Shadow Woman

14

The lights came up to reveal the Miraculous Miranda in a Victorian gown, standing behind tall glass windows in an octagonal set like a gazebo. The back wall of the little room was covered with library shelves. She stood on tiptoes to lift from a shelf a folio volume bound in worn leather, opened it, and turned the old parchment pages as she walked toward a small table. Finally she found a passage and read it with interest. She closed the book, set it on the floor, and snapped her fingers. A bottle of champagne appeared on the table. She snapped them again and a stemmed glass appeared beside it. She stared at the bottle with a scowl of concentration: nothing happened. She took a deep breath, stared harder, and the cork popped fifteen feet into the air. When it came down she caught it happily and held it while it turned into a little bird. She opened the window and let it fly away above the heads of the audience, then closed the window.

Miranda picked up the bottle and poured champagne into the glass, lifting the bottle higher so the stream of clear liquid caught in the spotlights appeared first green, then red, then blue, then the golden color of her hair. She sipped from the glass, then set it back on the small, graceful table, took a step away, and faced the audience to resume her act. But she changed her mind and returned to the table. She poured the liquid into the glass again. The bubbly liquid foamed to the rim, but she kept pouring. The foam frothed over the side of the glass and down the stem, off the table and onto the floor. She seemed to be intrigued by the way the foam kept bubbling and growing. Soon there was a sudsy puddle at her feet that threatened to cover the floor of the little pavilion.

Miranda seemed nonplussed. She righted the bottle and scrutinized the label with curiosity. But while she read it, she noticed that turning the bottle upright had not stopped the liquid from gushing out. It came faster and faster, first like a fountain, then like the eruption of a volcano. She set it on the table and backed uneasily away from it, toward the tall shelves of books.

The audience was enchanted, but Miranda seemed concerned about her long nineteenth-century dress. She held the skirts up with both hands as the sudsy champagne soaked her dancing pumps and rose to her ankles. She looked around toward the wings of the stage, but none of her helpers seemed to be able to see her around the walls of books at the sides of the set. She waved testily above the set at the lighting and music technicians in the glass booth behind the audience, but the fans who turned their heads to follow her gaze saw that the two men were shrugging and shaking their heads in dismay. The lighting man seemed to be the only one with any presence of mind, and he switched on a row of soft lights above Miranda so she could see what she was doing.

As the flood from the bottle rose higher, the audience could see that Miranda was on her own. She turned to the bookshelves, placed one foot on the lowest shelf, pushing the books back with her toe, and began to climb. On the sixth shelf, her foot caught on the hem of the dress and slipped. She lost her footing, dropped with a stomach-gripping jerk, grasped a shelf, and dangled there.

Miranda’s toe found a purchase, and that freed one hand. She quickly undid the buttons on the front of the dress and let it fall to her ankles. She stepped out of it with one foot and looked over her shoulder in frustration. With her free hand she gave a hasty gesture, and conjured a wooden hanger floating in the air. She gave the dress a kick and it promptly flew through the air and hung itself on the hanger. She snapped her fingers and it vanished from sight.

Now that Miranda was dressed only in a corset, petticoat, and white stockings, her unnaturally strong and nimble acrobat’s body seemed to scale the bookshelves effortlessly. She reached the top shelf at the rim of the structure as the foaming torrent sloshed behind the tall windows, turning the room into an aquarium.

Just as the audience seemed to make the analogy, the resemblance became inescapable. Brightly colored foot-long fish began to flit and glide out of the bookshelves, then swim down into the room to investigate the furniture. The mind struggled to go through the processes it had been trained to do: Are the fish alive, or mechanical, or holograms of live fish projected from offstage into the liquid? But the cogitation stumbled over itself and collapsed, because in Miranda’s little pantomimes, guessing the method answered no question at all, and something else was always coming in to change the mixture.

Miranda was visibly fascinated by what she saw in the library below her. She seemed to forget the audience for a moment. She slipped off her stockings and put a toe in. She stood and paced along the top of the bookcase, looking into the pool, and as she did she loosed herself from the corset and stepped out of the petticoat to reveal a bright orange two-piece bathing suit. Then she ran back along the top of the bookcase, sprang into the air, executed a flip, and knifed into the water.

