Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“Freud was right,” Max opined. “Dreams are the key. At least mine were. I’ve recovered some pretty vivid memories from before my engineered fall at the Neon Nightmare. I dreamed a whole cast of characters. Old-school magicians or charlatans … Cosimo Sparks?”

“ ‘Old-school’ is right. Cosimo was strictly minor, even in his heyday. Retired to Vegas from better days in the Midwest. Did social-club benefits and auctions. Thought when they said how the mighty have fallen they meant him. A stumble maybe, but his career successes were mostly in his own ego.”

“Carmen?”

“Ah. Your type, right? Femme fatale. Poisonous young thing, once. When I was still working, which is several years ago, as you know, she tried to seduce me into replacing Gloria Fuentes as my assistant. Indeed! Give up a trained veteran who still looked PDG.”

“PDG?”

“Pretty damned good. At my age, you appreciate women who manage that, and some do into their nineties now. It’s in the head,” he said, tapping his right temple. Max winced, sensitized to the word temple now. “Anyway, I don’t dump a loyal partner for a few crow’s-feet when I’m all over sags and bags.”

“That’s so encouraging,” Max said.

“You just twinkled, wicked boy! Making fun of your old partner in a double-edged way. Go to it! That’s the spirit. ‘Curse, if you must, this old gray head… .’ ”

“Enough, ‘Barbara Frietchie.’ I had that poem in grade school too. From what you tell me, we both honored our ‘country’s flag,’ as in that old poem, more than the average.”

“Charmin’ Carmen.” Gandolph mused. “That moniker came later when she conned the guy who made a mint becoming the Cloaked Conjuror into taking her on. Ramona Zamora was her real name. Oh, she was tasty, though. Nineteen and hungry. But what was really in it for me to dump Gloria for a young thing but a few blow jobs and a kiss-off?”

“Garry! Have I ever heard you talk that way before?”

He had the grace to look apologetic. “No.” He rubbed a hand over his weary features, giving them a passing face-lift. “I used to respect women more, and the world.”

“Didn’t Gloria die?”

“Hardly. She was killed last year. Only fifty-eight. Police couldn’t find her murderer right away and probably retired the case. Woman accosted and killed in a parking lot. It’s the major unsolved cliché crime of our time.”

“Helluva time,” Max muttered.

“Don’t let me hang up your dream memories. I can’t believe your subconscious has dredged up those familiar names from my days of yore. I helped you set up the Phantom Mage persona and act at the Neon Nightmare. We knew the Synth members met there, or even owned the place, but you never reported names back to me. Just questions about the Synth, which I’d never heard of before. Who else has your memory conjured?”

“Czarina Catherina, the usual fake medium in a fake turban.”

“Oh, I’d exposed her years ago in Cleveland.”

“More details about your unsuspected sex life, Gandolph? Really, I’m still too young for such confessions.”

“I exposed her as a fake, bilking people out of money for ‘messages’ from dead loved ones.”

“You don’t think one can get messages from dead loved ones?”

Gandolph glanced at him with worried eyes. “Occasionally, there are cases and mediums that seem … actual. What do you think you saw in your dreams last night, Max?”

“I think one of the four Synth members present is still a mystery to me, because I saw myself in a mirror, and I was Sean.”

“You recognized him, and them. A giant step forward, Max.”

“Really? I saw Sean as the full-grown man he’d never lived to be.”

“You think he’s ‘haunting’ you?”

“I think he’s always haunted me, but we don’t know for sure, do we?”

“I do know you were that rarity in Irish-American family life—an only child.”

“So Sean and I must have been more like brothers than cousins. The same age. What do you know of our families?”

“The cold facts. Nothing personal. Sean was part of the usual large brood. He was a gregarious, charming boy, from what I gathered, but immature. Unlike you.”

Max laughed. “ ‘Gregarious.’ Why do I know that’s not me?”

“You were always the ‘run silent, run deep’ sort, Max. Charming too, when you found it useful. And cursed with maturity.”

“Even about girls, women? Even about revenge?”

“Why do you think you ended up with the enchanting Kathleen O’Connor, who was an ‘older woman.’ Technically?”

“I don’t know. I saw her dead in my dreams, just a swatch of her face on the dark ground, no features. She’d have been in her early twenties when we met, and she already had been through hell.”

“Twenty-three to your seventeen. A huge gulf at those ages.”

“Gandolph!”

“Yes, Max?”

“Her mother was condemned to a Magdalen house, and she in her turn. She was an unwed mother by her late teens. What happened to her infant?”

“Adopted out? Could have died during childbirth. Teenage mothers—”

“God! Don’t tell me we need to look for another lost soul!”

“I don’t know, Max. It doesn’t concern us now. If getting pieces of your memory back means you’re going to obsess about Kathleen O’Connor again, all right. I can live with that, as I did before. But we don’t have time to hunt younger generations of old losses. The burying of the terrorism hatchet so long impaled in this island seems to have released some collateral mischief. That’s why our old enemies are talking to us. They want what we know.”

“What I know is cobwebs and night frights.”

“Perhaps more than that, behind the veil?”

“I saw a ring,” Max remembered. “An unlucky opal ring. The seductress in the dream, your real-life Carmen, produced it for me, but I declared it synthetic. Like dreams, like my not-quite-teen angel, Kitty the Cutter, like God knows what else is synthetic.”

“ ‘Synthetic,’ Max? An odd word for a dream.”

“What? Dreams don’t come in three syllable words? Mine do.”

“Listen, Max. We’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with these ‘retired’ Irish operatives. They want to know something from us or they’d never cooperate. We desperately need to know what, and what not, to tell them during these upcoming negotiations.”

“I get it.”

“No, you don’t. Even your dreams are trying to tell you. We’ve been tracing the vague trail of a conspiracy, or cabal of individuals, many of them magicians or former magicians, and unsolved murders in Las Vegas.”

“And we’re now in Northern Ireland, because … ?”

“Because it may have started but not ended here. You dreamed up the word synthetic, clearly referring to what these magicians call themselves—the Synth.”

“Sounds like they suffer from a lisp.”

“This is not funny, Max!” Gandolph’s fist hit the hardwood arm of his chair. “This is not a holiday jaunt.” He rubbed his banged fist with the other hand, brows forming an anxious knot above the bridge of his nose. “It’s obvious your subconscious is trying to break out of your amnesia. Going back to the scenes of your youth might leapfrog a lot of time and pain. So might this.”

Gandolph spun his laptop so Max could see the drawing of a city map split by mostly red and green blocks of color covering innumerable neighborhood names.

“The Orange and the Green sides,” Max guessed. “Orange, east; Green, west. When’s the Broadway musical coming?”

“This ‘tune’ is too bitter to play in America. To this day,” Gandolph said, “this is a land packed with atrocities vividly remembered on both sides of Belfast and both sides—south and north—of the island itself.”