The Hidden Man (2 page)

That’s the secret,
he reminded himself while he took that first step out onto the stage.
Just don’t let them get bored. They will forgive anything else.

The strong spotlight swung toward him while he stepped into view. Its beam was generated by the theatre’s brand-new, all-electric direct current illumination system, and after the light was concentrated through the powerful Fresnel lens, it hit him so hard that it sent a rush of golden sparkles swirling through him.

A sudden wave of ecstasy pounded into him. It was all he could do to remain on his feet. No matter that he was already in full view; nothing could stop such powerful waves from washing through him. He planted his feet and doubled over, writhing with the irresistible sensations.

Everything good so far,
J.D. reassured himself. He knew that during the first moments of any show, the audience was so ready for entertainment that they would play along with practically anything. He called that time period the Golden Moment, and the secret of its forgiving magic lay in understanding that the Golden Moment was always short. You could get away with all kinds of slips and false starts, but whatever it was that you asked the audience to play along with during the Golden Moment, you had damned well better be able to tie it all up before the end of the show.

If you do, they will love you.

If you don’t, they will mock you out of town.
J.D.’s time-leash tended to be a bit longer than those of other performers, because his audiences were always primed for weird experiences in the mysteries of hypnotic trances. He had to hope that during tonight’s Golden Moment, the audience would interpret any odd behavior on his part as being some kind of exotic preparation ritual.

It worked, to an extent. Everyone fell silent in fascination while he gyrated and jerked in response to the overwhelming physical sensations storming through him.

A little luck arrived; the social scale of that particular audience was such that no rude noises came from the house, in spite of his unique behavior. No unkind observations were spoken in that special sotto voce style of the theatre world, that false display of discretion intended to be overheard. Throughout the packed house, dignity trumped common impulse. Except for some confused muttering, the respectful silence held—for the moment.

By the time J.D. regained enough control to proceed to the podium, he knew that he was still inside the Golden Moment, but just barely. He gazed out over the audience with an equal mix of elation and terror.

Still there was no other course but to press straight ahead. He knew his routine well enough to hope that if he let himself run on sheer experience—and did not put too much thought into anything—he might somehow fake his way through the evening without stumbling so badly that no recovery was possible.

That small hope consoled him well enough that once he began calling out his customary opening lines to the rapt audience, his fear at finding himself in this situation was not as bad as the realization that he still had no memory of taking the elixir. Certainly not mixing it into his tea. Or of forgetting, unforgivably, to put the bag away.

No. He realized in that instant that he had been wrong to doubt himself. If the elixir had been in his tea, somebody else had to have put it there. Someone else did it, despite the fact that he had never met anyone on the American continent who was even aware of its existence.

J.D. knew the elixir’s effects well enough, but the knowledge did little to protect him from it. After being exposed to such an amount, he felt his trademark sharp mental skills turning to dust.

One last, semicoherent thought ran through his head before he surrendered to the situation and attempted to run through his show under a combination of ingrained memory and force of habit. The thought was that as soon as the performance was over, he should be sure not to forget about something. Backstage, seeing a door closing from the corner of his eye.

But by this point, his vision was filled with tiny heat waves. The faces in the audience appeared to be painted on balloons.

And yet the Golden Moment carried him. His standard opening run of hypnosis jokes came out of his mouth as easily as his breath. Their sole purpose was to relax and disarm the audience, to get them synchronized. And during the familiar introduction, he was able to sit back inside himself and let the long years of practice guide his performance while the hidden man ruminated behind the mask.

Something about a door backstage, but what? Did someone sneak in just to slip this massive dose into his tea? Why would anyone know about this incredible elixir, and
not steal
it?

But before he could expend any energy on the mystery, he had to demonstrate the color of his smoke and the glint of his mirrors to the movers and shakers of San Francisco. He had to give the folks a solid sample of what they had bought from James “J.D.” Duncan for the full duration of their Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

If he failed to give them a show, an entire year’s worth of steady work would be lost. Worse: The gossip factor would be unendurable.

Now that he was in his sixth decade among a population who frequently lived no longer than that, any sort of sullied reputation—say, a story about an aging performer who might be losing his special powers—would be a kiss from the Grim Reaper. James “J.D.” Duncan could not afford to take any backward steps at this late point, or backward might well become the only direction that the folks allowed him to travel in.

So he kept his mouth moving with the familiar words, tried not to listen to himself too hard—and hoped like hell that he was making sense to the folks out there in the house.

SIMULTANEOUSLY

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

D
ETECTIVE
R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN WAS
in a dark mood. He was a damned
homicide
investigator, far too valuable to be wasted on an evening of private guard duty for some show business bigwig. He tried to remember when he had ever suffered through such an idiotic waste of his time, even back during his days of walking a beat. Nothing came to mind.

Blackburn stared out through the hallway window on the theatre’s second floor, but the late evening darkness was thickened by an inbound fog. There was little to look at. Along the upper reaches of Market Street, where the streetlamps were still only powered by fragile gas lines, the best that the lamps could do was to provide glowing place markers in the featureless night. He could see the faltering yellow-orange gaslights for no more than two blocks in the distance, and between them only flat darkness littered with charcoal shadows.

