Two for the Show (2 page)

Even from my quiet remove on the fifteenth fairway, I suspected almost immediately it was Eddie behind it. Eddie, who had purchased tickets for that night’s show, as I discovered when I searched my databases, but had not shown up for it, which indicated last-minute indecision, maybe a shifting, conflicted abduction plan of some sort.
Should I be there for the show? Should I not be?
I had researched Eddie and his henchmen previously, knew their names and addresses. I started to check credit card purchase patterns for Eddie and his henchmen, and they turned out to be highly irregular in the hours preceding Wallace’s disappearance. (How do I access their credit card records? More on that later.) A stop for gas at a station not on their regular route. A similarly irregular purchase at a hardware store none of them had ever been in before—rope, tape, locks, and a chain, the receipt said. (Hmm. Gee.) But the big giveaway was the fast food—tacos, Chinese food, pasta, chicken marsala. Probably would have paid cash normally, but there were four entrées—which told me four people and that, however I chose to proceed, I’d have to be four times as careful.

Of course, the fact that no one can know I have any connection to Wallace, the fact that I must remain a ghost, means I can’t call up his friends, can’t make investigative calls to hotels or restaurants, can’t trace his whereabouts like a traditional detective—but it puts me at a great advantage for actually helping. No one knows I’m there.

Which let me get fairly close to the house where they had him stowed—stowed to do Eddie’s bidding, presumably. To read the minds of poker players at a high-stakes table or of a jewelry store owner with a combination safe, to place some big bets, help them pull off a heist; to answer Eddie’s questions about horse race or football game outcomes; or all of the above. To be the infallible criminal asset that Eddie had probably dreamed of since boyhood. Eddie was living in a
Superman
episode. Thinking,
This is all I need to become a criminal mastermind.

Looking in the house’s generous bay window with a high-pow
ered nightscope (I have the toys—but just the scope, no weapon attached), I watched. Just the thugs—talking, watching television—and no Wallace, from which I concluded that he was locked away somewhere else in the house. I watched until one of the thugs knocked on a closed door, and I could see him mouth some words at it and cock his head next to it for a response. I smiled with a quick satisfaction. Wallace the Amazing: found.

I waited, patiently. With the patience, the altered sense of time of a man who passes unmarked, unnoticed, undifferentiated hours in front of a computer screen.

I waited until all the lights in the house went out, and I waited some more.

Then, moving around the far side of the house, I could see a small, high window that, given the simple layout and dimensions of a desert house like this, must be to the room behind that closed door. The window was too small to fit through. But I could approach it pretty safely in the cloudless night. (Don’t get me wrong, though—my heart was pounding; I was terrified. You never know what thugs will get it in their heads to do; unpredictability is part of their charm.) In a moment, I was looking through that small window at Wallace the Amazing, and he was looking at me, face-to-face for the first time in years. I knew of course what he looked like. It took him a moment to know it was me, because he hadn’t seen me since I was twenty. We both looked at the small window grimly. The window between us. That we couldn’t risk raising our voices to talk through.

It was one of those desert houses thrown up by the hundreds in the fifties and early sixties—the very start of the booming, blooming desert, the first wave of settlement. Its indistinguishability, its sameness and invisibility, made it a perfect hideout. It also made it vulnerable. Because it was one of those classic pre-slab, pre-condo Western desert houses with stucco walls but a wooden floor—meaning it was raised up a few feet off the sand (so the varmints and bugs don’t get in), and you can crawl past the flimsy wooden trelliswork and underneath it pretty easily.

Wallace pointed to the floor. I nodded. But I was way ahead of him.

I’d brought the tool bag I keep in the car with me. Some screwdrivers, some wire, some lock-picking pins and punches and pliers, and the most primitive tool in it, a crowbar. Quietly, carefully, now crouched beneath the house, I jimmied the crowbar between the floor joist and a wide, soft, aged plank of fifties flooring. As I levered the crowbar down, I watched the plank begin to lift up, cooperatively, with only a low, unsuspicious squeak that could merely be the old house’s inveterate protests in the desert wind. As I began to loosen the second plank, the first one began to lift up above me, as if magically (Wallace assisting silently from above), and with the second plank loosened, Wallace now slipped lithely through the opening—a nimble seal, like it was a trick he had rehearsed a thousand times. A magic act’s trapdoor.

I tried to settle the two planks of wood roughly back into place but didn’t spend long at it. The whole operation took less than a minute.

I motioned him silently to follow me. With four thugs only a few feet above us, we could not risk the sound or the time of even a quick exchange of greeting. We could be heard. We could be trapped. Twenty years, and here I am inches from Wallace in the darkness, but I could not risk even a few words. I put my finger over my lips to assure the silence, to protect him.

