The Devil You Know

I threw out my arms, squared my shoulders, tugged my cuffs—a pantomime display of preparation intended mainly to get Sebastian off the hook. It worked, as far as that went; all eyes turned to me. “Watch very carefully,” I said, taking a new prop out of one of the cases and putting it on the table in front of me. “An ordinary cereal box. Any of you eat this stuff? No, me neither. I tried them once, but I was mauled by a cartoon tiger.” Not a glimmer; not a sign of mercy in any of the forty or so eyes that were watching me.

“Nothing special about the box. No trapdoors. No false bottoms.” I rotated it through three dimensions, flicked it with a thumbnail to get a hollow thwack out of it, and held the open end up to Peter’s face for him to take a look inside. He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe he was being asked to go along with this stuff, then gave me a wave that said he was as satisfied of the box’s emptiness as he was ever going to be.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said with a derisive snort. His friends laughed, too; he was popular enough to get a choric echo whenever he spoke or snickered or made farting noises in his cheek. He had the touch, all right. Give him four, maybe five years, and he was going to grow up into a right bastard.

Unless he took a walk down the Damascus Road one morning and met something big and fast coming the other way.

“O-o-okay,” I said, sweeping the box around in a wide arc so that everyone else could see it. “So it’s an empty box. So who needs it, right? Boxes like this, they’re just landfill waiting to happen.” I stood it on the ground, open end downward, and trod it flat.

That got at least a widened eye and a shift of posture here and there around the room—kids leaning forward to watch, if only to check out how complete and convincing the damage was. I was thorough. You have to be. Like a dominatrix, you find that there’s a direct relationship between the intensity of the stamping and trampling and the scale of the final effect.

When the box was comprehensively flattened, I picked it up and allowed it to dangle flaccidly from my left hand.

“But before you throw this stuff away,” I said, sweeping the cluster of stolid faces with a stern, schoolteacherly gaze, “you’ve got to check for biohazards. Anyone up for that? Anyone want to be an environmental health inspector when they grow up?”

There was an awkward silence, but I let it lengthen. It was Peter’s dime; I only had to entertain him, not pimp for him.

Finally, one of the front-row cronies shrugged and stood up. I stepped a little aside to welcome him into my performance space—broadly speaking, the area between the leather recliner and the running buffet.

“Give a big hand to the volunteer,” I suggested. They razzed him cordially instead—you find out who your friends are.

I straightened the box with a few well-practiced tugs and tucks. This was the crucial part, so of course I kept my face as bland as school custard. The volunteer held his hand out for the box. Instead, I caught his hand in my own and turned it palm up. “And the other one,” I said. “Make a cup. Verstehen Sie ‘cup’? Like this. Right. Excellent. Good luck, because you never know . . .”

I upended the box over his hands, and a large brown rat smacked right down into the makeshift basket of his fingers. He gurgled like a punctured water bed and jumped back, his hands flying convulsively apart, but I was ready and caught the rat neatly before she could fall.

Then, because I knew her well, I added a small grace note to the trick by stroking her nipples with the ball of my thumb. This made her arch her back and gape her mouth wide open, so that when I brandished her in the faces of the other kids, I got a suitable set of jolts and starts. Of course, it wasn’t a threat display—it was “More, big boy, give me more”—but they couldn’t be expected to know that look at their tender age. Any more than they knew that I’d dropped Rhona into the box when I pretended to straighten it after the trampling.

And bow. And acknowledge the applause. Which would have been fine if there’d been any. But Peter still sat like Patience on a monument, as the volunteer trudged back to his seat with his machismo at half-mast.

Peter’s face said I’d have to do a damn sight more than that to impress him.

So I thought about the Damascus Road again. And, like the bastard I am, I reached for the camera.

This isn’t my idea of how a grown man should go about keeping the wolf from the door, I’d like you to know. It was Pen who put me up to it. Pamela Elisa Bruckner—why that shortens to Pen rather than Pam I’ve never been sure, but she’s an old friend of mine, and incidentally the rightful owner of Rhona the rat. She’s also my landlady, for the moment at least, and since I wouldn’t wish that fate on a rabid dog, I count myself lucky that it’s fallen to someone who’s genuinely fond of me. It lets me get away with a hell of a lot.