Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Sleep indeed. Let’s just say I don’t like the coincidence of two men working the flies on an act of mine dying for it.”

“When do you actually go up there?”

“Later in the act. My female assistant goes on first. She’s a midget like you, no bigger than a mayfly, and she does this ballet-acrobatic routine, like a silvery cocoon spinning and lifting and lowering. Very classy. Then she bursts out of her chrysalis waving filmy wings of fabric.”

“I know. I saw the tape. Her act reminds me of Loïe Fuller.”

“Louie who?”

Temple smiled. “A pioneering modern dancer at the end of the nineteenth century who wielded incredible lengths of white silky wings.”

“Everything recycles.”

Temple was thinking that Beauty and the Beast was one of the more enduring fables to recycle, from French seventeenth-century fabulist Charles Perrault to Walt Disney. And that’s what an act comprising the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La would be. Beauty and Beast. How clever. How marketable.

She recalled, with a pang, that once Max had kidded her about joining his act. She was no acrobat or illusionist, but she understood the innate showmanship of it, petite little her, supernaturally strong and elegant him: fairy girl and superhero.

“And then, of course,” CC added in his commanding faux voice, “there are the cats. Now that Siegfried and Roy are tragically removed from the scene, mine is the last act to feature big cats, and one very small one.”

So, the amazingly agile performing Siamese that Shangri-La had worked with at the Opium Den would be appearing here as well! How had these two far-removed performers ever hooked up?

Temple asked CC that question in much more elegant terms.

“She hit on me, in the professional sense. Showed up at my . . . home with an offer I couldn’t refuse. Amazing woman. I notice small-statured women are particularly insistent. And Shang had her Asian background to both overcome and assert.”

Temple flashed for a second on half of Molina’s prize homicide team of Alch and Su: detective Merry Su. Teeny, wiry, implacable. Given the historic low regard for women in her culture, from exposing girl babies to the lethal elements in the bad old days to aborting them in the bad new days, those Chinese women who went West and thrived were veritable Dragon Ladies.

Normally, Temple admired women of steel. In Shangri-La’s case, she made a significant exception. The woman was associated with an incident involving a semi-load of stolen designer drugs. People often forgot that Las Vegas catered heavily to the Pacific Trade. Asians were fevered gamblers, and had become treasured high-roller clients of every major hotel-casino along the Strip.

With that came the Asian mafia, the drug trade, and every evil flower of crosscultural international corporate/gangster contamination. So, what was Shangri-La’s game here? Besides spinning like an entombed butterfly above a fabulous treasure trove of Russian artwork? She couldn’t ask the Cloaked Conjuror such blunt questions, but she could skirt around them.

“Your solo act was a huge hit, exposing magician’s tricks. Why add an element?”

Even through the cumbersome mask, CC’s laugh was rueful.

“My shtick is great. I’m big, I’m anonymous, I’m half man, half mystery. Even the death threats work into my mystique. And the big cats. Audiences are all unconsciously waiting for that Roy Horn–Manticore moment, though they’d never admit it. Ask NASCAR drivers. But look at me. All this disguise paraphernalia weighs me down. My act needed a certain lightness of being. Shangri-La and Hyacinth provide that.”

Temple was surprised to hear CC use a literary phrase, but she nodded. “Yin and yang. Always appealing, always commercial.”

“And this blend of fine art and illusion is another yin-yang combo. Very potent. Very exploitable.”

“Very volatile maybe.”

“For that dangling dead man, yeah. I earn millions per year, Miss Barr. I pay my crew a rock star’s ransom. The hotel has millions sunk into my act. But there’s a person in here behind all this theatrical bluster. I don’t want anyone else to die on my set. Ever.”

“You think the death of your TitaniCon crewman and this unidentified stranger are connected.” Temple did not put a question into her voice.

“I do.”

“Part of the magicians’ vendetta against you?”

“Maybe. But I suspect it’s even more than that.”

“Why?”

“Instinct? In this getup, that’s what I rely on, more than my senses.”

“It must be hell, being a literal prisoner of your success.”

The huge head was eerily still for several long moments.

“I didn’t understand,” the mask said in its altered voice, “when I got into this thing.” CC’s gauntleted hands struck his Batman-molded chest. “It seemed like a straight drive to success after years of fringe action. So what? James Earl Jones’s voice got fab reviews for Star Wars. Let me tell you, Darth Vader is not a cushy part.”

“Surely at home you can ditch the equipment.”

“And wouldn’t everybody think that way, and go after me there? Tabloid photographers. Blackmailers. Hired killers.”