The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (3 page)

Chapter 2

There was a yelp from the audience as the cavern suddenly went black. And then, just as the echo of that exclamation had died down, the room began to vibrate with the deep, eerie tones of a pipe organ. A moment later a spotlight snapped on, revealing an imposing figure, all in black, standing like a statue in the center of the stage. His sudden appearance produced the intended gasp from several audience members. He stood silently for a few moments and then the organ music dipped in volume and he began to speak in a rich, sonorous baritone.

“Good evening,” he said. “Tonight we shall travel together, across the ether. We will summon souls from the other side and explore the terrain of the afterlife, step-by-step and hand-in-hand. We will touch the past and we will in turn be touched by the future. My name is Grey and this is my promise to you.”

Grey spoke with an accent that could have been European, could have been South African, but was definitely not Minnesotan. I looked at him on the stage across the room, and then turned to get a better view on one of the wide-screen TV monitors that had been placed throughout the cavern. He was tall and wiry. His thick, jet-black hair was slicked back, exposing diamond studs in each earlobe, which sparkled in the spotlight. Other reflections were produced by the oversized diamond rings he sported on each hand. He was dressed elegantly in a tailored black suit coat, black turtleneck, and black slacks. His green eyes scanned the room methodically.

“To begin our journey, I require the assistance of a volunteer,” he said as he launched into his act. He quickly found his first volunteer, a heavyset woman, about forty-five, who looked a little too well dressed for someone planning to spend Halloween on a folding chair in a damp cave. The woman appeared both thrilled and terrified as she jumped up and made her way toward the stage while a cameraman with a handheld video camera walked backwards in front of her.

As this matronly volunteer headed down the aisle, I noticed for the first time that Grey had an assistant, a figure who was standing silently at the base of the steps. She was a slim young woman. Like Grey, she was dressed all in black, with long dark hair that appeared to flow down to her waist and perhaps even beyond. If it weren’t for her pale, almost translucent skin she might have disappeared completely into the black draping that spanned the back of the stage. Even from my vantage point across the room I could see that she was both exotic and stunning. While others in the room had decked themselves out for Halloween—from Jedi Knights to way-too old Harry Potters to your standard issue ghosts, witches and political figures—her wardrobe appeared to be something she had simply taken from her closet. Not goth, really, but just this side of Morticia Addams.

“Thank you, Nova,” Grey said to her as she handed the woman off to him. Grey smoothly guided the volunteer up the steps and across the stage to where a heavy wooden table and three chairs had been set.

“What is your name, my dear?” he asked.

“Sharon,” she said, her voice cracking a bit from nervousness and excitement.

“Excellent. Sharon, with your help I am going to begin the process of moving from this, the corporeal world, to the other side. I need to ask…Do you have any medical training?”

“I took a CPR class,” she said almost apologetically. “But it was years ago.”

“Then perhaps you know how to find my pulse? Do you think you could do that?”

With his guidance she proceeded to find his pulse. She held his wrist awkwardly, nodding that she had in fact found a pulse.

Grey nodded and then tilted his head back, with a sudden and sharp intake of breath. His body tensed and his head twisted oddly from side to side. Sharon continued to hold his wrist, her eyes widening at his near convulsions. And then she visibly paled. She moved her hand around his wrist, first slowly and then with growing concern.

“It’s, it’s stopped,” she finally said, a tremor of fear in her voice. “You don’t have a pulse.”

“Excellent. Then I have crossed,” Grey said, exhaling deeply. “I now stand on the precipice, on the border between the living and the deceased. For the next few minutes I will be neither alive nor dead, but instead will act as a conduit between these two disparate worlds.”

He stood, and as he did Sharon lost her grip on his wrist.

“Thank you for helping me to cross.” He put a hand on her shoulder and guided the clearly shaken woman to the steps at the front of the stage, where his assistant helped navigate her way back to her seat.

“How the hell did he do that?” Pete hissed in my ear. He’s a couple inches shorter than I am, so this move had required him to stand on his toes.

“There’s lots of ways to accomplish it, but my guess is that he’s got a tennis ball strapped into his arm pit,” I whispered back. “A little pressure and you cut off blood flow to the wrist, which gives the effect of no pulse. My uncle calls the trick the Armpit Tourniquet.”

Clive clucked his tongue, in apparent agreement with my assessment.

Our brief conversation elicited another sharp look from one of the crewmembers, so I didn’t continue my explanation. Regardless of his method, Grey had grabbed the audience’s attention and they were listening raptly as he stepped back to his chair and withdrew a long strip of black fabric from his suit coat pocket.

“As I said, I have crossed and stand on the precipice between the living and the dead. However, in order to truly hone in on that connection, I need to do some fine-tuning.” He looked up and smiled, his oily charm emanating from every pore. “For those of you who have taken long car trips, it’s not unlike tuning a car radio in the middle of a remote desert, trying to find the point of greatest connection. To that end, I will attempt a couple of experiments—warm-up exercises, as it were. Experience has taught me that these are best accomplished without the burden of visual stimulation.”

With that he sat down in the chair and placed the black strip of fabric over his eyes. Nova had silently joined him on-stage and she stepped forward to tie the blindfold for him, making a final adjustment to ensure that his eyes were completely covered. She then picked up a handheld microphone from the table and silently left the stage.

