Honest Illusions

  “Sure.” Luke slid the bottom drawer of the dresser open and pulled out a small bottle of brandy. “No snifters, I’m afraid.”

  “I can rough it if you can.”

  Nodding, Luke poured three fingers of brandy into water glasses. “You have some things to say about me and Roxanne,” Luke began. “I’ve wondered why you haven’t brought it up before.”

  “It’s hard to admit, but I didn’t know how. What I said this afternoon—”

  “You were out of line with Rox,” Luke interrupted. “Not with me.”

  “Luke.” Max laid a hand on Luke’s arm. His eyes were filled with appeal and regret. “Don’t close the door on me. I was angry, but anger, contrary to the popular belief, does not always carve out the truth. I sliced to hurt, because I was hurting. I’m ashamed of that.”

  “Forget it.” Uneasy, Luke set the brandy aside and rose. “It was a moment of temper, that’s all.”

  “And do you believe what I said in temper above what I’ve said and shown you all these years?”

  Luke looked back, and his eyes were those of that wild, reckless boy again. “You’ve given me all I’ve ever had. You don’t owe me anything else.”

  “A pity people don’t realize what power words wield. They’d have more respect for the use of them. It’s easier for Roxanne to forgive because she’s never doubted my love. I’d hoped that you wouldn’t have cause to doubt it either.” Max set his brandy, untouched, beside Luke’s. “You’re the son Lily and I could never make together. Can you understand that there have been entire blocks of time that I’ve forgotten you hadn’t been born to me? And that if I thought of it, it didn’t matter.”

  For a moment Luke said nothing, could say nothing. Then he sat on the edge of the bed. “Yes. Because there were times I nearly forgot myself.”

  “And perhaps because the lines were blurred in my heart, I found it hard, very hard, to accept what’s between you and my daughter.”

  Luke gave a half laugh. “It gave me some bad moments, so much so that I nearly sent her away.” He lifted his head. “I couldn’t send her away, Max, not even for you.”

  “She wouldn’t have gone.” He understood both of his children. He laid a hand on Luke’s shoulder, squeezing though his fingers wept with pain. “Free lesson,” he murmured and watched Luke smile. “Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take unrelenting and unabating practice.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “See that you do.” Max started toward the door, but stopped when a thought ran through his head. “I would like grandchildren,” he said, and Luke’s mouth dropped open. “I would like them very much.”

  21

  Sam was quite satisfied with the progress of his plans. He was a highly respected member of the community, a recognizable force in Washington. As the senator’s right-hand man, he had his own office, a modestly decorated bastion of masculinity with leather chairs and neutral colors. He had his own secretary, a sharp-minded political veteran who knew exactly what number to call to ferret out information.

  Though he would have preferred a zippy foreign make, Sam was forward-thinking and drove a Chrysler. The grass-roots grumbling about buying American was growing. He had plans to be America’s favorite son.

  According to his timetable, he would slip seamlessly into the senator’s position within six years. All the groundwork was there. The years of dedicated public service, the contacts in Washington, in the corporate world and on the streets.

  Factoring in his advantages, Sam had nearly tossed his hat into the ring for the most recent election. But patience had won out. He knew his youth would be an initial strike against him, and a good number of bleeding hearts would have interpreted the move as disloyalty to the old fart Bushfield.

  So, he bided his time and took his next steps with a cool-eyed look at the nineties. He courted and married Justine Spring, a wealthy department-store heiress with polished looks and impeccable lineage. She championed the correct charities, could plan a dinner party for fifty without turning a hair and had the extra advantage of photographing like a dream.

  When Sam had slipped the ring on her finger, he’d known he’d taken another important step. The American people preferred their leaders to be married. With the proper timing, he would campaign for the Senate seat as the devoted father of one, and Justine would be rosily pregnant with their second, and last, child.

  He fancied himself a latter-day Kennedy—not the politics, naturally. These were the Reagan years. But the youth, the good looks, the pretty wife and the young, charming family.

  It would work because he knew how to play the game. He was climbing the ladder toward the Oval Office with slow, calculated steps, and was already halfway up the rungs.

  There was only one niggling sense of failure in Sam’s world. The Nouvelles. They were loose ends untied, dangling questions unanswered. He wanted revenge on them for personal reasons, but he needed it for what he considered sharp professional motives. It was important that they be weakened, crushed, so that any vicious truths they might shout about his character would be laughed aside.

  He’d had ample time to observe them up close on his honeymoon cruise. Now, cozied into the sumptuous Helmsley Palace in New York, awaiting the parties and celebrations for the Statue of Liberty’s one hundredth birthday, he had time to shuffle through his impressions.

  The old man looked tired. Sam remembered the lightning-quick movements of those hands a decade before and judged that Max was slowing down. It was interesting as well that the aging magician was spending so much time looking for some mystical rock.

