“Do be careful, Herr Zen,” she said, helping me on with my jacket. “You’re a fine young gentleman, but remember: for anyone who becomes so famous so fast, the snares of the city are especially treacherous.”
I thanked her for what I heard as a compliment, but was deaf to her advice. It was impossible for me to think of Madeleine as someone to avoid—not when I longed to be with her more—even when I reminded myself of the obvious: she was perhaps an even more temporary resident of Vienna—as she had hinted to me several times—utterly dependent on her unreliable sister, a married woman on the run from her husband.
It took the unexpected appearance of that husband to bring this home to me. He arrived in Vienna on the afternoon of August 25, the very day I would make a discovery that not only altered my relationship with Madeleine and diverted my musical career, but made me flee Vienna.
It was a summer day so hot that clouds of steam were rising from the many fountains along the Klappersteinstrasse. I had left the Marquise’s apartment at noon after another leisurely breakfast with Madeleine, picked up some money at Hoyer’s office, and was walking carefree toward the river, where I knew I would find a cool breeze. When I stopped beneath a shade tree to eat a chocolate given me by the Marquise’s maid, Margot (who by that time had become complicitous in my nocturnal visits), I spotted a colorful poster on a nearby wall that stopped me cold:
WORLD-FAMOUS CONJURER,
NECROMANCER & PRESTIDIGITATOR
MAXIMUS GRANDIOS PERFORMING IN A LIMITED ENGAGEMENT AT THE TOFFENKLAUS THEATER
AUGUST 25–29, 8 O’CLOCK
I had learned enough German to know that Grandios meant “Magnificent.” And that Maximus was the German for Massimo. My heart skipped a beat: was Massimo performing in Vienna? And, if so, why hadn’t I heard about it before? I hurried to the Toffenklaus Theater, just a few blocks away, where I found another poster at the main entrance that baffled me even more. The conjurer depicted on the poster was not Massimo. He had close-cropped blond hair, a blond mustache, blue eyes, pointier ears than Massimo, and a squarer, Germanic jaw. On his palm he balanced a miniature man in full evening dress. The man looked bewildered, as well he should, for this was supposedly one of Maximus Grandios’s signature feats: taking a volunteer from the audience and shrinking him to the size of a mouse.
I bought a ticket for that evening’s show and went directly home, where I found Gertrude preparing my lunch.
“Tell me, Gertrude, what do you know about a conjurer named Maximus Grandios?”
She answered almost exactly as Signor Agnetti’s landlady had when I asked about Massimo the Magnificent. “Everyone in Vienna has heard of Maximus Grandios,” she said. “The greatest magician in all of Austria.”
“He lives here, in Vienna?”
“Of course.”
“For how long?”
She looked puzzled. “As long as I can remember.”
“Have you ever seen him perform?”
“Once. With my sister. But we left early.”
“Why?”
“My sister grew frightened. She said his tricks did not seem like tricks. And that all magic is black magic.” Gertrude paused. “She is very religious.”
“But what frightened her?”
“When he made a man disappear—a silversmith—she was sure the man had really disappeared.” She averted her eyes. “I thought it was a trick.”
“Yet you haven’t gone to see Maximus again.”
“No.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I had a friend who knew that silversmith. About two weeks after Maximus’s performance, I met her on the street and she told me the silversmith had disappeared that same night. No one had seen or heard from him. People said he had run off with a woman, or was in trouble with the police.”
“Were the police called in?”
“The chief of police was at the theater. He is a friend of Maximus’s. He assumed the silversmith had fled the city for personal reasons.”
“What was the trick Maximus performed?”
“The silversmith went onstage and Maximus’s assistant gave him a pair of shoes to put on.”
“What kind of shoes?”
