"A hotel," he said, “is a good idea."
A look of doubt had crossed her face.
"What about your wife…?" she said. "We might be seen."
He took her hand. "Shall we be invisible, then?"
"I'm serious."
"So am I," he insisted. "Take it from me; seeing is not believing. I should know. It's the cornerstone of my profession." She did not look much reassured. "If anyone recognises us," he told her, "I'll simply tell them their eyes are playing tricks."
She smiled at this, and he kissed her. She returned the kiss with unquestionable fervor.
"Miraculous," he said, when their mouths parted. "Shall we go before the tigers gossip?"
He led her across the stage. The cleaners had not yet got about their business, and there, lying on the boards, was a litter of rose-buds. Some had been trampled, a few had not. Swann took his hand from hers, and walked across to where the flowers lay.
She watched him stoop to pluck a rose from the ground, enchanted by the gesture, but before he could stand upright again something in the air above him caught her eye. She looked up and her gaze met a slice of silver that was even now plunging towards him. She made to warn him, but the sword was quicker than her tongue. At the last possible moment he seemed to sense the danger he was in and looked round, the bud in his hand, as the point met his back. The sword's momentum carried it through his body to the hilt. Blood fled from his chest, and splashed the floor. He made no sound, but fell forward, forcing two-thirds of the sword's length out of his body again as he hit the stage. She would have screamed, but that her attention was claimed by a sound from the clutter of magical apparatus arrayed in the wings behind her, a muttered growl which was indisputably the voice of the tiger. She froze. There were probably instructions on how best to stare down rogue tigers, but as a Manhattanite born and bred they were techniques she wasn't acquainted with.
"Swann?" she said, hoping this yet might be some baroque illusion staged purely for her benefit. "Swann. Please get up."
But the magician only lay where he had fallen, the pool spreading from beneath him.
"If this is a joke -” she said testily,"- I'm not amused." When he didn't rise to her remark she tried a sweeter tactic. "Swann, my sweet, I'd like to go now, if you don't mind."
The growl came again. She didn't want to turn and seek out its source, but equally she didn't want to be sprung upon from behind.
Cautiously she looked round. The wings were in darkness. The clutter of properties kept her from working out the precise location of the beast. She could hear it still, however: its tread, its growl. Step by step, she retreated towards the apron of the stage. The closed curtains sealed her off from the auditorium, but she hoped she might scramble under them before the tiger reached her.
As she backed against the heavy fabric, one of the shadows in the wings forsook its ambiguity, and the animal appeared. It was not beautiful, as she had thought it when behind bars. It was vast and lethal and hungry. She went down on her haunches and reached for the hem of the curtain. The fabric was heavily weighted, and she had more difficulty lifting it than she'd expected, but she had managed to slide halfway under the drape when, head and hands pressed to the boards, she sensed the thump of the tiger's advance. An instant later she felt the splash of its breath on her bare back, and screamed as it hooked its talons into her body and hauled her from the sight of safety towards its steaming jaws.
Even then, she refused to give up her life. She kicked at it, and tore out its fur in handfuls, and delivered a hail of punches to its snout. But her resistance was negligible in the face of such authority; her assault, for all its ferocity, did not slow the beast a jot. It ripped open her body with one casual clout. Mercifully, with that first wound her senses gave up all claim to verisimilitude, and took instead to preposterous invention. It seemed to her that she heard applause from somewhere, and the roar of an approving audience, and that in place of the blood that was surely springing from her body there came fountains of sparkling light. The agony her nerve-endings were suffering didn't touch her at all. Even when the animal had divided her into three or four parts her head lay on its side at the edge of the stage and watched as her torso was mauled and her limbs devoured.
And all the while, when she wondered how all this could be possible – that her eyes could live to witness this last supper – the only reply she could think of was Swann's: "It's magic," he'd said.
Indeed, she was thinking that very thing, that this must be magic, when the tiger ambled across to her head, and swallowed it down in one bite.
Amongst a certain set Harry D'Amour liked to believe he had some small reputation – a coterie which did not, alas, include his ex-wife, his creditors or those anonymous critics who regularly posted dogs' excrement through his office letterbox. But the woman who was on the phone now, her voice so full of grief she might have been crying for half a year, and was about to begin again, she knew him for the paragon he was.
"-I need your help, Mr. D'Amour; very badly."
"I'm busy on several cases at the moment," he told her. "Maybe you could come to the office?" "I can't leave the house," the woman informed him. "I'll explain everything. Please come."
He was sorely tempted. But there were several out- standing cases, one of which, if not solved soon, might end in fratricide. He suggested she try elsewhere.
"I can't go to just anybody," the woman insisted.
"Why me?"
"I read about you. About what happened in Brooklyn."
Making mention of his most conspicuous failure was not the surest method of securing his services, Harry thought, but it certainly got his attention. What had happened in Wyckoff Street had begun innocently enough, with a husband who'd employed him to spy on his adulterous wife, and had ended on the top storey of the Lomax house with the world he thought he'd known turning inside out. When the body-count was done, and the surviving priests dispatched, he was left with a fear of stairs, and more questions than he'd ever answer this side of the family plot. He took no pleasure in being reminded of those terrors.