“Crime weather,” Blackburn muttered under his breath. He pushed his gaze a little harder into the night.

Pitch-black. One of the two ways that criminals like it best. Pitch-black, or sunny and clear. Rain keeps them home.

He pulled the silver watch from the inside chest pocket of his coat. The open face showed nine-twenty. The silver plating was rubbed through in some places, right where the fingers go. He had also replaced the crystal face six times, so far, courtesy of half a dozen of the countless petty crooks and vicious killers over the years who forced him to take them down with brute force. He pocketed the watch again, protecting it out of long habit.

At the age of forty-one, Blackburn knew that he could still dominate most men in their twenties. But he also felt the speed leaving his legs, felt the knees giving in to frequent snaps of pain that came out of nowhere. On some of the worst mornings, he awoke with knuckles too swollen to make a solid fist or to hold his nightstick with any real grip. He could work the fingers back into action, but it sometimes took a few minutes of vigorous rubbing.

And now he was a detective, by God. Entitled to thrill and amaze his superior officers by sniffing out criminals while leaving the eager up-and-comers to vie for the endless honors of flushing perpetrators from the shadows. Let them take the victory lumps and earn the useless purple hearts.

Yet tonight, the department brass in their immortal wisdom had him on the sort of honorary “body guard” duty that made a great training exercise for a wet-eared rookie. Naturally, then, the department was going to waste the services of a detective on such an assignment. No advance instructions, just “show up at the theatre and be prepared to work.”

The runner with the orders had warned Blackburn that the captain was meeting with Police Chief White about him, at that very moment. “Under no circumstances” was Blackburn to leave the second-floor hallway before Captain Merced arrived.

But once he got up there, he was left to wait while the rest of the audience filed in, gradually finding their seats. Eventually, the heavy doorway curtains were pulled shut and the show began. Blackburn heard the strains of patriotic theme music, an announcer booming on and on about the
Glorious Achievement of Instantaneous Communication by Voice, from One Side of the Country to the Other!

The renowned mesmerist, James Duncan, then took over the audience. Duncan immediately began to shout and bellow from the stage, strangely forceful in his delivery. Blackburn casually wondered if this trait was part of the man’s usual act. He could not make out the words from his position, but the showman’s voice remained filled with bursts of fiery passion. He sounded like a half-crazed evangelist. The man’s emotional tone was unusual enough to tickle at Blackburn’s investigative sense, even though he could not see the stage.

Since he was under orders to play the role of personal escort to this showman, he tossed the question of onstage emotional levels into his mental “could be something” bin, just in case. It was an old habit. The bin was large.

Forty-five minutes of the mesmerist’s one-hour show went by. Frustration compressed his head, but under orders from his captain, he could only wait and quietly pace in a slow loop.

His boot heel lightly nicked something on the floor. He had just done the same thing moments before. This time he looked down and saw that there was a hairline crack running all the way across the floor. It extended as far as he could see from that point. His heel had briefly caught on it because the floor on one side had taken a slight vertical drop—maybe an eighth of an inch. He had never studied masonry, but he knew that this was a fairly new building, brick and stone over a steel frame. It was built atop the ruins of the theatre that was demolished by the Great Earthquake, and billed as a solemn testament to the need for worthy construction in this unstable part of the world. Here, of all places, it seemed odd for such a long split to run through a new building’s floor. The fact that he noticed it at all was a grim marker of his level of boredom, but he made a mental note to report the crack to somebody back at the City Hall Station.

At that point, his train of thought was finally derailed by the appearance of Captain Christian Merced. The man puffed his short and portly body up the stairs, swiveling a domed head in all directions until he spotted Blackburn. When he did, he immediately locked on to Blackburn’s eyes. Merced was not imposing as a physical figure, but his momentary anger amplified his permanent sense of rank and made him a formidable presence.

Blackburn felt the same cold chill that he sometimes caught during card games. Nothing good ever followed it.

The captain stepped toward the nearest curtained alcove, and without so much as a glance back at Blackburn, he flicked a silent gesture of commandment to join him. Blackburn’s cold chill deepened while he stepped over to him.

The moment that they were both inside the temporary alcove formed by the thick velvet sound curtains, Captain Merced stared straight up at Blackburn. His expression seemed to insist that Blackburn’s greater size would do nothing to protect him.

“Detective Blackburn,” Merced began, but he stopped and swallowed, making a visible effort to quell his emotions.

After a brief pause, he went on. “Tonight, Chief White was so upset and angry with
me…
that he actually questioned
my
competence. Do you hear me?
Four years,
he’s been in that position, and I have never heard one peep out of him. Not against me or my command!”

“I’m, ah…”

“Sorry! You’re sorry.” Merced took a deep pull at his cigar. He blew a long, tight exhale straight against Blackburn’s uniform.

“Of course you’re not
really
sorry, though, are you?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“But we’re about to take care of that. Because it’s all downhill for you after this, Detective.”

“For me.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even be addressing you as ‘Detective.’”

