The Very Best of Tad Williams (28 page)

She shook her head pityingly, as though I had just urged her to buy heavily into Flat Earth futures. “Haven’t you ever heard of hired killers?” We lurched into motion just as the light turned red once more.

You just can’t trust clients. It happens every time. They come through your door, wave money under your nose and make lots of promises—then boom! Next thing you know, that little party you were hired for turns out to be a smoker, and you’re doing card tricks for a bunch of surly drunks because the stripper hasn’t showed up.

Yeah, I’m a little bitter. When you’ve been around this business as long as I have you get that way. You splurge on a Tibetan Mystery Box some guy swears is just like new and when you get it home it’s riddled with woodworm. You order a shipment of doves from the mail order house and they forget to punch air-holes in the box. And women! Don’t even talk to me about women. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been standing around backstage somewhere, ten minutes before curtain for the Sunday matinee, arguing on the phone with my latest assistant, who isn’t there because she’s got water-bloat, or her boyfriend’s in jail, or because I introduced her as “the lovely Zelda” the night before and her name’s really “Zora.”

“Pull over,” I snapped. “And try using the brakes instead of just glancing off streetlights until the car stops.”

She followed my advice. (In fact, she used the brakes so enthusiastically that I wore a very accurate impression of the dashboard grain on my forehead for hours afterward.)

“Get the hell out, then,” she said. “I knew you were a loser from the moment I first saw you crawling around on the floor.”

“Well, I may be a loser...but you hired me.” The effect of my clever comeback and sweeping exit was diminished slightly by the fact that I hadn’t unbuckled the safety belt. The ensuing struggle also allowed me time to cool down a little. After I finally worked free and fell onto the sidewalk, I turned to look back, expecting to see the tears of a helpless woman, or perhaps a momentary glimpse of Charlie’s features in hers, which would remind me of the old friend whose desperate daughter this was. Emily wasn’t such a bad kid, really. I was half-ready to have my gruff masculine heart melted.

“Shut the damn door,” she snarled. If there were any tears, I definitely missed them.

She did manage to run over my foot as she drove away.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised, I reflected as I limped home. I had fallen out with Emily’s father much the same way. Nobody in the whole damn family could admit they were wrong.

Charlie Helton had been a wonderful guy, my mentor in the business. He’d helped me find my first agent and had shared many of his hard-won secrets with me, giving me a boost that few young performers got. He’d been everywhere almost, had done things few other people had even read about, and could tell you stories that would make your eyes pop out. But he could be difficult and stubborn at times, and as Ivone had so vividly remembered, he had a rather strange idea of fun. After he and Emily’s mother had broken up he had lived a solitary life—I hadn’t even known he’d been married until several years into our friendship—and like a lot of bachelor-types, his life revolved around what other people might consider pretty useless hobbies. In Charlie’s case there were two: puzzles and practical jokes.

Unfortunately, not all of his jokes were funny, at least to the victims. One such, a particularly complicated operation, had involved my booking for a show at a naturist colony in the Catskills. I was very uncertain, since it required me to perform naked except for cape and top hat, but Charlie convinced me that a lot of big entertainment people were weekend nudists, and that I would be bound to make some great contacts.

When I arrived at the resort the night of the show I was met backstage by the club manager, who was definitely naked. He was a big fat guy of about fifty, and knowing that people like him could do it helped me wrestle down my inhibitions. See, when you perform, if the stage lights are bright enough, you hardly see the audience anyway; the manager assured me that it would be just like doing a show in my own bedroom. So, I stripped, squared my shoulders, calmed my quivering stomach, and marched out onto the stage.

And no, it
wasn’t
a nudist colony, of course. It was a regular Catskills resort, median audience age: almost dead and holding. The “club manager” was a confederate of Charlie’s who’d taken off as soon as he’d finished his part of the scam.

The audience was not amused. Neither was I.

