Authors: Jonathan Stone
Two for the Show
Also by Jonathan Stone
The Teller
Moving Day
The Cold Truth
The Heat of Lies
Breakthrough
Parting Shot
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Stone
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503934856
ISBN-10: 1503934853
Cover design by Brian Zimmerman
To my brothers Harlan and Mike, who couldn’t believe I’d never been to Vegas, and rectified the situation in memorable style. Both are still avid fiction readers, I’m happy to say.
And to our mother, Judy, who always read little Jonny’s poems, plays, and stories with genuine delight and encouragement.
Thanks all. And keep reading.
Contents
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke
ONE
It’s the strangest job
you’ve ever heard of.
Stranger still, it’s mine.
I’ve been doing it over twenty years. Which makes it a career, I guess.
Technically, I’m a detective. A private investigator. But not the kind you’re thinking of. One client. Ongoing investigation. The case never closes. The job never ends.
I’m in the entertainment business. But not in the way you’re used to thinking.
I work for a mentalist. A famous magician and stage personality who astounds members of his audience by knowing everything about them—who they are and where they work and who they share an office with and what cars they drive and
used
to drive and
want
to drive and what they just ate for lunch and who taught them in kindergarten and sixth grade and how much cash is in their wallets and what labels are on their shirts and skirts and where they were last night and who they were with, and most impressive of all, even what they’re thinking about. Knowing their life situations and communicating with their dead relatives and relating uncanny details. Supernatural powers. Extraordinary ESP. Conversing with the Other Side. All of that.
We’ve worked Atlantic City. The Mohegan Sun. Branson, Missouri. Royal Caribbean cruises. Mississippi riverboats. Tours, television appearances, even a TV series loosely based on his life. It’s been a lot of time on the road over the past twenty years. But for the last few of them, I’m glad to say, we’ve had our own exclusive venue here in Vegas. For that peculiarly American combination of miracle tent-show theatrics, slick overproduction, and celebrity, Vegas is true north.
Of course, there’s nothing supernatural about it. I supply him with all the information. I get it for him with each show. I start with the credit card information from the advance ticket purchases—get the names, the addresses, their pictures, their basic life facts. But that’s just a start. I dig in. Hacking new Internet databases, my job gets easier every month. And of course, I follow up with traditional detective work. Tailing. Snooping. Shadowing . . .
What my boss
does
have is an extraordinary memory. A memory that he trains, works out with every morning, and exercises onstage every night. Seeing the face triggers the facts for him. Triggers the account numbers in the mark’s pocket. Triggers the names of the kids and the dog and the cat and the recently deceased uncle and the homebound aunt, all of which I’ve provided him with. He takes it from there. Inserts the theatrics, the lighting, the shock and awe.
So yes, I’m kind of a detective . . . and kind of in the entertain
ment business . . . and I’m also kind of a biographer. I supply biog
raphies—quickly, efficiently, digging out family secrets by the quick shovelful, looking around in the darkness to make sure no one will see. I get the information to him nightly. We have a smooth, untraceable mechanism for that, which has evolved considerably over the past twenty years. Today, it comes to him disguised as an online brokerage or bank statement. He has his private “account” password, of course, like any online bank or brokerage customer. His “statement” comes from a website only he and I know, which I nevertheless change frequently for added security. No one questions his right to the privacy of his finances—or his mildly neurotic habit of checking them daily. Not his wife, not his children. My employer, after all, is in the magic business to make money (the best magic of all), and no one questions his daily assurance to himself that he is in fact doing so. As the years have passed, where others in our position might naturally have become less cautious, we’ve only gotten more so; included in his “statement” will be the information directing him to where his next “statement” will be.
I never see him in person. I can’t risk being seen in the same room with him. I spend my life avoiding him—professionally. I have no contact, no intersection with him, except for the information I provide him in this secure, circuitous way. I could never risk attending his show, although of course I watch him on television. My anonymity, my invisibility, is obviously essential to the enterprise.
And obviously, I work alone. (Never has that statement been so profound. It probably explains this need to communicate, to reach out, that you are witnessing here.) Presumably there are people doing a similar job for other “mentalists” and “magicians,” guys just like me, but I don’t know that for sure, and of course we can never know each other. These possible, theoretical colleagues—who are not really competitors, who would be wonderful to commiserate with, swap war stories with—I can never know them.
In twenty years, my employer and I have been face-to-face only twice.
