The magician delicately places a piece of coal on a brass cradle atop a waist-high wooden stand just in front of the crushed – and, Zal can’t help but notice, frayed and fading – purple velvet curtains at the rear of the stage. There’s a pillar either side of the drapes, creating an ad-hoc proscenium arch, though their purpose is purely to support the deck above.
‘As you can see, merely an ordinary piece of coal,’ the magician says. Like his drapes, his affected aristocratic accent shows the effects of wear, small gaps occasionally revealing the less refined material immediately beneath. ‘But given enough time, and pressure, it will turn into a diamond. I have to confess I’ve been waiting a while, and up on this stage here I can certainly feel the pressure, but there’s still no sign of progress. We live in hope, nonetheless.’
His patter is greeted with a few laughs out of politeness and sympathy, bordering upon embarrassment. Zal doesn’t offer any fig-leaf chuckles of his own; it would just be too patronising, and the guy deserves more dignity than that. Any old stager does, even – maybe especially – when their gifts are long since faded and the final curtain is unavoidably beckoning. Under the stage lights, The Great Mysto, as the sign in the lobby advertises him, looks well into his sixties despite the make-up. He’s a slightly built man who must have been dartingly nimble once upon a time, a quickness on his feet matching a quickness of eye and mind. Now, though, he seems tired, his motions too deliberate, his stagecraft clunky and functionary, no spark to what he’s about. He looks defeated. His assistant knows it, too. She’s far younger than him, maybe early thirties, slim, petite and lithe as the position dictates, and wearing less make-up than he is. She keeps smiling as she faces the audience, but she looks tense half the time, afraid something’s going to go wrong at any second. With saws and swords lined up as part of the repertoire, Zal muses, this is an understandable anxiety.
The venue is barely a third full, and it’s not a big room: half the size of the suite next door where a stand-up comic is billed to appear later, and a quarter the size of the ship’s ballroom. The audience comprises mostly families, but half the kids aren’t even paying attention. It being term-time for school-age children, it’s mostly toddlers, who are just wandering around in the aisles. There are a few older ones, uniformly playing with their Gameboys. The adults are just as fidgety and inattentive, impatient for the show to finish so they can pack the kids off to bed and finally hit the bar, maybe even come back here to see a ‘proper’ show later. This is the early bill, scheduled partly to suit a family audience, and partly so that the room is free for the jazz/blues act billed to play the late-evening session.
‘Pressure,’ he says, as if trying to reboard his own train of thought before it chugs off without him. ‘Pressure: that’s the applied principle behind the sword.’ As he says this, he pulls a long blade from a rack, while his assistant slides a wicker basket from the side towards the centre of the stage. ‘The sharpness of the steel is essentially a means of concentrating pressure on the smallest possible area, allowing even a frail little man like me to defend myself with the minimum effort.’ At this, the assistant reaches into the basket and produces an armful of fruit, which she throws at him with impressive rapidity. The Great Mysto merely holds the sword vertically in front of him, the hilt gripped at waist-height, and the missiles are bisected: two limes, two lemons, two oranges, two grapefruit. This does raise a few chuckles, the fruit getting larger and the assistant’s apparent ire greater as she escalates her unilateral arms race. This culminates in her producing two weighty-looking water melons from the basket while the magician, apparently oblivious, turns face-on and gives a little bow as though the trick is finished. The assistant then lobs them, one from each hand, in a one-two movement so that both are in the air simultaneously, in response to which the Great Mysto nonchalantly flicks his wrist and angles the sword so that both melons are impaled upon it.
The assistant looks a little sheepish and the magician gestures to her to climb inside the erstwhile fruit receptacle. She complies with an exaggeratedly huffy pout, whereupon the Great Mysto commences the standard swords-through-the-basket routine.
Mysto’s not without his moments, but there’s something wrong, and Zal has worked out what it is. It took a while to occur to him, but then only a little more observation to confirm. There were no coins, no cards. The guy isn’t doing any intimate stuff, no close-up work, which to Zal seems an even more conspicuous omission given the inescapable modesty of the venue. A little room like this, a small audience, and the guy hasn’t so much as fanned a deck. Even the magicians playing theatres in Vegas would start off with something simple to set the scene, help to pace the ascent to grander illusions. Why wouldn’t a veteran conjuror playing under these reduced circumstances not get the little kiddies onside with some coin work, a few vanishes and transpositions before paying off the little bastards with a few miraculously appearing bribes?
