and Glenise—would love her for this.

Now she could see the original hardcover copy of
Shantaram
, sans jacket, waiting further along the shelf. She eagerly continued her search, checking for any other valuable
finds, and could barely believe her luck when she found another diary hiding amongst Adam’s textbooks, this time concealed under a book jacket for a treatise by the German philosopher Hegel.

This made her laugh out loud.

Hegel. Of course.

The philosopher was famous for, among other things, having kept incredibly meticulous journals every day of his life—his ‘excerpt mill’ he called them.

A coincidence?
No.
This kid was naïve, perhaps, but no dummy.

Mak felt sure she would get a much better feel for what made Adam Hart tick after reading his intimate thoughts. She was not one to fall for card tricks or magic shows. She believed in science and reason. A disappearing act like Adam’s could not be without clues. Makedde was determined to find them in his own words.

Only the first hundred or so pages of this journal were filled, with numerous blank pages waiting to receive his new thoughts and ideas. The final page of entries was bookmarked with a colourful vaudeville flyer: ‘Le Théâtre des Horreurs’, it proclaimed in elaborate gothic-style script.

‘Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!’

It was an hour before their performance for the Brisbane audience, and Bijou clapped her slender white hands together to punctuate each word, as the five younger performers sat in a circle at her feet, their heads bowed. No one dared talk back as their star berated them.

‘What will you be like?
Merveilleux? Non.
You are sloppy.’ Bijou shook her head. ‘Lara, you missed your cue last night.’

Lara opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. She
had
missed the cue, but only by half a beat.

‘If you were better performers, we would have a full house! You never listen to me! Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. It takes practice to be
magnifique
. Practice!’

‘We had a great review in Melbourne,’ Michel ventured. ‘This tour’s been going really well.’

Bijou ignored his valid point as if he had not spoken. ‘I’ve looked after all of you for too long!’ she shouted dramatically. ‘So long! What must I do? When will you learn? I’m docking
your pay this week. All of you. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with you.’

She doesn’t mean that
, Arslan the contortionist told himself.
She can’t mean that.

She paced around them as they sat on the floor, silent. This was something of a routine for the troupe. Every month or so it came to this. It had been that way for years. Arslan could not remember things having been any other way. This was life. Bijou was the brains behind the troupe, and she pushed all of them to be their best. She pushed them hard so they would be great one day. Without her, what would they be doing? Where would they be? Where would he be without her?

But Bijou was not finished yet. ‘Yelena!’ she went on. Arslan’s sister looked up, eyes wide. ‘You’re getting plump,’ she was told. ‘Day by day you are becoming a fat little pig. How will your brother lift you? We can’t have you being lazy like this. I won’t stand it any more.’

Yelena, though twenty-four years old, still reacted to Bijou’s scathing comments as she had when she was little more than a child. She clung to her brother Arslan’s arm and wept quietly, hiding her face. Arslan felt her hot tears on his biceps, and feelings of frustration and sadness swelled inside him.

‘Honestly, you look like a fat little dumpling out there. It’s disgusting,’ Bijou snapped. ‘Gia, you were supposed to keep an eye on her. Why hasn’t she lost any weight?’

Gia sat on her thin hands and said nothing.

Bijou, her still-beautiful face set in a pout, stalked off, her silk robe trailing behind her. The hectoring was over. For now. Arslan squinted darkly as he watched her. The contortionist rarely spoke, even when his sister was picked on in such ways. He understood English and French, but Russian was his first
language. Bijou spoke Russian too. She had travelled through Russia as a performer for a time. But Arslan and Yelena had been banned from speaking it. Now he sat in a lotus pose, his arms folded tightly. Yelena’s grip on his biceps was beginning to ache.

It was Michel who was always the voice of reason in these moments. ‘Arslan and Yelena, your act is tight.’

‘She’s not even watching. She’s too busy with that kid,’ Lara complained. She was the rebellious one in the troupe. She always spoke her mind, though perhaps not in front of Bijou.

