Carter Beats the Devil (74 page)

Baby started chewing.

Mysterioso let out a wounded scream. His knees collapsing under him, he bent forward until his face was against the stage. His lungs filled with air and he screamed—agonized, horrified—again.

Carter, who had been fruitlessly banging his cuffed wrist against the backdrop, paused. He saw Baby chewing and heard Mysterioso, and knew what had happened. He loved his pets and could have felt sorry for Mysterioso, the way he had once years ago after Blackmail, but he didn’t.
Good,
he thought, and turned his attention to the hand overhead, which had entirely drained of blood. It no longer felt like his hand but like a wooden paddle someone had attached to his wrist.

. . .

Over the stage, Phoebe was trying to get her bearings. The chair had come to a full stop after just a second of violent upward motion, as if fired out of a cannon. She had sat, hands gripping the wooden arms, listening to the voices below.

She had heard Mysterioso asking about Baby, and then Carter clapping. She listened closer for clues to her own location. Even when she was a girl, and still had her sight, she had realized she could
hear
objects. She had risen from bed with her eyes closed and knew, somehow, where the walls were, where the bureau was.

When she went blind, she learned that nearly every blind person had that proximity sense as a child and hoped it would help them, but it didn’t. Still, there were the magical few who could find their way around Lake Merritt. They made her terribly jealous. For her, finding her way around unfamiliar surroundings was hit or miss, and so here, over the stage, she put her toes out first, gingerly.

The chair could be alone, hanging by a wire, in empty space. There was in fact empty space under her feet. A fluttery feeling radiated to her palms. She pointed with her toes, walking them through the air. They hit something solid.

She took her shoes off and put them in her lap. She removed her stockings and balled them into her shoes. Using her bare feet, she felt along the edges—it was a wooden platform and it seemed to extend as far as her feet could reach. If Carter could remain calm, so could she. They would work together. She had to believe that. She lifted herself out of her chair and put both feet on the wood. She got on her knees and felt with her hands. Glad she hadn’t taken a broad step, for it wasn’t a platform, just a plank eighteen inches wide.

She left her shoes behind and tucked the hem of her dress into her
waistband so she could crawl forward. She crawled very slowly, listening to the sounds below her. When she heard Carter yell, “Never mistake obnoxiousness for audacity,” she grinned. He was a fighter.

The plank ended, and then Phoebe, confirming it led to a wider platform with a railing, stood. She smelled gasoline and exhaust, and when her hands touched rubber, and metal, she knew exactly where she was. She could hear, below, almost directly below, Mysterioso call out, “Little man, where are you?”

She ran her hands all over it, trying to turn everything she felt into a weapon. Headlamp, handlebars, the seats, the engine, the tires. What was in the panniers? They were empty. Why didn’t motorcycles come with machine guns and flamethrowers?

She heard Mysterioso scream. It sounded like keening. He was close by. How close?

If she started the motorcycle, and made it go over the platform, she could drop it on him.

It was a crazy idea. There was no way to accurately drop a motorcycle off the platform and onto a specific person who was standing nearby. Yet she had no further ideas. Locating the throttle was easy. Next she had to find the petcock and the kickstarter.

. . .

Mysterioso hovered by the cage. He was silent. Carter watched him carefully while thinking about his hand, which he continued to imagine being made of wood. An image of releasing himself came to mind; he banished it. He didn’t like the way that particular release worked.

Inside the cage, Baby was still chewing sporadically. Mysterioso picked up the power line. Carter shook his head, as if that would help. He called out, “Don’t do it,” which at least made the other magician look his way, eyes brimming.

Making a warrior’s cry, Mysterioso brought the 240-volt line against the bars of the cage. Baby switched from chewing to licking his paw and bringing it over his face to clean himself. Mysterioso yelled again, banging his cable against the cage. But it wasn’t grounded, and the current passed through harmlessly.

Mysterioso dropped the cable. He saw motion on the other side of the cage. He walked there, and saw, now collapsed on the floor, Agent Griffin. He was on his side, hands still cuffed, arms over his head, like a swimmer caught in mid-dive.

Mysterioso drew his gun and aimed it, then paused. Griffin was holding something in his hand. An eye hook.

He turned fast, but not fast enough, for Baby had already launched against the cage’s door, which swung open and knocked Mysterioso down.

