Night Magic (29 page)

Now Michael was standing in front of the table again, idly shuffling the pack of real cards. “I’ve been trying to learn how to do this next trick with imaginary cards, but so far I still need real ones.” He took two steps forward from the table, turned his back to the audience, and began flicking cards at the candles in the two candelabra, snapping their wicks, extinguishing them in rapid succession. He missed once, in a way that made you think he’d done it on purpose. The last card was still in flight when he whirled and bowed deeply to the audience.

The applause was enthusiastic, if a little stunned. Michael stood behind the table, leaned to the vase, and removed the long-stemmed rose, which was now a candlelighter with a burning taper. As he lit the candles once more, he said, “Lights, please,” and the room lights were dimmed by an unseen hand. He replaced the candlelighter, once again a long-stemmed rose, in the vase and doffed his hat to the audience. Back on his head, the hat grew up suddenly to three times its height. He snatched it off and flung it down onto the table, where it shrank to its former size. Another hat appeared at his fingertips; he put it on in place of the first one, but it was too wide and came down over his ears. He snatched this one off in its turn and scaled it into the audience, where the swamp monster who caught it found himself holding a black dunce’s cap. Michael thrust out his arms, and a top hat appeared at the fingertips of each hand. The look on his face, Emily thought, was slightly contemptuous, but it changed at once, because someone behind her had risen noisily from his seat and begun shouting.

“This is too much! This is too much! This I cannot tolerate!” The lights became suddenly bright again. It was Wurlitzer, she saw, all the way on the end of a row, about ten back; somehow she had missed him when she looked over the room.

“It’s all right, ladies and gentlemen,” Michael said sharply, “Mr. Wurlitzer likes to perform before an audience.” He looked at the master and hissed, “Please sit down,” through clenched teeth.

“No, I will not sit down! You invade my home, take over my life! And now you steal my act! This show
must
stop!”

“Sit down, old man,” Michael said, with a cold hatefulness in his voice that Emily had never heard before. “Your day is over. Senility and magic don’t mix.”

Wurlitzer sent his chair crashing against the wall, out of his way, and started marching toward the makeshift stage. One hand flashed inside his cloak and reappeared holding a gun.
“This must stop!”
he shouted again.

During this confrontation—Emily and Dazz later estimated that the whole thing took about ninety seconds, from beginning to end—the audience sat as though spellbound. Hardly anyone moved, though a few women screamed. Emily kept thinking dazedly, This doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense…

All at once Samir lurched to his feet and stood in front of the platform, screaming at Wurlitzer in Arabic, wailing the words like a muezzin’s prayer. The old man barked an answer, clipped and hoarse, and Samir reeled backward, raising one hand to Michael’s table for support. At the same time, Gilbert burst from the group of standing onlookers across the room and began running toward Wurlitzer, howling like a banshee and brandishing a club like a policeman’s billy which, though no magician, he had produced from the folds of his clothing.

Michael screamed—Emily wasn’t sure to whom—“Don’t be a fool!” as the old magician pointed his pistol at Gilbert and fired, sending him spinning and sprawling. Michael yelled, “You lunatic!” and vaulted in one smooth, feline motion over the table. He jerked the long-stemmed rose—it was now a heavy baton with two white tips—out of the vase and threw it at the old man, who swept it clattering against the wall with his free arm and fired three more shots, very close together. The first one struck splinters from the table near Samir’s white-knuckled hand; terrified, he did a belly flop onto the platform and crawled behind the hanging tablecloth. The second shot propelled one candelabrum resoundingly to the floor; some guests near the front later claimed they saw the tablecloth catch fire. The third shot shattered the empty vase. The old man was running toward Michael now, only to be met by a barrage of heterogeneous objects—sticks, balls, knives, saucers—that Michael pulled, seemingly out of thin air, and hurled at him with both hands. Wurlitzer stopped and fired again. The impact lifted Michael off his feet, snapping his head like a whiplash and launching him onto the tabletop. He fell on his shoulder blades, flipped himself heels over head, and knelt on the table, smiling broadly, unnaturally. He held this pose for a long time, a maniac’s grin frozen on his face and a small, dark lump of something clamped between his teeth. Then he plucked out the object and held it up to the audience. “The bullet, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, sprang lazily off the table, and bowed, gesturing toward the master. He too bowed, standing to the left just in front of the platform. Smoke still curled up from the pistol in his hand.

