Two for the Show (25 page)

Our hands tied. Our fates tied. Bound like this, we’d never get very far. We are stuck here, to be found by the Las Vegas police, here at the edge of the desert, only a mile or so from the bank branch.

We will look, at first, of course, like victims. We
are
victims. But when the police interview the bank clerks, the bank officers, the story will get more complex. And probably they already have descriptions from Wallace the Amazing. And no matter what, we will be held. If there is no Amanda, we will undoubtedly be held.

Bound to each other. And not able to see each other. The metaphor is all I think of, as three squad cars pull up.

TWENTY

The Las Vegas police holding
cells are clean, modern, germ-free, and suspect-free, for that matter, except for Dominique and me, in adjacent cells, our plastic ties now cut. The cells are painted in cheerful tones, obviously the conclusion of a report from expensive industrial psychology consultants.

We wait silently, in a silence so total it is perhaps disconcerting to the two guards observing us. But our work has always been done in silence. Nothing feels more natural to us—even in cells next to each other. We have always been in adjacent cells, after all. We know, without discussing it, who we are waiting for.

In the afternoon, he arrives. Strides off the TV screen and into the holding cell area with the same forthright gait, the same self-contained aura of disconnection and indifference. Daddy—coming to get the misbehaving children. To rescue us? Or to teach us a lesson? Daddies do both.

He stops outside the holding cells, stares first at Dominique.

The accompanying detectives observe, can report, only the continuing silence.

He shifts his focus to stare at me. Equal time.

His daughter’s captors. His mutinous employees.

It is the third time I have seen him face-to-face. The third and, I sense, last time. It has been twenty years since we looked at each other across the coffee shop table on the morning he hired me. There was also, of course, that frantic predawn moment when I freed him from the clutches of Big Eddie a few years ago, but that was rushed and desperate and in the dark, and did not even include a good look for either of us.

Both times were before I knew he was my father.

There are no lines around his eyes. He is as lean as ever. Anodyne. Artificial. His body, his physical presence, seems to have made little concession to time or reality.

“Do you know these people?” the detective asks him.

“No,” he says. Our nonexistence, our orphan status, our aloneness, confirmed. By the one person who could resurrect us. Who could bring us into the land of the living.
No.
With that one syllable, consigned once more to our strange, faceless existence.

And really, how could he say yes? How could I expect it? Because that would mean investigating the connection, the link between us, and finding absolutely none at first, none at all, and that would only stir more interest, deeper digging, until the truth is revealed. He must think, somewhere in him, that if he refuses to recognize us—says he doesn’t know us—that the show can go on. The consummate showman, or the consummate fool. The consummate illusionist . . . or delusionist.

“They haven’t found Amanda yet,” Wallace informs us, assuming (correctly) that it’s the first information that either of us would want—and making it appear to all observers that it’s what preoccupies him most. “No trace of her. Do you two have any idea where she is?” Asked with the naïveté and forthrightness of a desperate dad—imploring the criminals directly.

“She took off across the desert.” I know he knows that already, of course, but I say it so that he hears it from me, from an eyewitness. And in truth, to hear myself say something live, actual, to him.

“You think she’s going to turn up?” he asks us—generally, not directed at either of us specifically. It is almost merely rumination.

Dominique shrugs. I am silent. He looks at us.

His unspoken question:
What did you tell her? How much?

And our unspoken answer:
Enough. Enough that she took off across a desert. Enough that she wanted to disappear.

If he were to say to the guards, “I’d like to speak to these two privately,” well, that would risk revealing a previous relationship among us all, which the Vegas police would feel compelled to explore further, and they might stumble into the whole truth of our cozy connection.

But he surprises his police and guard entourage, if not us, with his next statement.

“I don’t want to press charges.” Wallace looks at us. Altruistic, superhuman, always surprising. “However these two were involved or not”—a dismissive flutter of hand like a magic wand—“I forgive them.”

“But your daughter hasn’t been located,” blusters the detective standing next to Wallace—
K
ITEGAWA
, his nametag says, presumably here in special deference to Wallace—and he is on the verge of outright anger. “Your daughter is still missing.”

“Yes. But these two didn’t take her.”

The detective: “How do you know that?”

Wallace turns to the lead guard, smiles thinly, sardonically, tilts his head a little.
Are you kidding? How do you think I know? Because I am Wallace the Amazing. And I know.

The detective appears sheepish. Looks uncomfortable. But then stands taller. “Well, look, sir, it doesn’t really matter if you want to drop charges. The state will press charges in any case.”

“Oh, they will?” And I can hear in his tempered response, a challenge.
We’ll see about that.

