Invisible Things (11 page)

Hermes Trismegistus proceeded to repeat the same feat with a young man’s engraved cigarette lighter and then an older gentleman’s mustache clippers. “A real stumper, that!” Mikael said sardonically into Sophie’s ear, and she had a difficult time not laughing out loud—gosh, it was awfully unsanitary, someone carrying such a thing around in his pocket, or using it in public!

After several more feats of mentalism—Mikael thought the audience members must be plants, but Sophie wasn’t so sure; wasn’t it genuinely possible that Hermes Trismegistus had learned how to open a quite focused channel of mental communication with his partner in the act?—Hermes Trismegistus unwrapped his lovely assistant and asked the audience to give her a round of applause. He took a few bows himself. Then the lights went out.

When they came back on, both he and his assistant had vanished, and the park’s ushers were quietly but effectively shepherding everyone out of the theater.

Mikael checked his watch, and whistled when he saw the time.

“Good thing that piece of charlatanry didn’t last any longer! Sophie, let’s make tracks; we’re due back at the station in fifteen minutes. . . .”

They picked their way through the crowds and out of the park, Sophie looking regretfully at various wonders she had not had the chance to examine properly and making herself a promise to come back one day and see everything in a more leisurely manner.

Inevitably when they got back to the station Bohr wasn’t at all ready to leave yet. Wittgenstein’s train had been delayed by an hour, and the two men had laid out an extraordinarily complex map of condiments and cutlery and napkins to represent the nuclear reactions with which they were concerned.

Sophie and Mikael found a bench to sit on while they waited. Their attention was arrested shortly thereafter, though, by the sight of a couple in heated argument. The fact of the man and woman’s both being dressed in street clothes and carrying perfectly ordinary-looking luggage could not obscure that they were the mentalist Hermes Trismegistus and his assistant Lilly.

The mentalist looked more or less as debonair and relaxed as he had onstage, but Lilly’s body was gathered up into an angry, self-contained rod of fury.

They came to rest in a spot not very far from Sophie and Mikael’s bench, and it was all too easy to hear what they were saying. They were speaking in English; indeed, Sophie could have sworn they both had Scottish accents (her Danish was certainly not yet good enough to identify a foreign accent in Danish).

“You’re impossible, Sean,” the woman was saying. “I don’t know whether you’ve come to believe all that mystical guff you spout during the show—”

“It’s not guff!” the mentalist interjected, sounding genuinely injured. “Lilly, you know that—”

“The only thing I know,” she snapped, “is that you seem quite incapable of understanding what
I’m
thinking!”

“You’re being unfair,” said the mentalist. “If you don’t tell me what you want, how am I supposed to intuit it?”

“You’re the thought reader, not me!” she shouted.

“Such skills of which I am possessed,” he said, “do not enable me to disentangle the confused jumble of desires and fears making up the average female psyche. . . .”

“Ouch!” Mikael whispered to Sophie. They were both mesmerized by the exchange, which had become loud enough that others in the station had begun to attend to it also.

“If you knew what you wanted, Lilly,” the mentalist added portentously, “I might be able to help you to it. As it is, my hands are tied.”

“I do know what I want!” Lilly said.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to want to marry me!” she shouted, and then burst into tears.

The mentalist put his arm around her and whisked a beautiful and gleamingly white silk handkerchief out of his pocket, but it was painfully obvious what he did not say.

At this juncture Bohr and Wittgenstein emerged from the buffet and began moving in Mikael and Sophie’s direction. Their path took them quite close by the theatrical couple; Lilly’s head was buried in the mentalist’s breast, but Sophie saw the mentalist himself do a small double take when he saw Bohr.

Of course, Bohr was very celebrated, so it was hardly surprising that he should be often recognized. But as the magician followed the scientists with his eyes, he did a quite evident
second
double take when his gaze fell on Mikael and Sophie.

Had he recognized them from the show earlier?

Some large proportion of the Tivoli audience, though, must have passed through the train station afterward; the two locations were just across the road from each other, and the train was by far the most obvious way to get home after an evening out. It certainly did not explain the way that the mentalist’s arm had dropped away from Lilly’s shoulders as he looked back and forth between Bohr and Sophie, a speculative gleam lighting his eyes. . . .