Through the row of tall windows the audience could see her swimming underwater with the bright blue and yellow fish. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. There was a creaking, tearing sound, the walls collapsed outward, and the water poured onto the stage to be sucked away by invisible drains. Miranda was left lying on the carpet near the table. She stirred, then stood up suddenly, bowed, and blew kisses. Then she bowed very low. Her face assumed that strange, playful, mischievous look as she picked up something from the rubble on the floor and held it up.

It was a big painting from one of the collapsed walls. It was a painting of Lady Godiva riding on her white horse.

Miranda looked down at her bright orange bathing suit, then at the audience. Now her smile was naughty. The audience roared, urging her to do whatever she was contemplating. She propped the painting against the table, picked up the old leather-bound book that still sat beside the bottle. She quickly leafed through the pages, found the right one and read it, and set the book down.

Miranda stepped back a few paces, gestured portentiously at the painting, and then, with a final mischievous glance at the audience, slowly raised her hand and pointed down at her own head.

There was a brilliant flash, a puff of smoke, and Miranda was gone. In her place stood a graceful white Arabian horse. Braided into its mane was a swatch of bright orange cloth that could have been the top of Miranda’s bathing suit, and into its long tail, the second piece of orange cloth. The audience was laughing, shrieking, applauding its approval: if Miranda had been a horse, this was the horse she would be.

The horse walked to the table, nosed the old book thoughtfully, as though it were Miranda trying to discover her mistake, then turned to face the audience, extended its foreleg, and lowered its head in a final bow. There was another flash and puff of smoke, and when it cleared, the horse too was gone.

Seaver sat on the folding chair beside Miranda’s technician and watched him engage the hydraulic lift, bringing the white horse the rest of the way down under the stage. The gleaming ten-inch cylinder shortened as the hole in the stage floor above snapped shut, the noise of it covered by the deafening music of Miranda’s exit. As the black platform moved down to eye level, he saw Miranda was standing on it with the horse. She swung her leg up over the horse’s back and mounted it, but she didn’t sit up. Instead she clung to it, her hands caressing the horse’s face, patting its neck while she spoke into its ear, crooning soft words into its dumb animal brain to keep it from remembering to panic.

When the hydraulic lift reached the level of the concrete floor she swung down from the horse, and now he could hear her words. “Great job, baby. Wonderful show. You made mama have a lot of fun.”

A woman who had to be the horse’s handler stepped forward with a halter in one hand and a few lumps of sugar in the other. Miranda took the sugar and watched the horse’s big prehensile lips nibble them off her palm, then hugged the horse again.

Like a wild animal, Miranda seemed to smell the unfamiliar presence. Her eyes swept the dim concrete enclosure filled with machinery and electronic devices and found him unerringly. Her voice hardened. “Take the horse, Judy.” She stepped to Seaver and stopped. The wardrobe mistress expertly slipped the black velvet robe up her arms and onto her shoulders, then receded. Miranda brought the belt around her and cinched it, hard.

She did not speak to him, but her sharp, angry eyes never left him as she called out to her staff, “Who is this?”

Seaver stood up and smiled. “Calvin Seaver. Vice president for security at Pleasure Island.” He had known she would be difficult, so he already had in his hand his plastic-coated identification card, along with the backstage visitor’s badge he had been issued at the Inside Straight. “Will King and I sometimes get together to check out each other’s operations. Professional courtesy.”

She studied the badges and looked back up at his face. “Sorry. You could have been a reporter or a trick thief. Real magicians don’t do that to each other. Professional courtesy. If you saw anything you didn’t know already, please keep it to yourself.” She took a step away.

Miranda’s stagehands and technicians all seemed to have been held frozen in a spell, not breathing. Now she released them. “Great show, everybody.” They relaxed and began working again, moving around each other without pausing.

Miranda took a second step. “Your secrets are safe with me,” said Seaver. “For the moment, anyway.”

She turned on her heel and faced him. “What do you want?”

“Three minutes,” he said. “Five at the most.”

