Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

the deck toward Danny, cards fanned. “Hi, Arik.”

“What are you doing?” Uncle Arik demanded. The owner grinned, somewhat apologetically. “Always wanted to be magician, you know. Go on, pick one.”

Danny picked a card. It was the Queen of Hearts. “Now, put it back, here. Let me just shuffle them for a moment.… Here, take the pack. Now, is your card there? No? Well…” He reached behind Danny’s ear. “Was this your card?”

“Very good!” Danny said. He didn’t have the heart to tell him that he saw him palming the card just a moment before.

“Don’t encourage him,” Uncle Arik said.

“Well, anyway,” the bookseller-turned-magician said, “I better go. Oh, that reminds me, Danny. I found this the other day. It must have fallen from that book you bought last time. Do you want it?” And he handed Danny a small slip of paper. “It’s in English.”

“The boy has good English!” Uncle Arik said. “Like his uncle.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, see you later.” And he hurried down the road, his hands still busily shuffling cards, the top hat precariously balanced at a crooked angle on his head. Danny looked at the slip of paper.

The Palestine News, 5 February 1945.

MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT DISAPPEARS

HAIFA—In a public performance last night outside the Jewish Technion building, magician Mordechai Itzikovic performed his renowned trick, The Projected Girl, for what may be the last time. In the show’s finale, the magician uses a projector to seemingly make his assistant shrink, only to appear moments later inside a picture on the wall. The assistant is then returned—but not last night. “I don’t know what went wrong,” a distraught Mr. Itzikovic was reported as saying. “Where did she go?”

The assistant, a young Jewish woman, was sought last night for questioning by the Palestine Police Force, and Mr. Itzikovic has been detained by the PPF to help with their inquiries. In a baffling turn of events, the projected picture of the girl remained last night on the wall despite the magician’s apparatus being turned off shortly after the performance.

“So she disappeared!” Danny said.

“Ha? Who’s disappeared?” Uncle Arik said, and then with a broad grin, “Are you having girl trouble, Danny?”

“What? No!”

She’d disappeared. And the magician never performed again. (That was a feat of deductive reasoning on Danny’s part, for why else would the notebook be left blank?)

Questions.

What happened that night?

“So tell me about her,” Uncle Arik said.

Danny sighed. He felt adult beyond his years. He was a detective on the trail of a missing girl. He was the keeper of a mystery only he knew existed. He was assailed by the adult’s sense of importance mixed with doubt, power mixed with confusion. How can such opposite feelings coexist?

Danny took a deep breath. “There was once this magician.…” he began.

you cry in bright petals

and sometimes I pick your tears

to press between the pages of a book

left on the shelf for someone else to find:

some other time,

long after forgetting why we cried,

when only our names remain like flowered shreds

entwined in the margins.

There was once this magician. And he made a girl disappear. Or the girl disappeared despite the magician. It all happened long ago in another town that resembled this one only slightly. It was a town of crusaders and templars, of Bedouin sheikhs and Ottoman Empire builders. City walls were built, destroyed, built up again. The Russians built a wharf; the Turks put through a train line; the British rebuilt a harbor that once saw Phoenician ships dock, their sails bellowing, with cedar from Lebanon and spices from Africa. Seagulls cried and dived overhead. Jews came, went, came back. The city was an old lady, draped in the patchwork clothes of centuries, worn with the dust of holy books.

It was not a holy city. It was not a Jerusalem preening in white stone, cold and aloof on its hills. It was a working city, an immigrant city, a city of sailors and prophets, of prostitutes and monks. Elijah fought the priests of Ba’al on Mount Carmel, and Napoleon quarantined his soldiers, sick with the plague after the Siege of Acre, in the monastery of Stella Maris and had them executed there, leaving a plaque behind. It was a city whose history was written in the margins, between the market stalls and the houses of ill repute, between the narrow lanes that separated dusty stores selling the produce of other, more-exotic places, and outside the bars and inns that had served the armies and navies of all the vanished empires.

It was a city that, sometimes, it was not too hard to disappear in.

* * *

Some of this Danny had learned from his Uncle Arik, who in his solitary pursuits, whose nature could never be adequately explained, had had plenty of time to learn the history of his city and some of its secrets. Some he had learned later, through books, through stories—which are the lies that people put in books to make them true—and some of it and more he learned eventually from his fearsome and formidable Great-Aunt Zsuzsi.

“You must ask Aunt Zsuzsi,” Uncle Arik said when Danny had finished his story. “She will know who your mystery girl was.”

Danny did not take kindly to that idea. He had the Jewish boy’s natural fear of elderly relatives, and Great- Aunt Zsuzsi—blue haired, cigarette smoking, stooped but not at all frail Zsuzsi—was by far the worst. She tended, amongst other things, to test at assorted family functions (be they weddings, funerals, birthdays, or bar mitzvahs, the four cornerstones of the familial social calendar) Danny’s knowledge of the classics by speaking to him loudly and ponderously in the ancient Latin she had learned in ancient days at school in Transylvania. Since Danny’s knowledge of that venerable old tongue was precisely none, the conversation was rather one-sided; and he could only take comfort in the hope that a cousin might shortly come along and be pounced upon in his stead.

Great-Aunt Zsuzsi had a voice thickened by cigarettes; she liked to pinch cheeks; she had a blue number tattooed on her arm; and she could remember everything you’d ever done, from the time you were three years old and peed your pants at Cousin Ofer’s bar mitzvah onward. She had been an archivist for the harbor authorities, and she had lived in the city for decades in a small third-story flat in the Stella Maris neighborhood, a family invitation to which caused children to develop immediate and lasting symptoms of flu, chicken pox, mumps, or measles, depending on the season and the child’s knowledge of medical matters.

“No way,” Danny said.

Uncle Arik laughed. “Who ever said being a detective is easy? Come on, I’m still hungry. Fancy going to McDavid for a burger?”

Danny gravely acknowledged that he was indeed amiable to such a suggestion.

* * *

On his way back that day he passed by the Technion building again. The painting of the girl in the field of sunflowers was still there. He looked at her with new eyes, and he had the strangest feeling that she was looking back at him from across the wall, and that she was smiling.

* * *

That night, Danny looked through his bookshelves again. Answers could be found there, he was sure. The shelves were like a packed convention of detectives, bursting with clues, feats of deduction, witnesses, and dissemblers, clouded with pipe smoke, bellowing with cloaks. The books of David Tidhar were there, and Danny was drawn back to the volume where he had secreted that mysterious letter on the day of his birthday. He pulled out the slim volume. Disappearance on Mount Carmel. He opened the book at random.

“What is it?” the commandant asked short-temperedly, pausing from his examination of the case files that