Kiwi Con, page 28
Once there, Temple loaded Mariah up with facial tattoos of all the coolest media characters and even got a likeness of Angel for her own Buffy-bare shoulder.
Mariah stopped to buy a small ceramic candleholder in the shape of Saturn for her mother, something Temple doubted Molina would have much use for, but the thought was sweet. What had Midnight Louie ever bought for her, besides some untimely interference in her lifeline?
"Matt's nice, but he's not very good at taking girls out, is he?" Mariah observed during one of their few quiet moments.
Temple nearly choked on her Nimbus of Narnia, which was hard to do, because it was mostly blue-dyed air, aka cotton candy.
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, he worries about everything."
"He's not used to escorting girls your age, who keep getting into trouble."
"What's trouble?"
Temple remembered Mariah's wink yesterday and realized that she was talking to a homicide lieutenant's daughter. "Walking into a ballroom with a dead man in it. That should be a pretty traumatizing thing."
Mariah shrugged. "It wasn't bloody or anything. Now, if it had been one of my cats--"
Mariah swallowed hard at the very idea. "Besides, I loved the Khatlord series, but the guy who played him, well, he was kinda stuck up. He really threw a tantrum yesterday when that other guy pretended to be him. Kinda immature, you know?"
"Actors can be that way. I've known a few. And other actors can be as mature as Methuselah."
"Methuselah? What show is he on?"
"And oldie but goodie called the Old Testament."
"Neat name, but you can't fool me. That's just that churchy stuff."
"You'd be surprised how far out that churchy stuff can be. But, anyway, have you bankrupted your mother yet?"
"Nope. I've got some left. Besides, Matt bought me this ear-ring." Mariah gave it a finger snap so it swung.
"I thought he wasn't good at taking girls out."
"Well, sometimes. Except when he says no."
"That's his job."
"He's a baby-sitter." The tone was sarcastic.
"You're still a baby sometimes," Temple said firmly.
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
"Says who?"
"Says Buffy. All right?"
"You're silly for a grown-up."
"Thank you."
"When are we gonna find the murderer?"
******************
Temple took a deep breath. "I don't think that's our job here."
"What is our job here?"
"Keeping the murderer from finding us."
Matt had hardly had time to don his new Giles guise when he was snagged by a pair of roving detectives.
"We were hoping Miss Barr would be with you," Detective Su told him undiplomatically.
Nothing like being unwanted by the police to give a person low self-esteem. "Anything I can do?" he asked.
"As a matter of fact," Alch, the senior member of the team began, but Su made an impatient gesture. "He might have some insight," Alch persisted.
"We wanted Miss Barr," Su explained, "because of her public relations expertise."
"She certainly has it," Matt agreed.
"Then she'd know about this crowd?" Alch asked, eyeing the passing slipstream of T-shirt-clad attendees liberally blended with assorted aliens and elves.
"Not personally."
Alch's face puckered. "Did you always wear glasses?"
"Uh, no. Not. . . always. What were your questions?"
"Well." Alch scratched his mustache, "We've never interviewed tougher subjects before."
"Tougher?" Matt was surprised. Except for outstandingly temperamental writers like Schmidt, and occasional opinionated outbursts by obsessive enthusiasts, he found this crowd more pacifist than most.
"He means we can't get through to them," Su explained, lifting her exotically shaped eyebrows. "Earth to Pluto problems."
"They won't cooperate?"
Alch was paging through his narrow spiral-bound notebook. "Oh, they seem cooperative enough. There was this fellow in a robe who lingered after the film presentation and saw a Khatlord go into the ballroom. His testimony was, 'Forsooth, and my eyes not deceive me, I saw yon dead man walk to his own demise all unawares. If only I had known to belay him.' When I asked what time he had seen this, he answered that he was not wealthy enough to own a timepiece, but he supposed by the rumbles of his stomach that it was nearing the hour to sup, perhaps five of the clock."
