The Wonders (15 page)

Kathryn slammed her fist onto the arm of the couch. “For fuck's sake, they're in our garden, our pool. It must be one of our staff.” She turned to glare at the people lined up at the back of the projection room. They had gasped as loudly as the Wonders when the images filled the screen.

“No, miss! Not us,” Vidonia said in her loud chef's voice. “You know who to trust. You know that.”

“It's okay, Vee. I trust you, of course I do.” Kathryn sank back into her seat.

“Darling, prepare yourself. They have you too.” Rhona switched to the next shot and three more of Kathryn beside the pool. The angle made her look huge in the hips and buttocks, as if she was stuffed with great wads of cotton under the wool. In the fourth photo she was bent over, massive bottom half out of the shot, face looming between her arm and torso as though she could see the camera. Her upside-down face jowly and misshapen, eyes bloodshot. Looking half human.

“I've had much worse than that courtesy of my delightful husband. They'll have to do a lot better to humiliate me. But poor Leon here is gobsmacked. He looks as if he's been hit with a hammer.”

Leon did feel like he'd been hit with a hammer. The others were staring at him, perhaps seeing something new. Minh tsked behind him, reached over and held his shoulder for a moment.

“Don't take any notice of this,” Minh said. “It's important you don't get upset. Everyone's been working very hard. You're all overtaxed and I don't want you stressed as well.”

At the back of the room the staff were protesting their innocence.

Rhona promised to track down the person responsible. “Welcome to celebrity, Leon,” she said. “It's only when people despise you that you know you've really made it.”

S
OON AFTER HE
had moved into Overington, Leon ordered books that referenced Rhona's father, the infamous Penny King. From the first time they had met, Rhona had been conjuring up her dead father to explain why Leon would grow rich, why she could summon forty media reporters and they would arrive within an hour, why her logo had a hint of a striped awning, why she sometimes called herself a barker. “He taught me what I need to know to survive in this business. In any business, really.”

The books and websites told a much more complex story of Samuel Burke, the man who built the greatest circus in the United States after the war, and whose fame peaked when a purposely lit fire burned down the circus as it was playing Denver. Forty-two patrons and staff died, trapped in tents of canvas that wrapped around their bodies in flaming sheets when they tried to break through to the outside. Witness accounts told of people running with their bodies burning, how the torn canvas that had caught on their clothes gave them fiery wings and tails
like devils straight from hell. Animals burned to death shrieking and howling in their cages. The circus went bankrupt, and a month later the Penny King disappeared.

His show was called the Enchanted Circus, a perverse name for a circus known for its brutal mistreatment of animals, punishing working conditions and mysterious connections with the criminal underworld.

“Some men would come around,” Rhona said once, offhandedly, “collecting money. I don't know. Probably it was the games. Cards. A cockfight every now and then.”

She spoke this way as though she knew little and cared less, but that had never been true of Rhona so Leon didn't believe a word of it. Rhona knew everything that went on. He could imagine her as a child, the way she had described it to him, following her father around, watching, listening, learning everything about how the circus ran.

“There were some protests,” he had heard her say another time, a casual remark when Kathryn was asking about the circus.

He hadn't finished with the research into Rhona's background, but he had also turned his attention to the new project: finding Susan. He couldn't help this drive to dig out information. He had learned to be solitary and yet it was his nature to want to know, to hunt in books and online until he had ferreted out answers. He and Minh were working their way through lists in their search for his old surgeon, not hurrying, covering ground carefully and thoroughly. The last time they compared their findings, Minh had said he should be either a private detective or a therapist.

“I know you'll find her. You have that quiet persistent determination. It's a rare quality. I'd better be careful or I'll spill all my secrets to you.”

“You can do that if you like.” Leon barely believed the words had come out of his mouth. Was he flirting? Was this how you flirted?

She laughed her infectious laugh. “I might not be able to help myself.” They were bent together over the screen, talking at it instead of facing each other. He couldn't bear to turn and look at her face in case she was toying with him and he would see her lip lifted in a sneer or her burned-toffee eyes rolling in disbelief. He could smell her skin, sweetish with a hint of cardamom. A teardrop crystal dangling on the end of a chain at her throat caught the light from the screen and gave it back as a rainbow. It was too much. He stood up.

Minh stayed leaning into the screen. She closed the Susan file. When she turned to face him, he noticed fingers of pink on her throat.

“I read about Rhona's father's circus too. An incredible story,” he said.

“So tell me. We all want to know. She never gives much away.”

He told her what he'd learned. In 1949, when the circus was performing in Idaho, the safety tie-rope of a young trapeze artist snapped as he flew beyond the top of his usual arc and somersaulted too late in a practice session. He fell forty feet to the sawdust-covered floor. The rope was frayed and untwisted, fifteen years old, gray and tired and worn. The Penny King had laughed when the trapeze boy asked for a loan against his salary to buy a new rope. The report on the incident quoted the trapeze artist's father, a strongman in the circus:

He laughed at my boy and sneered and told him not to be a sissy. Well, my boy was no sissy but now he's dead and that man has the blame right there on his shoulders. Only he won't
take it. He won't take the blame and to my mind that makes him a coward. A real sniveling coward.

