Confessor (20 page)

“First, the base metal.” His right hand went to the deeper of the two dishes and rose, sprinkling a dark gray substance so that it fell, like sand in an hourglass, back into its container. “Iron filings. A good starting point for base metal. And this”—the brass cylindrical vial—“this is a vial which once, they tell me, belonged to Zosimus the Panoplite, who lived around the fourth century
A.D.

“Even by then there was a mixture said to react with any metal to form gold. It consisted mainly of salt, mercury and sulfur. It is that same mixture we sometimes hear called the Vinegar of the Sages. In my own quest for the true substance, I discovered that one ingredient was missing. To complete the mixture, one must add the tears of a twenty-one-year-old virgin—either masculine or feminine; one has to be politically correct. After a long search I found these tears and so was successful in producing a small quantity of a mixture close to the Vinegar of the Sages. Let me show you. First the base metal …” He took several pinches of the iron filings, carefully letting them trickle into the brass vial.

“Next, a delicate mixing of the metal with the secret ingredient.” He lifted the glass stopper from the blue bottle and transferred one drop of the liquid three times, then replaced the cork on the brass vial.

“It is well known that the Vinegar of the Sages must be used accompanied by certain words which I must keep secret.” His lips moved soundlessly as he held the vial in his right hand, placing it at various points on the table. A student of the occult would have recognized that the way he placed the vial followed the lines of the Pentagram.

“Now, it should be done.” Damautus uncorked the vial and tipped the contents onto the shallow silver dish. Instead of iron filings, a stream of finely ground gold sandy material trickled from the vial.

Damautus shrugged and made a petulant noise. “Not quite.” He looked up and smiled. “A little more of the mixture, I think,” he said, pouring the fine gold back into the vial.

Now he added one more drop from the blue bottle, placed the cork back onto the vial and went through the business of soundless mumbling and moving of the vial again.

This time, when he uncorked the vial and tipped it onto the table, three small hard golden nuggets rolled out.

“There. Base metal into gold.”

He waited for the scatter of applause and then picked up the three nuggets. “The real trick is to make the gold into something one can freely use. Watch.” Placing the nuggets on the palm of his hand, Damautus reached out so everyone could see that the hand held only the trio of shining pieces. He closed the fingers of his right hand, blew on it and opened the hand once more. In place of the three nuggets lay a gold piece the size of a silver dollar.

Applause started. “Wait,” he cautioned. “There is one problem in turning base metal into gold using this method. Unhappily, the gold is unstable. Watch.” He flicked the gold coin into the air. Herbie was convinced that the coin altered as it reached its apogee, for when it fell back into Damautus’s palm, it had become a silver dollar.

“You see the dangers.” Damautus closed his hand into a fist again and this time turned the clenched hand, thumb upwards. Leaning forward, he allowed a thin trickle of what could have been sparkling golden sand to ran from his fist onto the shallow dish. Only then, with a smile and a sideways nod of the head, did Damautus acknowledge the applause, showing the hand completely empty.

To Herbie, the fantastic part about what he had seen was that everything had been done in the open, with hands away from his body and the forearms naked.

“Is marvelous, eh?” He turned to Bex Olesker.

“Oh, it’s clever enough.” She made a sour face. “Very clever, but it’s a trick. I’d like to know how he does it.”

“If it’s a clever trick, you do it then,” Kruger almost barked. But on the screen, Damautus, still smiling, had begun to talk again. “There are, of course, other ways of making metal into currency.” He smiled, rolling a small cube of silverlike metal onto the table. The cube was no bigger than a Monopoly die.

“This way requires only the skill and knowledge of one equipped with the right incantations.” He covered the cube with his right hand and started a rolling motion, his hand flat against the cube. “Now see.” Lifting his hand, he revealed that the cube had become a small sphere. “The art is in making the metal into the right shape.” His hand was empty as he brought it down over the sphere, starting the rolling motion again, his lips moving as though he were concentrating on the metal under his palm. This time, when he lifted his hand, the sphere was replaced by a flat blank of silver, which he flicked into the air and caught, offering it forward for the audience’s inspection.