And have spoken only once.
On the morning he hired me.
I was a kid—still in college, going for a degree in computer science and forensic research. This was the one time
he
was the detective. He’d done his homework. I was an only child and my parents had both passed away—my mom recently from lung cancer and my dad in a highway accident when I was very young—but I was independent and self-sufficient and inner-directed even when they were alive. The perfect candidate. The perfect background. He looked at me, made crystal clear how this was a one-time, all-or-nothing, for-life decision. His look said that he meant it. That he knew what he was talking about. And he did; he was right.
And as he has grown more popular, the prospect of our
ever
meeting again—exchanging greetings, sharing a drink or a meal—has grown more remote. Has become impossible, merely a fantasy, an idle dream. But we need each other. We care about each other. We respect each other. And that need, care, and respect have only deepened over the years. Something I can only sense on his part—because we’ve never actually spoken since that first meeting.
It’s the ultimate symbiotic relationship, but one that takes place at a distance. Does it end only when one of us dies? Not even then. He can’t risk showing up at my funeral and revealing any possible connection between us. As I can’t risk showing up at his, only for some inquisitive type to realize it was not magic and mentalism but computer hacking and fraud—probably ending his estate’s ability to generate income, which wouldn’t be right for his heirs or mine (if I someday have any, that is).
We are partners in the truest sense—each unable to proceed or succeed without the other. And despite his fame and my anonymity, we hold enormous power over each other. He is nothing without me. I am nothing without him. We are each other’s secret. Each other’s best friend, each other’s lurking nightmare. A secret shared with no one else. We are brothers who never share a story or a beer, but who are nevertheless everything to one another.
Secrecy, silence, discretion—they’re obviously a way of life for me. For twenty years now, I’ve known nothing else. I’m a professional ghost. And because I have not yet decided, as I write this, exactly what I will be doing with this document, what its ultimate use will be—and in light of a professional habit of protective silence and secrecy and shadow that I am already, somewhat uncomfortably, jeopardizing here—I’ll refer to my employer, for the moment anyway, for the purposes of this record, as . . . oh, I don’t know, let’s call him Wallace the Amazing.
I live nicely. He pays me well. I have a simple but beautiful three-bedroom condominium on a golf course here in the desert. Few have ever seen it. (I’ve seen Wallace the Amazing’s home, of course. Every room of it. On TV specials. Behind him in interviews.) My neighbors rarely ask me what I do. For those few who tentatively inquire, I answer proudly, cheerfully, honestly, “Computers.” They look terrified that I’ll elaborate, that I’ll lose them in technology, so I’m quiet, and they seem happy to leave it at that. There are so many ways to make a buck, after all, and my Las Vegas neighbors seem to intuitively and readily accept that. Las Vegas, interestingly, is a place where the lines are very fluid between work and retirement, between full time and part time, between employed and unemployed, between flush with cash and tapped out. People here readily accept all kinds of unusual financial angles and ways of making money. Which makes it an easier place to avoid discussing or revealing what I do to pay my bills.
And what do my neighbors see, in their lightning glances and assessments, if they notice me at all? Someone trim, compact, neatly groomed, unremarkable. A bland second-tier type, not instantly desirable or attention-getting, perhaps, until my generation begins to age and the big, charismatic alpha males grow bellies and jowls and limp from old athletic injuries and I start to look pretty good in comparison. A beta male of lean muscle and unflashy efficiency and steadiness, built for the long haul. A beta male who earns a second look, a subtle appraisal and approval from alert women who catch my warm eyes, my hospitable smile. So for the sake of my profession and our cautious secrecy, I must look down, turn away, try my best not to draw that approval, try to suppress my smile.
Not always successfully. Debbie saw it, after all. Debbie, my sometime companion. A television-commercial actress who people sometimes think they’ve met at a party or seen in a department store, but in fact they only know her—vaguely, unidentifiably—from the television screen. Her gift is looking like anyone, and being no one. Filling out a crowd. Fitting into generalized fantasies and thirty-second tableaux of beauty, outdoor health, youthful fun. With her knack for seamlessly fitting in, the perfect accompaniment to my own inconspicuous existence.
She doesn’t know what I do for a living. I explained early on that I couldn’t tell her, that I’ll never be able to tell her, that she’ll have to simply accept that fact if she wants us to continue to see each other. But I assured her it is legal and causes no pain or harm—in fact, quite the opposite: it creates considerable nightly charm and joy in the world—and she knows me well enough now to know I’m telling the truth, and so she accepts it. Accepts my terms, sensing it’s the truth.