He looked at me, studied me for a moment, nodded his head affirmatively—with understanding
and
regret? Both, I choose to think.

And once we were out from beneath the house, standing in the yard for a fraught, suspended moment, enveloped in night and cool desert air and the mild fresh scent of the bougainvillea that gripped every nearby wall and fence, the sliver of desert moon above us waning cooperatively, leaving us in shadow, Wallace surprised me when he turned abruptly and took off. Striding almost arrogantly away from the front of the house. Where there was a good chance they would see him. Which, I realized later, is what he wanted. For them to see him, striding out—floating out—across the desert alone. Amazing.

“Hey!” two of the thugs yelled. Because they
did
see him. I cringed, expected to hear warning shots, see them running toward him—but the desert was pitch-black, and he was already too far away for them to catch. Too far away for them to stumble out into the darkness, then hustle back inside for their Escalade keys, hurry back out, rev it up, spin it around, and find him in a sweep of headlights. He disappeared around a hillock, into the darkness. He would undoubtedly get a ride from the next car. Maybe from a shocked fan, gratified to help. Who would, it occurred to me, as Wallace knew, more than likely spread the story, tell the tale.

He would become known for pulling off the miraculous, immaculate escape himself. The word would spread. The myth would grow.

Indeed, the whole episode only added to the Amazing’s allure. Now he was not only a mentalist but an escape artist as well. A
real
escape, from gangsters with guns. He now added that skill to the magician’s résumé, to round him out, to make him complete. The inexplicable, amazing escape only burnished Wallace’s image, even for Eddie himself. It was proof positive to Eddie—who was jailed, of course, if only briefly, as a gesture, but interviewed ceaselessly in jail, his local celebrity revived, in telling the tale. Eddie didn’t seem to mind, loved the attention, and here was proof he could wave in the face of the doubters that there was something otherworldly, not of this planet, in Wallace’s abilities.

I watched Wallace go, just as the thugs did. I had expected to guide him out, of course, lead him through the dark to my hidden waiting car, to drop him somewhere civilized, somewhere safe. But he had turned away abruptly, silently. Even amid my rescue, maintaining our distance. With his silent turn, making a statement about preserving our arrangement. Not risking or jeopardizing or altering it—no matter what.

So instead, I watched him glide across the desert, before I turned and crouched in a run to my car. Still unseen. Still unknown.

TWO

The immense black-velvet curtain parts,
and he walks out unassuming, inattentive, lost in thought, as if unaware of where he is. He stands in the middle of the stage. A single spotlight bathes him in a fierce brightness, as if he were a medical specimen under examination. For ninety minutes, he doesn’t move. Doesn’t take a step. It’s the antithesis of a stage show, of glitz and glimmer, and that’s the point. That it is nevertheless—and all the more—riveting.

“What you’re about to see isn’t really a show,” he says. (Always the same opening: ritualistic, the call to worship, the opening prayer.) “It’s a partnership. A meeting of the minds, a conversation that we are all a part of. It is a connection between us. A connection between us all that is close, and real, and precortical, and in fact the most powerful thing in our lives. A degree of human connection that is entirely unconscious for the fortunate majority of us, but alas, not for me. A connection that I can demonstrate but cannot explain. Every night I come out here with the same wish to explain it, and the same inability to explain it. It is weird, and odd, so weird and odd and inexplicable that it will trouble your sleep tonight, stay with you the rest of your life, but there is nothing I can do about that. I stand here in khakis and a blue button-down shirt and conventional shoes and a conventional haircut to try to make it all less odd, more comfortable, which doesn’t work, but at least I try. Is it a kind of dream state? Some kind of access to our common DNA?”

And then he simply starts. Scans along the front row and says, “Hi, Eleanor. Have we ever met?” A white-haired matron shakes her head eagerly, no. Already looks faint with anticipation. “So it may surprise you to know that I remember when you were a redhead.” She smiles, and a murmuring tide of appreciation washes over the audience. “Clairol Shade 251”—her eyes widen—“and I remember when you were a blonde, Revlon Color Wheel 950.” And her eyes widen even more, and now there is a rolling wave of laughter at Eleanor’s mutable vanity so blithely revealed. “And did you know that sitting in row twenty-four tonight is a man named Rex Sterrett, who picked you up when you were a redhead, at a bar called the Hearty Seaman”—Wallace’s eyebrow arching comically at the lewd potential of the bar’s name, a responsive fresh wave of laughter, in on the joke—“in Red Hook—I kid you not, folks—Red Hook, New York, on Saturday, March 24th, in 2001. Stand up over there, Rex, look at each other, see if you remember each other. Be honest, now . . .”