As before, the audience was too stunned to recover quickly into applause. Dazz was the first to begin, followed at once by Miss Wales, and eventually the room was a tumult of clapping, which grew louder as the blur of events became clearer in the memories of those who had witnessed them. Emily, made uneasy in a way she couldn’t as yet describe, ventured a little generic applause, though by now Dazz and many others were shouting, stamping, pounding their hands together. Pandemonium broke loose when Samir, like Leporello after the devils have dragged Don Giovanni away from his supper and down to hell, crawled out from behind the tablecloth and looked about him with bewildered eyes.

Emily watched Michael as he stood unruffled, unsurprised, smiling a little, accepting the approval of his audience as though it were an unsatisfactory gift, a shirt the wrong size or a book already on his shelves. Then he held up his hands for quiet and stepped behind the remaining candelabrum. “Lights, please,” he said, and all the lights in the room were dimmed. Emily looked around for Wurlitzer, but he was nowhere to be seen; his chair lay where he had flung it. With the candlelight flickering on his face, Michael began to speak in a vibrant, compelling voice, another voice Emily had not heard before.

He talked concisely, eloquently, about the Celtic Halloween and the Christian All Hallows’ Eve, and about parallel celebrations on this date in other cultures, such as the Mexican
dia de los muertos,
when the dead return briefly to dwell among the living. On this night, he explained, the spirits of the departed seem to hover close by those they loved in life, and it was only fitting for the partygoers to think for a few moments about their own dead. Not, he said, as we normally think of those who have died, with sadness and regret; think of them as though they were alive, present, enjoying life as we are, still loving, still beloved.

As he spoke, the audience subsided and grew quiet. The air in the room was languid with their absolute surrender. His listeners were enraptured by his words, enraptured yet more by the images he called upon them to evoke from their memories and their imaginations. Emily, dazzled and afraid, felt that she too was falling under Michael’s spell, she who used to abet the spellbinder. Michael had undergone, she saw, some real transformation; power radiated from him, from his weaving, expressive hands, from the bright pallor of his forehead, from his exalted, effulgent eyes. Emily thought of her grandmother, dead now for a dozen years, who used to braid her hair for her when she was a girl and tell her Chinese fairy tales. She could hear that dear voice now, feel the gentle tugging at her scalp…

Christ, he’s doing it to
me,
Emily thought, feeling like Mary Magdalene—or Eva Braun. Michael had asked for silence, and the room was utterly still; everyone seemed lost in contemplation. “They are here,” Michael said. “They have come to greet you.”

A swishing, rushing sound, like the beating of many wings, filled the room, and for a moment Emily saw her grandmother’s face beaming at her while with one hand she stroked her hair. Vaguely, she noticed that many of the people around her were on their feet, some gasping, some sobbing; loud smacks, like hearty kisses, could be heard on all sides. Emily clearly recognized Samir’s ecstatic voice, shouting, “Syrie! Syrie!” and then the rushing sound came again, louder than before, rising in a crescendo and ceasing abruptly, harshly.

“Lights, please,” Michael said in his normal voice, then waited for them to come on, smiled coolly at his stricken audience, and bowed. The applause, when it finally came, was deafening.

Michael held up his hands for silence. Emily stole a glance at Dazz, who was absently daubing a tearstained cheek with his aviator’s cap. Michael began to speak, and she shifted her gaze back to him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for my final demonstration, I need the assistance of someone in the audience. No, no, thank you,” he dissuaded a pair of young women sitting near the front. “I need someone very strong and very brave.” His eyes passed swiftly over the onlookers, came to rest on Gilbert, who was standing near the wall, apparently recovered from the effects of the earlier gunfire, but tense, wary, hostile. “Gilbert,” Michael said. “Come here.”

Gilbert gave him an incredulous look and folded his arms. A long moment of silence was broken by Samir, who struck his hands together and spoke in rapid Arabic. Snake-eyed and reluctant, Gilbert shuffled over and stood in front of the table.

