The Spirit Cabinet (35 page)

But she was having none of it. “I guess you figure I’m kind of weird, huh?”

“Well …” Preston drew a breath. “Being flawless, as you are, you were probably very attracted to the horn as a kind of symbol …”

“I travelled with the fair for about two years. I learned how to assist the magician. I learned how to cover the angles, how to block sightlines to the shifts and sleights. I learned how to turn in the sword box, how to suck in my stomach so that in the middle I took up a space three inches wide.”

Miranda pulled hard on the conversational wheel, changing subjects like a hot-rodder changes lanes on a freeway. “What did Rudolfo want?”

“Oh,” said Preston the Adequate, who could not stop a note
of sadness from singing in his throat. “You know what he wanted. He wanted to ask questions about the books. Same as you want to ask questions about the books.”

The Hickey and Winchester Circus and Fair burned to the ground in Albany, New York. There was no loss of life, no loss of human life, anyway, although an ancient Indian elephant succumbed to smoke inhalation, charging through the flames without harm but then teetering and timbering dead on the grey grass outside.

After that, Miranda spent three years traversing the country, spending much of her time seeking out the little museums that dot the countryside like pimples on a puberty-twisted face. The state of Ohio alone took her four months to get through, because every mile or so there would be another little edifice dedicated to some trivial or bizarre aspect of human behaviour. There was the Hoover Museum of Vacuum Cleaners, for example. The Zane Grey Museum in Zanesville. The Museum of Power and Water, dedicated to the history and glorification of the Enema. Miranda went to them all, looking at the oddities, searching for possibilities.

Eventually she achieved the desert, and on the outskirts of Las Vegas she found The Oasis, and on the top floor she found Emile Zsosz. Her timing was impeccable. As she stepped off the elevator, Zsosz’s assistant stepped on. The woman’s fury was hugely apparent. Her black bodysuit was disarranged, the material covered with paw prints. Emile Zsosz himself wobbled nearby, still reeling from a blow to the face, but too drunk to actually fall over. The elevator doors closed on the assistant, Miranda took her place, and there is reason to believe that it never registered in Zsosz’s soggy brain that a change had occurred. “It’s showtime,” he whispered, extending his hand toward Miranda.

Miranda rose from the bed and started dressing, even though dawn was still hours away.

“Where are you going?” asked Preston the Adequate.

“The damned Abraxas.”

“How come?”

“I just don’t like the direction this conversation is headed.”

“Miranda, I look at you, I look at me, I gotta think there’s some factor I’m not entering into the equation. It’s got to be the books.”

“Hey, dorkus. I was with the guy who’s got the books. Remember? I left him to be with the guy who no longer
has
the books.”

Preston found something in that statement that quieted him, although one couldn’t tell from his expression whether it was sense and reason or a deeper, bluer mystery. After a very long moment’s silence, Preston lit up a cigarette and said, “Hey, want to hear a joke?”

Miranda smiled, nodded, peeled off the clothes she’d thrown on and climbed back into bed. A large and clumsy man, Preston received her as gingerly as he could.

“Okay, here goes,” he said. “There was this magician, this cheap, untalented magician who only knew a few old, tired tricks. And one day this genie appears, you know, poof, this big genie appears and the genie says, ‘You get one wish.’ ”

“Only one?”

“Yeah, only one. And this magician says, ‘For one night, just one night, I want your powers. I want to be capable of doing real, true magic.’ ”

“Yeah.”

“So the genie says okay. And he waves his hand and the magician goes and does his show and he’s a huge success. And the next day the genie reappears and says, ‘How did it go?’ And the magician says, ‘Great. I pulled a rabbit out a hat, I made some
coins disappear into thin air …’ ” Preston the Adequate allowed his voice to fall away into silence.

“It’s a good joke,” noted Miranda. “It’s not very funny, but it’s a good joke.”

“Barry Reno,” said Curtis Sweetchurch, “can go fuck himself.”

He slipped a hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone and looked over at Bren. The two men threw their shoulders up and down in silent mirth. Whoever Curtis was talking to remonstrated at quite a pitch, forcing him to peel the telephone away from the side of his head. “I know, I know, last time you were doing me a favour. I know that, snookums. But I have my clients’ best interests at heart.”

Rudolfo walked into the Gymnasium at this moment, stripped down to his workout briefs. He was startled, even horrified, to find the two men in there. Curtis was straddling the stationary bike, although he was not pedalling. Bren was doing wrist curls, his hands clutching enormous dumbbells.

Curtis turned around—the bike was faced away from the doorway so as to reduce distraction—and saw his client. “Rudy, baby,” he said, folding up the telephone and hiding it deep within the pockets of the enormous shorts he was wearing. “Where’s Jurgen?”

