Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 16

Of course they all knew that. He was a renegade. A true solo artist. Everyone knew of him, and no one knew him. And he was one of them. A professional magician of the old school.

"You vanished," Carmen observed with an Elvis-like S-curled lip.

"I gave up the art, for a while." Max paused. "It's changed. Now it's more fashionable to mock magic than to practice it."

That was the party line, of course. Yet he believed it enough to sound sincere. He had grown up in the old traditions. Even if he hadn't been forced to flee after the murder at the Goliath over a year ago, he had already begun to wonder if he could move fast enough for the sh.e.l.l game that magic in the media age had become. Or if he even wanted to.

Heads were nodding around the room, grizzled, balding heads. One belonged to the man who had interviewed the Phantom Mage and said, Don't call us; we'll call you. Apparently Max had not lost his touch for changing his personality, his stance, his mentality with each new role he played. Max winced internally. Problem was, now in his own persona, he wasn't playing the role as much as he should be. He hadn't identified with this generation; he had revered it. Now, he wondered, had he joined it?

The older woman's turbaned head also nodded, as much in sorrow as in agreement. "Magic isn't what it used to be," she added in the fruity, post-menopausal tones of an Ethel Mertz.

Max took a deep but shallow breath, so no one would notice. He would be accepted here. He realized that meant they thought he was pa.s.se, that they had no reason to think he might not be as disgruntled as they were.

An upsetting thought. Not that he had finessed them into accepting him under false colors, but that they knew his performing persona and found it quite logical that the Mystifying Max should be part of a retrograde magicians' coven, driven by dissatisfaction and bile, angry at progress, set on preserving the past at any cost.

Could it be that truth was the best disguise?

"Come to the fire," Colonel Mustard invited.

The invitation triggered a memory. Sparks, the man's performing name had been. Cosimo Sparks.

"Have some brandy," suggested the turbaned woman, lilting her thinning eyebrows and a snifter at the same time.

There was something familiar about her, but he couldn't quite attach it to a time or a place.

"Czarina Catharina," she introduced herself. "I did a mentalist act."

He nodded. He had seen the posters in Jeff Mangel's on-campus art gallery at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and she wasn't among them, but a mentalist wasn't quite a magician. The professor had died surrounded by the posters he had preserved, but now Max was surrounded by many of the famous faces immortalized in those very posters, a Who's Who of ... forgotten magicians, bypa.s.sed headliners, outmoded prestidigitators.

The potent brandy seared his lips, making him jerk like a false reading on a lie detector test graph.

"Strong stuff," Carmen noted with a contralto laugh.

"No," Max muttered. "It's strong stuff meeting a roster of a World Magicians' Hall of Fame." Oddly, he meant it.

His hand shook slightly as he lifted his brandy snifter and inhaled the high-proof perfume of Hennessy XO Special. He had liked to think he had retired, forcibly, from his profession, pushed by an inexplicable murder into flight. He didn't like to think he had also reached a dead end.

"World Magicians' Hall of Fame! There's no such organization." Sparks barked like a discontented seal. "It's all commercial tie-ins nowadays. Make a Lear jet disappear on live TV. Make the Seagram Building crumble on cable TV. We might as well be terrorists as illusionists."

"You were always too subtle," Czarina noted sadly, "to survive."

Her words struck a chill like a dagger to Max's heart. He had consoled himself that he had retired because his primary career, counterterrorism, had finally made his cover profession useless. But the fact was he had been a magician first and foremost, from his preteen years, and now he was among his own kind, who faced his own kind of extinction, and they were his enemies. They were the Synth.

Max couldn't help it. He took a deep, sighing breath.

Carmen rose and stalked toward him. "You are one of us, aren't you? However, or why ever you 'blundered' in here, it was no accident. You have come home."

An undercover operative could not have asked for an easier "in."

A fellow magician could not have imagined a harder task.

He was in like Flynn. Like Errol Flynn, Mr. Swashbuckler, he would have to play many parts, and some of them, he saw now, might break his heart.

Chapter 22.

. . . Playback Hand it to Leticia, Matt thought. She never fully relinquished the Earth-mother persona of Ambrosia.

