The Spirit Cabinet (21 page)

As Preston passed him the deck, Kaz said quietly, “Hey, Preston. I’m suing your fat ass,” and sprang suddenly to his feet. Preston supposed that he’d meant the action to be dramatic, but Kaz’s forte did not lie in the physical realm. He bolted too far forward, smashing his hips into the chairback in front. He folded up, bent backwards to correct and landed once more in his seat. Then he rose again, this time with greater care. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, turning around so that he could be seen by more of the little crowd, “I believe this deck is none of those things he says it isn’t.”

“Hey, Kaz,” put in Preston, “nice sentence.” The crack got a little chuckle.

“But you have to be careful around guys like Preston. Maybe he left something out. For example, he might have a locator card in here. That would be a card shaved just a little bit shorter than the rest, so Preston could find it any time he wanted just by running his fingertips over the end of the deck like this …” Kaz demonstrated, once, twice, again. Then he shrugged and handed back the deck. “Ordinary deck of cards,” he pronounced.

“All that palaver,” mumbled Preston, “and he couldn’t even find it.” He shuffled the deck a few times, trying to think of what to do. Not about Kaz and his silly threat to sue—
fuck Kaz and the elephant he rides offstage on
—but this portion of the show was unplanned. He simply did five or six card tricks with various
members of the audience. He knew thousands of card tricks—he likely knew more than any other human being on the planet—so they changed from night to night, according to his mood or whim. “Here’s a good one,” he said aloud, selecting an audience member—in this case a small man who sat across the aisle from Kaz—and fanning the cards under his nose.

“Did you hear me?” whispered Kaz as Preston turned his back.

“Pick a card.” As the man made his selection, Preston executed a small half-turn and demanded, “Sue me for what, Kaz?”

“Collusion.”

“Yes, well done, sir.” Preston, relieved to see that the man had taken the force card, said, “I’ll turn my back, you show the face to the people around you.”

Now Preston could direct the full bloodshot scorn of his eyeballs at the world-famous Kaz. “What the hell are you talking about, Kaz?”

“You and those two German faggots are buddy-buddy-buddy.”

“Rudolfo,” countered Preston, “is Swiss.” He spun back to the small man. “Now, look. I’m going to give you the rest of the deck. Put your card back in and shuffle them.”

“See?” hissed Kaz behind his back. “You
know
that. Rudolfo is Swiss; only someone very close to them would know that. And when that someone was involved in what was supposed to be a fair auction—”

“Have you shuffled the cards well, sir? Very good. Now go through the deck and find me your selected card.”

“We’ve been watching you,” said Kaz. He was breathing very heavily, creating a huge cloud of rancid effluvium. “You went and saw their show. You never came to see my show.”

Preston suddenly felt very sorry for Kaz, who could be wounded by such a small thing. If he hadn’t been in front of such an audience, Preston would have told Kaz the truth, as much
of the truth as he knew. Kaz might have gone away happy and contented.

“I can’t find the card,” giggled the small man.

“Can’t find it? What the hell did you do with it?”

“I don’t know,” the small man said with effort, now almost consumed by giggles. “It’s just not there.”

“You lost the card?”

“I guess so,” agreed the small man.

“Then you owe me two-and-a-half bucks. Because a fifty-one card deck is useless. What card was it, anyway?”

“The eight of spades.”

“Damn,” said Preston. “That’s one of my favourite cards.”

“Sure,” whispered Kaz, ” ’cause it’s the one you palmed off.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Preston loudly. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, hey, aren’t magicians bound by a code of brotherhood? Well, I want you to know that Kaz and I are actually in—what was that word?—
collusion
. Accusing me of palming off that card was classic misdirection. Because, you know where that eight of spades is right now? It’s in his underwear.”

“Bullshit,” sniped Kaz.

“Seriously.”

“
I
couldn’t even have put that card in my underwear.”

Preston shrugged modestly. “What can I tell you? That’s where it is.”

Kaz rose from his seat, a skeptical look drawing his face even longer, and ran his thin hand down the back of his tight jeans. He rummaged around for the briefest of moments, and then withdrew his hand. The eight of spades was caught between the tips of his first and second fingers.