"I don't like to talk about Brooklyn," he said.
"Forgive me," the woman replied, “but I need somebody who has experience with… with the occult." She stopped speaking for a moment. He could still hear her breath down the line: soft, but erratic. "I need you," she said. He had already decided, in that pause when only her fear had been audible, what reply he would make. "I'll come."
"I'm grateful to you," she said. "The house is on East 61st Street -” He scribbled down the details. Her last words were, "Please hurry." Then she put down the phone.
He made some calls, in the vain hope of placating two of his more excitable clients, then pulled on his jacket, locked the office, and started downstairs. The landing and the lobby smelt pungent. As he reached the front door he caught Chaplin, the janitor, emerging from the basement.
"This place stinks," he told the man.
"It's disinfectant."
"It's cat's piss," Harry said. "Get something done about it, will you? I've got a reputation to protect." He left the man laughing.
The brownstone on East 61st Street was in pristine condition. He stood on the scrubbed step, sweaty and sour breathed, and felt like a slob. The expression on the face that met him when the door opened did nothing to dissuade him of that opinion.
"Yes?" it wanted to know.
"I'm Harry D'Amour," he said. "I got a call."
The man nodded. "You'd better come in," he said without enthusiasm.
It was cooler in than out; and sweeter. The place reeked of perfume. Harry followed the disapproving face down the hallway and into a large room, on the other side of which – across an oriental carpet that had everything woven into its pattern but the price – sat a widow. She didn't suit black; nor tears. She stood up and offered her hand. "Mr. D'Amour?"
"Yes."
"Valentin will get you something to drink if you'd like."
"Please. M ilk,
if you have it." His belly had been jittering for the last hour; since her talk of Wyckoff Street, in fact. Valentin retired from the room, not taking his beady eyes off Harry until the last possible moment. "Somebody died," said Harry, once the man had gone.
"That's right," the widow said, sitting down again. At her invitation he sat opposite her, amongst enough cushions to furnish a harem. "My husband."
"I'm sorry."
"There's no time to be sorry," she said, her every look and gesture betraying her words. He was glad of her grief; the tearstains and the fatigue blemished a beauty which, had he seen it unimpaired, might have rendered him dumb with admiration.
"They say that my husband's death was an accident," she was saying. "I know it wasn't."
"May I ask… your name?"
"I'm sorry. My name is Swann, Mr. D'Amour. Dorothea Swann. You may have heard of my husband?" The magician?"
"Illusionist," she said.
"I read about it. Tragic."
"Did you ever see his performance?"
Harry shook his head. "I can't afford Broadway, Mrs Swann."
"We were only over for three months, while his show ran. We were going back in September…" "Back?"
"To Hamburg," she said, "I don't like this city. It's too hot. And too cruel."
"Don't blame New York," he said. "It can't help itself."
"Maybe," she replied, nodding. "Perhaps what happened to Swann would have happened anyway, wherever we'd been. People keep telling me: it was an accident. That's all. Just an accident." "But you don't believe it?" Valentin had appeared with a glass of milk. He set it down on the table in front of Harry. As he made to leave, she said: "Valentin. The letter?"
He looked at her strangely, almost as though she'd said something obscene.
"The letter," she repeated.
He exited.
"You were saying -”
She frowned. "What?"
"About it being an accident."
"Oh yes. I lived with Swann seven and a half years, and I got to understand him as well as anybody ever could. I learned to sense when he wanted me around, and when he didn't. When he didn't, I'd take myself off somewhere and let him have his privacy. Genius needs privacy. And he was a genius, you know. The greatest illusionist since Houdini."
"Is that so?"
"I'd think sometimes – it was a kind of miracle that he let me into his life…"
Harry wanted to say Swann would have been mad not to have done so, but the comment was inappropriate. She didn't want blandishments; didn't need them. Didn't need anything, perhaps, but her husband alive again. "Now I think I didn't know him at all," she went on, "I didn't understand him. I think maybe it was another trick. Another part of his magic."
"I called him a magician a while back," Harry said. "You corrected me."
"So I did," she said, conceding his point with an apologetic look. "Forgive me. That was Swann talking. He hated to be called a magician. He said that was a word that had to be kept for miracle-workers."
"And he was no miracle-worker?"
"He used to call himself the Great Pretender," she said. The thought made her smile.
Valentin had re-appeared, his lugubrious features rife with suspicion. He carried an envelope, which he clearly had no desire to give up. Dorothea had to cross the carpet and take it from his hands.
"Is this wise?" he said.
"Yes," she told him.
He turned on his heel and made a smart withdrawal. "He's grief-stricken," she said. "Forgive him his behaviour. He was with Swann from the beginning of his career. I think he loved my husband as much as I did." She ran her linger down into the envelope and pulled the letter out. The paper was pale yellow, and gossamer- thin. "A few hours after he died, this letter was delivered here by hand," she said. "It was addressed to him. I opened it. I think you ought to read it." She passed it to him.
The hand it was written in was solid and unaffected.