  Sam wrote the philosophers’ stone on Leona’s elegant hotel stationery and idly circled it. Maybe he’d have some of his men do some digging into the rock.

  There was Lily, as tacky and top-heavy as ever. And as naive, Sam thought, with a smile that curled his lips back from his teeth. He’d made a point of joining her on deck one day, and by the time he’d strolled away, she’d been patting his hand and telling him how glad she was he’d made something good out of his life.

  And Roxanne. Ah, Roxanne. If magic existed at all, it existed there. What spell had conjured the skinny, wild-haired girl into a stunning woman? A pity he hadn’t had the opportunity to make a few moves in that direction before Justine. He’d have enjoyed seducing her, using her in a way that would shock and disgust his pretty, lukewarm wife.

  But no matter how alluring the prospect, he’d had to move carefully there. The incident on ship had very nearly created a scene a public figure—a married public figure—could ill afford.

  Which brought him to Luke. Always to Luke. There was the key to the Nouvelles. Sam could dismiss Mouse and LeClerc as callously as he would dismiss servants. They were nothing. But Luke was the linchpin. Destroying him would put a crack in the wall of the Nouvelles that might never be shored up. It would also be such a sweet, personal triumph.

  The business with Cobb wasn’t progressing as Sam had hoped. It had taken him years after leaving New Orleans to reach the position where he could afford to hire detectives to investigate Luke’s background.

  It had cost, and cost dearly, but Sam considered it an investment in the future, and payment for the past. Locating the junkie whore who’d been Luke’s mother had been a stroke of luck. But Cobb, Cobb had been icing on the cake.

  Sam closed his eyes and drifted out of the elegant suite in the Helmsley, transporting himself to a dank, waterfront bar.

  The air smelled of fish and urine, and the cheap whiskey and tobacco consumed by the patrons. Pool balls smacked angrily together across the room, and the men who played cast surly glances at the table as they chalked cues.

  A single whore sat at the end of the bar with mean eyes and a preference for Four Roses while she waited to ply her trade. Her eyes skimmed over Sam as he sat in the corner, lingering a moment in consideration, then passed on.

  He’d chosen the shadows. A hat was pulled lo
w on his head, and a bulky coat disguised his frame. It was chill enough in the bar with a late-winter wind battering sleet against the windows. But the light sweat of anticipation greased Sam’s skin.

  He watched Cobb walk in. Saw him hitch up his heavily buckled belt before scanning the room. Once he spotted the figure in the corner, he nodded, strolled with what Sam assumed was meant to be nonchalance to the bar. He brought a glass of whiskey to the table.

  “You got business with me?” It was a tough tone, delivered before his first sip of whiskey.

  “I have a business offer.”

  Cobb shrugged his massive shoulders and attempted to look bored. “So?”

  “I believe you know an acquaintance of mine.” Sam left his own drink untouched on the table. He’d noted, with mild disgust, that the glass was none too clean. “Luke Callahan.”

  Surprise flickered before Cobb narrowed his eyes. “Can’t say as I do.”

  “Let’s not complicate a simple matter. You’ve been fucking Callahan’s mother on and off for years. You lived with them when he was a boy—a kind of unofficial stepfather. At that time, you were doing some unimaginative pimping and dipping your toe into pornography—with an emphasis on children and adolescents.”

  Cobb’s face suffused with color so that the network of broken capillaries flared like torches. “I don’t know what that ungrateful shit told you, but I treated him good. Kept food in his belly, didn’t I? Showed him what was what.”

  “You left your mark on him, Cobb. I’ve seen that for myself.” Sam smiled, and Cobb caught a flash of white teeth.

  “The boy needed discipline.” Whiskey was curdling in Cobb’s nervous belly. He sent more down to join it. “I seen him on TV. Big shot now. Don’t see him paying me or his old lady back for all the years we did for him.”

  Sam heard exactly what he’d hoped to hear, resentment, bitterness and envy. “You figure he owes you?”

  “Goddamn class A right he does.” Cobb leaned forward, but gleaned no more than a vague impression of Sam’s face through the smoke and dingy shadows. “If he sent you here to rattle my chain—”

  “No one sends me. Callahan owes me, as well. You can be of use to me.” Sam reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. After a quick glance around the room, Cobb picked it up. His wide thumb flipped through five hundred in well-used twenties.

  “What do you want for it?”

  “Satisfaction. This is what I want you to do.”

  So Sam had sent his dog to New Orleans.

  The blackmail wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped, Sam mused. The thirty or forty thousand a year was paid without comment. Since Sam had made it his business to know precisely what income Luke reported each year, he would up the ante. There would be a plain white postcard waiting for Luke when he returned to New Orleans. This time the figure on it would be ten thousand.

  Sam calculated that a few months of these slim postcards would slide neatly under Luke’s foundations. Before long, they would crumble.

  It infuriated him. Luke crushed the white square in his fist and hurled it across the room. It terrified him.