“Come on.” She walked to the far end of the area below the stage, around two more hydraulic lifts and a console that seemed to have been set up to control the explosive charges wired on stage. She stopped. “What’s your pitch?”

“I’m looking for a woman.”

“Smile more. They’ll like you better.”

“A particular woman. Dark hair, pretty, in very good physical condition. Three months ago she helped a gentleman named Pete Hatcher disappear. You might recall the evening, because you slipped him out the back door for her at the start of your midnight show.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “Did I?”

“Yes. At first, I thought the dark-haired woman might be you. What you do on stage makes strolling out the door in a dark wig and getting two security men to look the wrong way seem like a small thing.”

He reached into his coat pocket, snatched out an envelope, and handed it to her. “So I did a background investigation. All of your legal papers—licenses, birth records, Social Security—say your real name is supposed to be Katie Mullen. Even your union records and personnel file. You’re from Ohio. But—funny thing—there’s nothing on Katie Mullen that goes back more than eight years.”

He watched her look at the credit report, then at the Social Security earnings report, then at the two lists of avenues checked, with “none” or “not found” beside them. She shrugged. “Not much happened to me before then.” She folded the papers, tucked them in the envelope, and handed them back to him.

Seaver slipped them into the inner pocket of his coat. “No record of enrollment in a high school class in Ohio.”

“You can’t get that.”

“I use a company that arranges class reunions. They feed all the names into their computer for mailing lists. They ran three years of them for me.”

“I lie about my age.”

“Your birth certificate says what you say. But I’ll bet the paper the original is printed on isn’t more than eight years old.”

“I’m not the dark-haired woman.”

“No, you’re not. You’re somebody she helped one time. There never was a Katie Mullen. She helped you disappear from someplace, so you helped her.”

She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. “So who did I used to be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I want to know is who the dark-haired woman is.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Then good night.” She pushed off the wall and took a step toward the corridor.

Seaver’s hand closed on her forearm, and she looked down at it icily until Seaver began to wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. He loosened his grip until it was too loose, and she snatched it away. “What now?”

“I want you to take one minute to think about what Vincent Bogliarese would feel if he knew what we were talking about.”

She looked at Seaver with a sense of wonder. She had underestimated him. She turned to face him. Her impossibly golden hair had dried into a wild mane, the skin of her sculpted face was still covered with a makeup that had little metallic sparkles in it. She didn’t look quite human. The big, unblinking blue eyes acquired the mischievous look they wore on stage.

“The back elevator over there goes up to my suite. By now, Vincent is up there waiting for me. Maybe he knows everything you know. Maybe he doesn’t. Come with me.” She took two steps toward the elevator, then stopped, turned, and looked back at him. Her face was a blank, like a portrait of a woman, but the eyes were burning him.

Seaver tried to decide. If he had been anything but positive, he would never have come here. She had once been in some kind of trouble. She had escaped because she’d had the help of a professional, who had given her false papers and set off whatever changes had transformed her into the Miraculous Miranda. She would not have slipped Pete Hatcher out for any other reason. Who would have the money to pay a performer like her to do anything? It must have been to return a favor, and a big one, at that. Now that he had met her, he was even more certain.

The incarnations he could trace were unbroken for about eight years: first Katie Mullen, the pretty assistant in the brief costume who opened trap doors and distracted the audience for a past-his-prime magician in worn tailcoat named Mister Zenobia; then Magical Miranda, playing kids’ birthday parties in the daytime and, at night, doing gigs at supper clubs where part of the deal was waiting on tables. Then, three years ago, the Miraculous Miranda had materialized in Las Vegas.

But Seaver had miscalculated. The eight years should have made him at least suspect it. He had assumed that she had been running from some woman problem—maybe an arrest or two for soliciting, maybe a stint starring in pornographic movies.

Seaver studied her face, and was suddenly lost in amazement at her perfidy. She was trying to look as though she were bluffing, but she wasn’t. She had already shown all her cards to Vincent. What she had been hiding was a whole lot worse than Seaver had imagined. She wasn’t hiding some embarrassing period of her past from her boyfriend. That wasn’t it at all.