“Kaz, ladies and gentlemen!” shouted Preston, gesticulating in the general direction of the gaunt conjuror with halitosis. The people applauded, so Kaz had no choice but to bow deeply, which he did with all the grace of a puppet with snapped strings.
He then fled the theatre, leaving behind only lingering fumes.

“There goes,” said Preston to the audience, “one very talented—and strange—guy.”

Rudolfo had to revise his sleep deprivation theory. Jurgen didn’t suffer from sleeplessness. Jurgen got
no
sleep, but suffered no ill effects. He seemed somehow to have lost his need for sleep. For the past few nights Rudolfo had woken up at all hours—once as early as three-fifteen—to find the other half of the circular bed deserted. He had floated dreamily down to the kitchen, feigning an interest in a midnight snack, filching a carrot out of the crisper, perhaps an apple or banana. Chewing peacefully (the ghostly white spectre Samson walking silently at his heels) Rudolfo had drifted through the mansion. He’d made no special effort to pass by the Grotto, but he knew that if he continued drifting, he would do so soon enough. And always the remote-controlled boulder was rolled into place, and a little light from inside bled slightly around its hulking shape.

One night Rudolfo stood stock still some ten feet away from the Grotto’s boulder and was overcome with shivering. His breath came out in short gasps and his skin, every square inch of it, prickled and beaded with sweat. Jurgen must be sick.

Preston’s Show was going very well, indeed. He was somehow buoyed, made cocky, by the encounter with Kaz. Preston didn’t consider himself a competitive man. He disdained the Magic Olympics, for example. He thought the event was adolescent at best, likely harmful to the craft, so he never went even though it was held in his hometown. But if he did, he knew he would surely kick some international butt. The truth of the matter is that Preston wasn’t competitive because he knew he was the best, in his own small way.

So Preston did some tricks he didn’t always do, stuff that
even he found a little difficult. Stuff that required a gambler’s confident recklessness, counting off three cards when he was really clutching twenty, making blind forces, disregarding sight-lines so that—were he not the best and his fingers the quickest—all of the sleights could be detected.

“Okay,” said Preston, truing the cards on his little production table. “I need another volunteer from the audience.”

He watched arms flower upwards. He eliminated the hairy ones first of all. He disregarded the ones with fat drooping beneath the muscle. He generally tried to pick a fairly good-looking arm, hoping that someone fairly good-looking was attached to it.

On this night, no particular arm seemed quite the ticket. Preston took much longer with the selection than he should have. Good thing he had nothing but scorn for his father’s cornball and antiquated theories of Entertainment.
Alacrity
, that’s what Preston the Magnificent had always counselled. His son appraised each arm with some care, looking for, well, he didn’t know what. But there was no denying the sensation of uniqueness that infused the night, an ember of excitement in his tummy where there had been nothing previously.

Then the arm appeared, unfolding with mechanical precision, as if controlled by levers and pulleys. When it was fully extended, its fingers blossomed into a little bouquet, long thin petals tipped with golden nails. Preston lifted the deck of cards and motioned vaguely in the direction of the arm.

The arm rocketed upwards then, and in its wake there came a shoulder, a breast, a hip. “You,” Preston grunted, and such was the brilliance of the smile that Miranda returned that the heads in the audience snapped back, startled.

“Oh, say, look who has come! Long see, no time.” Rudolfo stepped back into the foyer and allowed Dr. Merdam to enter. He
had to move back quite a bit because Merdam weighed over four hundred pounds.

Despite the fact that the audience at the Abraxas had an average weight of well over two hundred pounds, Rudolfo disliked fat people, generally. But Dr. Merdam was different, because in some peculiar way, he didn’t
seem
fat. He gave the illusion of daintiness, in this instance executing a little half-turn so he could fit through the doorway and then shuffling through with tiny balletic minces. He wore a dark suit, as ever, a plain white shirt and a florid bow tie. All remarkably clean; Dr. Merdam appeared always to be dressed in new clothes. He was a very handsome man, despite the roundness of his face, an olive-skinned beauty with large dark eyes and full lips.

“Hello, Rudolfo,” he said. “You seem surprised to see me. I thought we had an appointment.”

