Two for the Show (9 page)

Yes, Wallace the Amazing
was
amazing.

And I realized the corollary. That he was covered. He didn’t
need
to rescue me. Arguably couldn’t
risk
rescuing me, couldn’t risk the connection between us being known or seen.

I am on my own.

Alone, with the fragile, unstable, real Archer Wallace.

Meaning, I am alone.

“So what
do
you do for him?” Stewartson asked me, proffering a wedge of orange teasingly in front of me, then taking it back, biting into it himself. Still annoyed at my evident superfluousness, my apparent lack of immediate value or connection to the show—but still curious.

I still wasn’t going to tell them, because that would have meant the end of it. The end of the act. The end of everything. Wallace the Amazing had been my surrogate family. For now, at least, I had to protect him. For now, I knew no other way, no other choice. Whatever his real name, his real identity, turned out to be.

But now I also knew he could go on without me. That he
would
go on without me. That he already had. So what harm was there in telling the Stewartsons what I did for him? Maybe there were more of us “detectives,” more of us suppliers—three, four, a dozen, all unknown to one another. Maybe he added more of us as he grew more successful.

I was angry, hurt by what was now a series of lies—his name, his past, the actual size and nature of the staff that surrounded him—piling up, and who knew how high the pile would grow? The pile of lies atop which I looked out now, my perspective skewed, angled, false, the lies still shifting beneath me. Who he implied he was versus who he actually was. My bedrock understanding that I was his lifeline—and then, suddenly, I wasn’t. I was angry, hurt, but of course, he had never explicitly said or promised otherwise.

So why not join the Stewartsons? Help them pull off the blackmail? God knows I could be helpful to them. No one knew him like I did—his whereabouts, his inclinations, his judgments, his relationships, his very thoughts. Why not get even for his misrepresentation? There was every reason to save myself from the infliction of pain, the torture, that undoubtedly would ensue if I continued to resist the Stewartsons’ questions. Why continue to be loyal? Jesus, what was my crazy loyalty about?

Soon enough, I understand why we are still tied up. Why the Stewartsons are settling in. Because my condo provides a perfect way for them to keep an eye on both Archer and me, as well as a useful, serendipitous base of operations. My grabbing Archer, holing up here—it now looks practically like an invitation to them.

They e-mail Wallace the Amazing. I have never e-mailed him, of course; it is too direct, too easily traceable. But for them, it is simple. They send a short, pointed piece of fan mail to his website. They sign the e-mail “Dave Stewartson.” You know, that strange fan from a few nights ago? That will get his attention. An e-mail, a communication, he’s undoubtedly been watching for anyway.

It does get his attention. He writes back as cryptically but purposefully. You can see the purpose, the focus, the anger, the comprehension, arcing behind his response to one more rabid fan.

We’re with Archer. He says hello.

says the Stewartsons’ e-mail. Innocent, but telegraphic.

Who’s Archer?

says the e-mail back. In its entirety. Implication: I’m not admitting to any understanding of what you’re talking about or even who you are. Implication: I’m not giving this bull crap the time of day. Implication: Come and get me. Go ahead. Just try.

Who’s Archer?
Is that a message to them or to me? Everything tempts me to abandon Wallace, or whoever he is. Everything tempts me to, but for whatever crazy reason I remain a dutiful employee.

Hands and legs bound, mouths taped, we are side by side in the dark, Archer and I. (He is no longer who I originally thought—the invisible, absent Dave Stewartson—and yet, in his disconnection and isolation, he is still my doppelganger.) We are held identically captive, literally composing each other’s shadow in the light from the blaring television, in case there was ever any doubt. We look at each other, eyes to eyes, incommunicative, merely factual, the rest of our means of expression—oral and facial—taped over. It’s a late-night blizzard of infomercials: abdominal machines, weight loss programs, miracle face creams, vitamin regimens, all of it cast out broadly like an electronic fishing net across America. I watch the screen’s color, blinking and flashing in the face of Archer Wallace—cragged, white, a recipient over whom the messages wash like the light, a distant blur, not for him. The blasting of the television is hardly intended to entertain us. It is, I’m sure, to mask the antics in my master bedroom, where the athletic Dave and Sandi are unwinding, amped up by the excitement of their criminal escapade,
by recovering their Archer Wallace prize, by making e-mail con
tact—acknowledgment, a response—and thus being a step closer to hitting the jackpot. But the TV’s blare doesn’t mask the bedroom noise.

