Stuart Kaminsky: Now You See It

“A threat?” Blackstone had asked the man on the phone.

“A threat,” he had replied and hung up.

Blackstone had not recognized the voice of his caller.

The magician had contacted the police. They had told Blackstone they were not going to be pulled into some publicity stunt. He had persisted. Eventually he got to Sergeant Steve Seidman, my brother’s ex-partner, who suggested that he get in touch with us.

And now I stood behind the thick blue velvet curtain at the rear of the stage peering through a small hole, scanning the audience, turning right and left to look for something or someone unexpected or suspicious backstage.

At the stage door, we had posted Jeremy Butler, the huge, bald, 250-lb former wrestler and present poet who was our landlord at the Farraday Building. Jeremy had been a professional wrestler. He was over sixty now, but I didn’t think there were many people on the planet who could get past him without the use of gun or a very large sledgehammer, and even then Jeremy might not go down. I wasn’t expecting anyone with a gun or a sledgehammer, but both my brother in the audience and me behind the curtain, wearing a bright blue marching-band uniform complete with white epaulets and big brass buttons, were armed. Phil could shoot. So could I. The difference was that Phil was likely to hit what he was shooting at. History told me that I was most likely to shoot an unarmed bystander or myself.

I was pushing fifty, with a few dollars left in the bank from a job I’d done for Joan Crawford and a nice advance from Blackstone. Since being fired from Warner Brothers six years ago by Harry Warner himself for breaking the nose of a cowboy star who was being less than a prairie knight with a young starlet, I had almost supported myself as a private investigator. Now that my brother had left the Los Angeles Police Department and joined me, we needed enough income to support his family and me. For years my brother and I had carried on a love-hate relationship based on (a) my choice of what he considered a less than reputable profession, (b) my changing my name from Pevsner to Peters, (c) my having been born the night my mother died and a variety of other reasons, most of them more reasonable than a, b, and c. Ruth’s death had changed that.

What Phil brought to the partnership was knowledge of the city, its crime and criminals, and a lack of even minimal tolerance for people who engaged in felony. Phil had many virtues. Given time, I can come up with a few beyond his loyalty to his family and friends. Phil also had a few problems, most notably his temper. He did not suffer criminals gladly, nor insults, not even for a fraction of a second. That was before Ruth died. Now he could suffer insult and injury for a second or two, far less than the average criminal lunatic. We were a perfect pair.

Through the slit in the curtain I could see Blackstone pull a handkerchief from his pocket, a plain white handkerchief. He tied a little knot in it and suddenly it came to life, responding or refusing to respond to commands. The handkerchief moved away from the magician who pursued it, and began to dance to its own music. It stopped suddenly when Blackstone asked it to do a minuet. The hankie launched into a can-can instead. The audience laughed. The audience applauded. The handkerchief bowed. Blackstone showed that there were no strings attached to the willful fabric. Finally, seemingly frustrated, Blackstone slapped the handkerchief down to the stage floor only to have it rise and do a belly dance as an encore. The audience laughed while the Ziegfeld of magic played straight man to a piece of cloth.

Behind me, Blackstone’s crew silently moved equipment to prepare for the next illusion. I hastily got out of their way and headed toward the right wing, listening to the applause. I heard Black-stone’s voice onstage, but the only word I could make out was “ducks.”

There was no one new in the crew. The most recent addition had been six months earlier. I eased past boxes, caged birds, doves and rabbits, barrels and people.

A thin boy about ten or twelve, with dark hair and eyes, wearing knickers and a look of rapt attention stood watching from the wings as the magician pulled live and quacking ducks from what appeared to be an empty tub of water. The boy had been chosen before the show to take part in one of the acts. Phil and I had been told that when Blackstone’s ten-year-old son, Harry, Jr., was on the road with them, he would take part in the act. Harry, Jr. was back home in Michigan going to school. But, considering what was happening, that was fine with Blackstone.

The kid in the wings looked nervous.

“You alright?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, his eyes meeting mine, his smile a slight raising of the right side of his mouth that was almost a tic.

“You want to be a magician?” I asked.

“Actor,” he said. “Like my father.”

Onstage, Blackstone scooped up the ducks and placed them on a table inside of a little duck inn.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. A young man, no more than nineteen or twenty, with a freckled hometown nose, whispered to me, “We’ve got a problem.”

The little boy in the wings glanced at us as we moved past him and then looked back at the stage where the magician was taking the inn apart plank by plank to show that the ducks had all disappeared. The young man with the freckles, whose name was Jimmy Clark, led the way limping, which I assumed was the reason he was not on some island in the Pacific or pushing back the Germans in Europe, instead of backstage at the Pantages.

Peter, the image of his brother, but without the tux and with his silver hair not billowing, stood in front of a polished cage on a wheeled platform.

“It’s gone,” Pete Bouton said shaking his head.

“What’s gone?”

“The switch on the giant buzz saw,” said Pete. “The show stopper, the next act.”

“Switch?”

“It’s … about this size.”

He held up his spread-out hands about the width of a cigar box.

“Can’t do the illusion without it,” he said. “I haven’t got time to make another one.”

“No backup?”

“It’s gone too,” said Peter, looking at the curtain. “We can do the illusion without it but….”

“But?”

“There could be a problem,” he said. “Not much chance, but … I can’t ask any of the girls to do it. I’ll let Harry know we have to end with something else.”

Pete Bouton looked decidedly worried, more worried than a canceled illusion seemed to call for.

“What?” I asked.

“There was a note near the box next to the missing backup switch.”

He handed me a folded sheet of paper. I unfolded it and moved back where there was more light.

The note, in neat letters, read:

Magician, is this the unkindest cut of all? Remember the missing blade? It rests where we can all see it. You found a substitute last time. Not this time. You know what I want. I’ll contact you.

There was no signature.

“The trick is safe?” I asked. “I mean, even without the switch?”

“Well,” said Bouton. “I’ve built it with three safety backups, but I don’t know what this guy has done.”

“Can you check it out?”

“Not without going onstage during the act. It’s out there covered by a red silk sheet.”

“What’s the stuff about the missing blade?”

Pete frowned and pursed his lips.

“Only once before has a major piece of equipment been missing, a saw blade for this act. We have a full 70-foot baggage car wherever we go, and in thirty years we’ve never lost a major piece of equipment except.…”

“… except for the saw blade.”

He nodded and said,

“And that was about twenty years ago.”