Trick of the Light (6 page)

It was all a matter of recovery.

And careful planning.

His large spade-shaped fingers were surprisingly dexterous as he twisted the cards over to lay them face up.

Now he was left with the pack of the pasteboards held over, sixty-four in total.
The hand
. Face down in a solid rectangle. You may only turn them once.

If they had no place, thence to the
talon
.

Before he began, Magnus surveyed the spread. It had possibilities but would depend on the order of what ensued from the pack.

Now if he was a true sensitive he might intuit what was to come. But he was merely a gambler with a gift of the gab.

Before he made his first move, Magnus snapped open a small silver case and extracted a slim cheroot, which he lit up to puff out a thin spurt of smoke, eyes closed in tobacco heaven. Some preached against the leaf but they had no idea what it added to the pleasures of the flesh.

He opened his eyes once more and gazed round the well-appointed hotel room. Yes indeed, the lap of luxury, who would have thought a riverboat gambler down on his luck could have found such a sweet little ace in the hole?

His eyes flicked to the side door behind which Sophia was enclosed.

His own quarters were out across the hall for propriety’s sake but the woman shared her bed now and then if she had an itch to scratch.

Not presently though. Something in the tea house had set her mind inwards and Sophia had retreated to the separate small side room in her quarters she always insisted on possessing no matter where they had their lodgings.

And it had to have a lock. What she did in there was anyone’s guess; commune with the spirits?

Another mystery was the small leather suitcase she carried by herself everywhere they travelled. That case Sophia kept in the side room as well and when he had made the mistake one day of trying to spring the catch in a London hotel lobby, the Langham no less, while she was powdering her pudenda, the damned woman somehow knew and in a white fury warned him that if he wanted to keep his procreative means intact, he’d best contain his curiosity.

Or his testicles would pay the price.

She hadn’t exactly phrased it in such blunt fashion but Magnus had got the message. Yes, indeedy.

And the other message received was that of the milk cow. These fine young teats of hers, with a tug here and a tug there, brought forth rich reward.

But it was
her
milk. She provided. He merely managed the liquid flow. That was his talent.

Magnus had always been a showman, a gambler, a handsome brute, a lady’s man; he hid his card manipulations behind a ready smile and friendly, open face.

He was also blessed with a fine baritone voice and eloquent sincerity of speech; he could have been an actor or nostrum salesman but Lady Luck had claimed him as her own.

For a while.

Then the damned Civil War had blown the steamboats out of the water; not that he had taken sides, a gambler never takes sides so he cursed Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in equal measure.

Between them, however, they had wrecked the fine currents that Magnus plied his trade in, and if that were not enough, then came the railroads.

No romance to the iron horse.

Where was the full moon shining on the Mississippi water, where a man might wander up to a pilgrim who had made a killing in some cattle deal, had money to burn, whisky on his breath, leaning against the rail dreaming of some woman who was never in a million years his wife, and offer up a friendly game of cards?

The air would smell of river blossom; some mulatto girl, bare-legged, with long slender arms, slowly washing clothes by the bank, a traveller’s mind wandering to some tryst with such a succulent creature, and in that splendid state of priapic suggestibility he would be a lamb to the slaughter.

A secluded cabin, a whisky bottle on the table, perhaps some other travelling men, a fresh deck of cards and that sweet thrill when the deal went down.

No such delight upon a train. Conductors, railway detectives and sour-faced women keeping an eye on their sad-faced husbands.

In the long years after the war, his luck had gone to hell even with the calculated skill he could bring to bear. He gambled now in saloons where the pilgrims were sharp-eyed and quick tempered.

Ended up in San Francisco, down by the docks, lost all his money in a game of poker. Some dewy-eyed kid turned over a full house and cleaned the table.

Magnus walked out of that bar with a five-dollar bill in his shoe, court of the last resort. He was over forty years and running out of luck.

