Out of the Sun (17 page)

"How did they meet you?"

"Long story, Harry. But since we've got a long drive ahead of us .. ." Hackensack gave the rear-view mirror a hard stare and nodded to himself in evident satisfaction. "You may as well hear it. I'm surprised you haven't heard it from David. But maybe that just goes to show what you probably already know."

"Which is?"

That you've got a son to be proud of."

TWENTY-FOUR

Woodrow Hackensack apparently considered an autobiographical preamble essential to his account. A couple of attempts to urge him on having failed, Harry resigned himself to learning more than he really wanted to about the former illusionist's childhood in a southern Vermont village where his parents ran the general store; his frustrated intellectual yearnings; his adolescent rebellions; his friendship with a cantankerous old vaudevillian who taught him some conjuring and card tricks; his short-lived career as an insurance clerk in Boston; his tentative forays into show business; his love affair with the daughter of a Polish acrobat; their marriage and peripatetic life together; his precarious prime as "Mr. Nemo, Man of Magic'; his wife's death in a trapeze accident; and his subsequent decline into drink-sodden drug-sapped un employ-ability.

They had been on the road more than an hour before Hackensack mentioned a name Harry recognized. By then they had left New York far behind, the sun had set and their promised back-road tour had begun: a serpentine cruise along pot-holed routes between nowhere much and nowhere else. Hackensack's story had rambled with it into the limbo of his recent past: a roach-ridden apartment on New York's Lower East Side; subway rides to Coney Island with his wife's ghost; drugged days and drunken nights lived on the crumbling brink of vagrancy; a twilit spiral of self-pity and self-destruction. And then, one evening, in a Bowery bar, he picked up a discarded newspaper and read about the latest Off-Broadway sensation: English magician Adam Slade.

"I can't recall whether it was his grinning photograph or his horse shit claims about higher dimensions that made me angry. Maybe it was both. Or maybe it was his lack of respect for fellow professionals. Magicians deal in tricks and illusions. They should admit that. They should claim credit for it. But Slade wants the dime and the doughnut. He wants people to admire his talents and believe he's got inherited powers. That's probably what got my goat. So, I tidied myself up and went along to one of his Friday night shows, at a theatre in Greenwich Village, just to see for myself. And d'you know what I saw? A lot of gullible people. And a few clever tricks."

"I saw Slade in London recently," put in Harry. "He was impressive."

"So was I in my day. Without resorting to hyper-dimensional hog swill We're magicians, not messiahs. We're entitled to applause, not worship. We don't need it. We're too good to need it. Or we should be."

"You don't think Slade is?"

"Matter of fact, I do. The guy's a natural. Slick and dexterous. But that only makes it worse. He adds these higher powers onto his act as a come-on, as a way of saying he's better than the rest of us without having to prove it."

"Doesn't the act prove it?"

Hackensack grunted dismissively. The act proves nothing. Hoops round table legs and those other stunts? Jesus, I could do them in my sleep." He paused. "Well, maybe not. But I could do them, with enough practice. I don't exactly know how he does them. But there'll be a way. There always is. With time and patience, I could work it out."

That's easy to say."

"Don't believe me, Harry? Healthily sceptical, are you? Good. Tell me this, then. When you saw Slade in London, did he do any mind-reading?"

"Not as such."

"When I saw him, he did. Another demonstration of higher dimensions, y'see. The way he explained it, one of these dimensions accessed the thoughts and memories of people around him. So he fretted a bit and furrowed his brow and announced stray recollections he'd picked up from the audience to see if any fitted. Which, naturally, they did. If there was no response, he put it down to shyness on the part of the person concerned. Most everybody there seemed to swallow the thing. He summoned up a memory of small-town Nebraska for some girl who'd grown up there. Even had the first name of the best friend she'd gone to school with. Persuasive stuff. She nearly passed out."

"But you weren't persuaded?"

"I know the tricks of the trade. And I could see Slade was getting over-confident. Maybe believing his own publicity. So, when nobody claimed some half-assed memory of a favourite uncle making model aeroplanes, I put up my hand and said, "Jeez, that must be Uncle Ira." Slade went for it in a big way. Had me nodding like a donkey to some crap about Uncle Ira standing in for my dead pa. He'd been killed in Korea, seemingly. I still kept his medals in a tobacco tin. Polished them every Veterans' Day. It was something, believe me. Till I up and said, "See here, Mr. Slade, I may as well own up. That was all a crock of lies. I've never had an Uncle Ira. Or a war hero for a father. What made you think I had? I mean, why didn't your hyper-dimensional insight tell you I was lying?" '

"What did he say?"

