The Disappearing Dwarf (14 page)

A block up, however, out of sight of the river, things were a bit different. Light spilled from open doorways and the streets were full of people idling on the sidewalks and hurrying in and out of taverns and cafés. Piano music and smoke rolled out of one dark café that had a great sign hanging in the window that promised
Best food in town
. The ‘in town’ had been crossed out and beneath it was scribbled the word, ‘anywhere’, and then that too had been lined through. ‘Best food’ seemed, by itself, to pretty much make the point, Jonathan supposed. The anywhere part was superfluous.

On the chance that the sign was at least partly accurate, they crossed toward the café, the Professor pointing out that the music was a bit too loud for comfort and that noise had an adverse affect on digestion. Miles agreed, but Bufo and Gump, claiming to be hungry as hogs, insisted at least on reading the menu.

They weren’t halfway across the street, however, when through the smoky doorway tumbled a ragged-looking lumberjack. With a wild shout he sprang to his feet and raged back inside, shouting something about filthy cheats and scum. Bufo and Gump decided that the sign probably was wholly inaccurate anyway, like those signs that advertise home-cooked meals, and they gave the place a wide berth and steered toward a less active tavern a ways up the street.

A tendril of fog overtook them about then, curling up the road on the late evening breeze and followed by wisps of the stuff that obscured the streetlamps and the doorways and muffled the laughter and the music and the noise from the taverns. They stopped before a tavern called, mysteriously,
THE OLD SHADES
, which promised entertainment along with the food. A ragged but nicely gaudy poster advertising a stage magician was glued to the window.
Zippo, Wizard Extraordinaire
announced the poster, which showed a picture of the extraordinary Zippo shoving curlicue swords through a woman sleeping in a pine box.

Miles was disgusted by the poster and by the very idea of parlor magic, but it was just the sort of thing that Jonathan liked. The more wild and unlikely the poster, in fact, the cheaper and tawdrier the colors, the more it appealed to him. It was the menu, finally, advertising gumbos and fried river squid and lime-juice oysters on the half shell that persuaded Miles to follow the rest of them inside.

The tables were set up before a stage that was hung with a weirdly woven tapestry of a crumbling palace. Before it lay a long line of tumbled skeletons that had apparently once stood in a file like a line of dominoes and had been laid to waste in the same style. Each lay with a look of mixed horror and amazement on its face, staring sightlessly toward a hooded figure outlined in a lit window of the palace before them. The tapestry gave Jonathan the creeps, but he had to admit that it was just the sort of thing to decorate a magic show.

When their food was served, it was just about as marvelous as the scene on the tapestry. Jonathan had a big bowl of dark, steaming gumbo with weird sea creatures – mussels and oysters and grinning shrimp and kelp crab – looking out of it. It reminded him of a boiled tide pool. Miles had a platter of fried baby river squid – rubbery-looking beasts with haunting eyes, all of them swimming in lemon and butter. The Professor sat before a mess of unidentifiable tentacles and ribby-looking items on a bed of rice. Bufo and Gump, giggling and pointing at the various peculiarities, had ordered steak and fried potatoes.

‘No surprises in steak and potatoes,’ Jonathan said, trying, more than anything else, to convince himself that he’d been wise to order the local specialty.

‘You can say that again,’ Bufo said slicing out a big hunk of rare steak. ‘What’s that devil there?’ He pointed with his fork at the business end of a sea cucumber that protruded from Jonathan’s soup. ‘Looks like trouble to me.’

‘Not a bit of it.’ Jonathan assured him, gamely tying into the thing. ‘Absolute delight, actually.’ He washed the morsel down quickly with a swallow of ale. Bufo didn’t appear to be convinced.

The houselights dimmed, a piano banged away, and Zippo the magician bent out under the curtain, bowing profusely. He didn’t look much like the mustachioed wizard on the poster. Not only was he considerably shorter and fatter, but he didn’t have nearly the same air of mystery and dark purpose about him. He wasn’t very old, but he wore a bit of a toupee that was parted down the middle and that had been made originally for someone with a head about half the size of Zippo’s. Miles was utterly disgusted and shrank into his seat so as to avoid being identified as one of Zippo’s peers.