Carter yelled encouragement as Baby jumped from the cage. Above the stage, Phoebe had found the petcock, and the throttle, and she stood astride the motorcycle, her bare foot finding the kickstarter. She pushed down tentatively. A purr, the sound of something spinning. But nothing else.

Miraculously, Mysterioso managed to hold on to his gun, and as he pushed himself upright, he looked for the lion but did not see him until Baby was on him. Baby roared, and a spiked paw the size of a frying pan knocked Mysterioso in the face. The gun skittered across the floor. Baby snarled and placed his jaws around Mysterioso’s chest, ready to dig in.

Phoebe kicked the motorcycle over. The engine came to life. It coughed. Then, carburetors flooding, it backfired.

Baby fell over.

Carter watched with sheer disbelief. One moment, savagery; the next, the lion groaned and collapsed and his enemy was saved. He unthinkingly tried to bring his hands together to clap—of course he couldn’t. Trembling with adrenaline, Mysterioso crab-walked backward, eyes on the lion, whose eyes were closed, stomach rising and falling peacefully.

Mysterioso sat upright. He looked himself over, finding cuts and tears, but all his limbs accounted for. He laughed. Bits of Handsome’s hair clung to his Vandyke.

He glanced at Carter slyly, and then looked toward the sound of the motorcycle engine. Carter strained against the knife again. He saw his enemy shading his eyes as he looked upward, taking slow paces.

Over the engine noise, Phoebe could hear very little. Someone nearby, speaking to her.

“You can come out now, Phoebe,” Mysterioso called. “I won’t hurt you.” She seethed: he spoke as if she were a child. This gave her an idea. It began with pretending they were both idiots.

“Stand where I can see you,” she said.

“See me?”

Carter yelled, “Hey!” for though he couldn’t hear the conversation—the engine drowned them out—the thought of Phoebe speaking to Mysterioso terrified him.

“See me?” Mysterioso shook his head. “Is there a place on God’s green earth where you can see me?”

“That’s not nice,” she said. She was thinking,
Please underestimate me.

“I apologize.” She could hear from the sound of his voice that he was walking in circles below the platform, looking for ways up, or at least looking for her silhouette. And even from this height, she could smell his cheap cologne.

She said, “Just stand in front of the platform.”

“How did you start the motorcycle?”

“Please, I’m very frightened. I need to know I can trust you.”

Mysterioso took a step. He hesitated. Standing directly in front of a running motorcycle? He thought not. He stopped to the left-hand side of the platform and folded his arms. “I’m standing right here,” he said.

“Where?”

“Right here.” He tilted his head back.

Phoebe, gasoline line in hand, took careful aim at the voice and drained the full fourteen-liter tank directly onto Mysterioso. He caught the first dump in his face, the rest on his head and shoulders.

Phoebe killed the engine. Sputtering, Mysterioso half-slid, half-staggered away from her. She listened to this, unsure how satisfied to feel.

With the engine off, she heard Carter yelling her name.

“I’ve dowsed him in fuel,” she yelled. “Can you get him?”

“Yes!” Carter said, “Good work!” but he wasn’t eager to tell her he was pinned to a board like a beetle. He saw a form moving haltingly up the ladder on the far wall. “Phoebe, get away from the platform. Go up the rope ladder.”

After he said that, he was silent. He was no good to anyone staying here. And he realized the only thing that kept him trapped was that he was holding on to magic. How would a magician get away? He would have a gimmick. Or an accomplice. Baby would stay in a heap until he clapped. Griffin was unconscious or worse. A magician would use cunning, natural forces, optics, physics, he would use his physical body, which he’d trained to perform what seemed impossible. But Carter was freed of being a magician.

Now, he had to do something horrible. He began to turn his mind off, bringing the cold, anatomical terms into focus. Mysterioso had planted the knife vertically, between his middle and index fingers, in the valley of the second palmar interosseous, probably turning the second and third shafts of the metacarpi into shrapnel. His hand—a cozy array of levers and pulleys whose delicate motion had helped Carter find some peace. He said a silent good-bye to them.

He lifted both heels up. Tucked his knees against his chest. He
managed to bend his arm and hung there for a moment, the pressure causing a new fountain of blood as his weight dragged him down a quarter inch, a half inch, opening the gouge around the knife. Not enough. Full weight, tugging, still, unrelenting, a terrible limitless pain jolting down his arm. He dropped to the ground.