And the audience by now is of course going crazy, going crazy because of what they have just seen, and going crazy because they know it is just beginning . . .

“You remember that redhead, don’t you, Rex? And I’ll remind you both, in case you do this one-night-stand thing a lot, which I know neither of you does, I’ll remind you that it was snowing that night, accumulations of six inches, and you talked about, let’s see . . .” He pauses. “
Rain Man
, the Cubs, Springsteen, but the snow gave you both the excuse of taking Rex’s 1985 F-150 green pickup—remember that truck, Rex?—to your apartment, remember the hole in the leather driver’s seat where you burned it with your lighter, Rex? And maybe we’ll come back to you two later in the evening to hear what happened later in your evening, but I’m not going to do that to you now . . .”

The audience is roaring.

“. . . because do you realize that on your way there you passed a house with toile curtains? The toile is a French barnyard pattern, by the way. Well, that house belongs to Elma Antonella, who’s here tonight with her husband celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this weekend. Stand up, Elma.” And an astonished older woman screams and obediently stands as if in her pew and the priest or Jesus or God himself has commanded it. “You know the curtains I mean, Elma?”

“Of course! Yes!”

“And Elma, that same barnyard toile is in two other houses of audience members here; it’s the bedspread of”—he points—“Anna Durkin.”

A blonde woman in a group of blonde women stands and screams, “Yes!”

“And it’s the living room curtains of the Arthur Golds . . .” He looks across the room at Arthur and Bev Gold, whom he motions to stand, who do stand, shakily, stunned. “You see, we’re all connected, we’re all so close, we’re intertwined, and we just don’t know it; we pass one another unaware, but we have no degrees of separation, none . . .” His theme is connection, and he will go on like this for ninety minutes, connecting classmates, neighbors across fences, couples at adjacent restaurant tables, at the supermarket, on vacations, and it’s stunning. “Amelia, you’re wearing a brooch inherited from your grandmother, but it was made by the grandfather of Allan Wolf, in the fiftieth row. Look at the back, Amelia, look closely and you’ll see the A. W. of Allan’s grandfather, emigrated from Minsk, right, Alan?” Gasps, breathlessness, eruptions, paroxysms, an orgy of excitement and credulity and disbelief and belief.

As you can see, I do a pretty damn good job.

But so does he.

“Connection, it is all connection, incredible connection, it’s a lesson to us, isn’t it, the profundity of our connection to one another, whereas I am only a medium for it . . .”

And then, toward the end of the show, as always, his aw-shucks, I’m-just-like-you shrug. His earnest attempt to share the gift. To take everyone into it. To demystify it in a way that only mystifies it all the more. “That little coincidence that you notice, smile at, half dismiss, maybe mention to your wife or friend. The person you were just thinking about, calling you out of the blue on the phone, suddenly there in line at the checkout, brought up by a friend in conversation. An unusual word you just said to someone, suddenly there on the page in front of you. Your hotel room number is the same as your ATM PIN number. Your golf partner has the same birthday as your wife. Your gym locker number turns out to be your zip code. Someone you were just thinking about, suddenly coming toward you on the sidewalk, suddenly driving by the other way in her new convertible. The kind of little coincidence that makes even the practical, the pragmatic, the faithless, wonder for a moment about the inner clockworks of the world. I work inward or outward from the little coincidence. The little feeling in passing you get from that, a mild, free-floating anxiety or a frisson of fear or excitement—that’s what I’m working from, curling in or expanding out from it like a nautilus shell. You wonder: Is there something? Something more to it? Something more you’re not aware of, you’re not seeing? Yes, there is. And I decided, from an early age, to pay attention. I sensed there was something there.

“It’s those little synapses of connection, of one thing leaping inside you to be part of another, that are what I do, what I note, what I have learned to observe. Those coincidences are connection, the poor cousin, the poor relation, of deeper connection, but it’s the same thing. Let me be clear: I am not reading minds. I am reading the coincidence, the surprising relationships of the human mind. What we dismiss as coincidence is connection, gently disguised so modern man can accept it, can handle it . . .”