“Ordinary-looking shoes. They may have been green—or blue. The silversmith put them on and stepped inside a circle of candles the assistant lit. From the shadows, Maximus asked the silversmith where he would most like to be if he could be anywhere else in the world. The silversmith thought about it, and replied, ‘India.’ Maximus closed his eyes, clapped his hands, and the silversmith was gone without a trace. Like everyone else, I thought our eyes had deceived us and that he would reappear at any moment. When his seat remained empty, I figured he must be backstage. That’s when my sister grew agitated. And she wasn’t surprised two weeks later when I told her the silversmith hadn’t been seen at his shop or his house. ‘If he returned by sea,’ she said, ‘it would take him longer than that.’ ”
“And did he return?” I asked.
Gertrude shook her head. “No, Herr Zen. And I heard that Maximus has never performed the trick again—not in Vienna, anyway.”
2
I was in an aisle seat in the second row when Maximus Grandios came onstage and bowed. He was dressed in white from head to toe. He was as tall and formidable as Massimo Magnifico, with a similar aura of confidence and power. At first glance, he didn’t much resemble Massimo, but there were certain elements—sharply angled left eyebrow, thin upper lip, broad uncreased forehead—that, when looked at discretely, reminded me of Massimo. In fact, if I reassembled Maximus’s face in my mind using only those elements and leaving the rest blank, I might imagine I was looking at Massimo. Because of that, and his name, of course, and his monochromatic costume, I knew I had to meet Maximus Grandios face to face.
The crowd was enthusiastic, buzzing in anticipation, leaping to their feet as one to applaud Maximus’s entrance. It was clear that many of them had been drawn to the theater for something more than light entertainment. There was an edginess, a sense of danger, arising from the mere fact of their having entered Maximus’s domain, where any one of them could meet the fate of the silversmith.
Maximus’s props consisted of three curtained booths, a gold pyramid with a triangular door, and a cauldron dancing with flames. The backdrop was a scarlet curtain on which gold and silver birds were embroidered—except that they were moving, flitting from point to point, sometimes flying off to circle beneath the theater’s domed ceiling before returning to the fabric of the curtain. All through Maximus’s act, those birds were in motion, yet so intense was his presence, and so startling his conjurations, that they barely distracted me.
Without addressing the audience, Maximus began abruptly with a twist on the conjuration that had carried off the silversmith. Standing at center stage, he closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips together, and called out, “Now, Friedrich!”
A few moments later, a woman in the third row jumped up from her seat. “It can’t be!” she screamed.
“Please stand, Friedrich,” Maximus said calmly.
A middle-aged man in the seat beside the woman stood up and looked around apprehensively. He had long gray hair and stooped shoulders. His eyes were blank and his movements stilted. He was dressed in farmer’s overalls, wearing a straw hat and mud-coated boots.
“Tell us where you came from,” Maximus said to him.
“I—I—”
“But how did he get here?” the woman cried. “He hasn’t been to Vienna in years.”
“Please, madame,” Maximus said, “bear with me. It’s all right, Friedrich. You were at your farm, correct?”
The man nodded.
“And where is your farm located?”
The man cleared his throat. “Outside Pressburg. I just left the barn.”
“And the lady beside you is your cousin, correct?”
“My cousin, Anna, yes. But who are you, and where are we?” he stammered.
“Anna,” Maximus said, “is this your cousin
Friedrich, from Pressburg?”
The woman was frozen now, speechless in her fright. Finally she nodded assent.
The audience, stunned into silence at first, burst into applause, after which they began talking excitedly among themselves, asking one another how this man could have materialized suddenly. “Yes, I swear, his seat was empty,” I heard a man in the third row exclaim.
“Quiet!” Maximus boomed, and as soon as the audience settled down, he called out, “Come, Fiona.”
A few seconds passed, and another audience member, an elderly man in a middle row, cried out in astonishment, “My god, it’s her!”
Maximus went through the same gentle interrogation, establishing that the young woman in a blue coat was indeed Fiona, the daughter of the elderly man. She was a dressmaker who resided in Bottenheim. She was as disoriented as Friedrich from Pressburg, her eyes vacant and her hands shaking, but she embraced the elderly man and said, “We’re in a dream, Father. Don’t be afraid.”
