The Motion of Puppets (12 page)

Midnight arrived in the catacombs, but the puppets were buried in confetti. Kay could hear them awaken into the half life, but for all her squirming and wriggling, she could not move. They were all stuck in space like the dead and buried. To shake the claustrophobia, she blew out a string of quick puffs and tried to calm down. From the left came a gentle sobbing, and she imagined poor Noë full of sorrow. On her right, Nix began to whistle the “Entry of the Gladiators,” which she recognized from her circus days, the old chromatic tune to send in the clowns.

“Pipe down.” A voice overhead, Olya's, cut through the noise. “For God's sake, if we are to share the same grave, we can't have that whistlink and that sobbink night and day.”

“Olya,” Kay said, “is that you? What is happening to us? Why did they pack away the man in the bell jar?”

“Do not despair, Kay Harper. We are just on a holiday. Taking a little trip.”

“We are leaving the Back Room?”

“Dahlink, the Back Room is not a place, it is a state of mind. We go where the wind blows. We might travel for a bit, we might find a new home.”

Her sister Masha cleared her throat. “Is not the first time, kitten. Live for a century, learn for a century. I remember the time we were just in the middle of a performance of
Macbeth
, when they had to skedaddle.”

“The three witches,” said Irina.

“‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,'” Masha answered. “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.'”

“How did it go, sister?” Irina asked. “‘Fillet of a fenny snake.' You remember the Worm, eh? How he hated the part. ‘In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt—'”

“All right,” Olya said. “That will do for the Memory Lane. These poor gills are worried sick.”

Irina could not resist. “‘By the pricking of my thumb, Something wicked this way comes.'”

“Enough,” Olya shouted. From the box next door came soft titters. “Calm down, everyone. Now and then, it is time to go. The Quatre Mains knows best. Perhaps he has heard whispers in the dark, rumors in the audience that this puppet or that is too lifelike, too real, and they start poking around in his business.”

Masha offered another theory. “Or perhaps the two puppeteers have simply grown tired of this place. The road is in their blood. Gypsies.”

“Living out of a suitcase,” Irina said. “Better than living in one, eh?”

Nix laughed. “You saw they packed away the Original, too. I am sure we will not come back to this place. Our happy home.”

“But what about my people?” Kay asked. “How will they know where to find us?”

“We are your people,” Olya said. “You are one of us, and you go where we go.”

Kay stared at the partition above her head, wondering how long she was doomed to be in this cubicle. How long till she could be free, to see the outside world again, to hold her husband in her arms. She searched her memories for his image, his name, but found it had slipped her mind. She did not know how she would bear such a prison.

Early in the morning before the moon had set, a knock came at the back door. As if in answer, the shop bells rang once from the front door. The giants had come for them. A wave of August filled the Back Room. Footsteps, the sound of an engine in the alley behind the toy shop, and then the box was being lifted in the air, let loose from gravity's bounds. They were leaving, they were in motion. Kay wondered if he would stop looking now that she was truly gone. She whispered her good-byes.

*   *   *

In the end, Theo packed Kay's things to take home with him to New York. Her suitcases sat next to his in the foyer. All that was left to do was box up his books and papers, the unfinished Muybridge. Fortunately, his publisher had granted him an extension, under the circumstances, and he promised it by December. The sublet on the apartment expired as well, and Theo's few acquaintances had come to say
au revoir
. Thompson leafed through
Animals in Motion
while Foucault was engrossed in a newspaper account of the photographer's trial and acquittal. Sipping a beer in an easy chair, Egon appeared more relaxed now that the cirque's run was over and summer near its end.

“Just so you know, Mr. Harper,” said Thompson. “Theo. We questioned Reance a number of times, questioned all the women who went out with him that night as well. I know you have your doubts, but believe me, if he was involved, we would know.”

“The criminal mind always has a hiccup,” Foucault said. “A giveaway. Working a suspect is like playing poker. Do you play, Monsieur Harper? Any fool can win with your winners. The trick is to lay down your obvious losers but bluff when the time is right. Too often and they con on to your game. Too rarely and you're depending on luck again. Most players make a psychological mistake. There's a tell, a subconscious move or gesture that gives away whether they have the nuts, are limping in, or completely bullshitting. Play with a fella long enough and you discover the tell. If you pay attention. If you are good at that sort of thing. We must have had that guy in a half-dozen times. Not our man. No tell.”

