Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Suggestions erupted now like the Mirage's volcano. "Elvis!" "Marilyn Monroe!" "Frank Sinatra!" "Hey, he's not dead!" "Yet--" "Bugsy Siegel!" "Jersey Joe Jackson!" someone contributed. Not Temple. Who had called out his name? she wondered. Jersey Joe Jack-son was ancient history in this town.

"On a note of dead celebrity, we will end this inquiry into the mantic arts," the professor said, checking his watch. "Thank you for coming."

Temple studied the dispersing undergraduates while waiting for Mangel to disengage from a couple who had run up to speak to him afterward. She was not that long removed from their ranks, but they seemed so young as they bustled by, their small talk studded with expressions only hip among the teenage set.

"Nice to meet you close up, Miss Barr." Professor Mangel was standing beside her, smiling at her eye to eye, glasses frame to glasses frame. "Your interjection of the Fool enlivened the forlorn slate of guesses just when I desperately needed some sign of invention. Pity you were not one of my students."

"I was for a few minutes. And I enjoyed it."

He grinned. "At least my subject matter can compete with Geraldo and Close Encounters and Sightings . Television shows! Who would have thought transistors would replace the groves of Academe?" He gestured to the low-profile panorama of the desert campus. "Shall we walk while we talk?"

They did, while Temple tried to calculate the last time she had heard the verb "shall."

Despite his academic speech, Mangel was younger than his bald head implied; his walk, his talk, his mental agility added up to a dynamic masculine energy that made being short, shortsighted and prematurely bald immaterial. Temple would bet that many a female freshman had developed a crush on him.

He settled his papers and Tarot cards into a soft black leather case as they walked. "I like to do these guest seminars on local campuses when I travel, though my study of paranormal matters is considered 'popular' education. So you're interested in information on mediums and the immaterial world for a hotel theme park?"

" 'Theme park' is a pretty grand term for what I have in mind. It would be part of a Jersey Joe Jackson attraction at the Crystal Phoenix."

"The Crystal Phoenix I've heard of. Jersey Joe Jackson, no. I take it back: let's sit and chat. I may want to take notes."

"Me too." She pulled a stenographer's notebook from her tote bag as they settled onto a low stone bench in an area devoted to landscaping. "That's a beautiful tarot deck you had."

"Isn't it, though?" Mangel pulled a black velvet pouch from his case, then slipped out the cards. "The Tarot of the Cat People by Karen Kuykendall."

"That's what the design on the back was! Cats--but with blue-and green-striped bodies!

Rather Cheshire Cat-looking. Can I see the Magician close up? And how did you draw it blind?"

"Magician's trick, of course. You've got to perform to keep the modern student's attention.

Psychology professors are a lot less intriguing than web browsers and computer games these days."

He handed her the correct card, face up. The Magician was an exotic figure, his full robe patterned with a rainbow of bubbles, his hair an enormous black Egyptian wig surmounted by the jeweled figure of a spotted cat. Levitated before him were a pentagram, a chalice and a sword.

Temple studied the card. "Something about the figure reminds me of Beardsley's drawing of Salome with the head of Saint John the Baptist."

"Grisly analogy," he said, taking the card back again to view it. "But I see what you mean.

Perhaps it's the central figure's intense concentration."

"You mean that magicians and murderers must both be obsessed?"

Mangel's watery hazel eyes, so light they were almost alley-cat' yellow, sharpened with interest. "Another intriguing analogy, but apt. No one is more obsessive than a magician."

Temple pointed to the floating objects in the picture. "I see the chalice of the priest, and I suppose the sword could represent the criminal, but the pentagram is a poor symbol for an actor."

"I don't know; it takes magic to command a stage. David Copperfield considers the magician first and foremost a performer, and that conviction has made him enormously rich."

"What about mediums and psychics? Are they magicians? Criminals? Priests and priestesses?"

"Assuredly, Temple, if I may call you that?"

"Assuredly, if you'll tell me if professors have first names."

His laughter was abrupt and brief. "Yes, I am always 'the' professor, seldom 'Jefferson.'"

"And never 'Jeff?"

"Never! It doesn't go with my PhD."

"So, Jeff, what about psychics and mediums, fortune-tellers and tea-leaf readers? Are they for real, or frauds?"

He carefully tucked the tarot deck into its pouch, even more carefully selected his next words. "I sense that you are seeking more than some lurid details for a hotel attraction. So I'll tell you what I wouldn't tell pompous academics: yes, most of these people are frauds, many are self-delusional frauds and a few, a precious few are ... ambiguous at best."

"I thought you were a gung-ho advocate--"

"That's the popular assumption. No, I'm a gung-ho hunter of the rare real thing."

"As the late Gandolph was a gung-ho hunter of the unreal thing?"

"Poor man. Do you realize that he became what he abhorred to track it down? The Edwina Mayfair persona was decently well known, even respected, in psychic circles. Everyone wondered, when Gandolph came out with one of his sudden exposes of a particular practitioner, how he had gathered the goods. Nobody dreamed he had done his groundwork undercover, and under such potentially comic cover too." Jeffs face sobered. "Of course it wasn't comic when he died in character."

"No one suspected Edwina Mayfair of being anything other than she was? Isn't that a little hard to believe?"

"The psychic field is filled with extreme personalities who pursue extreme positions. There were never any rumors that Edwina was anything other than she seemed to be."

"Given the theatricality many mediums seem to cultivate, how can anyone seriously believe in any of them, or their effects?"

"You mean, how can I? Simple." He rummaged in his case and drew out a vending-machine packet of peanut-butter-filled cheese-flavored crackers. After he pulled the red opening strip f the cellophane package, he offered Temple one of the crackers as nonchalantly as if he were extending a cigarette. She would have preferred a cigarette to the salt, flavoring and dye-laden cracker before her, and shook her head.

"You see," he went on, happily munching and strewing orange cracker crumbs on his jeans,

"I'm not that different from Houdini." He caught her expression, which had gone from being appalled by his snack to being appalled by his statement. "Oh, I'm not confessing to being an unreformed mama's boy or even a magician. And you've got to remember that Houdini spent the most impressionable half of his life in the nineteenth century, when mother-worship was sentimentalized. It's just that when it comes to the notion of contacting the dead, I'm a hopeless optimist while remaining about as skeptical as a rattlesnake."

"Houdini was as skeptical as a rattlesnake? Then why did he even entertain a hope of anyone returning from the dead?"

"That old obsessive personality. Mama. He desperately wanted to see Mama again. She had died while he was out of the country, and at a time in the family drama when he was about to disown his brother Leopold for marrying his brother Nathan's ex-wife. See, they had dysfunctional families even then, but they labeled it "sin" instead of "sickness." If Houdini's mother had asked him to accept the new couple to avoid a family chasm, he would have. He had hoped to be there when she died, and had hoped that her last word to him would have been