Reserved for the Cat (14 page)

Wolf, who was always backstage during performances, flew down from his perch in the flies and landed on Nigel’s shoulder as the latter cursed the Fire Master mentally.

“There could be a dozen reasons why Hightower hasn’t contacted you, Nigel,” the bird said quietly into his ear. “Chief of which is that he is a performer, with his own act to rehearse and perform. Unlike you, he does not have the luxury of a private office in which to conduct rites.”

“There’s nothing out of the ordinary about sending a telegram,” Nigel replied, with irritation. “Nothing that difficult. Step around the corner to the post office and—”

“But why should I do that, when I can come here in person?” said Jonathon Hightower, stepping around a gaggle of little chorus dancers. He grinned, and they tittered nervously; Jonathon looked very much like a caricature of Satan, minus the horns, and he played on the resemblance by cultivating a slim moustache and goatee, and wearing a scarlet-lined black evening cape and top hat whenever possible.

Amazingly this seemingly Satanic appearance translated seamlessly into his stage persona of the mysterious Chinese magician, Kung Chow. Very few people outside the theatrical world connected the flamboyant Hightower with the secretive Kung Chow, and that was the way Hightower liked it.

“Jonathon, you
wretch—”
Nigel exclaimed.

Hightower laughed. “Now how could I resist coming here myself, after all the newspaper stories about the beautiful Russian dancer you rescued from the briny deep?” He lifted an eyebrow significantly. “Had to come see her for myself, don’t you know.”

Nigel looked at him with exasperation. “Come back to the flat with me, and you can meet her yourself.”

“Oh, really?” Jonathon grinned. Nigel gritted his teeth.

“Obviously she had nowhere else to go, Jonathon,” he said. “She’ll be moving into her own establishment shortly.”

Jonathon kept grinning as Nigel passed Wolf over to Arthur and made his round of the backstage before leading him out the stage door. But once outside and away from anyone likely to overhear them, he rounded on his friend.

“First of all, there is nothing going on with that young woman,” he said fiercely, as they walked to where he had left his auto parked, moving from patch of gaslight to patch of gaslight. “I have a new sort of musical theater I am planning, I intend to make her the central figure in it, and the last thing in the world I am ever going to do is mix my personal pleasures with the business of my theater!”

Jonathon sobered immediately. “Look, old man, I—”

“And secondly,” Nigel went on, without losing a bit of his heat, “The girl is one of
us,
or at least her father was. Enough of a mage that he was able to create a protector for her. What else was I to do but take her in? For heaven’s sake, it was her cat that summoned us to aid her!”

By that point, they had reached the auto; Jonathon got in, silently, and remained quiet while Nigel went through the complicated little ritual that the auto demanded to get it started. Only when they were well down the street did he speak again.

“Well, I feel a right fool.”

“You should,” Nigel snapped. “Now the reasons I asked you to contact me in the first place are part of all that. I want to engage you for a full year at the least, and I want to make you the other star attraction of this production. Now here is what I have in mind—”

He explained his plans for the new sort of musical theater as the auto chugged down the street. Jonathon said nothing, only nodded from time to time, but Nigel could tell that he was interested.

“Well,” Jonathon said, as Nigel pulled his auto into the carriage house that now served it as its garage, “I’m equally torn by two questions, one mundane, the other arcane. The mundane one is rather simple; would you rather cast me as the villain of the piece, or sympathetic?”

“Well, I suppose that would depend on how sophisticated we think the audience will be, wouldn’t it?” Nigel closed up and prudently locked the carriage house doors. That was the grand thing about having an auto; no horse to feed or stalls to clean out. One could talk all one wanted about the romance of horseflesh, but the amount of cleaning up and caring for—he had far rather pay the mechanic once in a while to fix the motorcar than keep a stableman day in, day out.

“If we thought they would be capable of it, we could write something that casts you as the villain but redeems you in the end,” Nigel suggested, as they made their way into the foyer of the building, brightly lit in the newest fashion with fine electric fixtures. “Say . . . your character has a change of heart and helps the girl escape, staying to face the wrath of the sultan?” Nigel’s flat was on the third floor of this rather posh establishment, reached by a modern, brass-caged elevator, although stairs were available. It was self-operated, although the owners of the other two flats in the building generally had their servants do the operating.

“I must say, I like that idea,” Jonathon mused, as they both strolled into the anteroom of Nigel’s flat, to be met by a servant who took their coats. “By the way, I took the liberty of sending my things here . . .”

“I
do
have more than one guest room, you know,” Nigel pointed out. He turned to his manservant, who was bringing drinks for both of them, knowing, as he did, what Jonathon’s preference was. “Asher, I am perishing. Could something be arranged?”

“I anticipated your requirement, sir, and took the liberty of having a late supper prepared for you and Mr. Hightower.” The manservant nodded in the direction of the dining room, and Nigel and his guest lost no time in settling themselves in there.

Discussion of plots continued over the Welsh rarebit, eggs, bacon, crumpets and broiled tomatoes, Nigel secretly gloating the entire time. For all that Jonathon could be an irritating fellow, he was also entertaining and the best illusionist that Nigel had ever seen. And he had a good sense of storytelling. All his suggestions were sound ones.

“Am I missing something, or have you neglected to cast a romantic male lead in this venture?” Jonathon asked, as they moved their discussion and their whiskeys back into the library, where they each took one of the comfortable Windsor chairs.

