gentle nudge with his foot in the exact spot where his last kick landed persuaded him to supply a simple nod.
“Good,” Fleck said. He thudded his hands together, and the spacegirls returned to whisk the platters away. “This meal is now concluded.”
“What, no dessert?” Shawn said.
Fleck reached into his breast pocket and took out a plastic card. “I do not intend to guide your investigation, but I assume you will want to begin with the suite P’tol P’kah calls home. This key will operate the elevator from his dressing room. My only request is that you leave everything exactly as you found it. If you are able to find my client and he is healthy and able to return, I don’t want him to feel that his privacy has been violated. Is there anything else?”
“Just one question,” Shawn said, moving his leg out of the way in case Gus was planning another assault on his ankle. “What if we find P’nut P’brittle and he doesn’t want to come back?”
Benny Fleck didn’t move. His facial expression didn’t change; his body language wasn’t altered in any way. But Gus somehow got the impression that their lunch host had become much taller than the missing Martian.
“P’tol P’kah has a contract with me,” Fleck said calmly. “I’m sure his only desire in this or any other world is to live up to it. But if you find him and he suggests in any way that he’d prefer not to return, you must do as he wishes. Leave him be and let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” Gus said, a wave of relief washing over him.
“Let me know exactly where he is,” Fleck continued. “My internal security people will do the rest.”
Chapter Ten
“ Shawn, he’s going to kill him.”
Gus stood in the middle of P’tol P’kah’s penthouse suite, still nauseated from the thirty-nine-story ascent in the private elevator from the dressing room. He took a step across the brilliant white carpet to where Shawn stood looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows, but as soon as he did, the room started spinning again. He might not have minded this so much, except that the suite was large enough to house the entire Good-year blimp fleet with room left over for most of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons, and that was a mighty big space to have twirling around his head.
“You’re right,” Shawn said.
At least that was progress. As they had followed yet another silver-suited spacegirl through the employee tunnels that ran from the restaurant’s kitchen to the backstage area of the Starlight Theater, Shawn had refused to acknowledge there was anything ominous in the last part of their meeting with Fleck.
“We’ve got to do something.”
“Absolutely,” Shawn said. “I’m putting twenty bucks on the champ.”
“What champ? What are you talking about?”
“That.” Shawn pointed out the window. Fighting off his wooziness, Gus managed to cross the room and join him, only to see that Shawn was looking out at an enormous sign in front of Caesar’s Palace, advertising tonight’s heavyweight championship. “I know a lot of people have been saying the champ’s past his prime, but Montoya won’t last three rounds.”
Down below, the cars looked no bigger than the Hot Wheels Gus and Shawn used to play with, and Gus turned away quickly before his nausea teamed up with incipient vertigo to make him pass out.
“I don’t care about a fight, Shawn,” Gus said in between deep, heavy, regular breaths. “I care about what’s going to happen if we find P’tol P’kah and he doesn’t want to come back here.”
“Are you kidding?” Shawn waved his arm around the suite. One wall was covered by a flat-screen TV the size of a freeway exit sign. A door on the opposite side led to a closet that seemed to run the entire length of the hotel tower, and it was filled with endless iterations of a custom-made outfit perfect for the stylish Martian-slacks in black and khaki, blazers in blue and black, white shirts, and leather loafers, all in sizes Yao Ming could swim in. And if Yao were a guest and he felt like some actual nonsartorial swimming, another door opened onto an Olympic-sized indoor pool. The steel-and-marble gourmet kitchen was stocked with every kind of snack food Shawn and Gus had ever heard of and many they hadn’t. “Who wouldn’t want to come back here?”
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Maybe someone who gets nauseated in fast elevators. Someone who’s afraid of heights. Or maybe a guy who dissolves in a tank of water, never rematerializes, and leaves a dead guy floating in his place.”
Shawn took a moment to think through what Gus was saying. “You have a theory?”
“Yes,” Gus said. “And it’s the same one you have, because it’s the only one that makes sense.”
“The only theory that makes sense is the one that starts with a Martian dissolving in water?”
“That’s his trick,” Gus said impatiently. “We both know he didn’t really dissolve.”
“You were the one who thought it was so impressive.”
“Shawn!”
“Okay, fine,” Shawn said, plopping himself on a plush, down-filled leather sofa. “Let’s assume that P’tato P’tahto isn’t really a Martian. He’s just another stage magician. What do we know?”
“That the Dissolving Man is a trick.”
“And?”
“And the reason we can’t figure it out is because the solution is too obvious,” Gus said, settling down in an overstuffed armchair.
“So if we take away all the razzle-dazzle, the basic illusion is that the magician is locked into some kind of cabinet, the lights go out, and he slips out through some secret exit. Meanwhile, he’s got a device that instantly clones him and delivers the clone wherever the beam is pointed.”
“That’s the solution that’s so obvious, no one would ever figure it out?” Gus said.
“It is to anyone who saw that Hugh Jackman movie,” Shawn said. “Although it’s also possible he has a twin brother who hides out in the audience. But do Martians even come in twins? There’s a lot of basic research that hasn’t been done on that issue.”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s the cloning machine,” Gus said. “You’ve nailed this one. Except for one thing-the lights never went out.”
“Sure they did,” Shawn said. “Remember that blast of light at the very end? It blinded us all for a few seconds-plenty of time.”
Gus thought back and realized that anything could have happened in that time and he never would have known-he was not only blind, but the roaring sound could easily have covered just about any noise.
“So P’tol P’kah did his trick as usual. Then instead of appearing in the audience, he ran,” Gus said. “That’s what I was saying. He wanted to get away from this gilded cage, and he set up the entire Fortress of Magic show as a ruse to allow him out. But where did he go? And more to the point, who’s the dead guy in the tank and how did he get there?”
“I have an idea on that,” Shawn said. “But let’s hold off on the dead guy for a minute. Instead we should-”
“Let’s not,” Gus interrupted.
“What do you mean, ‘Let’s not’?” Shawn said. “This is my theory, and I get to lay it out however I want to.”
“Sure, when you’re talking to Lassiter or to Chief Vick or to a client,” Gus said. “Then you can lay out your explanation step by step, making sure every piece is in the perfect place to build audience expectation. Then you hit them with the big finale, and everyone’s left thinking you’re a genius. But you don’t need to sell me, so why don’t you just say who the dead guy is now?”
“In the time it took you to lay out that objection, I could have explained everything.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Gus said. “You couldn’t explain a cheese sandwich in less than five minutes.” Gus pressed his fingertips to his forehead and scrunched up his eyes as if he’d been hit with a migraine. “I’m sensing something. It’s a condominium. No, wait, it’s a comic book. No, close to a comic book. It’s-it’s a condiment! Yes, I’m sensing mayonnaise. It’s saying, ‘Put me next to the lettuce.’ ”
“Those explanations are what brings in the lettuce for both of us,” Shawn said. “And why are you getting so