As soon as Zal asks himself the question, he realises his query already contains the answer – veteran conjuror – and a little scrutiny verifies his hypothesis. It’s his hands: the poor sonofabitch has rheumatoid arthritis, and has constructed an act out of what illusions his stiff and irreversibly deforming fingers can still execute, with an inevitable weighting towards machinery: self-working tricks and automated gizmos that ought really to be used more sparingly to augment a wider repertoire.
Zal feels it right in the heart, pictures the slow deterioration, the moment the guy tried a particular palm or sleight and realised he could no longer manage it. What moves him all the more is that the guy is still clinging on to flotsam long after his ship has been wrecked. He’s been unable to give it up and is still performing his failing act before dwindling and disinterested audiences aboard a cruise liner. Zal can’t decide what would be the sadder: if he is doing it because he still needs the dough, or doing it simply because it is all he knows. Probably a combination of both.
It sure helps create a breathless tension to Mysto’s execution of the old basket routine, but unfortunately only for Zal, who can’t take his eyes off the old man’s hands as he thrusts each sword through tiny slits in the wickerwork. If he had played up an image of bumbling clumsiness, it would perhaps have engaged the audience more, but the overture to the trick had been about precision, emphasising not only the sharpness of the blade but the control with which Mysto wielded it. Thus the audience were more taken with the overture than the trick itself, the former having the novelty value of an element of the unexpected and unpredictable. The latter is something they’ve seen a hundred times on TV, and even seeing it live makes no difference, because Mysto just doesn’t have the stagecraft to get them excited about it. Zal’s witnessed comics perform classic gags the audience have already heard over and over on TV, but they know how to play the material so that they still get the laugh: they know how to sell it. Mysto must have known once, but now he’s just going through the motions, his audiences’ indifference having created a kind of positive-feedback loop so that he cares just a little less with each performance. Thus the paltry crowd today has little interest in the outcome, and even less appreciation of the skill and ingenuity being practised by the two performers. They know the girl is going to climb out of the basket unharmed, so every sword he drives in is one more he’ll have to pull out again before the trick is concluded: meaning each blade is not one sword more than could explicably go through that basket without injuring the girl, it’s one sword more between them and that drink once the kids have been safely tucked up in their cabins.
Zal, the Great Mysto and the weary parents are all aboard the cruise ship Spirit of Athene, three days out of Palma and currently en route to the Canary Islands via Casablanca and Agadir. It had put in at Palma for forty-eight hours and, as it turned out, was due to depart at exactly the same time as Zal’s flight to Paris. He didn’t believe in fate or providence, but sometimes you just took your cues from the signs life randomly threw up. What else was he going to do: throw a dart at a map? Head for the airport and play departure-board roulette? A cruise liner was not exactly his scene, but it seemed an effective way of dropping off the screen at zero notice. It was also a concentrated version of the lifestyle he’d adopted for much of the past year: the ultimate in travelling hopefully but never arriving.
Bitch of a place for anyone to abduct him from, too. Bearing that consideration in mind, he’d booked his berth online at an internet café, using Albert Fleet’s credit card details to pay for it. He’d got all he needed from the wallet, including the guy’s mailing address from his driver’s licence. That was partly why he’d made play of taking the hard cash and dropping the wallet itself: make him think he’d no interest in the other goodies. Fleet wouldn’t know anything was wrong until he got his next bill – not unless they flagged it up for authorisation, but Zal figured spontaneous travel fares weren’t exactly a conspicuous rarity on this guy’s monthly statement. The other way he might find out sooner would be if Zal went crazy and maxed out his credit limit, but there was no call for that. He didn’t need the guy’s money, just needed him to pay for his passage. It was appropriate, after all: Fleet had been planning to set up Zal with a cosy cabin aboard a boat leaving Palma that morning anyway, hadn’t he?
He signed himself up for a month, due to finish up at Marbella on the return leg. Time enough to reflect and consider what he was going to do with a future that he had now resolved would not, could not contain Angelique.
