The Spirit Cabinet (4 page)

Despite these revelations, Houdini had pursued the Spirit Cabinet with great ardour and prized it above all other possessions. He’d first heard of it as a young magician on Coney Island, where he and his wife, “Harry and Bessie Houdini,” had performed a simple routine consisting of two parts: mentalism (a tired carnival act) and a Transformation. It’s popular lore that Ehrich Weiss began his career as an escape artist by scouring flea markets and second-hand shops for old locks and handcuffs (he learned the secret of each, one at a time, working at them with picks and needles), but it’s not so well known that at each stop Harry hiked one of his dark eyebrows and stared into the shadowiest corners.

The auctioneer opened the floor for bidding, folding his hands together and leaning forward ever so slightly.

Jurgen crossed his arms with resolution. Kaz did likewise, pushing his feet out in front of him, sinking down into the chair as if none of this was of any concern. There was a long moment of weighted silence. Finally a gentleman from Ottawa, Canada, an eccentric millionaire merely, lifted his arm and spoke the sum of five hundred thousand dollars.

“Von million dollars,” muttered Jurgen.

Rudolfo’s impulse was to correct what was assuredly a language error. Perhaps Jurgen had meant to say,
I don’t care about these silly books
. But Jurgen was grinning, and the arms folded across his chest were afire with the nervous flexing of small, knotted muscles.

To their left Kaz snickered, jerking his head with arrogance. The sudden force tilted his huge glasses and flipped the right temple away from the ear. Kaz adjusted his spectacles with long bony hands and spoke through them as he did so. “One and a half million dollars.”

“Two millions,” said Jurgen.

“Hoo boy!” sang out Rudolfo.

Preston the Adequate still stood at the back of the theatre, his bottom lip folded beneath his yellowed upper teeth, the pressure draining the colour from his face. He was not a man given to prayer, but that was, in fact, what he was doing.

Suddenly there was a stranger beside him, drifting through the doorway soundlessly despite being swaddled in acres of tulle and muslin. The man had a third eye tattooed between the two given by nature. He wore a topknot, a long spray of bone-white hair that stood bolt upright; the rest of his scalp was a prickly silver nap. This man wore an expression of bemused serenity. However, when Kaz called out “Two and a half million,” the stranger—already very pale—blanched. “Shit,” he whimpered, and disappeared.

Preston stared sadly after the man. “Things is tough all over,” he mumbled.

“Tree—”

“Hoo boy!”

“—millions,” said Jurgen.

Kaz gave the first hint of weakness: instead of adding a half million dollars to Jurgen’s bid, he hesitated briefly, then spat out, “Three million four.”

Jurgen stirred in his seat as though trying to surreptitiously release gas. He turned and looked at Rudolfo. His eyelids had become riotous, rising and lowering independently of each other. Jurgen lifted a thick eyebrow questioningly. Rudolfo shook his head, with considerable urgency. Jurgen’s eyes darkened and he turned them toward Miranda.

Miranda lifted her hands from her lap, hands of an unnatural size and smoothness. She fanned fingers quickly and briefly. Three six.

“Three millions and sixes,” said Jurgen.

“Three eight,” snapped Kaz. He’d realized he’d made a
tactical error and was trying to make up for it with a kind of churlish aplomb. But this allowed Jurgen to say “Four” with finality. Even Rudolfo, alarmed as he was by the proceedings, was impressed with the muscular timbre of Jurgen’s voice.

So now the onus was on Kaz to venture into the fours. He’d already exceeded what his accountant had told him he might spend, but he was driven on by a couple of thoughts. One was that he
must
own the books, the other was that he
should
. There was a rightness to it. Kaz was, after all, the greatest magician in the world, much better than those two Aryan faggots. The trouble was, Kaz knew perfectly well that Rudolfo and Jurgen made more money than he did. Not much more per week, but they worked almost every goddamn week. Kaz then tried to calculate their overhead and expenses. They owned their absurd mansion. Given that the place was laced with man-made streams and waterfalls, Kaz suspected their utility bills alone negated the disparity in weekly salary. And all those fucking animals! Kaz shot out an arm confidently and said, “Four million one hundred thousand.”