“It is from blanks like this that coins are made.” Another smile. “The problem, however, is that one cannot control what kind of coin materializes.” The silver blank was dropped onto the table again, the hand shown empty and then placed over the silver disk and immediately lifted to reveal a rough, irregular-sided coin. “A silver doubloon or a groat or whatever it is,” holding the ancient coin between finger and thumb. “The real object is to get its present-day value in usable coinage.” The old coin slid back to the flat of his open hand, in full view as he closed the fingers. Almost immediately he opened them and slowly dropped four silver half-dollars onto the table.

“There, we might be able to use these. Four half-dollars. Two American dollars.”

The silver coins remained in view, spread towards the front of the table, as Damautus’s hands moved quickly, clearing away the other items and replacing them with a wineglass, a packet of cigarettes, a small round silver box with a lid, and an oblong glass casket with brass corner pieces. This casket was around three by seven inches, and about three inches deep.

“We’ve made a couple of dollars so far.” Damautus never once went out of character, and he spoke each word as though passing some confidential secret to each individual member of the audience. “Let’s see if we can keep the money this time.”

Picking up the casket, he showed that the top was a hinged lid, then he placed it in the center of the table.

“Smoking can damage your health”—he picked up the pack of cigarettes—“so I won’t smoke.” He laid the packet across the top of the wineglass and covered the whole thing with a square of black silk. “Let’s cover all the glass, just in case we get a lightning strike,” throwing another black-and-silver cloth across the casket. “Now, the coins.” He scooped the four half-dollars into his right hand and picked up the round silver box, clearly putting the four coins into it, one at a time, then dropping the lid on top. This he placed onto the covered pack of cigarettes, snapped his fingers and immediately picked the box up again, lifting the lid, turning it over to show the four coins had vanished.

“Into thin air,” he said, lifting the packet of cigarettes and the silk from the glass, which was now filled with thick, boiling smoke. “Or thick smoke.”

For the first time that evening, Damautus rose and lifted the glass full of smoke. “Maybe,” he said, “if I pour the smoke towards the covered casket, you might just see where the coins went. You’ll certainly hear them.”

His hand holding the glass was almost two feet above the covered casket. He tipped the glass and the smoke poured downwards like liquid. The camera held both the glass and the casket in frame and Herbie swore that he saw at least two of the coins drift down towards the casket in slow motion through the smoke. He also heard the sounds as one by one the coins thudded and clinked against the casket, and the moment the fourth coin was heard, Damautus put the glass down and whipped the silk from the casket, picking it up and holding it high so that the four coins now inside could be seen clearly. In case someone was not quite certain, he opened the lid and took the coins out one at a time, tossing them back onto the table as he took his final bow.

“You see that?” Herbie was as excited as a schoolboy. “Bex, did
you
see those coins drifting through the smoke?”

“I thought I did, but I bet it was a camera trick; they fell too slowly.”

“They said no camera tricks.”

“What do we know? They all lie, that’s one of the things I’m unhappy about. The magician gets up there and does incredible things, defies logic, yet you know he’s telling you one thing while something else is happening.”

“How do you
know
that, Bex? You tell your kids there’s no Santa Claus?”

“I haven’t got any kids.”

“So? So, you miss the fun. Me, I still believe in Santa Claus, and I believe in what old Gus did on that tape. Completely I believed it.”

“You’re sure that was Gus?”

“One hundred percent proof.”

“A good and clever disguise.”

“A very good disguise: a wonderful wig, a little change here and there, and he’s a different person.”

“But you’re sure it’s Gus?”

“Completely sure. Know him anywhere.”

“But you said …”

“You want to watch another tape?”

“No, I’m ready for bed. What’re we doing tomorrow?”

“We’re talking to the good widow Keene whether Tony Worboys likes it or not.”

She stood, her eyes on him, an eyebrow cocked, the look one of disbelief. “You believe in elves and fairies as well?” She was still harping on his delight at Gus’s magic show.

“Not quite. But I think people like that … like Gus … can bring wonders into our lives. Entertainment, bewilderment. Maybe a return to childhood isn’t so bad.”