The second day out, at noon, he marked the moment when he was scheduled to meet Angelique at the Musée d’Orsay by leaning against a guardrail and firing cards into the water with practised flicks of his wrist. He tried not to wonder whether she’d even be there, tried not to picture the scene. When he got to the last card, he turned it over to reveal it as the eight of diamonds: the card she’d chosen (or rather the card he’d forced on her) once upon a time at the Louvre. This was no fateful coincidence, however, as he had earlier flicked through the deck, selected it and slipped it to the bottom in a sequence of moves now so natural and automatic as to be almost subconscious. He looked at it for a second, thought of keeping it as a symbol, but a symbol of what? Some token he’d sometimes lie awake and fantasise about giving her should they ever meet again? No, here was a symbol: let her go.
He threw it and watched it spin on the breeze, losing sight of it against the bright blue sky.
Farewell.
His third night at sea, he’d had enough of his own company, fed up soul-searching and just about done feeling sorry for himself. He decided to check out the onboard entertainment. It would be a waste not to: Albert Fleet had worked hard to earn the money that was paying for this, after all.
The assistant has retreated offstage, leaving the Great Mysto to run through a few tricks on his own. Watching him work – clunky and struggling – Zal is feeling a strange disquiet, a restlessness of spirit. It’s growing like a goddamn itch. He observes Mysto go through the motions and can’t help but remember sitting in a lounge in Vegas, watching his dad do all of this so much better: so, so much better. Even hungover, even half drunk, his father was several classes above this shambles, and probably several classes above Mysto even when the latter had been at the top of his game. He remembers the view from the side of the stage, once he was a little older, after Mom died and Dad straightened out, when his old man employed him behind the scenes. He feels the restlessness turn into a twisted longing that churns him up inside. He’s recalling the conflict within, the price he paid for a denial borne out of spite and blame and anger and grief and all the things a boy his age could neither comprehend nor contain.
‘This stuff can be taught, son,’ his dad stated. ‘I was taught, and I had a great teacher. But you’ve got something natural, something that cannae be taught. You could be among the best, son, way above my league.’
Time and again his dad would tell him this, and that angry, hollow part of him enjoyed hearing it because he knew how much it hurt the old man. Not becoming a magician, not realising his own potential and his father’s dreams, that was his revenge for how the old man had failed him and Mom, his payback for the neglect and selfishness of the alcoholism that caused Zal to blame his dad for her death as much as the asshole drunk-driver who killed her.
Yeah, he really socked it to him with that shit. If you really want to hurt someone, hurt the one he loves. Zal’s revenge had been an ongoing act of self-harm.
Seeing the not-so-Great Mysto right now, it all comes back, though the memory of his anger is transmuted into sadness and regret, and it is the feeling his anger was in conflict with that comes through strongest. He felt it when he was seven years old, he felt it in his teens, he felt it even as he told his dad he wanted nothing to do with his profession, and he felt it every night he pulled a crowd in the Dracon Rojo.
The Great Mysto completes a passable cup-and-balls routine. Zal watches his thumb and forefinger, his wrist action. The appropriate joints are still supple enough to turn the moves, though there’s an awkwardness about his grip that would be jarring to a more attentive audience. Zal flexes his own digits, feels the absence of a coin like it’s the absence of a finger, and reaches to his pocket to remedy this. He flips it, turns it, passes it, repeating the moves absently like a nervous habit as the show limps on.
Mysto procures a volunteer, picking on a parent near the front, knowing an adult will be too polite to refuse. Zal wonders what he’s going to attempt, and is set on edge to see the magician break out a deck of cards. The woman briskly approaches the stage with the same combination of the dutiful and sheepish, as though she was retrieving her errant toddler from having strayed into someone else’s cabin. Mysto executes a three-quarter circular fan of the deck, which looks graceful enough in motion, but fairly ragged and uneven by the time he’s presenting it to his ‘volunteer’. He offers her the fan and asks her to pick a card, which she must show to the audience but not to him. It’s the ace of diamonds; Zal’s guessing a force, given it’s a big card, wonders if it might even be a forcing pack.
