Kadesky smiled as he watched them rise and amble toward the exits to safety. But he was thinking:
Chicago, Illinois, December 1903. At a matinee performance of Eddie Foy's famous vaudeville routine at the Iroquois Theater a spotlight started a fire that quickly spread from the stage to the seats. The two thousand people inside raced to the exits, jamming them closed so completely that firemen couldn't get through the doors. More than six hundred in the audience died horrible deaths.
Hartford, Connecticut, July 1944. Another matinee. At the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey circus, just as the famous Wallenda family was starting its renowned high-wire act, a small fire started in the southeast side of the tent and soon devoured the canvas-which had been waterproofed with gasoline and paraffin. Within minutes more than one hundred fifty people had been burned, suffocated or crushed to death.
Chicago, Hartford, so many other cities too. Thousands of terrible deaths in theater and circus fires over the years. Was that going to happen here? Is that how the Cirque Fantastique, how his show would be remembered?
The tent was emptying smoothly. Yet, the price of avoiding panic was a
slow exit. There were still many people inside. And some, it seemed, remained in their seats, preferring to stay inside and miss the spectacle in the park. When most people had left he'd have to tell them what was really going on.
When was the bomb set to go off? Probably not right away. Weir would give the latecomers a chance to arrive and take their seats-to cause the most injuries. It was now 2:10. Maybe he'd set it for an even time: quarter past or 2:30.
And where was it?
He had no clue where one might leave a bomb so that it would do the most damage. Glancing across the tent to the crowd massing at the front doorway he
saw Katherine's silhouette-the woman's arm beckoning to him to leave. But he was staying. He'd do whatever was necessary to evacuate the tent, including taking people by the hand and leading them to the door, pushing them out if he needed to and returning for more-even if the tent was falling in sheets of fire around him. He was going to be the last person out. Smiling broadly, he shook his head to her and then lifted the microphone and continued to tell the audience what a delightful act awaited them outside. Suddenly loud music interrupted him. He glanced at the
bandstand. The musicians had left-as Kadesky had ordered-but the bandleader stood over the computer console that controlled the prerecorded music they sometimes used. Their eyes met and Kadesky nodded in approval. The leader, a veteran of circus life, had put on a tape and turned the volume up. The tune was "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
Amelia Sachs pushed through the crowds exiting the Cirque Fantastique and ran into the center of the tent, where marching music was blaring loudly and Edward Kadesky was holding a microphone and enthusiastically urging everyone outside to see a special illusion-to avoid panic, she assumed.
Brilliant idea, she thought, picturing the horrific crush if this many people raced for the exits.
Sachs was the first officer to arrive-approaching sirens told her other rescue workers would be here soon-but she didn't wait for anyone else; she began the search immediately. She looked around, trying to decide the best place to leave a fuel bomb. To cause the most fatalities, she supposed, he'd plant it under some bleachers, near an exit.
The device---or devices-would be bulky. Unlike dynamite or plastic explosives, fuel bombs must be large to do significant damage. They could be hidden in a shipping container or a large cardboard box. Maybe in an oil drum. She noticed a plastic trash container-a big one, which would hold about fifty gallons, she guessed. It was just to the side of the main exit and dozens of people were walking slowly past it on their way outside. There were twenty or twenty-five such bins inside the tent. The dark green containers would be the perfect choice to hide bombs.
She ran to the one nearest her and paused at the drum. She was unable to see inside-the lid was in an inverted V-shape with a swinging door-but Sachs knew the door wouldn't be rigged to trigger the detonator; the brass told them he was using a timer. She took a small flashlight from her back pocket and shone it into the messy, foul-smelling interior. The bin was already more than half full of paper and food wrappers and empty cups; she couldn't see the bottom. She shifted the drum slightly; it was too light to hold even a gallon of gasoline.
Another glance around the tent. Still hundreds of people inside, heading slowly for the doors.
And dozens of other trash bins to check out. She started for the next one.
Then she stopped and squinted. Under the main bleachers and right near the south exit of the tent was an object about four feet square, covered by a black tarp. She thought immediately about Weir's trick of using a cloth to hide himself. Whatever was under the cloth was virtually invisible and was big enough to hold hundreds of gallons of gas.
A large crowd was within twenty feet of it.
Outside, sirens grew louder and then began to go silent as the emer
gency vehicles parked near the tent. Firemen and police officers began to enter. She flashed her shield to the one nearest her. "Bomb Squad here yet?"
"Should be five, six minutes."
She nodded and told them to carefully check the trash drums then she started toward the tarp-covered box.
And then it happened.
Not the bomb itself. But the panic, which seemed to erupt as fast as a detonation.
Sachs wasn't sure what prompted it-the sight of the emergency vehicles outside and the firemen pushing their way inside probably made some patrons uneasy. Then Sachs heard a series of pops at the main doorway. She recognized the sound from yesterday: the snapping of the huge commedia dell'arte Harlequin banner in the wind. But the audience at that exit must've thought they were gunshots and turned back, panicked, looking for other exits. Suddenly the tent filled with a huge collective voice, like the inhalation of a breath in fear. A deep rustling, a roar.
Then the wave broke.
Screaming and crying out, people stampeded for the doors. Sachs was slammed from behind by the terrified mass. Her cheekbone struck the shoulder of a man in front of her, leaving her stunned. Screams rose, snatches of howls and shouts about fire, about bombs, about terrorists.
"Don't push!" she cried. But no one heard her words. It would be impossible to stop the tide anyway. A thousand individuals had become a single entity. Some people tried to fend off its crushing body but in the surge from behind they were pressed into it and became part of the beast, which lurched desperately toward the glare of the opening.
