Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Max!”

He turned as they reached the living room, which was lit by pools of lamplight like spotlights in the dark.

She stopped him to examine the long, jagged claw marks festering on his pale skin. “Those’ll put you at the scene for sure.”

“If anyone can find me to see this. Besides you.”

“You’ve got to get them treated. Even so, the marks will be visible for weeks.”

“Fine. I don’t intend to be.”

“You’re not really magic, you know. You can’t actually disappear, like the Cheshire Cat, until only your scratch scars are visible.”

“I’ll have to. Drink?”

A bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey sat on a wooden end table beside a juice glass filled either with cider or whiskey neat.

“Didn’t feel like breaking out the best crystal,” Max said, noticing her surprised look. “Nothing to celebrate. I’ll get another glass.”

“I’ll get some rubbing alcohol, antibiotic cream, gauze, tape . . . from the bathroom. Cat scratches can be virulent. You never know where those claws have been. Especially Shangri-La’s cat’s claws.”

“These claws already have been virulent,” he said from the kitchen. “They made me drop her and they sting like they had chili peppers on them.”

By the time Temple had assembled the first aid materials, Max had poured her a fruit juice glass of straight whiskey. No coasters. He was really rattled when he skipped the small civilizing touches. Details were his livelihood and his safety line and his passion.

Temple sat down and had a good belt, then made him sit forward in his chair and tended his back by lamplight, feeling like Florence Nightingale.

“You saw, I suppose?” he asked.

“What there was to be seen. I don’t know why you were there, or what you thought you were doing, or how those set pieces collapsed like that.”

“Why, what, how are the mystery. We know when and where. Answer the first three and the five key questions of a journalist are covered.”

“Max! I’m not asking this as a journalist. I’m not even asking this as someone who’s responsible for the exhibition going smoothly and has had her ground cut out from under her by her own boyfriend. I’m asking this as someone who cares about you. And your bloody back.”

Max bolted more whiskey but never quivered a muscle as she flooded his back with raw alcohol, then patted it down with a towel.

“A Max Kinsella Production gone very wrong,” he said at last. “Some other unexpected stage manager had gotten there before me and booby-trapped the entire set. Everything alive up there was meant to plunge to the floor below.”

“Including you, the mystery guest?”

“I’m beginning to think so. Maybe me most of all, and the others were just a cover.”

“Why?”

“Sabotage on that scale usually has more than mere greed behind it. Maybe a geopolitical motive.”

“Russian stuff?”

He eyed her. “More likely the Synth.”

“They’re a logical suspect for a plot to destroy the Cloaked Conjuror who’s been betraying their trade secrets nightly, but why would renegade magicians have a geopolitical motive?”

Max shrugged, then winced at the pain the automatic gesture caused. “For years, Gandolph and I found the role of magician handy for international tours in the service of counterterrorism work. Why wouldn’t the opposition discover the same thing?”

“Magicians are entertainers, not political fanatics.”

“Fooling all the people almost all the time can get to be a power trip. Maybe the profession is uniquely vulnerable to political recruitment. I was.”

“You’d lost a close friend and relative to terrorism. Why did your mentor Gandolph become involved in counterterrorism?”

“He’d become disillusioned with hucksters who used their talents to delude and defraud gullible people, false mediums and the like. When he was approached to use that gift to foil spies and bombers, he was ready for a more meaningful role.”

“Could you go back to it full-time, just being a magician? Just being entertaining?”

“Maybe. I won’t know until I infiltrate the Synth and break it, or vindicate it.”

“Why were you there? Did you have some idea that the cast would be targeted?”

“No. No heroics. I was there on behalf of the Synth. A sort of initiation ritual.”

“Some kind of frat boy stunt? Intrude yourself into the aerial show and upset everything and vanish? No harm done?”

“Right. No harm done. That was not on the menu. Not mine, anyway. Now I’m wondering if they haven’t seen through my deception and if my so-called ‘assignment’ wasn’t an attempt to off me. My ‘entry fee’ for the Synth was stealing the Czar Alexander scepter. They wanted me out on a limb; they wanted to have something on me before they would accept me.”

“A very sick initiation ritual.” Temple resumed her seat, dismayed.

She’d suspected the Synth had become Max’s mission, that the Synth had put their relationship on the back burner. That situation was even less likely to change now and it had impacted her work.

“And you couldn’t argue, of course,” she told him, “when their target turned out to involve my job and my reputation. You’re clever, Max. Couldn’t you have talked them into ripping off some other hotel that hadn’t given me the best PR contract of my life?”

“I’m clever, but they made it clear that it was this or nothing. Of course, I didn’t know then that you’d been hired for this exhibition. When I found out, it was too late to pitch another treasure. It would have looked suspicious, and they already have their suspicions about me.”

“Just asking you to do this pretty much blew your cover. Who else besides you could have engineered that death-defying aerial ballet of thievery, rescue, and tragic death?”

“God!” He drank half the fruit juice glass in one gulp. “I could not hold on to that lightweight woman one more second. Her cat landing on my back, all four feet splayed out, and scratching me to ribbons was the last claw.”

“Everyone could see that you—Zorro, the masked man, the superhero—saved the Cloaked Conjuror and almost saved Shangri-La. And still snagged the scepter. Maybe saved it too. Frankly, I’m toying with spinning it for the press as a Robin Hood sort of feat. The earlier death proved someone was interested in robbing the exhibition and the booby-trapped platforms tonight show that some kind of plot was still live and lethal.”

“The masked man stole the scepter to save it?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re the clever one, Temple.” His expression, bleak until now, softened into a smile. It quickly vanished. “Watching those white robes flutter like a leaf to vanish into the matching marble floor below were the longest moments of my life. I wished—I really, really wished—that I was a real magician, that I could have waved a hand and kept that from happening.”

Temple kept silent. A death not prevented was a life lost forever, for no reason. She tried a different tack.

“Maybe she was always the target of the falling set pieces. Shangri-La did work the shady side. She must have at least been complicit in the kidnapping of me and Louie and the truckload of designer drugs we were spirited away in. Who knows who put her up to that and maybe wanted to punish her for failing?”

“She still didn’t deserve a fatal fall to a cold stone floor. She was no friend to either of us, but at least we know she wasn’t in on this caper or she’d have saved herself.”

“She was working with the Cloaked Conjuror. The Synth would have considered her a traitor.”

Max nodded and sipped again. “Maybe they meant to off all three of us in one blow. I’m still not sure that my ‘test’ wasn’t a way to get rid of me.”