Carnival of Shadows (34 page)

“Silence please, ladies and gentlemen,” Haynes said.

The crowd hushed, as silent as a funeral.

Haynes raised the hands of the child to his right, turned their palms upward, and then had the second child do the same. Their fingertips were perhaps two or three feet apart.

Haynes stepped back again, and then he raised his hands.

Before either child could do or say anything, a fine white line seemed to materialize between their outstretched fingertips, spanning that gap between them, and as it grew brighter, it seemed to solidify, until it was as if a rope of light tied their hands together. The light moved, no doubt. It seemed alive and real and as tangible as daylight itself. The crowd gasped. The children’s faces were animated and dreamlike, full of amazement, seemingly unperturbed by what was happening between them.

Haynes clicked his fingers and the light changed color. White to blue. Again, another click of the fingers. Blue to scorching red. Red to yellow. Yellow to white once more. And then he was waving his hands over that rope of light, and the color changed again and again, faster and faster, until there was a pulsing rainbow between those children.

The crowd was stunned into silence.

And then the light went out. It snapped almost audibly, like a distant crack of thunder, and it was gone.

The children stood there, and their hands were filled with candies, almost too many for them to hold. Simultaneously, seemingly without prompt, they both turned toward the audience and tossed those handfuls of candies toward the spectators. The children grabbed those candies from the air. The kids on the stage were laughing, and as they stepped down and were received by their parents, Travis could see an expression in those adults’ faces. It was almost gratitude, as if their children had been selected to receive some special gift, as if they had been chosen above all others to experience something truly meaningful and profound.

Haynes took his bows, and then he left the stage.

The tent started to empty out, the hubbub of excitement and chatter dying down, and Travis was one of the very last to leave.

He took some steps toward the stage, scanned the ground for the petals that Haynes had thrown into the audience; he saw nothing but trampled grass and muddy footprints.

He heard someone behind him, knew it was Doyle, had a question on his lips even as he turned.

“Not yet, Agent Travis,” Doyle said, preempting anything Travis might have asked.

“But—”

“The show isn’t over yet,” Doyle said. “You have yet to see Mr. Greene weave his… his—what shall we call it?—his
mind magic
. Then, and only then, will I answer your question.”

Travis had already forgotten the question he’d intended to ask.

“Walk. Breathe. Look at the sky for a while, Agent Travis. Come back to earth, as they say.” Doyle smiled, and there was something so sincere in his expression that Travis felt completely undone. He felt as if the stitching that held all his seams together had loosened considerably, and all of a sudden he would fall right out of his body and never be able to return.

“All I will say,” Doyle whispered, “is that people sometimes see just exactly what they want to see. The mind is powerful, Michael. Too powerful to put in a box. Too powerful to hide away from. Too powerful to do anything but accept that it has unknown and unlimited capabilities, and we haven’t even scratched the surface. As you know all too well, sometimes things happen simply because we believe they will.”

Doyle reached out and touched Travis’s arm.

“It gets easier, Michael,” he said, “just as long as you don’t fight it.”

29

Travis did not fight it, not because he didn’t wish to, but because he possessed neither the will nor the strength.

Somewhere within himself something was faltering, as if some slow and relentless wave of self-doubt was eating away at the foundation of his certainties. He did not feel good. Nor did he feel bad. He did not know how he felt, and thus he was unsure of what to think. He knew that these people had done something to him, but he did not know what. He knew that they were doing something to the people of Seneca Falls, to all the carnival’s visitors, but he could not identify what it was that was happening. Some kind of mass hypnotism. Some kind of mind invasion perhaps. Some kind of mental intervention that created a collective experience, a collective appearance. But such things were not possible. Travis knew that such things were utterly impossible, and yet he possessed no other explanation.

