Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 43

Alien Eyes

Poor Jeff Mangel. His honorary gallery was in an eight-foot-high space whose ceiling Max could dust with his upstretched hand, a bland former classroom sporting sound-deadening ceiling tiles spotted with tiny black holes.

The floor was covered by equally uninspiring vinyl tile in a pastel, smashed-worms-on-sidewalk pattern.

Flashback.

Max had gone to high school in exactly the same bland spaces. If he hadn’t made himself a stranger to his family in his teens, as Gandolph told him, he would know where to go to confirm these unsettling slide shows in his brain. Wisconsin, Gandolph said. Max didn’t feel like a Wisconsin sort of person … fresh air, bracing winters. More like an escapee from a Florida swamp filled with gators and snapping turtles and black mambas on the brain—oh, my.

He strolled around the perimeter to study the three-dimensional items under Plexiglas boxes.

Decks of gorgeously illustrated antique tarot cards; wood and metal coin boxes, the Okito, Boston and slot varieties; wands of all types …

He stopped and moved back to the coin boxes. One was made of beautifully grained cocobolo wood, as wands often were. Not a seam showed in its curved dimensions, but a ring of ivory inset on the top was carved in the shape of a worm Ouroboros, the snake biting its tail and a symbol of eternity that matched the ring Kathleen O’Connor had forced Matt Devine to wear for a time.

The image was commonly known to people with a mystical bent. This could be meaningless, but it had belonged to Jefferson Mangel, who perhaps had been a man who knew too much.

The Plexiglas cover wasn’t locked. It had an “invisible” sliding seam on one side. Max had the cocobolo wood box in his hands in an instant, and the other four coin boxes in that section respaced to hide its absence. He could return the piece as easily.

The wood warmed in his hands. His fingertips felt no opening, but there had to be one. Time to play with it later. It slipped into his pants pocket.

Could there be something interesting in the ranks of posters displayed carpet-sample fashion? Max flipped through the giant aluminum frames like pages in a book, viewing show placards that pictured magicians from the Frenchman Robert-Houdin, to the Austrian he’d inspired, Houdini, to Blackstone to David Copperfield and to … the Mystifying Max. He started slightly as he came face-to-face with himself.

All magicians, except the Cloaked Conjuror, aspired to that Bela Lugosi as Dracula hypnotic stare, but Max was surprised in ambush by the dramatically intent expression. His green-eyed black-panther stare would do Midnight Louie proud.

Flashback.

He is standing, seeing his blue eyes in the mirror and then, blink, the green contact lenses glide into place on his vitreous humour, the glistening fluid of his eyes. He becomes the Mystifying Max … and also a few degrees closer to a disguise that will keep Max Kinsella a wholly separate entity, at least in international intrigue circles.

His own gall surprises him. By doing a show in Las Vegas in any guise he’d been taking a hell of a risk.

Why had he done the Vegas bit? Garry had retired here, of course. He must have gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Goliath. Only for a year, but it must have been renewable. And … as his memory clicked into operation, the eyes on his poster shifted from feline green to a tantalizing blue gray, not quite either. Temple Barr’s eyes.

Max shut his eyelids as memory replayed himself talking, selling, cajoling. She’d come here to Vegas because of his upcoming gig. Because of him. Leaving her home city, her career. That was a major commitment. Had he ever experienced anything but specific traumas of the distant past? Was he as brave as Temple Barr? Or just obsessed?

Max paged past his own frozen image. The Mystifying Max was history. Even if he remembered all his old stage moves and illusions, his compromised physique would probably be unable to duplicate them.

The next poster had him staring into Harry Houdini’s truly mesmerizing vividly black gaze. That man had enough visceral charisma and drive to power a planet. The storied “escapologist” was pictured nearly naked, hunched over like an ape-man, metal cuffs and chains hanging from every muscle and sinew. He’d accomplished incredible feats of working in freezing water to free himself, of hanging upside down like a bat. The illusions may all have stemmed from the same secret magical routines of his predecessors, but the marketing chutzpah and electrifying stage presence were individual.

Max searched himself and found no remembered driving motive. Revenge for Gandolph’s death? That tragic recent incident in Belfast had been a last impotent cannon shot in a cause long left behind by a more tortured contemporary history. It wouldn’t have happened if Garry hadn’t been so loyal in tracking down Max’s obsession with a past he didn’t even have the good grace to remember.

Maybe it was good to have no one to hate, but it was more than bad to have no one to love.

Max flipped back to his false-eyed image.

He did not know the man.