The Spirit Cabinet (9 page)

Rudolfo was briefly alarmed to see a fat man sitting over in the shadows, but as his eyes got used to the gloom, he realized that it was the big wooden doll-man. (He would not have been able to name it—
Moon
—even though the word was carved into the top of the automaton’s pedestal.) In the middle of it all, at a small schoolboy’s desk complete with empty inkwell and the initials of children long dead, sat Jurgen Schubert, a large leather-bound tome clutched in his hands, the covers sealed by cobwebbing.

Jurgen flipped the front cover open and blew away dust. As he read the title page, his eyelids fluttered up and down rapidly like antique television sets that need adjustment with the horizontal hold.

“Hi, chief,” said Rudolfo, from the hole that was the doorway, leaning up against the cool rock. “Anything good?”

“
The Art of Juggling, or
 …” said Jurgen, reading the English. There was another word on the title page,
Legerdemain
, which he did not attempt. He switched to German. “It’s a very famous book. Four hundred years old. One of the first books about magic.”

“We have to the hotel be going.” Rudolfo would often use English when petulant, peeved or baffled.

Jurgen looked up at his friend, nodded, and closed the book.

“So,” asked their driver, Jimmy, “what’s the story on this Tee-hee-hee Collection?”

Jimmy was a large man with a head that consisted of oversized features—long, froggy lips, a bulbous nose marbled with exploded veins—stuck onto a billiard ball. Very unpleasant. Fortunately, they rarely saw his face.

“Why do you me this ask?” said Jurgen.

Rudolfo scowled, annoyed as always with his partner’s English syntax.

“No reason, boss,” responded Jimmy. Jimmy had originally come to Vegas hoping to become the driver for a shadowy underworld figure. He’d had a vision, which he found deeply exciting, of steering a long black limousine, willing himself to stare straight ahead, occasionally, very occasionally, glancing into the rearview mirror where he saw such goings-on as were unheard of in Missouri. “It was on television.”

“What was on television?” snapped Rudolfo.

“The thing,” explained Jimmy. “The Collection thing. They said as how you guys bought it. On the news.”

“Oh, so it was on the news,
ja?
”

“Yeah,” nodded Jimmy. “Not on the
news
-news, where there’s a picture in the background and the chick is reading from a piece of paper.”

“Whatever in the world are you blistering about?” asked Rudolfo.

“It was on that part at the end, you know, when the chick newscaster and the sports guy and the weather guy are all sitting together. And she says how you guys bought this Collection, and then they said some more stuff. Had a few laughs.”

They hit the Strip suddenly, light and noise exploding upon the planet.

“
Ja
, well,” said Rudolfo, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but local coverage will never harm me.” He felt very sad momentarily, for without thinking he had quoted Miss Joe, their first manager.

“So this Collection thing,” persisted Jimmy—this now qualified officially as the longest conversation Jurgen and Rudolfo had ever had with their driver— “is a big deal, huh?”

“It is,” responded Rudolfo, “just a bunch of books and a few hideous pieces of wood.”

Jurgen put sunglasses on, even though it was still daylight and nowhere near as bright as it would be at night. “I will tell you about books,” he said quietly. He took a deep breath and chewed at his lips briefly, as if to draw blood and energy into them, and Rudolfo realized that he intended to continue in English, that whatever he meant to say was as much for Jimmy’s illumination as his own.

“Was a man named Jean. In France, many years ago. And he was young man, eighteen years maybe, he is wanting to be, like his fodder—”

“Father?” suggested Rudolfo meanly.

“Watchmaker. Maker of watches. So he is asking the bookseller for book, you know, about making watch.”

“You understand this, Jimmy?” wondered Rudolfo.

Jimmy grunted, threw his shoulders upwards in a loose and uncoordinated manner. “Sure. Like on the back of the matchbooks. It’s got watchmaker right there with refrigeration and air-conditioning technician.”

“So book comes, you know. It looks funny. It is name
Amusing Mechanical Devices
. Not about watch at all. It is about how to make, oh, Transformation Boxes and Automata and all sort of thing. So Jean becomes magician. Sometimes you no choose books. Books choose you.”