Travis then did as Doyle had suggested. He walked out of the tent and crossed to the edge of the field. This time he was not turned back by crowds of people. He held on to the wooden fence and he looked out toward the horizon. The air was chill, the sky clear, and visible as if within arm’s reach were not only the lights of Seneca Falls, but also the stars above his head. They seemed equidistant, as if one were merely an earthbound reflection of the other, and somewhere out there, somewhere farther than his eyes could see, the sky and the earth were stitched together by some invisible hand.

“Mr. Travis?”

Travis turned at the sound of the voice.

Laura McCaffrey stood there, her brothers Danny and Lester nowhere to be seen. She seemed almost embarrassed.

“Laura,” Travis said, wishing he could remain alone, wishing he could just have these few moments to gather his thoughts together.

“I was just wondering if you…” She looked away, as if consulting some unseen person on how best to ask whatever she wished to ask.

“If I?” Travis prompted.

“Well, Danny and Lester and I… we just wondered whether you would like to come to dinner at our house on Sunday.”

She paused for a moment. “We are at church in the morning,” she went on, “but we always have a Sunday dinner afterward, and you don’t know anyone here, and you spend all your time working, and we just wondered if you—”

“That is very much appreciated, Laura, of course, but Bureau protocol…”

Laura nodded understandingly. “I thought that would be the case,” she interjected. “Nevertheless, the invitation is there. I wanted to ask you, and I’ve done so. I am sorry you can’t come, and I’m sure Danny will be sorry too. He does so admire you, you know?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, he always had his heart set on being in the Sheriff’s Department like his brother, but he was sick when he was a child, and he has some kind of weakness in his heart you see? It’s not life-threatening or anything like that, but he is limited when it comes to heavily exerting himself. He can’t run very far. He tries not to lift things that are too heavy. That’s all, really. However, it meant that he couldn’t be a sheriff, and I know that is always going to be a disappointment for him.” She smiled coyly. “You, however, are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She laughed briefly. “He calls you the G-man. I know from the way he talks about you that he admires what you do, and he kind of wishes he could do the same.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I am sure Danny would make the most excellent G-man.”

“Oh, you should tell him that, Agent Travis. That would just make his day. You have absolutely no idea.”

“I’ll be sure to do that, Laura.”

Laura McCaffrey hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “Are you not allowed to have any friends, Agent Travis?”

Travis looked at her. A frown creased his brow.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was very rude of me. I didn’t mean—”

Travis raised his hand and she fell silent. “No offense taken. I understood what you meant just perfectly.”

“Well, yes, and I am sure you have just a wealth of friends back in Kansas, right?”

“Yes, Laura. A wealth of friends.”

“I have to be getting back,” she said. “I want to see the little man again. What he did on Friday was just remarkable, and I have to see him do it again.”

“You’re speaking of Chester Greene, right?”

“If he’s the little man, then yes, that’s him.”

“And what is it that he did on Friday?” Travis asked.

“Oh, he can see right into your mind, Agent Travis,” she said. Her eyes lit up like Roman candles. “Right into your mind. The most remarkable thing I ever saw. It just has to be seen to be believed.”

“Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world, then,” Travis said.

“Okay,” Laura said. “Well, the invitation for dinner is still open if you decide we’re no longer murder suspects.”

“Appreciated,” Travis said.

Laura stepped forward and started to reach out her hand. She hesitated, merely grazed the sleeve of his jacket with her fingertips, and it seemed that there was just a world of unspoken words in her eyes.

“If you ever feel like you need another friend,” she said. “I mean, I know you have so many back home, but if you ever…” She looked away, embarrassed again, but there was such kindness in her eyes that Travis felt his heart would burst.

“It was nice speaking with you, Laura,” he said.

She touched his sleeve once more, and then she turned suddenly and hurried away.

Travis watched her go, his breath caught in his chest, and then he looked upward to the sky, down again to the lights of Seneca Falls, and he inhaled deeply.

He knew then that he was tired of fighting the world, but he knew he dared not stop. If he stopped, then what would he do? Who would he be? What would become of him?

Michael Travis gripped the fence and bowed his head.

He counted to ten, and then he headed back to the marquee to see a dwarf from Oklahoma City perform
mind magic
.