Again the audience applauded wildly. Apparently Maximus Grandios could not only make people disappear; he could also make them appear, transported from distant places. And not just any people, but the kin of audience members.
With a lesser magician, one might conclude that these random audience members and appearers had been planted, but I didn’t believe Maximus had done that. For this to be a hoax, all of them would have to be superb actors, with near perfect timing. No, whatever the underlying facts, I had just witnessed a conjuration of the first order, which only the most accomplished magician could pull off, as fantastical and inexplicable as anything in Massimo’s repertoire.
After levitating a woman from the audience, and releasing seventeen doves from a basket that looked as if it could hold no more than two, Maximus delivered an aside about the number 17 in his rolling bass voice: “It is a number associated with water: on the seventeenth day of the second month, the Great Flood began; after his tryst with the nymph Calypso, the Greek hero Odysseus put to sea on a raft for seventeen days; and from its source in the Black Forest to its mouth at the Black Sea, our Danube River is seventeen hundred miles long.” Moments later, he performed the feat depicted on his posters: a man six feet tall, in evening dress, stepped from that golden pyramid twirling a cane, walked into the first booth and reemerged three feet tall; entered the second booth and reemerged one foot in height; then went in and out of the third booth and ended up, six inches tall, with a toothpick for a cane, in the palm of Maximus’s hand.
The audience greeted this feat with loud gasps and bursts of applause, but in a matter of seconds, I lost interest in it, and all that had preceded it, from the appearers to the levitating woman, when Maximus’s assistant walked onstage for the first time.
I recognized her immediately: a slender, long-legged girl wearing a black silk dress and silver slippers. Her long hair was tied back with a black ribbon. A burning taper in each hand, she held her head high and moved gracefully. She seemed as supremely confident as Maximus himself. Slowly she scanned the audience without pausing to meet anyone’s gaze—until she came to me. Our eyes locked, then she smiled and looked away.
It was Meta, Massimo’s assistant! I was certain of it. My first impulse was to rush backstage the moment Maximus completed his curtain calls. But I checked myself. Yes, there was a remote possibility that this was the same girl I had met in Venice. Or, more likely, her Viennese counterpart, a conjurer’s assistant with the same unique ability to reflect whatever image a member of the audience might project upon her (“like a mirror,” as Massimo had said). Just as in Venice, Meta had appeared to me to be, first Julietta, then Adriana, this girl could appear to be Meta herself. Unnatural as it seemed, was it really that much of a jump to think I might be projecting onto this conjurer’s assistant the image of the only other conjurer’s assistant I had ever encountered?
My head was spinning with these questions as I watched Maximus and the girl part the scarlet curtain and disappear.
I could have ascertained Maximus’s address the following day and attempted to pay him a proper visit. But I didn’t want to wait that long. Stepping outside the theater, I put up my collar against the wind and rain. Hailing a cab, I instructed my driver to wait by the entrance to the alley that led to the stage door. I watched the audience stream from the theater, chattering about Maximus’s act. Last to exit were Maximus’s appearers, without their various relations. Linking arms, they floated down the street and, like pale shadows, dissolved in the mist.
As I strained to see some trace of them, a silver coach drawn by four black horses thundered up the alley and sped around the corner. I glimpsed Maximus and the girl inside, peering out their windows. I ordered my driver to follow them, and we were off, up the Kohlstrasse, onto the Boulevard Hauser, around the green marble fountain in the Kirchnerplatz, and down a succession of narrow zigzag alleys. Maximus’s coachman snapped his whip over the black horses, and I was fortunate to have a driver who, with two aging workhorses, managed to stay close behind. Our chase ended abruptly at the south end of the Kundenstrasse.