She had told Vincent all about it, and that meant it wasn’t that there were some videotapes of her going down on one of those pimply-faced druggies that were the foot soldiers of the porn trade. That would have driven a man like Vincent nuts. What she was hiding was a charge that wouldn’t get stale after eight years—a class-one felony, like armed robbery or homicide. And of all the men in the world, Vincent Bogliarese would be the last one to write her off for homicide. His own father had a homicide conviction. Whatever Miranda had done in her early twenties, Vincent Senior had done more in his. For that matter, Seaver had always heard that these old families still expected a son to make his bones before he could be trusted with business matters, and Vincent Junior had been running the Inside Straight for at least ten years.

She was trying to get him to think she was bluffing, so he would go up there with her and get himself killed. There was no way in the world he was going to step into that elevator. He had never relished the idea, and now there was no reason to consider it. What he had come for was safe in his coat pocket. When he had handed her the papers, his purpose wasn’t to show her he knew nothing. He had just wanted her to touch them. He would have to get one of his old buddies on the L.A.P.D. to run the fingerprints before he knew what it was he had. But he had something. Now it was his turn to let her think he had been bluffing.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I’d like to speak with Mr. Bogliarese at this time. You go on without me.”

Miranda’s smile grew. She winked, spun around with a speed and grace that an ordinary woman would not have imitated, even if she could, because she had no excuse to be bigger than life. Miranda stepped into the elevator and let the doors close on her.

Seaver decided not to take the time to get upstairs and walk out the front door with the customers. Miranda wasn’t predictable enough for that. Right now she might be giving her boyfriend some version of what had just happened. Seaver walked straight to the steel door at the back of the stage area and said to a stagehand, “Can you let me out?” There was a sign on it that said, EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND, but he knew they must have keys to it, because that was the way Pete Hatcher had slipped out. The stagehand opened it and let him out onto a long narrow asphalt strip beside the building where a few employees’ cars were parked.

It took Seaver at least five minutes to walk all the way to the front of the building, then another ten to walk down the covered mall and out the other side to the lot where his car was parked. He patted the envelope in his coat pocket three times during the walk.

He got into his car and started the engine. He had already begun to back out when he realized that patting the envelope was not going to be enough. He stopped the car, pulled forward a little, and slipped it into neutral. He had watched Miranda touch the papers, so he knew exactly where her prints were, and he wouldn’t make the mistake of smudging them. She had been hot and sweaty from the show, so the prints would be oily and clear. But thinking of Miranda’s show during his walk had prompted a small twinge of uneasiness in him. This was a woman who was world famous for sleight of hand. Could he really be sure that what he had seen was her tucking the papers back into the envelope before she had handed it back to him? The same set of papers?

Seaver reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out the envelope. He held it on his lap where no bystander could see it, placed only the nails of his thumbs in the slot and made sure that they touched only the envelope, then pushed the envelope’s sides outward just enough.

There was a blinding flash of light, a sound like an indrawn breath, and a choking smell as though a whole box of matches were burning. A thin, jagged line of orange fire streaked from the bottom of the envelope up both sides until his thumbs held nothing, and a pile of black powder was settling onto his lap. He rolled to the side out of the car, slapping his pants furiously.

In a few seconds, he was sure his clothes had not ignited, and nothing had reached his skin. He stood beside the car for a moment and closed his eyes. He could still see a bright green patch floating behind his eyelids from the flash. He hated that woman. He knew exactly how she had done it. All of the big pyrotechnics in her act had been fired electronically by her technicians, but not the little ones. Somewhere in her costume she must have carried a supply of flash powder, so she could use it when she wanted it. Probably it was in pea-sized, airtight capsules. That way it would be safe and inert, until the mixture was exposed to oxygen and a tiny trace of white phosphorous ignited whatever else was in there. It had to be something like that, anyway, or it would have gone off before he opened the envelope.

He got into the car, opened all the windows, and drove out into the night. He was not going to stick a knife into the Miraculous Miranda. He was not even going to fabricate anything about her to send to Vincent Bogliarese. He was going to forget her. All she had ever been was one avenue to find the dark-haired woman who had made Pete Hatcher disappear. There were others.