“What the hell kind of stupid shit story is that?” demanded Rudolfo in German, the hard sounds and diminutives making him sound petulant and childish.

“He make his name ‘Jean Robert-Houdin.’ He was the greatest magician of his day,” Jurgen switched to German.
“That’s what you must do; that’s all that counts. Being the greatest magician of the day. And then another day comes, but that’s all right.”

“And you are the greatest magician of your day,” said Rudolfo.

“No.”

“You are,” insisted Rudolfo. “Who else is there? Preston the Unsightly? He’s nothing. He’s no better than a gypsy playing three-card monte. Who else? The asshole? Kaz is shit and he knows it! He’s got all those people helping him. Half the audience are sticks, you know that.”

“It’s not that Kaz is or isn’t good,” said Jurgen. “It’s that I am bad.”

“Act of the Year, four years in a row.”

“I’m so scared every time I do an effect. Even one I’ve done a thousand times, I’m afraid that people will see that it’s a trick and point at me and laugh and say,
Jurgen Schubert, you big fake
.”

“Everyone’s a
fake
,” argued Rudolfo. “Magic is a fake. That’s why
showmanship
is so important.”

But Jurgen had turned away, and no longer seemed to be listening.

Having not seen them for a while—had he ever seen them, other than on television?—Preston decided to go to the Abraxas Hotel and catch the Jurgen and Rudolfo Show. He had to cancel his own evening’s performance, which he did simply enough. He telephoned Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley and advised her to stay home. She grunted groggily on the other end, having been newly woken. Preston offered to pay her nightly salary anyway, at which point she hung up.

For a man who dressed as poorly as he did, Preston spent a lot of time thinking about wardrobe. He considered wearing the morning suit he had worn the day before, the one that had belonged to his father, Preston the Magnificent. But he had sweated the garment out—there were dark skunky stains emanating from the armpits. He next considered wearing his show clothes, a sweatshirt with the images of the moon and stars stitched on and a pair of jeans that kept a crease because he only wore them for two hours a night. But Preston decided that this garb was too ostentatious. He opened his closet door and surveyed his apparel. He selected an ornate and colourful Hawaiian
shirt and put it with the trousers from the morning suit, which had not been damaged too badly by perspiration. Then he forced his fat and puffy feet into a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots.

Preston went through the door of his apartment and descended into the theatre.

The George had been built in 1917, during a brief boom. Badgered out of the sands by the obdurate Helen Stewart—widowed on account of a duel in which her husband Archibald had been forced to defend her honour—Las Vegas was a random stop on the tracks being laid along the Mormon Trail. The George Theater lay in the heart of Block 16, the haunt of faro players and horny railway workers. It had been erected by a theatrical Englishman, Ivor Thicknesse, who was surely suffering from heatstroke, the skin on his pate perpetually blistered by the merciless sun. Thicknesse opened the George with a production of
Hamlet
, taking the lead himself, spinning about the stage in a state of advanced delirium. He managed to put on quite a few shows, even persuading some of the prominent thespians of the day—George Arliss, Edmund Breece, Lumsden Hare—that the George in “Ragtown” represented a fruitful and gratifying stop on any transcontinental tour. Thicknesse himself always took a part, at least he did until an audience member, caught up in the duel taking place before him, shot Thicknesse’s Tybalt in the back of the head.

The theatre was then clapboarded and tarpapered, and it lay unused until Preston the Magnificent, Jr., bought it, refurbished it and started presenting his little entertainments in its hall. It seemed a very odd thing to do; Preston was rumoured to have a problem with strong drink.

The stairs snaked and curled, connecting the loges and the small auditorium below. Preston was forced to take hold of the banister, to place his feet with precision on the uneven, wobbly risers. The lamplight was dampened by the dust on the glass. It
wasn’t that Preston was lazy about housekeeping duties, but he liked the idea of dust so much he was loathe to wipe and feather it away. Dust was mostly human skin, Preston had heard, and in this unhygienic manner Ivor Thicknesse was still prowling about the George, his brains boiled by the heat.