The sad thing was, Charlie and I fell out not because of the prank itself, nasty as it had been, but because I refused to admit there was anything humorous about it. I guess his pride was wounded—he thought he was the funniest guy in the world.

Things started to go downhill for me after that, but not because of my premature venture into performance art. I just caught some bad breaks. Well, a
lot
of bad breaks.

Maybe Charlie had been feeling guilty about our parting all these years, and about not being around to help me get back on my feet. Maybe that was why he’d told his daughter that if she ever needed someone to trust, to seek me out.

There was something else to consider, I suddenly realized. On the infinitesimal chance that Emily Heltenbocker was right and everyone else was wrong, maybe Charlie had been snuffed because one of his jokes had offended someone. Maybe he’d made a bad enemy, and it didn’t have anything to do with his manuscript at all.

I was pleased with this genuine detective-style thinking. Despite the misery of my long trudge home, I began to consider whether I should allow Emily—if she was suitably contrite—to rehire me. Charlie and I had been through a lot of good times before the bottom fell out. Maybe his daughter deserved a little patience.

Not to mention that she owed me for at least one night’s work.

“Your girlfriend’s on the phone,” shouted Tilly.

I put down my self-help bankruptcy book and unhurriedly picked up the receiver. I had known Emily would come crawling back, but I wasn’t going to let her off too easily.

“You still have my father’s graduation photograph,” she said in a tone like a whip-crack. “Send it back immediately or I’ll come over there and break your arm.”

She was playing it a little more cagily than I’d expected. “Don’t hurt me,” I said. “My health insurance lists attack-by-schoolteacher as an Act of God, and it’ll be hell getting them to pay.”

“Just send me the picture. Right now.”

I was sure I detected an undercurrent of playfulness in her voice, albeit well-camouflaged. “How about if I drop it by in person? Then we can discuss last night’s little difference of opinion.”

“If you come within a mile of me, you’re going to have to learn how to make balloon animals with your teeth.”

She hung up loudly enough to loosen a few of my fillings, but I knew I basically had her.

Thus it was that after only a few dozen more phone calls (and a slight strategic modification on my part which might have been mistaken by some unschooled observers for a cringing apology) Emily Heltenbocker and I resumed our partnership.

“Tell me their names again.” She revved the engine, although the light was still resolutely red.

I’d finally pinned down the other two mystery men, through laborious research in various trade booking guides. “Sandor Horja Nagy, the Hungarian Houdini—he’s the one we’re going to see right now. The other’s Gerard O’Neill. And, just for your information, they were
both
doing shows on the night in question, just like Ivone. Two more airtight alibis.”

“For goodness sake, Pinnard, you’re so unimaginative. We’re talking about magicians—people who disappear and reappear elsewhere for a living. Honestly, if this were a murder mystery in a book, you’d be the idiot cop they always have stumbling around to make the detective look good.”

“Thank you for your many kindnesses.” I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes. Emily had finally tendered my retainer and I had splurged on a whole carton. “Whatever you may think, a stage magician nearing retirement age cannot disappear in the middle of a downtown performance, catch a cab to the suburbs, murder an old classmate, and be back before the audience notices. And he can’t spin straw into gold or turn a pumpkin into a horse-drawn carriage either, just in case you still harbor some misconceptions about what real magicians do.” I leaned back and withdrew my new, top-of-the-line disposable lighter.

“Don’t you dare light that in my car. I don’t want my upholstery smelling of smoke.”

Obviously she had no similar problem with the scent of self-deceit and denial. I didn’t say that, of course. Long years of working with the public have taught me that, although the customer may not always be right, only a fool behaves otherwise before he’s been paid in full. “Look,” I said, “I’m just being sensible. You’re a nice lady, Emily, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. The police say it was an accident. The coroner said it was an accident. And all your suspects have alibis. When are you going to face up to what that really means?”