“You are not missing anything; I haven’t. I am not sure that I want to.” Nigel tapped the side of his glass thoughtfully. “There is the inevitable problem of finding a dancing partner for her if we do. How many male dancers do you know that are in variety that were trained in ballet?”

Jonathon shook his head.

“Whereas if she doesn’t have a male romantic lead as such, we can just have some of the fellows do the lifts, and maybe assist in her turns. Lads trained in the usual sort of stage dance can do that,” Nigel pointed out.

Jonathon laughed.
“I
can do that,” he replied.

“Well, then, I’m not at all sure we need a romantic lead for her. Might be more interesting if your magician character starts out being a villain, and then gets won over and sacrifices himself so she can get away.” He pondered. “Or at least it looks that way. You’ve always wanted to do a spectacular escape trick; how about if the Sultan takes the magician prisoner and he makes a showy escape?”

Jonathon got a wicked gleam in his eye. “Can I make the palace collapse on the Sultan and all his evil minions? Or set it on fire?”

“If you can do it under budget.” That was Arthur, being shown in by the manservant, a whiskey already in his hand.

“I’ll set it on fire. That will sell a lot of tickets,” Jonathon decided. “Besides leaving the ambiguity that maybe the magician was secretly something like Mephistopheles all along, and sent to bring his master the soul of the Sultan.”

“Good idea!” Wolf exclaimed from Arthur’s shoulder. “Makes the whole thing less sticky-sweet. I could even write music for that—”

“No arias!”
All three of the humans exclaimed at once. Wolf fluffed his feathers in indignation.

“All right, that takes care of that. I think we have a pretty strong book for this, and once we know what acts we’ll be putting into it, and how often our star can perform over the course of it, we’ll know exactly what music we need.” Nigel tossed back the last of his drink and refilled it from the decanter himself. “Now, as for the other reason why you in particular are here, Jonathon, let me tell you what we know about the young lady.”

“And her cat,” Wolf added sourly. “Let’s not forget the cat.
He
certainly won’t let you.”

“Cat?” Jonathon looked at them all quizzically.

“Let me start at the beginning,” Nigel replied with a laugh, and did so.

When he was done, Jonathon was unexpectedly silent. After waiting for some sort of reaction, and getting nothing, Nigel finally asked, “What are you thinking?”

“That it is certainly interesting. I’m not at all familiar with the Russian Masters. Actually, I don’t think much of anyone is; we have a lot of contact with the French and Italian ones, a little less with the Spanish, but . . .” He shrugged. “It does sound as if her father must have come to an untimely end, probably at the hands of another Master. And if he left such a guardian for his daughter, that suggests he expected whoever his enemy was would come after her as well.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Arthur said quietly. Both Nigel and Jonathon grimaced a little. Arthur’s grandfather had run afoul of a bad-tempered Scottish Master, who had pursued not only the old man, but the man’s son and grandson. It was only at the death of the Scottish magician that the persecution had ceased.

“Russians are notorious for temper.” Jonathon tossed back his own drink. “On the other hand, I am not exactly weak. And Fire magic is rather well suited to combat. Unlike Air, and no slur intended, Nigel.”

“No offense taken. Air is the weakest, offensively and defensively. But when it comes to gaining information—” He shrugged. “Short of finding a way to live without breathing, you can’t shut Air Elementals out.”

“Well, don’t underestimate your ability to add to my power. Air feeds Fire and never forget it.” Jonathon set his glass down and steepled his fingers together. “Whatever might come after this young woman, I think we will be prepared for it.”

“And that is
exactly
why I wanted you here,” Nigel said with satisfaction. Well, there it was. The tacit agreement to make all of this a reality, and to protect Nina from whatever it was that threatened her. If Jonathon had not actually come out and said he was going to help out with this enterprise, it was certainly written between the lines. And he would not
say,
not yet, for a magician’s words were binding. He wanted to be sure, and Nigel could hardly blame him.

“But I want to meet her before I make any decisions,” Jonathon continued, and measured Nigel with a stern look. “No offense, Nigel, but your weakness has always been a damsel in distress. I’m not so easily gulled, and my stock-in-trade is illusion. I want to see her
and
this cat of hers. I want your promise that you will hold by my decision as well. Do I have it?”

Nigel shrugged. He knew Jonathon was right, and although he liked Nina Tchereslavsky quite a bit, well . . . he had to face the fact that if she was pulling some sort of deception, there were other singers and dancers he could base his endeavor around. And he had to keep reminding himself of that. She might appear to need rescue, he might want to rescue her, but there was always the possibility that it was all part of some grand confidence game. Not everyone was worth rescuing.

They are talking about you,
said the cat. He sat near the door of Ninette’s room, with his head cocked to one side. She put her book down in her lap and regarded him thoughtfully.

“They? Nigel and Arthur and Wolf?” She had heard them come in, but had thought it better not to intrude, since it sounded as if they were having a discussion of business.

And someone new. Another Elemental Master.
The cat was very still, staring at the door with his tail curled around his feet.
A Fire Master. I think I know him, or at least, his reputation.

Another magician? “Why is
he
here?” she asked.

She bit her lip. That was the last thing she needed. “What if he finds out—”

The cat shook his head.
He won’t. Or at least, he will not until it no longer matters. What he expects is that you have some purpose other than dancing, perhaps that you intend to get Nigel to marry you.

She giggled. Nigel was not the sort of “rich” she expected for a protector. He was very careful with his money, and when she found someone to keep her, she wanted it to be a gentleman who liked to show his appreciation lavishly. “But could he find out I am not who I say I am?”