  Ten thousand dollars. It wasn’t the money itself. He had enough of that, and could easily get more. It was the realization that Cobb was not only never going away, but that he was growing greedy.

  The next time it could be twenty thousand, or thirty.

  Let the fucker go to the press, he thought. The tabloids could have a field day with it.

  MASTER MAGICIAN’S SECRET CHILDHOOD

  So what?

  ESCAPE ARTIST’S LIFE AS A WHORE

  Who gave a shit?

  THE NOUVELLES’ UGLY TRIANGLE

  Magician’s affair with mentor, and his master’s daughter

  Oh, God. Luke scrubbed his hands over his face and tried to think. He was entitled to his life, damn it. The one he’d put together piece by piece since he’d run away from that gin-soaked apartment with his back screaming with pain and the terror of not knowing what they might have done to him after he’d lapsed into unconsciousness.

  He would not, could not stand to have what he’d run from dug up and smeared into his face. He wouldn’t see the stink of that mud flung at the only people he’d ever loved. And yet. And yet he was losing something of himself every time he answered one of those postcards like a well-trained monkey.

  There was one alternative he hadn’t yet considered. Luke picked up a teacup, intently studying the delicate design of violets against the cream-colored china. One he’d dreamed about, certainly, but had never put on the floor for a vote.

  He could fly up to Maine and lure Cobb out of his hole. Then he could do what he’d yearned to do every time the belt had slashed his flesh. He could kill him.

  The cup shattered in his hand, but Luke didn’t jolt. He continued to stare down while the image formed more truly in his mind, and the blood welled like a thin smile across his palm.

  He could kill.

  The pounding on the door jerked him back. The thought was still wheeling like dazzling colored lights in his head as he yanked it open.

  “Hi!” Roxanne’s hair dripped into her eyes. Her T-shirt clung wetly to her torso. She lifted her lips to Luke’s and brought him the scent of rain and summer meadows. “I thought you’d like a picnic.”

  “Picnic?” He fought hard to bank the violence and smile at her. He glanced toward the torrent falling outside the window as he shut the door behind her. “I guess this kind of weather should cut down on ants.”

  “Barbecued chicken wings,” she said, holding out a cardboard box.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “The really sloppy kind, and a big bowl of LeClerc’s potato salad that I swiped from the fridge, and a very nice white Bordeaux.”

  “Seems you’ve thought of everything. Except dessert.”

  She sent him a long sideways glance as she knelt on the rug. “Oh, I thought of that, too. Why don’t you get us a couple of glasses—what’s this?” She picked up a shard of broken china.

  “I—broke a cup.”

  When he bent down to pick up the pieces, she spotted the blood on his hand. “Oh, what have you done?” She snatched his hand, clucking over it while she daubed at blood with the hem of her shirt.

  “It’s just a scratch, doc.”

  “Don’t joke.” But she saw with relief that it was, and shallow at that. “Your hands are worth quite a bit, you know. Professionally.”

  He skimmed a finger down the slope of her breast. “Professionally?”

  “Yes. And I do have a personal interest in them, as well.” After nibbling on his lips, she sat back on her heels in strategic retreat. “How about those glasses—and a corkscrew?”

  Ready to oblige, he rose and started toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you dig out a dry shirt? You’ll drip on the potato salad.”

  “No, I won’t.” The sopping shirt landed a step behind him, splatting on the linoleum. Luke glanced down at it, then at her. It should be an interesting picnic, he mused. Chicken, potato salad and a wet, half-naked woman. The lingering tension dissolved in a grin. “I love practical women.”

  It was dark. The shadows were suffocating and stank of sweat. The walls were close on all four sides, and overhead the ceiling dropped low like the lid of a coffin.

  There was no door. No latch. No light.

  He knew he was naked, for the heat pressed down on his exposed skin like an anvil that throbbed and throbbed under a relentless hammer. Something was crawling over him. For a horrible minute he feared it was spiders. But it was only the creep of his own perspiration.

  He tried to be quiet, very, very quiet, but the sound of his labored breathing rattled and whooped with a hollow echo despite the cramped space.

  They’d come if he wasn’t quiet.

  He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop his panicked heart from booming in his chest or the small animallike sounds of terror that kept bubbling up in his throat.

  His hands were tied. The rope bit i
nto his thin wrists as he twisted and struggled for freedom. He smelled blood and tasted tears and the sweat stung his abraded wrists like a torch.

  He had to get out. Had to. There had to be a way to escape. But there was no trap door, no clever mechanism, no slick panel waiting to slide away at his touch.

  He was only a boy, after all. And it was so hard to think. So hard to be strong. The sweat froze like tiny balls of ice when he realized he wasn’t alone in the box. He could hear the heavy, excited breathing close, could smell the sour stink of gin.

  He howled like a wolf when the hands gripped him, his body jerking, bucking, drawing up tight.