Holy Terror (14 page)

Conor and Eleanor climbed out of the taxi into the heat.

‘You know this guy?' asked the taxi driver.

‘He's a friend,' said Eleanor, sharply.

The taxi driver shrugged and said nothing, although he clearly implied that Sidney Randall was a well-known local fruitcake. ‘You want to be rescued, call this number,' he said, and handed them a card.

‘Funny,' said Eleanor. ‘I never thought that I'd ever come back to Staten Island. Rex had a studio not far from here, on Sharrott Avenue.'

The front yard was busy with crickets. They climbed the steps and Conor pulled the doorbell, which had the cast-iron head of a snarling wolf. They waited a long time, listening for any response. Eleanor shaded her eyes with her hand and peered in through the diamond-shaped panes of yellow stained glass. ‘I can't
see
anybody,' she said. ‘But it looks like the back door is open, and I'm sure that I can hear music.'

‘Let's try the rear,' said Conor.

They walked around the side of the house, negotiating a narrow path prickly with briars. The music grew more distinct: it was
Pavane pour une infante défunte
by Ravel – slow, melancholy piano music, in time with the heat and the chirruping of the crickets, and the treacly feeling that they had left
the city behind and arrived in another world.

In the yard, in a hammock slung between two apple trees, a tall bony old man was sleeping, with a white linen hat over his face. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar, and voluminous white pants. A butterfly was perched on his bare big toe.

‘God, he's aged,' said Eleanor.

She approached him through the knee-length grass. The butterfly flickered away. She stood beside him for a while, just looking at him. Then she slowly lifted his hat.

He opened his eyes. He had an angular, sculptured face, with a prominent nose and a straggly gray beard. He looked like one of those characters standing third from the left in a Civil War photograph, while Sherman sits in front of him at a small folding table.

‘Saints alive, I'm dreaming,' he said.

‘No, you're not,' said Eleanor. ‘It's really, really me.'

He sat up and peered at her. ‘By God, Bipsy, you've grown older.'

‘It's been a long time, that's why.'

‘Oh, don't get me wrong. You're just as beautiful as you ever were.'

‘Too late,' said Eleanor, in mock-petulance. ‘You've said it now.'

‘But it's true! Did I ever lie to you? Did I ever lie to you once?'

‘Oh, stop all the sentimental nonsense. I'd like you to meet a new friend of mine, Conor O'Neil.'

Sidney swung awkwardly out of his hammock. He came forward and laid his hand on Conor's
shoulder. ‘Glad to know you, Mr O'Neil. I won't shake hands with you, it's just a little problem I have. But you're welcome all the same. How about some iced tea? Or maybe a glass of wine? It's damned hot, isn't it?'

‘The Vaudeville Artistes' Fund said you were dead, Sidney,' Eleanor told him. ‘You'd better call them up and tell them that the rumors are exaggerated.'

‘Hell, no. I told them that I was dead to stop them pestering me. They kept calling me and asking me to come to charity cookouts and old folks' get-togethers. I never worked for nothing before I retired and sure as hell I'm not going to work for nothing now. Just because I'm a senior they think they can take advantage.'

He led them inside the house. It was much cooler here, even though he didn't have air conditioning. He had left the doors open so that the heat could flow through and six or seven windchimes jangled in chorus.

The floors were bare-boarded and varnished, with a scattering of threadbare rugs. The furniture looked as if it had been ordered from a Sears catalog at the turn of the century. Heavy quarter-sawed-oak chairs with leathercloth upholstery; sideboards that whole families could have lived in; Roman couches and china cabinets. In the hallway there were scores of framed posters advertising ‘Sidney Randall, Mesmerist Extraordinary' with photographs of a much younger Sidney with his eyes bulging and his fingers extended in the archetypal pose of the stage hypnotist.

‘Never thought that I'd ever clap eyes on you again, Bipsy,' said Sidney. He led them through to a high-ceilinged living room with a tigerskin rug and two bronze statuettes of naked Native American girls with feathers in their hair. The blinds were drawn but it was so sunny outside that the whole room was suffused with light. ‘Sit down … what'll you have to drink?'

‘You don't remember?'