He fumbles slightly as he closes the fan, inviting her to place the card where he has cut the deck. Zal wonders for a second whether it’s a mask for his technique, the moment of clumsiness creating the offbeat in which to execute a switch, but no: this isn’t a trick, it’s a tragedy. The legendary Cardini feigned being drunk, but that was an intrinsic part of his act, a running gag between him and his audience and thus part of the charm of his act. This, by contrast, is merely painful to behold, and of the audience, only Zal is even capable of noticing.
The lady scuttles hurriedly back to her seat, while Mysto walks to the front of the stage, cutting and recutting the pack.
‘In order to find your card, madam, I’m going to perform a special shuffle. It’s one that takes years to perfect, so don’t anybody ask me to teach them it afterwards, and don’t ask me to repeat it, because at my age I’m lucky if I can get it right once. Okay, here goes.’
Zal leans forward on his seat, the coin between his fingers suddenly held still in suspense. This is even worse than the basket illusion. Mysto cuts the deck once more, taking a half in each of his gnarly and slightly malformed hands. Though he feels like he ought to be watching through his fingers, Zal’s eyes are locked on to Mysto’s own digits, his thumbs springing tension into the cards, preparing a horizontal spring riffle.
The magician’s hands suddenly spasm and the cards explode from the collapsing cradle of his fingers, spraying, spinning, fluttering about the stage like crisp autumn leaves stirred from the gutter by a sudden gust. It is not a flourish, but a fumble, a moment of startlement. A trick derailed, an unscripted incompetence. Some members of the audience gasp, others fail to stifle giggles. The muted laughter is horrible: a cringing combination of being embarrassed on the faltering magician’s behalf and being embarrassed by being present at such a tawdry spectacle. But can he recover, that’s the question? Does he have an out?
The Great Mysto looks up once the last of the cards has fluttered to the ground, then gives a grin.
‘Told you I can only do it once,’ he says, eliciting a couple of sympathetic laughs. ‘But I did also say it was magic. What was your card, madam?’
‘The ace of diamonds,’ the lady replies.
The magician turns side-on and gestures to the rear of the stage. Sitting on the brass cradle, where the lump of coal was resting the last time anyone cared to look, is the card she named.
‘And what do you know, it turned into a diamond in the end.’
The magician takes his bow, joined shortly by his assistant. There is applause, mostly out of relief that the show is over. Zal, however, offers his more sincerely. The Great Mysto might be failing and ailing, but kudos to him, kudos indeed, as he really drew Zal with that last trick. He liked everything about it, everything it represented. Zal guessed the assistant had reached through the curtain and performed the switch during the disastrous spring riffle, which was poetry: his revenge on his debilitation, and the only moment he’d shown a genuine twinkle in his eye.
The house lights come up and the audience begin to bail before Mysto and his assistant have even left the stage. Not everybody makes for the exit, however: Zal spots a man in a suit, with a laminate clipped to his breast pocket, standing just inside the door, leaning against the wall, arms folded. Having had his eyes on the stage, Zal doesn’t know how long he’s been standing there or how much of the show he’s seen, but from his expression, figures an accurate estimate would be ‘enough’. He waits until the performers have retreated from sight and begins making his way towards the front, treading on to the stage and through the curtains with the unmistakable proprietary air of officialdom.
Zal remains in his seat, the only spectator left as a couple of cleaners enter the room with a cart and begin moving through the rows clearing trash. He figures the popcorn boxes and candy wrappers aren’t the only things getting shit-canned right now.
The guy in the suit emerges only a few minutes later, pausing for a moment to let out a long sigh before heading for the main door. He doesn’t look like he enjoyed what he just did, so give him that much.
Serendipity: is it being in the right place at the right time, or are we frequently in the right place at the right time and serendipity is the name we give to those rare moments when we have the vision to realise it?
Zal waits for the guy in the suit to leave, then makes his way on to the stage and slips behind the curtain. The area beyond is deceptively large, far deeper than the view from the front suggested. The Great Mysto has draped it to control the sight-lines, bearing in mind the two pillars, and delineated a small performing area, leaving an unused space at least three times the size of what the audience can see. For this reason, neither he nor the assistant notice Zal slip through the velvet and stand still, taking in the plethora of props and equipment ranged untidily about the place; some of it deposited haphazardly during the performance, other items veteran remnants of shows gone by: artefacts of the Great Mysto’s magical history, uncatalogued museum pieces, impeccably preserved but gathering dust.
