The master was near enough to speak. Fierce laughter glinted in his eye as he said, “Saint Francis preaching to the birds, I presume?” Then he lifted his chin, raised his arms, and shifting slowly from his hips turned from left to right as if taking his unheeding audience into his strong embrace.
The uproar subsided, ceased. All through the park, the cries of raging animals gave way to human groans, human coughing, human lamentation.
The master somewhat gingerly helped Michael out of the pool, then pulled out a handkerchief and, with a grimace of distaste, wiped his hands. “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” he quoted. He stopped, glowered, seemed to expect a reply.
None came. Michael hung his head and plucked debris from his drenched clothing.
“A truly abominable display,” the master went on, “the inevitable result when imperfect knowledge joins forces with presumption.”
Unable to meet the master’s eye, Michael remained silent, save for his rattling chest and compulsive sniffling. The tears came again, and when his eyes were blinded by them he felt capable of looking up. “I’m sorry,” he quavered.
“As well you might be,” the master said, but his voice was softer, and Michael’s blurred vision registered what might have been an avuncular smile. “On the other hand,” he concluded, gesturing vaguely toward their surroundings, “I must observe that you’re making good progress. Your technical abilities are quite, how shall I say it”—he contemplated the erstwhile kangaroo family, who lay together in a tight clutch on the pavement nearby—“impressive.”
The master paused, and both of them considered for a time the pitiful spectacle of the park. The dozens of people still in the fountain clung wearily to its rim, wheezing and choking, too dazed, too exhausted to recapitulate evolutionary history by dragging themselves out of the primeval slime and onto dry land. Elsewhere, the ground was littered like a battlefield with bodies—some writhing, some twitching, some flat on their backs, gazing confusedly at the bright sky, the emerging leaves of the trees. Only Michael and the master, of all the bipedal primate mammals in Washington Square Park, stood erect.
Sirens wailed, jarring discordantly with the keening of the former animals. The master bestirred himself, made the negligent hand movement Michael had come to recognize as his manner of bidding farewell, and took a few steps toward the arch. He turned once and said in his most sepulchral, most sardonic tones, “A little more discipline, and who knows what you may be capable of.” Then he made his departure, moving with that odd, shuffling gait, leaving Michael alone among the wreckage he had made, shaken, devastated, covered with shame.
And exhilarated.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Come into My Parlor
“SO IF I STEP inside, will I disappear?” Emily asked, eyeing the open Chinese cabinet.
“Not unless you want to,” Lena answered with a smile.
They were backstage, readying props and equipment for the imminent and much-heralded reopening of the Little Cairo Museum of Wonders. This event, eagerly awaited by a public whose numbers had steadily increased during the six months of Michael’s association with Wurlitzer, promised to do justice, and more than justice, to the spectacular metamorphosis that the theater itself was undergoing. Nearly a month of renovations had transformed the old place, and at least on its newly glistening surfaces (whatever might have been the case in its more hidden recesses), nothing dingy or shabby remained. Fresh smells pervaded the auditorium and offstage areas—paint, varnish, polish, virgin upholstery, disinfectant soap, filtered circulating air.
The most satisfying result of Emily’s partially successful attempt to attach herself to the tiny troupe at the Little Cairo had been her growing intimacy with Lena. Despite large disparities in their ages and outlooks, the two women were sympathetic, compatible, mutually appreciative, each having tacitly recognized the other as a fellow passenger on the same strange boat. Now Lena was padding about in her curled Turkish slippers, folding costumes, checking mechanisms, oiling hinges and grooves, adjusting screens. Emily, fascinated as always by the cabinet, was not being much help.
“Let’s see,” Lena said, furrowing her brow. “They want different wands. Where are we putting the wands?”
“Magic wands,” Emily declaimed, as though reciting a lesson. “Small Storeroom Number One. Hanging on the back wall in some kind of quiver.”
“Thank you, dear,” Lena said as she shuffled across the gleaming floor to S.S. #1. “I wish I had a memory like yours.”