I am still thinking about my misplaced loyalty. The bedroom noise is an irritant—but it’s about to be a blessing, and a signal, I realize in a moment.

Connection, connection. We are more connected than we know.

And he is right. Because here she is.

Tiptoeing in the front door as if merely coming in late from work, as if being careful not to wake me asleep on the couch in front of the television.

Debbie.

My Debbie, now standing over Archer and me.

Debbie—as if drawn to me, from somewhere out of the desert, in my hour of need.

Debbie, who still has her keys to my condo, of course, and could lurk outside, waiting for the perfect moment to enter, which doesn’t come any more perfect than the current animated primal bedroom antics.

She stands for a moment, taking in the two of us tied here. A vindication at least of her decision to help. I presume that she was watching the house, trying to decide whether to come in, to forgive, to try again with me, when she saw a couple breaking in. Or else she was just swinging by, uncommitted, curious, unsure what she would feel or do as she passed, and saw the unfamiliar car, and all the drawn shades, and managed somewhere, given this house she knows so well, to peek in to see what was going on. But either way, waiting cautiously, until the right moment to enter, to assess, to help.

And as she stands over me, looking at me tied up and taped, we both listen to, can’t help but hear, the spirited grunting and groaning in the next room. Even here, amid the extreme tension of the moment, or maybe because of it, an unmistakable sexual charge passes between us. For a short moment, here in the television’s shadow, there is no mistaking the rush of desire mixing with the flood of my gratitude. It’s bound only by the ropes and tape, obvious in my eyes above my taped mouth.

Quickly, silently, catlike, she moves to the kitchen, returns with a serrated knife from my hardly used butcher-block set, slices through the tape on my wrists. I seize the knife from her, cut down and through the tape on my ankles, and go to work on Archer Wallace. Though we can’t discuss it, can’t risk making a sound, it is obvious that we are listening for either Dave or his girlfriend to climax; we know we have until then.

I look at Debbie; I look at Archer; I look around the living room. I realize I might be seeing my own home, my safe house and sanctuary, for the last time. I can’t return here; they’d know where to find me. Debbie, the real Archer Wallace, my home—a triumvirate of meaning for me, a triumvirate of my connection to the world, and in seconds I am taking in all three and facing some fundamental shift that I can’t yet define.

I quietly rush into my office, grab my laptop, slap it shut as I tuck it under my arm, like a little black dog I’m rescuing from a fire, and we hustle together—me, Debbie, and the fragile but improving Archer Wallace—out into the darkness.

As we scurry for Debbie’s car—mine they know, hers they don’t—I am dealt one more surprise, this one not as welcome as Debbie.

Archer Wallace, fragile Archer Wallace, just behind us, without warning, limps off to the right and into the desert blackness.

Away from my rescue. Away from my heroism. Away from me.

Just like Wallace the Amazing, when I rescued him from Big Eddie’s thugs. The same trot off into the desert. As if to return me to my previous nonexistence, to ghostliness. As if what had just occurred had never occurred at all.

Debbie—surprised and confused, but sensing that he is somehow on our side, is one of us, that he
needs
us—wants to call out to him, stop him, but I brusquely cover her mouth, stifle her. We’re still just outside the condo’s bedroom window, and if the Stewartsons hear anything, they’ll be off each other and out here in a flash, armed. No, the first sound they hear needs to be Debbie’s car pulling away, only taillights visible—if they hear or see anything at all.

The real Archer Wallace—emboldened? possessed? not thinking clearly after the physical and mental strain of a day and night taped to a chair? or thinking extremely clearly?—disappears into the desert darkness.

Debbie fires up her old Triumph, and we slip away, down the bland desert street into the night, into the unknown, into a new world.