Matt tried not to laugh. "They come here to live in another world, Detective. I suppose they don't know how to leave it when reality intrudes."
Alch, having found a sympathetic ear, flipped some more pages. "So we start looking for people in Khatlord costumes who might have gone in, and we dig up this other guy--"
Detective Su snorted in disgust at the mention.
"--named Tom Snell. He says a Khatlord answers only to the King Khatlord and now that the King is dead, long live the King, and he must wait until a new Khatlord is prided before he can deal with alien investigators."
"He can deal with us downtown," Su said. "A few official interrogations ought to snap these idiots out of la-la land."
"This isn't a limited phenomenon," Matt said. "Have either of you ever been to 'Star Trek: The Experience' at the Hilton?" His answer was their looks of extreme incredulity. "I was just there with a friend, and when she tried to ask the Ferengi host--you know, the Ferengi; the bald, big-eared creatures from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?"
"I am so sick," Su said, "of hearing the words 'Star Trek' in italics with colons after them."
"Anyway," Matt went on to the sympathetically nodding Alch, "my companion couldn't get Word One out of him about costume and makeup. She's an artist who's interested in the massive changes in physiognomy these alien-mask makeovers achieve, but he wouldn't even admit that he was in costume, or that everything about him wasn't perfectly normal. So I can see you'd have a hard time breaking through these people's fantasy zone."
"Great!" Su's exasperation was boiling over. "We have to go back downtown and tell the lieutenant that all our witnesses and suspects are reality-challenged. Why bother pursuing the case? Get a change of venue to Mars and let the little green men take care of everything!"
Alch was chuckling.
Su wasn't through. "And that nut who just went off to the dealers' room, tickled pink that he might be a suspect. Harry Schmidt or whoever. These people are too deranged to kill anyone."
"Hanford Schmidt," Matt corrected. "And I hear his writing career has been in a stall. A little notoriety might be up his alley."
"Say," Alch suggested to his partner. "Maybe we should run him in. Help the guy out. He might actually confess. I hear writers like solitary."
"Solitude," Su corrected acidly. "Although I'll probably end up in solitary on a homicide charge if we don't make some headway with the mental fender benders around here."
Alch gave Matt a one-finger salute in thanks and farewell as Su stalked off on her chunky heels.
He reminded Matt of a man walking a very ferocious Pekingese. No doubt her intensity and his sagacity made a good detecting combination, when their variant personalities weren't driving each other nuts.
Having nothing better to do, Matt edged into the dealers' room to kill time and mull over the investigation. He didn't envy the detectives trying to tease testimony from people who had come here to forget reality, not witness it.
He idly paged through some large, mounted posters in a bin, trying to figure out what Molina had in mind by returning her daughter to the scene of the crime. Luridly colored images of Flash Gordon and Dale Arden flashed by, along with planetscapes and sinister machines.
The passing of Timothy Hathaway was now fact. The morning TV news shows had all announced the puzzling and sudden death. They hadn't said murder, but the police hadn't said that it wasn't murder.
Still, Matt knew, more than Hathaway's death was going on here. Whatever it was, it had made Molina go icy with fear, then had led her to take a risky gamble. He had watched her decide to throw the dice. Whatever she planned was so out of character that if he saw the full picture, he'd be scared white-knuckled himself.
But he didn't know, though he guessed that he, and Temple, and Mariah were all a part of it.
Should he even be here now? Or should he be with Temple and Mariah, although he'd sensed he wasn't particularly welcome on their shopping expedition? Tonight was the big costume Masquerade. Was that when a murderer would be unmasked? Or would strike again?
"You like that?" a soft voice inquired over his shoulder.
Matt focused on the posters he was flipping past. Long-legged space girls in racy costumes, or mostly absence of same.
"I hadn't noticed," he started to say, realizing how lame that sounded. Any guy who failed to notice these would be blind or gay.