Michael stooped quickly. When he straightened up again, he was holding what appeared to be a large iron weight, shaped like a giant flatiron and fitted with a metal handle. He swung it easily onto the table, where it landed with a shuddering thud. He moved around the table, carelessly picking up the weight as though it were an empty purse, and set it on the floor at Gilbert’s feet. “Gilbert,” he said, “you are a strong man, a proud man. Show us your strength.” With his foot, Michael nudged the weight several inches closer. “Pick it up.”

Glaring fiercely all the while, the tall Arab bent down and grasped the handle. A tentative pull, followed by a jerk, failed to budge the weight. Michael sarcastically urged him on; Gilbert straddled the thing, planted his feet, and pulled upwards with both hands. His eyeballs bulged, the veins in his neck swelled, his forearms flexed until they seemed about to burst: the weight did not move. Straining and sweating, locked in combat with an immovable object, Gilbert sank slowly to his knees, still clutching the weight, wrenching it with both hands.

Michael stood over his victim with an exultant, contemptuous smile on his face. A low moan, more like a whine, escaped from Gilbert’s lips; he continued to haul on the handle convulsively, but whether he still hoped to raise the weight or simply wished to free his hands no one could tell. His eyes, filled with hatred and fear, were fixed helplessly on his tormentor. Michael laughed out loud, nastily, shockingly. He’s
enjoying
this, Emily thought, and could no longer bear to look at his face. At last he said, “That will do. You’re not as strong as I hoped,” and gave Gilbert a slight push that detached him from the weight and left him sprawled in a sitting position on the floor. “The next time I’ll choose a better man.” Michael lifted the weight with two fingers, dropped it crashing onto the table, and gave Gilbert one last, disdainful sneer. “That’s all for this evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your attention,” Michael said, and stood bowing to the swelling applause.

Dazz was ecstatic, overwhelmed. “I can’t believe how good he is,” he shouted several times into Emily’s ear, a little breathless from his frenzied clapping. “He’s gonna make
millions!
”

Her thoughts were blurting at her, all she could do was blurt in turn. “But he’s hateful!” she yelled.

“How do you mean, ‘hateful’?” Dazz asked.

The applause had finally subsided, replaced by a babel of voices. People were standing in groups, talking excitedly. Michael basked at the center of a large and growing circle of admirers. Emily felt shaky, sad, and her distress increased at the thought that her reaction might be taken for jealousy. She determined to make Dazz understand.

“I mean
hateful
—rude, arrogant, unfeeling. You know he’s not really like that.”

“That’s just part of the act. People like to watch ego displays. He’s really good and he knows it. So what?”

“Oh, sure, he’s a great magician,” Emily admitted, “but it’s wrong to use talent like that. He just wants to control people. He reminds me of some tyrant. That old man has ruined him.”

“If you ask me, that old man has made him a star. I thought it was a bad move, going to live there, but God was I wrong. We are looking at major earning potential here.”

“Terrific. He’ll be a
rich
sadistic egomaniac.”

“Emily, don’t you think you’re being a little—”

“No, I don’t,” she interrupted him. “I know Michael. He hasn’t had an easy life, but he’s come through it gentle and kindhearted, so far. Maybe a little sad. But he’s not this sneering zombie we saw tonight, I know that. I’ve got to help him.”

Dazz rolled his eyes enormously, as though at the hopeless unreason of all womankind. “‘Help,’ as in ‘bitch at’?”

“As in whatever it takes. I want him back the way he was. I’ll beg him to let me play for his shows again. I’ve got to be with him.” She stood up suddenly. “I want him back,” she repeated. Ignoring whatever reply Dazz was making, she started pushing her way through the crowd around Michael.

It’s that old man, she thought. The Queer Duck. His “master.” As she drew closer, a young woman was earnestly confiding to Michael, “I
love
magic. I think I was a shamaness in another life.” On his other side, the blond Cleopatra Emily had noticed before, she of the honey-colored hair and heat-seeking breasts, said in a voice heavy with hope, “Do you do hypnosis?”

Emily backed away, unwilling to join this particular chorus. Why not go straight to the root of the problem? Let poor Michael continue his absorbing chat with the former shamaness, or hypnotize Cleopatra until she surrendered her asp; she, Emily, would confront the real cause of her misery, the real villain of the piece. She shoved her way free of the crowd and began searching everywhere for Wurlitzer.