Sidney touched two fingertips to his forehead and then he said, ‘Sure I do. White Witch. Not sure if I have any Cointreau.'

He padded off on his bare feet to fix Eleanor's drink. While he did so, Conor leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘
Bipsy
? You and he were—?'

‘Close,' Eleanor nodded. ‘Very,
very
close. But Sidney's trouble is that he has to go off from time to time and commune with nature. He'll wake up one morning and say, “That's it, I'm gone,” and he'll pack his bag and fly to New Mexico and spend the next six months living with the Zuñi Indians. He loved me, you know, in his way. But he never really understood what devotion meant. Well – not the kind of devotion that
I
needed.'

Sidney came back with a White Witch for Eleanor, complete with sugar-dusted mint leaves, and a large glass of cold white wine for Conor. He sat down and said, ‘You didn't come over just to say hello. Not that I'm complaining.'

‘Conor needs your help,' said Eleanor.

‘This is nothing to do with hypnotism, I hope? I don't get involved with hypnotism any more, except to write about it.'

‘Well… it is in a way,' said Conor, and explained what had happened at Spurr's Fifth Avenue. Sidney shook his head from side to side like a pendulum. ‘That's a bad business. That's a real bad business. But I can't help you there. I had a tragic experience with hypnotism six or seven years ago and I swore that I'd never get involved in it again.'

‘You don't have to get involved with hypnotism again,' said Eleanor. ‘All that Conor needs to know is how he can find Hypnos and Hetti.'

‘I wish I could help, Bipsy. I really do. But I haven't heard a word from Ramon in a coon's age. I thought he'd gone back to Tijuana or wherever. Even if you could find them, what could you do? They'd shake your hand, and the next thing you knew you'd be waking up five hours later wondering what the hell had hit you.'

‘That's what Ramon did to me,' said Conor. ‘He shook my hand. He shook my hand and said, “Do you know me?'”

‘Standard hypnotic induction,' Sidney nodded. ‘That's why I won't shake hands with people. And that's why you can't go looking for Hypnos and Hetti without knowing about hypnosis, and what powers it can give you, and how you can resist it; and that's why I can't help you, because I won't have anything to do with it. Not any more.'

‘What happened?' asked Conor.

‘Well… I'm sure you don't want to hear another sad story. You've got problems enough of your own.'

Conor said, ‘I'm desperate, Sidney. And I'm so damned frustrated. If I can't find Hypnos and Hetti then I'm going to spend the rest of my life as a
fugitive. Nobody can go on running for ever; and one day I'm going to be crossing the street or stepping out of some market and smack! that's going to be it.'

Sidney stood up and walked across to the fireplace. Over the fireplace hung a huge romanticized oil painting of a Native American struggling with a bear.

‘A young girl came to me,' he said, with his back turned. ‘Her name was Vanessa. She was anorexic, and she wanted to learn how to hypnotize herself so that she wouldn't think that she was overweight. I refused at first, because she didn't seem to be stable, you know? She was prone to mood swings, outbursts of weeping, that kind of thing. But she was persistent, and her parents gave me their blessing. So I taught her how to put herself into a mild hypnotic trance. I taught her how to convince herself that she was light as a feather.'

‘And did it work?' asked Eleanor.

‘Oh, yes. It worked only too well. Vanessa believed that she was so light that she could fly. One day she went to the top of the building where she lived and stepped right off the edge, thinking that the wind would carry her.'

He paused, and licked his lips, and then he said, ‘She fell eighteen stories, right through a glassed-in conservatory. She was decapitated.'

‘How do you know it wasn't suicide?'

‘Oh, there was a witness. One of her friends. Vanessa said, “Look at me … I'm as light as a dandelion-clock!” and over she went. That's when I gave up hypnotism for good.'

‘Couldn't you make one last exception?' said Eleanor.

Sidney gave her a world-weary smile. ‘I was always making exceptions for you, wasn't I, Bipsy?'

‘Wasn't I worth it?'

‘Oh for sure. I'm just sorry that you and me ended up the way we did. I hurt you, didn't I?'

‘Come on. You were young. You had other things to think of.'

‘I guess.' Sidney's pain was self-evident.