He turned to confront a masked female in a shiny-burgundy spandex bodysuit with holes cut out at the shoulders and sides, the living embodiment of the fantasy forms in the posters.
"Just passing time." His equilibrium switched wildly between fantasy and reality. Hard to believe a real girl could embody the exaggerated form celebrated in the drawings.
Then he realized something even more astounding: He knew her. "Sheila?"
She shrugged, which did a lot for the catsuit. "I don't usually wear this where anyone really knows me. I guess it's not professional."
Now he couldn't ignore it. Her. And he couldn't just whistle, like the guy who was passing behind them was doing at the moment.
"You look .. . marvelous. Gosh, I sound like Billy Crystal. Fantastic, I guess, would say it."
"Thanks." She took a deep breath. Also good for the catsuit. "I'm really nervous doing this.
Maybe you can understand--"
"I get it. I truly do. We were given unwanted gifts, right?"
She nodded, relieved. "I feel so split. Ever since I passed puberty. God is cruel sometimes.
Great body; lousy face. Sometimes, I just feel I've got to show it off. And here, I can wear a mask."
"We can wear masks anywhere. So, what happens at these things when you--?"
"Oh, the guys drool. Guys who'd never look twice at the woman behind the mask lust after me like they've got no chance. Maybe it's revenge. I don't know. I always feel like a fraud, no matter what I do. I have some fun here, though. I'm like a minicelebrity. You watch."
"I can believe it. You give Seven of Nine a run for her silicone."
"Mine's all natural," Sheila sniffed. "Will your friends be ashamed of me like this? I can change."
"Let's see."
"It's funny. You hate your looks, and I hate my body."
"I'm getting over that looks thing. It's how we use our gifts, not what they are."
"Then I shouldn't be playing this game."
"Maybe you can remind people that their fantasies aren't totally unrealistic."
"I feel so shallow for enjoying my little game."
"I don't know, Sheila. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Does it?"
She shrugged again, and three guys behind her ran into each other.
Matt let the racy posters flip back against the vintage movie stills. He didn't know where to look, of course, but was that his problem, or Sheila's?
He wondered what Temple would make of this.
****************
Max stood in the wings of the New Millennium's massive theater, feeling more nostalgic than he could afford to.
The petaled ranks of empty- crimson-velvet seats made the immense house into one full-blown rose of a space, ripe for filling. The black, wooden stage floor tempted his feet and legs with its unique spring, a surface made for leaping, bounding, disappearing on.
At the proscenium arch's sides, the curtains fell from somewhere high, beyond seeing. Their heavy-, textured folds bunched, like a forest of giant sequoias with velvet trunks.
The backstage was as deserted as the auditorium, but Max had hopes his asked-for audience would take place anyway.
Echoes of a single set of footsteps came from the opposite wing area. A tall man wearing magician's black emerged from the backstage darkness, pausing just as he became visible to Max. Had an audience filled the empty seats, not even someone seated on the front row's most extreme edge would have been able to spot the man, he was that careful.
Max moved toward him, crossing the empty stage, exposed to the empty house. His own measured footsteps echoed like a Spanish dancer's played at thirty-three-and-a-third speed.
The man nodded. Or, rather, his mask did. Like a ninja mask, it covered his head and neck, fashioned of flashy spandex fabric that mimicked a leopard's spots. From a distance, it resembled an all-over tribal tattoo.
"My bodyguards are twenty feet away," he told Max, speaking through the same hidden device he wore in performance, a tiny lavalier microphone attached to a voice-altering unit, also tiny. The eerie "protected witness" effect only enhanced his performances. Max doubted it would do much for his social life, though.
Not that the man had any social life, any more than Max did.
"Would I really know you?" was Max's first question, asked with a smile that admitted he already knew he wouldn't get a straight answer.
"You might. I know you. You've done your own disappearing act. Professionally as well as personally."