Dorothea, he had written, if you are reading this, then I am dead. You know how little store I set by dreams and premonitions and such; but for the last few days strange thoughts have just crept into my head, and I have the suspicion that death is very close to me. If so, so. There's no help for it. Don't waste time trying to puzzle out the whys and wherefores; they're old news now. Just know that I love you, and that I have always loved you in my way. I'm sorry for whatever unhappiness I've caused, or am causing now, but it was out of my hands. I have some instructions regarding the disposal of my body. Please adhere to them to the letter. Don't let anybody try to persuade you out of doing as I ask. I want you to have my body watched night and day until I'm cremated. Don't try and take my remains back to Europe. Have me cremated here, as soon as possible, then throw the ashes in the East River. My sweet darling, I'm afraid. Not of bad dreams, or of what might happen to me in this life, but of what my enemies may try to do once I'm dead. You know how critics can be: they wait until you can't fight them back, then they start the character assassinations. It's too long a business to try and explain all of this, so I must simply trust you to do as I say. Again, I love you, and I hope you never have to read this letter.
Your adoring, Swann.
"Some farewell note," Harry commented when he'd read it through twice. He folded it up and passed it back to the widow.
"I'd like you to stay with him," she said. "Corpse-sit, if you will. Just until all the legal formalities are dealt with and I can make arrangements for his cremation. It shouldn't take them long. I've got a lawyer working on it now." "Again: why me?"
She avoided his gaze. "As he says in the letter, he was never superstitious. But I am. I believe in omens. And there was an odd atmosphere about the place in the days before he died. As if we were watched."
"You think he was murdered?"
She mused on this, then said: "I don't believe it was an accident."
"These enemies he talks about…"
"He was a great man. Much envied."
"Professional jealousy? Is that a motive for murder?"
"Anything can be a motive, can't it?" she said.
"People get killed for the colour of their eyes, don't they?"
Harry was impressed. It had taken him twenty years to learn how arbitrary things were. She spoke it as conventional wisdom.
"Where is your husband?" he asked her.
"Upstairs," she said. "I had the body brought back here, where I could look after him. I can't pretend I understand what's going on, but I'm not going to risk ignoring his instructions."
Harry nodded.
"Swann was my life," she added softly, apropos of nothing; and everything.
She took him upstairs. The perfume that had met him at the door intensified. The master bedroom had been turned into a Chapel of Rest, knee-deep in sprays and wreaths of every shape and variety; their mingled scents verged on the hallucinogenic. In the midst of this abundance, the casket – an elaborate affair in black and silver – was mounted on trestles. The upper half of the lid stood open, the plush overlay folded back. At Dorothea's invitation he waded through the tributes to view the deceased. He liked Swann's face; it had humour, and a certain guile; it was even handsome in its weary way. More: it had inspired the love of Dorothea; a face could have few better recommendations. Harry stood waist-high in flowers and, absurd as it was, felt a twinge of envy for the love this man must have enjoyed.
"Will you help me, Mr. D'Amour?"
What could he say but: "Yes, of course I'll help." That, and: "Call me Harry."
He would be missed at Wing's Pavilion tonight. He had occupied the best table there every Friday night for the past six and a half years, eating at one sitting enough to compensate for what his diet lacked in excellence and variety the other six days of the week. This feast – the best Chinese cuisine to be had south of Canal Street – came gratis, thanks to services he had once rendered the owner. Tonight the table would go empty.
Not that his stomach suffered. He had only been sitting with Swann an hou
r or so when Valentin came up and said: "How do you like your steak?"
"Just shy of burned," Harry replied.
Valentin was none too pleased by the response. "I hate to overcook good steak," he said.
"And I hate the sight of blood," Harry said, “even if it isn't my own."
The chef clearly despaired of his guest's palate, and turned to go.
"Valentin?"
The man looked round.
"Is that your Christian name?" Harry asked.
"Christian names are for Christians," came the reply.
Harry nodded. "You don't like my being here, am I right?"
Valentin made no reply. His eyes had drifted past Harry to the open coffin.
"I'm not going to be here for long," Harry said, “but while I am, can't we be friends?"
Valentin's gaze found him once more.
"I don't have any friends," he said without enmity or self-pity. "Not now."
"OK. I'm sorry."
"What's to be sorry for?" Valentin wanted to know. "Swann's dead. It's all over, bar the shouting." The doleful face stoically refused tears. A stone would weep sooner, Harry guessed. But there was grief there, and all the more acute for being dumb.
"One question."
"Only one?"
"Why didn't you want me to read his letter?"
Valentin raised his eyebrows slightly; they were fine enough to have been penciled on. "He wasn't insane," he said. "I didn't want you thinking he was a crazy man, because of what he wrote. What you read you keep to yourself. Swann was a legend. I don't want his memory besmirched."
"You should write a book," Harry said. "Tell the whole story once and for all. You were with him a long time, I hear."
"Oh yes," said Valentin. "Long enough to know better than to tell the truth."
So saying he made an exit, leaving the flowers to wilt, and Harry with more puzzles on his hands than he'd begun with.
Twenty minutes later, Valentin brought up a tray of food: a large salad, bread, wine, and the steak. It was one degree short of charcoal.