Touch of Magic (3 page)

She'd felt she owed it to
Yussuf
to hide the gun.
 
There was probably some perfectly logical explanation for it. He'd gotten used to carrying one because of so much travel, maybe. If the press learned about
it, though, there'd be innuendos. She wasn't going
to let that happen to
Yussuf's
name. Not just to help
this vacuum-nose, she wasn't.

He glared at her and she relaxed deliberately.
Her gaze was clear to telegraph her confidence. She
savored his moment of recognition as angry red
suffused his face. It wasn't the first time some over
bearing official had realized he couldn't budge her;
she'd run some real gauntlets getting drilling permits in foreign countries.

The detective grilled her with a few more ques
tions, then turned back to the boy. After a few min
utes he flipped his notebook shut in disgust.

"Go on. Both of you."

They walked out together, neither speaking. As
they reached the street the boy, whose name was
Serafin
, hunched his shoulders.

In a flash, and because she was watching him,
Channing recognized the gesture. She knew that
wary glide of a gaze up the street. She'd seen that
look on children sleeping in doorways, on children clamoring to watch her Jeep for a few baht or
pias
ters
in some foreign city.

He had nowhere to go. His grief over losing
Yus
suf
must be as great as her own -- even worse, considering his age. She heard him swallow a dry sob. He didn't look as though he'd had a meal in a week.

"You lied about where you lived. You don't live
anywhere, do you?"

She wondered why she had to work to keep her voice from shaking.

He squinted at her. His legs were preparing for
flight.

"My mom moves a lot."

"Uh-huh."

In the instant he leapt from the steps, Channing jerked him back by the waist of his pants.

"Listen, if I have to turn you in to Children's Services, neither one of us will get any sleep tonight. It would be a lot simpler if you came home with me.
Yussuf
came to my house a lot."

Still wiggling, he looked at her in surprise.

Well, now I've done it, Channing thought. There were probably laws against this. But she knew he
must feel lost and sick at heart tonight. So did she. It
seemed right for them to be together. She was sure those clothes on
Yussuf's
couch had been for the
boy. It seemed right to do something for him.

Besides, she'd always felt slightly guilty about all the unused space in the big house she'd inherited in Altadena.

*
  
*
  
*

"You've
lot
a lot of blood, Mr. Ellery. We're going
to admit you."

"Jesus Christ, no!"

Bill Ellery came to with a start. He'd been trying
to figure where
Ballieu
might go, letting them fix his
shoulder. Now a childhood panic hit him in the gut.
He struggled to sit.

A rubber tube jerked him back. He was in a curtained
-off cubicle of the emergency room. They had
some kind of IV hooked to him. Trapping him, like before.

He'd been eleven then, left alone for a week in a
foreign hospital where he couldn't speak the lan
guage. His leg in traction. Vomiting and having to
lie in the mess because he couldn't move. A huge
nurse slapping him. Helpless. And worst of all
...

"You said the bullet was out -- a clean wound."

He fought his irrational fear, ashamed at his loss of
control. So much for hitching a ride with the local
police to get to the hospital, he thought.

The doctor, a woman, was frowning over a chart.

"It is out -- and you've lost three pints of blood."

"Yeah, well. I've always been careless."

He tried to grin.

His parents had left him in that Swiss hospital
because he hadn't met their specifications -- too average in school, too inward and tongue-tied, an an
noyance to them, unlike his brother, Reid. Yet
maybe it was lying there, scared shitless, that had taught him grit, he thought. Grit was the one thing
he had in abundance.

Not the zeal to make a million bucks before he
was thirty, as his father had done. Not the knack for
trite conversation that might have pleased his
mother. Not Reid's thirst for power. The rest of the
family thought he was a poet, a dropout, an underachiever.
It gave him a perverse satisfaction.

"We need to observe you for twenty-four hours,"
the doctor said crisply.

Ellery shook his head, dislodging a cowlick of
brown hair.

The State Department needed him. Was depending
on him. And a long time ago he'd come to see
how much difference one man could make in the
world. He'd been working the film case since it had
popped ten days ago. He owed it to the department to see things through -- to Sammy, too, he thought
grimly.

Sam had promised his oldest a ten-speed for Christmas. Ellery made a mental note to make sure
that happened.

"Could I have my shirt?"

He raised himself on an elbow that wobbled. A nurse was appraising his naked torso with undis
guised interest. The doctor, making notes on a
chart, flicked a look at him.

"Who's your next of kin, Mr. Ellery?"

Jesus Christ, did he have to promise he'd eat liver
three meals a day?

"No next of kin. I'm in town on business." He held
his impatience, made the words sound reasonable.

