Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 10

The Mysteries of Gandolpho

Louie was still boycotting the Circle Ritz when Temple greeted Max at the patio door at seven that evening. She had tried calling Matt earlier before he left for work at the hotline, but got no answer. She had an edgy feeling that he was taking Effinger's attack far harder than he had let her see the previous evening.

But tonight was Max's and she'd get really schizophrenic if she kept mentally bouncing between the two of them.

In honor of her New Year's Day's night with Max, she had donned loose knit pants and top, in burglar black, and tennis shoes.

Max seemed please to find her waiting, but glanced at her feet. "What are those?"

She looked down at her $7.88 discount- store black velvet tennies. "Stealth tennis shoes. I assume we'll need to slink into your house, as usual. Things are rough, Kinsella, when you have to break into your own place."

He looked around the condominium. "Yeah. I know."

An awkward caesura killed the chitchat. Midnight Louie wasn't even around to serve as a conversation piece.

Temple joined Max on the uncontested couch, offering him a mug of coffee. She expected this to be a long evening, one way or another. "So, seriously, what's at your place that's so fascinating, besides you?"

He lifted an eyebrow at her concession of interest. "I've been poking around Gandolph's computer files and his inventory of magical appliances."

" 'Magical appliances'? Sounds kinky."

"Magic has always had a kinky undercurrent, and a metaphysical one. Confinement, release.

Death, rebirth. But I'm running into traces of more than the usual baggage. Something . . .

sinister."

"Does it have anything to do with Gandolph's death?"

Max hesitated. "It could."

"Well, now that we're hyped up on caffeine, I suppose we're ready to face anything. As least I won't crash at ten p.m."

Max put her half-drunk coffee mug on the glass-topped table. His long fingers suddenly framed her naked face. The expression in his eyes was so intense she felt she was listening to the profession of a vow.

"No more 'crashes' for you. Not from that quarter. I doubt that Effinger will be anyone's problem very much longer."

She was afraid to ask him what he meant, just as she had been afraid to tell Matt what she meant to do with her personal life. It wasn't lost on her that Max would escort her to and from his house; she was not to be on the streets alone.

*******************

Max's house, previously occupied by the late Gary Randolph-- Max's magician mentor known professionally as Gandolph--and before that by the late Orson Welles, gave Temple the creeps. And it wasn't just the ghosts of the two dead men.

Maybe the house felt eerie because they were always having to creep up on it. Max wanted--needed--to conceal his residence there, so every entry was clandestine.

Temple was also intimidated by the house's heavy oriental furniture, especially Max's opium bed, a sort of fretwork pagoda, inlaid with cinnabar and mother-of-pearl. It exhaled the scents of exotic perfumes, forbidden substances and irresistibly unnatural acts.

Add to the house's outre appeal a spare bedroom crammed with Gandolph's and Max's magical paraphernalia, and now his computer cockpit, and you had a juxtaposition of the mystical and the technological that was positively bizarre.

Sneaking into the place was the usual blast.

Once inside, Max led her to the world-class kitchen.

Even here she was uneasy. It was so clinical--so stainless steel/wine cellar/walk-in freezer perfect--that it unnerved her. You could hide a body in that freezer, in that climatically controlled walk-in wine cellar. Maybe even in that microwave.

"You look better." Max brushed a thumb over her bruised cheek. "Or is it makeup again?"

"Light foundation. Cover Girl if you're interested in the brand."

"Don't talk so tough in your Material Girl way. None of it's real but the act."

"True. How real is your act?"

He leaned against the stainless-steel-fronted refrigerator to consider it. Temple remembered the poster that Lieutenant Molina had commandeered from the inside of her bedroom closet wall so many months ago. That preserved the Max of two years ago: big hair, laser/razor cut. All eyes, like a cat. Mystery his middle name. Sex appeal his secret code.

Today he was otter-sleek, simpler. Dark hair pulled back into the low-profile pony tail made his face all elegant bone and nerve. Lots of nerve, but not nervy, like a spooked horse.

He was stripped down, bereft of stage props, boiled down to muscle and bone and a hank of hair.