"For my own reasons. This"--he nodded at the man's bizarre mask and mike setup--"is more than an act, isn't it?"
"Oh, yeah. The death threats haven't stopped since I began turning the magician's bags of tricks inside out five years ago. But those TV specials got me this star gig."
"Is it worth it?"
How much is several million a year worth? It can buy me wall-to-wall protection."
"There are always chinks."
"There are chinks crossing the Strip."
Max had to listen hard to decipher the harmonic double-talk that came from the masked face's high-tech vocal scrambler. He was reminded of Darth Vader. No wonder this guy was cleaning up. He was tapping into moviedom's mythic unconsciousness just by trying to stay alive.
Max also felt he was looking into a distorted mirror. They were both magicians. They were both something more and paying for it with threats to their lives. Max was a vocational antiterrorist, or had been. The man opposite him had become a professional debunker, perhaps after his own magic career had piddled out. Now he was an entertainment phenomenon, revealing secrets to decades-old magic tricks. He wisely avoided spilling the beans on current magicians' illusions--they were his neighbors down the Strip, after all--but a lot of second-rate magicians out there still worked the old chestnuts, and they didn't like his act one bit.
"You ever hear from the Synth?" Max asked.
"The Synth, the Brotherhood of Prestidigitators, the kids with magic kits. They all hate me."
"You fear any of them more than the other?"
"Nope. Anybody could be nuts enough to make good on a threat. Look at kids nowadays.
Look at Columbine."
"And the Synth?"
"Sounds phony. Sounds pretentious. But what do I know?"
"Ever hear of a Shangri-la?"
"Magician? Female?"
Max nodded. Twice.
"No. I don't really pay attention to what the legitimate charlatans do, you know? Sorry, didn't mean to get personal."
"I don't let things get personal with me. That man who fell from the TitaniCon catwalk early this week. He was working for you, wasn't he?"
The antimagician started, jerked like a puppet on a string. "What makes you think that?"
"The paper described him as being dressed as a Khatlord, but he was wearing one of your masks, wasn't he? There isn't much difference between your leopardlike mask and a Khatlord's.
Especially in the dark. On a catwalk."
"Son of a bitch!" The voice garbler made it sound like Donald Duck was swearing, not a very Disney thing to do. "You're saying Barry didn't just fall?" he garbled on. "He was pushed?"
"Or was killed and then pushed. What was he doing way up there?"
The Cloaked Conjuror began pacing, careful to walk north and south instead of east and west, careful not to put himself in view of anyone who might be lurking in the supposedly empty auditorium.
Max moved into the wings's shadow, too. He'd proved his good intentions by exposing himself; now he didn't have to. Especially now that he knew for sure that the first man had been murdered.
"Damn," the eerie voice said. "You put your finger on it. My mask is their mask. I've been using this for five years. The Khatlord empire is just three years old. They ripped off" my persona."
"So sue them."
"You know it's easy to sue, but hard to win."
"So you were planning to upstage the King Khatlord's guest appearance at TitaniCon?"
The Cloaked Conjuror stopped moving. "How did you know?"
"I'm a showman, too. What was it going to be? An unannounced appearance from on high by the Cloaked Conjuror in the middle of the King Khatlord's signing session? Maybe with a big cat conjured out of nowhere at the same time? A leopard? That would point up the too-close resemblance in the masks as well as get you and your million-dollar show lots of ink. Except now the head Khatlord is dead, too. So what does that make the motive for your man's death?"
"Hey. I didn't have anything against Hathaway. All's unfair in love and multimedia franchises, but the actor who played the King Khatlord was just a tool. It's the so-called writer-producer who ripped off my face, so to speak, and he isn't even at TitaniCon. Those guys always hide behind accountants and avoid the line of fire."
"Apparently a lot of underpaid authors are about as happy with those guys as you are."
"See. People like that would be much more likely to resort to murder. I mean, I get paid a Khatlord's ransom, and you just said they get cheated with peanuts."