And his closing—always the same. As the lights go down, the spotlight remains on him. “I’m glad you’ve come. I hope you’ve had a good time. But to really understand, to truly feel the full effect of the magic of this connection, well, you have to experience it personally . . .” And a second spotlight materializes out of his own, breaks away and skims suddenly across the crowd to land on a startled audience member, and after a moment of focusing, he continues. “. . . like Emily Baines. Thirty-three? Wirehaired terrier and Doberman? Planning a renovation? Still debating the Corian versus the marble, although your sister Anna says marble.” And Emily is screaming, wide-eyed, and the audience is whistling, and Wallace says, “Connection. Good night.” And the two spotlights, his and Emily’s, go black.

Tent show, rock concert, maestro standing humbly by his instrument and taking a bow, all in one.

Wallace the Amazing.

His biography is well known. Easily accessible. Familiar without even knowing how you know it. Legendary. Archer Wallace. Poor boy of the American South. Nothing but sky, dirt, fields—nothing to distract him. Nothing to interrupt the development of his gift. No one to tell him he had a unique ability and frighten him or socialize him out of it. A simple but amazing past. One that I closely manage and monitor at all its Internet sources. Part of my job is to continually buff and shine and embellish this public biography—of simplicity, of giftedness, of springing astonishing and whole from the American landscape.

How does he do it?
Rational people are challenged by him, to the point where it makes them uncomfortable, works on their assumptions, turns them anew to contemplations of a sixth sense, of faith, of an unseen universe, of ghosts, of alternate forms of knowledge like intuition, of brain structure, the continuing unknowns of neural pathways, all things that they haven’t thought about since high school or college bull sessions.
How does he do it?
He’s allowed reporters into his world, to follow him, to spend time with him and his family, and the resulting story, in which the reporter finds nothing, therefore ends up speculating about faith and the supernatural and the ancient capacities of the brain and man’s sixth sense and unexplained strands and coils of DNA. And the longer they find nothing, no trail, no hint or trace of me, the more the press puzzles in a magazine profile or a broadcast news segment, the better for Wallace the Amazing.

How does he do it?
The simple, rich, reverberating theme of Wallace’s life.

How does he do it?
Here’s a little more on how:

Government databases, IRS databases, credit bureau databases, credit card company databases. For those I can’t hack myself, I call on my Internet “friends”—online hacker acquaintanceships of long standing—all of us protected by screen names, and we swap tips and secrets and techniques, and labor under the banners of freedom and the free flow of information. Sometimes I pay for the information. My Internet friends have no idea what I’m doing with the information. They assume, I’m sure, it’s for something more conventionally illicit. And I’ve had contacts, friends, in many of these offices and companies since well before their computer systems were secure. Contacts, friends, who
built
those systems. Friends in their respective IT departments since before there
were
systems.

Plus, there’s an entire subculture that thrives, gets an adrenaline rush, from accessing computer systems—not necessarily to profit from them, just for the pure accomplishment of it—and I am tapped into that subculture.

Think of my computer mouse as a real one, skittering around desks at night, finding morsels and scraps sloppily left out, there for the taking. Munch, munch. Click, click. Funny, isn’t it, that what appears onstage as the triumph of intuition, is in fact the triumph of its opposite—data. So that night after night, I observe the odd standoff of science and faith. The pure juggernaut power of data versus the ineffable power of blind belief. It’s a conundrum, and a nightly showdown: mankind’s historic yearning for explanation versus an equally historic enchantment with the unexplained.

He lives in a compound out in the high desert. A bright, shimmering, white-and-pink sandstone fortress of domes and turrets, rising like a mirage, a sensual Arabian fantasy, set up on a bluff, proffering an extra half hour of essentially private and personal afternoon light. Protected by massive gates with fanciful filigree. Among the believers, among the credulous and the converted, the theory is that he chose this spot because it is removed from the mental waves and pulses that relentlessly surround him, that he cannot quiet or avoid except far out in the pristine desert. I know better. That he was simply looking for privacy and quiet for himself and his family, to replicate and preserve the intense control that he is used to maintaining onstage and backstage in his professional life and that he wants, demands, cherishes, in his personal life as well.

And eventually, Vegas’s endless supply of rock supergroup reunion shows, the titillating dance and sex reviews, the elaborate choreography in water or midair, the spectacle, the visual assault, all wear thin, no longer fascinate, and there is one show left: Wallace the Amazing, entering minds, invading the last realm, bringing nightly, reliably, a note from the beyond. A show that sends its audience in on itself, that summons everyone’s past, that frightens, that exhilarates with the unexplained, that burrows into your consciousness, into all your questions about omniscience and thought and mind and life. A show that is intimate, dangerously intimate, for each audience member, because it is about us as individuals, special, unique. A show that makes magic not out of spectacle but out of our daily world, our daily connections, our daily lives. It is, quite understandably, quite unassailably, the ultimate Vegas hit.