"Where were you when you were gone?" she asked.

He smiled. "Where do the politically awkward always go? Canada. I worked as a corporate magician."

"You? A company man?"

"My role was subversive. I was supposed to make people laugh, relax, screw the boss. It worked. Actually, I liked it a lot. Even Canadian companies are so structured ... I was a deconstructivist, and well paid for it, which is more than most real artists can say."

"You should have met Domingo."

"The Flamingo Man?"

She nodded. "I think his secret sin is that he really is a rather good artist. Don't you miss being a magician?"

He wrapped his arms around himself, made himself into a matte-black mummy against the steel-colored sarcophagus of the freezer.

"Did I ever leave it?"

"Your performance dates. Your venues. Your agent."

His hands mimed emptiness. "Magic is smaller than that. Much smaller. Thumbelina. In your hand." His empty palm opened to her in the mime's classic gesture.

"Is that why you like little women?"

"You're wrong. I love little women."

Temple blinked. Contact lens trouble again. Or something.

"What about your family?"

"What about them?"

"What did they do for Christmas?"

Max pushed off the refrigerator, moved to the huge stainless-steel-sheathed island unit.

Once, under his spell, she had envisioned that kitchen accessory as a stage prop, and herself as an accessory to magic upon it. The little lady who may be sawed in half, or who may just be feigning truncation. Now it looked like an altar.

The magician was part actor, part policeman, part priest. She remembered Professor Mangel quoting Edmund Wilson on the subject. Part deceiver, part detective.

"My family." Max declaimed the words like the title of an essay; an exercise in school.

Something distant. Academic.

"I went back for Sean's funeral. Have your ever been the One Alive when you should have been the One Dead? We went as two on our teenage jaunt to the Old Country. One came back dead, one came back alive. Or did he? Everything that appalled me, that killed Sean in the Old Country became instantly real in the New Country. Why him? Why not me? His family never said it, my family never said it. But they both felt it. I felt it. I saw then there was no place for me here."

" 'Here?' The U.S.? With your family?"

"Both."

"But you were barely seventeen years old."

"I was a hundred years old. I'd survived, and he hadn't. And there was no way to explain it."

"So you've never gone home for Christmas since then?"

He shook his sleek head as if tossing off invisible droplets. Of water. Of blood. "It would have stirred up the blame."

"Do you blame yourself?"

"For surviving when he didn't, yes. For doing what I did at the time, no. We were ignorant boys. But we died as men. That's what Ireland, north and south, does to you."

"Died? Both died?"

Max nodded.

"That's why you retreated back to Europe; you had brought the Troubles back to your own home town."

"Back to my own family. I saw in a nutshell how four hundred years of strife had divided a whole population. And ... I was dangerous to those closest to me, even if some of them hated my guts."

"Dangerous because you were in danger?"

He nodded again. "From the IRA, from the government forces. When I turned in the IRA men who had bombed the pub and killed Sean, I was an instant wild card no one wanted. Except those who deplored all terrorism. Gary Randolph was my first mentor. I began as an apprentice to Gandolph the Great, but magicians have a perfect cover, and our European appearances were always more than magic."

"Why are you letting me interrogate you?"

"You ask good questions. And you deserve any answers I can give you."

"Okay. Enough for now. What have you got to show me?" A pause, a very long pause. "Not that! I mean the advertised mysteries. What was hidden in Gandolph's magical mystery supply of tricks? What did the computer files reveal? Where is the hidden staircase?"

Max grinned and took her hand. "Follow me, and all will be revealed."

The room, or rat hole, in which resided the new object of Max's affections, the computer and its attachments and various arcane guides to them all, was as crowded and messy as when Temple had last seen it. Only someone who knew the extreme, catlike meticulousness of Max Kinsella, as Temple did, would have been surprised by that.

The glowing computer screen was a window into a lurid Halloween world inhabited by squadrons of bats flying over haunted houses and graveyards.

"The Halloween screen saver is still on," he noted. "Would you care for something Christmasy? Flying Santas?"