"True. But I don't think your man died because of the Khatlord stunt."
Mariah stopped to buy a small ceramic candleholder in the shape of Saturn for her mother, something Temple doubted Molina would have much use for, but the thought was sweet. What had Midnight Louie ever bought for her, besides some untimely interference in her lifeline?
"Matt's nice, but he's not very good at taking girls out, is he?" Mariah observed during one of their few quiet moments.
Temple nearly choked on her Nimbus of Narnia, which was hard to do, because it was mostly blue-dyed air, aka cotton candy.
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, he worries about everything."
"He's not used to escorting girls your age, who keep getting into trouble."
"What's trouble?"
Temple remembered Mariah's wink yesterday and realized that she was talking to a homicide lieutenant's daughter. "Walking into a ballroom with a dead man in it. That should be a pretty traumatizing thing."
Mariah shrugged. "It wasn't bloody or anything. Now, if it had been one of my cats--"
Mariah swallowed hard at the very idea. "Besides, I loved the Khatlord series, but the guy who played him, well, he was kinda stuck up. He really threw a tantrum yesterday when that other guy pretended to be him. Kinda immature, you know?"
"Actors can be that way. I've known a few. And other actors can be as mature as Methuselah."
"Methuselah? What show is he on?"
"And oldie but goodie called the Old Testament."
"Neat name, but you can't fool me. That's just that churchy stuff."
"You'd be surprised how far out that churchy stuff can be. But, anyway, have you bankrupted your mother yet?"
"Nope. I've got some left. Besides, Matt bought me this ear-ring." Mariah gave it a finger snap so it swung.
"I thought he wasn't good at taking girls out."
"Well, sometimes. Except when he says no."
"That's his job."
"He's a baby-sitter." The tone was sarcastic.
"You're still a baby sometimes," Temple said firmly.
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
"Says who?"
"Says Buffy. All right?"
"You're silly for a grown-up."
"Thank you."
"When are we gonna find the murderer?"
******************
Temple took a deep breath. "I don't think that's our job here."
"What is our job here?"
"Keeping the murderer from finding us."
Matt had hardly had time to don his new Giles guise when he was snagged by a pair of roving detectives.
"We were hoping Miss Barr would be with you," Detective Su told him undiplomatically.
Nothing like being unwanted by the police to give a person low self-esteem. "Anything I can do?" he asked.
"As a matter of fact," Alch, the senior member of the team began, but Su made an impatient gesture. "He might have some insight," Alch persisted.
"We wanted Miss Barr," Su explained, "because of her public relations expertise."
"She certainly has it," Matt agreed.
"Then she'd know about this crowd?" Alch asked, eyeing the passing slipstream of T-shirt-clad attendees liberally blended with assorted aliens and elves.
"Not personally."
Alch's face puckered. "Did you always wear glasses?"
"Uh, no. Not. . . always. What were your questions?"
"Well." Alch scratched his mustache, "We've never interviewed tougher subjects before."
"Tougher?" Matt was surprised. Except for outstandingly temperamental writers like Schmidt, and occasional opinionated outbursts by obsessive enthusiasts, he found this crowd more pacifist than most.
"He means we can't get through to them," Su explained, lifting her exotically shaped eyebrows. "Earth to Pluto problems."
"They won't cooperate?"
Alch was paging through his narrow spiral-bound notebook. "Oh, they seem cooperative enough. There was this fellow in a robe who lingered after the film presentation and saw a Khatlord go into the ballroom. His testimony was, 'Forsooth, and my eyes not deceive me, I saw yon dead man walk to his own demise all unawares. If only I had known to belay him.' When I asked what time he had seen this, he answered that he was not wealthy enough to own a timepiece, but he supposed by the rumbles of his stomach that it was nearing the hour to sup, perhaps five of the clock."
Matt tried not to laugh. "They come here to live in another world, Detective. I suppose they don't know how to leave it when reality intrudes."
