“So he set up the performance at the Fortress of Magic,” Gus said. “And when it was time for the climax, he dissolved himself out of the tank-and dissolved Chubby Dead Guy in. It would have been instantaneous, so he wouldn’t even have had time to hold his breath. That explains why he drowned so fast.”
They were coming up to their exit, but Gus didn’t feel like getting off the freeway. Right now, driving with the sparkling blue ocean outside his window, he could feel the solution to this mystery falling into place. All of it was making sense. But he knew the second he pulled into a parking place and turned off the engine, the part of his brain he needed for driving would rush in to focus on the problem of P’tol P’kah, and it would find all kinds of holes in Shawn’s theories.
But even though oil prices had been falling, Gus was still feeling uncomfortable about the idea of wasting gasoline. And he knew that no matter how far they drove, eventually he’d have to put his entire mind to work on the problem. A quick glance over at Shawn showed him that his partner was having some difficulty with the theory, too.
“It does sound good,” Gus said. “I mean, the internal logic all works out pretty well. But we can’t really go with it until we can reconcile it with reality.”
“That’s not what’s bothering me,” Shawn said.
“What, the fact that what we’re talking about is physically impossible?” Gus said. “That’s not the problem?”
A look at Shawn’s grim face convinced Gus that this was no time for a brain-sucking joyride. He clicked on the signal and drifted across the lanes to his exit.
“That would actually be a good thing,” Shawn said. “Because if I’m actually right…”
Shawn let his sentence trail off.
“What?” Gus said finally.
“If I’m actually right, there’s a crazy man wandering around somewhere out there with an unstoppable death ray,” Shawn said. “And we got purple Popsicle on his white carpet.”
Chapter Nineteen
Augie Balustrade stepped into his bathroom and locked the door behind him. There was no reason for him to turn the latch, or even to close the door-Augie had lived alone since his last girlfriend moved out two years ago, and he hadn’t had a single guest over in at least six months-but this was a habit he’d developed in his early teens, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break it.
Checking the knob to make sure the door was secure, Balustrade steepled his fingers together and turned them inside out until they cracked. Then he waggled each one from every joint until they were as loose as they could be. Only then did he produce the deck of cards from his vest pocket.
How many times had he laid out fifty-two cards on the back of the toilet, effortlessly fanning them across the slick white porcelain, flipping them over, expanding and contracting them like an accordion? He’d practiced the basic moves four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for forty-seven years now-sixty-eight thousand four hundred thirty-two hours, two thousand eight hundred fifty-one days. Almost eight full years, nearly a sixth of his life, he had dedicated to this simple set of tasks, and still he knew he could get better.
When Augie was little, his father used to hit him if he caught Augie with a deck of cards. To Martin Balustrade, cards were the tools of hustlers and victims, thieves and suckers, and he hadn’t worked his entire life so that his son could grow up to be a low-life. Martin’s grandfather had been a peasant in the Old Country, his father had worked with his hands building the rails and bridges that made this country strong, and Martin had made the transition into small business with that most traditional of entry-level entrepreneur-ships, the mom- and-pop dry cleaning store. (Although in this case it was only the pop dry cleaning store, since Mom had long since run off with a man who operated a traveling pony ride for small children.) It was more than a cliche; it was Augie’s destiny that he would take the family name one more rung up society’s ladder, finding prominence as a doctor, lawyer, or corporate executive. His future son, in turn, would then climb all the way to the top, so that his own descendants could tumble into decadence. This, Martin would explain nightly in place of a bedtime story, was the American dream, and it was their responsibility to live it out or die trying.
That might have been fine with Augie, had he not sneaked out of his house one Saturday when he was supposed to be doing his chores to see a matinee of some movie all the kids at school were talking about. He didn’t quite get the appeal of watching four singers with weird accents and weirder haircuts be chased around London by a bunch of hysterical girls, but everybody in his class had already seen it, and he was tired of being left out of the conversation. Halfway to the theater, though, he saw something that would change his life forever.
It was only a cardboard box, flipped upside down so that its bottom became a tabletop. And behind that tabletop, an indistinct man in a slick suit was yammering to the passersby as his hands flicked through a small stack of playing cards.
Augie had no idea what the man was saying, and he didn’t understand why he was standing on a street corner, or why people walking by would stop, put down a dollar bill, then walk away without it. All he saw were the three cards the man laid out on his makeshift table, the way they moved, changed, flew, the way the man would put down four cards and make them look like three, the last one disappearing into his palm.
The movie began and ended three times while Augie watched the man’s hands and the cards, and if a beat cop hadn’t ambled by and chased the swindler away, Augie might have stayed there for the week.
From that moment on, his life was set. He began to study up on what his father called “card tricks,” but what he quickly learned was called “sleight of hand.” And then he began to lock himself in the bathroom. For the first few months, his father would hammer on the bathroom door and scream for him to come out, and for Augie, that was some of the best training he ever received. He learned early how to ignore the loudest heckler. And if he finally had to submit to weekly sessions with a therapist to discuss what his father assumed was the real reason he spent four hours at a time behind a locked bathroom door, that merely taught him more about the art of dissembling.
From that moment on the street corner, Augie never doubted that he would spend his life performing up close magic with playing cards. What didn’t occur to him then, or for many years, was that the marketplace for such an act was extremely limited. The thing that Augie loved so much about his art form-the close, personal nature of one man, two hands, and fifty-two cards-also severely limited its commercial possibilities. If you planned to make an elephant disappear, you could do it in a theater that would accommodate thousands. But if all you wanted was to make a certain card appear in the glove compartment of a locked car belonging to a man you’d never met, there was simply no way to sell a lot of tickets. Fortunately, making money was never among Augie’s chief concerns. Even when Ricky Jay, the preeminent, up-close magician of the age, did figure out a way to make a healthy living from his work, Augie didn’t waste a moment cursing himself for missing the opportunity. His father had willed him the tiny bungalow where he’d grown up. The sale of what had grown to be an empire of three dry cleaning establishments and a half dozen coin-op Laundromats provided a small nest egg, and as long as he could buy a case of Bicycles for less than twenty dollars, he didn’t need anything else.
Except an audience-and that had become increasingly difficult over the last few years as stage magic had reentered the mainstream of pop culture. Magic had become show business, and Augie couldn’t compete with the expectations of the spectacle-sated crowds. He didn’t object to Siegfried and Roy or David Cop perfield when they took their illusions to a ludicrously large scale, because he knew they were at heart master craftsmen, and the tricks they performed were based on the same set of skills they all shared.
But then there was P’tol P’kah, whose act, he was certain, was designed to destroy everything Augie loved about his art. Because what Augie did-and what every one of his predecessors had done for generations before him-was based on precise technical skill. Uncountable hours of practice went into the tiniest movement. This was the real secret of the professional magician. The genius of the act lay not in the trick, no matter how clever, but in the huge amount of work it took to master it.
The so-called Martian Magician was something else entirely, Augie was sure. This dissolving man trick really was just that-a trick. He didn’t know how the green guy was pulling it off, but he could tell that the secret was technological, not manual. And if all it took to be considered a great magician was access to the most expensive toys, then his art would be reduced to the level of the pop music industry, where computers could turn any