She returned at the same pace, wands in hand. Emily was still examining the Chinese cabinet, pulling the sliding screen inside back and forth on its track. “I love this thing,” she said. “Michael told me I’ll get to disappear in it at the big performance.”
“I know it works,” Lena said. “But I don’t really know how.”
“Where did it come from?” Emily asked. She was half inside the cabinet, feeling along the shifting slats in the floor. “Is it really Chinese?”
Lena stood watching her; an apprehensive smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know that either,” she said. “It could be. Max has had it for as long as I’ve known him.”
Emily came out of the cabinet, snapping the double doors closed behind her. “And how long is that exactly, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, a long time, I’m afraid. Over forty years now.”
“So you were both very young when you met.”
“I was young,” Lena said, looking wistful. “And very naive. But Max was…well, Max has always been as he is now.”
“He was always old?”
Lena nodded pensively. “Yes, in a way, I think he was.”
“So how old is he now?”
“I don’t know,” Lena replied. “I’ve never asked. It never seemed important. Max is a special man, with special gifts. I recognized that at once. I never cared about his age.”
“I guess his sweet temper keeps him going,” Emily said. She smiled at Lena’s mildly reproachful look. “Did you meet in New York?”
“Yes. I was just a girl, but I used to go from town to town giving psychic demonstrations. When I came to New York, I met Max Wurlitzer.”
“What’s a psychic demonstration?” Emily asked.
“Oh, you know, spirit writing, contacts with the astral plane, that sort of thing. I traveled by bus. I started in Seattle and made my way east on Greyhound buses. Max called it ‘Spiritualism on Wheels.’”
“And he came to one of your demonstrations?”
“Yes,” Lena said, gazing off into the wings of the stage as if she saw herself, young, impressionable, but talented and very willing to take advantage of her own peculiar, unexpected abilities. “Yes, that was how we met. When I saw him enter the room, I felt a shock”—she touched her breastbone, then her forehead—“here and here, a bolt, like electricity, and I saw a queer blue light around him. I knew then we would not part.”
Emily looked skeptical. The idea of Wurlitzer inspiring anything but a visceral distaste strained her credulity. “Was he trying to contact a departed loved one?” she asked.
“No.” Lena’s dreamy gaze went hard and she looked away from her imaginary scene, turning to Emily. “No. He was looking for an apprentice. Or so he said. He may only have been looking for me.”
Emily raised her eyebrows. “You mean he’s been looking for an apprentice for forty years?”
“There was another one,” Lena said. “A long time ago.” She looked about the room nervously, then continued. “But that didn’t work out.”
Not surprising, Emily thought, given the questionable charms of Max Wurlitzer, that he should find only one other dupe as susceptible as poor Michael in a lifetime of searching. Only the other one had the sense to get out. To banish these thoughts, which she knew she couldn’t share with Lena, she took up a set of Chinese linking rings and began twisting them this way and that. “I’m going to figure these things out if it kills me,” she muttered. Lena
busied herself arranging the quick-change costumes, while Emily continued to struggle with the rings. But they remained as they were, cold, glinting, inseparable. At last she gave up, and the two women passed through the wings. After Lena had switched on the houselights, they stood on the stage.
Everything was clean and bright, polished and painted, rejuvenated and revamped. The seats, burnished wood, elegantly appointed with maroon velvet upholstery, arranged in perfectly symmetrical rows, waited with an air of stately expectancy, as though serene in the knowledge that soon they would bear witness to momentous events. Emily and Lena turned to face the painted fire curtain, a minor masterpiece of restoration carried out by Dazz in accordance with Wurlitzer’s explicitly detailed instructions: a Nile scene, as before, but richer in detail, more robust in execution, its vivid colors vibrant and shimmering in the refracted light. Above the pyramid, exactly at the focal point of the composition, an Eye of Horus projected into the empty house its blank, inhuman stare.
Emily bridled at the sight of it. “That wasn’t there before, was it?” she asked, pointing at the Eye.