Set on a broad lawn behind an iron fence, Maximus’s house was flanked by a windowless church and a substation of the metropolitan waterworks. It was an imposing residence, four stories of black granite, with a black-tiled roof and black shutters. The doors and chimneys, and even the path to the front door, were black. It was like a dark mirror image of Massimo’s Venetian villa. But there was no park off the cobbled courtyard, and no imposing statue, just an enormous oak tree whose upper boughs were lined with dozens of crows, gleaming in the rain.
I watched Maximus and the girl step from their coach and enter the house. I waited a moment as their coach continued around the house to a stable, then paid my driver and walked up to the front door. The door knocker was a black lightning bolt.
The footman who opened the door was short and bald, but otherwise did not resemble Lodovico, Massimo’s footman. He had a hatchet profile, long nose, and a short red beard. He wore a black patch over one eye. His livery was also black. Like Lodovico, he wore a single earring; but it was in his right ear, not his left, and it was onyx to Lodovico’s ivory. And unlike Lodovico, he spoke more than one syllable at a time.
“Come in,” he said.
“Thank you. And your name would be …”
“Ludwig. My master is expecting you.”
Ludwig is the German version of Lodovico; that it was the footman’s name did not surprise me as much as the fact that Maximus was expecting me.
“Let me dry your coat,” Ludwig said. “Please wait here.”
He carried away my coat and I gazed down three long hallways that emanated from the foyer. They were lined with pots of black flowers whose rich, peppery fragrance filled the air. I expected everything in the house to counterpoint the contents of Massimo’s villa—black rooms, furniture, carpets—but it wasn’t like that at all. The hallways were painted yellow, the doors blue, and the Turkish carpets were a swirl of colors. The chandeliers’ red crystals cast sparks off the ceilings. And the draperies depicted scenes out of Greek mythology—Atalanta and her golden apples, Hephaistos throwing his net over Ares and Aphrodite, Hades’s abduction of Persephone—which I recognized from a book of Madeleine’s.
Ludwig returned and beckoned me to follow him down the middle hallway. The five doors off that hallway were shut. But as we approached the last one, it opened and two black mastiffs emerged and began circling me. Had they reared up on their hind legs, they would easily have been taller than me. But they were friendly, and after sniffing me, they retreated. Next I heard a loud tinkling, and a half dozen black cats wearing bells on their collars ran past us. At the end of this hallway, we entered a large circular room with a domed ceiling. An oak table sat at the center of the room beneath a massive candelabra. Though it could easily seat twenty guests, there were only three place settings at one end. The plates and goblets were silver and the napkins linen. On the lower third of the wall there was a three-hundred-sixty-degr
ee mural of Chinese pilgrims disembarking from barges on a broad river and marching along a dusty yellow road, through forests and fields, over rocky hills, and up a steep, dangerous path to a mountaintop temple glittering with sunlight. The pilgrims numbered all varieties of humanity: princes and beggars, athletes and cripples, warriors and priests, nuns and courtesans, the old and the newborn. I felt that even if I gazed at it for days, or weeks, I would barely take in its details. But as incredible as the mural was, it was the floor in that circular room that riveted me. The octagonal tiles were not marble or stone, but glass, beneath which pale green water was flowing fast, punctuated by flashes of color—red, orange, yellow. They were fish!
“An underground tributary of the Danube flows beneath this house,” the voice of Maximus boomed. “The ancient tribes that inhabited this valley took sustenance from such streams.” He chuckled. “Unlike their descendants, they preferred fishing to hunting wild boar.”
I couldn’t figure out where Maximus was until I glanced up and saw him standing on a high balcony that was obviously connected to a room on the fourth floor. He was wearing a black robe and a red turban.
“Welcome, Nicolò Zen! You’re just in time for dinner. Take a seat, and I’ll be right down.”
As I approached the table, his assistant entered the room from a door on my right. She had changed into a black dressing gown and removed the ribbon from her hair, which flowed over her shoulders. She wore silver bracelets on her wrists and a cat’s-eye ring on her left hand. “Hello,” she said, barely acknowledging me.
“I’m Nicolò.”
“I know,” she said, sitting down. “I’m Lila.”