Play dead

TWENTY-FOUR

He had given the girl a much-needed bath, washed and conditioned her hair, averting his eyes as much as he could and still do a proper job, lest the girl find him immodest or, even worse, lecherous.

He used a mint shampoo from Origins.

Restoration, he had thought with a smile. In which an object is restored to its original condition.

When they were finished, he wheeled her down the hall. She was still a little groggy. He had given her yet another Brisette, one of his crushable ampoules containing chloroform. In the 1970s his father had purchased hundreds of them from an English woman who worked as a midwife. Joseph knew all too well their effect.

"Are you comfortable, my love?"

She turned her head slowly, remained silent.

They entered an upstairs sewing room. It was one of Joseph's favorite rooms. The wallpaper was a blowsy floral in water silk, papered from the skirting board up to the dado rail. But the room was much more than beautiful. It was magic. With the touch of a button, located behind the reproduction of William Beattie-Brown's Golden Highlands, the eastern wall would rise and give onto a small parlor overlooking the rear of the property. The touch of another button, this one beneath the spy window overlooking the great room, would release a four-by-four trapdoor behind the divan. Swann had never found the need to use either.

He positioned her in front of the television and pressed the PLAY button on the remote, starting the video.

"Attend, the Great Cygne," Swann said.

He had transferred all the old film footage-there was precious little of it, reaching back to his father's early performances in 1948-to videocassette years ago. The original 8 mm footage had been brittle, and he had found a company in South Philly that transferred old home movies to CD, DVD, and videocassette.

The first images were of his father as a very young man, perhaps twenty. An entertainer of German extraction, performing in New York City in the late 1940s. What courage it must have taken, Joseph often thought.

A quick cut found his father at about twenty-eight. He now sat at a nightclub table with five others. It was a static, high-angle shot. Vegas, late 1950s. The very best place at the one of the very best times in history. The Great Cygne performed some coin magic to a delighted crowd. He executed Four Coins to a Glass, the Flying Eagles, the Traveling Centavos. In a flourish he grabbed an ice bucket from a passing cart and presented a variation on Miser's Dream.

The next images passed in a blur: a club in Amsterdam, a backyard party in Midland Texas, an appearance at a county fair in Berea, Ohio, a performance for which his father was paid in rolls of quarters.

Image after image, as the tape rolled on, showed a man whose skills and temperament were slowly eroding, a man whose mind was becoming an echoing hollow of horrors, a journeyman illusionist reduced to catalogue tricks: cigarette through a quarter, cut and restored rope, sympathetic cards.

That is why, years earlier, Joseph added a postscript to the tape, a breathtaking coda filmed when his father was in his prime.

The Seven Wonders was a tightly edited, graphic-rich version of a full-length routine his father had performed on a local-access cable channel in Shreveport. Joseph had cut the performance to the sounds of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" Hokey, he knew. He had once had thoughts of marketing the event on DVD someday, provided he could get back the rights.

Swann watched for what was perhaps the five hundredth time, his heart racing.

First was the Garden of Flowers, then the Girl Without a Middle, then the Drowning Girl, then the Girl in the Sword Box.

"Watch this," he said to Patricia. "Watch what happens next. This is the Girl in the Sub Tank. This is your part."

When the video was finished, Swann descended the stairs, crossed the great room, allowed himself a glass of sherry. He climbed back upstairs.

"I have a few errands to run, but I will be back, and you and I will have dinner. Maybe we'll even dress. Won't that be fun?"

The girl looked at him. Her velvet gaze was no longer soft. It amazed him again and again how quickly youth faded. He rolled the chair into the guest room and locked the door.

Minutes later, as he prepared to leave, he heard the girl scream. By the time he reached the foyer and slipped into his coat, the sound had receded to a distant echo. By the time he stepped onto the porch, it was only a memory.

The day was bright and sunny, rich with birdsong. Swann singled out a voice. It was a yellow-throated warbler, another lost soul, asking its peculiar questions of the world.