“Oh, no,” he laughed as we watched the tiger swat aside our apples like a cat with the yarn. “She don’t like apples. Them apples is just to give her the smell. The smell of human, I mean.”
As he said this, he gripped us by the scruffs of our necks, and he made a big show of sniffing us like as if we were the dinner. Then he dragged us toward the door of the cage of the tiger. We screamed and we struggled, but it was useless, his grip was so strong.
By now, we were crying and pleading for our lives in Italian. We thought truly we had reached the end.
“Good-bye,” I said to Luciano.
“No, not good-bye, just arrivederci,” he said, looking up toward the sky. “We will be together always.”
“Yes, together always,” I said, trying to be as brave as he was. I touched my finger to the crescent moon of his birthmark and I closed my eyes.
“Let go of them, Sammy!”
It was the Ringmaster walking toward us. “Don’t worry, boys. That old tiger don’t got any more teeth than Sammy does. She couldn’t hurt a fly!”
Eyes twinkling, he said we should know better than to run away like that with the stolen goods.
“When you steal something, you should walk away slowly,” he instructed us. “Otherwise you attract attention.”
As a punishment for our poor attempt at thievery, the Ringmaster ordered us to help Sammy clean the cages of the animals. Very relieved to be alive, we worked so hard that even Sammy was happy with us.
The next morning, exhausted but also exhilarated, we were sitting outside the Ringmaster’s trailer with his three-year-old daughter while inside his wife prepared the breakfast. To pass the time, we took out our deck of cards and practiced the tricks—which the Ringmaster’s daughter seemed to find extremely amusing. We did not know it but the Ringmaster he was watching us from the trailer. When we finished, he applauded.
“Lucy knows a good trick when she sees it,” he said, pointing to his daughter. “We try out all our acts on her.”
After Luciano and I we ate all the bacon and the flapjacks (why is it that the food always tastes so much better in the outside?) the Ringmaster instructed to us to help his crew pack up the tents. He never asked from where we came or to where we were going. He just assumed that we would be traveling with the circus—and so did we.
If you’re one of the lucky (or is it the unlucky?) people that are meant for the life of the circus, it is as natural as the migrating is for the geese, or as the hibernating is for the bear.
After reading that last sentence, Cass closed the magician’s notebook. She had to stop reading not because the story had ended but because the bell had rung. Actually, it had started ringing around the time Pietro and his brother were being fed to the tiger and if Cass and Max-Ernest didn’t move very quickly they were going to be late for their next classes.
Max-Ernest, in an unusually rebellious mood, suggested they skip their classes altogether and continue reading, but Cass pointed out that they might attract unwanted attention that way. After all, neither of them was in the habit of ditching class. So they reluctantly agreed to postpone reading until lunch, when they would remeet behind the gym.
When lunch hour arrived, Cass was so anxious to get back to the magician’s notebook that she didn’t notice the police cars and fire trucks parked in front of the school.
Can you imagine—Cass missing what may well have been the first real disaster in her school’s history? What can I say—even a survivalist gets distracted sometimes.
I promise we’ll return to those police cars and whatever terrible event it is that they foreshadow. But let’s stay with Cass for the moment; I’m sure you’re almost as anxious to get back to the notebook as she was.
In case for some reason you had to stop reading earlier when she did—if, say, some mean person caught you reading this book when you were supposed to be doing your schoolwork, or when you were supposed to be outside “enjoying the sun”—I remind you that Pietro and his brother, after accidentally stumbling on the circus, have now become a part of it.
As soon as Max-Ernest joined her behind the gym, Cass jumped right back in and started reading aloud:
After a few weeks in which we did every job from cleaning up the elephant dung to acting as the shills, the Ringmaster let us put together our own circus act. The act included not only the card tricks but also the mind reading—this was perfect for us because we knew each other so well and practically we had been in the telepathic communication all of our lives.
Also, and this will become important to my tale, we both had the condition that is called the “synesthesia”—the confusion of the senses.*
For people who have the synesthesia, the sounds and the colors and even the smells are all mixed up in our heads.
When I hear the sound of scraping metal, I see a streak of bright yellow-green light. Screeching tires are orange-red. Most bells are blue, although when I see the blue, I don’t hear the bells, I smell the soap.
There was even a certain woman who needed only to say one word and I would see a dark gray cloud and then feel like I was drowning in the coldest lake on the Earth—but I am getting ahead of myself. She appears a little later in my history. If only she never appeared at all!
What was the most helpful for our act was that, for me and for Luciano, the numbers and the letters they all had the colors. For example, the number 1 was green, 2 was purple, and 3 was yellow. At the same time, the letter X was red, Y was gray, and Z was turquoise.*
I can recall the day my brother and I first realized that other people did not see the letters the way we saw them. We were seven years old and a friend from the neighborhood she was drawing with us. She kept writing her name over and over and we kept telling her she was using the wrong colors. I am ashamed to say we were not very nice about it. Our friend started crying so loudly that our mother had to come and tell us that our friend could use whatever colors she chose.
