warmth of the sun on her back. In her dream the boy appeared a long way ahead of her and stood waiting.
When she at last drew close to him, he looked at her as he had done that afternoon. But he said nothing. He simply fell into step beside her.
They walked together through the tall grass, and the elephant, in her dream, thought that this was a wonderful thing, to walk beside the boy. She felt that things were exactly as they should be, and she was happy.
The sun was so warm!
In the prison the magician lay upon his cloak, staring up at the window, hoping for the clouds to break and the bright star to appear.
He could no longer sleep.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the elephant crashing through the ceiling of the opera house and landing on top of Madam LaVaughn. The image bedevilled him to the point where he could get no rest, no respite. All he could think of was the elephant and the amazing, stupendous magic he had performed to call her forth.
At the same time, he was achingly, devastatingly lonely, and he wished, with the whole of his heart, to see a face, any human face. He would have been delighted, pleased beyond measure, to gaze upon even the accusatory, pleading countenance of the crippled Madam LaVaughn. If she appeared beside him right now, he would show her the star that was sometimes visible through his window. He would say to her, “Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”
All of which is to say that the magician was awake that night when the outer door of the prison clanged open and two sets of footsteps sounded down the long corridor.
He stood.
He put on his cloak.
He looked out through the bars of his cell and saw the light of a lantern shining in the darkened corridor. His heart leaped inside him. He called out to the approaching light.
And what did the magician say?
You know full well the words he spoke.
“I intended only lilies!” shouted the magician. “Please, I intended only a bouquet of lilies.”
In the light from the lantern that Leo Matienne held aloft, Peter could see the magician all too clearly. His beard was long and wild, his fingernails ragged and torn, his cloak covered in a patina of mould. His eyes burned bright, but they were the eyes of a cornered animal: desperate and pleading and angry all at once.
Peter’s heart sank. This man did not look as if he could perform any magic at all, much less the huge magic, the tremendous magic, of sending an elephant home.
“Who are you?” said the magician. “Who has sent you?”
“My name is Leo Matienne,” said Leo, “and this is Peter Augustus Duchene, and we have come to speak to you about the elephant.”
“Of course, of course,” said the magician. “What else would you speak to me of but the elephant?”
“We want you to do the magic that will send her home,” said Peter.
The magician laughed; it was not a pleasant sound. “Send her home, you say? And why would I do that?”
“Because she will die if you do not,” said Peter.
“And why will she die?”
“She is homesick,” said Peter. “I think that her heart is broken.”
“A homesick, broken-hearted magic trick,” said the magician. He laughed again. He shook his head. “It was all so magnificent when it happened; it was all so wondrous when it occurred – you would not believe it; truly you would not. And look what it has come to.”
Somewhere in the prison, someone was crying. It was the kind of strangled weeping that Vilna Lutz sometimes gave himself over to when he thought that Peter was asleep.
The world is broken, thought Peter, and it cannot be fixed.
The magician kept still, his head pressed against the bars. The sound of the prisoner weeping rose and fell, rose and fell. And then Peter saw that the magician was crying too; great, lonely tears rolled down his face and disappeared into his beard.
May be it was not too late after all.
“I believe,” said Peter very quietly.
“What do you believe?” said the magician without moving.
“I believe that things can still be set right. I believe that you can perform the necessary magic.”
The magician shook his head. “No.” He said the word quietly, as if he were speaking it to himself. “No.”
There was a long silence.
Leo Matienne cleared his throat, once, and then again. He opened his mouth and spoke two simple words. He said, “What if?”
The magician raised his head then and looked at the policeman. “What if?” he said. “‘What if?’ is a question that belongs to magic.”
“Yes,” said Leo, “to magic and also to the world in which we live every day. So: what if? What if you merely tried?”
“I tried already,” said the magician. “I tried and failed to send her back.” The tears continued to roll down his face. “You must understand: I did not want to send her back; she was the finest magic I have ever performed.”
“To return her to where she belongs would be a fine magic too,” said Leo Matienne.
“So you say,” said the magician. He looked at Leo Matienne and then at Peter and then back again at Leo Matienne.
“Please,” said Peter.
The light from the lantern in Leo’s outstretched arm flickered, and the magician’s shadow, cast on the wall behind him, reared back suddenly and then grew larger. The shadow stood apart from him as if it were another creature entirely, watching over him, waiting anxiously, along with Peter, for the magician to decide what seemed to be the fate of the entire universe.
“Very well,” said the magician at last. “I will try. But I will need two things. I will need the elephant, for I cannot make her disappear without her being present. And I will need Madam LaVaughn. You must bring both the elephant and the noblewoman here to me.”
“But that is impossible,” said Peter.
“Magic is always impossible,” said the magician. “It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.”
Chapter Fifteen
Madam LaVaughn was often kept awake at night by shooting pains in her legs. And because she was awake, she insisted that the whole household stay awake with her.
Further, she insisted that they listen again to the story of how she had dressed for the theatre that night, how she had walked into the building (Walked! On her own two legs!) entirely and absolutely innocent of the fate that awaited her inside. She insisted that the gardener and the cook, the serving maids and the chambermaids, pretend to be interested as she spoke again of how the magician had selected her from among the sea of hopefuls.
“‘Who, then, will come before me and receive my magic?’ Those were his exact words,” said Madam LaVaughn.
The assembled servants listened (or pretended to) as the noblewoman spoke of the elephant falling from