30

Travis was not late, but he did enter the marquee to find the place jammed from side to side. There must have been three hundred people in there. Scanning faces, he recognized almost no one. It seemed that each time he looked, there were new people to see, all of them strangers, all of them wearing that self-same expression of transfixed anticipation. There
was
something in the atmosphere. There was no denying it. Travis did not like it, nor could he determine what it was that he did not like.

The stage was empty but for a single wooden chair. It was the folding kind, the kind one might put in the back of the car for a picnic. There was no sign of Doyle or Valeria Mironescu, nor Slate or Benedek or Akiko Mimasuya. He could not see Laura or the McCaffrey brothers, nor Larry Youngman or Sheriff Rourke. Travis felt even more alone than ever before.

It was a little while before Travis became aware of the music. If he was not mistaken, it was Stravinsky’s
The Firebird
, again something he knew solely because of Esther’s interest in such music. It created an ominous feeling perhaps, something altogether uneasy and unsettling, and when Chester Greene finally walked onto the little makeshift stage, as the music swelled and then quietened, the crowd of spectators seemed to hold their breath in unison.

Greene stood center stage, and for such a tiny man, he seemed to not only command the attention of everyone present, but also project a charismatic aura that reached the very back of the tent with ease.

He smiled, winked at the audience.

“Lighten up,” he said quietly. “I ain’t gonna bite.”

There was a moment’s hesitation, and then a ripple of laughter spread through the tent. There seemed to be a collective exhalation, and a sense of strange relief filled Travis’s body. He did not know what he had been expecting, but the feeling had been that it would be the worst. Now that was gone, gone altogether, and he was merely standing there watching a small man from Oklahoma start his carnival routine.

Greene nudged his hat back on his head. He stood with one hand on his hip, the other on the back of the chair.

“Tell you something now, you menfolk. What’s the best way to remember your wife’s birthday?”

Greene paused for a second.

“Forget it once!”

A smattering of laughs throughout the crowd.

“I have a friend called Lionel. He’s Jewish, like me. Nice guy. Has a wife called Frieda. Took Frieda to the doctor for a checkup. Doctor did a full examination. He comes out to see Lionel in the waiting room, says, ‘Lionel, I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. I’ve done a full examination of your wife, and I don’t like what I’m seeing.’ Lionel, he looks at the doctor, and he says, ‘Hey, Doc, no need to get personal. I seem to remember your wife ain’t no oil painting neither.’”

The crowd was laughing then, the earlier sense of unease now completely gone.

Greene tipped his hat and winked again.

“Another friend,” he went on. “Name’s Moshe. Went to see his psychiatrist. Moshe says to the psychiatrist, ‘I had a strange dream recently. I saw my mother in the dream, but then I noticed she had your face. I found this so worrying that I immediately awoke and couldn’t get back to sleep. I just stayed there thinking about it until seven a.m. I got up, made myself a slice of toast and some coffee, and came straight here. Can you please help me explain the meaning of my dream?’ The psychiatrist kept silent for some time, then said, ‘One slice of toast and coffee? You call that a breakfast?’”

Even Travis smiled, found himself resisting the desire to laugh, and then he let it go. The man was funny, no doubt about it.

Greene took a step forward, put his hands on his hips. “A businessman boards a plane and sits next to an elegant woman wearing the largest diamond ring he’s ever seen. He asks her about it. ‘This is the Egoheimer diamond,’ the woman says. ‘It’s beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it.’ The businessman is curious. He asks her what the curse is. The woman shakes her head, looks very serious. ‘It’s called Mr. Egoheimer.’”

There is barely a breath before the crowd erupts with laughter.

Greene was in his element. He took a bow.

“Too kind, too kind, too kind,” he said.

The audience settled.

“But we digress,” Greene said, and with that he took off his hat and put it under the chair. He sat down, his hands on his knees, his knees together, and he smiled at the crowd. He said nothing at all for a good thirty seconds. He just sat there and smiled, and instead of unnerving them, it seemed to do the opposite. People seemed to just relax, to settle down, to ready themselves for whatever was coming next.