The show itself, all in all, wasn’t half-bad. The magician wheeled out a great mechanical fish that was a marvel of glittering scales and glowing glass eyes. From the open mouth of the fish issued a swarm of green butterflies that fluttered about the stage for a bit then out through the door into the foggy evening. After that, shimmering bubbles poured forth, following after the butterflies, and then, peeking through the rush of bubbles, a tiny, winged pig wandered out. Squacking twice, it flapped away between the tables. Jonathan had never seen the like.

Jonathan turned to Miles. ‘This is the real thing!’ Gump and Bufo nodded awed assent. The Professor just
harumphed.

‘This is someone shoving odds and ends through the mouth of a clockwork fish,’ said Miles. But if he was unimpressed by Zippo’s methods, he clearly approved of his results, for he put a finger to his lip and nodded up at the stage.

Zippo was hocus-pocusing about, and the mouth of the fish head was clacking shut and opening again, rhythmically, as if getting set to spew forth some new wonder. A little, marble-sized ball drifted out, floating, rising and falling like a leaf in the wind. It hovered momentarily then rose into the air toward the smoky ceiling, expanding as it did. It grew to the size of an apple, then to the size of a man’s head, then bloomed amazingly into an immense paper flower. A shower of golden glitter fell from the mouth of the flower, sparkling like summer rain in the stagelights. The center of the flower was as purple as a midnight sky and was surrounded by a thousand petals of salmon and silver and sea green and luminous turquoise and emerald like an impossible magical rose from the Wonderful Isles or the Kingdom of Oceania.

As everyone
oohed
and
aahed
over the hovering flowers, a hundred more of the little round buds drifted slowly out of the yawning mouth of the fish, drifting on slow currents of air. Jonathan started as one brushed past his nose. Another, a dud apparently, fell with a plop into the remains of his gumbo and sprouted there among the sea shells and exoskeletons and crab claws of the unlikely soup. In an instant the air was filled with the weird paper blooms. There were bunches of blue lilacs and clusters of tiny violets. Iris as big as plates slowly changed color, fading from deep crimson and blue to pinks and lavenders. Then, one by one, the things deflated slowly, shrinking away to something resembling a moist purple rubber band and falling lifeless on the floor and tables like unhappy little worms. Somehow the tavern, after the collapse of the wonderful air flowers, seemed sad and empty. Jonathan hauled one of the shreds out of his ale glass and looked it over.

‘Helium buds,’ the Professor said. ‘From the Orient. Very simple, really.’

Miles nodded, but again seemed pleased with the effect of Zippo’s latest trick. Jonathan decided to obtain some of the magical buds – a thousand or two so that he could release a handful any time he chose and never run out.

The show didn’t amount to so much after that. If Zippo had one fault as a performer it was that he tossed off his best act halfway through the evening with the effect of making the rest of the show seem like something of a decline. He wheeled out the advertised pine box and shoved a variety of colorful swords through it and, seemingly, through the body of a woman reclining in the box – a woman who was either sleeping or dead. Then he pulled a variety of animals out of a bottomless hat and shoved each down his pants. Then he took off his shoe and pulled the same crowd out again, dropping them, one by one, into his shirt and retrieving the beasts with a great show of spirit from an immense coat pocket. From there they disappeared into his ear and were hauled out wearisomely from his mouth. The gag, Jonathan realized, could quite conceivably go on all night, and it began to seem as if it would when a catcall or two from the shadows at the back of the tavern dampened Zippo’s enthusiasm. Thereafter, a deck of cards was waved about and shuffled and manipulated, and cards were fished out of the ears of those grinning members of the audience – including Gump – who sat near the stage.

Finally Zippo produced a mortar and pestle and called on the audience to volunteer a pocketwatch. Jonathan, in a sporting mood by then, yanked out his own, recently purchased from Beezle’s market, and handed it up to the taciturn Zippo, who slammed it immediately into the mortar and ground it to dust. A spring or two shot out and bounced on the stage as Zippo worked at the contents of the mortar, displaying it to the shouting audience, finally, as a little ruined heap of bent metal and glass bits and twisted cogs. Jonathan took it gracefully. Clearly this was what was known as prestidigitation, finger flummery. Some valueless old broken watch had gone into the mortar and Jonathan’s watch was surely up Zippo’s sleeve.