“No. Max asked your friend to add it. He did a wonderful job,” Lena replied, then lapsed into silence as she admired the play of shape and color.
Emily stepped closer and scrutinized the disembodied orb. “It looks just like that piece of slate Max wears around his neck,” she announced.
“It’s not slate, it’s earthenware,” Lena murmured, adding suddenly, in an unnaturally bright voice, “Would you like to come upstairs for a cup of coffee?”
Emily was not distracted from her confrontation with the Eye. “Why does he wear it all the time?” she asked harshly.
Lena began to shift her weight from one foot to the other, launching herself into the swaying motion that meant she was uncomfortable. “It’s a kind of magician’s amulet,” she answered with reluctance. “He says it increases his power.”
Emily sighed. “I suppose we’re lucky it’s not a voodoo doll.” She turned away from the curtain and faced Lena, who was by now listing perilously to either side. “It’s almost obscene, the way he keeps stroking it,” Emily burst out. “I think he even talks to it. And it’s so valuable. If someone who knows where he got it ever sees it, he could get locked up.”
At these words Lena’s head jerked back and she stood stock-still, regarding Emily with horrified, beseeching eyes.
Emily laughed softly and gave Lena’s arm a gentle shake. “Don’t worry,” she reassured her. “I’m not going to turn him in, even though I should.” She chuckled again as Lena’s eyes grew even wider. “Come on, Lena,” she said. “You think I don’t know Max stole that thing from the museum? I figured that out the day it happened. So did Michael. But what I want to know is, what’s he doing with it? Why is it so important?”
Lena considered her answer carefully. “Well, I think it has something to do with Max’s farewell show…”
“The famous Grand Finale. What’s an amulet got to do with that?”
“Can’t we go backstage?” Lena said weakly. “I want to sit down.”
They passed through the wings in silence and settled backstage, side by side, in two thronelike chairs that Max and Michael used in some of their more relaxed—or more magisterial—routines. Emily waited for Lena to raise her head, then pressed relentlessly on. “Now tell me about the Eye.”
“I really don’t know much. Max wants to pass it on to Michael as some sort of symbol, like passing a torch.”
“He doesn’t treat it like something he intends to give away.”
“He plans to give everything away, I think,” Lena said. “That’s what worries me. He talks about it all the time—quitting the scene, leaving everything behind, saying his last goodbye. But he doesn’t talk about what he’s going to do afterward.” Lena’s voice trailed off into a whisper. “Sometimes he sounds as though he’s making plans to die…”
Emily remained quiet, brooding on her throne, going over Lena’s remarks, the story of how she met Max, his fascination with the Eye of Horus, his preoccupation with death, his Grand Finale, at which he planned to make both a glorious comeback and a permanent departure from the stage. Why was he doing it, why bother? He wasn’t famous anymore; only magic fanatics like Michael had even heard of the Great Wurlitzer. People would be coming to the show to see Michael, not the mad old has-been who purported to be his master. “The master,” Emily said, imitating Michael’s breathless, almost girlish tone when he spoke of Wurlitzer. She glanced at Lena, who was sunk deep into her throne, looking, Emily thought, miserable and cold. “Are you tired?” she asked. “Do you want to go upstairs now?”
“I am,” Lena replied. “But it’s more than that. I have something I feel I should tell you, though Max would be angry at me if he knew.”
“I won’t tell him,” Emily said. “What is it?”
“It’s about the other apprentice. It was a long time ago. He was a very talented young man, very intelligent and earnest.”
“Yes,” Emily said. “Like Michael. But he didn’t get on with Max?”
“No. It wasn’t that.” Lena paused, looking hesitantly at Emily, who detected something in her voice that wasn’t weariness but fear; and, as Emily recognized it, that fear suddenly gripped her like a cord pulled tight across her chest.
“What happened to him?” she asked softly.
“He was killed,” Lena said. She leaned on the arm of her chair and rubbed her eyes with one hand. “It was an accident. It was onstage, during a performance.”