And for once, Wallace the Amazing is not the mind reader. I am. I can read his mind:

He can’t do the show without us. He needs us. At least one of us. His redundancy system, his backup plan (in case one of us gets sick and dies, or is in a crash, or has a stroke) is now side by side in a Las Vegas holding cell. Unless there is a third, or a fourth data specialist. But if there were, Wallace wouldn’t be here at all. He wouldn’t need to be. He wouldn’t be taking the risk of being seen with us. He needs us.

And without our jobs, jailed here—nonexistent, off-the-grid black holes for the LV police to begin to explore, unless he steps in and claims us—we need him. To get us out, his clout the only way—we need him.

So it’s symbiotic. As symbiotic as ever. Which makes any assessment or judgment about love and true feeling a mere side consideration. Need is first. As simple as it is transactional. As defiant of any deeper subtext. He needs us. We need him.

The detective looks at us. “Anything to say for yourselves? In your own defense? To explain yourselves?”

Yes. I’m her half brother. This is her mother.
But that startling revelation wouldn’t change anything. Oh, it would create a little stir. It would be interesting. It would provide context and explanation. But we still kidnapped her. We still demanded ransom. We still stole her away from her life. Remaining undiscovered. Unknown. Ciphers inputting the data to the Amazing machine.

So we remain silent. Our customary silence, easy to maintain, and the detective, taking us for hardened professionals (yes, but of a certain kind), mildly disappointed but unsurprised, turns away.

But not before asking me: “What happened to your finger?”

The missing fingertip.

Proof forever that I am a kidnapper.

An extremely masochistic kidnapper.

A misinformed kidnapper.

An incompetent kidnapper.

But a kidnapper just the same.

TWENTY-ONE

Eventually, everyone comes to Vegas.

Everyone wants to see it at least once. Feel it once. Experience it once. Its institutionalized happiness. A city just for the fun of it. For the thrill of it. For the hell of it. See if it’s really different. But most of all, see if it makes them
feel
any different. If it takes them outside their own personalities, their familiar selves, if only a little bit, if only for a little while. That’s the secret of Vegas. Its unspoken, misunderstood appeal. Not to escape your own
life
for a little while, or for a little longer, or forever. No—it’s to escape your own
self
—for a little while, for a little longer, maybe forever.

That’s the secret of the Vegas vacation. Vacating your usual perceptions. Vacating your habits. Your previous point of view. For a little while, vacating your self.

And like twenty thousand people who stream in every day from across the country, a woman shows up among them. She is dressed plainly—print dress, flats, hair up, sunglasses up on her head, ready for the sunshine. Tall, thin, wrinkles on her neck and around her eyes, but former beauty still in evidence. Oversize purse. Roller bag. Moving with the crowd through the airport. Taking the bus into town. Dropping her bag at her hotel. But then, not walking along the strip, looking up at the hotels, watching the fountains, like the thousands of others who arrived with her. No, instead, hopping into a cab, and giving the driver directions he’s rarely heard an out-of-town tourist ask for, if ever, in all his years here. A downtown address. The Las Vegas police station.

“Welcome to Vegas,” I say to my mother, as she stares at me, silently, through the bars. “Everyone should see it once.”

And while there are bars between us, that’s the least of our prisons, and we both know it. The setting is as metaphoric as it is real, and that is what renders it surreal.

For a week now, I have imagined flying back there one more time, confronting her, asking—but not asking, of course, demanding to know—what was it exactly between her and Wallace the Amazing, why had she done this, what are the details of this deal with the devil? And if she understood what she was doing, if she understood the damage she had done, how could she do this to her child?

But of course, she didn’t know. Or didn’t know at the time. At the time she thought it was the right thing. Security for her son, a place, a career, a way to guarantee that he would not be merely an afterthought, an annoying byproduct, of the man she’d had a liaison with. A way to engage the man, make the boy a part of the man’s life. But the man of course had concocted a way to make the boy a part of his life
and
keep him
away
from his life. To put him—me—into a permanent half-life. A ghost life.

She is silent. But the silence feels entirely familiar. Because there has always been silence. We are separated, but that feels familiar too, because we have always been separated. It is a prison, but that also feels familiar, because we have always been imprisoned—by the agreement, by the “arrangement,” the floating, unwritten, unsigned document, the human codicil between her and Wallace, delivered and agreed to amid circumstances still opaque to me.

“That locked trunk that we fought over when I left for college,” I say to her quietly. “It’s empty, isn’t it? A big argument over the contents, that big padlock on it for all my years growing up, and it’s always been empty.” Nothing in there. Nothing but whatever I chose to imagine, to create a father out of the one who died in an accident. Nothing but a further note of Wallace the Amazing’s psychological mastery.

