The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (16 page)

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-degree 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.”

I took the chair across from her. She moved like Meta—her gestures, her walk—and her voice sounded the same, but up close the resemblance ended. Lila’s eyes were narrower, her face more oval-shaped, her lips thinner. Clearly I had projected Meta’s features onto her. And yet, as with Maximus and Massimo, there was something about her that made me doubt my own eyes. “It isn’t you, then,” I murmured.

“Of course it’s me.”

“I’m Venetian, you know.”

She folded her hands on the table and averted her eyes.

“Have you ever been to Venice?” I asked.

“No. Why are you staring at me?” she said crossly.

“I’m a little confused.”

“Understandably so,” Maximus said, coming up behind me and patting me on the shoulder. “Perhaps by the end of this meal, Nicolò, things will be clearer.”

I was startled to see that he had a crow on his shoulder, which flew off to a perch across the room and remained planted there.

Maximus’s robe was velvet, with a fur collar. His turban was adorned with a pin in the shape of a lightning bolt. As he sat down at the head of the table, Ludwig entered with a Siamese servant girl named Soon-ji. She was wearing a silver sari and carrying a tray of steaming platters on her head. Her long hair was braided down her back. She had bells on her slippers identical
to the bells the cats wore on their collars. In fact, she moved like a cat, lithe and self-possessed, with soft, precise steps. She had quick pale eyes, and small, alert ears that looked as if they could pick up sounds at a great distance.

The meal she served was unlike any I had encountered in Vienna, or anywhere else: red seaweed garnished with pickled radishes; black rice noodles and spotted mushrooms boiled in wine; grilled squid stuffed with flying fish roe; and yellow cherries sautéed in butter. The hot bread was laced with cinnamon and paprika. The goat cheese was coated with thyme honey. Instead of wine, Maximus drank vodka flavored with pomegranate, which I declined, opting for apple cider. I was already stimulated enough.

Maximus pointed at the crow. “His name is Téodor. He and his brethren outside are from the Carpathian Mountains, near the Laborec River. They are the most intelligent crows in Europe. They can understand human speech and do basic arithmetic. They can even fashion tools with which to build nests. Téodor is the cleverest of the lot. He was a part of my act for many years. On command, he would fly through an open skylight in the theater and bring back some object I had requested: a plum, a coin, a button, a blue or red stone—those are the colors he knows best. Now he is eleven years old, retired, dining on herring and grasshoppers, never confined in a cage. On occasion, two of his sons work with me. But neither is as good as Téodor.”

“He can do arithmetic?” I said.

“Téodor,” Maximus called out, “how many of us are dining here?”

The crow cocked his head and tapped the wall three times with his beak.

“How many candles does it hold?” Maximus asked, pointing at the candelabra.