Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

So, here he stood at midnight on a dark pinnacle inside Neon Nightmare, timing the first of many risky plunges to the abyss below. In the morning’s wee hours, he’d be moonlighting at the New Millennium, planning a daring art heist.

And sometime in between, he should be making a few personal appearances before an audience of one. Temple. He’d been forced to neglect her, and them. She was feeling it and saying so.

He remembered the overpowering plunge of falling for her more than two years earlier when they’d met in Minneapolis. He’d lured her to follow him to Vegas where they’d settled like newlyweds into a co-owned condo at the Circle Ritz. That was when he’d first started to investigate the possibility of slipping out of his undercover counterterrorist role that had been forced on him as a teenager. He could retire at the ripe age of thirty-four and become a magician, pure and simple.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Someone had tumbled to him. Someone hounded him out of Las Vegas and into hiding for a year.

He’d come back to find that Temple, smart and spirited and cute as a kitten, had stood her ground like a tiger when the police came sniffing around about his past and present whereabouts.

He’d known female assassins who were stone killers, but Temple had her own brand of toughness all the more lovable for being so unexpected in such a petite package.

Now he couldn’t even manage regular appearances in her bedroom, and his promises of finally breaking free of his past had become as empty as an old-time magician’s top hat.

He had so many roles to play, public and hidden, professional and personal, that even an expert juggler like himself couldn’t keep them all up in the air.

Max had become the man in the mirror, the middle, the mirage. He was the magician, the mechanic, the pawn, and the power player . . . depending on whose casting card you read.

For the first time, this position seemed untenable. Undoable. Doomed. He had split himself into too many personas. Some would not, could not, survive. That was the curse of the double agent. He had acted that role for many years. Now, all aspects of his various personas dueled each other. He wore the three faces of . . . not Eve, but Eventual destruction.

He had the sinking feeling that he stood on the Eve of Destruction.

He swung off his high, invisible perch into the darkness eighty feet below, into the laser lights and neon, losing his misgivings in the sudden enthralling swoop of risk and danger.

Flying, falling, flying while people below gasped and cheered and some few hoped, in the darkest corner of their too human hearts, that he would fall for real and truly thrill them.

Swept Off Her Feet

Temple Barr woke up at 10:30 A.M. in her own bed, which was hardly unusual, and supposed that there wasn’t a woman in America who didn’t ache for one of those Scarlett O’Hara moments.

Maybe it was Scarlett swearing to heaven that she’d never have to choke down another raw turnip (or broccoli or cauliflower floret . . . or diet book) again.

Maybe it was the spunky freshman Scarlett, telling that blind-stupid Ashley Wilkes right out that he ought to be dating her instead of some wimpy prom queen from the next plantation down along the Sewanee.

Maybe it was Scarlett cornered on the stairs of Tara shooting an attacking Yankee soldier dead.

Or Scarlett in any of the dazzling fashion-show gowns in which she schemed, fought, and flounced her way through the Civil War and its aftermath . . . especially the gutsy gown made from green velvet drapes she wore to convince a jailed Rhett Butler that she wasn’t down and out when she was.

But the most perfect Scarlett moment of all involved the crimson velvet dressing gown she wore as Rhett carried her upstairs when he’d had it with her fickle, bewitching, bitching Scarlett ways.

Feminists long removed from the 1930s debut of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind choked on their turnips over that scene, which to modern sensibilities plays like date rape—or, in that case, wife rape.

But no matter how a woman might land on the swept-upstairs-scene issue, she couldn’t fault the famous morning-after scene.

What a wake-up call! That was when Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett awoke in a cat-contented camera close-up. When her eyes recalled the-night-before-the-morning-after with the devilish satisfaction of a distinctly un-downtrodden Southern belle indeed. . . .

Temple awoke this day to one of those classic dawning moments. It made her world take an unexpected lurch toward a totally different axis than it had previously been twirling around like a ballerina in a well-known routine.

Oh. Right. Yes. Oh. My. Oh. Dear. Oh!

Because all morning-afters have their down as well as their up sides, and Temple was starting to see that. It didn’t help that Midnight Louie, all fully furred twenty pounds of him, was sitting on her chest like a guilty conscience, staring at her with unblinking feline-green eyes.