Alch, having found a sympathetic ear, flipped some more pages. "So we start looking for people in Khatlord costumes who might have gone in, and we dig up this other guy--"
Detective Su snorted in disgust at the mention.
"--named Tom Snell. He says a Khatlord answers only to the King Khatlord and now that the King is dead, long live the King, and he must wait until a new Khatlord is prided before he can deal with alien investigators."
"He can deal with us downtown," Su said. "A few official interrogations ought to snap these idiots out of la-la land."
"This isn't a limited phenomenon," Matt said. "Have either of you ever been to 'Star Trek: The Experience' at the Hilton?" His answer was their looks of extreme incredulity. "I was just there with a friend, and when she tried to ask the Ferengi host--you know, the Ferengi; the bald, big-eared creatures from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?"
"I am so sick," Su said, "of hearing the words 'Star Trek' in italics with colons after them."
"Anyway," Matt went on to the sympathetically nodding Alch, "my companion couldn't get Word One out of him about costume and makeup. She's an artist who's interested in the massive changes in physiognomy these alien-mask makeovers achieve, but he wouldn't even admit that he was in costume, or that everything about him wasn't perfectly normal. So I can see you'd have a hard time breaking through these people's fantasy zone."
"Great!" Su's exasperation was boiling over. "We have to go back downtown and tell the lieutenant that all our witnesses and suspects are reality-challenged. Why bother pursuing the case? Get a change of venue to Mars and let the little green men take care of everything!"
Alch was chuckling.
Su wasn't through. "And that nut who just went off to the dealers' room, tickled pink that he might be a suspect. Harry Schmidt or whoever. These people are too deranged to kill anyone."
"Hanford Schmidt," Matt corrected. "And I hear his writing career has been in a stall. A little notoriety might be up his alley."
"Say," Alch suggested to his partner. "Maybe we should run him in. Help the guy out. He might actually confess. I hear writers like solitary."
"Solitude," Su corrected acidly. "Although I'll probably end up in solitary on a homicide charge if we don't make some headway with the mental fender benders around here."
Alch gave Matt a one-finger salute in thanks and farewell as Su stalked off on her chunky heels.
He reminded Matt of a man walking a very ferocious Pekingese. No doubt her intensity and his sagacity made a good detecting combination, when their variant personalities weren't driving each other nuts.
Having nothing better to do, Matt edged into the dealers' room to kill time and mull over the investigation. He didn't envy the detectives trying to tease testimony from people who had come here to forget reality, not witness it.
He idly paged through some large, mounted posters in a bin, trying to figure out what Molina had in mind by returning her daughter to the scene of the crime. Luridly colored images of Flash Gordon and Dale Arden flashed by, along with planetscapes and sinister machines.
The passing of Timothy Hathaway was now fact. The morning TV news shows had all announced the puzzling and sudden death. They hadn't said murder, but the police hadn't said that it wasn't murder.
Still, Matt knew, more than Hathaway's death was going on here. Whatever it was, it had made Molina go icy with fear, then had led her to take a risky gamble. He had watched her decide to throw the dice. Whatever she planned was so out of character that if he saw the full picture, he'd be scared white-knuckled himself.
But he didn't know, though he guessed that he, and Temple, and Mariah were all a part of it.
Should he even be here now? Or should he be with Temple and Mariah, although he'd sensed he wasn't particularly welcome on their shopping expedition? Tonight was the big costume Masquerade. Was that when a murderer would be unmasked? Or would strike again?
"You like that?" a soft voice inquired over his shoulder.
Matt focused on the posters he was flipping past. Long-legged space girls in racy costumes, or mostly absence of same.
"I hadn't noticed," he started to say, realizing how lame that sounded. Any guy who failed to notice these would be blind or gay.
He turned to confront a masked female in a shiny-burgundy spandex bodysuit with holes cut out at the shoulders and sides, the living embodiment of the fantasy forms in the posters.
