Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

High Anxiety

Max’s stint as the Phantom Mage at Neon Nightmare was the ideal training ground for this job at the New Millennium.

“Job”in the sense of pulling a heist.

In the deepest dark of night, against the ceiling of the black-painted area above the exhibition, he’d installed his own web of deception.

He and Gandolph had spent many wee morning hours after Max’s Neon Nightmare shows tunneling a secret entrance above the suspended platforms and electronically operated mirrors and the web of bungee cords the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La had rigged for themselves, the two black panthers, and her acrobatic Siamese cat.

The tangled nest of electric cords and circus gadgetry had evolved into two levels of treachery. The machinery of illusion could always be dangerous. Two hidden hands, two different purposes made it doubly treacherous. As was Shangri-La herself.

Max had erected a secret shadow rigging above the original installation.

He planned to tangle CC in a falling net of cables, then swing down in his stead, wearing a duplicate costume. In front of a transfixed audience (the way he always liked ‘em), he would use the heavy boots to kick away the Lexan pyramid-cum-onion dome protecting the scepter, which he and Gandolph had rigged to give. Then he’d swing up into the black nowhere, prize attached to utility belt.

No matter that the alarm system screeched its worst.

The guards would believe their eyes and waste time lumbering upward to corral a sputtering and stunned Cloaked Conjuror.

Max by then would be shimmying through eighty feet of narrow aluminum tubing installed like a long, long, skylight tunnel. CC’s mask and heavy shoes and cloak would remain behind, as deflated as the hat and robe of the melting Wicked Witch of the West.

What a world, what a world!

The Synth would have proof of his loyalty and daring and would at last admit him to their inner sanctum of secrets. Gandolph, presumed dead and therefore not suspect, would keep the scepter for producing later, when the Synth and all its murky works would be known to Max and the world and be broken.

Max would gladly retire his growing poker hand of identities. Maybe he could break the Synth in a couple of months, then come back as his original performing persona, the Mystifying Max. He was in superb physical condition again. Maybe the Crystal Phoenix would renew its offer, particularly with Temple as his . . . agent. They could stop playing hide and seek. Get married. Buy a house of their own.

But all that was later. This was now. The biggest problem for his successful escape was Shangri-La. He carried a lariat of steel cord. If he could encoil her on the way down, her long tatters of costume would become her prison.

Now, he hung under the ceiling like a big black spider, feet and hands in the holds he and Gandolph had screwed into the unseen joists. He breathed deeply, trying to relax in the trying position.

The music was revving up to introduce the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La. Across the chasm below, he could see into the staging area hidden from the audience. The low-level spotlights that dotted the black ceiling gleamed on the steel bars caging in the big cats across from him. Their eyes gleamed in the dark as they growled softly with anticipation. They saw him and spotted prey, but no one would heed them. That would be invisible to the audience looking up from the pool of brightly lit white exhibition cubicles and pedestals far below.

They sat in a semicircle of sleek white stands on the museum’s far walls, chattering with opening night excitement. Buzz. Temple would be happy. Even though the press wouldn’t be allowed into the exhibit until the following week, he knew that she would be down there, making sure all the VIPs were at ease and ready for the big preview night. But he didn’t dare shake his concentration to look for her.

He hated to ruin an event she had worked on, but she was endlessly clever at turning bad publicity into good.

Max eyed the equipment installed for the true performers. They had tested it many times for stability and strength, as he had his own gear. This mock-robbery stunt was nothing more, or less, than Cirque du Soleil had so elegantly reinvented for Vegas, a spectacular, arty circus act.

Max inhaled long and slow. Launch time was only a few minutes. He would swoop down, looking like part of the act. He would leave the real CC and Shangri-La hanging uneasily, shocked.

He would take the prize and retract his presence as swiftly as a spider reeling in web silk. And he, like Robert the Bruce, had studied their swift and efficient ways on the back patio of Gandolph’s house, now his. Not his and Temple’s. Someplace new for them. Fresh. Free.

No. Think the job. Only the job. Not the rewards.

The music swelled into the introduction segment, forcing the upward-staring faces below to turn down as they settled into their seats.

Like a bird of prey, he swiftly eyed all the platforms: CC’s, Shangri-La’s, the big cats’, even the tiny one reserved for the Siamese cat named Hyacinth.

She was really too small for an aerial show. She wouldn’t be very visible. But Max understood Shangri-La’s loyalty to an animal partner. He’d worked with some himself and knew that they came to love and crave the spotlight. Praise and adulation and applause could seduce any species, a sad commentary on how often it was missing in young human and animal lives.