It was not lost on Rudolfo that all anybody seemed to ask him these days was, “Where’s Jurgen?” As if he knew. He knew the options, he alone held the list of possibilities, but he rarely had any idea where Jurgen was. Every night, he knew, Jurgen showed up to do the Show. He didn’t always drive in with Rudolfo. Sometimes he did; sometimes as Rudolfo was climbing glumly into the back of the limousine, Jurgen would appear suddenly, his eyes blazing, his robe tattered and dull. He would address
der Schwarze
in a strange language, his mouth opening with exaggerated volume and modulation, his tongue making clicking sounds against the roof of his mouth. The chauffeur would bow deeply, as though in the presence of royalty. But other nights, Rudolfo would close the door to the car and tap the glass separating the cab. He would sit alone and silent during the drive through the desert. Jurgen would be at the Abraxas, waiting.

Where could Jurgen be? Well, he could be in the Grotto, reading the books, although he seemed to be spending less and less time there. Rudolfo got the impression—formulated through rare sightings and an informal surveillance of the rock that blocked the Grotto—that Jurgen was no longer spending hours and hours locked away in that shadowy cave. Instead, he seemed to be dashing in and out. But where did he go when he left the Grotto? Rudolfo had no idea.

“Reno wants you guys back,” said Curtis. Rudolfo’s presence unnerved and unsettled him. For one thing, he failed to respond to questions—where
was
Jurgen?—and simply stood there brooding, his lips pursed, his brow moulded with thought. For another thing, what was with that underwear?

The other place that Jurgen could be, Rudolfo was thinking, was actually inside the Davenport Spirit Cabinet. Rudolfo hoped not, because this possibility terrified him the most. He hated it when he came upon the hideous wardrobe with its door closed; light struggled from its cracks and openings, light so weak that it
only made it a foot or two before being swallowed by darkness. Animals crawled and flew from the cookie-cutout holes, not furry or feathered animals but scaly creatures that even Rudolfo, avid amateur naturalist, could not identify. Rudolfo hated it when Jurgen was shut in the Spirit Cabinet, but he hated it even more when the doors flew apart and Jurgen emerged, ghostly white and glowing.

Bren spoke up. “We told Reno to get stuffed.” He possessed a very low voice. Rudolfo turned toward Bren and blinked several times, but he was still not moved to speech.

“You know what?” demanded Curtis, who hated silence in general, and weird silences in particular. “You guys are too big for Reno. You guys are too big for
television
. I’m not talking to anybody who is not from a major studio, because my vision now is one of motion pictures.”

“I’ve written a treatment,” announced Bren. “I haven’t shown it to anybody, but already there’s a lot of interest.”

“There’s very strong buzz,” concurred Sweetchurch, staring at the sullen Rudolfo, “and no one even knows about the project.”

“It’s an adventure slash comedy slash drama slash motivational type thing,” said Bren. When he said
slash
he smote the air brutally with the dumbbells.

“Is funny,” said Rudolfo suddenly. Curtis almost fell off the bike. “Because Houdini, you know, he sell fucking books because he lose money in movies.” Or, at least, that was the story. It was possible, it suddenly occurred to him, that the lost revenue had nothing to do with it. That may be just a cover-up story,
ja
, it was possible, likely even, that there was otherworldly contagion, a virus attached to the books, or contained within the mouldy apparatus—cultured within the smelly Davenport Spirit Cabinet itself—and Houdini sold the Collection so as to get rid of the disease.

And why did Eddie McGehee decide so suddenly to auction off the Collection?

Because, Rudolfo saw now, he had discovered the sickness.

“Curtis Sweetchurch,” Rudolfo commanded, lofting a finger and stabbing it toward his manager. “You will find for me Eddie McGehee.”

“Oh, sugar,” whimpered Curtis, “I’m a busy beaver. I’ve got no time—”

“Do as I say.”

“Now, now, Rudolfo—” Bren started, curling the weights significantly, popping veins the length of his forearm.

“Find me Eddie McGehee. Get me his address. I must go have speaks with him. Now get out. I am making exercise in the Gymnasium.”

Cowed by Rudolfo’s sudden reclamation of his previous hauteur, Curtis slipped off the stationary bike and slunk toward the door. Bren lingered, his knuckles tightening around the steel grips of the weights he was holding. Sweetchurch jerked his head at his assistant, and Bren allowed the dumbbells to drop to the ground with a resounding thud.

Then Rudolfo was alone.

Dizzy with energy, he yanked off his cap and wig, climbed aboard the stationary bike and pedalled furiously nowhere.

He sensed, but didn’t see, Jurgen enter. There was a mirror on the wall some twenty feet in front of him, but it started halfway up to accommodate the racks of dumbbells and bars, the squat trees of clamps and plates. If Rudolfo had lifted his head he might have seen his partner, but he chose not to. He wanted to avoid the deathly pallor and the pale eyes, so he pretended to be in the final stages of the Tour de France. He hunkered down over the bars, leaning heavily on his forearms with his rear end elevated behind him. He considered saying something—demanding to know what was in the books, demanding to know
why it was so important, demanding to know what was wrong—but instead he chose a heavy, panting silence and concentrated on the pistonlike motion of his legs, the rhythmic displacement of his two-cylinder butt.