“There are ways and means,” Greene said quietly. “For everything, there are ways and means. Some we understand, some we don’t. Some make sense, and some seem to possess no sense at all. Sometimes people tell you that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but it’s the other way around, folks. If you know something, well, you can do something about it, right? If you understand something, well, you can work it out, rationalize it, fix it good and proper so it’s not a problem anymore. Seems to me that the thing we should all fear the most is ignorance. Most of the troubles we see in the world are born out of ignorance. Ignorance leads to impatience and intolerance and hatred. Just look at the way the colored folks get treated sometimes. Look at the way the Jewish people were persecuted in the war. All out of ignorance.”

Greene leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled together. “So, I always say it’s better to know than to not know. Better to see than to be blind. Better to find out than leave it all covered up and hidden. If you hide a light under a bushel, well, it doesn’t change the fact that the light is still there.”

There was a murmur of consent in the crowd. All of a sudden it started to feel more like a revivalist meeting than a carnival act. Greene had their attention, no question about it, and for a moment Travis wondered whether this monologue was the precursor to some further sort of collective hypnosis. Was he—even now—lulling them all into some false sense of security?

Trust me, people. Listen to my voice. It is calming, it is soothing, and you can believe every word I say. Look at me now. Do I look like the kind of guy who would sell you a bill of goods?

Wasn’t this the point of such a pretense, to make people feel that Chester Greene—the funny Jewish dwarf—was incapable of anything but the truth?

Travis felt that sense of instinctive suspicion, as if to build a wall around his mind, refusing to allow himself to be duped into seeing or hearing something that was anything but real and tangible.

“Erasmus once said that man’s mind was formed in such a way as to be far more susceptible to falsehood than truth. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we shall try to redress the balance a little. We shall try to return a little truth into the grander scheme of things. However, there are some things that are more easily done than said, so I am not going to try to explain what happens here tonight.”

Greene smiled at the audience, and then he took a deep breath.

“And so… we begin with the small matter of a broken promise.”

Greene scanned the audience, and then his attention appeared to be fixed somewhere over to Travis’s left. The stage was lit, the audience in semidarkness, and Travis could not see who Greene might have been looking at.

“She made a vow,” Greene continued, “and she made it with the best intention in the world, and—in all honesty—it wasn’t even possible to keep that vow. Not really. Not if she had been truthful to herself and to her mother. But she made the vow, as we often do, and then the time came when the vow was broken, and ever since that time, she’s been holding on to it like she did the very worst thing in the world, and for all the world to see, she is unhappy and burdened and will never find a way to smile again.”

There was a breathless silence in that tent.

Greene echoed that silence for a moment, and then he shook his head. “Promises to those who are dying are sometimes the best way to kill those who are left behind, my dear.”

There was a stifled sob from somewhere within the audience.

People moved, and right before Travis’s eyes, the crowd parted, and a man and a woman came into view. The woman was crying, no doubt about it, and the man beside her held her as if she were deadweight.

Greene was good. Travis had to grant him that. What could have been more likely than someone in the audience burdened beneath a promise to a dying person that they then failed to keep?

“When someone you love dies,” Greene said, “it feels like a little of you dies as well. The more you loved them, the more it feels like your life will never be the same. They went, that’s understood, but you are left behind, and you still have to live your own life the best you can.”

The woman held the handkerchief to her face. The man beside her looked at Greene as if he were administering some kind of emotional resuscitation.

“You are Alice, aren’t you?” Greene said, no absence of certainty in his voice.

The woman stifled a painful sob and nodded in the affirmative.

The plant
, Travis thought. He would bet his life on the fact that this woman was not from Seneca Falls. This was an outsider, brought in to play the part, to get the audience going.