She walked Matt out to the parking lot. The 2:00 A.M. sick-green parking-lot lights turned the black asphalt gray and made a knot of female fans waiting for Matt look jaundiced.

"Safety in numbers," Leticia declared. "Don't you linger after all the sweet young things get your John Hanc.o.c.k and leave."

Matt eyed his white Probe, looking pea-green in the lights, and nodded. He could edge over to the car while signing the station photographs and they could all skedaddle without risking a close encounter with Kitty the Cutter.

The slam of Leticia's car door a.s.sured him that she was sealed away from any motorcycle raids. He thanked his gushing fans and signed, moving toward the car.

Sweet young things they were not. More like sweet middle-aged things, women whose faces wore the worry lines of hard work and hard times. People with higher educations and high-paying jobs took their insecurities to psychoa.n.a.lysts and trendier alternative pract.i.tioners. Radio listeners let it all hang out, Matt had discovered, the same phenomenon that drove the tabloid TV show phenomenon and kept Jerry and Ricki and company in clover.

He was just a local phenomenon in a second-tier media. He liked it that way, and hoped that Kathleen's unfond farewell broadcast on his show meant she was really out of his hair.

He was signing on the Probe's fender now, straining to keep some light on the photograph so his penmanship was at least recognizable.

There was one last customer, an immensely overweight woman with the optimistic beaming eyes of a child. Seeing such doomed outcasts always made Matt hurt for them. Everybody faces rejection, but not everybody is a walking advertis.e.m.e.nt for it. She did everything wrong: carried too much weight, wore circus-size polyester, had her brown hair crimped into some shapeless frizz, a bad complexion, thick-lensed gla.s.ses in bad frames, and bit her fingernails down to the b.l.o.o.d.y quick. Did the Almighty have no mercy sometimes? Couldn't He have given this female equivalent of Red Skelton's Poor Soul some natural advantage? Just one.

Her smile. She brought the signed photo close to the crooked-framed gla.s.ses, read what he'd written, and smiled. Her teeth were perfect: small, even, white as snow.

"Gee, thanks! That's one thing I'm good at. Devotion. Your 'devoted listener.' I just love radio. It lets you imagine anything."

And off she toddled, happy.

Matt leaned against the car door. There ought to be an Individuals Anonymous group for people who weren't thin, confident, good-looking, and socially smooth.

They should spend their time reinforcing their self-esteem, instead of pursuing autographs from people like him who looked like they had it all together and certainly didn't.

He breathed deeply. The air was the exact temperature of his body. Breathing seemed to be swimming in a puddle of warm, unscented night.

Was she really gone, out of his life, Kathleen O'Connor? But before he could breath free, something fell from somewhere, out of the corner of his eye, a piece of air-lifted paper, whatever. It looked like a falling woman, Va.s.sar slipping downward in the hollow core of the Goliath Hotel at an hour when everybody else was wafted upward in the gla.s.s cages of hotel elevators.

A pale figure stepped out of the radio station building's one-story shadow.

Matt straightened, tightening his fingers on the car keys in his pocket.

He'd been dreaming when he should have been following Leticia's orders and getting himself out of the deserted parking lot.

The figure was slight, light-colored, and coming toward him.

For a moment he fantasized the ghost of Va.s.sar. Then he feared it was Kitty.

Before he could act on any instinct: stand or run, the figure had come too close to avoid.

"Matt? You are Matt Devine?"

He hesitated, unwilling to give anything of himself away again.

The figure stepped closer, into the wedge of green light that shed a lime pall over Matt and his white car. He was relieved to see it was a man.

Most people would fear male muggers. Matt feared a female one.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Don't you recognize me?"

This invitation to inspection had Matt trying to pin a label on a cipher. The guy was maybe five-five, pale-skinned, no Las Vegasite. Balding hard, but only in his ... mid-thirties, maybe? Mild-looking. No mugger. So what was he, then?"It's Jerome," he said.

Jerome. Okay. Didn't ring a bell. Or did it?

"Do I know you from somewhere?"

"St. Vincent's. And I guess I've changed. Used to have a mop of hair. That's the way it always is with us bald guys; heavy on top at the beginning, cue b.a.l.l.s by the time we hit the late twenties. Your hair seems to be hanging on."