"No. No, thank you." Temple hadn't mentioned the Santa slaying in New York. She thought she probably never would.

"You're right; it's a little late for Christmas. I suppose I could find something for Martin Luther King Day."

"Flying freedom marchers in outer space, no doubt. No thank you. So. What's to see here?"

Max sat in the swiveling office chair, swiveled, and plucked a two-inch-high stack of papers from the top of a pile that leaned like the Tower of Pisa.

Temple hefted the stack. "Half a ream. Impressive. What is it?"

"Gary's book. My book. I hope, your book."

"Really? You finished a draft of Gandolph's expose on false psychics? Already? He must have been an interesting man, always a secret crusader. Did he die because of what you two did in your common past, or because of his late-life campaign to expose psychic fraud? I wonder if his mystery will ever be solved, or how much you can reveal in a book. I realized why you wanted to finish his book, but for a nonwriter to actually accomplish it " She regarded Max with respect.

"I'm . . . amazed."

She flipped through the neatly typed pages, surprised and somehow gratified to see Max dealing with a process she had always understood; not special effects and illusions, but ideas made into the flesh of words. Paper work. Writing.

"Gary's part of the story was mostly written down already. I tried to give it context. I don't know if I succeeded."

"Modest Max."

"Yes. You know I'm hoping that you'll read it. Make suggestions. Edit. Cut me to ribbons, if you like."

"Oh, not ribbons. Whose byline?"

"I don't care, personally. Gary's, I suppose. And yours if you want."

"Pity he wasn't as well known as David Copperfield, or even you."

"Gary gave all that up to follow his quest. He really was a knight in shining . . . drag, I guess.

It's almost hard for me to believe. I added some sections on disguise to explain his success."

"Makes sense. I'll read it and give you my expert opinion, buttressed by the publishing observations and consulting opinions of my aunt the historical novelist."

"Really? That rather elfin lady writes those big heavy tomes of yesteryear?"

"Er, yes." Temple would be damned before she'd clutter the discussion with that put-down word of all put-down words, historical "romance."

Why was every novel in the nineteenth century considered a "romance," and in the twentieth century a "romance" considered "a bodice ripper?" From what she had heard of mid-twentieth-century popular literature, male writers were the main practitioners of bodice-ripping scenes.

"I'll take the manuscript home and study it assiduously."

"Manuscript. That has a nice sound."

" 'Book' is even better, but the jury is out on that."

Max's long fingers hit some keys. The screen saver vanished as if swallowed by Dracula's inky cloak. Temple recognized the Windows program, but Max's fingers flitted from screen to screen too fast to follow.

"I've come across traces of unauthorized entry."

"In your computer?"

"It was Gandolph's. From what my long-distance friends can determine, someone has been watching Gandolph's literary progress and mine."

"Looking at the book?"

Max nodded. "I've been given safeguards and procedures. But sophisticated defenses beget sophisticated offenses. I take it as a given that this computer is not fully secure."

"And . . . this house?"

He shrugged. "Any house is vulnerable. It depends on who wants to break into it how badly."

"You said something about Gandolph's illusions."

"Illusions. Always the best place to attack. In this case, quite literally. Can I take you to a scene of the crime?"

"Fine." Temple left her tote bag by the computer and followed Max out into the single-story home's bedroom hallway.

He led her to the room filled with magic, with painted boxes and curtained mirrors and other arcana.

"You know how valuable these artifacts are?" he asked.

"I guess. They must be custom-made."

"Temple! They are magician-made. They're worth literally thousands and thousands of dollars. Each magician's tricks are his stock-in-trade. When he retires he can sell them to one inheritor. Never more than one. It's the professional code. We never betray each other. We perfect our signature acts in solitude and keep their workings secret. We're worse than the Masons used to be."

"Sounds creepy."

"It is creepy. But I inherited Gandolph's equipment, and I've been exploring it. In this--,"

Max pressed an elaborately painted upright box, a sarcophagus shape again. A small drawer in the base snicked open. "--I found these." He presented her with a hand-written book bound in heavy parchment, thongs of suede tying it together.

