Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 42

Back to School

Max strolled through the shady thronging university campus. It was almost as incredibly lush and green as Ireland. Acacia, sycamore, and oak trees thrived among the cacti and majestic desert willows. Discreet signs advised that the landscaping was desert-appropriate and water-saving. Max tried to let natural beauty and memory wash wavelike over him under the blazing blue sky, though he doubted he’d had many reasons to visit the site when he’d lived here earlier.

Students rolled past him in waves, energetic and vital, chirping like grasshoppers. They made him smile. Why did he feel so old?

“Mr. Randolph,” a female voice hailed him, stunned him.

It was throaty and mature.

He turned. She was blond, she was confidently striding toward him, and she was the only woman he remembered ever sleeping with.

“Miss Schneider.” Revienne. Her lovely first name, the word in French for “return.” And here she was again, a beautiful but bad penny turning up?

Her smile remained dazzling yet mysterious. “So whom do I discover on this amazing campus in the entertainment capital of the world but my very recent … shall we say, exchange student from abroad?”

He stared at her, suspicious yet enthralled.

“And you’re walking well. Very well,” she added encouragingly. Like a teacher.

Normally, people would say, “You’re looking well.” No. This was a renowned psychiatrist, and a clever one. With one phrase she revived every moment of their recent escape/escapade through Switzerland. You’re walking well.

“Thanks,” he said. “Care to stroll, then?”

She hoisted a gold-metallic leather bag large enough to hold papers to her shoulder. A Prada silk scarf was loosely knotted around one strap. The gesture released a whisper of perfume into the dry desert air.

“This entire campus is designated as an arboretum,” she commented, adopting the role of tour guide. “Isn’t it lovely? I have no pressing engagements so I took a walk.”

“That’s lovely too.”

“What about you? What are you doing here, Mr. Randolph?”

“Not skiing in St. Moritz,” he said, reviving the fiction that he’d been injured in a skiing accident and had naturally ended up at a Swiss clinic. The four-week coma had not been so natural. And he’d let her think Garry’s surname was his. That was how he had been registered at the clinic.

“And your memory, it is returning?” she asked.

“In bits and pieces. Enough to make things … interesting.”

They ambled together, staid adults among hurrying students on foot and riding bikes.

“What an astounding coincidence,” she said in her perfect but charmingly inflected accent, an icing of German, a tantalizing trace of French, to match her genes.

“Astounding,” he agreed. Affably.

“I had no idea you had links to this area, this city.”

“I didn’t either.”

“How are you really doing?”

The question was hardly casual. “Fine, as you see. And you? What brings you here?”

“Business, although an old school friend lives here and we enjoyed a reunion visit. I’d committed to assisting a former mentor from Lyon in a study of his, and am enjoying a visiting professorship on this beautiful campus.”

“In what subject, may I ask?”

“You may ask anything.” Her smile was more Da Vinci Code than Mona Lisa. “Psychology, of course. Herr Doktor Hugo Gruetzmeyer has a guest professorship here.” She stopped walking, not because he needed to. “Why are you here?”

Of course, he was currently pondering the existential meaning of that common query, but he couldn’t afford to seem needy with her, especially of information.

“An excellent place to recuperate. Lots of walking required.”

“On campus, or on the Strip?”

“Both,” he said.

“You seem … more stressed than when you left Zurich.”

“American life. We’re more stressed by nature than Europeans. The ‘save the world’ complex,’ I suppose you’d call it.”

She looked around so he had a chance to sum her up on his supposed turf. Cool, controlled, blond. The Hitchcock thriller movie femme fatale who seemed unapproachable, but who’d unravel at first contact with a stressed Hitchcock everyman who knew too much, or not enough.

She dressed, he realized in this American setting, like so many of the politically ultraconservative women pundits, high heels, short skirts, long blond hair. Barbie for the Tea Party set. This short-skirted suit was ivory linen over a familiar olive green silk camisole.

“You’re wearing part of the ensemble I bought you in Zurich,” Max noted, sounding pleased.

“Yes, thank you. You noticed.”

One thing not politically useful he’d learned in Zurich was that Revienne Schneider wore scraps of silk and lace, not bras. Very French.

“But,” she continued, “I found a fabulous new perfume at the Bellagio shops. Like it?” She brushed cheeks, leaving a comet trail of hair caressing his skin in her wake and a scent like walking into a wall of exquisite perfume flowers blooming in the south of France. This was a blend of jasmine and mimosa.

“I’d have to be a block of stone not to,” he answered.

He and Garry had endlessly discussed on their trek from Zurich to Belfast whether Revienne Schneider, his assigned shrink at the Alpine clinic, was friend or foe. Max still didn’t know. He did know Garry’s reaction to Max sleeping with Revienne while they were on the run. It unreeled in his brain like a film clip.

“You have no idea who Ms. Schneider really is or what her agenda was, or still might be. You were foolish, Max. That kind of sexual bravura got you and Sean tangled up with the IRA all those years ago when you were green and seventeen. You don’t need to act impulsively anymore.”