Mysto and his assistant are a good ten yards away, the magician sitting on a closed trunk, his back to Zal, blocking him from the girl’s line of sight. Zal figures he could be right next to them and they’d not notice, as they seem isolated in their own intimate little world of despond. Zal hears the man cry, sees his shoulders shake with a sob, sees the girl’s arms move around him, the top of her head visible as she leans over and presses her face against his chest. Zal hears her sniff.
‘Oh, please don’t cry, Dad, you’re setting me off now.’
‘I’m sorry, love. I’ll be fine in a minute. Don’t know why I’m like this: I knew what was coming, we both did. It’s just... well, I’d like to have known it was my last show before, you know? In advance. Not find out like this that it’s already gone. Best part of forty years and it all ends just like that, with a whimper. My bloody whimper,’ he adds with a bitter laugh.
‘Just remember that the best part of those forty years wasn’t on this bloody tub, Dad.’
‘Aye, that I know, Lizzie. And it’s a mercy, really. You ought to be spreading your wings, girl. Not stuck here propping up an old fossil.’
‘Don’t be daft, Dad. Besides, nobody’s been battering down my door, either.’
‘Well, more fool them. Ach, I should have given up ages ago, that’s all I’m saying. Never dragged you along after I ought to have realised my time was up.’
Lizzie sniffs again. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it, Dad,’ she says.
Zal is conscious of his apparent invisibility and decides he ought to draw attention to his presence before he feels any more voyeuristic. He has been inspecting the contents of a well-travelled but formidably constructed wood-and-leather trunk, so lets the lid drop closed. The bang is cushioned, testament to the craftsmanship, but audible enough for Lizzie to stand up straight and look over her father’s now slowly turning head.
‘Can we help you?’ she asks, with an aggression that instead states: ‘Can we help you rapidly fuck off out of our privacy?’
Zal understands what he’s just walked into and knows he has to defuse it. He also knows that simply being here and derailing their grief is already half the battle. He now just needs a little of the conjuror’s stock-in-trade: misdirection.
‘Yeah,’ he says, bending down briefly and passing an appreciative hand over a device on the floor, rolled back there and discarded during the performance. ‘This flower cascade looks like a Bautier deKolta. It’s not...surely not an original, is it? And if my eyes don’t deceive me, that looks very much like a cocktail bar set-up after Alan Wakeling.’
Lizzie comes stomping towards him, wiping a tear but indignation thoroughly erasing the grief from her expression.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she mutters to her father. ‘That tosser Henderson tipped the wink to some bloody collector before he even informed you. Of all the disrespect...’
‘I’m not a collector,’ Zal informs her calmly.
‘Wasting your time if you were,’ says Mysto, getting off the trunk he was sitting on and turning towards Zal. ‘They’re neither of them originals. Made ’em meself, but you could call them reproductions.’
‘I’m betting you made the trunks too. The deKolta is first class, great to see something like that still in action.’
The old man can’t help but smile, as much at a shared appreciation of the golden-age apparatus as at Zal’s compliment to his craftsmanship. Lizzie stands vigilantly with her arms folded, like a bouncer waiting for the nod to kick Zal out into the street.
‘I did have first-hand access to the originals,’ Mysto says. ‘Collector got me to manufacture a working copy of the cascade so he had a functional model as well as one actually crafted by the man himself, and I just made two. For the Wakeling copy, I had to procure a private examination.’ He raises his eyebrows involuntarily at this, the memory of a doubtless dubious undertaking. ‘Haven’t used it in a while, though. It’s my hands, you see.’
Zal nods.
‘Bet it worked beautifully back in the day, though.’
‘Oh, what? Brought the house down,’ he says with a sad smile, which turns that bit brighter and prouder as he adds: ‘Though not as much as my deKolta Expanding Die.’
‘You gotta be kidding me. Jesus, didn’t even Houdini covet the secret of that trick? And you made one yourself?’
‘Houdini paid Goldston a fortune for it, yes, but then Goldston published the plans so Houdini wouldn’t have it exclusively, one of the few times a friend or a rival – and Goldston was both – put one over on him. Happily for the likes of me, the design’s long since been out there for those as have the know-how and the skill to give it life.’