“Jesus Christ,” Emily said, through clenched teeth. “How did it happen?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know,” Lena protested. “There was an inquest, of course. Max was exonerated entirely.”
Emily got to her feet shakily, then fell to her knees before the older woman, reaching up to take her hands in her own. “But it was his fault, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, no,” Lena said. “No. That couldn’t be true.”
“But it was,” Emily insisted.
“Max was devastated,” Lena replied. “He blamed himself, but it wasn’t his fault.”
Emily frowned, bowing her head. She had to tell Michael.
“He didn’t perform again for years,” Lena continued. “He couldn’t bear it. He said, more than once, ‘It should have been me.’”
Emily, wild with impatience, jumped up when Michael entered the coffee shop across from the Little Cairo. These days, it seemed, she had to make appointments with him in order to see him at all, and she couldn’t wait to speak to him, hardly pausing to respond to his maddeningly friendly greeting and affectionate kiss.
“Michael,” she began at once, “Lena told me something horrible this evening.”
“Oh?” he said, absently stroking her arm. It was a way he had adopted with her in recent months, a means of placating her, appeasing her, calming her down; he could do it and seem attentive without actually giving his full attention to whatever she was saying. “What did Lena tell you?”
“She told me the old man’s last assistant was killed in an accident—onstage.”
The slow stroking continued at exactly the same rate. “Yes, I know all about that,” he said in a voice without affect. “A freak accident.” He paused and thought for a minute, his eyes on the small laminated menu that was wedged between the sugar jar and the paper-napkin dispenser. “I believe I’ll have some iced tea for a change. How’s school?”
“Michael,” Emily said, “the last person who did what you’re doing with that weird old man died doing it. Don’t you see you’re in danger?”
He was patting her hand now. “That was a long time ago, Emily. And the guy who died wasn’t nearly as good as I am. Don’t worry about me.”
“I worry about you all the time,” she said bitterly, moving her hands out of his reach. “I’ve worried about you since the first moment you set eyes on him. And I’m not alone; Lena’s concerned about you too.”
“Why? Things couldn’t be better.
People can’t wait for the theater to open again. And the master’s farewell show is going to be—I can’t describe it—it’s going to be the most amazing magic show anyone’s ever seen. Well, you’ll see when we start working on it.”
“Michael, I’m afraid to start working on it. Lena says Max is acting strangely, not eating, talking about death all the time. And his fixation on that Egyptian thing he stole is just sick.”
“Well, it’s true he seems preoccupied with death.” Michael paused, contemplating this minor disloyalty, then went on. “He’s kind of morbid these days. To tell you the truth, I’m a little worried about him. He’s the one you ought to be concerned about, not me.” He stopped abruptly, failed to respond or even react to Emily’s snort. She followed the direction of his gaze, and the two of them watched the lean, somber, sidling figure of Wurlitzer as his peculiar gait took him past the window of the coffee shop.
Michael, his eyes fixed as though magnetized on the master’s retreating figure, his expression a study in perplexed foreboding, rose suddenly to his feet. “What’s he doing out at this time of night? He told me he was dead tired.” Without looking at Emily, he said to her, “Sorry. I’ve got to go,” and rushed out into the street.
Ahead of him, chin to chest, shoulders hunched, and lofting the big black umbrella over his head—a thick, persistent drizzle had started to fall—the master shuffled along the wet sidewalk. He wore rubbers over his patent-leather shoes, an old coat, and a velour slouch hat. Michael saw him cross to the southeast corner of the street and slow down; his umbrella angled to the side, and his head swung around, the glass eye flashing in the light from the streetlamp. Then he continued on, heading toward Fifth Avenue.
Emily came out of the coffee shop behind Michael just as he began to run, sprinting out into the traffic, ignoring her call, the angry horns, darting across the street, intent on closing the gap. When he was satisfied that he had the tall, lean figure within following distance, he slowed down, keeping to the doorways so he could duck should the old man turn around again.