In the tiny foyer was the small glass booth that contained, ordinarily, the pinch-faced Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley, who would make change and issue tickets with sober, churlish industry. Preston removed from his pocket a piece of paper (it was actually a Kleenex). He reached through the cut-out and fished around on Mrs. Kingsley’s desktop until he located the stub of a pencil. Then he wrote the words
SHOW CANCELLED
—
TAKE A RAINCHECK
on the Kleenex, licked a corner and stuck it up.

He carefully locked the big theatre doors behind him with a massive, old-fashioned key, a heart wrought at one end, the works merely three truncated fingers. In Las Vegas, a town full of crooks and magicians, this precaution was more than useless. There were guys, Preston knew, who could undo the lock without even touching it. But he enjoyed old locks and old keys, so he worked the loud, clunky mechanism, whistling all the while, and when he was done he paused to look at his poster.

PRESTON THE MAGNIFICENT
,
JR
., large letters proclaimed, although the man in the poster looked not much like the Preston we know. The man in the poster was slim and clear-eyed. He held his hands in an awkward manner, the fingers spread wide. They were empty, but the poster made one imagine that they had been full of things just the moment before, or would be the moment after—all manner of things, coins and cards and radiant doves. In the poster, Preston was wearing one of his father’s capes, long, black and embroidered with a design of lightning flashes. Preston no longer wore that cape. In fact, he had no idea where it was. That thought made him chuckle a bit, because the cape was certainly left loaded, a collapsible wand tucked into the
hem, along with the thin metal rod that controlled the flying ball. If anyone found it, his father would be exposed for the cheap cozening thimblerigger he was.

As far as Preston was concerned, his father had only ever performed one worthwile stunt. It had taken place in Cleveland, where Preston the Magnificent was giving a Saturday afternoon matinee. Preston could imagine his father standing on stage, unreasonably rigid (so that his huge, sculpted hairdo would not be knocked askew), announcing each illusion in an English that no one else spoke or understood. “Yea,” his father might say, sometimes even adding the
verily
, “Wither comes this luminiferous orb? It cometh out of a mystic vacuity!”

So there he was, Preston the Magnificent, prestidigitating for all his worth, when the manager appeared in the wings making frantic hisses and come-hither motions with his index finger. Preston the Magnificent ignored him for a good long while, upset by this lack of breeding and manners, but finally and reluctantly he asked the audience’s indulgence and went to see what was up.

“Fire,” whispered the manager. Only then did Preston the Magnificent notice the smoke, the flame that was licking the edges of the scrim.

The story, as reported by the newspapers and repeated at chintzy conjurors’ conventions, had it that Preston the Magnificent didn’t hesitate at all, merely wheeled about and walked to his mark, stuck a finger into the air and began to speak. His son didn’t buy that, exactly. He imagined that his father opened and closed his mouth wordlessly a few times, that his face coloured with anger. The idea of anything interrupting a show would make him apoplectic. So Preston the Magnificent probably swore at the fire (he used several childish words in place of curses, things like
fizz
and
pigwart
) and then spent long moments realigning and adjusting his clothing, feeling sullied by
this proximity to vulgarity. Preston the Magnificent then turned and marched to the centre of the stage, raised the tiny pale finger and began to speak. “Laddies and lassies,” he said, “the next miracle is the globally celebrated and much ballyhooed Hindu Rope Trick. I, alone in the Occident, possess the arcanum of this wonder, having learnt it firsthand from a Cingalese swami. But, hear me, why should I perform this
chef-d’oeuvre
inside this theatre, opening the doors for accusations of subterfuge and chicanery, insinuations of thin wire attached to the lighting grids holding up the rope?” (Preston, when he heard the speech repeated verbatim, knew just how angry and upset his father had been, because he had blown the effect right there.) “Instead, I shall perform the deed upon the
boulevard without
! If you therefore stand and effect an egress in an orderly fashion—the youngsters in the last row should go first, then the penultimate, etcetera—you will see a miracle that shall go down into the vaults of historical annals!” And the children did leave calmly, and were all outside when the theatre popped into full conflagration. Preston the Magnificent lost everything, from big apparatus down to his little bag of coin effects, but such was the publicity that he was booked for about seven years afterwards—largely for children’s matinees—and it took him no time to reassemble an act.