Wittgenstein was grumbling about not having a detective story to read on the train and seemed unable to concentrate on anything Bohr was saying. He barely responded to Bohr’s warm farewell, and went off to his train with nary a backward glance.

“I hope you had a good conversation with Wittgenstein, Professor Bohr,” Mikael said mischievously.

“Yes, yes, most productive,” Bohr said. “Mikael, I don’t suppose you can identify this gentleman who is making his way toward us, can you?”

“I don’t know him personally,” Mikael said, surprised, “but Sophie and I saw his show just now at the Tivoli Gardens, and I can tell you that he is a self-described mentalist who performs under the name Hermes Trismegistus.”

“Hermes Trismegistus?” Bohr said, his attention distracted for a moment despite the imminence of the mentalist’s arrival. “Delightful! When I was a boy, I once came across an old book of alchemical texts—I spent an entire term convinced that I might discover the technique for transmuting lead into gold! Lead, of course, is a beautiful element in its own right, with quite magical properties. Let us see what this fellow wants, but if he detains us too long, Mikael, you must help me detach myself. . . .”

The mentalist was by now hard upon them. Sophie half expected him to greet Bohr with a showy low bow, but he shook hands in a fashion that even Great-aunt Tabitha might have deemed reasonably couth.

“Sean Kelly, at your service,” he said.

“My name is Niels Bohr,” the Danish scientist said politely, even though the other man obviously already knew who he was. “This is Mikael Petersen, and the young lady is Sophie Hunter.”

“Sophie Hunter!” Kelly exclaimed, the Hermes Trismegistus self flickering showily in and out of his manner as he spoke. “Indeed, I thought it must be so—I never forget a face. I saw a photograph of the young lady earlier this year; her features stayed with me.”

“What do you want?” Bohr asked, his voice neutral, but he was usually so warm that even neutrality felt to Sophie like a kind of hostility toward the interloper.

“I feel certain the three of you will find this odd—you do not know me from Adam, as they say—but I have taken the liberty of introducing myself, at this inconveniently late hour and in a public place where Professor Bohr would doubtless prefer to pass unmolested, though it be by one of his most devoted admirers—”

Bohr looked at his watch, and the mentalist caught himself up short.

“I will cut to the chase,” he said. “I believe myself to be in possession of some information that may prove interesting to Miss Hunter.”

Bohr looked puzzled, and Mikael had already interposed himself physically between Sophie and the mentalist.

“Sophie,” Mikael said, glaring at the performer, “tell me if you want me to make this fellow go away!”

Instead Sophie stepped forward. In her boldest voice, though she could hear it shaking a little, she asked, “What sort of information?”

“You might rather ask, information concerning what?” the mentalist said, the staginess very strongly peppering his manner.

“What, then?” Mikael asked irritably.

“It is something I heard from a woman we both knew—the woman who had Sophie’s picture and named her for me.”

Suddenly Sophie knew what he would say next.

“You must be talking about Mrs. Tansy!” she exclaimed. “She called her cat after you—I wondered earlier, but now I’m sure of it. Was she terribly impressed with your stage name?”

“Strict honesty compels me to admit,” said the mentalist—and it really did seem to pain him to say the words—“that the cat had the name first.”

Sophie tried to keep her face grave, but she could not quite maintain her expression, and the mentalist coughed.

“I consider myself honored, I might add, to share the denomination with so distinguished a member of the species worshiped by the ancient Egyptians.”

Mikael did not actually say, “Stuff it!” but his thought was almost as clear to Sophie as if he had spoken the words.

“I knew Mrs. Tansy for many years,” the mentalist continued. “We worked together a few times, and I saw her not long before she died. She told me she had a commission, from a reclusive dynamiteur whose name I need not sully by airing it in public, to get the young girl in the picture out of Scotland. She was more discreet about what was supposed to happen after that, but I feel certain the sight of you here—and in such distinguished company!—would have given her considerable satisfaction.”