“Why are you on campus?” Revienne asked him, now confronting the apparent coincidence. “It’s insane we should run into one another a world away, like this.”

“Kismet, maybe?” He chose flirting over frankness.

She wet her already glossed lips. “I never expected to see you again.”

“Me neither.”

“That’s an odd expression.”

“Colloquial English, although you do that well, as you do everything well. I meant I didn’t expect to see you again either. What are we going to do about it?”

“You could enroll in my class.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Identity and the Troubled Soul in the Modern Zeitgeist.”

“Sounds … mesmerizing. My legs don’t care to sit for long stretches in Spartan classroom accommodations, though.”

“A nice cushy leather banquette for dinner then,” she said.

“Delicious.”

“When?” she asked.

“This is Thursday. Saturday? Unless you’re otherwise engaged.”

“Not. And you?” she asked.

He did have a rather important engagement Friday night, but not Saturday. “Not.”

“Where shall I meet you?” she asked.

“I can’t pick you up?” He was surprised.

“You already have,” she said.

He shrugged. “The Eiffel Tower restaurant at the Paris Hotel.”

“What a very American place.”

“I am American.”

“And I am not.”

“Vive la différence.”

“It’s rather dangerous to take a Paris resident to an ersatz version of the city,” she pointed out.

“You already know I like danger. The view of the Bellagio fountains is particularly spectacular, and American.”

“The Bellagio.” She laughed merrily, something he’d never heard on their arduous escape from the Swiss clinic that perhaps was intended to imprison him.

“Yes,” he said. “Americans spring from all nationalities, and you can sample the best of each here in Las Vegas. I know Continental dining is late, but the earliest seating works best at the Paris. You can watch the sun set on the Strip from the corner table overlooking the fountains.”

“Very romantic, Mr. Randolph.” She was flirting back, but then an undercover agent would.

“I’m sure it’ll be a … memorable occasion. I’ll meet you at the private elevator in the Paris lobby at … six, say?”

She agreed and moved on through the hot, dappled shade created by the many trees. He watched her like a lovesick swain until she was out of sight, then quickly ducked into the nearest building to study the rosters of classes and instructors and the campus map on his cell phone. Amazing, what was on the Internet these days.

Revienne had just left that dreary seminar on existential angst. If he hurried, he could catch her partner in academic crime at his office, finishing up student appointments.

Max was “walking well.” And his vague excuse for being in Las Vegas and on this campus, walk therapy, was proving genuine. Max bolted up the stairs to the third-floor office, not knowing if the class called Motivation and Emotion could explain his momentary burst of energy. Obviously, Revienne’s incredibly uncoincidental presence in Las Vegas either meant he was on the brink of a bracing duel of wits, or a love affair. Why not? He was fancy-free.

And so was Professor Gruetzmeyer free, at least after a lanky kid with a backpack slouched out of the professor’s office door and down the hall.

Max knocked on the ajar doorframe.

“You’re very late,” the man’s voice boomed from within.

When Max appeared around the door, he looked abashed to see a stranger. Excellent. It put the guy off balance.

“Professor Gruetzmeyer. How lucky to have found you in. I was on campus merely to explore the layout and ring up for an appointment.”

“At least you look ahead, young man.”

Since Professor Gruetzmeyer was only about fifteen years older than Max, he must be used to addressing younger students. He was a fit and youthful fifty, curly haired and missing the Freudian beard and mustache. He wore a dress shirt rolled up at the elbows and reading glasses perched on his strong nose, underlining his green eyes. Impressionable twenty-somethings might crush on him but he didn’t seem Revienne’s type.

“You’re late for enrolling in the summer program,” he was telling Max. “Are you returning for credits toward a degree?”

“Not at all, Professor. I’m a writer.” The moment he said it, Max knew in some deep well of experience that this was true. Or was it Gandolph who was the writer? “My name is Matt Butler.” Always pick a false first name that’s close enough to yours. You won’t jump if you hear someone call you by it. However, what had popped out was some Freudian port in a storm. Matt?

“Fiction you write?” Gruetzmeyer had a slight German accent and he’d used the Yoda-like word reversal of foreign-born English speakers.

“Nonfiction. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes? I’m not sure you’re the resource I need.”

“Step in. Sit down. How can I help you?”

Max smiled his thanks and obeyed. Psychology was a “helping profession.” Suggest that someone of that temperament couldn’t be of help and they’d be eager to prove the opposite. Max didn’t have a degree (that he remembered) in anything, but his instincts hadn’t gone missing with his shorter-term memory.

He sat in the chair opposite an impressively laden but neat desk. “I am writing,” he explained, “a book on the mystique of what some people consider a profession, others an art form, and still others an elegant con game.”

“Tasty.” The professor settled back. “Far more interesting than these earnest, labored class papers. Why come to me?”

“Because I’ve discovered that my prime source is, to put it right out there, dead.”

