The Pinch (35 page)

But thunderstruck as they were, Mama Rose and Morris remained seated lest they disrupt the proceedings—they were that cowed by their circumstances. It’s true that Mrs. Padauer had started up without thinking from her chair, but Morris, himself drained of color, restrained her with a hand to the wrist, saying, “Mama, we cooled already our heels this long …” Her full bosom aquiver, his wife resumed her seat; their reuniting could wait (could it not?) till after the show, though in the meantime both she and her husband might plotz from anticipation.

Charged by the hypnotist to sleep the sleep of the guiltless, the row of volunteers had instantly slumped against one another like weary travelers in a station waiting room. Sauntering to the front of the stage, Splendido assured his rapt audience that the subjects were now entirely under his control. “I can change them any way I want,” he boasted. His voice, no longer merely beguiling, had acquired a touch of the petulance consistent with his age; it was a little chilling given the powers he laid claim to, and the cabaret patrons laid down their utensils, their dinners growing cold on their plates.

“You, sir,” said the hypnotist, tapping the shoulder of a natty gentleman sleeper, who was jerked awake at the touch. “You were created by the echo of a voice from the black heaven and are now infested with demons.”

Straightaway the young man tumbled from his chair, his lacquered hair losing its wave as he began to roll around the stage. Thrashing and flailing as if attempting to escape his own skin, he was heard to utter words in languages that (the hypnotist submitted) were conceived before the creation of Adam.

Leaving the possessed gentleman to his loquacious seizure, Splendido began tapping the other volunteers. “You and you and you,” until all the rest were awakened, “are swine.”

The lot of them lurched from their chairs and, negligent of their evening finery, began scrambling about the stage on all fours, grunting, snuffling, and rooting about as if for truffles. Readdressing the possessed man, the hypnotist proclaimed, “By the secrets I stole from a nest in the cosmic tree, I command the demons to flee through your left big toe.” The man was propelled into the air as if yanked by the foot in question before falling limply onto the boards. Then via some invisible transit, his demons seemed to have taken up residence in the swine, who emitted bloodcurdling squeals as they spilled from the stage and circulated among the tables. The audience snatched up dishes and bunched their skirts, craning their necks to watch the bewitched volunteers racing toward the surrounding parapets. They clambered onto the low walls, where they reared up on their hind legs, teetering perilously above the streets, until Master Splendido called out to them, “Be as you were!” At his direction they stepped backward from the walls as one and, uttering residual oinks, returned to the stage, where they resumed their chairs and again fell immediately asleep.

Shaken by what they’d witnessed, the spectators dabbed their faces with napkins and murmured among themselves in a susurrus of hushed conversation. Onstage the hypnotist, having reawakened and dismissed his volunteers, doffed his high hat to take a bow. The applause was irresolute. “Mama,” whispered Morris a bit uncertainly, “it’s a rare little pisher we made,” but Mama Rose could barely nod her head to concur.

Released from their trance, the volunteers, apparently amnesiac, looked perfectly composed as they took their places again at the candlelit tables. Their fellow patrons, however, regarded them suspiciously. Then Master Splendido began to move among them, menacing now despite his pink cheeks and dewy curls. In fact, most of the audience avoided making eye contact as he toddled past them, asking, “Who would like next to be transmogrificated?” Nor did he seem especially discouraged that no one was willing. When he’d strolled to the farthest tables, he paused beside the Padauers and smiled at them like, they felt, the breaking dawn. “Would you care to join me on the stage?” he asked warmly, and Rose and Morris squeezed hands under the table. Between them the pretend Benjy was acutely aware of their contact, and he cringed in his knowledge of what he believed they were thinking: they were thinking that the wonderful boy had recognized them as well, and was summoning them to a surprise reunion where all would be revealed; the audience would stand and cheer the happy occasion. Benjy’s heart (or whatever crabbed organ still pumped the green ichor through his calcified arteries) sank as he watched the half-pint sorcerer help his family to their feet—she in her frumpy tub frock and he in his shabby gabardine suit.

