Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

Through a tinny speaker mounted under the ceiling, he could hear the music, the Cloaked Conjuror’s disguised vocal croakings, the applause that sounded as mechanical and distorted as the magician’s voice.

It was like eavesdropping on another, unreal world. One he had once lived in intimately.

Was he just jealous? Not if dreams are only in your head.

He wasn’t used to being confined alone with his own thoughts. It felt like being penned in a well-lit confessional, waiting eternally for some unknown person in the other confessional to finish his business and the small window beyond the pleated white linen to slide open so the man hidden behind the curtain could wait for Max to say “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Lord! He was going back to his earliest childhood at his grandmother’s church. The Catholic Church did open-air confessions now, in large, well-lighted rooms with no hint of claustrophobia.

Max had to wonder if his childish hunger to escape the small dark room where he enumerated his failings to the hidden listener had first interested him in escapology and magic tricks. Yet the king of escapology, Houdini, hadn’t been Catholic but Jewish. Escape that fact.

The dressing room door creaked. Max leaped up to confront his visitor with his borrowed face.

“I’m fine,” the husky computer-disguised voice of the Cloaked Conjuror rasped from outside the open door. “Just keep anyone from entering, okay?”

The door opened only enough to admit his muscular form. He was a bit too thickset to perform the most agile illusions, one reason he’d turned to unmasking unreality, probably.

He knew what the magical community said of the debunkers: failed magicians. Those who can, do; those who can’t, criticize.

The Cloaked Conjuror turned on Max the moment the door was shut and dead-bolted.

“I can’t believe you! Right onstage. You could have ruined my act. Are you crazy? My bodyguards could have thought you were an assassin. Are you suicidal?”

“I can’t believe you,” Max charged back in an eerie, altered, amplified tone of voice. “Right in the public print. Telling the world that death threats forced my retirement. That’s not true. Why in the name of Harry Houdini would you mention me at all in that interview? Are you crazy? Suicidal?”

Their masks glared at each other, then Max pulled his off.

“How did you get offstage so fast?”

“Jumped up and was assumed into the wings on the curtain pulleys.”

“My bodyguards—”

“Never look up. They watch you, and you stay with your feet on the ground.”

“That was a nervy thing to do.”

“It was a nervy thing to drag me into your interview. I vanished for a reason, and I’d prefer the public, and everybody else, to forget about me entirely. You’ve just blown a year’s worth of invisibility.”

The Cloaked Conjuror lifted his arms and dropped them to indicate helpless regret. The mechanical voice forced him to rely on gesture rather than speech even in private. He resembled a mute Phantom of the Opera.

Max stopped being envious, if he ever had been.

The magician sat at his dressing table, where Max had warmed the seat only moments before. He didn’t remove his mask.

“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.” Even the mechanical voice sounded weary. “I figured if I mentioned your name you might contact me. But not onstage in the middle of my act! My bodyguards are all over that backstage. Man, you are crazy.”

“No. I just know that the safest place to be when a man is under constant guard is right next to him. Even if they had noticed my brief visit, they weren’t about to shoot until they knew which man in black was who.”

The Cloaked Conjuror shook his head. “Whatever you are, you’re the only one who tumbled to the fact that my assistant was killed at the TitaniCon weekend. I’ve got a new problem, but it might be from an old source.”

Max pulled a chair closer to the mirror and sat beside the magician. “The Synth?”

“Maybe. I’ve been working with a new cat. Going to reveal the old cat into woman trick. Add a little femme pheromones to the act, you know? Somebody’s swiped the animal.”

“Big cat? Leopard, I suppose?”

The leopard-spotted mask nodded. “Cost a bundle. And a fine, mature animal. Worth…a bundle.”

“You blew my cover over a cat-napping?”

“A note was left, signed ‘the Synth.’”

“You’ve contacted the police?”

“Would you?”

“No. What’s the ransom?”

“The note didn’t mention a ransom.”

“Any calls?”

“Not for money. Not about the leopard.”

Max pondered the sense of announcing you’re the kidnapper without demanding ransom. “Do you think they’ll ask for money after you sweat a little, or do they really want the animal? Or is this a nuisance attack? Harassment.”

“I don’t know. I do know my security force is pretty teed off about someone breaching the perimeter and taking the cat. Either way, it’s a message.”

Max nodded again. “A major message. So the leopard was taken from your residence. I suppose you’re not about to share the location of that with me.”

“Not unless you convince me that you absolutely need it.”

“It’s near Las Vegas, though?”

“Yeah. Near enough.”

“Obviously, there are several messages here: one, they know where you are. Two, you aren’t as secure as you think. Three, they know what you’re planning for the act. Four, they can extort your money from you, or maybe they think they deserve it and you don’t, since you’re an antimagician. So why do you think I can do anything for you? Especially after you’ve irritated the hell out of me.”

The Cloaked Conjuror kept silent for a good minute, his masked face as still as a corpse’s. “I’ve seen tapes of your show. You’re the real thing. Man, you nearly gave me a heart attack when you showed up backstage. See, no one’s supposed to be able to do that. I figure if anyone can go up against the Synth, you can. I’ll pay you whatever you need to get the cat back and find out the who, what, and why behind this whole thing.”

Max stood, shoved his chair under the dressing table, glanced at the empty mask he had abandoned on the tabletop.

“I may need to produce money for the cat, and I may need that in advance.”

“Just ask.”

“Who was the woman?”

“What woman?”

“The woman you were going to change into a cat, and vice versa. One of your lissome assistants in the leopard catsuits?”

“No. I found someone a little more exotic, but she’s out of the picture for now. She wasn’t going to join the act until after the cat was trained.”

“How exotic?”

“Hot.”

“Like that’s a rarity in Las Vegas?”

The Cloaked Conjuror chuckled. “She does her own act, but it’s small-time. You may have heard of her. Shangri-La.”

“Shangri-La. I guess she’s used to working with a cat, or a house cat anyway. What is its name?”

“Her house cat?”

“No, your missing leopard.”

“Osiris.”

“The Egyptian god of death. Not a nice omen. Let’s hope that the real cat has as posh an afterlife as a pharaoh is granted.”

“Listen, if this big cat just has the regulation feline nine lives, I’ll be happy.”

“If I have them, I’ll be happier.”

Chapter 6

Sister Act

If there is anything I hate more than an overzealous bodyguard, it is two of them.

These particular two bracket the Cloaked Conjuror’s dressing room door as if they were guarding Pharaoh.

I know a thing or two about Pharaoh from a past life—Pharaoh’s past life, not mine—and I know that the Royal Bearded One takes it most unkindly when the hired help clings to the doorjamb like a couple of caryatids. Okay, caryatids were these naked ladies from a little later era, but the ladies along the Nile were not big on overdressing either. Anyway, these statuesque broads would have done well in a late-night topless chorus line at the Stardust, and it is a downright shame to find these two overgrown musclemen making like doorposts on the Cloaked Conjuror’s doorstep, thereby interfering with my eavesdropping.