All of the performers had attended the funeral in their costumes as a mark of respect. After the funeral they returned to the camp, had a few drinks in the big top under the trapeze wires, and fueled their resentment at their treatment by the Penny King.

Later that evening they gathered at the circus gate where crowds were queuing for the night's show. The Penny King had refused to close the circus, even for one night, even though the performers had offered to give up their night's wages.

The dead boy's father spoke to the crowd first. He had a fellow performer bring him a crate to stand on. He was weeping as only a strongman can weep, with his whole body. He asked the audience to go home, to respect the memory of a young man who had died. Some of the people looked away as if not seeing him might make him vanish. The ticket seller was counting out change as slowly as she could, placing the coins one by one on the lip of the wooden counter that jutted out from the window of the booth.

About half the people in the queue drifted away. The dwarf clown walked along the line of the people who remained and spoke to them individually. “You think about how you'd like someone turning up to your house when your son has just died. Asking to come in and play a game of cards or listen to your radio. How'd you like that?” More people left. As the demonstrators passed around the whiskey and the remaining small crowd shuffled uncertainly around the ticket booth, the Penny King appeared at the gate. He wore his ringmaster costume, red and gold with brass buttons and shiny black knee boots. He carried, as always, his whip.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted in the voice that never failed to thrill children and convince their parents that the ticket price was money well spent. “There
will
be a show tonight. You will see performing elephants, wild tigers, a strongman”—here he focused his attention momentarily on the father of the dead boy—“and everything you ever expected from the greatest circus in the United States of America. This will be a show to commemorate the life of one of our special performers who died in a tragic accident yesterday as we rehearsed to bring the show to you here in Boise. So tonight will be a tribute show in honor of our terrible loss and in honor of all the great circus performers who have lost their lives bringing joy to audiences around the world. Our people”—he gestured at his disgruntled employees—“want to show their respect. And because of that, all tickets will be half price.”

The people waiting to get in sent their children to let everyone know about the cheap tickets, and the crowd swelled to its largest-ever size for that town. The strongman retired to his van, but the other performers, except the high-wire acts who were too drunk to take the risk, came out for the spontaneous “tribute” show, which was reported around the country and gave the Enchanted Circus more publicity than it had seen in years.

The next day the strongman left the circus and applied to the US Postal Service for a job.

That was the first demonstration, and the smallest. The big ones came a couple of years later. The two strikes by unpaid workers, followed by the humane society rally in 1953 that brought animal lovers from across the country. Nine hundred people protesting the beating and starvation of circus animals that had been documented by an undercover reporter and published with graphic photographs and eyewitness accounts in a major daily newspaper.

The Penny King managed to ride that out too. He was a masterful manipulator of people and of the truth. Whether he cleaned up the circus or not isn't clear, but he managed to keep out of the press for the next couple of years. Then came the fire, and his disappearance.

The most curious thing about Leon's research into the Enchanted Circus was that every source said the Penny King was single and had no known children.

I
T SEEMED TO
Leon that two cracks had opened in the world. Out of one poured the human longing for mystery, bringing love letters and exaltation. From the other spewed the ghosts of human discontent and envy. The leaked ugly photos. Hate letters. Threats boxed like gifts, nestled in tissue paper and ribbon. Religious groups had been muttering online that the “freaks” were devils or messengers from hell. The complaints came from fundamentalists of all different denominations: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, even Satanists. The worst of them took everything literally. In their rantings, Leon was a demonic machine, Kathryn was a talking animal and Christos was an evil angel. Security had to be tightened, Hap said. He could provide the staff, but the Wonders needed to be more alert themselves. “Do not relax in public,” he told them.

It was not easy to be alert to danger on a clear, crisp, beautiful night in New York City. On the way into dinner at Rockefeller Center, the Wonders paused on a walkway to look down through the glass at handsome couples spinning on the small
ice rink. The skaters held hands and glided around with the precision of elegant figures in a brass automaton. Groups of onlookers hung over the rails above, their breath mingling in steamy clouds of conversation. Kathryn watched the skaters for a few moments before turning to Christos.

“Be my escort? I used to hate skating, but I feel more confident now I have extra padding. I was always a bony thing. Falling down used to hurt.”

Christos told Kathryn he would sit by the side of the rink and watch her. Risky sports put him in danger. “If I fall on my back . . .”

Kathryn sniffed. “Precious fecking princess,” she said so softly that only Leon heard.

She turned to Yuri. “Yuri? Will you?”

“So sorry, Kathryn. I cannot skate. My mother was afraid to let me on the ice.”

“How about you, Leon? Will you take me skating?”

“You know the way my heart works—I'd have to spend twenty minutes warming up to get my blood flow in sync with the pace of exercise. By the time I was ready you'd be chewing your own foot off.”