The Spirit Cabinet (32 page)

On the night of Miranda’s final performance, something happened that provoked Rudolfo into action. He’d been avoiding true and significant investigation, but he realized, on this night, that he must understand what was happening to Jurgen if ever he was to stop it.

Miranda brought her boyfriend with her. She entered the green room with her perfect hand linked through Preston’s bloated and hairy one. “Hey, everybody,” Miranda said, “is it okay if Preston watches from the wings?”

The green room had, lately, become very crowded. Curtis Sweetchurch was always in attendance. He had acquired an assistant, a particularly unctuous young man named Bren. Bren was thick and muscular, which gave his unctuousness a threatening nature; Rudolfo often felt that a failure to accept an offer of carrot juice or Orangina would earn him a sound thrashing. The Abraxas management had also materialized, fat men who reeked of cigars. The offending cigars were never in evidence—it was forbidden by Rudolfo—but that didn’t prevent the stench from
coming in. The fat men brought their wives or girlfriends, doe-eyed young girls, a year or two out of the chorus lines. So this is why Miranda had addressed her question to “everybody.”

They all turned to look at Jurgen, who sat cross-legged on a sofa. He held a deck of cards in his hands and shuffled with effortless grace, despite his fingernails. Jurgen had played
here’s the church, here’s the steeple
until his digits formed a solid, even architecturally sound, church; when he opened the doors he displayed a host of tiny, fleshy worshippers, more than could be accounted for by eight fingers. After he had gone as far as he could with that very limited art form, he had moved on to card shuffling.

Feeling the weight of eyes upon him, he made the entire deck disappear. The hangers-on clapped dutifully. Jurgen looked up and shrugged. The lights hit his eyes and robbed them of their blueness, leaving him with two pale stones. “Ask Rudolfo,” Jurgen said.

Rudolfo, of course, resented this meaningless deference. He could feel power shifting; even as the Show gained popularity, Rudolfo’s hold on it weakened. Still, he opened his mouth to say “no.” Magicians do not stand in the wings during the performances of other magicians. It was a transgression against the rules that sorcerers, even weak and ersatz ones, should adhere to. Then it occurred to Rudolfo that he himself was no fucking magician and couldn’t care less. “No problem,” he muttered.

“Thanks,” said Preston.

So they had done the Show with Preston standing backstage with his hands in his pockets as though he were waiting for a bus. Rudolfo had to admit that he didn’t really seem to bother anybody. Jurgen even slapped him on the back before trotting onto the stage, like the two of them were teammates participating in one of the barbaric contests Jurgen found so riveting on television. (
Used to find so riveting
. Jurgen no longer watched televised sports, or televised anything.) Miranda, darting on and off,
threw a number of warm smiles in Preston’s direction. Several times she’d make her costume changes beside him, peeling off one outfit, exchanging it for another, all the time looking at him with impishly raised eyebrows. Preston would blush and look away, leaning forward as if to see more exactly what the shadows between the curtains held. The only one who seemed quite upset with the rival magician’s presence was Samson, who refused to climb into the silver ball as long as Preston was watching.

The Show went along very nicely, Rudolfo thought, until it ground to a halt with the Houdini Substitution Box. But Rudolfo had resigned himself to this grinding. He went to the silver stand and wrenched the pistol-shaped microphone off the head. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Everybody is hearing of Harry Houdini.”

Suddenly the microphone disappeared from his hand; it took Rudolfo a moment to realize that Jurgen had yanked it away and was now wandering about the stage, flipping the mike cable in his wake. “Everybody, tonight is special night, and also very sad. Because tonight we going to lose our Miranda.”

Miranda, Rudolfo saw, was crying. There were slick patches under both of her eyes. Rudolfo was furious with Miranda. (Actually, he was simply furious, and Miranda was a handy target.) It was her decision to leave the Show after all these years, it was her choice to throw in her lot with Preston and the shoddy little George Theater. So, thought Rudolfo,
fuck you, bay-bee
.

“But instead of be sad,” said Jurgen, spinning now so that the cable didn’t become tangled with the hem of his long sackcloth, “we going to have a little bit of fun. How about that?”

Rudolfo clapped his hands together. “Hoo boy!” he called out listlessly.