For the next twenty minutes, Grey skillfully performed some basic, almost rudimentary mentalism routines. With the help of the dark-haired Nova, he did a second sight bit, where she selected objects from audience members and he—still blindfolded—divined the nature, color, and size of the objects, much to the audience’s amazement. After several short exchanges with various audience members—in which he divined the amount of money in a wallet, the age of an older gentleman, and the color of a pair of socks—Nova selected a nervous woman on the aisle. After a short, whispered exchange with the woman, Nova spoke into the handheld microphone. Her voice was soft and almost childlike.

“Grey.”

“Yes, Nova,” he said in a deep whisper. It sounded as if an audio engineer had added some reverberation to his microphone.

“See if you would tell me this woman’s name,” Nova said.

The audience looked from Nova to Grey, who sat stiff-backed and motionless on the stage.

“Her name is Joy,” he finally said. The woman tried to suppress her surprised reaction by putting her hand over her mouth as the audience applauded. Nova had another brief, whispered conversation with the woman and then, as the applause died down, she continued.

“Now then, in what month was she born?”

Again the audience turned, almost in unison, from Nova to Grey.

“She was born in…in September,” he said in a flat monotone.

“Would you tell me the date of her birth?”

“The fifth of September.”

The woman nodded vigorously to the crowd, to demonstrate that every answer so far had been spot on. The audience burst into applause again.

“Someone’s read his Corinda,” Clive whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth.

“Classic presentation,” I agreed. “Nothing new here.”

Nova stepped back and looked the woman over head to toe. “Grey, can you tell me what color shoes Joy is wearing?”

Grey tilted his head to one side. “Her shoes are brown.”

The woman looked down at her feet and then shook her head, first toward Grey and then toward Nova.

Nova seemed flustered for a moment. “I meant, will you tell me?
Will
you tell me what color they are?”

Even with a blindfold covering much of his face, Grey looked annoyed. But he quickly masked that emotion and continued. “Her shoes are black.”

The woman nodded to Nova and to the crowd, and again they applauded, but this time with what felt to me to be a little less enthusiasm. Nova held out her open palm to the woman, who at first wasn’t sure what was wanted of her. Then she pulled a ring off her finger. She handed it over to Nova, who clasped it tightly in her hand before continuing.

“Joy has given me a personal object. I want you to tell me what this is, now.”

Grey looked momentarily puzzled. “A stamp?” he said, posing more of a question than making a statement.

“No,” Nova stammered. “I want you to tell me what this is,
now then
.”

Grey did his best to cover a sigh. “It’s a ring.”

Nova quickly rattled off her next request. “I’d like you to tell me what it is made of.”

“Gold.”

The woman smiled and nodded to the crowd, to let them know that Grey had been correct. The crowd applauded, some of their lost enthusiasm returning. Nova handed the ring to the woman and moved away, searching for another candidate.

“Grey, next we have a man—”

He cut her off brusquely. “For our next exercise, we will continue to strengthen my connection with the other side. For this demonstration, my assistant will pass out several recent magazines and books.”

Nova looked surprised at the sudden shift in plan, but obeyed and headed back toward the stage. As she moved around the back row of seats, she passed an audio speaker resting on a stand. As soon as she moved in front of the speaker, there was a tremendous shriek of feedback. Nova held her free hand up to cover her ear. She clicked the
off
switch on the microphone, silencing the feedback and then she scampered toward the stage. There she picked up a silver tray that held a stack of magazines and books.

As new age music played through the sound system, Nova moved smoothly through the crowd, distributing the periodicals and books. By the time she reached me, the tray was empty. She shrugged impishly and turned back toward the stage, putting the tray under her arm while she flipped her microphone back on.

“Grey.”

“Yes, Nova,” he answered, still seated stiffly on the stage, his eyes covered by the black fabric.

“Distribution is complete,” she said.

Grey then instructed those audience members who had received a book or magazine to page through it and find a single page, and then to concentrate with all their energy on that page. As I looked around the cavern I could see that people, God love ’em, were attacking the assignment with relish. Those who hadn’t been lucky enough to receive one of the books or periodicals appeared to be wasting no time in assisting their neighbor in finding just the right page.

The first person selected from the audience was a heavy-set man in a blue denim work shirt and suspenders. He was holding a magazine. He held the cover up to Nova and then turned the magazine toward her to reveal his chosen page number.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Scott,” he said, leaning awkwardly toward her microphone.

“Grey,” she said, turning back toward the stage, “your first reading is with Scott. Scott has this week’s
Time
magazine and he is looking at page thirty-one.”

“
Time
magazine,” Grey repeated. “Page thirty-one. Look at that page and concentrate, Scott. Think of nothing else.”

He held a hand up to his forehead dramatically, and then lowered it. “Scott, I’m having trouble seeing page thirty-one, because I’m seeing an advertisement for a ladies’ razor, which consists primarily of a photo of a woman in a bathtub, shaving her legs. She appears to be completely naked, although I hasten to point out that the advertisement is in fine taste. However, there is no number on that page. Is that the page directly across from thirty-one?”

Nova held the microphone up to Scott, who shrugged his shoulders sheepishly. “Yes, it is. That’s an ad.”

Grey chuckled. “That was your first choice, wasn’t it, Scott? But you didn’t want to admit that to us, did you?”

“That’s right,” Scott mumbled into the microphone as the audience laughed.

“Thank you, Scott. You may sit down.”

He sat amidst the good-natured teasing of several pals around him. Nova moved across the aisle to an elderly woman who was holding a paperback book. “What is your name, ma’am?” Nova asked.

“Bernice,” the white-haired woman said softly. Nova looked at the book the woman was holding and the page she had the book opened to.

“Grey, Bernice is looking at page seventy-four of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
.”