"Just passing time." His equilibrium switched wildly between fantasy and reality. Hard to believe a real girl could embody the exaggerated form celebrated in the drawings.
Then he realized something even more astounding: He knew her. "Sheila?"
She shrugged, which did a lot for the catsuit. "I don't usually wear this where anyone really knows me. I guess it's not professional."
Now he couldn't ignore it. Her. And he couldn't just whistle, like the guy who was passing behind them was doing at the moment.
"You look .. . marvelous. Gosh, I sound like Billy Crystal. Fantastic, I guess, would say it."
"Thanks." She took a deep breath. Also good for the catsuit. "I'm really nervous doing this.
Maybe you can understand--"
"I get it. I truly do. We were given unwanted gifts, right?"
She nodded, relieved. "I feel so split. Ever since I passed puberty. God is cruel sometimes.
Great body; lousy face. Sometimes, I just feel I've got to show it off. And here, I can wear a mask."
"We can wear masks anywhere. So, what happens at these things when you--?"
"Oh, the guys drool. Guys who'd never look twice at the woman behind the mask lust after me like they've got no chance. Maybe it's revenge. I don't know. I always feel like a fraud, no matter what I do. I have some fun here, though. I'm like a minicelebrity. You watch."
"I can believe it. You give Seven of Nine a run for her silicone."
"Mine's all natural," Sheila sniffed. "Will your friends be ashamed of me like this? I can change."
"Let's see."
"It's funny. You hate your looks, and I hate my body."
"I'm getting over that looks thing. It's how we use our gifts, not what they are."
"Then I shouldn't be playing this game."
"Maybe you can remind people that their fantasies aren't totally unrealistic."
"I feel so shallow for enjoying my little game."
"I don't know, Sheila. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Does it?"
She shrugged again, and three guys behind her ran into each other.
Matt let the racy posters flip back against the vintage movie stills. He didn't know where to look, of course, but was that his problem, or Sheila's?
He wondered what Temple would make of this.
****************
Max stood in the wings of the New Millennium's massive theater, feeling more nostalgic than he could afford to.
The petaled ranks of empty- crimson-velvet seats made the immense house into one full-blown rose of a space, ripe for filling. The black, wooden stage floor tempted his feet and legs with its unique spring, a surface made for leaping, bounding, disappearing on.
At the proscenium arch's sides, the curtains fell from somewhere high, beyond seeing. Their heavy-, textured folds bunched, like a forest of giant sequoias with velvet trunks.
The backstage was as deserted as the auditorium, but Max had hopes his asked-for audience would take place anyway.
Echoes of a single set of footsteps came from the opposite wing area. A tall man wearing magician's black emerged from the backstage darkness, pausing just as he became visible to Max. Had an audience filled the empty seats, not even someone seated on the front row's most extreme edge would have been able to spot the man, he was that careful.
Max moved toward him, crossing the empty stage, exposed to the empty house. His own measured footsteps echoed like a Spanish dancer's played at thirty-three-and-a-third speed.
The man nodded. Or, rather, his mask did. Like a ninja mask, it covered his head and neck, fashioned of flashy spandex fabric that mimicked a leopard's spots. From a distance, it resembled an all-over tribal tattoo.
"My bodyguards are twenty feet away," he told Max, speaking through the same hidden device he wore in performance, a tiny lavalier microphone attached to a voice-altering unit, also tiny. The eerie "protected witness" effect only enhanced his performances. Max doubted it would do much for his social life, though.
Not that the man had any social life, any more than Max did.
"Would I really know you?" was Max's first question, asked with a smile that admitted he already knew he wouldn't get a straight answer.
"You might. I know you. You've done your own disappearing act. Professionally as well as personally."
"For my own reasons. This"--he nodded at the man's bizarre mask and mike setup--"is more than an act, isn't it?"
