Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Matt didn’t know what to say.

“I just hope that Temple appreciates that, and I mean to see that she does. For both your sakes.”

The Russians Are

Coming

The only thing wrong with working for a mega hotel was the meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

Temple supposed some PR persons enjoyed numbing their rears until they could hear the cellulite piling on underneath them, but she liked to be on her toes in more ways than one. There were always so many chiefs at meetings that the foot soldiers spent all their time deferring to rank instead of getting anything done.

Which was why she was a freelancer.

At least the operations meeting room at the New Millennium was spectacular: a huge, black-marble-topped conference table, brushed stainless-steel chairs upholstered in black leather. A shrimp-colored marble floor. Every chair had a wireless silver flat-screen computer in front of it, the screen as big as a place mat and the sleek keyboard the size of a videotape.

No ashtrays. No cups of coffee or glasses of water or booze. No chitchat.

Around the perimeter were honest-to-God, gray-flannel vertical blinds that could be operated from the computer keyboards, Randy had said, to cast shadows in various shades of gray.

Pete Wayans, the hotel’s operations manager, was a beefy middle-aged guy wearing wire-framed half-glasses that looked like a pair of tsetse flies posed on a hippo snout.

He stood in front of the giant plasma TV, narrating the exhibition layout and contents while the same scenario played on their individual computers.

Temple tapped in notes and observations (on the eerily silent toy keyboard), like her fellow attendees. And they were all fellows. This was when she began to seriously lament her blond dye job at the Teen Idol reality TV show. She couldn’t yet testify that blondes had more fun (although it was beginning to look like it).

Dang! She’d typed in “Matt blond” instead of matte black to describe her idea for an invitation card.

Temple backspaced to erase the error, aka Freudian slip, noticing that the men in her vicinity all noticed her retreat. Blondes attracted much closer examination, she’d discovered, which Temple didn’t welcome. At half an inch per month, it would take almost a year for her natural coppery red color to reach its usual below-the-ear-length. She didn’t know if she could take the stress that long.

Wayans droned on, but the computer show was so spectacular and self-explanatory that it didn’t matter what he said or didn’t say.

Essentially the exhibition would funnel guests up a circular ramp of paintings hanging between bullet-proof Lexan-plastic display cases sparkling with court dress, jewels, furniture, and precious artifacts of every conceivable type, ending in a translucent onion dome apex, where Czar Alexander’s scepter could be displayed upright on a block of rock crystal, like the Sword in the Stone from Arthurian legends.

A close-up of the scepter revealed a silver and gold rod circled by a lacework of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls twining its two-foot length. The crowning orb held a yellow diamond of three hundred and sixty-five carats. It was called the Calendar Diamond, for the days of the year.

As Wayans read the laundry list of the pieces: jewels and their weights and history and values, Temple found her mind drawn back to the Sword in the Stone analogy.

Set an object up as a modern-day Sword in the Stone and what do you get? Something a lot of people might compete to unseat. Of course, Temple thought like a crook—she was the significant other of a world-class magician and had undone a few crooks of her own.

Pete Wayans thought like a hotel mogul with the artiest state-of-the-art-security system and the hottest high-class act in town.

Then he got to the good part. On Temple’s screen, multiplied by sixteen around the table, the viewpoint swooped above the scepter to show a life-size jewel-enlaced human figure spinning slowly in the gallery’s upper blackness.

It was a woman wearing a headdress that duplicated the scepter’s daggerlike lines, her arms close to her lithe body, straight legs crossed at the ankles and arched into one sharp point, like a ballerina’s toes, her head straining upward on a long swanlike neck.

Temple had seen acrobats at the Cirque du Soleil spinning like this by their teeth, but not invisibly and not—here her blood ran cold, just like in the cliché, and Temple hated clichés—with a white-painted face with exaggerated features drawn in Oriental shades of black and blushing crimson as in a Chinese opera.

Before Temple could fully register who this scepter sylph was, a huge male figure came striding out of the darkness, booted, caped, and wearing a dark tiger-pattern mask that covered his entire head.

At a gesture of his gloved hand, the scepter woman sank lower, like a spider on an invisible web. Lower, lower, turning faster and faster, a blur now. A flick of the magician’s wrist, and a glittering web of empty cloth floated down, tenting the onion dome in a lacy cobweb.

Everybody applauded the stunning effect.

Everybody except Temple. She wasn’t surprised, of course, to see the Cloaked Conjuror appear. He headlined at the New Millennium, after all.

What had shocked the accumulating cellulite off her behind was seeing the made-up countenance of a magician who’d done her—and Max, and Midnight Louie—wrong, and had never been seen again. Shangri-La, last glimpsed several months ago at the Opium Den, a low-end casino off the Strip.

As part of her disappearing act, this woman had stolen Temple’s almost-engagement ring from Max right on stage. The only time Temple had been called out of a Las Vegas audience to do an onstage turn had almost cost her, and Louie, their lives.

Max needed to know about this . . . pronto!

Friendly Fire

“What is she doing here?”

Max’s annoyed tone roused Garry Randolph from the humble task of coiling a rubber snake of electrical cord in one corner of the New Millennium’s exhibition area scaffolding, fifteen feet above the construction-littered floor.

This place wasn’t just a room, that was for sure.

The whir of power drills backgrounded their conversation. A faint miasma of sanded Spackle dusted their workmen’s white jumpsuits a whiter shade of pale.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Garry, who once had performed as Gandolph the Great.

“Two,” Max said grimly, looking up, and then back down again. “The worst part is that they’ve both seen me, one more than the other.”

Gandolph followed Max’s quick flick of eyelashes both up and down.

Up, the problem was obvious. A lithe figure in pale tights and leotard was cavorting like the Sugar Plum Fairy on a distant tightrope invisible against the flat black ceiling of the museum-to-be.

“I don’t know where Shangri-La came from,” Garry admitted, “but I know you had an unpleasant run-in with her months ago—”

“More than one, and the last one way too recently,” Max interrupted, looping his own length of cable into the tight coil of a striking cobra.

Garry eyed his one-time apprentice at both magic and counterterrorism work. The painter’s cap hid Max’s thick dark hair. Spackle dusted the arched Faustian eyebrows. His eyes were their natural blue. He expertly hunched his four inches over six feet into a droop-shouldered stance that kept him from literally standing out in a crowd, rather like Sherlock Holmes on a stakeout.

“Where did you last see her?” Garry asked.

“At the Cloaked Conjuror’s estate. Creepy old place near a cemetery. Keeps the tabloids and the tourists away. Crazy young woman, always wears her stage makeup. We had a little talk, she and I, and it wasn’t peace negotiations.”