Max blinked. He wasn’t wearing his colored contact lenses tonight: not the Mystifying Max’s feline-green ones, not the Phantom Mage’s brown ones. His eyes were their natural hue, blue, rather like the Siamese cat’s.

But he wasn’t seeing a Siamese cat on the small, half-hidden perch reserved for it.

He was seeing a small glimmer of ultra-feline green, as vivid as his own false lenses. He didn’t see much else there, just disembodied eyes, like the isolated toothy smile of the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland, implying a total cat, but winking out.

This was a kink in the perfect plan. Hyacinth hadn’t suddenly made her blue eyes green. With a shudder of premonition, Max looked harder. A dark feline form was moving onto the platform poised like a diver’s board on the edge of nothing.

It was, of course, Temple’s eternally meddling tomcat, Midnight Louie. While he posed there, invisible to everyone near and far but Max, he glanced up. Directly. At Max.

Great. Outed by an alley cat.

Then Louie pounced farther out onto his podium, as if chasing phantom prey.

Max’s mouth opened to shout a warning no cat would heed. Stop!

But Midnight Louie had already leapt back into the shadow of what passed for wings up here, besides bungee cords.

And the entire platform buckled and fell vertical to its support members. It dangled there as if held by an invisible thread of remaining support.

Sometimes seconds can take minutes. It required enormous muscular strength for Max to cling to the ceiling. His body craved the release of a bungee freefall, of stretching long to fly and then liberate the prize, seize it, rebound upward toward ungiving ceiling, then cling and skitter out the escape route.

That release was gone, Max realized. While he and Gandolph had been rigging their secret web above it all, someone else had sabotaged the actual performance platforms, and probably the bungee cord anchors too. Everything was too weak to hold . . . even an alley cat.

Who? Why? Didn’t matter. Everyone involved in the show, everything, including the cats big and small, were in peril of fatal plunges to the hard marble floor below.

Max glanced again to where Louie had appeared. His place on the brink of the disabled pedestal had been taken by a small, pale-coated cat tipped dark brown on all its extremities. Hyacinth.

A piece of moving darkness showed that Louie was now balancing at the entrance to the big cats’ divided platforms. Their huge forms shifted in the dark, the spotlights glancing off huge white fangs as they panted with pre-performance excitement and off the bejeweled green of their shining eyes.

Louie apparently intended to turn these bruisers back. Single pawed. Max saw Louie’s back hoop in the classic feline offensive/defensive pose. He could almost hear the hiss of a housecat hitting those large, rounded, jungle-sharp ears.

Max could do nothing about the cats, wild or domestic. Who ever could? His eyes flicked to the two opposing platforms where CC and Shangri-La would appear very shortly.

Great. Two booby-trapped platforms waiting for the weight of one footstep from their human victims.

One observer, with only a reach and strength so long, so fast.

Who to rescue?

Shangri-La weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds in her airy costume. Easy save. Like Tarzan and Jane. Except . . . she was an enemy.

The Cloaked Conjuror was a confrere, a kind of friend. Max didn’t envy his hidden life and the masked face that kept him isolated, however wealthy and famous. Maybe he’d welcome a spectacular death. A Page One passing. Anyway, the man, costumed in Klingon-style platform boots and mask, must run two-fifty. Max weighed one-eighty sopping wet, which he was now, with dangerous perspiration. Bad for his grip.

The introductory music swelled to a climax to blast out the entrance bars. Echoing here above and down below. In Heaven and Hell.

The most certain save was the most personally distasteful. The most unlikely save was the most preferred. Gallantry said rescue the woman. Personal druthers said preserve the fellow magician.

Time for thought was done. The spotlights brightened on each platform, forty feet apart. A lithe figure in fluttering white stepped forward. A massive Darth Vader–like persona in black stepped forward.

Max swung out from the ceiling, dark but neither light nor heavy.

He swept out and down, catching Shangri-La’s torso in one arm, and rappelled off the side wall to deposit her in the niche where Midnight Louie held the big cats at bay. Maybe she was too light to tip the balance.

He pushed his feet against the wall again and caught up with the Cloaked Conjuror just as the platform broke and plummeted from his booted feet to the floor below. The crowd roared with fright.

He’d snagged CC by one arm. Their combined weight pulled Max’s bungee cord down, down, down toward the Lexan onion dome that both revealed and guarded the newly installed scepter.

Drop CC and the prize was his.

Instead they fell together like a lead weight, until the top of the spiral staircase leading to the scepter was just below.

Max let CC go. He dropped perhaps four feet.

Max kicked off the onion dome, swinging over the installation.

