Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“I remember a still photo of that on a vintage nostalgia auction site.”

“You’re moving from vintage shops to online?”

“Most worthwhile vintage clothing is online now. I had a bid number registered for Debbie Reynolds’ fabulous Hollywood costume auction a few years ago, and watched every second. The bidding for one of Judy Garland’s simple Dorothy dresses going up and up to almost a million dollars was breathless. You wished she could have lived to see what an iconic character she created.

“But even trinkets I bid on went up into the hundreds…a swooping hat, some gloves, and so much of our cinematic history went to Asia. Call me xenophobic, but that kind of rankles. Debbie saved Old Hollywood by buying out MGM ’s entire stock before anyone valued it. She was the only woman star with the guts to try to float a Vegas venue based around her career and costume collection, and it failed. She finally couldn’t afford to maintain the collection.”

“She made millions on the sale, didn’t she?”

“That’s for her heirs, and she knows she saved those things for posterity, but it hurt to let her lifelong passion go. I know.”

“Temple. That must have been when I went ‘missing’. Had I been there I’d have bought you a fabulous hat if I’d known. And one for Debbie to keep too.”

“Which is why you will find the perfect woman for you, and I warn you, I’ve started shopping right now.”

He laughed again. “Right now we need to decipher what Louie is sitting on.”

Temple sighed. “If it’s on a small scale, what is shaped like the child’s drawing of a ‘house’?”

Max spread his long fingers and twisted the traced image over the blow-up of central Las Vegas.

“Most shows on the Strip are mostly two-dimensional. We see that on TV, in films, we learn to think that way. When I appeared to be walking on air in my act, with all the doves landing on and flying around me, I was actually, thanks to fast-winking strobe lights, walking back and forth between the foreground and the background, like a zigzag sewing machine, although I appeared to be going on a straight, linear line.”

“The depth was the distraction.”

“Everything in magic, and too much in life, is a distraction, Temple.”

“Too much math for me.”

Midnight Louie looked up, intently and made those jaw-tremoring chee-chee-chee chirps cat make when spotting prey.

Max picked up a black remote control Temple hadn’t noticed and aimed it at the interior apex of the Neon Nightmare.

Louie leaped to the lowest liquor shelf, then up to the top one, chirruping steadily.

“This place is a huge cat toy, isn’t it?” Max said. “All those dancing shifting lights. Care to accompany me to the top?”

Temple took a deep, shaky breath. “No.”

“The hidden scaffolding that continues up and behind the Synth’s third-floor clubroom bird’s-nest on the opposite wall, it’s quite safe. You’d have to leave your heels behind, though.”

“I hate heights.”

“You wear high heels every day.”

“That’s on a small scale.”

“Look at Louie.”

His round, intent eyes moved with the circling images. The traditional signs of the Zodiac, crab, goat, scorpion, lion, along with the disputed thirteenth sign.

Max whispered, “A still central core is generating the illusion of movement and depth. Ophiuchus circles his attacking serpent continually. It’s like a clockwork construction, and, like clockwork, has many parts. Game?”

Temple kicked off her heels, which hit the bar side and fell to the floor. “If you can replay your almost fatal fall, I can climb some pathetic…hidden, dark, secret scaffolding.”

Oh yeah. Maybe.

Max was as sure as a mountain goat and he easily wafted Temple from level to level by a firm hand grip. Since his remote control handled the working lights, the backstage structure was well-lit and simple. And the scaffolding was three feet wide and solid, she was relieved to find.

At the building’s pointed apex, a nest of spotlights dueled, creating crossing beams of colorful shimmer. That was when Temple began to lose confidence.

Max left her clinging to two cross bars and climbed higher. His black clothing was soon invisible against the dark, mirrored surfaces and dueling lights. She envisioned the four floors of empty space below, equally dark, and also reflecting crossed sabers of colored lights.

“Max,” she whispered, ashamed of her cold feet.

Something warm and furry brushed her calves.

“Louie,” she whispered again, reassured.

Then Louie’s silhouette vaulted up past her, backlit by the light show. For a moment he seemed as huge as a leaping black panther.

The opposite wall flared with a yellow-lit image of the wrestling man and giant serpent.

Then the circling light show paused. Had Max made the apex of the pyramid go dark for an instant? And stop?

Another click. Only the yellow work lights were on and Temple had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden illumination.

She heard and felt Max and Louie leap down onto the lower scaffold, one large thump that vibrated the boards, followed by a smaller one. Temple teetered, spreading her bare toes for balance and looking down from a sideways squint. Up here the scaffolding was ten feet wide.

It could have accommodated a van.

Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better. There was always getting down.

“Max Kinsella, why I let you talk me into climbing the inside of this magic mountain I will never know, but I am so over you.”

He leapt down beside her. “I wanted you to be the first—and last in this country to see. Look.”

Max’s hands opened the magician’s typical black silken square that produced white rabbits and doves.

Nothing white appeared. His cupped hands held a mini-universe of captive, eye-dazzling red, green, blue, and white…the colors of what she’d taken for gel-tinted theatrical spotlights, now boiled down into large, faceted gemstones.

Louie stretched himself three feet long along her leg, and Max did a knee-dip so he could see too.

Louie’s paw automatically tensed to touch.

“Oh, no, boy,” Max said, “this is a very different kind of kibble than you eat.”

“He doesn’t,” said Temple. “Eat kibble. He just pretends to. He’s in it for the toppings I ladle on it to get him to eat the healthful Free-to-Be-Feline. Which he doesn’t.”

“What a con that cat has going.” Max laughed as the silk square shrunk in his hands and disappeared.

Temple looked around. “This entire building’s lighting system is a spinning gigantic kaleidoscope in the sky,” she realized. “Made from the IRA money Cosimo Sparks found, converted into jewels, and then secretly kept. He was the worst crook and hypocrite ever. He murdered people to maintain a phony scam about Strip-rejected magicians finding Kathleen O’Connor’s stockpile of undelivered IRA support funds, and all along he’d found and converted them to diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds to dazzle night-clubbing tourists right in front of his duped co-conspirators’ eyes. Why?”

“It was a magician-conning-magician scheme, all right,” Max said.

Temple looked down. Plain yellow-white spotlights raked the black mirror walls. The neon glamour was gone. The Plexiglas looked scratched and dull under the unrelenting light.

“How are we going to get back do-o-o-o-own ?

“No! No, Max, no-o-o-o!”

Not a bungee cord!

She was not suicidal.

Temple felt the air rush up and her stomach swoop down and then bounce back a tad as she gasped to a stop, hanging a couple inches above the black glass floor and her abandoned shoes.