They reached the car and Gus fished in his pocket for his keys. “But if she really is from Homeland Security, how did you get her to back off?”
“She didn’t want publicity,” Shawn said. “You saw that.”
“So why didn’t she just arrest us all?”
“Because whatever she’s doing here, it’s not an official DHS operation,” Shawn said.
“And you know that how?”
“The little d on top of her plane ticket,” Shawn said. “It’s a fare code. She flew DC to LAX in a full-price business-class seat,” Shawn said.
“Last I heard the government had lots of money,” Gus said. “At least they act like they do.”
“Right,” Shawn said. “So if this really was a crisis involving national security, she would have taken a DHS jet.”
“How do you know they have one?”
“Their budget is like fifty billion dollars,” Shawn said. “Can you imagine having fifty billion dollars and not buying at least one jet? And even if they didn’t, they would have sent her on a military transport.”
“Maybe it’s not an emergency.”
“In which case she would have flown coach,” Shawn said. “Federal officials aren’t allowed to fly business class.”
Gus hit the remote on his key fob and the car doors popped open, but he didn’t want to get in until he was sure he understood what Shawn was saying. “They’ll spend millions buying a jet, but they wouldn’t spring for a business-class ticket? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Then I must be wrong,” Shawn said. “Oh, wait, this is the federal government. I’m right. Can we get out of here now?”
Before Gus could answer, Shawn opened his door and got in. If Gus wanted any more answers, he’d have to get in, too. He buckled himself into his seat, but he didn’t start the car.
“Okay, fine,” Gus said. “What else?”
“There’s more?”
Gus waited until Shawn gave in.
“Did you see the upper lip on that agent?” Shawn said. “It was bright white, while the rest of his face was tanned. Which means he had a mustache until a day or so ago.”
“And?”
“And another one of the agents had a dragon tattoo running down his arm,” Shawn said. “At least, I assume it ran down his arm. The tip of the tail was sticking out of his sleeve, and it’s hard to imagine anyone having just the tip of a dragon’s tail tattooed on his wrist.”
“Which means what?”
“Homeland Security agents can’t have tattoos or facial hair,” Shawn said. “These are rental guys she picked up in LA.”
“So she’s a phony.”
“Not necessarily,” Shawn said. “It’s quite possible that Major Voges had some vacation time coming and she decided to spend it interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation.”
“That one doesn’t work for me.”
“Then how about this?” Shawn said. “There’s something terribly, terribly wrong, and whatever it is, it’s something that Major Voges was supposed to take care of. She probably even told her superiors that she had. But she screwed up, and now it’s worse than either of us could ever possibly imagine.”
“Like what?”
“Did you miss the part about it being worse than either of us could ever possibly imagine?” Shawn said. “That means I can’t imagine what it is. But think of everything that Homeland Security has screwed up that no one got fired for. And now imagine that Major Voges is afraid she will be if anyone finds out what she’s done.”
Gus thought about it and shuddered. “We’re doomed.”
“I think that’s probably right,” Shawn said.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m thinking about a nice game of pin the tail on the donkey.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was about the art. About the precision of his movements, the subtlety of his misdirection, the speed of his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t mat-his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t matter whom he was performing for. He had astonished the crowned heads of Europe and amazed the jaded jet-setters of Monte Carlo, but their reaction was no more important to him than that of any other group who sought release in the presence of miracles.
There were those who claimed to pity Barnaby Rudge. He could hear them whispering in the Fortress of Magic. He, the great Rudge, who had traveled to India to meet the guru, if not quite with the Beatles, then at least with Herman’s Hermits. Rudge, who had been painted by Warhol and filmed by Jodorowsky, who had exchanged phone numbers with Anita Pallenberg and Bianca Perez-Mora Macias before losing both beauties to Keith and Mick. Rudge, who would have electrified an entire nation when he performed his greatest illusion, the Groovy Gap, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on April 11, 1969, if only those idiots had shut up about the Vietnam War for one more week instead of getting themselves cancelled.
Now, he had heard the whisperers say, Rudge was so forgotten, people assumed he stole the idea of using a Dickens title for his stage name from David Cop- perfield, when it was so obviously the reverse. He was reduced to playing to tiny crowds for peanuts. He had lost everything.
But Rudge knew he had lost nothing. As long as his fingers could still move, his art was still alive. And his art was all that mattered.
Barnaby Rudge bowed to his audience as he transitioned between illusions. The show had been going superbly. The scarves had flowed out of his sleeves like water down a mountain streambed. The Chinese linking rings had clashed together like armies in the night. There was a small hitch when he reached into the false bottom of his top hat and discovered that he’d left his pint of Cutty inside with the cap partially unscrewed and the dove he’d meant to produce had suffocated on the whiskey fumes. But he had improvised a clever bit of patter to distract the crowd as he disposed of both chapeau and oiseau, and no one seemed to notice the lacuna in the performance. And the rabbit, that irresistible pink-nosed climax to his act, the one that never failed to rouse the audience to a standing cheer, was nestled safely beneath the false bottom of his dove cage. This would be a show for the ages.
With a grand flourish, Rudge produced the cane that in moments he would transform into a bouquet of lovely flowers. The sight of so much color exploding from a simple black stick would elicit awed sighs from his audience, and while they were marveling, he’d use their stunned focus on the blooms to set the switch on the dove cage. It was all going perfectly.
Rudge felt a sticky blob slap against his cheek-avian revenge for the dove’s demise, perhaps. No matter. He would allow no bird to disturb his act when it was nearing its climax. He reached up to wipe it off and his hand came back slimed with green and pink. There was a brown circle in the middle of the blotch, which he realized was most of one of the icing a ’s in “Happy Birthday.”
Rudge glared out into the crowd to see who had flung the frosting at him. The culprit wasn’t hard to find. It was little Jimmy Eisenstein, whose tenth birthday the magician had been hired to help celebrate. Rudge could tell it was Jimmy who had iced him. He still held the frosting catapult-in this case a white plastic spork-aloft, now reloaded for a second assault. But even without the weapon, Rudge would have known who had committed this assault, because while Rudge had been consumed with the details of his performance, the entire audience of second graders had slipped out of their folding chairs and drifted away from the living room, leaving only the birthday boy to appreciate the act.
“Stay that missile, you fine young man,” Rudge boomed out cheerfully. “And I will show you the wonders of the Orient.”