In an instant, he had seized the scepter and ricocheted from the base of the installation. The piercing whine of an alarm ran up and down the scale as the bungee cord rebounded up to the ceiling, making him a Spider-man about to go comic book splat!

Max caught at the collapsed platform that had been CC’s downfall. His body bruised into it, but his grasp held long enough to slow his rebound.

Then the platform sagged and broke free, falling down into the heart of the screams and scattering audience members below, including Temple.

Max had no time to look back. He bounced off the looming ceiling, slowed, in control again.

The big cats, cowed perhaps as much by the unscripted chaos as Midnight Louie’s fierce stand, had backed away from the treacherous platforms they’d been trained to mount on the music’s cue. If Midnight Louie could intimidate two panthers who outweighed him a hundred-to-one, Max guessed he could pull Shangri-La to safety.

She was using her considerable acrobatic skills to take her weight off the disintegrating platform beneath her feet, which were hampered by arch-deforming ballet toe-shoes. They produced a graceful image for an airborne magician-acrobat, but they were useless for establishing any foothold on a disintegrating web of wooden platforms and elastic bungee cords.

Max sailed down, the scepter in his belt flashing in one of the hidden mirrors above. He glimpsed Shangri-La’s makeup-masked features, her exotic beauty and grace, dismissing her ambiguous role in shady events past and present. Her life and lifeline made her as fragile now as a blown-glass ballerina.

He caught one wrist as she was slipping away. It was sharp and thin, a bundle of razor blades. Every sinew in his arm strained, but he had only to dive low, release her over a safe landing point, then fly up like Peter Pan dropping Wendy back at home.

But CC’s rescue had strained his synapses as well as tendon and bone. He could barely hold on to her. . . . Then a fiery cactus exploded on his back and shoulders.

He heard a martial arts yowl, cat style.

That damn Hyacinth, thinking to protect her mistress, was dooming her instead. Max’s fingers tightened, flinched, then felt skin and bones slipping through his grasp.

They were still thirty feet above the hard marble flooring.

The white butterfly fluttered free below him, spinning and glittering in a graceful, fatal trajectory.

Max, freed from the dead weight, rebounded against the ceiling so fast it took all of his remaining strength to slow the snap, to grab disintegrating platforms on his rebound, to become an unseen spider in a lethal web high above.

The cat slid off his back and fell, a tangle of bungee cords serving as its precarious cradle. It swung there, its shrill voice mimicking the relentless, heartbeat-stirring siren of the alarm.

The canned music hid the sound of whatever impact there had been. The scepter installation site looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

Below him, people—heads of all colors—gathered, unthinking, around a shining reverse-Rorschach ink-blot pattern of fallen white on the pale floor far below. No one else seemed injured.

Max had no time left to linger, look back, regret. He unsnapped his trusty bungee cord, the only safe one because whoever had sabotaged the magic act had not known about his own arrangements. Then he ditched the boots, cloak, and CC mask, and his spider self slipped from the ceiling handholds and down the narrow escape tunnel he and Gandolph had made.

The Cloaked Conjuror and the big cats had survived to perform another day, thanks to Max—and Midnight Louie—being on the scene. Shangri-La definitely and possibly her cat Hyacinth were among the collateral damage.

“Damn,” Max hissed to himself over and over as he elbow crawled through the passage, its existence now publicly betrayed.

He struggled to keep the invaluable scepter from scraping on the narrowing ductwork. His spectacular theft had turned into a botched heist and a messy, semifailed rescue operation.

A woman lay dead on the exhibition floor. Temple’s assignment as well as his own were both terminally damaged. The Cloaked Conjuror’s show and career were tainted, perhaps beyond redemption, like his own.

He had let down everyone who depended upon him, whether they knew it or not.

And . . . the Synth would not be pleased. Or maybe those manipulative shadow figures would be delighted with the carnage, and the publicity.

Poor Temple! Her career was at stake, and he had not only meddled in it, but devastated the site of her greatest PR triumph.

Damn!

His back burned with raw fire, the badge of a cat’s tragically misguided courage. Otherwise he could have saved a human life, no matter his suspicions about its purpose. Shangri-La had been a mystery, maybe a criminal, but until tonight, she had been living. Her life had hung from his hands and slipped away.

He felt sick, as sick as when the IRA pub bomb had turned his boyhood best friend, his cousin Sean, into exploded bits of flesh and blood.

How could he face his uncle and aunt, his family?

He couldn’t then.

He couldn’t now. He had to go away, run far, find some way to make reparations. Leave home. Leave Temple. Leave Las Vegas, leave life and death behind him. Again.

Damn!