"Oh, the obvious. That I'd claimed somebody else's memory simply to make mischief. That I could lie, but his instincts couldn't. He was shaken, but he hid it well. Most of the audience probably believed him. They wanted to believe him, y'see. They certainly didn't rush to my support when the security goons threw me out. I was shouting back over my shoulder at Slade all the way. About how I was a real magician who didn't try to deceive his customers. About how I'd forgotten more tricks than he'd ever learn. Pretty unoriginal. But I was mad at him by then. For being so brazen as well as so successful. And for not recognizing me. I guess that hurt more than his lack of ethics. Still, it taught him a lesson. Mind-reading's been sidelined from his public performances since then. He only does it with carefully vetted audiences. And they don't include the likes of me."

"Did the press make anything of your set-to with him?"

"Nah. He wasn't quite famous enough then. But it didn't go completely unnoticed. Some guy followed me out onto the street and asked if he could buy me a drink in exchange for my considered opinion of Slade's hyper-dimensional powers. Nice feller. Young, good-looking, friendly. Had his girlfriend along with him."

"David and Donna?"

"You got it. We went to a bar and he pumped me for details of how Slade could do those things without special powers. Since he kept the drinks coming, I didn't mind obliging with the answers. Well, the hunches, anyway. My guesses about how he did it. David wasn't convinced. I could tell that. Even then, I could tell he wanted it to be true. Donna saw it differently. She was real eager for me to discredit Slade. I think David's belief in him worried her. That's how I read it later anyway At the time, I was just happy to sound off. Turned out Donna had seen my act once, in Seattle, where she grew up. But she hadn't recognized me as Mr. Nemo. I'd changed too much. That really broke me up. That or the drink. In the end, they had to take me home in a cab. By then, I was babbling about Anna and the day she fell from the high trapeze. Next morning, I couldn't remember much about it. I reckoned one thing was certain, though. I wouldn't see either of them again. And there I was dead wrong. They came to see me that afternoon. They were up from Washington for the weekend and didn't want to go back without checking how I was. Seems my theories about Slade's act had got to David. And those old Mr. Nemo posters peeling off the walls of my mildewed apartment had got to Donna. They wanted to help. Get me off the juice and put me back on the rails. They wanted to rescue me. Can you believe it? It was like the Salvation Army without the tambourines."

"But it worked?"

"Yeh, it worked. You see beside you a sane overweight stimulant-free man. David and Donna pulled some strings with a doctor they knew at a clinic out on Long Island. Got me admitted free of charge and pretty much put back together. Then they helped find me a part-time job. Caretaker at the Vanderbilt Law School. It's not exactly Wall Street wages, but I've stuck it. Hell, with what I've saved on booze and dope alone, I've been able to move to a better apartment. Well, a habitable apartment, leastways. Plus this stylish vehicle you're currently resting your butt in. Anna would be proud of me. And it's all down to two people who don't owe me a damn thing. One of them your son. Who's evidently been too modest to tell you about it."

"We've rather lost touch recently."

"That a fact? Some kinda disagreement, was there?"

"More a lack of understanding."

"It happens. I hope you get the chance to put it right, Harry, I surely do. Y'see, all this academic ambition, this career building, isn't the whole man, is it? At bottom, David's one of the good guys."

Trustworthy? Loyal? Reliable?"

"Sure is. That's why I'm doing this. Why the hell else would I?"

"No reason."

Hackensack slowed gently to a stop at the side of the road, turned off the lights and looked back over his shoulder. Then he lowered the window and listened for a moment. "Nothing," he finally pronounced. "Not a dog's barked since we left the Taconic State Parkway. This is a clear run, Harry. You don't have a thing to worry about."

Hackensack's confidence was such that he reckoned they could safely lay up at an inn he knew for a couple of hours before heading on to Albany. It was a quiet well-kept place near the centre of a scattered settlement of trimmed farmyards and prosperous residences. Harry was by now as clueless as to their whereabouts as he was uncaring. The inn supplied food, drink and warmth in an atmosphere of old-fashioned hospitality, all of which he badly needed. His other requirements were at the mercy of plans hatched for him by strangers. And for the moment he was content to leave them that way. His curiosity on another subject was very much alive, however.