Her silent downward glance confirms the trunk’s emptiness. An emptiness real and metaphoric.
What were you thinking?
I want to scream. But I know what she was thinking. And she knows I know.

“Say the word, and I will bring him down,” she says to me now, looking up, eyes narrowed, her prey vivid in her mind. “I can do it. DNA shows that he is your father, that I am your mother, and I will tell the world how he abandoned us. Another celebrity with a buried past. By itself, it’s nothing of course.
People
magazine stuff. But this celebrity has baggage he can’t shrug off and discard. A past the world won’t be able to brush off and ignore. His whole identity, swiped wholesale from someone else. A complete fake, onstage and off. A young woman, seduced and abandoned as almost a child herself. Say the word, Charles, and I can bring him down for you.”

I look at her. I
don’t
say the word. I shrug—unsure, undecided, defeated. I have the sense she knows I won’t “say the word.” That whatever my rage, resentment, fantasies of revenge, sense of justice, she knows it isn’t in my personality to say the word.

And then her posture of action, of force, of “say the word,” melts away in front of me; her eyes are suddenly soaking, and tears roll silently, plentifully down her cheeks. I instantly remember her weeping from behind the bathroom door. Grief, regret, suppressed and subverted—hiding no more.

My mother’s small, rounded shoulders heave. Her head hangs, her tears flow, a pained whimper, the burden of all the silent years sluicing through her body. I can’t reach for her, the bars are between us, and it occurs to me that’s exactly what permits her to cry. Experiencing it alone. Safely separated from my sympathy or recrimination. All the suppressed feeling triggered by my presence, but taking responsibility for it alone.
I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I’ve ruined so much for us. I’ve hidden the truth for a lifetime. Two lifetimes—my own, and my only son’s.
All the things that could be said, but don’t have to be said, they are so obvious to us both.

And then—absently wiping her eyes, straightening her spine, drawing a breath—she alters the picture a little, in a way that my imaginings, my scenarios, had not factored in. A way that displaces the midwestern matron, the quiet, safe, exceedingly private, shy woman who raised me. She drops the last (I hope the last, I assume the last) in these two weeks’ series of bombshells, which have pockmarked and torn up the road ahead of me to where its route, even its direction, is unrecognizable.

“I was with him in the jungle,” she says. Looks at me, gauges my reaction, lets me absorb it for a moment, prepare myself a little for the unexpected, dense path down which she is heading, before she continues. Smiling. “You were conceived in a hammock. Born on the banks of the Amazon. The only white child for a thousand miles.”

The demure midwestern widow. There is turning out to be much more to her. My sense of being ambushed, my resentment and anger at being kept in the dark, is tempered by my sense of discovery—my innate, professional, detective curiosity.

She pauses for a moment. Furrows her brow. Thinking, it seems, how to express the next thought. And when she does, I see it is, and she means it as, a summation of Wallace’s life, his philosophy, and his appeal for a conventional, impressionable young girl.

“He followed no rules.” She smiles wistfully. “Saw no boundaries.”

In the abstract, it sounds ridiculously romantic. Overstated. Except of course, the evidence is overwhelming. The case was consistent over years, over decades, over an entire lifetime.
No rules. No boundaries.
So he made his own.
No rules. No boundaries.
It was succinct. It was
explanatory
.

Yet he had forced me to live by the strictest set of rules. A tight little box. Organized into a life of unvarying routine, predictability, strictly enforced by my occupation. My only escapes imaginary, temporary, not real.

“What’s his real name?”

She smiles softly. “Robert.”

She said it so sweetly, so quietly, so full of ineffable and long-suppressed connection and emotion, it made the moment all the more painful.

Real name: Edward Lambent Corder.
The name from my painstaking research, now blinking its warning pixels in my anxious imagination.

I had expected to hear “Edward,” of course. My question had been intended only as confirmation—not to probe whether my mother was finally being truthful, or still respecting some pact, or hiding in some further weave of secrecy. But suddenly, all those questions were opened. And the element of testing her that was hidden in my question, was front and center in her unexpected answer. Was she lying? (Why now?) Or was my Internet research somehow wrong? (Planted there expressly for me?) Or—and this only occurred to me at the moment, from the tonality of her answer—
does she not know?

In the next moment, the human trumped the analytic; motherhood triumphed. Because she must have seen my face fall a little, must have seen the falter, the stutter in my expression, the moment of disappointment, the involuntary blink.

