Longarm chuckled and said, “It’s fermented cactus juice. Not as strong as tequila, but go easy on it, anyway. Pulque is the poor man’s beer in these parts and leads to more blood and slaughter than one might suspect from the uninteresting taste. I don’t know if it’s stronger than our suds or whether they get drunk easier. It could be both.”
The Great Costello said he could never drink enough of it to get drunk and asked about the bullring across the way. Longarm said, “We don’t figure on being here long enough to worry about all the whooping and hollering next Sunday. I’ve never figured out why they hold La Fiesta Brava on the sabbath, since it don’t strike me as a religious experience. On the other hand, it’s always struck me as a lot of trouble to go to any time when the end result is a stabbed cow.”
“Do they ever hold bullfights at night?” asked the greener-to-Mexico man.
Longarm laughed and said, “Not to my knowledge. Some of them fighting bulls can get sort of dangerous, even when you can see ‘em coming at you in broad-ass daylight. Why are we talking about bullfights, old son?”
“You just said the locals find them exciting. Excited people cause confusion, right?”
“I follow your drift, but like I said, they don’t figure on attracting a bullfight crowd over yonder this side of Sunday afternoon.”
The Great Costello asked, “What about fireworks? Do you think it would be possible to buy some fireworks this late after the Fourth of July?”
“Hell, if you got the money you can buy a six-year-old virgin in Juarez, or at least they’ll tell you she’s a virgin. Fireworks are easier. They don’t take the Fourth of July as serious as we do, but Mexicans do shoot off fireworks at Christmas. Your drift is getting easier to follow and it sounds like fun. I knew a bank robber one time who liked to cover up his gunplay with strings of Chinese firecrackers. I felt sort of morose, having to gun such a playful cuss. What else do you reckon we’ll need to misdirect the audience, old son?”
The rogue magician said, “I’m still thinking. I don’t know just what the trick will have to be, yet. It depends on where and how they’re holding the rabbit I mean to vanish.”
They went on talking and poking at the grub for a spell. Longarm got to know his prisoner better, but didn’t like him any better, as the Great Costello boasted of great illusions he’d invented, and displayed a good bit of self-pity in the process.
When he was able to slip a word in edgewise, Longarm said to Costello, “You’re full of shit. You may know more than me about putting on a magic act, but I know something about watching ‘em. It’s small wonder you made your small-time audiences yawn, if you went through all that fuss to make your daughter Maureen climb into one trunk and pop out of another on the far side of the stage. It’s like I just said about La Fiesta Brava—unless you’re really up on the finer points, you have to watch a gent in a monkey suit take forever, prancing and dancing, before he just gets down to butchering some beef like you expected him to from the beginning. What in thunder would your audience expect a redhead in a rainy-Suzie skirt to do when she climbs into a trunk except to vanish, or at least turn into something else? What would anyone expect to leap out of the second truck but the same pretty gal, an elephant? You might have done better if you’d worked faster. All them drum rolls and brags gave your audience time to figure out what was coming.”
The Great Costello scowled and said, “All right. You’re not the first to complain that my timing might have been a bit off. But damn it, that was a good trick. Not even the managers who told me my act was slowly paced could ever tell me how I did it!”
“They must not have been as interested in magic as me, then. I spend lots of time at the Denver Library, reading up on all sorts of stuff. A man in my line of work can’t know too much, and I once made a fool out of a dangerous medicine man by knowing more than most old boys about electric wiring. He had a big old electromagnet rigged so only him and his friends looked strong enough to pick up an iron anvil. He sure looked dumb, once I done some rewiring.”
“All right, suppose you tell me how I dematerialized Maureen in one place and made her appear in another,” Costello challenged.
“Well, I ain’t no infernal magician, but even I know how easy it is to make any number of things look empty if you have a mirror in ‘em at a forty-five degree angle. With the lid open, the glass reflecting the side that ain’t covered by it makes it look as if one’s looking in at both sides—adding up to empty—when you still got half the space to hide things or folk in.”
The stage magician grumbled, “There ought to be a law against printing books like that. If you’re so smart, how did I get her clean across the stage to the other trunk without anyone seeing her travel a foot?”
“She didn’t have to get out of the first box,” Longarm said. “She just had to scrunch up under the hinged mirror so you could prove it was empty. The gal who got out of the second box, after acting invisible the same way, was no doubt her twin, or at least a sister close enough to pass for her at that range.”
The Great Costello stared across at Longarm, thundergasted, to demand, “Did she tell you that? I mean, fun is fun, but she had no right to give away trade secrets to a rube!”
Longarm soothed, “She never. You did. You slipped up and let me know you had at least two daughters. The notion they might be twins only came to me when you bragged on how you could make redheads fly through the air, invisible. When something don’t strike me as possible, I generally try to figure out what might be.”
The Great Costello sighed and said,“It’s just as well I gave up show business, if even cowboys can get at books published by traitors. But let me tell you about an illusion I pulled off in Toledo, one time. It was a one-of-a- kind, because the theatre had an unusual design, but …”
Then El Gato came back and Longarm was spared the brag. The young Mex hunkered down with them and said, “They don’t have Don Julio where we thought. They had already taken him to the railroad depot when word came in about that washed-out trestle. The special detail holding him works out of Ciudad Mejico, not here. So they simply bundled him upstairs in the hotel by the depot. Naturally, the arrogant bastards don’t have to worry about hotel bills. Had they not evicted guests to take over a luxury suite for their own use, I would have had more trouble finding all of this out.”
Longarm grimaced and said, “I’d say you found out good and bad. Getting in might be easier, but that hotel’s smack in the middle of town, with bright lights all around, save for the rail yards behind the depot, that is.”
El Gato said, “Si, I think our best escape route would lie in that direction, too.”
But the Great Costello objected, “So will they. And you said there’s a railroad crew working, under military guard, just to the south of those tracks. I like the front door better.”
