Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Gandolph—and Max now focused on the older man as a magician in the classical sense of a mage, like the wizard Gandalf his stage name played upon—shook his head.

“You’re a hard case, Max Kinsella, but hard times made you so. Why do you think we’re following the sad trail of Kathleen O’Connor?”

“She’s an irresistible siren, that girl renamed Rebecca. I remember the movie.”

“Just the movie? There were several TV versions as well.”

“Rebecca was a beauty, but she was an evil woman, a manipulator, a man-eater,” Max said.

“Granted. Notorious women leave longer legends than noble ones.”

“And dead before the novel began, yet she had more vitality even when dead than the novel’s pallid nameless heroine.”

“That was the point, my boy. Evil can be not only attractive but vital. Some women are poison.”

Max glanced at his mentor as the accelerating Mondeo clung to a curve. “You have Revienne in mind?”

“Don’t you? Oh, what a lovely candidate for a femme fatale. Blonde. Beautiful. French, but don’t forget she’s half German. Easy for her to be at war with herself. I know nothing about this woman, Max, except her impressive résumé as a psychiatrist. When I discovered she was associated with the sanitarium I whisked you to in desperation, I seized upon her services. I knew every step of the way it could all have been set up by whoever attempted to kill you back at the Neon Nightmare club in Vegas. Or not. It’s hard to believe any man would encounter two she-devils before he was thirty-five.”

“And Kathleen O’Connor was indeed demonic?”

“After our visit to the Convent of the Little Flower near Dublin and a glimpse into its presumed impious prisoners, wouldn’t you have been?”

“Unbelievable how past wrongs keep raising their monstrous heads. I remember reading about the Irish institutional abuses a decade ago, and here they are making headlines again.”

“Victims never forget. And … it’s easier to track records, and people, now.”

Max glanced at the open netbook on Gandolph’s lap. “You find anything online on Kathleen as opposed to the downtrodden Rebecca?”

“Kathleen O’Connors are as common as grains of sand on a beach, in Ireland or out. We’ll have to rely on personal interviews with old enemies. Next stop, Belfast and any ex-IRA men we can turn up.”

“You’re sure they’re ‘ex’? I do remember headlines about pub bombings and outrages against innocents in my vague ‘way back when’ youth.”

“You don’t remember family? Where you lived? Wisconsin? A street? The house?”

“Pieces. As if Picasso had played Guernica with images of my past. A long empty echoing hall, in a school or possibly a church. Snow covering a looming pair of fir trees in a front yard. Concrete stairs and a metal railing to a white-painted door. Midwestern, it looked. I felt more at home on the Alpine meadows, come to think of it.”

“You were on the run. That’s been half your life, the most recent life. No faces from your past haunt you?”

“No faces. It’s as if someone had erased the most intimate parts of my memories.”

“You’re sure Revienne didn’t drug you? Hypnotize you?”

“No. How could I be sure she didn’t? I stayed off the pain pills and injections in the Swiss clinic as soon as I was conscious, but anything could have been pumped into my mind or veins before that. My apparent memory loss could be totally induced.”

“That’s the Max I remember. Always suspicious.”

“Not a fun guy.”

“Not now. You used to be amusing company.”

“I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. When did we stop keeping company?”

“Just over two years ago. We split up when you got the Vegas hotel job. You’d met Temple Barr in Minneapolis, and it was love at first sight.”

“Wasn’t I … more careful then?’

“Not about her. You whisked her away from her native city and family to live in sin with you in Vegas while you headlined a magic show at the Goliath. I, and our employers, understood you deserved a life. Hiding behind the magician persona had always been a natural cover for you. I was relieved we both seemed to have ‘retired’ due to true love, and I resumed my long-ago hobby of unmasking fraudulent psychics.”

“A contradiction in terms, isn’t that last?”

“So I’ve always found, but I have hopes. Anyway, your redheaded girlfriend got involved promoting a hokey Vegas Halloween séance in which I was playing the undercover patsy … and you came along eventually to safeguard her, so I had to fake my own death.”

“A true Gandalf.”

“I’ve always been Gandolph. What do you mean by true?”

“The book! Even I remember The Lord of the Rings. You took your stage name from the wizard Gandalf the Grey, right? He appeared to die in the novels and then came back.”