She started an angry reply, but bit it off. She stayed silent for a long while, and even when the light finally turned green, she accelerated with none of her usual gusto. I was pleased that I had finally made her see sense, but not exactly happy about it, if you know what I mean. Sometimes when something goes very wrong, we humans desperately want there to be a reason. It’s not fun being the person who takes that possibility away.

“It’s just not like my father,” she said at last. “Suicide, never. Not in a million years. So that leaves accident. But you knew him too, Pinnard. You know how carefully he planned everything.”

I had to admit that was true. Watching Charlie work up an illusion was like watching Admiral Nimitz setting out his bath toys—no detail too small for obsessive consideration. “But sometimes even careful people get careless,” I pointed out. “Or sometimes they just don’t give a damn any more. You told me he was having real bad financial problems.”

“You are too, but I don’t see you getting your throat slit.”

“Not when I’ve got a whole carton of cigarettes,” I said cheerfully. “I prefer my suicide slow.”

“That’s not very funny.”

I immediately felt bad. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry. Look, let’s go see this Nagy guy. Even if it turns out you’re wrong about the murder angle, you’ll feel better if you know for certain.”

She nodded, but didn’t seem very convinced. Or very cheerful. She was even still driving in an uncharacteristically moderate way. So, basically nice guy that I am, I sang a medley of Burt Bacharach songs for her as we made our way across town. I’ve always thought that if magic hadn’t worked out, I could have made a tidy bundle warbling “Walk on By” in your better grade of dinner-houses.

It didn’t jolly her up much. “I’ll pay you the rest of tonight’s fee right now if you shut up,” was how she put it.

Sandor Nagy (I think you’re supposed to say it “Nagy Sandor,” but what I know for sure about Hungarian customs you could write on the back of a postage stamp and still have room for your favorite goulash recipe) had seen better days. As a performer, our pal Ivone was, by comparison, Elvis.

We warmed the plastic chairs in the hallway of the Rotary Club while we waited for Nagy to finish changing his clothes in the men’s room. The show had been interesting—if watching a drunk perform for a bunch of guys offended because the entertainment was more blasted than they were is the kind of thing that interests you. Partly out of pity, we took Nagy to the 24-hour coffee shop across the street and bought him a Grand Slam Breakfast. (There is no time in places like that, so you might as well eat breakfast. Actually, there is time, but only the waitresses experience it, which is why they’re all about a hundred and four years old. I’ve always thought someone should write a science fiction book about this paradox.)

“I’m not quite sure what went wrong with that trunk escape,” Nagy said. Or slurred, to be more precise. “Usually it works like a charm.”

After the gruelling experience of his show, I had been planning to down a quick couple of beers—I wasn’t going to drink club soda forever just because I was hanging around with Ms. Ruler-across-the-knuckles—but the old guy’s breath and the bold yet intricate vein patterns on his nose persuaded me to order myself a Coke. Thus, I had my mouth wrapped around a straw and didn’t have to comment.

“I’m sure you would have got out eventually,” said Emily. “I didn’t think they really needed to call the fire department.”

Nagy eyed his soft-boiled eggs with great sadness. I think he would much rather have had a couple of belts himself, but we had declined to buy him anything with a proof content. He wasn’t real coherent as it was, even after all the oxygen the fire crew had forced into him. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said. “I’m not as sharp as I used to be. A step slower these days, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, you and my father were at the Academy at the same time, weren’t you? That was quite a way back.”

I smiled. Emily was showing definite improvement. All the same, interrogating this guy made about as much sense as bringing down a pigeon with a surface-to-air missile. If he was a murderer, I was Merlin.

“Oh, that’s right, you said you were Charlie Helton’s kid. Shame about him. I heard he was writing a book. Wouldn’t want to take time from my escape work, myself. There’s a lot of practice involved.” He pushed one of his eggs with the fork, as though unsure whether to commit to something so strenuous as eating. “He was a strange one, your dad. Drove a lot of people crazy.”