Zippo produced a garish handkerchief and waved it over the remains, making spider conjurations at it with his free hand. ‘Hocus, pocus, mooliocus!’ he shouted, and with a flourish of the scarf, revealed the same ground remains that had once been a pocketwatch.

The audience jeered and laughed. Jonathan, still a sport, laughed along with the rest. He noticed, however, that Miles, somehow, didn’t see much humor in the gag. Probably, Jonathan thought, because Miles had little taste for such an obvious parlor trick.

Zippo waved the kerchief over the mortar again and effected the same result. Again he waved the scarf and shouted his mumbo jumbo, and again he uncovered a heap of ruined watch. After the third flourish there was less laughter from the audience; not, it seemed, because they feared the loss of Jonathan’s timepiece, but because the ground-watch gag was quickly becoming as tiresome as the animals-in-the-hat production.

Jonathan’s sporting attitude, in fact, was fading too, and so was Zippo’s enthusiastic flourishing. Then, from behind the tapestry, the pine-box woman pranced out on tiptoe waving a loaf of old bread. Zippo paused, cast the crowd a look of mock surprise, and ripped open the loaf, producing, to everyone’s compound astonishment, a pocketwatch. Cheers erupted from everyone as Zippo put the watch into a little velvet bag and passed it down to Jonathan.

Zippo bowed this way and that, nodding to Jonathan, who slipped the bag happily into his shirt pocket without bothering to look inside. He didn’t, after all, want to call Zippo’s skills into question. All in all, the magician seemed to be as amazing as any Jonathan could remember having seen – outside of Miles, of course, who was a genuine wizard.

Zippo disappeared behind the strange tapestry. As the stage lamps dimmed, the tapestry began to glow. The line of fallen skeletons and the eyes of the hooded creature in the castle window were lit like sea foam in moonlight. The audience, including Miles, gasped in surprised horror as the skeletons, one by one, stood upright and jerked along single file into the dark door of the castle, the thing in the window seeming to fade and disappear into the dark night behind it. When the wall lamps in the tavern were turned up and the audience sat squinting in the smoky room, the tapestry showed an empty rock-strewn night landscape with the castle, its windows and doors dark as pitch, sitting in the foreground.

The general amazement, however, soon faded as the sound of clinking glasses and plates filled the air along with shouts for ale and wine. ‘Well,’ said Jonathan, turning to the Professor. ‘That was first rate.’

‘Indeed,’ the Professor replied. ‘Quite a show. I’m astonished by that last trick with the tapestry. The rest of it was nothing. Very nice, mind you. I don’t mean that it wasn’t very clever and all. But like Miles said, most of it was a matter of shoving odds and ends through the mouth of a mechanical fish.’

‘Most of it,’ Miles said. ‘Let me see your pocketwatch, Jonathan.’ And Jonathan plucked the little velvet bag out of his shirt pocket and handed the whole works to Miles who dumped the watch out into his hand and looked at it grimly.

‘Yours?’ he asked, dangling a sad-looking brass watch by a piece of twine.

‘No!’ Jonathan shouted, grabbing the watch and examining it. The crystal was cracked across and one of the hands was missing altogether. When he wound the stem he could feel what might have been the crunch and scrape of ruined works grinding against one another.

‘Sold!’ the Professor shouted, slamming his hand onto the table top. Jonathan handed the watch to Bufo and Gump, who were anxious to have a look at it; then he and the Professor, both with the same thought, climbed onto the stage and ducked beneath the tapestry. There was a little chamber beyond the curtain which was empty save for the sword-punctured pine box. A hallway ran off toward the back of the tavern and led to several rear rooms, all of them empty but the last. There a hunched little man mopped morosely at a dirty wooden floor.

‘Where’s Zippo?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Gone out.’

‘The devil he did!’ the Professor shouted, who was, in truth, even more worked up than Jonathan. ‘Where did he go?’

‘Don’t know.’ The man slopped a mop full of soapy water onto the floor and swished about in it. ‘Just ran out after the show. Didn’t say why. Said he’d be back tomorrow night.’