Mysto warms to his subject, already talking to Zal with an openness and enthusiasm that seems to have forgotten their circumstances. Lizzie hasn’t, and decides to intervene.
‘I really am sorry, Mr, eh...?’
Zal turns to look at her, takes a beat. ‘McMillan,’ he tells her.
‘Mr McMillan. This isn’t the best time right now. Sorry to be brusque, but can you tell us your business, please? If you’re not a collector, then who are you?’
Jolted out of reverie by his daughter, Mysto remembers himself enough to be suspicious rather than merely curious. ‘Aye,’ he says inquiringly. ‘What kind of man can recognise a deKolta, never mind an Alan Wakeling reproduction?’
‘The kind of man who saw Alan Wakeling use it live on stage, though I was very young, so I remember it better from seeing Earl Nelson perform later using Wakeling’s original rig. I’m a man very much like yourself, Mr...?’
‘Morrit. Daniel Morrit. Like me how? A magician?’
‘An out-of-work magician. One could in fact say, very accurately, that we’re in the same boat.’
‘If that’s the standard of your patter, no wonder you’re out of work,’ Morrit says grimly.
‘So you were tipped off,’ Lizzie observes.
‘No, I’m just a keen observer. Keen enough to spot that the Great Mysto can’t handle coins or cards any more, though not keen enough to spot you switching that ace for the coal.’ Zal smiles. ‘I liked that.’
Lizzie’s arms remain folded but there’s a hint of pride in her face at this compliment. Zal can tell her defences are lowering, just a little.
‘I want to make you an offer,’ he says.
‘For what?’ Morrit asks grumpily. ‘The deKolta?’
‘No, for everything.’
‘Job lot? I don’t know, son. Some of this stuff I’d never sell, other of it’s not worth a wet fart. Besides, it’s too soon for me to be thinking about it. For God’s sake, I only just—’
‘When I say everything, I don’t mean your stuff. I mean the show: like a franchise. Or more like a partnership. I’ll confess, watching the performance, I was just planning to offer to buy you out, but when I came backstage and saw some of this stuff, I realised...’
‘Hang on a minute, son,’ Morrit says, screwing his face up like he’s trying to do trigonometry in a hurricane. ‘I think you’re forgetting what happened between you watching the show and you coming back here. There is no show. We’ve had our cards, remember? Henderson’s paid us off. Settled the rest of our contract but told us we’re not performing any more. Said we were bringing down the tone, not up to the class they want the ship associated with, and he’s not bloody wrong, either.’
Zal nods, unperturbed.
‘Were you contracted for just this cruise, or a month, six months, what?’ he asks.
‘Just this cruise, but it doesn’t—’
‘That’s ideal. Means we can negotiate a better contract all the sooner. That’s assuming you and I can reach an accommodation. I’d need you to be my technical consultant as well as my craftsman, and I’m rusty on a few techniques so you’d be my tutor too. You’d retain ownership of all the materials but we’d be fifty-fifty on any new apparatus our collaboration happens to conceive.’
Morrit starts shaking his head. The trigonometry face has loosened and given way to an expression of patient amusement at the ramblings of a fool. He steals a glance across at his daughter, whose incredulity looks neither patient nor amused.
‘What part of “we’re fired” are you having trouble grasping, Mr McMillan?’ she asks.
‘All of it,’ Zal shoots back, eyeing Lizzie with his own impatient sincerity. ‘Look, I appreciate that this is the bit in the musical where it looks like the show won’t go on, but believe me, it will. Your show is over, that part’s true, but this guy Henderson has a boatload of people to entertain, and if we stage a new show that puts asses on seats, that’s all he’s gonna care about.’
Morrit’s starting to get it. ‘A new magician,’ he says, thoughtfully.
‘Exactly right. Now, the ship’s putting in at Casablanca for two nights. I figure we can be ready by the time she sails again. Henderson sees we’ve got a big crowd, that changes everything. Weather forecast for the next week is not good – lot of cloud, lot of rain, lot of people stuck indoors on this hulk. Word gets around, pretty soon they’ll be blowing the cobwebs off the House Full sign, you wait and see. I’m betting by the time we hit the return leg after the Canaries, we’ll be in the big suite next door, which is just as well, because it’s got a trapdoor and this room doesn’t, and I wanna start with the Expanding Die. You up for that, Mr Morrit?’