Sachs wrenched her arm free from between two teenage boys, their ruddy faces long with fear. Her head was slammed forward and she glimpsed some tattered flesh on the tent floor. She gasped, thinking a child was being trampled. But no, it was a shredded balloon. A baby's bottle, a scrap of green cloth, popcorn, a souvenir Harlequin mask, a Discman were being ground apart under the massive weight of the feet. If anyone was to fall they'd die in seconds. Sachs herself felt no balance or control; it seemed she could tumble helplessly to the floor at any moment.
Then her feet were actually lifted off the floor, sandwiched between two sweating bodies-a big man in a bloody Izod shirt, holding a sobbing young boy above his head, and a woman who seemed to have passed out. The screams grew louder, children's and adults' mixed, and fueled the panic. Heat enveloped her and soon it was nearly impossible to breathe. The pressure on her chest threatened to crush her heart to silence. Claustrophobia-Amelia Sachs's one big fear-now wrapped its tight arms around her and she felt herself swallowed up by an unbearable sensation of confinement.
When you move they can't getcha...
But she wasn't moving anywhere. She was held tight by a suffocating mass of powerful, damp bodies, not even human now, a collection of muscles and sweat and fists and spit and feet pressing harder and harder into itself.
Please, no! Please, let me move! Let me get one hand free. Let me take one breath of air.
She thought she saw blood. She thought she saw tom flesh.
Maybe they were hers.
From terror as much as from the pain and the suffocation, Amelia Sachs felt herself start to black out.
No! Don't fall under their feet. Don't fall!
Please!
She couldn't breathe. Not a cubic inch of air entered her lungs. Then she saw a knee inches from her face. It slammed into her cheek and stayed rooted there. She could smell dirty jeans, saw a scuffed boot in front of her eyes, inches away.
Please don't let me fall!
Then she realized that maybe she already had.
Chapter Thirty-one
Wearing a bellhop's uniform that closely matched those worn by the staff at the Lanham Arms Hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Malerick walked along the fifteenth-floor hallway of the hotel. He carried a heavy room service tray on which was a domed plate cover and a vase containing a huge red tulip.
Everything about him was in harmony with his surroundings so as not to arouse suspicion. Malerick himself was the model of a deferential, pleasant bellhop. The averted eyes, the half smile, the unobtrusive walk, the spotless tray.
Only one thing set him apart from the other bellhops here at the Lanham: under the metal warming dome on the tray was not a plate of eggs Benedict or a club sandwich but a loaded Beretta automatic pistol, equipped with a sausage-thick sound suppressor, and a leather pouch of lock picking and other tools.
"Enjoying your stay?" he asked one couple.
Yes, they were, and they wished him a good afternoon.
He continued to nod and smile at the guests returning to their rooms after Sunday brunch or on their way to sightsee on this fine spring afternoon. He passed a window, in which he could see a bit of green-a portion of Central Park. He wondered what sort of excitement was unfolding there at the moment, inside the white tent of the Cirque Fantastique-the place to
which he'd spent the past few days directing the police with the clues he'd left at the sites of the murders.
Or misdirecting them, he should say.
Misdirection and ruse were the keys to successful illusion and there was
no one better at it than Malerick, the man of a million faces, the man who materialized like a struck match, who disappeared like a snuffed flame. The man who vanished himself.
The police would be frantic, of course, looking for the gasoline bomb,
which they believed would go off at any moment. But there was no bomb, no risk at all to the two thousand people at the Cirque Fantastique (no risk other than the possibility that some of them would be trampled to death in their mindless panic).
At the end of the hallway Malerick glanced behind him and observed that he was alone. Quickly he set the tray on the floor near a doorway and lifted the cover. He collected the black pistol and slipped it into a zippered pocket in his bellman's uniform. He opened the leather tool pouch, extracted a screwdriver and pocketed the pouch too.
Moving fast, he unscrewed the metal guard that allowed the window to open only a few inches (human beings do seem to take any opportunity to kill themselves, don't they? he reflected) and raised the window all the way. He carefully replaced the screwdriver in its spot in the leather pouch and zipped it away. His strong arms deftly boosted him onto the sill. He stepped carefully out on the ledge, 150 feet above the ground.
The ledge was twenty inches wide-he'd measured the same ledge from the window of the room he'd taken here a few days ago-and though he'd only done limited acrobatics in his life, he had the superb balance of all great illusionists. He moved along the limestone rim now as comfortably as if it were a sidewalk. After a stroll of only fifteen feet he came to the comer of the hotel and stopped, looking at the building next door to the Lanham Arms.
This, an apartment building on East Seventy-fifth Street, had no ledges but did have a fire escape, six feet away from where he now stood-overlooking an air shaft filled with the restless churning of air conditioners. Malerick took a brief running start and leaped over the bottomless gap, easily reaching the fire escape and vaulting over the railing.
He climbed up two flights and paused at a window on the seventeenth floor. A glance inside. The hallway was empty. He placed the gun and the tool kit on the window ledge then stripped off the fake bellhop's uniform in
one fast peel, revealing beneath it a simple gray suit, white shirt and tie. The gun went into his belt and he used the tools again to open the window lock. He hopped inside.
Standing motionless, catching his breath. Malerick then started down the hallway toward the apartment he sought. Stopping at the door, he dropped to his knees and opened the tool kit again. Into the keyhole he inserted a tension bar and above it the lock pick. In three seconds he'd scrubbed the lock open. In five, the deadbolt. He pushed the door open only far enough to be able to see the hinges, which he sprayed with oil from a tiny canister, like breath spray, to keep them silent. A moment later he was inside the long, dark hallway of the apartment. Malerick eased the door shut.