The impulse was to call out, to make some comment, to at least make his protest and disagreement heard. This kind of thing was outrageous, not only from the viewpoint of tricking the public out of their money, but also the fact that it was tantamount to fraud. Lord only knew what would be going on in the minds of the others present. Watching this kind of thing,
believing
this kind of thing, gave people false hope. It gave them ideas that things could be understood that could and would
never
be understood.

Greene shook his head sagely. “It’s time now, Alice,” he said. “It’s time to let her go, to let her be. The longer you hold on to it, the longer you will stay upset, and that’s doing nobody any good.”

Greene looked up at the roof of the tent. “She holds on for you, Alice. You know that? She’s right here.”

The audience gasped in collective wonder.

“She’s held on for you all this time. She loves you so very much, and she can’t bear to see you unhappy, and if you’ll just let her go now, if you’ll just wish her well and let her go, then she can move on. Until you do that, well, she is just caught here in our world, and she cannot move on to where she needs to be.”

“Alice” started sobbing more pronouncedly. Whoever she was, she was also good. The “husband” played his part with stoicism.

“So, that’s what you need to do, Alice, and though this is more for her than for you, I am sure you will feel an awful lot better.”

Chester Greene leaned forward. “Let go, my dear. Just let go. You won’t drown; you won’t die. It will all come out right in the end. I promise.”

The “husband” started toward the stage with “Alice,” and when they reached it, he held out his hand.

The crowd held their breath.

Greene reached back, and for a moment their fingers touched.

“Thank you,” the “husband” said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Thank you
so
much, Mr. Greene.”

The couple turned, and then applause started. People touched them as they walked, hands to their shoulders as if acknowledging them for some commitment to faith.

There was a sense of fervor and enthusiasm surrounding the whole performance that just seemed so very wrong to Travis.

He felt at first contemptuous of Greene, of Doyle, of all of them, and then a growing sense of disgust invaded his thoughts. What would happen now? “Alice” and her “husband” would be seen to offer some financial contribution as they left? Was that how it worked? Would they hand over five bucks, and thus prompt others to start emptying their pockets?

Travis swallowed his sense of shame at what he was witnessing, and then he wondered whether the dead Hungarian had been here too, whether he had seen what was happening, whether he’d started to make noises about the kind of confidence trick that was being perpetrated. Was that why he had been killed, for suggesting that he would expose their scams and have them investigated by the authorities? Was this nothing more than a simple case of murder for profit? Murder committed to prevent the exposure of a lucrative scheme founded in lies?

The applause died down.

Greene rose from the chair and walked back and forth across the front of the stage.

“My mind is filled with happiness,” he said. “Where are you? The ones with the child?”

There was a brief exclamation of surprise from somewhere in the shadows. People stepped away, and a young couple came forward.

“You learned today?” Greene asked the woman.

The woman nodded, smiling from ear to ear.

“They are going to have a baby!” Greene said.

The crowd applauded.

“Congratulations to you both,” Greene went on. “A truly wondrous and wonderful thing!” He winked, smiled at them both. “And don’t worry,” he added. “When your mother finds out, she’ll stop nagging at your husband about finding a better job!”

The woman looked stunned, the husband started laughing, and then the crowd was laughing too. The earlier sense of despondency and sadness had been completely dispelled. The crowd were animated, wholly engaged by Greene’s performance, and he was milking it for all it was worth.

“The boxes are there, folks,” Greene said. “Sometimes you just gotta face that fact and take a look. As has been said so many times before, many of life’s problems can be solved with just twenty seconds of courage. And you know what else? Time doesn’t heal. No, sirree. Old Man Time is the Great Pretender, you know?”

Greene took a seat. He lit a cigarette, and the smoke rose above his head in hieroglyphics. There were shapes and faces among those arabesques and garlands, hanging there like ghosts, and then they folded away into nothing.

“Time doesn’t mend a broken heart. Time doesn’t bring back those we have lost. Time merely dulls the sharp edge of memory, but those memories can often return sharper than ever and cut you just as deep.” He shook his head and smiled sardonically. “And if anyone would know the truth of that, then it’s me.”