Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“I can just make it.” Max half rose before pausing to sit back down. “Wasn’t Professor Mangel young to have made a will?”

“You can do it online now. Jeff was forty-eight, far too young to die.” Gruetzmeyer shook his shaggy head. “I made mine after the calamitous fact of his death.”

“He sounds exceptionally expert on the magic and the mantic arts. Did he advise any other magicians?”

“He had a couple of local pals. Let me see.” Gruetzmeyer squinted his eyes tight on his own command, letting relinquished memories resurface.

Max understood that technique well. He’d done it at home with a glass of Irish whiskey. Some men drink to forget, they said. He drank to loosen up his subconscious, to remember.

The prof’s striking green eyes popped open, brightening as they saw the light. “One was an older fellow. Larry Randolph, or some such.”

Max nodded, holding himself very still.

“Then there was a practicing magician, but at small clubs around Vegas, not a big shot. Still performed in full white tie, tails and top hat. I don’t think he pulled rabbits out of the top hat, though. His name was odd … ‘Topper’?”

“Topper?” Max asked. “That could refer to the top hat.”

“And Còsimo, like Còsimo di Mèdici, the Renaissance prince.”

“Cosmo.” Max muttered the word that leaped into his arbitrary brain before tying ‘Cosmo Topper’ to a character in an old TV show.

“No. Còsimo. That name is known in Europe. Còsimo and … something to do with fire.”

“Cosimo Sparks?”

“That’s it!”

“And you just recalled it now?” Max asked.

“Yes, thanks to your inquiries. Why, should it be familiar?”

“No. He was pretty much retired, as far as I can find out.”

Max was sure some mention of the man’s recent death had been in the newspaper or on TV, but Gruetzmeyer seemed the kind of old-fashioned intellectual who relied on books, not electronic media. Max recalled Temple bemoaning the ill luck of having media on hand to film the dead body as it was being discovered—her bright idea gone wrong—since she wasn’t expecting a corpse to show up for her ceremonial opening of an old underground safe.

And Cosimo Sparks, also stabbed like Jefferson Mangel, had also been found with his red-satin-lined cloak arranged in a tortured shape.

He decided not to ask Professor Gruetzmeyer if he’d heard of Ophiuchus. The big question was whether Revienne had.

Chapter 43

Alien Eyes

Poor Jeff Mangel. His honorary gallery was in an eight-foot-high space whose ceiling Max could dust with his upstretched hand, a bland former classroom sporting sound-deadening ceiling tiles spotted with tiny black holes.

The floor was covered by equally uninspiring vinyl tile in a pastel, smashed-worms-on-sidewalk pattern.

Flashback.

Max had gone to high school in exactly the same bland spaces. If he hadn’t made himself a stranger to his family in his teens, as Gandolph told him, he would know where to go to confirm these unsettling slide shows in his brain. Wisconsin, Gandolph said. Max didn’t feel like a Wisconsin sort of person … fresh air, bracing winters. More like an escapee from a Florida swamp filled with gators and snapping turtles and black mambas on the brain—oh, my.

He strolled around the perimeter to study the three-dimensional items under Plexiglas boxes.

Decks of gorgeously illustrated antique tarot cards; wood and metal coin boxes, the Okito, Boston and slot varieties; wands of all types …

He stopped and moved back to the coin boxes. One was made of beautifully grained cocobolo wood, as wands often were. Not a seam showed in its curved dimensions, but a ring of ivory inset on the top was carved in the shape of a worm Ouroboros, the snake biting its tail and a symbol of eternity that matched the ring Kathleen O’Connor had forced Matt Devine to wear for a time.

The image was commonly known to people with a mystical bent. This could be meaningless, but it had belonged to Jefferson Mangel, who perhaps had been a man who knew too much.

The Plexiglas cover wasn’t locked. It had an “invisible” sliding seam on one side. Max had the cocobolo wood box in his hands in an instant, and the other four coin boxes in that section respaced to hide its absence. He could return the piece as easily.

The wood warmed in his hands. His fingertips felt no opening, but there had to be one. Time to play with it later. It slipped into his pants pocket.

Could there be something interesting in the ranks of posters displayed carpet-sample fashion? Max flipped through the giant aluminum frames like pages in a book, viewing show placards that pictured magicians from the Frenchman Robert-Houdin, to the Austrian he’d inspired, Houdini, to Blackstone to David Copperfield and to … the Mystifying Max. He started slightly as he came face-to-face with himself.

All magicians, except the Cloaked Conjuror, aspired to that Bela Lugosi as Dracula hypnotic stare, but Max was surprised in ambush by the dramatically intent expression. His green-eyed black-panther stare would do Midnight Louie proud.

Flashback.