Tell me more about David, Woodrow."

"He's your son, Harry. Hell, you talk as if you've never met him."

"Pretend I haven't. Describe him as you would to somebody who never had."

"OK. If you want me to. He seems lightweight at first acquaintance. Genial and accommodating. Then you realize there's a remoteness behind the smile. You could take it for aloofness, even arrogance. But that's not it. It's just half his mind is always somewhere else. Floating round those damned equations. He'd be attractive to women, I guess. But they'd have to be on his scientific wavelength. Like Donna, y'know? She told me he'd been married to some Hollywood social climber and it's no surprise that was a disaster. Mathematics is more than his profession. It's an obsession. He believed in Slade's hyper-dimensional powers because he was mathematically satisfied that higher dimensions exist and therefore, theoretically, should be accessible to us. Well, you'd have to call that single-minded, wouldn't you? Whatever he was doing for Globescope, I can assure you it didn't command much of his attention. Last time I met him, he was still on that hyper-dimensional duck-hunt."

"When was that?"

"Oh, a couple of months back. Just before he flew to England. Start of the Labor Day weekend. Early September."

"In New York?"

"Yeh. He turned up at my apartment just as I was leaving for work Friday evening. He looked fine, but he sounded kinda odd, kinda .. . spaced out. Asked if he could stay over. Well, that was no problem. Least I could do. Then, Saturday morning, he asked if I'd do him a favour and go upstate with him to see somebody. Well, that was no problem either. I was happy to go along for the ride. We headed for Poughkeepsie, just west of here, down on the Hudson."

"Who did you see?"

"An inmate of the Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center. Guy name of Dobermann. Y'know? Like the dog. Carl Dobermann."

"Who's he?"

"Well, no dog-breeder, that's for sure and certain. A head case. Chronically wacko. Been in that hospital more than thirty years. On the way up to Poughkeepsie, David told me a bit about him. A bit about why he wanted to see him. Not all, though. He was holding something back. I could tell by his manner. Shifty. Nervy. A mite ashamed of himself. Anyway, it seems Dobermann's been locked up at Hudson Valley since he was a student at Columbia back in the fifties. So long nobody's sure why he was locked up there in the first place. Lately he's been allowed to mix with other inmates more. To walk around the grounds. Even leave them under escort. I guess that's why the rumours started. Visitors began saying they'd seen him do the weirdest things. Move objects without touching them. Appear as if out of thin air, then disappear the same way. Predict the arrival in the car park of a certain make and colour of automobile before anyone else could see it. I mean, bizarre stuff. Seriously screwball."

"What was David's interest in him?"

"Can't you guess? He thought it was possible Dobermann had hyper-dimensional powers. Might have gone crazy because of them. But might still possess them. That was the point. He wanted to check him out. And he wanted me as a confirmed sceptic to be there when he did it. To authenticate whatever happened."

"What did happen?"

"Not a thing. Oh, we met Mr. Dobermann. He seemed real pleased to see us. He's about sixty. Looks it, leastways. Lean as a hoe, with a hospital tunic several sizes too big hanging off him like a sail from a mast on a windless day. Grins a lot. Twitches a hell of a lot more. But says near to nothing. I mean, out of touch isn't in it. He still thinks Eisenhower's in the White House. This is not a together guy. As for walking through walls, forget it. The special effects were off-line."

"A wasted visit, then?"

"Not exactly. After a while David took him for a walk round the grounds. Told me he thought I might be making Dobermann nervous. So I waited in the car park. When David came back, he seemed, well, satisfied about something. He didn't say much, other than Dobermann hadn't gone up in a puff of blue smoke. They'd talked about Columbia mostly, he said. About Dobermann's studies there."

"Was Dobermann a ... mathematician?"

"Hole in one. Carl Dobermann was studying for a doctorate in mathematics when he had his breakdown. He was writing a thesis on higher dimensions and David had got hold of an early draft of his work. That was as much as he told me on the way back to New York. But I reckon there was a hell of a lot more he wasn't telling. I didn't get the chance to find out, though. He flew to England that very night."