“Okay, so this is Substitution Box. Same one used by Harry Houdini. Here is how it work.”

Jurgen held the microphone out to the side. Rudolfo stared
at it for a few seconds before realizing that he was expected to trot over and claim it like a menial stagehand. Still, he did so, and he pressed the soft mesh to his lips and went, “Hoo boy,” once again, in a darkly ominous way.

Miranda stood above the box, raised the curtain and then, in the slimmest of moments, the curtain was lowered and there stood Jurgen. The Substitution Box was opened and Miranda was found bound and manacled in the sack that, moments before, had held Jurgen. The audience applauded enthusiastically. “Is same trick Harry Houdini did!” explained Rudolfo. “Exactly the same. No change in seventy years.”

Again the microphone disappeared. Rudolfo made a mental note:
two
microphones. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” said Jurgen. “Rudolfo is right. No change. Never any change in metamorphosis routine. Except tonight, Miranda and I going to do something little bit different.”

Miranda cocked her head sideways, suddenly. This was obviously news to her.

“We going to do it again
without
the curtain!” Jurgen clapped his hands together, meaning to kick-start the stage into animation. But Rudolfo and Miranda (and Samson, over in the corner) merely stared at him blankly.

“Come on, let’s do it!” said Jurgen, driving the palms of his hands together once more.

“Um,” questioned Rudolfo, raising a finger into the air, “can you do it without curtain?”

“Why not?” demanded Jurgen.

Well, thought Rudolfo, this is hardly the place to have this discussion. Still, if he gave his words a kind of goofy, comedic spin, maybe everyone would assume it was part of the Show. Too bad he wasn’t any good at giving words a goofy, comedic spin. “Well, if you don’t use the curtain, Jurgie, everybody going to see how you do it!”

“That’s okay,” said Jurgen. This time, when he clapped, the sound cue trumpeted, new lights speared the stage, and Miranda bolted forward.

What did people see in the moment of exchange, in that instant when Miranda disappeared and Jurgen took her place? Talking about it afterwards, audience members were divided in their opinions. Some claimed that there had been a kind of transmutation, that Miranda’s limbs had shrivelled slightly, that her torso rippled with new masculine muscle, that her hair had receded and whitened and then there stood the conjuror in her stead. Others claimed that there had simply been an exchange, as though the Almighty had spliced one piece of time, containing Miranda, to another piece of time, containing Jurgen.

What did Rudolfo see? He saw nothing, because he had turned away. This was only partly out of fear. There was, in the split-second before the transformation took place, a realization, and Rudolfo turned abruptly to look at Preston. What Rudolfo saw was Preston fashioning his face into the most profound of scowls. Preston mouthed the word “Shit” with great venom and fumbled for a cigarette.

So it was that the following day—a dark Monday—Rudolfo determined to attend Preston’s Show at the George.

Ever since Jimmy there had been a succession of chauffeurs. Men and women were sent from a firm whose job it was to connect menials with masters. Chauffeurs changed on an almost daily basis, because Rudolfo, finding some paltry ennoblement in the ruling of the roost, dismissed them with aristocratic hauteur. This one talked too much, this one talked too little, this one smelt bad, this one used too much cologne. Rudolfo went out to the garages not knowing who or what to expect.

He threw open the door, hoping to catch the newest chauffeur picking his nose or idly toying with his
Schniedelwutz
. It
would have afforded Rudolfo a tiny amount of satisfaction to fire a driver just seconds after having laid eyes upon him. His initial thought was that the garage was empty, at least of humanity. The limousine sat there, washed and gleaming; the chauffeur’s table and chair was nearby, a logbook unfolded upon the table top. But no chauffeur, or so Rudolfo thought, until he glanced down.

A dark little man, his skin the shade of eggplant, squatted there in a ridiculously squashed way, knees parallel with his rounded eyes, his bum just a fraction of an inch from the floor. His hands held stones, round and pale as Jurgen’s eyes. He tossed these onto the ground, allowed them to roll to a stop, then scooped them up again. Rudolfo stared down at the man’s scalp, where designs had been cut and razored into the short black curls. He cleared his throat.

The man leapt up, not from alarm so much as a kind of elasticity, his legs snapping and propelling him skyward. He displayed a set of blindingly white teeth and hooked a palm over his eyes, a hasty and sloppy salute. Then he produced his cap and spent many long moments putting it on, even though it was nothing more than a brim with a few tatters of material miraculously attached.