“Four millions,” replied Jurgen, “and two hundred thousands of dollars.”

Kaz then remembered that it was not as though he rented a one-bedroom apartment or anything. He owned a mansion, too, not an absurd one, maybe, but one that likely cost about the same. Kaz also went through money pretty quickly. He had a huge staff, for one thing. He had office people, personal secretaries, no less than eight female assistants (showgirls with an average height of six feet, although he found not a one as tantalizing as he found Miranda), not to mention the Doubles and Confederates, sworn to secrecy and paid well to maintain it. “Four three,” Kaz mumbled quietly.

“
Ja
, four millions dollars and four hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Kaz pinched the end of his nose with force, fanning pain into his forehead and eyeballs. Jurgen gave every indication of being willing to augment whatever bid Kaz made. But he could be bluffing. After all, there were several illusions, really elementary stuff, that Jurgen made work by sheer dint of mien and manner, his brow furrowed and his pupils dilated, staring into the eyes of the first row as though daring them to spot the mirrors and false fronts. “Four five,” shouted Kaz, buoyed by this thought.

“Four eight,” came a voice, a new voice, and Kaz spun around in his seat to see who the intruder might be. Judging from the circle of twisted necks, the voice belonged to Rudolfo. Rudolfo’s thin lips were compressed into a shallow smile. Rudolfo took a deep breath through his nostrils, puffing out his chest until the tiny nipples poked through the pieces of metal and mirror.

Kaz was devastated. He couldn’t play with these guys, not the two guys together. He couldn’t keep up, the simple arithmetic wasn’t there. He also couldn’t say “five million.” The accountant had told him that calamity would absolutely befall him should he say those words. Kaz rose out of his seat suddenly, making for the aisle with a haste that gave no one time to move crossed feet or knees. He stumbled most of the way, grabbing hold of tops of heads for support. He thought he might faint—he’d fainted fairly regularly as a young boy—so when he achieved the aisle, he doubled over and sucked in air. “Congratulations, boys,” he groaned.

There was applause, awkward and halting, because no one was sure how to applaud at an auction.

As Kaz passed through the doorway at the back, he leaned in toward Preston the Adequate, close enough to bathe him in streams of putrid breath. “It’s like a couple of chimps bought some books about brain surgery,” he said bitterly.

Preston shrugged.

“We could have worked out a deal, you, me and McGehee. Private sale. Four million would have been no problem. Because I deserve the books. You couldn’t handle them, could you? Only I can handle them. Only me in the whole fucking world.”

“You don’t know what’s in the books,” said Preston the Adequate.

“Oh, yeah, I do,” said Kaz as he disappeared. “I
know
.”

“Well, that was brilliant,” said Rudolfo, fuming in the back of the limousine. He pulled open the bar beside him and poked around until he found a bottle of Orangina. He wrenched off the cap and poured some down his throat. Outside the darkened window lay the wasted plains of Nevada.

“What’s your problem?” wondered Jurgen, leafing through the catalogue with pursed lips. Jurgen’s lids had slid down to cover his eyes almost entirely; they didn’t rise up now, but there was some slight muscular activity, a weak electrical charge that caused them to quiver. “You made the final bid, after all.”

“Right,” nodded Rudolfo. “Because I had to go feed the animals, and I didn’t have time for
four millions and seven hundreds and fifty hundreds of thousands of dollars
.”

Miranda laughed, mostly because she was surprised at the sudden spurt of thick and clumsy English. Both men stared at her, sitting on the seat opposite. “Sorry,” she said.

“I’ve never bought anything before,” said Jurgen quietly, even though he was reasonably certain that Miranda couldn’t understand German.

“Oh, no? You bought the Lamborghini four-wheel drive.”

“I didn’t buy that,” returned Jurgen. “You gave that to me for my birthday.”

“Only because you asked for it.”

“That’s a different thing.” Jurgen flipped a page and began to read studiously. “Look,” he said, without removing his eyes from the print, “you buy all sorts of things. You spend millions of dollars every year on your animals—”

“
My
animals?” interrupted Rudolfo. “The animals are for the Show.”