"Oh, yeah. The death threats haven't stopped since I began turning the magician's bags of tricks inside out five years ago. But those TV specials got me this star gig."
"Is it worth it?"
How much is several million a year worth? It can buy me wall-to-wall protection."
"There are always chinks."
"There are chinks crossing the Strip."
Max had to listen hard to decipher the harmonic double-talk that came from the masked face's high-tech vocal scrambler. He was reminded of Darth Vader. No wonder this guy was cleaning up. He was tapping into moviedom's mythic unconsciousness just by trying to stay alive.
Max also felt he was looking into a distorted mirror. They were both magicians. They were both something more and paying for it with threats to their lives. Max was a vocational antiterrorist, or had been. The man opposite him had become a professional debunker, perhaps after his own magic career had piddled out. Now he was an entertainment phenomenon, revealing secrets to decades-old magic tricks. He wisely avoided spilling the beans on current magicians' illusions--they were his neighbors down the Strip, after all--but a lot of second-rate magicians out there still worked the old chestnuts, and they didn't like his act one bit.
"You ever hear from the Synth?" Max asked.
"The Synth, the Brotherhood of Prestidigitators, the kids with magic kits. They all hate me."
"You fear any of them more than the other?"
"Nope. Anybody could be nuts enough to make good on a threat. Look at kids nowadays.
Look at Columbine."
"And the Synth?"
"Sounds phony. Sounds pretentious. But what do I know?"
"Ever hear of a Shangri-la?"
"Magician? Female?"
Max nodded. Twice.
"No. I don't really pay attention to what the legitimate charlatans do, you know? Sorry, didn't mean to get personal."
"I don't let things get personal with me. That man who fell from the TitaniCon catwalk early this week. He was working for you, wasn't he?"
The antimagician started, jerked like a puppet on a string. "What makes you think that?"
"The paper described him as being dressed as a Khatlord, but he was wearing one of your masks, wasn't he? There isn't much difference between your leopardlike mask and a Khatlord's.
Especially in the dark. On a catwalk."
"Son of a bitch!" The voice garbler made it sound like Donald Duck was swearing, not a very Disney thing to do. "You're saying Barry didn't just fall?" he garbled on. "He was pushed?"
"Or was killed and then pushed. What was he doing way up there?"
The Cloaked Conjuror began pacing, careful to walk north and south instead of east and west, careful not to put himself in view of anyone who might be lurking in the supposedly empty auditorium.
Max moved into the wings's shadow, too. He'd proved his good intentions by exposing himself; now he didn't have to. Especially now that he knew for sure that the first man had been murdered.
"Damn," the eerie voice said. "You put your finger on it. My mask is their mask. I've been using this for five years. The Khatlord empire is just three years old. They ripped off" my persona."
"So sue them."
"You know it's easy to sue, but hard to win."
"So you were planning to upstage the King Khatlord's guest appearance at TitaniCon?"
The Cloaked Conjuror stopped moving. "How did you know?"
"I'm a showman, too. What was it going to be? An unannounced appearance from on high by the Cloaked Conjuror in the middle of the King Khatlord's signing session? Maybe with a big cat conjured out of nowhere at the same time? A leopard? That would point up the too-close resemblance in the masks as well as get you and your million-dollar show lots of ink. Except now the head Khatlord is dead, too. So what does that make the motive for your man's death?"
"Hey. I didn't have anything against Hathaway. All's unfair in love and multimedia franchises, but the actor who played the King Khatlord was just a tool. It's the so-called writer-producer who ripped off my face, so to speak, and he isn't even at TitaniCon. Those guys always hide behind accountants and avoid the line of fire."
"Apparently a lot of underpaid authors are about as happy with those guys as you are."
"See. People like that would be much more likely to resort to murder. I mean, I get paid a Khatlord's ransom, and you just said they get cheated with peanuts."
"True. But I don't think your man died because of the Khatlord stunt."