Somewhere off to the side he could hear a bunch of heathen Chinee squabbling over a game of mah-jong on one of the junk ships. A crescent moon above hooked into the sky, and it seemed as if he was the last man left alive as he walked along the creaking waterfront.

How long he had wandered, he’d lost count of that. Hours, days, nights, his head was full of dark thoughts: damned Irish stock, Bannerman, a name for someone who carried the flag at the front and died first in battle.

Found himself, like something in a dream, in front of a tall building that stood alone, composed of slatted wood, weathered by the salt currents of the sea. By the door were pinned cards advertising the wares of various flowers of the night who promised innocence and satisfaction.

Penetrate the one to achieve the other.

Then, almost in keeping with the exotic macabre feel of the occasion, a melancholy pulsation as if it was his last moment alive, his attention was caught by a newly tacked-up piece of thin white vellum amongst the promised joys.

The paper was already curling up, as if recoiling from the company it kept, and on impulse he ripped it from the nail and held it out under the light to reread the words he had already registered.

What is
your future
? said the message.

Magnus came back to the present. A hotel in Edinburgh. Turned over a card. It was the jack of diamonds.

He knew that future now.

The side door opened and Sophia Adler slipped through, locking it behind. She had changed into a simple pale green gown that fell softly round her uncorseted body in seductive folds and for a moment Magnus felt a carnal urge to leap across at her like some natural animal. But then he observed she had that distracted air and slewed, swivelling motion to her eyes; as if she had been floating in a fluid universe and was still immersed in some opalescent reverie.

Accordingly he returned to the cards, turning them over slowly while she walked to the window and looked from the hotel onto the sober thoroughfare of George Street spread out below, not yet echoing the busier parallel of Princes Street a few roads further down.

The weather was mild but the distrustful citizens paid no heed to the possibility of clemency; heads down, hunched as if suffering a driving rain, they shuffled and darted in the gloomy afternoon amidst carriages and sundry vehicles like denizens at the bottom of the deep, half-blind, anxious to avoid contact lest it contaminate.

At least that is how it appeared to Sophia. So much of her time when alone was spent in a world of shifting shapes and snatches of voices on the wind, that she was sometimes unsure where one world ended and the other commenced.

But she had worshipped at the shrine and cleansed her soul. Now it was almost time to begin.

Vengeance.

She was nineteen years old and had waited long enough. This was the city. Sophia had made her plans. Now it was time. Magnus snapped over a card and muttered in annoyance at the result. Then he suddenly laughed; it was one of his most attractive features, a sound that seemed to come from low in his belly and fill the room with genuine physical pleasure.

‘
What is your future
?’ he said, sliding one more unsuccessful card into the overlapping
talon
.

She smiled, remembering the way the flimsy door had creaked open in San Francisco and she had clutched a small derringer under the table in case her intuition had deceived, but no – a man stood there, liquor on his breath, a wild, desperate look to his eye. Caged inside himself.

The chosen one.

An empty space that she could fill.

It would take time but she had the power. He was the instrument.

‘How much did you charge that night?’ Magnus asked.

‘Five dollars. It was all you had,’ she answered from the window, watching a vagrant dog barely escape the wheels of a hurtling carriage, the coachman whipping the horse on in brutish fashion.

As the vehicle plunged off, the barking dog was joined by another, a yellow cur, slinking, less brave, the weaker of the two animals.

But strong enough to kill a rat.

Magnus laughed once more and puffed out a last thin column of smoke before stubbing out the cheroot. She liked that smell on his breath, it brought back memories.

Good before they became otherwise.

Her mother’s eyes looking into hers. Dilated, wild and wanton.

The broad back of a man. A man she recognised only too well.

She pulled herself back from memory. The hotel room was a pale peach colour, which she found restful and untainted by previous association: the place newly converted from three buildings meshed together.

The Spiritualist Society of Edinburgh, though not the main thrust of the organisation, had done them proud. It was the end of a long tour of Victoria’s kingdom and Sophia had insisted Magnus arrange that it end here. They had travelled all the main cities, word of mouth creating a hunger for what they had to offer. Another world. Where the dead spoke.

