Carter Beats the Devil (73 page)

Mysterioso approached Carter. When he was still a few steps away, he paused. “You’ll try something,” he murmured. With his free hand, he unbuttoned his shirt to the waist, showing off a handmade sort of sling. Sitting in the sling was a dog.

“Oh my God,” Carter murmured. Mysterioso took the dog out of the sling and put him on the floor. The dog stretched his front legs and yawned. “Handsome,” Carter said.

“Handsome III,” Mysterioso corrected. “Who’s my little man? Who’s my little man? Sit, Handsome.
Good boy!
”

With Handsome sitting at what his master judged was a safe distance from the treacherous Charles Carter, Mysterioso fished in Griffin’s pockets and found a second pair of cuffs. Extracting them, he felt under Griffin’s jaw. He frowned. “No, no,” he chided, and gave Griffin a brutal kick in the back. Griffin groaned, which seemed to relieve Mysterioso.

“Handsome! Go get din-din!” And the little dog bolted from his spot, settling daintily at the edge of the pool of blood, from which he began to drink noisily.

Carter’s stomach turned upside down.

Mysterioso threw the cuffs at him. “Put one cuff on your left wrist. Leave the other one free.”

At gunpoint, Mysterioso led Carter to the wooden backdrop he had used for the knife-throwing act. Carter could smell him now, cheap cologne over dark earthen smells, like a man who’d slept in barns and ditches. “Twelve years,” Mysterioso said. “Twelve years of you using my act and living the high life.”

“Like hell.”

“Oh, I’m sure you had many troubles,” he yawned. His black eyes focused on Carter. Twelve years ago, Carter had seen in them contempt and ego. But now, unexpectedly, he was looking into a void. There was nothing in those eyes. “Do you know what I did? I left the country. And where did I go? Go on, guess.”

“I don’t know.” Carter swallowed. He was feeling oddly lost, like the emptiness was spreading from Mysterioso’s eyes, and was obliterating all that he knew for certain.

“Really. The most obvious place.” Mysterioso grabbed the free end of the handcuffs and fastened it to a squat metal U-bar that jutted from the flat around waist level. “Guess.”

“India,” Carter said blankly.

“Exactly. I did exactly what all of us pretend to do. I went to India to learn magic at the feet of holy men. I went there for years, Carter, and while you were riding high, having the easy life, five thousand a week—”

“I never—”

“Be quiet.” Mysterioso pointed the Colt at his throat. Carter knew he would pull the trigger whenever he felt like it. Carter had a hand free, but his mind was foggy with images of ancient maps he’d seen of a flat world, with arrows to the edges and “here be dragons” promised for those who left the known behind. Mysterioso had gone
beyond.
There was no predicate to that, simply that no matter the map, geographic or psychic, Mysterioso had gone beyond any known point. “I traveled by donkey to the obscure cesspools, the vermin-infested caves and slums, and you know what the holy men taught? Do you?
Inner peace.
Enlightenment. Can you imagine? I just wanted one bloody, miserable thing no one else knew, anything, teach me to carve a boy to pieces and restore him, show me the real Indian rope trick, but no!
Yoga! Come on!
”

The gun went level with Carter’s solar plexus; with his other hand, Mysterioso grabbed Carter’s right hand and held it far over his head, against the backdrop. That sickly cologne made Carter choke. “Go on! Stand up straight, up on your tippy-toes,” he spat. “Stretch!”

It was an odd request. There was really no way for one magician to detain another. No one was sure what someone else could escape from. So Carter went willingly, not nearly as afraid as he should have been. He’d had years of experience doing one thing while observing another, so he pressed his back against the flat, and stretched up on his toes, his hand directly overhead, and he saw Griffin lift his head slightly, then drop it. Griffin had another pair of handcuffs. Perhaps Griffin had a second gun. Carter looked for signs of movement where the Gone! chair had parked and saw none. All this observation while at the same time figuring when he could best slip the cuffs. Mysterioso dug the gun into Carter’s gut. “Do you know what this gun is good for?”

“No,” Carter whispered.

“Misdirection,” Mysterioso said, which caused Carter to look down.
It was no longer the gun pressed against him—it was the handle of one of his throwing knives. The moment this substitution registered, Mysterioso brought it up and out into an arc and then drove it, blade first, through Carter’s hand. Mysterioso stepped back to admire the sight.