Diffident but full of expectation and exchanging secret grins, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer trailed behind Master Splendido back onto the stage. There they stood looking tenderly at the Tom Thumb mesmerist, who had already removed the grass-skirted figurine from his pocket and turned the key. Despite his poor eyesight and distance from the stage, Benjy was nevertheless able to lip-read the word the volunteers were mouthing in unison: “Zuninkeh.” Darling son. But the doll had already begun to wiggle her hips and Splendido, an unkind expression distorting his pretty features, to utter his trance-inducing suggestions. Then, still sharing their inane grin, the Padauers sank into the chairs—all but two of which had been removed by pygmy assistants—and were sound asleep.

The hypnotist wasted no time in rousing them again, rapping their heads with his knuckles till Rose and Morris sat abruptly upright.

“Feeling kind of amorous, are we?” asked Splendido. Mama Rose made a flirtatious moue in response to which her husband raised and lowered his monobrow suggestively. The spectators succumbed to a nervous tittering. “Perhaps you will give to the audience a lesson from romance.”

The couple needed no further encouragement. At once they were entwined in a heedless embrace, clinging to one another with grappling arms and legs as if seeking wrestling holds. Morris planted suction-cup kisses over his wife’s face and fleshy neck, popping a button at the top of her bodice in his passion; while Rose, her coiffure askew, grabbed hanks of her husband’s ebbing hair in her fists. Every blatant moan he extracted from his wife elicited another endearment from Morris: “Hartzeniu! Sweet hamantash!” The audience was in fits, though some shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, moved to concupiscence by the heat of the demonstration. At one point the pygmies wheeled on a gauze-curtained hospital screen, which Master Splendido, making a show of discretion (it had after all been billed as a family revue), placed in front of the lovers. But the sounds emanating from the shadow play behind the curtain provoked even greater gales of laughter than had the couple’s groping in plain sight.

At the back of the house Benjy seethed, the public humiliation of his foster parents having brought him to the brink of tears. The sensation had no place in his emotional repertoire; sympathy was not a common function of his species. His time among mortals, aggravated by the insults of his outdated age, must have softened him, which was itself a cause for indignity. He was further incensed when a pair of minstrels reappeared to accompany the lustful cries of the Padauers with screechings and tootings on their fiddle and flute. This sent the audience into convulsions. Benjy suspected that what he was seeing was not so much entertainment as a type of revenge. The pipsqueak hypnotist was after all a meshumed, a convert, gone over entirely to the tribe that had abducted him. He’d recognized his original begetters and was punishing them for the threat they posed to his disowned identity. Rather than embrace them as a returning prodigal, the little renegade had chosen instead to reject his birth parents outright: their degradation would put the lid on that rejection and by extension his rejection of humankind.

Such was the case, based wholly on instinct and enlightened self-interest, that the aged outcast had constructed against Master Splendido. Then it followed that, instead of making himself the instrument of their reconciliation, the greatest gift Benjy could give to Mama Rose and Mr. P. was to save them from their natural son.

He slid from his chair and began a resolute if splay-footed approach to the stage, bent on a showdown with the wicked child. It would be a duel between conjurors, with Benjy summoning the array of powers he’d inherited as a veteran shretele. There was the ability to shape-shift and render himself unseen, though colitis and lumbago had taken their toll on those faculties. (The most he could command in the way of invisibility now was to make himself a bit blurry about the gills.) There was the talent of invoking mind-bending incantations in occult tongues, none of which he remembered, or calling on animal helpers, though even friendly dogs shied away from him these days. He could still sour milk at a glance and tie the hair of sleepers in granny knots, but such skills would be of little use here. So what was left but a sixth sense that had small value now that the other five were so severely impaired? By the time he’d managed to scramble onto the stage he realized that he was virtually unarmed. Regardless, Benjy—he owned the name now that its previous possessor had forfeited it forever—intended somehow to unmask Master Splendido for the imposter he was.

The cabaret audience was still in stitches over the mounting crescendo of the Padauers’ dalliance behind the curtain, so no one paid much attention to the diminutive newcomer who’d lately taken the stage. In the interim a dwarf vocalist had joined the musicians, integrating Mama Rose’s rapturous
oys
into a song whose refrain went “I wanna be an oy oy oyviator.” Busy conducting the whole cacophony, the hypnotist had also yet to remark the intruder; then, out of the corner of an azure eye, he did. He ceased the rhythmic waving of his hands and faced the shrunken atomy, removing his hat to make a sweeping bow.

