Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

The parking lot lights were dark too, so Temple drove her red Miata with the convertible top down, as if that provided any security, right up to the main entry door.

The building was a black glass-clad pyramid, inside and out, a nightclub owned and also used as a private clubhouse by a cabal of magicians delighting in all the secret mystifying stage scenery, effects and props of their profession.

“Boo.” Max’s face appeared at her lowered driver’s side window.

Temple started. With his black hair and trademark black turtleneck sweater and slacks, she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the building. Magicians before and since before Houdini had used Men in Black against a black curtain onstage to create their illusions.

“Sorry,” Max said when she blinked. “I forgot how spooky this place was.” He opened the door and Temple handed him her tote bag while she locked the car.

“The place is closed,” she said. “How do we get in?”

“No worries. I already ‘cracked’ it. I did perform here as the Phantom Mage for a while.”

Temple took in the faint reflection of them as a couple in the dark door, cast by a distant street light, a dark attraction that had gone darker.

“You almost died here, Max. How can you stand seeing it again?”

“You’re right. Standing is taxing. We should go in and sit down.”

He produced a small but powerful flashlight and tapped the seamless black façade. A wide door clicked ajar. Faint light shone behind it.

“Temple, we have nothing to fear from the things that almost got us. It’s the new ones that might .”

“And your greatest enemy is out of the country for good? In Ireland. She’ll stay put?”

“She’s very not at liberty.”

Temple ventured inside reluctantly. She was dying to ask more about Kathleen O’Connor, but Max had walked to the long black-glass bar and put her tote bag on it.

Where it went, she went, and vice versa. Temple followed him to determine the light source that lit up a wall of liquor bottles still in place.

“Hurricane lamps?” She laughed. “Your idea of housekeeping?”

Temple studied the empty space. The black glass floor effect was always edgy. When the dance floor and the black mirrored walls of the pyramid pulsed to piped-in music with neon colors and shapes zapping into the air above, and the dancers gyrated and the drinkers at their tables shouted at each other it had that Vegas Hell vibe, like the crazy-popular deejay-driven electronic music nightclubs mesmerizing young Vegas visitors nowadays and putting zillions into the Strip venues.

Temple looked up to the peak high above where a swirling universe of lighted constellations rotated. She looked down fast, dizzy.

Max took her elbow.

Temple shook her head. “How could you leap down from there on a bungee cord every night? I get chills thinking about the High Roller ride at LINQ entertainment center.”

“You’ve always yearned to be taller.”

“Not that way.” She shuddered to think about that giant Ferris wheel of swaying cable cars.

“Let’s sit at the bar and examine your Ophiuchus file.”

Temple started laughing. “That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

With that, Max picked her up and perched her on a high barstool.

“I need to get rid of these dangerously tippy things,” Max said as he leaned easily into sitting on the adjoining stool. Nobody should have to hop up to a seat in a bar.”

“The world should be more considerate of short people, but I don’t think you can change that all on your own.”

“No, but here I can.”

“What? You’re staking out an abandoned building like a homeless person? Which you are after that witch burned you out of house and home.”

“Not exactly.” He spun to lean back against the bar, spread out his long arms and surveyed the vast black satin space. “I own it.”

“It almost killed you and you bought it? That is so…contrary and unpredictable. And yet ‘Max’,” she said. “When did you buy it?”

“After it failed. I felt it had potential.”

“Potential to be a rogue building and kill.”

“I do need a home.”

“So you’ve been living here. In all this gleaming, mocking, deceptive blackness?”

“No.” He nodded at the opposite wall where a rail-less stairway and the balcony above it were barely discernible.

“You’re living in the cozy, English-y clubrooms of those crazy magicians who called themselves the “Synth”! I spent one of the most heart-pounding moments of my life stumbling across that place and those people. Aren’t they all dead now?”

“Ghosts won’t hurt you, Temple, unless they’re in your head. The only dead Synth member is the leader, Cosimo Sparks, knifed in underground tunnels connecting the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters, and our old familiar venue here, the Neon Nightmare.”

Temple hooked her high heels over the stool’s lower rung, as she always had to in bars. She frowned, for a long time, as Max went back behind the bar to pour Bombay Sapphire into two crystal lowball glasses and place them before Temple.

He came around to reclaim his seat and one glass and stare into it as the hurricane lamps flickered, broadcasting a searing kerosene scent that unnerved Temple, but not Max, who was waxing contemplative without even a sip of liquor.

“I look at Sean and Deidre, and realize he recovered from that bomb and its scars long before I could. I had no right in Minneapolis to sweep you into my ungoverned, unsafe world, Temple.”

“Then why did you?”

“I think I thought that you could save my soul. And you did.” Max smiled. “It was selfish and self-pitying. I regret being an aggravating hiccup in your life.”

“Oh, you Irish. Always the martyrs. I needed to be jerked loose from my lovingly smothering family and get a little excitement in my life.”

Max lifted his glass. “A toast. To our separate but exciting futures.”

The crystal was Baccarat and rang like a heavenly chime from above in this hellish place.

“And so,” Temple said, “to work.” She pulled her tote bag flat on the bar to shuffle a deck of white papers onto the black onyx glass.

“We’ve always thought the drawn representation of the Ophiuchus constellation, the naked hero twined by and fighting a giant serpent, was a representation of what the ancient Greeks or other cultures saw in the stars. And we were half right. Matt recently learned that image had grabbed his stepfather’s pre-teen mind like a leech. He drew it constantly in class. The son he abandoned kept one drawing attached to his uncle’s refrigerator with a magnet. He had only that one keepsake image and memory of its significance to his father, and he inked it on his arm when he came of age.

“After my fake wedding, when a long-ago renovation was used to conceal the lost Binion stash of millions in gold under the Our Lady of Guadalupe altar, Matt recognized the altar’s central decoration, a turquoise carving of serial ‘Ms’ like the Loch Ness monster humps, with serpent heads at each end.”

“Surely not Ophiuchus.”

“No, but close. And not Ouroboros, the ancient eternity image of a serpent or dragon biting its own tail. After all the excitement, I looked it up. It represents the Central American god, Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, often depicted with a semi-naked human avatar standing beside the giant snake. Christian conquerors would integrate native symbols into the ‘new religion’ they forced upon the native people. The original builders of Our Lady of Guadalupe were part of that tradition, almost subconsciously by now.”

“So,” Max said, “the altar bore another representation of Cliff Effinger’s man-snake fetish, which is very Freudian, by the way—”