“What?”
Blackburn did not mean to yell. The word barked out of him in a burst of shock.

“Hold your voice down, damn it!” Merced’s words hissed like a steam pipe. “Or I will make good on that threat!”

“Sir, I have
no
idea what—”

“I know that you have no idea, Sergeant. I’m here to tell you! It’s that damned half-breed family or whatever kind of group you’ve got going on over at your house!”

Blackburn lost all sense of self-control and grabbed Captain Merced by the lapels, then whispered down onto his eyeballs, “My
family,
Captain. That’s all you have to say, if you want to refer to them. My
family.
That’s enough said.”

Abruptly, Blackburn regretted his choice of reactions and a sense of foolishness flashed through him. Along with the certainty that he had allowed himself to be baited and trapped.

But to his astonishment, the captain’s expression shifted and he gave out a small laugh of delight. “No! Oh, no! There’s a
whole lot more
to be said, Detective. Because nobody really minded when your young ward or whatever he—”

“My son,” Blackburn corrected. “I adopted both of them, Captain.”

“Neither one uses your name.”

“They already had one.” He slowly released his grip on the captain’s lapels, wondering where in the hell things were going to go after this.

Merced ignored that and continued, “Shane Nightingale was entitled to quit officer school. So he’s the ‘artistic type.’ Fair enough. No harm in trying.”

“He was mostly worried that I would be embarrassed because of it.” Blackburn could scarcely believe that they were talking this way, after he had just assaulted his superior officer.

“Exactly!” Merced replied with gusto. “He worried that he might have humiliated you by dropping out! But
now,
he won’t have that burden anymore! Gone!”

Merced was frighteningly delighted. He gave a fake gasp. “Poof! Is it a trick by the Great Mesmerist down there, James Duncan? No! I’ll tell you what it is: The low-water mark has just dropped by half a mile. Because at least your ‘son’ only failed after making an honest try.”

Blackburn did not dare to say a word, to move.

Merced kept talking, but his grin turned malevolent. “I suppose you call Vignette Nightingale your ‘daughter,’ then?”

Merced was far too happy for any of this. Blackburn did not bother to reply.

“Your ‘daughter’ is nineteen years old. Same age as Shane was, when he tried. But do you want to tell me how in God’s name she got the idea that she was going to be the one in your ‘family’ to make it through police training? Everybody knows the department doesn’t put women in uniform.
Everybody.
If they don’t know it—say, they’re new in town?—we tell them. Right off.”

“Are you saying that Vignette tried to sign up for—”

“No, no! What I am
telling
you is, that beanpole of a young woman looks quite a bit like a young man when she cuts her hair off.
That
is what I’m telling you.”

By now Blackburn was completely at a loss. He had seen Vignette earlier that morning and she had plenty of hair. She was wearing it in a different style, but it was not a man’s haircut by any means.

“Captain, did she actually go down to the station and try to fool someone, so she could go through police training?”

“No, Sergeant. She did
that
two weeks ago, when she applied. Last week, her incoming class of candidates began their first day, and for all of that week, your ‘daughter’ lagged behind on physical strength tests, but scored right up near the top on most of the others. I’m told that the instructors went home on Friday looking forward to seeing how this new recruit was going to come off in the days to come.”

“…Vignette?”

“She was exposed by somebody, just today. Two of our officers brought in a note that explained it all. Otherwise, come Monday, she would have been back there, I suppose. With the other recruits! Outshooting everybody at the gun range, for all I know!”

“Sir…Vignette has been attending police training…as a man?”

“A skinny one who doesn’t talk much. Half those recruits look like girls to me, anyway. Lot of soft young bastards.”

“And getting away with it?”

“You are
not
hearing this the way you ought to! Yes. She pulled it off for a few days. But she’s been ratted out now. Good joke, right? Uh-huh, until tonight, when Chief White got wind of it and
I
got to eat a horseshit sandwich for dinner. My humor is very bad, Detective. That’s why I am giving you this news myself.”

“Does Vignette know she’s been found out?”

“Vign—
Forget
her for just one minute! Mister James Duncan down there on the stage is the one who requested you as a body guard tonight. That’s why you’re here. And you could have gotten away with just hustling him around for a bit after the performance, then going on home, all finished, none the worse for wear.

“But no. One of your ‘family’ has embarrassed me, Detective Blackburn. And I find that the only way I can impress my unhappiness upon her is to make you so miserable that you go back home and do it for me.”

“Sir, if you could just talk to her.”

“We are far past the talking point. Here is what I will do. I am going to grant Mr. Duncan’s
other
request, which was for you to be supplied to him throughout the duration of the exposition, for personal guard duty.”

“What is this? I’m a homicide detect—”

“Exactly! I would never have so much as mentioned it to you otherwise. You would have kissed his arrogant ass for a while tonight, and tonight only, and then you would have been done with it. Now, you are going to be his personal, on-call bodyguard for the entire affair.”

“Ten
months
?”

Captain Merced’s only reply was to smooth his lapels back into place.

“Captain, if you want to bring me up on charges for grabbing you—”

“Forget that. Not interested.”

“You would throw away nearly a year of my—”