Carter never even heard the sound it must have made. A mild vibration traveled up his wrist, a sensation that trembled and widened as it found his mouth, which went taut in surprise. His hand was pinned over his head like he was the brightest student in the class. He stared without a thought in his head. The world became very wobbly, a poorly threaded projector, his vision skipping with each heartbeat.

There was some kind of motion around him but he had no clue what it was, as he was being poured out of his body. A memory, a fragment: a winter evening at the library, Thacher School, bare tree branches shaking outside in the rain, which poured down the windows, wind whistling past the building, him huddled over
Gray’s Anatomy
until the electric lights flickered once, twice, and then out, casting into darkness the etching of the transverse section of the carpus. He’d seen, snugly fit together like a cross-section of a cell, the skin, the tendons, vessels and nerves, the ligaments, flexors, muscles and bones cozied together, and then, when the lights went out, all that mortal power fizzled, just as he had once imagined shaking Horace Goldin’s portrait until the accoutrements of magic—the doves, the scarves, the coins and imps—spilled out and left an empty man.

He awaited pain, but felt none. Instead, fear began to spread. When pain came, it would be horrible. The application of will against the physical body, his hand was hopeless, and his will washed away, too, and in its place, a tidal wave now of thunderous, pounding, vicious pain.

Carter still hadn’t made a sound, and Mysterioso put his hands on his hips. “Oh, come on, that’s
got
to hurt.”

And
yes,
as conscious thought returned to him, the pain was there and with it the visceral message from body to brain and back again, sickly fear of further harm, but also a challenge, one Carter automatically clung to,
do not
give this man satisfaction.

He breathed through his nose and out his mouth. Labored. Clenched teeth that he fought to unclench.

“My employers,” Mysterioso said, crossing his arms and leaning against a support pillar, “are going to allow me to keep all of your devices. Well, whatever I don’t destroy.” He looked at his nails.

Carter rasped, with words that sounded measured, “Are you going after Houdini, too?”

Mysterioso considered this. He looked all around, alighting on Griffin (who wasn’t moving). “I’m sorry, are you making conversation until someone rescues you, or are you just making conversation? Houdini did what he had to do and I respect that. You, you were just Houdini’s punk, a cheap kard and koin opportunist who lucked into a momentary crown. So by the skill and determination that you don’t possess, I’m taking it all back. Audacious, no?”

He winced. That word. Three syllables.
Audacieux,
as it came to him for no particular reason in French. It brought him somewhere primal.
Jamais tromper pas la repout pour l’audace.
As Mysterioso turned away, Carter shouted, his eyes sealed shut with concentration, “Never mistake obnoxiousness for audacity!”

Mysterioso kept walking. Over his shoulder, he muttered, “Yes, yes, familiar advice.” He had reached the brick wall, and begun following something. “Who was that, Professor Hoffman?”

Ottawa Keyes. Carter’s eyes snapped open.

He watched Mysterioso, who counted off steps from the fuse box and down the wall—then looked at how he was pinned, the easy hand first: left hand, handcuff around a U-bar. No special tools needed, which was good because Carter’s special tools were up his other sleeve. Striking the cuff against a hard surface could release him. Mysterioso had cuffed him with the U-bar a good distance from the floor. With enough slack, he could use the U-bar itself.

He remembered how every night he’d worried about Annabelle’s hands, how she could have broken bones so easily by fighting. His morning ritual of olive oil and milk. A piece of him had been killed. There was no way to feel how
entirely
that was going to ruin him. He moved his thumb. He
could
move his thumb.

Mysterioso held a fire ax. Carter took a deep breath. When Mysterioso came near enough to swing it, he would kick as hard as he could, but even that wouldn’t be enough.

Mysterioso walked past him with the fire ax. Then back to the fuse box, which he popped open. He brought down a lever. The left side of the stage was plunged into darkness. He brought it back up; then he did the same with the right, then the overheads, then levers that seemed to do nothing, perhaps connected to the outside power, and then he brought the house lights up and down. “Ah,” he said, “that’s it.”