SIX

Debbie’s place is cozy,
lived-in, quaint, a comfortable cottage she has rented for years. I’ve never been here before. Not because of some arrogant she-comes-to-me-I-don’t-go-to-her reason, and not for some if-I-stay-there-it-escalates-the-relationship, fear-of-commitment reason, but simply because my work for Wallace has generally required me to be at my own house, with my computers. Now I’ll have to figure out an abbreviated way to do it, to deliver off my laptop only—of course, I know now that he has a backup system and may not need me anyway.

My first real visit to Debbie’s house is as a fugitive from my own, a man on the run. On the night I say a furtive good-bye to my own home, with not even time for a glance back, I am finally saying hello to hers. Noting the contrasts between the two, noting the striking similarities—the same cutlery, the same glasses from the same Sam’s Club sale—telltale signs of adults living alone.

Of course, two things have happened to alter the dynamic between us: the strangeness of my occupation has intruded, coming alive in the person of the emaciated real Wallace; and Debbie has rescued me. To say nothing of the fact that I can’t go home right now, which leaves me to stay here or at a motel, which we both know is riskier. Holed up at Debbie’s, I am—in the short term at least—effectively lost. In this case, a very good thing.

“I won’t ask you who he is,” she says. “I know you’re not going to tell me. But can you tell me where he’s going? Does he
have
somewhere to go?”

I shake my head. “He’s got no money. He knows no one. He’s got nowhere to go or hide. They’re going to find him . . .”

“Who
are
they, anyway? Who
are
these people?”

I look at her. I can tell her honestly. “They use the name Stewartson. Dave and Sandi. But who are they really? I have no idea.”

The Stewartsons standing up in the audience that first night, to make themselves known. I think about it. (It’s the one kind of stage entertainment where there’s such an intimate interaction between performer and audience, isn’t it? Singers, rock stars, dancers, tumblers, and illusionists, staging spectacles, take no such risks. They have no such intimacy. And of course, Wallace’s “act” is more intimate than even another magician’s. It is, ironically, an “act” that is all about intimacy, and honesty, and exposure.) The Stewartsons’ behavior after the show led me to an erroneous judgment about their amateurism. Their ability to follow me as I was following them, to uncover and hold Wallace, to so efficiently find and trap me, indicated something far more than the enthusiastic amateur Vegas grifter. (Vegas is of course rife with grifters. And I have to accept the fact that, behind all the technology and sophisticated data management, I am in truth only a grifter myself.)

So at three in the morning, after Debbie and I have held each other, wrapped ourselves chest to chest, alive, relieved, together—after we’ve found our connection again and felt that connection drift naturally, powerfully, familiarly yet freshly too, from our hearts to our loins—I get up out of bed, tiptoe out to the breakfast nook, and power up my trusty laptop. I turn to my sources that I have nurtured, to my databases that I have cultivated like plants, to my special network. For twenty-four hours, I’ve been reactive. It’s time to be proactive. I’ve been playing defense. It’s time to grab the ball back and march down the cyber-field into enemy territory.

Fake Dave Stewartson. That smiling quintessentially American visage. Let’s dig a little deeper.

At first I can find nothing. Which backfires on Dave. The fact that he is able to manage his Internet presence—or absence—so well, only confirms my suspicion that I am dealing with someone who is no amateur. I dig deeper. Deeper still. I tap into my reliable government and police and military sites. I use a graphic interface that allows me to do identification from a photo portrait only. I’m in full research mode. I’m awake. I’m alert.

And in an hour, Dave is a different dude. Though not a very surprising one. First of all, it’s Stewart Davidson—of course. Practically mocking me. Navy Seal, segueing to highly trained servant of the US intelligence services. Forced retirement on an internal violation in a diplomatically sensitive situation in South America. Pension adjustment reflecting this forced early shift in duties and subsequent forced “retirement”—which I take to be some form of termination (this obvious from Stewart Davidson’s pay stubs, tax returns, etc.). Six intensive years of training. Three years of active service. Then, finished. Not a very happy math. One that explains both his bitterness and his footlooseness—if that’s a word. Some of the actual dates are unclear, even redacted, but the nature and tone of Stew’s bio, of his service to his country, of his life, comes through loud and clear. It’s startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly he built an online “Dave Stewartson” (or simply added one to the thousands of existing Dave Stewartsons) to compete with the Dave Stewartson I had found. There is no rich Dave Stewartson in a ditch or dumpster somewhere, I realize. This former US intelligence operative just created him out of whole digital cloth with the click of a few buttons, probably swiping enough details from existing Dave Stewartsons to construct a credible new one. He had then simply intercepted a “real” Dave Stewartson’s show tickets—the easy trick of a forwarded address or mailbox grab—correctly suspecting that with Wallace’s incredible visual memory, or whatever system Wallace used, he would know immediately which photo didn’t match which live audience member. And maybe too, Wallace recognized Davidson from somewhere, which just confirmed the imposture for him.