He pondered that. “Did I know him? Or her?”

“I’m hoping so, because, from what I know of him, I’d think you would have been compatible colleagues.”

“Umm. Someone who used to teach here then?”

Max nodded. “I’m taking a flier on this. Pure instinct and hope.” He knew a psychologist or psychiatrist would love the combination of “motive and emotion.”

“Who is it?”

“Professor Jefferson Mangel.”

“Oh. Jeff. My God, yes. I knew him. A tragic loss. Then it’s not his field, philosophy, but his hobby, the philosophy of magic, you’re writing about?”

Max nodded.

“That wasn’t Jeff’s academic discipline, but it was his passion. He felt it should be taken on a psychological level. Yes, I do … did know Jeff quite well and his theories on the subject. In fact—” He leaned forward to click on a menu on his open laptop. “—Jeff probably has some papers in the university archives on the subject.”

“Not accessible to non-academics, I imagine.”

“I’d be happy to check them out for you, put you on a course of study on the subject of how Jeff’s mind worked. He was quite the, uh, magic trick detective, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he advised that fellow who does a Strip hotel show based on revealing the classic illusions’ underpinnings. The Caped Confabulator, or something.”

Max smiled. Performers on the Strip were world-famous. It was humbling and encouraging that some Las Vegas residents had such a casual knowledge of the industry that drove the city, and Nevada.

“Professor Mangel, I understand, had a mystical view of the subject.”

“Yes, yes. He was the true appreciative amateur.”

“Wasn’t his death very ironic?”

“More than ironic. Sinister. Murdered on campus. You can imagine that wasn’t something anyone official anywhere wanted to dwell on.”

“You think the murder was … magical?”

“Of course not. I said sinister. The poor man was stabbed to death among an exhibition of his collection of magic show posters old and new. He was found lying in a grotesque position on the floor, like in that insanely popular thriller novel of a few years ago about the Vatican and Mary Magdalen.”

“The Da Vinci Code,” Max prompted from some reviving memory synapses. “You think there’s a connection?”

“No. Of course not. Jeff didn’t have an enemy in the world. He was single, so there were no, ah, what you call hanky-panky motives.”

“A true mystery,” Max agreed. “Is anything left of the professor’s office or papers on campus?”

“Nothing I know of. That was months ago. He willed his estate to the university, so the small gallery has been named in his honor and his personal magical artifacts added to the poster display, which were a very small percentage of his collection. Jeff was ahead of his time in seeing that history of magic in Las Vegas deserved as much an academic mention as the history of the mob.”

The word “mention” was not lost on Max. “So I can visit the … shrine?”

“Next building, floor three. We have abbreviated hours, since a guard must be on site, ten A.M. to three P.M.”

“I can just make it.” Max half rose before pausing to sit back down. “Wasn’t Professor Mangel young to have made a will?”

“You can do it online now. Jeff was forty-eight, far too young to die.” Gruetzmeyer shook his shaggy head. “I made mine after the calamitous fact of his death.”

“He sounds exceptionally expert on the magic and the mantic arts. Did he advise any other magicians?”

“He had a couple of local pals. Let me see.” Gruetzmeyer squinted his eyes tight on his own command, letting relinquished memories resurface.

Max understood that technique well. He’d done it at home with a glass of Irish whiskey. Some men drink to forget, they said. He drank to loosen up his subconscious, to remember.

The prof’s striking green eyes popped open, brightening as they saw the light. “One was an older fellow. Larry Randolph, or some such.”

Max nodded, holding himself very still.

“Then there was a practicing magician, but at small clubs around Vegas, not a big shot. Still performed in full white tie, tails and top hat. I don’t think he pulled rabbits out of the top hat, though. His name was odd … ‘Topper’?”

“Topper?” Max asked. “That could refer to the top hat.”

“And Còsimo, like Còsimo di Mèdici, the Renaissance prince.”

“Cosmo.” Max muttered the word that leaped into his arbitrary brain before tying ‘Cosmo Topper’ to a character in an old TV show.

“No. Còsimo. That name is known in Europe. Còsimo and … something to do with fire.”

“Cosimo Sparks?”

“That’s it!”

“And you just recalled it now?” Max asked.

“Yes, thanks to your inquiries. Why, should it be familiar?”

“No. He was pretty much retired, as far as I can find out.”

Max was sure some mention of the man’s recent death had been in the newspaper or on TV, but Gruetzmeyer seemed the kind of old-fashioned intellectual who relied on books, not electronic media. Max recalled Temple bemoaning the ill luck of having media on hand to film the dead body as it was being discovered—her bright idea gone wrong—since she wasn’t expecting a corpse to show up for her ceremonial opening of an old underground safe.

And Cosimo Sparks, also stabbed like Jefferson Mangel, had also been found with his red-satin-lined cloak arranged in a tortured shape.

He decided not to ask Professor Gruetzmeyer if he’d heard of Ophiuchus. The big question was whether Revienne had.