Mysterioso walked along the wall about thirty feet, and then brought his ax over his head and down once, causing the blade to spark against the metal fasteners. He threw the ax aside and pried back on the
now-severed power line. He pulled it from its braces, which popped away like buttons, walking back to the fuse box, where he brought the power lever back on again. He now held, like a garden hose, forty feet of live cable, two 120-volt lines at 180 degrees out of phase, wrapped around a neutral, making 240 volts.

Carter bit down. He was not to be axed, but electrocuted. But then Mysterioso yelled, “Hey, Carter, how do you make the lion roar?”

. . .

Griffin had never been shot before. In his youth, he’d dreamed about it. Now, with the shock wearing off, all he could think for long minutes was how stupid he felt. Shot for no reason. Jack Griffin, idiot. There was now something definitive for his gravestone. It didn’t even hurt that much—he just felt weak. Moving might have been possible, but certainly wasn’t worth it.

He heard the two magicians talking. He watched as a little dog with diseased-looking skin lapped up his blood.

Griffin’s entire world filled up with the dog. He formed a complex relationship with him. He was thinking maybe he had actually lived his whole life for
this
moment, not the glory he’d hoped to die for, and the dog had lived its whole life without any foresight whatever. And here they were, the man who was always wrong, splayed before an animal.
Now I’m food for a vampire dog,
which seemed a fitting destiny. As Handsome grew bolder, actually standing in the blood, Griffin looked at the gauzy patches of white hair over his pink and grey skin. He saw a grey spot on the dog’s flank that looked like Florida. The world was a wonder. God’s infinite plan included the duplication of the state of Florida on a dog’s rump.

Then Handsome was overcome by greed and stepped directly to the source of his meal, Griffin’s side wound. Griffin felt sharp teeth on him, and his reflexes kicked in. A convulsive jerk. It was enough. Handsome recoiled, made a full circle, and watched Griffin from afar. If a dog’s eyes could make judgments, these were sizing him up, determining whether he was too dangerous to eat.

The little dog’s nose went in the air, and his lip curled. Without further preamble he trotted off.

Griffin chuckled, deep in his throat. He wasn’t meat yet.

“Griffin! Griffin? Can you hear me?”

He saw Carter, who was pinned just a few feet to his left, stealing glances at him, while Mysterioso was far away in the shadows, playing with the fuse box again.

Carter whispered, “Can you stand? Do you have another gun? Can you help me pull this knife out of the board?”

The answer to all those questions was no. But Griffin did feel a little stronger.

“Griffin,” he hissed, “crawl to the lion cage. Pull the pin. It’s by the floor.”

Mysterioso, satisfied that the lines would do, faced the cage. But Baby had gotten as far away as possible and sat with his back to him. Shocking the lion without seeing his face would never do. “Come, Baby. Come here.”

“Griffin, let the lion loose,” Carter whispered, head turned away from Mysterioso, speaking so quietly Griffin could barely hear him.

A wounded man letting a lion loose. At the word of a presidential assassin. Griffin glared at him with all the contempt he could muster.

Carter looked to the cage, and to Griffin, beseechingly. “I’ll confess to killing the President. Let the lion loose.”

. . .

Mysterioso reached into the cage with one hand and poked at the baked potato, of which a few bites had been taken. “Food, Baby. Come for food.” He heard a quick yip, its source somewhere nearby. Then a steady little whine that was somewhat muffled.

“Little man, where are you?” he asked with concern. This was not Handsome’s sweet play bark. It sounded strange.

He looked all around, at the crates and the dozens of places Handsome could be lost, then at the cage again. He saw a trail of tiny footprints outlined in Griffin’s blood. They led directly to a box near the cage, then into the cage, to the baked potato. The potato, now unattended, had a single dog-sized bite taken out of it.

“Little man?” Mysterioso asked anxiously.

Baby turned around slowly. Lions cannot grin, but Baby looked like he was grinning, for his mouth was open just wide enough to show off how well his great incisors made a cage for Handsome, who was alive and panting in his mouth.

“No!” Mysterioso dropped the power line. “No! No!” He waved his arms in front of him as if surrendering. Baby sat down, all four legs down, looking like a sphinx, teeth—and dog—bared.

They froze like that, Mysterioso afraid to move, as if any motion would alarm Baby. Finally, inspired, he brought his palms together.
Clap.