Theo wondered if they had been playing him all this time, too, trying to guess what his tell might be, what his gestures might be saying. He knew that they thought, at first, that he was responsible for his wife's disappearance. Hell, they even had Kay's mother believing he was guilty. But over time, Thompson at least had come to regard him above reproach, though perhaps for Foucault it was all a ploy, an elaborate double bluff.

“Do I have a giveaway?” Theo asked.

Rising from his easy chair, Egon lit up a cheroot and went to the window to blow smoke out to the street.

Thompson closed the book with a bang. “Theo, you surprise me. Once and for all, you are free and clear. We'll keep working on the case. We have all your contact information—”

“I can be here in two hours, if I fly.”

“Good.” Thompson patted him on the knee and motioned for his partner to get up. “I can't tell you how sorry I am that this happened here in Québec. And that we have so little from where we first began. We'll keep looking.
Tiens bon.
”

They departed via the stairway in the hall. From his perch, Egon watched, and seeing them pass on the street below, he flicked the butt of his cigar through the open window. “Useless,” he muttered.

“Not a clue,” Theo said. “Almost three months and not one damn lead. Not even a theory as to how she vanished.”

Into the box, he piled the Muybridge texts and then laid a neat stack of manuscript pages atop the books. Awaiting trial, Muybridge wondered in his misery if he would ever take another photograph. After he was acquitted that was all he ever did. Freed from the burdens of his marriage and the trial that changed his life, Muybridge pursued his art with a fanatic's obsession. Seeing his work all together made Theo uneasy, for so much remained to be done, but he could not imagine how he could ever find the will. School would start in a few weeks, and he had no idea how to prepare for the semester or simply face the students in the classroom. Not with Kay missing a world away.

“I'm running out of money,” he confessed. “If I could stay in Québec, I would. And I feel like I'm abandoning her somehow, to be leaving like this.”

The apartment looked so impersonal with all their things removed. He should leave a note behind, in case she returned to find him gone. Or if she was dead, so her ghost would not wander the rooms searching for him. Egon sat by without a word of comfort.

“Where will you go?” Theo asked.

“Maybe I'll try to latch on with another show. There's a group of puppeteers doing some interesting things in Calgary, and I've always wanted to spend some time in the wild West. Or I know a showman down in Burlington.”

“Well, if you decide on Vermont, you'll have to say hello to my mother-in-law. Though you might not want to mention our connection. She still thinks I am guilty as hell.”

They did not want to say good-bye, but neither knew what to say instead.

“When is your plane,
mon ami
? Tell me you have time for dinner or at least a drink.”

He smiled and put the lid on his translation. “Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“One more for the road, then. If we can't paint the old town red, at least we can pour some beer in our bellies.”

The summer crowds had thinned in the faded end of August. They walked alone through the city streets, heading for the Brigands. “Did I tell you about the ghost I saw last time I ventured here? One of the girls in the
Fantômes
show came running down the street, nearly bumped right into me. Scared the life out of me.”

“What would we do without the tourists, my friend, who come to see our ghosts and follies? And the lovely young things dressed up for a show?”

A sidewalk table was free, so they decided to dine al fresco, to watch the people stroll by. Their orders were quickly taken, and when the pints came, they fell into respectful silence and anticipation, savoring the cold smooth taste of ale. He had loved it here when they first arrived, the look and feel of the Old City reminding him of some wayward part of Europe broken off and drifted west across the Atlantic. Kay had adored the whole experience, foreign yet familiar. She would have been sorry to leave.

“There's a shop up ahead that was her favorite. An old toy store filled with antiques, but it was never open. We couldn't figure out what happened there, whether the owners just up and deserted it or if the banks had foreclosed. A shame, really, such lovely things in the window. She adored the dolls, and one puppet in particular, an old Inuit carving that stood under a bell jar.”

“The Quatre Mains? I know it well,” Egon said. “Let's go have a look after we eat. We'll break in, and I will steal it for you.”