Morrit’s growing grin heralds his answer. ‘Bloody right I am. What have I got to lose?’ he asks Lizzie, whose face is urging caution, afraid an already fragile man is getting carried away on false hopes.
‘You talk a good show, Mr McMillan, I’ll grant you that,’ she says. ‘But it begs the question, if you’re that good, how come you’re out of work?’
Zal thinks of the countless hours he spent practising in jail. He thinks of robbing a bank in broad daylight and in front of a legion of cops; of what he pulled off later under the noses of just as many police and a few dozen gangsters. He thinks of how amazing his dad was onstage, and he thinks of his dad’s words, the ones he always discarded or threw back in his face: that he had a natural gift for reading the audience, that he had timing, grace and touch ‘like I can only dream aboot, son’.
‘Let’s say I had a sabbatical,’ Zal replies. ‘But yeah, I’m pretty good.’
‘You’d better be,’ she says, extending a hand for him to grip, the welcome sign of her assent. ‘Especially as your first trick will be selling us back to the man who just dumped us.’
‘Oh, I’m not going to tell Henderson a thing. The first he’s going to know about it is when he comes to investigate why there’s a packed house in a lounge where nothing’s scheduled. We’re going to present him with a fait accompli.’
‘But how are we going to get a crowd?’ Morrit asks. ‘I’ve every fear I’ve already stifled any appetite there was for a magic show on board this ship, and if we’re doing it hush-hush and without official sanction, how are we going to advertise the bloody thing?’
‘That’s why we’ll pull a crowd,’ Zal tells him. ‘Because we’re gonna advertise our show the old-fashioned way.’
Morrit’s eyes narrow conspiratorially.
‘I like your style, Mr McMillan. Tell me, what should we call you, professionally?’
Zal pauses a moment, gives a smile to suggest he’s taking a beat to build anticipation. Truth is, he hadn’t thought. First thing that comes into his head is his dad’s stage name, which he can’t use for any number of reasons. Second thing is what his mum used to call him sometimes, her Mexican playful corruption of McMillan, the middle name his dad gave him.
‘Maximilian,’ he says.
Morrit nods approvingly, but Lizzie still seems perturbed.
‘You don’t like it?’ Zal asks her.
‘I like it fine. Just...forgive me: I dropped out of a business degree, so maybe I didn’t learn enough marketing and advertising theory. Can you tell me what the old-fashioned way entails?’
The Spirit of Athene is three hours out of Casablanca and sailing in heavy rain, as forecast. The larger of the ship’s indoor swimming lidos is extremely busy, not a spare plastic chair to be had, never mind a reclining lounger. Families have set up camp for the day, parents sitting amid piles of toys and towels. It hasn’t been warm enough for any but the most dedicated swimmers to brave the outdoor pools on this cruise, but many of the older passengers have been content to sit by the sides reading their papers and books, wrapped up in jackets and sweaters. Strangely, they always face inwards around the pools rather than out towards the ocean, almost as though they’re just waiting to finish one more page before they suddenly strip off and dive right in. Today, though, the decks are awash, but the hypnotic draw of chlorinated water has endured, and thus dozens of those with no intention of taking a dip have opted for the indoor poolside as their preferred spot to pass the rainy day.
Two men dressed in black dinner suits enter the lido carrying a large trunk between them, preceded by a petite and shapely woman in the eye-catching if impractical combination of a gold bathing costume and matching high heels. She sashays in like the poolside is a catwalk, one arm held aloft and her palm bearing a pair of handcuffs which dangle around her wrist. She’s smiling, making eye-contact with as many observers as possible as she proceeds around to the deep end, where the two men stop and deposit the trunk about a foot from the edge of the water.