That kid.

‘That kid’ was Adam Hart. Arslan, though merely five years older, was envious of the boy’s fresh-faced appearance. Bijou had pointed out the lines on his own face. The aging. The slow and irreversible loss of tone. More than that, though, Arslan was envious of Adam’s place in Bijou’s affections.

He had not at all recovered from being cast out of her bed.

He wanted Adam gone.

Adam waited in Bijou’s trailer with an agonising sense of excitement.

His lover had stepped out to attend to business with the troupe, and he had been trusted to remain there alone—an honour. Basking in fresh love, he soaked in the atmosphere of her private space, and decided it was the next best thing to being with her. Every detail spoke of her—the lingering scent of her perfume, her silk-and-lace slip hanging on a doorknob, her gowns and costumes hanging against the cupboard, her makeup and creams on the dressing table. This was a woman of sophistication. Never before had Adam been given the time of day by someone like her.

What will Mum think of her?

It might take some time, but he was sure she would be happy for him and this new love he had found. Yes, it would just take time and some planning.
Amor vincit omnia.
Love conquers all. With a love like this, surely she would see the importance of what he had found. Who cared about age gaps or differences of culture? His mother would understand. And even this strange beginning could be forgiven one day.

A wistful look came over his face as he admired the many magazine covers of Bijou framed in a clever wooden foldout screen she dressed behind. He stepped closer and looked carefully at each one. One cover showed Bijou standing in a white medieval-style gown, with a flowing fabric belt. Another was of Bijou with some ghoulish-looking players performing a dark horror piece. Before she’d left the trailer to rehearse with the others, she’d thrown a silk slip over the edge of the screen and Adam gently pushed it aside to take in his favourite cover of her. In this one she posed, hands on hips, in a burlesque showgirl outfit on the cover of
SHOW
. He could not understand the headlines, as they were written in French. She looked younger, and her dark hair was pixie-short. The paper was faded. He recognised that most of the covers were decades old, but he thought she looked just as beautiful now as she did in the pictures. Even more so.

Adam felt he was in a time of great growth. Once he’d met Bijou he’d realised that he’d never been in love before. What he’d felt and experienced with Patrice paled by comparison. Every moment of his life before Bijou had been nothing, he now realised. It was as if every minute of his young life had been leading up to their meeting. He had never felt anything
remotely like this before—this longing and painful need to be near someone.

Adam was overwhelmed.

It was such a glamorous, free life the troupe lived. A life to be envied. Especially Bijou’s. She was by far the most elegant and glamorous. She was a star.

Adam ran a fingertip over the stage photos she’d propped up against her mirror. She had a stack of magazines on her makeup table and he flicked through them, aching for her return. Underneath the magazines he found what looked like a photo album.

He opened it, and found it contained a number of newspaper clippings.

COMÉDIEN A ATTAQUÉ, a headline declared.

The string of words made Adam uneasy, though he did not know precisely what they meant. He did not have much French, but he knew that the word for actor in French was
comédien
. And was
attaqué
like the word ‘attack’? He flipped the page over and found another clipping slipped into the plastic sleeve on the other side.

It looked to be a scrapbook of the troupe’s reviews over the years. He turned the book sideways to read the next page. There was a large picture of Bijou, looking glamorous.

ATTAQUE A L’ACIDE! LA REINE DU HURLEMENT GRILLÉE SUR ENROULER DE SON AMANT

He squinted. Grilled? and
amant…
Didn’t Bijou use that word as some sort of endearment when they were together?

His brows pressed together. He looked at the face of the young man in the newsprint. The caption said ‘Jean-Baptiste Trevillie’. Jean-Baptiste was blond and young. In fact, Adam himself looked passingly like the young man in the photo.

Jean-Baptiste…
He had heard the name somewhere.

A small yellowing photograph fell out of the album. He picked it up.