Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“You were too good for the Neon Nightmare. You were having fun. I recognized the first impish cavorting of working masked. It feels like freedom.”

“We’ve talked about this before,” Max said. Suspecting.

“You’re the only magician I’d speak to.” The huge feline mask cocked like an inquisitive dog’s. Max almost laughed at the effect. From skirmishes with Midnight Louie, he knew cats expressed their curiosity with laser eye intensity and pointed paw examinations, not cutely tilted puzzlement.

“I’d hoped that was the case,” Max told him.

“Why wouldn’t it be? Don’t you remember?”

“Not … completely.”

The Cloaked Conjuror sat up straighter, abandoning the exhausted post-show slouch that Max recognized so well, now that he thought about it.

“What are you saying?” CC scratched his huge big cat nose, apparently a stock gesture for uncertainty. Max found it both odd and sad that he’d adapted so thoroughly to wearing the mask.

“I had a ‘brain crash.’” Max shrugged. “Memory loss was a side effect of the two broken legs that came from hitting the Neon Nightmare wall on the swing of a frayed bungee cord.”

“Damn!” CC’s striking bare fist, large folded fingers with hair-dusted knuckles, made the items on his makeup table, which weren’t makeup, bounce. “Onstage assassination attempt. I figure I’m going to end that way. When you’ve made a career of unmasking other magicians’ hallmark illusions, someone is going to get mad enough and is expert enough to do you in, no matter the guards. Look how close you came today. If you’d wanted to knife me instead of talk to me—”

“You’d be fine,” Max said. “The cloak is fine-woven chain mail, and the equipment-loaded mask collar puts your neck off-limits. I would have had time to slip a stiletto down your gauntlet, though, and cut your wrist veins.”

“Damn again! We’ve never thought of that in our security meetings.”

“You’d probably recover and I’d be dead,” Max said in consolation.

“Maybe not.” CC sounded morose. “You survived that Neon Nightmare impact. Why are you my friend?”

“I need one. And I’m nobody’s hired gun.”

“I’ve always thought we had common ground, Kinsella, that you were in some way imprisoned by your career as much as I am. That you were as really and truly solo as I have to be, not able to trust anyone, or ever let down my guard.”

“True enough,” Max said.

“And yet I do with you.” CC braced his armored right forearm on the dressing table, holding up a bare fist as an invitation to arm-wrestle.

Max hesitated, then braced and flexed his own right arm. His legs were iffy. His arm and upper body strength were the foundation of his career. He’d win in two seconds. Instead of grasping CC’s fist for a contest, he gave it a bump, the current gesture of camaraderie.

The man’s laughter sounded faint compared to his supplemented onstage voice. Max guessed he’d never see CC’s face unless he was in a casket. And the Cloaked Conjuror would probably want even that closed.

“I never exposed your ‘walking on air’ illusion,” CC said thoughtfully. “Of course it wasn’t magic. It was timing and astounding physical discipline. Loved the doves, man. That was a message.”

Flashback.

Strobe lights raking an empty stage faster than the blink of an eye. The audience hushing when the first dove flew to its invisible black perch against the stage’s velvet-black backdrop. The next dove flickered onto a different level on the other side of the stage. Then the next landed elsewhere until all you could see were doves fluttering like snowflakes, dozens of them, archangels landing on a cloud, wings lifted, balancing. The audience was now mentally adding the words to the instrumental music playing softly behind the first dove and getting louder. Upbeat. It was the “Believe It or Not” Mike Post theme from The Greatest American Hero TV show about an ordinary Joe becoming a superhero.

Only … blink again and there was the magician, standing upright on nothing, Max standing taller than a straight pin, wearing traditional magician’s garb. Dark hair, dark formal garb with strobe flashes of white tie and flying black tails, holding a slim white-tipped black wand. Wearing a shiny black top hat.

CC chuckled. “You were something else. Hugh Jackman doing Tommy Tune doing Fred Astaire as even Fred Astaire had never imagined it. I could never do that Lightfoot Harry act.”

And no matter where onstage Max had appeared, it was among a flutter of those constantly landing white doves. The strobe lights caught him flashing from one impeccably posed position to another, dancing in the dark, never captured striving or moving, walking on air, always the iconic image of the Magician. The Mystifying Max.

Flashback again:

“That effect,” he heard himself saying authoritatively, “was the product of years, five bird handlers, a tech crew of seven and a wonderfully calming dove cote only three miles off-Strip, plus the inspection and fiat of animal welfare groups.”