"What is this? The Necronomicron of the mad Arab himself?"

Max managed to look both intrigued and mystified.

"Never mind. Just jump out of the way if drops of blood start dripping onto the text from the ceiling."

"There's nothing up there but crawl space."

"Crawl space is named that for a reason, trust me. Can I sit down somewhere with good light and look at this?"

"Of course, Madame Detective. May I interest you in my parlor?"

"As long as the ceiling doesn't drip blood."

Max's "parlor" was what every good female fly would fear it would be: in his case, an opium bed.

Just the name of the thing carried a freight of exotic superstition. It was the size of a latticed garden gazebo, a lacy carved wooden structure meant for the swooning upper classes of China as they inhaled from the elegant sterling opium pipes curling around their thumbs like ophidian rings.

Temple knew the artistic provenance of the piece; she just didn't like its social history. Or maybe she didn't like the fact that one was likely to start living up to that history once reclining on the cushioned fabrics within its architectural boundaries.

But she had to admit it was the perfect site to sit, propped up by silk and suede-covered pillows of every shape in a geometry book, gazing on mysterious papers by the warm light of the craftsman-style floor lamps hung with fringed brocade shades.

"This setting reminds me of Fu Manchu's brothel," she complained while settling in after kicking off her black velvet tennis shoes.

Max bent down and wordlessly presented a tiny pair of embroidered satin Chinese slippers.

"Your feet could get cold."

Temple curled her toes into the silken mules and focused her new custom lenses on the thick calligraphy.

" 'Sacred secrets shall never be shared,' " she quoted the first page of parchment. "Well, the author has an overdeveloped sense of the poetic. Not only four instances of alliteration, but the first two are a simple 'ess' sound and the second two are the 'sh' sound so dear to librarians.

Pretty hokey."

"It gets hokier." Max leaned on one elbow, settling beside her like a warlord being entertained by a favorite geisha. No, that was Japan.

Temple frowned and read the second sheet, identically penned on identical paper.

" 'The Synth is like a battlement, safety. The aberrant brother is like a match, fire.' Were all the sheets folded in quarters?"

Max nodded. "Why?"

"It's an odd, old-fashioned way to fold messages, as if they weren't sent by mail."

"I found no envelopes."

Temple moved to the next crackling sheet of heavy paper. "Sherlock Holmes would no doubt have something enlightening to say about the paper source."

"It's handmade, high rag content. No maker's markings. A labor of love by a skilled craftsman."

"Or craftswoman."

Max nodded solemnly.

Temple recited the third message. " The aberrant brother shall be declared anathema. The price upon his head shall be death.' "

"Or her head?" Max wondered.

"This is a brotherhood," Temple pointed out. "I think we can take that literally. No need for equal opportunity pronouns. They were sent to Gandolph, presumably."

"Presumably." Max committed a private smile. "It's taken me more than a month to find and figure out how to open that particular hidey-hole, so I doubt anyone else has been paging through them. Gary was a talented magician long before he was a talented psychic debunker."

" Anathema.' That almost sounds like . . . excommunication from the Synth."

"Is that your broad liberal arts background talking, or your hard-headed Unitarian ancestors, or a touch too much of Matt Devine?"

"Maybe a little of all three."

Max took her hand, her left hand. He turned it so the lamplight caught the opal in his--her--

ring and turned it to pale fire. "Do you dress for the part, or for the partner of the moment?"

"Max, I am not going to bang anybody over the head with our relationship. What if Lieutenant Molina should spot this ring and ask about it, and she would, believe me. She's like a hawk looking for any trace of you in my life."

"Maybe she should get a life of her own."

"And maybe you shouldn't worry about controlling mine when I'm not with you."

"But you're so often not with me now, not like before, when I was foolish enough to think we could live together openly."

"So I don't wear my ring openly."

He nodded. "I know. I just don't want to know." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "Let me take those tacky illuminated threatening notes away before they give you a headache."

"A headache was never a reason to say no in my book."

"No. But why take any chances, when we've so few of them?"