Rudolfo was momentarily too stunned to fire him. By the time he had his finger lifted and poised, by the time he’d prepared his throat for the appropriate volume and tone, the black man had turned around and was skipping for the limousine. He pulled open the rear door and gestured madly at the leather interior. There was something in his smile, an almost insane desire to please and be helpful, that weakened Rudolfo, so he shrugged and said, “You are taking me to the George Theater.”

The man shrugged, compliantly, philosophically, arrogantly, Rudolfo couldn’t tell. “The George Theater,” he repeated and climbed into the huge stretch limo.

Rudolfo was wearing his nylon anorak, the hood pulled up and cinched tightly under his chin. He also had on large wraparound sunglasses that effectively hid half his face. And he assumed his hunch, the stooped posture that obscured his lovely physique. So he was very surprised to hear, as he hobbled toward the George Theater, a voice calling, “Oh! Hi, Rudolfo!”

He spun around and saw a man beside him, also headed for the George. He gazed upon the man with utter bafflement.

“Sam Rochester,” the stranger explained. “The Amazing Romo. I work the Byzantine.”

“Ja,”
said Rudolfo, picking through the man’s words with some distaste.

“Come to see Preston’s new show, huh?”

“Preston is very good friend of mine,” Rudolfo announced grandly. This was the tack he had decided to take if cornered by bloodthirsty journalists—that he, Jurgen and Preston were good friends, that the transference of Miranda was more along the lines of a trade or a loan than a heartless defection.

“He’s a great guy, isn’t he?” said this Sam Rochester, this Amazing Romo of whom, of course, Rudolfo had never heard.

“He is,” repeated Rudolfo, “good friend.”

Suddenly it was his turn to purchase a ticket. Behind the glass sat a woman with huge hair and enormous glasses that rose and cut into the air like wings. She did not possess a nose, but rather a beak, and her mouth, crudely outlined in thick black lipstick, moved constantly, as if waiting for worms to be dropped inside. “How many?” she screamed at Rudolfo.

Rudolfo thought about that for a moment, certainly not a long moment, but long enough for the woman to raise her voice until it rattled the glass booth. “How
many?
”

“One!” shouted Rudolfo.

“Fifteen smackeroos,” said the woman. Rudolfo began to dig around in his little waist-purse, silently praying that this odd phrase
had something to do with money. He fished out a hundred-dollar bill and, not noticing the mouse hole through which business was customarily conducted, reached up and tossed the bill over top of the glass. It floated down like a leaf and settled on Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley’s head. Rudolfo didn’t wait for change.

He clung to the shadowed wall at the back, not even claiming one of the old, worn, velveteen seats, but people continued to spot and recognize him. What was infuriating was that there was no excitement attached to the recognition; his presence sent no bristling ripples throughout the dusty room. Instead he got a lot of nods and mumbled pleasantries: “Hey, Rudolfo, how’s it going?” “
Ciao
, Rudolfo.” Who were these people who knew who he was but didn’t fully comprehend
who he was?

Miranda walked onto the stage, dressed in a man’s tuxedo jacket. Underneath, she wore a t-shirt heralding the Swift Current Broncos, faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. So piebald, faded and time-chewed were the boots that Rudolfo guessed that she’d pulled them from the feet of a dying cowboy. There was applause, enthusiastic even; Rudolfo began to suspect that strange things were going on, when Miranda could get applause without showing her breasts or perfect buttocks. He even spanked his own hands together listlessly.

Miranda raised a hand (the applause died away quickly, obediently) and snapped her fingers. A deck of blue-backed Bees appeared there. She fanned these, imperceptibly coaxing the cards into a perfect half-circle. She then tossed them into the air, where they hovered momentarily, and during that moment a fat hand appeared from nowhere, swiped the air greedily and grabbed one of the cards. The remainder of the deck fluttered to the ground. Then Preston stepped out of the shadows and approached the apron of the stage. “Hey, buddy,” he said, stabbing his finger at a young man. “Name a card.”

“Um …” said this fellow, “the seven of hearts.”

Preston snapped the card out from where it sat upon his palm. It was the seven of hearts.