“If you mean the rabbit, it peed in the birdcage and it’s dripping through the bottom,” the lovable young scamp retorted. “And I saw you flip that switch on the back of the cage. What does that do-unhook some door so you can reach through the fake floor?”
Rudge let out a hearty laugh, fighting off the urge to throttle the dear lad. Every magician worth his gold lame suit had encountered hecklers, and the worst were the ones who had dabbled in the art themselves. Clearly this boy was planning a career on the stage. Maybe he even hoped to model his act after Rudge’s.
Normally, the magician would have stifled the interloper with one of his special zingers. But there was a keen intelligence in the youngster’s eye, and since there were no other spectators to disillusion, perhaps he could use this as a moment to share his precious secrets.
“If you’d care to approach, young man, I might be persuaded to show you how to make the rabbit appear,” Rudge said.
“I’ll wait until the cage stops dripping pee,” Jimmy said.
“I have other miracles I could teach you,” Rudge said, glancing over to see a stream of rabbit urine dripping out of his dove house and bleaching the blue carpet beneath it a dingy yellow.
“My dad said you could probably make our entire liquor cabinet disappear if someone didn’t keep an eye on you,” Jimmy said.
Rudge glowed at the compliment. It had been many years since he’d practiced the illusion of the vanishing furniture, but it was good to know he was still remembered for it. “That is a particularly advanced glamour,” Rudge said. “Perhaps we should start with a smaller miracle and work our way up.”
“Whatever,” Jimmy said. “Can you tell me what my dad did on his last business trip to Omaha that made my mom so mad?”
“What kind of magic is that?” Rudge said.
“The kind the other guy is doing.”
Jimmy pointed out through the glass sliding door to the far end of the backyard, where the entire troop of ten-year-olds had clustered around a skinny, badly dressed man, who barely looked older than them, and his slightly better-dressed sidekick. As the interloper pressed his fingers deep into his forehead as if in communication with the Great Beyond, Rudge realized where he had seen him before-in the crowd at the Fortress of Magic.
With a shiver of disgust, Rudge realized what he must be dealing with-a pair of those self-styled “bad boys of magic.” Sure they were bad boys, in the same sense that basal cell carcinomas could be considered the “bad boys” of the metabolism. They had no respect for the Art. Their only interest was self-promotion. They froze themselves in ice cubes or buried themselves in glass coffins or hung by their toes for a month over Niagara Falls, and they had the temerity to call those stunts magic. They were acts of endurance, of self-immolation, of stupidity-but there was absolutely nothing magical about them.
These impostors had taken over almost every corner of the business. They sucked up all the increasingly rare TV time dedicated to professional magic. They got the best showroom bookings. They got the covers of all the trade papers. But there was one corner they would not steal from the true artists of the profession. They could not steal away the wonder in the eyes of children. Rudge would not allow it.
Barnaby Rudge marched out of the house and across the yard to where the interlopers stood surrounded by second graders. He pushed through the throng of children and glared at the bad boy with a stare that had paralyzed tigers in Bombay.
It took the bad boy a moment to acknowledge his presence, no doubt trying to figure out how to save face now that he’d been confronted by his superior. Instead, he bent down to one of the kids. “Your teacher thinks you’re a genius and your parents want to send you to a special school for advanced students,” he said. “And now you’re terrified because the only reason you’ve done so well on tests is that you found copies of the teachers’ editions of all your books in a thrift store and you’ve been cheating all year.”
The kid gaped up at him. He looked as if he wanted to deny the charges; then he broke down. “What do I do?” he whispered.
“I read auras; I don’t tell futures,” the bad boy said. “But I’m pretty sure the advanced school textbooks have teachers’ editions, too.”
The kid brightened again, and the bad boy searched the crowd for his next victim. Rudge stepped forward.
“Out, fraud,” Rudge boomed, an accusing finger in the bad boy’s face.
The interloper shrank back under the force of Rudge’s disapprobation. “Do not evict me, oh great wizard,” the interloper begged. “I seek only to learn at the feet of the master.”
At least that’s what he meant to say, Rudge could tell from the quaver in his voice. The actual words were closer to “Say, how do you get rabbit pee out of gold lame anyway?” but Rudge knew that one question would lead to another, and soon he would be begging for all the secrets of the magician’s art. Rudge’s will began to weaken. The Eisenstein boy was pretty young to take on as an apprentice; this new one was old enough to drive to the liquor store to do Rudge’s shopping when it was necessary. And he came with a sidekick, whom he could turn into a valuable ally if the student ever turned on the master. Best of all, the new-comer was doing a pretty good job of entertaining the children, which meant that Jimmy’s father would have no grounds for cutting Rudge’s negotiated fee for the appearance.
“Your act has promise, young wizard,” Rudge said, and waited for the glow of joy to spread across his incipient assistant’s face. “If you choose, you may study with me. I can teach you to take it to the next level-and all the way to the highest level.”
“Like you did with the Martian Magician?” the young man said, an awestruck tone cleverly hidden under a veneer of stylish cynicism.
Perhaps that was meant as praise. After all, that green thug was the highest-grossing act on the Vegas Strip. But the very thought that he would have anything to do with the villain who was destroying stage magic forever was enough to undo an entire week’s worth of blood pressure medication.
Still, if this young pup was impressed by Marvin the Martian, Rudge could use that to teach him some of the higher skills. Let the kid think he was going to follow the fake’s lead, and meanwhile teach him the real art. By the time class was over, his pupil would understand why the momentarily popular act was such a catastrophe.
“Well, yes,” Rudge said. “Everything he knows, he learned from me.”
The bad boy leaned close to Rudge, his face glowing with admiration. His eyes seemed to take in every inch of the magician’s face, then his body. And then there was some kind of shift that Rudge couldn’t understand, but he seemed to be appraising Rudge’s very soul.
“I knew it,” the youth said. “There was no way that someone could perform a miracle like the Dissolving Man without learning it all at the feet of a master.”
“That is very perspicacious,” Rudge said. “Your mind is strong and clear.”
“And then he rode that illusion he stole from you to the top of the entertainment industry without giving you the credit you so richly deserve,” he continued. “How justifiably enraged you were, how righteous in your fury. Not because you wanted that kind of money and fame for yourself, of course, but because he was damaging the art form.”
“Yes,” Rudge said.
“But you saw one way to stop him before he destroyed the entire world of stage magic,” the youth said. “You would use the very trick he stole from you against him. You would expose him on stage as a fraud and a charlatan, and he would slink off, back into anonymity forever.”
“I, um, what?” Rudge said. This was sounding less and less like an eager acolyte heaping praise on his new master.
“Because only you, Barnaby Rudge, knew the secret of the green man’s water tank. Only you were wizard enough to sabotage it,” he said.
“And what a brilliant way to ruin your rival.” It was the sidekick talking now. “Up on stage in front of every important magician working today. With one little flick of your wrist, you would kill his act forever.”
“Too bad you accidentally killed that chubby guy, too,” the youth said. “That’s even worse than when your pigeon died inside the top hat.”
“The pigeon was just resting,” Rudge said quickly, looking around to see if the goons from the SPCA had started following him again. “I chose not to disturb her sleep, so I moved on to the next illusion.”
“So you didn’t kill your bird, but you admit you killed the chubby man,” the youth said.