(I know the time bomb that ticks within our intimacy, that dooms us. I know that this enforced, insistent privacy of mine will eventually be the wedge between us, driving ever deeper, forcing us inevitably apart. Her effort to get close to me—to fully know me, to understand me—will eventually, paradoxically, push her away. My necessary secrets hang between us, and those same secrets, I know, keep me from feeling closer to her. I know how easily I can be returned to the occupational loner existence I previously inhabited and mastered—trolling the supermarket aisles by yourself, a drink or two in a sports bar where you are asked nothing about your profession. A mode of existence I know too well.)
We’ve been seeing each other almost a year now. Our life is quiet, unobtrusive, insular—of necessity. A small, rotating circle of merely casual friends. The two of us running laps together in the morning around my housing complex or swimming them together afternoons in the complex pool. Drinks in the red desert sunset. And always my work—obsessive, necessary, anxious, utterly unknown.
The second time I saw him face-to-face—well, the second time will give you a little more of a taste of Vegas itself, a little more about the tone and texture of our existence here. And a little more about that moment of belief that I see on many of your faces as the television camera pans the audience—thinking it’s a sixth sense or special power or tapping a primitive portion of the brain, or assuming it’s a trick but still shelling out eighty-five bucks a head to experience the spectacle and joyous mystification at how he does it—and how that belief extends well beyond our packed theater to encompass and characterize a whole city and way of life. People think of Vegas as a godless place—as the epitome, the ultimate expression, of godlessness—but it is in fact a desert brimming over with belief. Belief in good luck, faith in good fortune or a turn of fortune, belief in your flush destiny or just your destiny of a flush, and blind faith and trust in such demigods as Wallace the Amazing. (All the gaudy marriage chapels—that’s pure faith. Faith that it will work this time.)
Vegas, in its impersonal nature, its majestic blandeur, its happy democratic night blindness, is also a particularly welcoming town. Send me your perverts, your lunatic fringe, your miscreants yearning to breathe free.
So in Vegas, mobsters like Big Eddie are an accepted part of the desert landscape, well known for their brightly blooming local color—Eddie in his lime-green, cherry-red, or mauve leisure suit, massive jowls pendulating below the wide, starched collar. A bright desert flower giving off a stifling scent of aftershave if you get close enough to smell its petals. A desert flower whose thick stalks end in meat-hook hands whose previous activities you don’t want to ponder too closely.
For the several years we’d been in Vegas, Eddie had been a regular at Wallace’s show. Regularly brought an entourage, and it was hard to say whether he did it primarily for the entertainment and pleasure of his guests or as a clever method of disguising his own obsession with Wallace the Amazing. Because it can become an obsession. Imagine that you’re a nun-educated Catholic boy before getting swallowed up in street life; think how easily you’d get caught up in the thrill, the Lord-like prospect, of actually being able to read someone’s mind. And you brood about it, this godly ability, and the mobster mentality, as always, posits,
How can I convert that, how can I use that, what’s in it for me?
Wallace honored and rewarded Eddie’s obsessive commitment by not calling on him, not exposing him, and I’ll bet Eddie figured it was because the Amazing could see into his soul and his past and would of course not want to embarrass him by going there onstage. We did, however, call on a guest or two of Eddie’s every so often, and their amazement only ramped up Eddie’s obsession.
We should have known or guessed that his obsession was leading somewhere. But we didn’t. We’re not psychic. So after a show, when a little contingent of Eddie’s henchmen grabbed Wallace in the parking lot, it caught me—and Wallace, of course—unaware.
Normally in Vegas, you’d have cameras everywhere—mounted by the dozen throughout a venue, in the hallways and restrooms, canvassing the parking lot. But cameras would make our audience suspicious. They would assume the cameras were spying on them, revealing details, helping with the act, and therefore undercutting it, so part of the appeal of our show is “No Cameras,” no surveillance, no extra eyes. Wallace and I had debated putting a transmitter in the toe of his Topsider, or using a micro-camera disguised as one of the white buttons of his purposely conservative everyman button-down shirt, but that had risks too great, could bring all the wonder to a crashing halt, if someone—anyone—caught on. (The municipality insisted on cameras; Wallace insisted on none. Wallace, the super-tax-paying, high-revenue-generating Wallace, won.)