In the circus, it was very easy for us to have conversations with each other in the color code. If I asked a girl in the audience what day her birthday was, I could tell Luciano the date simply by waving at him a few colored scarves. He would pretend to concentrate really hard, then he would shout out her birthday like it had come to him in the trance. In this way, we seemed like very convincing psychics.
Over time, our act grew into something very splendid. The Ringmaster’s wife, she made for us the satin capes and the turbans, and Sammy, who was now our friend, he helped us to create some magical effects with the music and the smoke and the lights of many colors. But it was after a mysterious gift arrived that our act truly came to life—and also came to the end.
One afternoon, a local boy, he brought to us a large package wrapped in brown paper. He said a beautiful lady had paid to him a buck to deliver it to us—a fortune of money in those days.
As soon as he left, we ripped open the package. At first, we had no idea at what we were looking, or why it had been given to us. It was a wooden case, very old, containing dozens of the glass vials. Was it some kind of chemistry kit? For what purpose was it?
Only when we saw a small brass plaque that read “The Symphony of Smells” did we have the inkling. Could it be true? Were there other people in the world who experienced the music and the smells together? How fantastic!
After a few days of the experiments, we discovered we could make stronger the scents by making a fire and pouring in just a little bit from the vials. The smoke it turned many colors, and the aromas they filled the air. We added also a little of the gunpowder—enough to make the sparks together with the smoke and the smells. It was very exciting to see.
Luciano and I, we practiced every day until we were able to communicate with the smelly smoke—“smell signals” we called it. Imagine— now I could tell Luciano the name of somebody’s cat just by releasing the scent of mustard into the air! Truly our act was now “the feast for all the senses.”
The Ringmaster, he liked it so much he bo
ught for us a special tent with a big banner announcing “The Amazing Bergamo Brothers and Their Symphony of Smells.” Everywhere we went he put up the posters advertising our act. And the crowds, they lined up again and again.
It had been a year since we’d joined the circus and we were once again in Kansas. There was an article about our act in the newspaper and we wondered if perhaps our mother’s cousin would come to see us. Who knew—maybe our parents had already come from Italy and they would come, too!
During the show, I searched the audience, but I saw nobody special. Except, that is, for a woman who stepped into our tent toward the end of our show—and made me forget all about my parents.
This woman, she was so beautiful she seemed to make the whole world stand still. She had blue eyes and a waist so tiny she should have herself been a circus attraction. She had long blond hair, and she wore long, elegant gloves that reached up to her elbows. Gold jewelry glittered on her everywhere.
Truly she is a Golden Lady, I thought.
Afterward, I saw her standing by the entrance of our tent. When the rest of the crowd had left, she smiled and told my brother and me how much she enjoyed our show.
“Did you like your present?” she asked. “It seems you’ve put it to good use.”
“What present?” I asked.
“Why the Symphony of Smells, of course! It’s quite a treasure, you know. It was made by a French doctor many years ago. A scientist by training. But he was a great lover of the arts.”
Before we could thank her for the gift, the Golden Lady, she said she had a proposition for us. Could she take us to the dinner to discuss it?
Since we had never been to a restaurant before, her offer was very exciting and my brother eagerly accepted it. I, however, did not want to go. I had no real reason to be suspicious—and yet, as soon as I heard her speak, I knew she was not what she seemed.
Yes, as you may have guessed, the Golden Lady was the woman whose voice made me feel like as if I was drowning. I shiver now, just to think about it.
I tried to make the excuses, reminding my brother of all the chores we had to do. He kept saying our chores should wait. What was wrong with me? Here this nice woman was offering to take us to a real restaurant! And it went on like that. I think he was more than a little bit in love with her.
Finally, the Golden Lady she suggested that Luciano go to the dinner while I stayed behind. “If I can’t have both brothers, can’t I at least have one?” she asked, as if she was the child and we were the toys in the toy store.
I could see that Luciano was nervous about being separated from me for the first time in our lives, but we were too much angry at each other to argue against the idea. My brother, he left without saying the good-bye.
I stayed up all the night waiting for Luciano, imagining all the terrible things that could happen to him. When he had not returned by the morning, I searched the roads, looking for the signs of an accident. Then I searched the circus grounds, thinking maybe he was hiding from me because of the anger.
My brother, he was nowhere.
When I found the Ringmaster inside his trailer he looked very surprised to see me, as if I were a ghost or I had just sprouted the antlers. But he recovered quickly and started barking the orders at me. It was almost time to go. What was I doing lollygagging around? When I tried to tell to him about Luciano being taken away, he said he was too busy to worry about my brother.
The Ringmaster, he always acted impatient like this, but he said something else which confused me. “Anyway, she seemed like such a nice lady,” he said under his breath. “I’m sure your brother won’t come to any harm.”
How would he know? I wondered. Had he met the Golden Lady?
As he spoke, I noticed him pick up something from the table. It was a pile of the cash and he played with it in a very nervous way. I was still young but I’d been around long enough to comprehend what meant the money.
Nowadays, it would be a very shocking thing to sell a pair of ten-year-old twins to a stranger. This was the circus. My brother and I, we were some carnival attractions, no better than the trained monkeys. I wasn’t very surprised that the Ringmaster would trade us for a few dollar bills. But I hated him for it.