Henri
Ballieu
was out there somewhere, waiting
for that film, and he was going to see
Ballieu
didn't get it. Last year
Ballieu's
group had blown up a department store full of people. Six months ago
they'd kidnapped and killed a woman with kids just
because her father happened to be a politician. If
they got the capacity to make U.S. passports, they'd
be turning up everywhere.

As a kid, Ellery had daydreamed a lot. He'd won
dered how you insured justice and freedom and all the other things no one else around him seemed to
talk, or even think, about. Even in three years of law
school not many people talked about them. They
seemed too intangible. Too elusive, maybe. But in his work, he'd come to learn some of the answers.

"Unhook me, will you?"

He swung his legs over the edge of the gurney
that held him.

The nurse and an intern looked nervous. They'd seen his identification, he guessed. Or his gun.

The frosty little doctor gave a jerk of her head,
and the intern reached for a hypodermic needle.
Oh, Christ. They'd sedated him when he'd been
that scared little kid too. He could feel a cold sweat
starting.

Then a deep voice barked on the other side of the curtains.

"I don't care where I'm supposed to be. You treat
ing a man who was shot in the shoulder?"

Bill Ellery's fists unclenched at the familiar voice.
He knew with relief that he'd get out of there. He
wouldn't have to lie awake, tense, stalked by the
memory of the orderly in that expensive hospital all
those years ago who had tried to sodomize him.

Grinning at the doctor, who didn't seem to be
taking defeat very well, he reminded himself to tell
his boss about that girl in black who'd made the magician's gun disappear.

*
  
*
  
*

The house in Altadena was white and two stories high and captured the graciousness of a bygone era.
Channing's parents had died in an accident when she was five, and she had grown up here. She
couldn't bring herself to part with the house. Main
taining it seemed the most fitting memorial possible
to the couple who'd reared her. In this house her
grandfather, The Great Sebastian, had held her on his knee and taught her magic tricks from the time her fingers could hold cards. In this house her grandmother, a diminutive New England lady as fragile and strong as fine porcelain, had fed a constant stream of less successful magicians and set a
daily example of tolerance for those around her.

Serafin
looked at the house and shook his head.
Channing guessed he was thinking of money.
Gramps had left some. Her own income was good.
She'd made wise investments. There wasn't any problem maintaining the house.

An elderly houseman, features puckered as
though he'd been sucking limes, met them as the
door opened. Channing had inherited him from her
grandfather too. Or so it seemed to her. He was
caretaker in her absence, critic when she was present.

"Now what?" he demanded, peering along the
bridge of his hooked nose at
Serafin
.

Channing tossed her evening bag toward a table.

"This is
Serafin
. Get him something to eat and
show him a room.
Yussuf
was shot tonight. He's
dead."

She saw a kaleidoscope of emotions across
Rundell's
face. He was shocked by the news about
Yussuf
, who had come here often; he was at an utter
loss confronting a child. His expression settled quickly into a practiced glare of disapproval.

Rundell
disapproved of almost anything she did.
Even now, jangled as she was, Channing loved his
predictability. He'd been part of the household
ever since she could remember, and it had seemed
unconscionable to separate him and the house --
 
another reason for not selling. At his age, with his
disposition, he'd never find another job. And he'd
wither away without someone to harp at. Knowing
full well she wouldn't escape his grilling for long,
Channing climbed the curved central staircase to the room she'd occupied since she was a child.

Closing the door, she leaned against it and let out
her breath. She was tired -- more tired from yes
terday's long trip home than she'd realized. Abu
Dhabi to Riyadh. Riyadh to Paris. Finally the trans
atlantic flight, and the last leg, New York to Califor
nia.

Action. Action was the key to keeping your mind
from troubling thoughts. Pushing herself briskly
from the door, discarding her
kunjar
, she let her
black magician's dress slide to the floor. She spread its folds out over the back of a chair. She would hang
it tomorrow.

Why had someone killed
YussufP

A sense of anger and loss pushed through in spite of her efforts.
Yussuf
had been an old man, a magi
cian, his very life devoted to making people happy.

She winced a little from the thought.

Ten years ago that hadn't seemed enough to her.
She'd wanted to make the world better. Gramps
couldn't understand. He'd never grasped how
deeply their trip to Egypt the year she was sixteen
had affected her. That terrible village. People starving because there was no way of growing food. Babies dying from dehydration. And out in the desert,
the signs of water coming, but not fast enough for
most of those people.

Science had always been easy for her. She'd decided then, at sixteen. But Gramps hadn't taken her
seriously, not even when she got her degree in
hydro-geology. Not until she'd told him she'd been
approved for a graduate program abroad and she
was accepting.

She'd tried to make him understand that she
loved magic, but that she somehow had to give a better accounting of her life. After all, she'd sur
vived the accident that killed her parents.
Shouldn't one Stuart out of four generations do
something besides entertain?