My “trusty” Internet—I know it and use it as a place to uncover the truth. But it’s even more effective as a place to create lies. Lies I fell for easily and completely.

Perhaps more interesting is his companion, “Sandi Stewartson.” Hardly. Sheila Barton. Special Forces. Currently on active duty.
Active duty?
What, keeping an eye on Stew/Dave? Or managing to be in two places at once—not an unimaginable accomplishment, given the suspect organizational skills and record of the huge US military. Do they think she’s in Managua or Montevideo, when she’s actually in Vegas?

Anyway, it explains a lot—about their tracking of, sniffing out the real Wallace, etc. At least I know who they are. It doesn’t, as you can imagine, make me feel much better. They presumably still don’t know who I really am, or where I am, or much about me at all, which, considering their training and skills, makes me feel a pinch of pride there in Debbie’s breakfast nook. But that pinch of pride is of course overwhelmed by fear and uncertainty—and sympathy for the real Wallace, making his way somewhere in the desert.

It occurs to me that knowing their names and pasts has made the two of them, paradoxically, even more unknown to me, even more foreign and opaque. Because based on their biographies, they have led lives of action, of movement, of exposure, of physicality. They’ve dropped into and out of cities and countries; into and out of dangerous, fluid, chaotic, dynamic situations; into and out of the line of fire—in utter contrast to my own life spent in front of computer screens, utterly cautious, predictable, and unchanging. Our experiences are antithetical. I have uncovered their identities, but who they truly are, what makes them tick, is still impenetrable to me.

At the same time, I begin some corollary detective work. I start sifting through local public records, to find out who else moved to Vegas the week that I did. To find out which of those thousands of Vegas immigrants was single. And who, of those hundreds of singles, had also moved around Branson, Missouri; and Billings, Montana; and Nashville, Tennessee—living in hotels, motels, or short-term rentals during the same weeks or years that I had. Because if I can narrow it down to one name, then that’s the person, my unknown psychic twin, who is doing my work now. My backup. (Or else I was always
their
backup.) Could there really be three or four of us? A half dozen? A dozen? Impractical. Expensive even for Wallace. And way too risky that one of the six or more of us would slip, be a little sloppy, inadvertently reveal him or herself. But there is at least one person other than me. Someone who presumably doesn’t know that I exist, who is still working away unaware, just as I would have been, except for the advent of Dave and his action-figure companion babe.

Who is it? Where are they? Would they even begin to believe me, if I find them, if I tell them? Or do they know already? Did they know it all along and thus never mythologized their boss, who has us laboring, after all, on nothing more than a glorified, clandestine factory line.

Research monkeys, in different cages, with blankets hanging between us.

So the Stewartsons (Stewart Davidson and Sheila Barton, yes, but I have gotten to know them and will always think of them as the Stewartsons) now have two roundups to perform. It will be pitifully easy for them to find Archer Wallace, I’m afraid. Cruising the avenues, his lean fragile body lit garishly in the Las Vegas night. He won’t be able to disappear into the crowds of tourists—exuberant college kids in shorts and tees and baseball caps and tattoos, midwesterners plump as chickens, waddling short of breath along the Strip from hotel to hotel, as if wandering among sacred ruins. He could blend into the underworld of Vegas bums and vagrants, but would they accept him into their small fraternity? Does he have the strength to live on the streets? They are a particularly and surprisingly hearty and resilient bunch. If the Stewartsons are the pros they seem to be, it will be easy for them to find Archer—and maybe not much harder to find me.