“I’ll kill you!” I yelled, and then I ran away from the trailer—and from the circus—as fast I could.
The rest of my story it is seventy years long, but it is really very short.
I knew better than to go to the police. I was young and Italian and a carny—three strikes against me as far as the police would be concerned. Instead, I spent the years living on my own on the streets, searching for my brother, checking the back of every neck for that crescent-shaped birthmark. I never found so much as a single clue as to where was Luciano.
Except once.
A couple days after I fled from the circus, I hitchhiked to the next town where the circus had put up its tents. My plan was to murder the Ringmaster in his sleep. How I intended to do this I do not know—I had no weapons nor any experience as a murderer.
Whatever my plan was, I was too late. Where once the circus had been there was now nothing but the ash.
I wandered around the blackened fairgrounds in a daze. Some of the larger pieces of the rubble were still smoldering and the smoke hovered above. There was also a terrible odor in the air which at the time I thought was the smell of the rotten eggs but I now know was the smell of the sulfur.
I did not know exactly what had happened, but I was certain about one thing: the fire, it had been meant for me.
In the middle of all the ashes and the debris, I spied a crumpled piece of paper. I recognized the handwriting on it even from many feet away. It was a note from my brother, written in a code we had invented for the Symphony of Smells.
It said one word: “HELP.”
The note, it was like a knife inside my heart.
After the loss of my brother, the magic it no longer had any magic for me. Still, I had to make the living. So I performed in the parks and on the street corners—and on the trains when I could hop a ride with the hoboes.
Eventually, I graduated to the nightclubs and the theaters, and I believe I am a success as far as magicians go. I never socialized much, however-—no friend could ever take my brother’s place—and today I am an old hermit.
Yet I have never given up the hope of finding Luciano. Against all reason, I feel inside me that he is still alive.
One day, a few years ago, I was looking in a science magazine—the world of nature it has always interested me far more than the world of man—and I noticed an article about the synesthesia.
What most caught me was a reference to a prodigy child of the 1960s, a girl so talented at the violin that she came to be an international sensation. She claimed to see the colors when she played the music—a well-known form of the synesthesia—and she wrote a magnificent piece of the music called “The Rainbow Sonata” when she was only seven years old. At age nine she was kidnapped and never heard from again.
Another child with the synesthesia kidnapped! Just a coincidence? Perhaps. But it was the first clue I had found in seventy years. I had no choice but to investigate.
Mysteriously, all the newspaper stories about the violinist were missing from the libraries. At last, in a used bookstore in Alaska, I discovered an old magazine article that described the circumstance of her kidnapping. According to an usher at the concert hall where she had last performed, the violinist was seen talking to a woman shortly before her disappearance. The usher he said the woman was “dazzling.” She had the blond hair and the gold—
“Aaargh! It’s so annoying!”
Cass turned the notebook over and over in frustration, looking for more hidden pages.
“That’s it?” Max-Ernest asked.
“Yeah, it just ends there.”
“But we never found out what the terrible secret is.”
“I know. I think maybe he wrote more but he ripped it out. Look—” Cass opened the notebook fla
t and pointed to a broken seam, barely visible on the inside of the spine. “Like if he had to run away really quickly and he couldn’t take the whole notebook, the pages had to fit in his pocket.”
“You mean like if he heard someone coming or he smelled fire or something? I guess that’s possible,” said Max-Ernest. “Or else maybe he was killed, and the killer took the pages. Or—”
“Exactly,” Cass interrupted, grim. “You know who she is, right?”
“Who?” asked Max-Ernest.
“The Golden Lady. Couldn’t you tell? The Golden Lady is Ms. Mauvais.”
Max-Ernest shook his head. “No, she’s not. She can’t be—”
“Yeah, she is. Listen—” Cass flipped through the notebook. “She has a teeny waist, all that jewelry. She wears gloves.”
“It does sound like her,” agreed Max-Ernest. “But she’s not the Golden Lady. It wouldn’t make any sense.”
“What—why? Name one reason you think it’s not her.”
“OK. Here’s one reason. The lady in the story, at the circus, it was a really, really long time ago. If it was Ms. Mauvais, she would be like a hundred years old now. If she was even still alive. How ’bout that?”
Cass bit her lip. He had a point. Ms. Mauvais didn’t look anywhere near that old.
“Maybe if she was a vampire, then it could be her,” Max-Ernest suggested. “But that’s highly doubtful. Nobody thinks there are real vampires. Except for vampire bats—they’re real. And Count Dracula—he was real. But he wasn’t a real vampire. He was just a mean old guy. At least, that’s what people think. There’s no way to know for sure. He’s dead. I mean, unless he really was a—”
“OK, OK. Forget vampires. I agree, it’s not her. It wouldn’t make any sense,” said Cass. “So what do you think we should do?”
“I think we should get rid of the notebook as fast as we can, just like he said we should at the beginning,” said Max-Ernest.
“You mean stop the investigation? Don’t you even want to know what the secret is?”