While the two men lift the lid of the trunk and gently swing it open on its hinge, the woman skirts the row of sunloungers nearest the deep end, scanning the observers. She sees a likely candidate and extends her free hand, inviting a bashfully grinning bloke to take hold of it. No sooner have his fingers touched hers than she has brought around her other hand and cuffed herself to him. She walks away, forcing him to his feet and leading him across to the trunk amid laughter, whistles and cheers. One of the men by the trunk proffers a set of keys, which the woman takes, using them to free herself and then cuffing both the grinning man’s hands together. His daughter, a little girl of about three, runs up and hugs his legs with a look of confused concern. This elicits further laughter, then an appreciative ‘aaaw’, better than anything they could have scripted, as the woman surrenders the keys to the little girl in order to free her daddy. The man takes the keys from his daughter and unlocks himself, to much applause from all around the pool. He offers the cuffs back to the woman, who takes them from him and presents her cheek for a kiss, which he blushingly delivers. Then he walks away, or rather attempts to, before realising she has cuffed herself to him again.
The bloke sportingly endures another bout of laughter before being freed a second time, and is about to make his way back to his sunlounger when the woman beckons him towards the trunk, where the younger of its bearers is undressing from his DJ down to a pair of black swimming shorts. He has close-cropped blond hair and, denuded of his clothes, reveals himself to be athletically built and heavily tattooed. The older man then enlists the help of the new recruit to remove a number of items from the trunk: a length of heavy chain, two formidable-looking padlocks and a beige sack with aluminium eyelets puncturing its neck. The recruit is then invited to fasten the handcuffs behind the tattooed man’s back. The tattooed man slowly rotates himself three hundred and sixty degrees in order that everybody around the pool can see how thoroughly he is restrained.
The older man then opens the sack and the tattooed man steps into it. He crouches so that the neck can be pulled all the way over his head, then the heavy chain is passed through the eyelets and the sack pulled closed. The recruit is directed to lift one of the padlocks and uses it to secure the chain. Next, the two of them take hold of the man in the sack and lift him into the trunk. Once he has been placed inside, the lid is pulled closed and the recruit invited to attach the second padlock to the hasp on the trunk’s front.
Finally, the recruit is asked to take hold of one of the handles on the other side and help lift the trunk off the ground. He looks extremely unsure of himself as the older man indicates that the next task is to drop the trunk into the swimming pool, but the woman is already priming the crowd to count one-two-three in time with their swings.
The crowd counts, the pair lets go on three, and the trunk splashes into the water where it sinks swiftly to the bottom, air bubbling almost angrily from it for a few seconds after it comes to rest.
Many of the crowd get to their feet with the intention of getting a closer look, but the woman warns them to stay back from the pool. They obey, automatically investing the woman with imperative authority. Maybe it’s the heels, or more likely the need for reassurance that somebody is in charge of this and by extension that all of those involved know what they’re doing.
The woman asks the crowd to hold their breath. It’s only when she says this that some of them realise they’ve done so already. She tells them that it’s the best way of knowing when they ought to think about intervention. A minute passes. Two minutes. There are exhalations all around the lido as vital capacities are tested and found wanting. Laughter turns to silence as each panting proof of failure further builds the tension. The surface of the pool is calm, no movement disturbing its slow re-establishment of equilibrium since the submersion of the trunk.
Unseen inside, the tattooed man is checking his watch, for timing is everything. The quintessence of every escape trick is that it should seem last-gasp, thus he must let the tension grow and the seeds of fear be sown, but he should not stretch credulity nor scare the audience so much as to render the tone macabre or tasteless. There’s air enough for a few minutes more, but it’s also crucial to remember that a box at the bottom of a swimming pool is not a very interesting sight.
He was free of the cuffs even as the sack was being pulled over his head, free of the sack before the trunk was lifted off the tiles. He had to be, in order to press the switch releasing the air that generated all those bubbles, so vital to conveying the impression that the trunk had flooded.
He decides it’s time. He engages the concealed hinges on the padlocked side where the lid meets the trunk, then slides the switch that releases the hinges on the opposite wall. A few seconds later, he is climbing out of the pool, each of his hands then gripped by one of his companions, before all three of them take a bow, enthusiastic applause echoing all around the lido.
He announces to the gathering that if they wish to see more, he will be performing that same afternoon, with the details to be found on the cards his two companions are now passing out to a multitude of eagerly extended hands.
‘And that,’ he tells the woman in the gold bathing suit, ‘is the old-fashioned way.’