Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Max was trying to be the first. Gandolph had preceded him in that attempt and Gandolph was dead.

Max wasn’t dead yet. He grinned again at the screen. And he sure wasn’t a writer. Where there’s imperfection, there’s hope.

Back to last night. He had tried not to damage Molina to the point where she could press charges, which meant he’d had to take a few blows, yet appear subdued. That was the hardest part. Max had built a life on refusing to be subdued.

When the news of the attack at Baby Doll’s had come over Molina’s radio, he had raced there to collect Temple after the crime scene officers let her go and whisk her home to the Circle Ritz and the frantic comfort of a man with nothing good in his life but her. Then, restless in the wee hours, he had stolen away from a sleeping Temple to seek out his own kind, the caged Big Cats, trained to perform, who had been saved from fates worse than death to join the Cloaked Conjuror’s menagerie. It was the best situation for them, but they were as trapped, in a way, as he was, by what they were and what they could do. Dangerous beasts.

And then she had appeared: the most dangerous game of all. Shangri-La, whose likeness and act were a combination of Japanese Kabuki theater and Kung Fu. He could still see her flying though the air above the stage at the Opium Den like an ax, sharp and lethal, all tattered robes and tongues of sable hair, crimson nails as long as a switch blade, face hidden by dead-white makeup with a scarlet mask defining the cheekbones and eyes. And lips.

She had confronted him on his visit to the big cats, broadcasting contempt and threat. A small woman with major mojo.

He didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but he recognized personal threat when he felt it.

The Synth. She had to be an agent, or perhaps a director, of this mysterious alliance of magicians that had its roots as deeply in the past as the arcane ceremonies of the Masons.

He must find and infiltrate the Synth.

It would be the most dangerous assignment of his career, if he had already been targeted by the shadowy organization. If it existed.

Max read the section he had rewritten on Gandolph: Garry Randolph reinvented himself twice. He led three lives. The first was as the curious and clever adolescent, enchanted by the idea that he could instill wonder in watching eyes. That was the emerging magician, the teenage prestidigitator, renamed as an inverse of an old Western film star, Scott Randolph. (He had always loved the common name, Garry, with its oddball spelling. Hadn’t Garrison Keillor been a plain Gary once, and gotten famous by Easternizing his name on NPR?) Garry Randolph figured that two R’s had double the mystique.

Then he progressed from a good amateur magician to a gifted professional. Somewhere in the process he began to believe in his own magic and took on a stage name that reflected that journey: Gandolph the Great. It was an ingenious reference to that most benign of fictional magicians, and a bow to Garry’s sixties youth: Gandalf the Gray from The Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy, the one man of power strong enough to leave its use to less lethal beings than man or magician, like the hairy-footed, pint-size simple folk called hobbits.

In an odd way Garry’s life mirrored that fictional character.

At the height of his fame and career, he began undercutting his own stage illusions by debunking false mediums, and ultimately, the trickery practiced by magicians.

He ended as he had begun, better known as Garry Randolph than by any stage name. And so he had died. While disguised as a heavily veiled woman medium, in fact, at a phony séance, perhaps murdered by some charlatan’s hand.

In death, as in life, his passing through was a mystery. No one has yet been charged in his death, although several persons present had motives. Was he a victim of the ancient Synth? Had he trespassed against the timeless brotherhood of magicians?

Or is this sense of conspiracy only another stage illusion, created to dazzle the ignorant and the suggestible?

There the narrative ended. Perhaps because Max had only questions and no answers. Actually, it read a lot better than he had thought it would while he was writing. But now his thoughts had ricocheted from the unsuspected difficulties of the writing game to the hidden side of the magic world.

If there was a Synth, he had to find it. Then he had to penetrate it, expose it, survive it.

And he could tell no one.

Especially not Temple. He had to do this solo, much as she wanted, needed to help him in his quest. She was grittier than he had imagined. Max’s lone-wolf life had precluded real intimacy until he had met Temple at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and broken all his own rules.

She was smart, creative, and otherwise adorable. He’d always understood that he needed to protect her from the dangers of his counterterrorism past. When it came to international politics, good guys made bad enemies.

He hadn’t understood, until he was forced into a corner, that she was ready, willing, and able to protect him. She’d stone-walled Molina for months while he was gone. She deserved to know, but she didn’t have what the espionage industry called “a need to know.”

The Synth was too much an unknown, too risky, to allow Temple to know too much.

Who would even believe such a medieval entity still existed?

Only Garry Randolph, perhaps, and one fact about him was certain.

He was dead. Gone.

Chapter 8

Hobbits with Claws

“All things come to he who waits,” I tell Miss Midnight Louise.

“I am tired of trite and gender-limiting clichés,” she tells me right back.

“The truth is often uncomfortable, but I do not intend to be.” I settle back into the soft spot I have dented into the sofa cushion through long custom.

Miss Louise is still sitting upright on the opposite arm, twitching her tail, and she does have a long supple one to twitch.

“We should be ratcheting up the side of this crazy building right now,” she tells me. “I know we could eavesdrop an earful on Mr. Matt Devine’s patio.”

“Eavesdropping through solid glass and wood is a taxing affair.”

“Maybe for the senior set,” she shoots right back.

“And it would be hard to conceal our presence. The undercover operative is most effective when he—or she—is unseen. Around Miss Temple’s digs, a cat, or two, is ho-hum. Although I must admit that our double presence did cause the intimidating lieutenant a certain unease.”

“It was my unexpected presence that unnerved her. That, and the thought that you might be multiple. What did you do to scar the poor woman’s psyche?”

“That lieutenant is no ‘poor woman.’ Save your sympathy for someone more deserving, like the great white shark in Jaws.”

“You are referencing stuff way too old for my generation, Pops. Since when did playing the couch potato pass for head’s-up investigation?”

At this juncture I hear the key turn in our door. “Since now. Listen and learn, kit.”

Sure enough, Miss Temple bustles in and throws her key on a kitchen countertop. Then she snags the portable phone on the coffee table en route to casting herself down right alongside me on the couch Miss Louise finds so hospitable to potatoes.

She hits one digit that I know leads right to a certain cell phone.

On her perch, Miss Louise lifts an airy set of eyebrow hairs.

“Come on,” Miss Temple urges the phone, jiggling the sofa cushion unnecessarily as she idly caresses my ears. “Answer!”

Well, who would dare disobey my Miss Temple when she is in crisis mode? Not the phone system.

“Max!” She always sounds so glad to hear his voice. I admit to being a wee bit jealous, and stretch out so that my toes are tickling her thighs.