Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Then he got to the good part. On Temple’s screen, multiplied by sixteen around the table, the viewpoint swooped above the scepter to show a life-size jewel-enlaced human figure spinning slowly in the gallery’s upper blackness.

It was a woman wearing a headdress that duplicated the scepter’s daggerlike lines, her arms close to her lithe body, straight legs crossed at the ankles and arched into one sharp point, like a ballerina’s toes, her head straining upward on a long swanlike neck.

Temple had seen acrobats at the Cirque du Soleil spinning like this by their teeth, but not invisibly and not—here her blood ran cold, just like in the cliché, and Temple hated clichés—with a white-painted face with exaggerated features drawn in Oriental shades of black and blushing crimson as in a Chinese opera.

Before Temple could fully register who this scepter sylph was, a huge male figure came striding out of the darkness, booted, caped, and wearing a dark tiger-pattern mask that covered his entire head.

At a gesture of his gloved hand, the scepter woman sank lower, like a spider on an invisible web. Lower, lower, turning faster and faster, a blur now. A flick of the magician’s wrist, and a glittering web of empty cloth floated down, tenting the onion dome in a lacy cobweb.

Everybody applauded the stunning effect.

Everybody except Temple. She wasn’t surprised, of course, to see the Cloaked Conjuror appear. He headlined at the New Millennium, after all.

What had shocked the accumulating cellulite off her behind was seeing the made-up countenance of a magician who’d done her—and Max, and Midnight Louie—wrong, and had never been seen again. Shangri-La, last glimpsed several months ago at the Opium Den, a low-end casino off the Strip.

As part of her disappearing act, this woman had stolen Temple’s almost-engagement ring from Max right on stage. The only time Temple had been called out of a Las Vegas audience to do an onstage turn had almost cost her, and Louie, their lives.

Max needed to know about this . . . pronto!

Friendly Fire

“What is she doing here?”

Max’s annoyed tone roused Garry Randolph from the humble task of coiling a rubber snake of electrical cord in one corner of the New Millennium’s exhibition area scaffolding, fifteen feet above the construction-littered floor.

This place wasn’t just a room, that was for sure.

The whir of power drills backgrounded their conversation. A faint miasma of sanded Spackle dusted their workmen’s white jumpsuits a whiter shade of pale.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Garry, who once had performed as Gandolph the Great.

“Two,” Max said grimly, looking up, and then back down again. “The worst part is that they’ve both seen me, one more than the other.”

Gandolph followed Max’s quick flick of eyelashes both up and down.

Up, the problem was obvious. A lithe figure in pale tights and leotard was cavorting like the Sugar Plum Fairy on a distant tightrope invisible against the flat black ceiling of the museum-to-be.

“I don’t know where Shangri-La came from,” Garry admitted, “but I know you had an unpleasant run-in with her months ago—”

“More than one, and the last one way too recently,” Max interrupted, looping his own length of cable into the tight coil of a striking cobra.

Garry eyed his one-time apprentice at both magic and counterterrorism work. The painter’s cap hid Max’s thick dark hair. Spackle dusted the arched Faustian eyebrows. His eyes were their natural blue. He expertly hunched his four inches over six feet into a droop-shouldered stance that kept him from literally standing out in a crowd, rather like Sherlock Holmes on a stakeout.

“Where did you last see her?” Garry asked.

“At the Cloaked Conjuror’s estate. Creepy old place near a cemetery. Keeps the tabloids and the tourists away. Crazy young woman, always wears her stage makeup. We had a little talk, she and I, and it wasn’t peace negotiations.”

“What happened?”

“A few months ago, she lured Temple up on stage in her act in an audience-participation gig.”

“Always a crowd-pleaser.”

“Not that time. She did the take-the-item switch, only it was the Tiffany ring I gave Temple in New York. And not only that but she whisked Temple into a transformation box.”

“That’s risky to do with a civilian. Going down that trapdoor in the floor.”

“And then into another cabinet and into a departing semi trailer loaded with magic box illusions and illegal designer drugs. Also napped was Temple’s cat, Midnight Louie.”

As Gandolph regarded him with gaping jaw, Max said, “Don’t ask. I mean it. I got them back again, but it didn’t help my low profile with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

Gandolph chuckled. “Low profile was always a job for you. So, I get the lethal lady in the sky. What’s the problem on the ground?” Max shrugged in a direction that directed Gandolph’s attention down over his shoulder to a cluster of people way overdressed for the floor of a resort hotel and casino with summer coming on.