“Not Edward,” she says with a knowing smile, clearly aware of what I’d been thinking, what I had found in my Internet searching. “Robert.”

In that simple moment, proving herself in a way that required no more research from me. That let me finally shut off the computer.

And in that same moment I realize something fundamental about identity. Something simple and profound and undetective-like.
It doesn’t matter what his name is. It only matters who HE is. Who he is to her. And to me.

“Robert,” I repeat. A little crumb, an edge, a tincture of actuality.

She waits a beat. Looks around at the holding cell behind me, as if aware of it for the first time. As if aware of the world for the first time.

“The connection was all the more surprising and profound for both of us, considering how the deck was stacked against us to begin with.”

“Meaning?”

“I wasn’t just an innocent midwestern girl. Though I was certainly supposed to appear exactly that way to him.”

I feel my heart accelerate. My stomach feeling queasy. 

“What do you mean?”

“I had been hired to become his girlfriend. Recruited by the US government.” With irony, with bitterness, muted but not extinguished by the years. “Summoned by my country.”

I am simply looking at her, while she continues, explaining . . .

“To be on the inside. Become his lover. Report back . . .”

“Report back to who?”

“To the two federal agents who hired me. A man and a woman.”

No question which man and woman that might be. My heart beats a little faster, the detective’s thrill at the puzzle pieces—intractable, impossible shapes—finally shifting toward one another. But there is a problem of course. A problem of time. My mother was young then . . . she’s now sixty . . .

“Federal agents?”

“Very young, good looking, both of them. Newbies. Confident. Freshly recruited themselves to blend in as college kids traveling the Amazon, so not much older than me. Bent on getting their man.” And even as she continues, I am getting an inkling.
Las Vegas. City of new beginnings.
I feel a first, mild itch of comprehension.
Online photos that don’t match the databases.
The puzzle starts to take shape. Only more so. Only deeper. “But they made a serious mistake, didn’t they,” my mother says, “a serious miscalculation, when they convinced an impressionable, beautiful nineteen-year-old to go to bed with him. To appear as if she had fallen under his sway. The problem being, I
did
fall under his sway. He was . . . so . . .” And here she searches the cell, the bars, the ceiling, for the word, and can’t find it, and settles with a shrug for an inadequate substitute. “So
everything
, I guess, to a nineteen-year-old girl. They feared him, those two agents. But the fear they felt, that was part of his allure for me. I became his girlfriend, all right, just as they hoped, and then so much more than that. His muse. His confidante. His companion. But it was
my
deceit at first, Charles. I deceived him . . . I was the first deceiver.”

Perhaps the first deceiver. But not the last. Now I understood why Vegas for the Stewartsons. Why here. And by extension, why me. Vegas. Gambling, prostitution, entertainment . . . and plastic surgery. Radical treatments. The latest techniques. Whatever, however much, you want. Pushing the envelope. The clinics will do anything. Combining it with vitamins, pharmaceuticals, the latest unapproved unlicensed breakthroughs in extending youth and strength. Ground zero for the shadowy, quasi-scientific, anti-aging industry.

The strange animal vigor of the Stewartsons. That odd, pasted-on, eternal look of theirs. The strange, eerie, indefinable angularity I saw in their faces. Taut skin, bulging eyes. Their appearance struck me only as odd, vaguely disconcerting. Part and parcel of their sense of menace and threat.

I am so naive—so disconnected, so closed off in my online existence—it had never even occurred to me. And in fairness, I always saw them only glancingly at first—tracking them from far behind, ambushed by them in my condo at night and Debbie’s apartment at night as well, shades always cautiously drawn, tied up in darkness after a disorienting blow to the head, light purposely low, and then dark motel rooms and hideout, also kept cautiously dark. Never a single full-on, well-lit view, as I thought about it, until the bank meetings. As our furtive existence had worked so well for hiding my own fingertip, it had worked for hiding the freshness of their identities.

It went back to the very beginning, didn’t it? No wonder I’d been confused by the online photos of the original Dave and the fake Dave. No wonder my original research was so flawed, why the data was so contradictory, made no sense. Because “Dave” and “Sandi”
were
different. Different, even, from their own previous selves. Had new, different faces. Photo cross-referencing doesn’t work, with new, different faces. That indefinable, floating
otherness
emanating from their hands, in their eyes. You idiot—it
was
an otherness.

And simply assuming that the shriveled-up ghost I rescued from the motel bathroom was the real Dave—
living
with him, nursing him back to health—until he turned out to be Archer Wallace. Showing me once more, proving again, how wrong I could be. How fallible, how vulnerable, are my own assumptions and perceptions.