Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

"Yeah. Do we trust 'em?"

"Husband-and-wife team. Have a couple of children who travel with them. They're two of the best quick-change artists in the world. I can't imagine they'd have anything to do with the killings." She laughed. "See that's who gets jobs at Cirque Fantastique – performers who've been pros since they were five or six."

Sachs called Rhyme's phone and got Thom. She gave him the Ukrainian performers' names and what she'd learned. "Have Mel or somebody run them through NCIC and the State Department."

"Will do."

She disconnected the call and they started out of the park, walking west toward a slash of livid clouds, like striations of bruise, in the otherwise brilliant sky.

Another loud snap behind her – the banners again, flapping in the breeze, as the playful Harlequin continued to beckon passersby into his otherworldly kingdom.

• • •

Refreshed, Revered Audience? Relaxed?

Good, because it's time now for our second routine. You may not know the name P. T. Selbit, but if you've been to any magic shows at all or seen illusionists on television you're probably familiar with some of the tricks this Englishman made popular in the early 1900s.

Selbit began his career performing under his real name, Percy Thomas Tibbies, but he soon learned that such a mild name didn't suit a performer whose forte wasn't card tricks, vanishing doves or levitating children but sadomasochistic routines that shocked – and therefore, of course, drew crowds throughout the world.

Selbit – yes, his stage name was the reverse of his surname – created the famous Living Pincushion, in which a girl was apparently skewered with eighty-four needle-sharp spikes. Another of his creations was the Fourth Dimension, a routine where audiences watched in horror as a young woman was seemingly crushed to death under a huge box. One of my favorites of Selbit's was a routine he introduced in 1922. The title says it all, Revered Audience: The Idol of Blood, or Destroying a Girl.

Today I'm delighted to present to you an updated variation of Selbit's most renowned illusion, one that he presented in dozens of countries and that he was invited to perform at the Royal Command Variety Performance in the London Hippodrome.

It's known as…

Ah, but no…

No, Revered Audience. I think I'll keep you in suspense and refrain for the moment from mentioning the name of the illusion. But I'll give you one clue: when Selbit was performing this routine he instructed his assistants to pour fake blood into the gutters in front of the theater to tantalize passersby and get them to buy tickets. Which, naturally, they did.

Enjoy our next routine.

I hope you will.

I know of one person who most certainly won't.

How much sleep? the young man wondered.

The play had ended at midnight then there'd been drinks at the White Horse until who knew when, home at three, on the phone for forty minutes with Bragg, no, maybe an hour. Then the ridiculous plumbing had started up its ridiculous banging at 8:30.

How many hours' sleep was that then?

The math eluded Tony Calvert and he decided that it was probably better not to know too much about the extent of his exhaustion. At least he was working on Broadway and not doing advertising shoots, where you started work sometimes at – heaven help us – 6:00 A. M. His afternoon call at the Gielgud Theater tidily made up for the fact that he had to work Saturdays and Sundays.

He surveyed the tools of his trade and decided he needed some more tattoo concealer since chisel-chin boy was standing in today and the ladies from Teaneck and Garden City might wonder about the credibility of a leading man who lusted after the ingénue starlet when his ample biceps said "Love Forever Robert."

Calvert closed the big yellow makeup case and glanced in the mirror by the door.

He looked better than he felt, he had to admit. His complexion still retained a bit of the tan from the glorious March trip down to St. Thomas. And his trim build belied the dumpy sluggishness churning in his belly. ( God's sake, keep it to four beers. Okay? Hello, can we live with that? )

His eyes, though: yep, pretty red. But that's easily taken care of. A stylist knows hundreds of ways to make the old look young, the plain look beautiful and the weary look alert. He attacked with eyedrops and then followed through with the coup de grace – a swipe or two with an under-eye touch-up stick.

Calvert pulled on his leather jacket, locked the door and started down the hallway of his East Village apartment building, quiet now, a few minutes before noon. Most of the people in the building, he guessed, were outside, enjoying the first truly nice spring weekend this year or were still sleeping off their own debaucheries.

He used the back exit, as he always did, which deposited him in the alleyway behind the building. Starting for the sidewalk, forty feet away, he noticed something: motion down one of the cul-de-sacs leading off the alley.

He stopped and squinted into the dimness. An animal. Jesus, was that a rat?

But no – it was a cat, apparently injured. He looked around but the alleyway was completely deserted, no sign of its owner. Oh, the poor thing!

Calvert wasn't a pet person but he'd sat for a neighbor's Norwich terrier last year and remembered the man telling him that, just in case, Bilbo's vet was around the corner on St. Marks. He'd take the cat in on the way to the subway.

Maybe his sister'd want it. She adopted children. Why not cats?

Lingering in alleys wasn't the best idea in this neighborhood but Calvert saw that he was still completely alone. He moved slowly over the cobblestones so he wouldn't spook the animal. It was lying on its side, meowing faintly.

Could he pick it up? Would it try to scratch him? He remembered something in Prevention about cat-scratch fever. But the animal looked too weak to hurt him.

"Hey, what's the matter, fella?" he asked in a soothing voice. "You hurt?"

Crouching down, he set his makeup case on the cobblestones and reached out carefully in case the cat took a swipe at him. He touched it but then drew his hand back in shock. The animal was ice-cold and emaciated – he could feel stiff bones beneath the skin. Had it just died? But, no, the leg was still moving. And it uttered another faint meow.

He touched it again. And, wait, those weren't bones under the skin. They were rods, and inside its body was a metal box. What the fuck was this?

Was he on Candid Camera? Or was some asshole just ragging him?

Then he glanced up and saw someone ten feet away. Calvert gasped and reared back. A man was crouching -

But, no, he realized. It was his own image, reflected in a full-length mirror sitting in the corner at the end of the dark alley. Calvert saw his face, shocked, eyes wide, frozen for a moment. He started to relax and laughed. But then he frowned, watching himself slowly falling forward – as the mirror pivoted to the cobblestones and shattered.

The bearded, middle-aged man hiding behind it charged forward, raising a large piece of pipe.

"No! Help me!" the young man cried, scrabbling away. "My God, my God!"

The pipe swung down in a fierce arc directly toward his head. But Calvert grabbed the makeup case fast and thrust it toward the attacker, deflecting the blow. He struggled to his feet and began to run. The assailant started after him but slipped on the slick cobblestones and went down hard on one knee.

"Take the wallet! Take it!" He pulled his billfold from his pocket and flung it behind him. But the man ignored it and rose, continuing after him. He was between Calvert and the street; the only escape was back into the building.