“Why are you telling Sophie all this?” Mikael interrupted. “I don’t believe Mrs. Tansy wished Sophie well—not in any straightforward sense, or at least not other than insofar as it might have brought her some kind of material benefit. I wonder whether there isn’t something in it for you now, too. . . .”

“I swear by the sacred wheel of the Tibetan cosmology,” the mentalist said solemnly, “that I am not in the least motivated by pecuniary considerations, but only by a disinterested desire to pay respects to a friend’s memory and perhaps further the cause of good in the world, though my mentors at the monastery were continually cautioning me that any action, however well-intentioned, may initiate undesirable consequences. Is inaction on such grounds, though, perhaps overly scrupulous?”

“Get on with it, man!” Mikael snapped. “What do you have to say to Sophie?”

“You are surely fully apprised of the important part our friend the dynamiteur has played in this business,” the mentalist said. “Now,
there
is a man who worships, whether he understands it or not, at the altar of Shiva, destroyer of worlds. . . .”

Bohr flinched slightly at the name Shiva, and Sophie wondered whether it didn’t mean something to him.

“But Eugenia Tansy, though she was not above taking money in order, as it were, to tip the hands of the spirits one way or another, was also a woman of genuine and uncanny perceptiveness. She had a very special receptivity to goings-on in the ethereal world. And insofar as she had made a commitment to help the eminent gentleman whose name we will not contaminate by uttering it in a profane hall of locomotion—”

Mikael jabbed Sophie in the ribs. “Profane hall of locomotion?” he whispered scornfully. “A mighty fancy way of talking about a train station—mighty foolish, too! Sophie, this fellow is simply too awful; make him get to the point, can’t you? See how tired Bohr looks.”

Their restiveness seemed to register with the mentalist, who reined himself in and finally got to the point.

“In short, Sophie,” he said, “Mrs. Tansy was concerned about possible interference by another person—a third party who had some concern in the original transactions between the dynamiteur and your father—a person who felt thwarted by the stipulations of the original agreement, and who responded to it in the most intemperate, indeed, dare I say
lethal
manner.”

Even the convoluted idiom could not conceal his meaning.

“Are you saying,” Sophie asked slowly, “that someone else was the loser in that original arrangement—someone who perhaps wanted to buy my father’s invention, and was beaten out by—”

“Don’t say the name, Sophie!” Mikael interjected, looking around to see that nobody was listening.

“And that this person may have caused the explosion at my father’s factory,” Sophie continued, “in retribution for my father’s not being willing to sell the device to any comer?”

“It may well be so, Sophie,” said the mentalist. “At any rate, that is very much what Mrs. Tansy understood to have happened. She believed that the person in question would harbor some malevolence toward you, should he or she learn of your existence. She was highly concerned. . . .”

“Who was the person, though?” Sophie asked urgently. “If I know, I can watch out for him!”

“Alas, she did not know,” the mentalist said. “If she had, she might have told the dynamiteur—he would have paid well. But the person’s identity was almost fully hidden from her, which suggests to me the possibility of his or her possessing occult powers. The only thing she had to say, though I am not sure what good the information will do you, is that the color white may pose a special danger, and that you should avoid bees. . . .”

“Bees?” Sophie said. “It’s an odd sort of a warning.”

“Odd, and not particularly helpful,” Kelly admitted, “but there it is, Sophie. As soon as I realized who you were, I knew that it was my karmic obligation to transmit this information, and I hope you will forgive me for detaining you so long. I have a train to catch myself!”

And he rejoined his assistant, who had been waiting with considerable impatience, and they and their luggage vanished permanently from this story. Sophie sometimes wondered if she would see him again, but she never did, though once or twice she spotted an old handbill half plastered over on a hoarding with the name Trismegistus just visible, and many years later she read in the newspaper that a man called Sean Kelly had been appointed curator of Tibetan manuscripts at one of the great Asian libraries.

Bohr seemed bewildered by the exchange he had just witnessed. As they walked to the car, he asked Mikael an almost comically precise series of questions, most of which Mikael could not answer.

“Of course, he can’t really be capable of transmitting the object’s image to his assistant,” Bohr observed as Mikael unlocked the car.