After the fish and chips had filled them, after the drinks had whetted their daring, they staggered into the street, bound for thievery. He would do it for her, he thought, why not? With each step, the puppet transformed into a talisman. If he could rescue it, why not his wife? But the window display was empty. The dolls were gone. The bear had ridden away with the little dog. The tin soldiers off to another tin war. Every last trace. All that remained were cobwebs in the corners and two dead bees on the bottom shelf.

“Looks like the sheriff has beaten us to it. Or some five-year-old bandits,” Egon said.

Theo bent his head and pressed it against the window. A fat wet tear dropped to the ground.

“Come now, you mustn't. We will get Inspector Thompson and his sidekick to investigate where all the toys went.”

The front door was still locked when Theo tried the knob, and he waved for Egon to follow him around the corner. An alley ran in the shadows of an old and decaying section of the ramparts to the Vieux-Québec. It seemed to lead to a dead end, a place no one had visited for centuries. In the gathering gloom, they skulked behind a row of old stone houses, uncertain as to which was the back of the Quatre Mains. A heap of litter by the back door gave it away—papers and cardboard boxes, castaway wheels and springs and sprockets, a single wooden leg, a bisque head caved in at the right eye, and the tangled wires and handle of a marionette.

The door to the back was open. Egon stepped inside, and gingerly Theo followed. He found the switch to the overhead light which threw into relief the bare metal shelves and the yellow walls and the well-worn floor. Tiny footprints in the dust made him wonder about mice. A chair crafted from empty oatmeal boxes lay on its side. Small piles of sawdust dotted the surface of the center table. A wisp of cotton tumbled into a corner. Separating the back room from the store proper was a dark beaded curtain, filmed with dust that rose like pollen when he brushed past. All of the toys were gone. Even the man under glass that Kay so adored. Nothing but a stray ribbon, scraps of paper, price tags, a spent matchbook.

“Looks like someone left in a hurry,” Egon said.

Theo cast his gaze upon the bare walls, filled with regret that he and Kay had never been allowed inside when it was bright and full of life. He could picture her delight in being lost among the puppets, and he was seized by the enormity of his departure. The toy shop refused to give up its secrets. They left as they had arrived, no closer to understanding.

 

Book Two

 

10

The girl in the second row, three seats back in French 201, unless that Poindexter would take her usual spot. A woman in a yellow poncho crossing Amsterdam Avenue in the rain, who looked so surprised to find him chasing after her. Three times on the subway: once a pair of legs, once a woman in Kay's favorite red Donegal sweater, and once a face on the D train heading in the opposite direction. Her voice calling out for a wandering child—where would their children come from now?—on the steps outside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. He considered going inside, saying a prayer if such magical thinking would bring her back. Right now, on the spot, Kay marching down the center aisle to the pew where he knelt. The buzz of his cell phone in the middle of the night and fumbling under the pillow for it only to miss a telemarketer from Kissimmee, Florida, or Waterloo, Iowa, and then he was awake half the night imagining those lonely salespeople consigned to such a purgatory. Every time he checked the mailbox, he turned the key with the hopes of a child on Christmas morning—nothing but coal, bills, and junk. When the leaves began to change colors. When he was drinking her favorite chai, or passing by the corner where she had first touched his arm, first kiss, last kiss, the spot in Central Park where he first knew she would say yes if he asked, when he asked.

Theo missed her most on Tuesdays and Thursdays. During the fall semester at the small college upstate, he had only two days of classes teaching both French language and literature, more than enough to keep him busy, what with the unfinished Muybridge translation loitering in the background. In years gone by, the long train ride up the Hudson Valley had offered him a chance to read or write, but now he spent most of the trip looking at the passing landscape, his thoughts filled with Kay. Rocking, in constant motion, he dozed and dreamt of her in his arms, the warmth of her skin, the scent of her body, her hair, the taste, the sound, the touch—until he roused himself from slumber, embarrassed if someone happened to be sitting next to him. Then he would turn away, press his forehead against the window, and try to forget for the rest of the trip. “Not her, not her,” he whispered along with the rhythm of the train rolling on the track. And a bump would jolt him, bang his skull against the glass, and he would dig in his briefcase, find a book, grade a paper, set a lesson plan in his lap.