Bex grunted. Then: “Even if you’re right, how does it assist in a murder investigation—probably a terrorist murder?”

“Probably because this is a part of Gus’s life that none of his friends shared. I’ve known him for years, yet never guessed he could perform like this. It’s a new dimension—that’s the right word, Bex? Yes?”

“Dimension, sure. But I still don’t see how it helps.”

“In the long run, who knows? All I’m saying is that until now I did not know what Gus could do. Maybe it has no bearing but, again,
nobody
knew and it’s odd that someone who was a guardian of secrets led a second secret life. Somehow it jars.”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “I understand that. What about the widow Keene? Hasn’t she been given a once-over already?”

“Just lightly browned on both sides. The powers that be really didn’t want her put to the torture until the shock of Gus’s death had begun to wear off.”

“But—”

“But, I know, Bex. I know. Should have been done straightaway. I tried, but it wasn’t to be. We hit her tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to watch another video?”

“I’m absolutely positive. I would like to use the telephone, though. What’s the situation regarding private use of phones here?”

“Whatever you like. Might have a trace on them. All art-of-the-state here. But you can ring your boyfriend, no problem.”

She colored, a flash of anger crossing her eyes like a summer squall. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Husband then.”

“You’d better know, here and now, so that you won’t put your foot in it again. I have a girlfriend, okay?”

“Sure. Okay. Fine. No problem.” So, he thought, what’s wrong with that? Why the drama?

He went back into what he had called Merlin’s cave and sought out another video, spending half an hour watching Gus, as Claudius Damautus, do impossible things. He named a word only thought of by a spectator leafing through a book. He synchronized his wristwatch with that of a lady, then asked her just to think of a time and write it down; when the time was revealed, he showed that the hands of his own watch had moved to the time thought of by the lady.

He caused three finger rings, borrowed from his audience, to become linked together—each spectator identifying his or her ring—and then unlink. He did amazing things with playing cards—not just card tricks, but mysteries of impossibility where cards were simply thought of and then revealed to be missing from the deck; another card, merely thought of, was discovered under the person—on the chair upon which the man had been sitting. Gus, in his guise as Damautus, prophesied colors chosen at random; gave details of the contents of a woman’s handbag and many other impossibilities.

Herbie went to bed, his mind reeling from watching the Gus he had known become a man he would never in a thousand years have truly known. Foolishly, he took a book from the secret library to bed with him and learned about the first stirrings of this art in the childhood of the planet. He read about people of whom he had never heard, for the book reached back through the sands of time to early religious magic: the conjuring up of gods and oracles in Egypt; the magical methods of priests in Greece and Rome; Dedi, who had lived twenty-six hundred years before Christ and was reputed to have decapitated and restored the heads of geese and an ox; Zoroaster; Simon Magus; Elymas the Sorcerer; Apollonius of Tyana; and the Oracle of Abonotica.

As he finally drifted into sleep, he wondered at the knowledge Gus Keene would have had to acquire in order to perform these seemingly incredible feats. He slept restlessly, dreaming of sticks that turned into serpents and ghostly figures appearing on the walls of Greek temples.

Out in the other world,
Yussif
was talking to the
Intiqam
teams.

Y
USSIF
, THE LOGISTICS AND
communication backup for the two
Intiqam
teams, consisted of six men. Three hidden away in a remote cottage in the Hudson Valley, upstate New York, and another three living deep in the heart of rural Oxfordshire, England, near the thriving market town of Wantage.

Even these men who received and passed on instructions to the
Intiqam
teams did not possess the full, sweeping and demonic details of the master plan that was at the heart of
Intiqam
. Only one man carried all the facts, and he was guarded day and night in a pleasant villa outside Baghdad. He was also not known by name. The many people who made up the various teams called him the
Biwãba
—the Gatekeeper.

He was more than just the keeper of plots, this silent, secretive tall man with a huge hooked nose, and eyes that seemed to blaze into men’s souls, making his immediate body servants consider him to be like some enormous bird of prey.