But not all of them. Some stayed hidden. Waiting for a sign. Waiting for vengeance.

She shivered with a hunger of her own and crossed back to lay her hand upon his shoulder. Corporeal comfort.

Magnus was halfway through the game. Finely poised.

‘You think it can be solved?’ he asked.

‘How would I know?’ she replied.

Something in her tone stilled his restless fingers and he remembered the moment when he had pushed open the door and entered that dirty little airless room to find a figure sat facing him in the shadows, face and hair concealed behind a white veil like a bride’s, one hand under the table, one palm upwards pointing towards him.

Like any good gambler he had established the ante, slid over his last five dollars, and waited for his future to be told. No crystal ball to look within.

The figure spoke and asked his name. He gave it. She had a soft accent, Southern hint perhaps, hard to tell.

His own had no trace of a family of ten, in Pittsburgh’s fair city, grinding poverty and empty guts.

His father all the way from Armagh found a German woman to his liking and set about recreating the very reason he had left Ireland in the first damned place.

A big man. Big hands. Michael Bannerman. Worked in the steel mills on the south side as a puddler. Magnus was the oldest. He got the knuckle first. His privilege.

Truth be told, he was probably an evil brute to have around, big like his father, violent in temperament, and, from an early age, slippery with the stair-head girls.

The breaking point had come when his devout mother Marta, back early from kissing the Pope’s backside, discovered her own first born bare-arse naked with the wife of her husband’s best friend, Sonny, who worked down the docks with an iron hook instead of a right hand.

Turned out the damned priest had keeled over, a heart attack, hence Marta back at the wrong time, hence her scream to see a decent neighbour and wife spread-eagled up against the cellar wall, hence her wastrel son hauling up his pants and rabbit-footing out of there never to look back.

Magnus sometimes wondered what had happened to the wife, Maria, Spanish blood she had running in her veins, hot to touch. Then he thought of that hook.

Spanish blood.

He was fifteen. After that, on his own.

Took on another identity. Clever with cards, words, took on another voice, buried the stink of a ferrety existence, buried the times when his father’s fist had smashed him to the floor, buried all his dark violence deep behind a smile, down forgotten deep to the entrails.

Buried the beast.

That was the past. Another life.

‘Put your hands in mine,’ the voice had said.

The figure extended both of hers, palms up, across the table and he covered the white fingers with his own great paws. He felt a jolt of sorts run up his arm and the shape opposite shuddered as if lightning had struck her down the very middle.

She whipped her hands back and regarded him through the veil. The silence brought out anger, as if she was intruding into a secret, like someone at a circus peering in a cage.

At the hidden violent animal.

‘I have paid you five dollars,’ he growled, as a bear might. ‘I demand to know my prospects.’

There was a sound behind the veil that might have been smothered laughter, then the gauze was lifted and he looked into a pair of violet eyes that pierced him to the bone.

‘You’re a dead man,’ she said, pale skin glowing in the dark. ‘You’ve run out of time. You have no prospects.’

He knew this to be the truth.

She was young, he could see that now. Might be no more than seventeen years. Or seven thousand.

That damned superstitious Irish blood; it infected him with wild belief.

He had switched away from the eyes. Down to the mouth. The lips were rosebud pink, sensuous. Forming words.

‘You have but a single chance,’ they said. ‘The only future left …is the one you have with me.’

That’s where it had started.

All this had flashed through his mind as recollection froze him in front of the spread deck.

Sophia reached forward and in a sudden movement, smashed all the cards together,
foundation
aces, kings, queens, treacherous one-eyed jacks, she destroyed their various citadels, then pulled his head round so that he was looking up at her.

‘The only future left,’ she said.

After such a declaration, her eyes crossed focus, a comical phenomenon that happened when she had been in the fierce grip of the other world or as a harbinger of sexual passion.