Jurgen sighed wearily.

Miranda could understand some of the things she heard—
die Tiere
, for example,
the animals
. It was a phrase the two often exchanged, Jurgen employing a tone of annoyance, Rudolfo one of gentleness.
“Die Tiere sind für die Schau, da,”
said Rudolfo. When he said
die Tiere
he moved his arms, throwing them away from his body and then allowing them to resettle gently, a vague kind of gathering motion.

Rudolfo leaned forward and touched Miranda’s knee. It was an odd thing to do, as if her attention needed redirection from the window or something, whereas in fact she’d had her eyes aimed steadily at him. Miranda tilted her head slightly by way of asking what he wanted.

“Miranda,” asked Rudolfo, “where can you drop off?”

“Oh,” she shrugged, going through her not very extensive list of alternatives. “The hotel.”

“
Ja
, Jimmy!” shouted Rudolfo. The driver raised his shoulders, wrinkling the folds of skin on the back of his neck. “Miranda is to the hotel going.”

Jimmy grunted. Jimmy seemed to have only a specific number of words that he could utter on any one day—twelve, perhaps—so he usually grunted or made a chicking sound as though everyone else in the world were a horse.

Samson sat up front beside Jimmy, because it made him very nervous not to be able to see where he was going. The ancient albino leopard craned his neck back toward the other passengers and appeared to nod. His tongue hung from his mouth, a long slab of meat with just the slightest tinge of pinkishness.

“Christ is hot,” said Rudolfo, throwing himself backwards into the leather seats. He turned his head sharply to Jurgen. “You could have told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That the books were so fucking expensive, what else?”

“It was an
auction
,” replied Jurgen. “How was I to know how much the books would cost?”

“You could have told me
the park of the ball
.”

Jurgen shrugged and continued to flip pages. He couldn’t have said what books he’d expected to find on the list, but the names he was reading didn’t seem right:
Geeston en Demonen, Satanova Cirkev, Ho Leukas Magos, Tachydaktyklourgon Kai Thaumatopoion, Mejik Triksa
. So many in so many strange languages.

“Did you know,” asked Rudolfo, “that Kaz the asshole was going to try to buy the Collection?”

“Sure,” Jurgen nodded.

“You could have told me that,” said Rudolfo.

“Why, what would you have done? Have him murdered?”

“We might have been able to negotiate a private deal with the auctioneer.” A scowl blew across Rudolfo’s face as he remembered the man with the peanut-shaped head and the laugh he’d gotten from the crowd. “By the way,” he mentioned, “I’m thinking about a small change to the Show—”

Jurgen sighed.

“What?” snapped Rudolfo.

“Nothing.”

“What?” demanded Rudolfo again.

Miranda, who this time
had
been looking through the window at the endless desert, spun her head toward Rudolfo and his harsh,
“Was? Was?”
She immediately saw that it had nothing to do with her, but she didn’t look away.

“This silly guy,” explained Rudolfo, jerking a thumb at his partner, “all I’m having to do is say
die Schau
and he is hurling his chests. Every time he is doing this.” Rudolfo did a sarcastic imitation of Jurgen’s breast-heaving.

“A small change,” said Jurgen, leaning forward suddenly, adjusting his bottom on the leathery seat, sticky despite the air conditioning. “I’m tired of small changes.”

Whatever Jurgen said, Miranda saw, had made Rudolfo angry. His skin, so smooth that he sometimes seemed waxed, coloured many shades of red, the deepest ruddiness filling in the hollows of his cheeks. Rudolfo’s blue eyes widened and his nostrils trembled as though he were stifling a sneeze. Then he began to speak, softly, the German sounding to Miranda like nothing more than wet sounds and growls.

“Sure,” he said to Jurgen, “what we really need to do is completely change the Show. After all, it has only won Act of the Year four years in a row. That means that it’s not particularly good. Maybe we should reconsider the whole concept. Maybe we should do a fucking song-and-dance act, maybe we should try plate-spinning like that greasy Italian boy you thought was so adorable.”