“Paskudnyik,” croaked Benjy, “a thunderbolt in your pants if you don’t release from your spell these good people.”

Master Splendido seemed to welcome the challenge. He’d already withdrawn the tin doll from his deep pocket, but Benjy was much too shrewd to be seduced by her hoochie-kooch. He ignored the hypnotist’s injunction to “Watch Jemima dance” and instead looked the kid straight in the eye. He steeled himself to do … what? Maybe head-butt him in his kishkes, the beautiful boy, with his blue eyes flecked with gold like tiny fishes swimming in circles, the circles themselves spinning like pinwheels. Peering into them, the old hobgoblin, centuries old in fact and very sleepy, lost all consciousness.

“What looks here like a miniature Methuselah,” pronounced the hypnotist in the fullness of his authority, “is really a chicken.”

It would have been diverting enough just to leer at the little eyesore who’d dared to defy the child phenom. But to see him now as a docile subject dropped into a squat, beginning to cluck and flap his elbows like wings, sent the audience into an orgy of belly laughs and guffaws. That the hypnotist’s subject did actually manage to stay aloft for some seconds in his maniacal flapping only increased the general mirth. Then Master Splendido invited the spectators to toss any spare change they might have in their pockets and purses onto the stage. A hail of coins showered the ensorcelled Benjy, who, waddling awkwardly here and there, proceeded to peck at the scattered pennies and dimes; he paused just long enough in his foraging to raise his chin, shaking his head to facilitate the sliding of the coins down his gullet. So loud was his contented squawking, to say nothing of the peals of rooftop hilarity, that the symphonic climax of the couple behind the screen was drowned out. Nor was it observed that the man and wife had warily poked their heads through a gap in the curtains.

“He’s too gristly for roasting,” judged Splendido with respect to the chicken, “but he might make a tasty soup.”

He clapped his hands and a party of pygmy minstrels, stripped now to grass skirts with bones through their noses, carried out a large zinc boiler possibly commandeered from the cabaret kitchen. It sloshed over when they set it down on the boards, steam coiling out like hooded cobras. Then, pursued by the pygmies, the pseudochicken ran gabbling and squawking about the stage as aimlessly as if he’d lost his head. In the end he was tackled and bound hand and foot with lengths of rope, though he struggled in a welter of imaginary feathers. In the throes of his furious resistance, however, Benjy became dully alert to a fact of his trussed condition: how it was analogous to his plight on that memorable night some years ago when he was smuggled into the Padauers’ apartment. The realization was sobering enough to rouse him from his trance. An awareness of his present circumstance returned to Benjy as it had for his foster parents, whose tempestuous trifling had jolted them back into a consciousness of their whereabouts. Of course they had no recollection of what had happened or how they’d arrived at such a pass; nor did they recognize the author of the event as anything more than the puerile principal of the evening’s program—who, with the help of the near-naked minstrels, had hoisted their little Benjy above the cauldron and was about to drop him in.

This the Padauers could not abide. They hesitated only a moment, as if trying unsuccessfully to recall some unrelated issue, then shared a mutual shrug and, with their clothing still immodestly disarranged, charged forth from behind the screen. Mama Rose went teeth-first for the hypnotist’s tender calf while Morris grabbed his throat and a fistful of his golden locks with tenacious fingers. Taken off guard, Master Splendido lowered his hands to defend himself, leaving the unsupported weight of his victim to slump onto the crown of his hat, shoving the stovepipe over his ears and eyes. His assistants—their bare chests like saloon doors on spindle legs—backed away from the frenzied interference. In the succeeding fracas Benjy was left to tumble onto the planks, where he wriggled like a bug from a chrysalis as he shucked off his bonds. Besieged by the Padauers, Splendido had lost all pretense of his magisterial presence; blind now and powerless to fend off his assailants, he’d begun to bawl like the child he was. At length his whimpering incited his tribe to regroup and make an effort to come to his rescue. The aborigines that had already taken the stage were joined by the costumed strutters, all of them swarming over the couple who’d disabled their young headliner. Semi-recovered from his ordeal and seeing his family in danger, the self-liberated Benjy trotted headlong into the fray; promptly tossed out, he turned about and headed back into the scrimmage again undismayed.