Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Dark of night in Las Vegas, and Max was just where he wanted to be, making like Spider-Man in darkness high above the New Millennium Hotel’s massive stage. He was back to his apparently favorite death-defying persona, undercover high-wire artist.

Every few seconds, a shifting stage effect or a neon-bright light from the performance below forced him to skid five feet down a four-story ladder or duck behind the bars of rolled-up scenery scrims.

How do you finagle a private audience with a man advertised as “the world’s most mysterious and reclusive and richest magician”? Max had probably done just that in the recent past. Now … all the shortcuts in his brain were short-circuited. Any magic formulas he’d known had tangled on his tongue. He needed to contact his quarry in the split second between leaving the stage and stepping into the arms of his security forces waiting in the wings just beyond the audience’s line of sight.

Operating under the radar and slipping past security had proved to be one skill still solidly in place. Just the act of scaling the complicated set pieces put his mind and limbs into motions that should shake loose the blocks of memory loss.

The noise bouncing off the hard concrete walls up here made his memory synapses jolt as the pulse-pounding music vibrated the metal framework he perched upon. Gigantic light sabers washed the four-story box’s inner walls in rhythm with the approving roar of the crowd.

Max waited to pounce on his one perfect moment, linked to the height by a thick thread, his favored and always potentially fatal bungee cord. These tensile bundles of elastic nerves made Cirque de Soleil’s many franchised arty acrobat shows—in Vegas and on the road—a billion-dollar business.

The stage floor below was broken into round elevator platforms that lifted magic effects to different levels, and then sank them below view for set changes. And through this magic mushroom stagescape strode the king of the jungle, his dreadlock mane surrounding a tiger-striped face mask, with a muscular-shouldered leather cloak concealing six-inch platform boots off some seventies’ rock album cover.

As applause thundered, Max timed the departing magician’s stride length. He pushed off the high framework to land on point beside the moving man, unfastening the bungee cord at the same time his hand crushed the leather cloak shoulder and his mouth spoke against the cat-head’s broad striped cheek, right on the hearing amplifying device.

“Me Tarzan.” Max’s low, gritty tone would thrum inside the hollow mask. “You in jeopardy.”

“And you’re a dead man,” came the answering rasp. The Caped Conjuror had flicked off his voice amplifier as quickly as Max had appeared.

Now his huge gloved paw waved off three security guys a-leaping in front of sixty fans with backstage passes a-pushing. His arm clutched Max’s shoulders in a bear hug, signaling friendship to his hair-trigger crew, and feeling like custody to Max.

You mess with a big cat, you might catch some claws.

The hold carried Max along at the center of the exiting cadre, leaving behind a crush of fans and the blinding blinks of cell phone cameras held on high.

Only yards away was the dressing room door made of heavy metal: big, blank, and bank-vault solid. Once it slammed shut on them, the two men were alone.

“Lucky I recognize your voice.” CC slung his heavy cloak onto the shoulders of a super-tall mannequin standing in one corner. The base had been bolted to the floor to handle the weight CC carried two shows a day. “So you’re back from the dead.”

“What made you think I was dead?” Max asked, throwing himself into the cushy leather armchair CC had indicated with a wave of his doffed gauntlets. “That didn’t get out.”

“I have kept an eye on every magician’s act in and out of this town, especially some new cat calling himself the ‘Phantom Mage.’ That costume and routine treaded awfully close to my franchise, pal.”

CC stepped off his platforms while holding on to a bathtub bar screwed into the wall. “My security setup doesn’t permit me having a dresser. Too easily bought off. Give me a hand?”

Max pushed himself upright.

“If you can give me some leg,” he said wryly, absorbing the big guy’s weight while CC stepped over the bulky platforms and dropped down into the upholstered chair at his dressing table. He was shorter than Max, but stockier.

“I would ask how you can walk on those things,” Max added, eyeing the Klingon-style height-enhancers, “but I have several female friends and Lady Gaga ready to swear it’s no problem.”

“It’s a problem,” CC said. “This costume is a sweatbox, a molded plastic and felt and fabric prison.”

Max nodded. “As for ripping you off in my Neon Nightmare persona, a mask and cape aren’t copyrightable wardrobe items. Ask Zorro or Batman. And, as you discovered, those costume bits are the only way to disguise a face and build. What tipped you off to my pseudonymous act?”