"Yeah. I guess." Matt didn't think much about his hair, except when it needed cutting. It had never occurred to him that cutting was a privilege. "St. Vincent Seminary?"

"In Indiana. We were there. Together."

"Jerome. Jerome! Uh, Johnson, wasn't it?"

"Still is."

"Sorry. Las Vegas is so far away from all that."

"Is it ever."

"What are you doing here?" *

"Here? Right now? Or here in Las Vegas?"

"Both, I guess." Matt looked around, realizing their vulnerability. "You have a car. Want to go somewhere?"

"I have a Geo Metro. Sure, but I don't know the places yet."

"Why don't you follow me to the first fast-food joint we hit? They'll have chairs and coffee."

"Kinda like an AA meeting."

"Yeah." Matt immediately wondered if that was Jerome's problem. Because he had to have one. People from your past didn't turn up unless they did. Look at himself, turning up in Cliff Effinger's present. And now Effinger had no future at all. Ever. Anywhere.

I'm dangerous to know, Matt wanted to tell Jerome Johnson from St. Vincent's. You don't want to go anywhere with me.

The man reeked of the Midwest. He could have been an extra in Fargo, but he'd come a long way to be in this parking lot. Matt couldn't turn him away.

He got into the Probe, started it, watched in the rearview mirror for Jerome's vehicle to wheel in behind him. It did, a toy car on spindly wheels, looking as insubstantial as the man who drove it.

Why? Matt wondered.

Johnson had obviously come here trying to make a connection. St. Vincent's was an Ice Age ago to them both. So much water had melted under the church's medieval bridge since those days. So much had happened to them both. Jerome today had not worn a collar. It didn't mean he had left the priesthood too. Lots of priests nowadays dispensed with obvious religious labeling. But Matt sensed they had something in common. That was why Jerome had looked him up, had approached him in this disconcerting way. The only way he could have found him was through the radio persona, and even then he would have had to have tried hard.

Matt pulled onto the deserted street, watching for motorcycles, but more worried about the una.s.suming man in the very una.s.suming car behind him.

Matt didn't like surprises from his past any more than he liked surprises from Max Kinsella's past. In that case, he had ended up stalked by a madwoman. What did this sad little guy want from him? More than Matt could or would want to give, he'd bet.

Lose one crown of thorns, gain another. G.o.d help him.

He drove, half an eye ahead on the highway of lit signs fifteen feet above the street level, half an eye in his rearview mirror, not only scanning for the headlights of Jerome's little car, but for any other following vehicles.

Nothing.

Matt suddenly swung the Probe's steering wheel up the usual Strip center rise and dip designed to discourage speedsters. A Wendy's he remembered only when he saw the big lighted sign.

He took a slot between two mammoth SUVs near the front door. Jerome found a place in the street-facing row behind him.

They entered together, suddenly lit by night-bright restaurant fluorescents.

It was awkward standing in line to order, strangers surrounded by strangers, not wanting to make small talk because there was none. Between graduates of the same seminary there was only large talk.

They found a fairly crumb-free table for their plastic trays and sat near the window, where they could watch lights stab the night ad infinitum. It was like a fallen universe, a big city street at night, with galaxies of signs touting 24/7 enterprises and the small satellites of cars cruising by continually.

The black-backed window faintly reflected their faces, neither particularly recognizable.

"So how did you find me?" Matt asked, stripping the flimsy paper jacket off the straw for his Sprite.

"Just . . . luck. I saw the billboard. Or one of them."

"Those miserable things! Hype. But the radio industry is a media business, and it's all hype. What were you doing in Las Vegas?"

"I work here. Live here."

"Really? You ever go to the ex-priest meetings in Henderson?"

Jerome lowered his eyes to his tissue-wrapped burger. Grease was soaking through like giant raindrops. "No. I ... I felt no need."

"I don't go myself. I just was surprised that there were enough of us in Las Vegas to get a group together. So you are . . . ex, then?"

Jerome nodded as if not happy about it. Or about admitting it. Matt said, "There are almost as many 'exes' as 'ins,' these days."