Rudolfo’s eyes widened briefly; he closed his mouth so tightly his thin lips blanched.

“You know,” Dr. Merdam said, “you don’t look at all well.” Another remarkable thing about the doctor was that despite carting around all that extra weight under the heartless Nevadan sun, he didn’t sweat. He often—as he did now—removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket to pat daintily at his upper lip, but this seemed to be more emotionally palliative than anything else, as though the handkerchief were laced with his mother’s own perfume.

“Doc,” said Rudolfo with soft urgency, “keep a button on the yapper.”

The doctor, a little alarmed, turned and waltzed daintily toward the sunken living room, tiny animals nipping at his polished heels.

“Jurgen!” Rudolfo bellowed. “Guess what? Today is an appointment to be medically examined which we have made many weeks ago and completely all forgotten about!”

Merdam executed a nimble glissade down the short flight of stairs. The animals, far less graceful in comparison, tumbled off the top riser.

Rudolfo actually had quite a bit to do with Dr. Merdam’s gracefulness, although he’d forgotten this. When they’d first met, years ago, Merdam had been merely chunky, a perspiring man who couldn’t keep his shirt tucked in properly. Rudolfo had gone to visit his office complaining about a strange pain in his left shoulder, a snarling bite that chewed at the muscle and sinew whenever he executed the military press.

These were the days before the Abraxas Hotel. These were the days when Jurgen and Rudolfo did only ten minutes between bare-breasted bubble-bottomed showgirls at the hotels and motels on the fringes of Vegas, for which they received exactly one hundred dollars per night. These circumstances embittered the duo, because just a few months previously they had been a huge sensation in Paris, so much so that when something truly weird occurred, your average Parisian was likely to comment,
“Mais, c’est trés Jurgen et Rudolfo!”
In Las Vegas they rented a single room in a motel that had the very strange name of Tophet—it was actually “Top of the Town,” but several of the neon bulbs were blown—where they lived with Samson, three vermilion flycatchers, a snowy egret, a crimson stilt and an overweight rabbit.

Jurgen spent his days sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in a genteel manner, staring forlornly at the ghostly images produced by the antique television set in their room. He watched American football and American baseball, even though he found it all very baffling. Occasionally he would pick up a deck of cards or a stack of coins and practise, but his enthusiasm was gone. He would lay the stuff aside and refocus his fuzzy attention on the television screen. When the crowds cheered, Jurgen would produce a small, hollow grunt.

Rudolfo rather desperately cooked up a surfeit of ambition and enthusiasm, simply to battle the ennui that threatened to devour them. He first found an affordable gymnasium. It was called Shecky’s Olympus and was buried at the intersection of Paradise Road and Sahara Avenue. You pushed through a door at street level and then descended an almost endless staircase. With each step the temperature went up a degree, the miasma of sweat becoming more acrid and stinging. At the bottom was a huge room full of medieval torture devices. The people working them were stripped down to the barest of ribbons, worn more to bind potential hernias than to cover body parts. These people were extremely serious. General Bosco had been single-minded and industrious, but compared to these people he was a dabbler. Bosco would hunker under the bar and do squats, and he would howl and scream and when he finished his face would be slick with tears and his thighs and hams would be quivering. These people didn’t howl, as a rule, which meant that one could hear the muscle tissue ripping apart. Sets were stopped, most often, not because they were done, but because the lifter had passed out, vomited or ruptured an internal organ.

Rudolfo noticed that all of these people had strange black boxes strapped to their sides; a thin cord led from there to plugs, little foam-covered stones that they popped into their ears. They were tape players, not nearly so common back then. Everyone would listen with intense concentration and were very hard to distract, which meant that Rudolfo found it difficult to find anyone to spot him.

There was one non-maniacal member, a very tall and beautiful woman who would descend into the sweat-bowels for the purposes of toning only. This woman would straddle a preacher’s bench, curl her fingers around the steel bar and begin to lift. One could actually watch the biceps enlarge, inflated as though by a foot pump. The skin would begin to glisten, light and dark
would play in the newly formed hollows. This woman would work a few major groups and then, having barely raised a sweat, would nod vaguely in the direction of the lifters and disappear.