Eleanor stood up and took hold of Sidney's hands. ‘You can't go on regretting the past, Sidney.'

‘Why not? I'm seventy-eight now. I don't have much of a future.'

‘Neither will Conor if you don't help him. Come on, Stanley. Please. Pretty please.'

She gave him a look that was almost ridiculously coquettish. Sidney looked away, looked back, and then burst out laughing.

‘I can't believe you! You're damn well flirting with me, aren't you, just like you always did!'

‘Don't tell me you don't like it.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I like it. And – all right, I'll see what I can do to help you out.'

‘You're an angel,' said Eleanor, and kissed him twice.

Sidney took them to a local restaurant called the Richmond Inn, a cozy colonial building with red checkered tablecloths and decoy ducks over the fireplace. They sat outside on the veranda overlooking a small paved garden. Conor ordered ham hock and peas, while Eleanor chose a smoked chicken salad. Sidney said that he wasn't hungry and contented himself with repeated handfuls of salted pecan nuts.

There was no wind here, absolutely none, and the garden was so hot that it looked as if they were seeing it through polished glass.

Sidney ordered a bottle of dry white wine. Before the waiter could open it, Conor lifted it out of its earthenware cooler. ‘Here,' he said, showing it to Eleanor and Sidney. ‘A perfectly ordinary bottle of wine. But watch.'

He wrapped the bottle in his napkin so that only the neck protruded. Then he nicked the foil cap with his knife, peeled it back and folded it so quickly that neither Eleanor nor Sidney could see what he was doing. He banged the bottom of the bottle on the table, so that the cutlery jumped. There was a
second's pause, and then the cork dropped onto Eleanor's place-mat, with a tiny man sitting astride it, fashioned out of foil.

Sidney couldn't help laughing. ‘That's about the fanciest way of opening a bottle of wine I've ever seen.'

‘You should have been in vaudeville, too,' said Eleanor.

Conor shook his head. ‘It's only a trick my Uncle Dermot taught me. He said that stage magic was a good lesson in life. People will believe what they want to believe, even when you prove them wrong.'

‘Very much like hypnotism,' said Sidney.

As they ate, he explained the difference between clinical hypnotism and stage hypnotism. He had a curiously soft, droning voice that reminded Conor of a bee going from flower to flower. ‘Before I went on the stage, I was a clinical hypnotherapist. Studied eight years at Temple University in Philadelphia under Milton Erickson. I took up public performing more to make a point than to make a living – although I
did
make a living, and a very good one. I simply wasn't impressed by any of the stage hypnotists, even the famous ones. They were all so clumsy … and some of them were positively dangerous. I mean, gosh, it was like handing a loaded revolver to a three-year-old.

‘Most of the time they were putting their subjects into trances that were far deeper than they needed to be. In the Forties and Fifties I used to go see guys like Ralph Slater or Franz Polgar, “the World's Fastest Hypnotist”. But they couldn't hold a candle
to clinical hypnotherapists like Erickson.

‘Somebody like Erickson could hypnotize you without even talking to you. I had breakfast with him once, and although he never put me into what you might call a formal trance, he kept making this repetitive little movement with his hand and before I knew what I was doing I had reached out spontaneously and picked up the pot of coffee on the table. He had given me a nonverbal request that he wanted another cup.

‘A good hypnotist doesn't have to swing a pendant in front of your eyes, or say any of that stuff like “sleep … sleep … your eyes are getting heavy”. He can use a whole variety of nonverbal techniques to induce catalepsy – and he can have you in a trance before you know it. That's what Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic were especially good at. I'm pretty convinced that at least one of them must be a clinically trained hypnotherapist. I talked to Perez a few times when Hypnos and Hetti were performing in cabaret off Seventh Avenue, but Perez wouldn't answer any questions about his act, or where he learned it. He used to say that his talent was “
una maldición
” – a curse – but whether he meant it was a curse to him or a curse to other people, I never found out. It was certainly a curse to
you
, Conor.'

Conor said, ‘I always thought that I was too darn suspicious for anybody to hypnotize me – too wary. You know, I'm a cop. I'm actually
trained
to be suspicious. But I'll tell you one thing for sure: I'm never going to let it happen again.'