Arm now down, feeling began to return—he hadn’t even been aware how blessedly numb he’d been. He couldn’t look. He touched his left fingertips to his right hand and confirmed he had ripped a hole from his palm upward and through the line of bones and cartilage between his fingers, which seemed to hang inappropriately from his hand. With the crème-colored silks in his pocket, he improvised a bandage that immediately became a map of another world, red oceans spilling over white continents. Mechanically, his left hand went up his right sleeve and pulled out a wire. He inserted it and the cuffs fell to the ground.

He looked at the knife in the board and thought about ripping it out. Too difficult. He saw Mysterioso overhead leaping from the ladder and onto the top of a piece of the Egyptian scenery, walking across it.

The props table. No matches. No self-lighting candles. The other five throwing knives were gone. Albert had used them all during the show. Albert who was such a fire bug.

Carter touched his pockets. Flash paper. The three sheets he’d taken from Albert. He had those. They only worked intermittently, with the right friction, and had less flame than a match head, perfect when you needed to dazzle the eye. But Albert had juggled torches without igniting these three papers—they were almost useless. The bullet-catching pistols, where were they?

Looking overhead—Mysterioso was spiderlike, crawling up a ladder stealthily; Carter couldn’t see Phoebe, but he hoped she had found cover somewhere impenetrable. Carter returned to the middle of the stage, where Mysterioso had laid the pistols down. He looked on the black-matted floor, under a triad of spotlights that gave perfect illumination for yards, but they were gone. He remembered Griffin had kicked them away. He heard quick footsteps overhead, two kinds, one light, the other in heavy boots. One-handed, bleeding, armed with three sheets of flash paper, he set off toward the rafters, where his last battle awaited.

Rather, he tried. He ended up making a wide circle. Things were getting fuzzy. Climbing a ladder one handed? There was an elevator, but it was parked at the top of the highest catwalk.

He looked upward. There were levels of catwalks and flies crossing
like tree branches. There were banks of lights. He saw, suspended over the stage, the statues from the Egyptian illusion. He stared at them. Brilliant, golden, heavy.

. . .

The rope ladder Phoebe had found went several vertical yards up to an iron walkway that felt cold against her feet. She padded along, hands on the waist-high railing, attuned to the slightest vibrations in the metal. She could hear small aquatic sounds, hollow and echoing, which meant she was over the water tank. What was near that? What was useful?

A sudden clang of boots on metal. The close seasick smell of gasoline. She clutched at the railing. She was forty feet in the air.

“I’m unarmed,” she said in a small voice.

“Good,” he replied and drew back his fist. But there was a turbinelike sound of the Ramses statue dropping on its cable, and Mysterioso turned his head in anticipation of seeing it crash to the stage.

There followed a panoply of things in motion, taken together as inevitable as the figures on a giant village clockworks striking the hour: Mysterioso’s head turning downward, toward the stage, and Charles Carter, riding the Fairbanks rope, propelling upward. Mysterioso, ready to wrestle with him, took a step toward Phoebe, who tripped, yelling as she fell onto the catwalk. Mysterioso gripped the railing so that if Carter pried him away, they would fall forty feet together. The natural motion of the rope forced Carter up and out, in a parabola, and he jumped, feet planted just outside the railing, on the edge of the catwalk, and grabbed Mysterioso in a bear hug, one arm under the armpit, the other squeezing him around the neck. With arms linked, jerking with his own dead weight, Carter pulled him over the railing.

The plaster statue smashed onto the stage, coming apart into chicken wire and powder. Phoebe was alone. She held tightly to the still-shaking catwalk. She had no idea what had happened. She didn’t hear the impact of bodies.

“Charlie?”

Below the catwalk, spread out in all dimensions, with wires and filaments as translucent and complex as a spider web, was the asrah levitation device that Carter, not Kellar, had designed. Despite its delicacy—under the stage lights, it was of course invisible—it was as strong as high-tensile fishing wire. It was a net stretched between springs tense enough to launch boulders over distant battlements. Carter and Mysterioso had landed in its embrace, bouncing slightly, and safely, twenty-five feet over the stage. But each was tangled in threads they couldn’t see. Two bloody,
contorted men seeming to float in the ether as if waiting for a giant arachnid.