The Illusionists

‘You think he’ll give you the money, do you?’ Under the make-up Carlo’s face was flushed and his eyes glassy.

‘We shall see,’ Devil said simply.

At the end of the show the place where Grady sat to hand out the performers’ shillings and pence was taken by his deputy, a terrier of a man who wore his hat tipped on the back of his head like a bookmaker.

‘Two hundred seats,’ Devil growled when the man passed him the usual two shillings and sixpence.

‘What’s that?’

‘Eighty per cent capacity. Tonight Carlo and I get ten per cent of the takings.’

Grady’s deputy sneered. ‘Next,’ he called to the waiting line and waved Devil and Carlo aside. Devil planted himself squarely in front of the table and leaned over the man.

‘Ten per cent. According to my contract, signed by Jacko Grady.’

‘Take it up with Grady, then. Next.’

Devil’s fist smashed down, sending a little pile of coins rolling.

‘Contract!’ he shouted.

‘You can roll up your so-called contract and stick it up your arse. So far as I am concerned,’ the man said. Devil grabbed him by the coat lapels and hoisted him out of his seat. Coins spilled all over the floor and the other performers catcalled and jostled as they snatched them up. The deputy’s legs feebly kicked in the air and the table overturned.

Carlo sadly shook his head.

‘Won’t help,’ he sighed.

‘Give us our money,’ Devil snarled into the man’s face.

‘Not mine to give,’ the other retorted. Recognising the truth of this Devil slammed him back into his chair and took up the rickety card table as if he were about to joust with it. Impatience at the delay began to ripple down the queue. Devil poked the legs of the table at the deputy’s chest.

‘Tell Grady. I want my money. Tomorrow.’

‘Tell him yourself. Next, I say, and look sharp the rest of you if you’re wanting to get paid tonight.’

Devil dropped the table on the deputy’s feet. With the man’s yelp of pain to console him he stalked away and Carlo followed. Outside it was bitterly cold, with clots of wet snow swirling through the sepia glimmer of the street lamps. In silence they began to trudge towards Holborn but Carlo walked so slowly that Devil gave up the pursuit of his own furious thoughts to look round for him. The dwarf pressed his hand against a leprous wall for support as he coughed and spat the product into the gutter.

‘Are you ill?’ Devil asked him.

‘Yes.’ Carlo was too tired even to attempt a sharp retort.

Devil sighed. ‘Come on.’ With their heads down they trod the familiar way back through the alleys to the lodging house. When they reached the attic room it was hardly warmer than outside. The squalor of it struck even Devil after he had lit the lamp. He looked around at the mounds of props and boxes, the unswept boards and dirty pots. Carlo’s white doves sat in their cage, reproachful black eyes on Devil. He stirred up a fire and the dwarf sank into his blanket. He drank the toddy that Devil mixed for him and then lay in a piteous huddle. He closed his eyes.

‘This is how our Sallie went,’ he murmured.

‘You’re not going anywhere. Except to the Palmyra theatre.’

Carlo only shivered.

‘We are about to make our fortunes, my friend. Two hundred seats sold, remember.’

‘I want to sleep.’

Devil lay in his bed and listened for most of the night to the dwarf’s feverish tossing and turning. In the morning Carlo’s face was hollow and his eyes were sunk in their sockets. Devil let him rest and went out to buy food that Carlo could barely pick at. As the time approached for them to make their way to the theatre Devil fussed from bed to table, peering at the small heap of skin and bones under the blanket and praying that the dwarf would at least get up from his bed. He was hardly able to hope that he would actually be able to perform. At the last possible moment Carlo dragged himself upright. He coughed fitfully and lurched to his feet.

At the foot of the stairs Maria Hayes was waiting for them. She raised her thick eyebrows.

‘Compliments of the season, ma’am,’ Devil murmured. Carlo moved like a shadow behind him and Devil believed he could feel in his own bones the shudder of a suppressed cough. The landlady would welcome a sick dwarf even less readily than a healthy one.

‘Rent is owing, Mr Wix. For two occupants.’ Her voice was like ice in a bucket.

‘And it will be paid this very evening, Mrs Hayes. Boldoni and Wix are becoming quite the spectacular success, as you know.’

Devil had taken care to present the landlady with a pair of tickets, and she and her husband had duly visited the Palmyra. For two or three days thereafter relations had been cordial, even admiring, and Carlo had been tacitly accepted as a lodger even though none of the Hayes family ever spoke to him. But when the rent was overdue Mrs Hayes was immune even to Devil’s persuasions.

‘This evening.’ She turned the phrase into a threat, her mouth as yielding as a cut-throat razor. She withdrew into her quarters.

As they walked up the alley Devil grimly said, ‘Carlo, we have to work. Tonight and every night. Otherwise’ – but there was no need for him to say what otherwise would involve. It lay hungry all about them in the ruined houses, even in the meagre shelter beneath market carts, and for the unluckiest in corners where the sleet-laden fingers of the wind dug a little less keenly.

Carlo looked up at him. For the first time in the long weeks since they had met he seemed fragile. Usually his tiny frame was springing with energy but tonight his neck seemed hardly strong enough to bear the weight of his large head. His cracked lips barely moved when he spoke, and he still winced.

‘I know.’

He was brave, for such a scrap of a man. Devil felt an urge to pull his cap down and wrap his ragged muffler closer about his throat for him, but these signs of tenderness embarrassed him. He touched the dwarf’s shoulder instead, quickly withdrew his hand and turned towards the Strand.

The audience were already taking their seats. In anticipation of the Christmas holiday there was a hum of good-humoured anticipation rising through the auditorium. Devil put his eye to a chink in the curtain. More than two hundred in tonight, that was certain. As soon as the show was over he would force Jacko Grady to an accounting. He made this decision and then put it aside in order to give all his mind to the performance.

Carlo looked like a death’s head as Devil led him out into the lights. A cohort of costumed philosophers in the cheaper seats roared at his appearance. The familiar moves of the playlet began. In the third row he was surprised to see Eliza Dunlop’s face turned up to the stage.

‘I shall never yield my secret,’ Carlo said. His voice was hoarse and would not have been audible at the back of the theatre had not the students raised theirs in echo. ‘Never, while breath remains in this body.’

The dwarf’s body was visibly wobbling atop his stilts. The occult symbols stitched to his robe swayed and shimmered.

Devil swung the blade and crushed the small phial of cochineal liquid concealed in his palm. In perfect synchrony the percussion powder detonated in the wings, the lights went down to the crash of a chord and Carlo fell in a heap at the evil philosopher’s feet.

The lights flared again, catching the coils of smoke rising through the vents in the stage. As always the stink of it caught in the back of Devil’s throat. Red liquid ran down the sword blade and smirched his fingers.

The trick was wrong. He knew it even before Carlo fell.

Instead of a neat heap of empty robes supported by a wicker frame there was an inert body. Carlo lay in plain view, his wig askew and his robe caught up to expose a rough wooden limb extension.

The audience had quietened. They waited, collective breath drawn in, for the interesting new direction the illusion must take.

A second of time stretched for Devil into a creeping eternity, and Carlo did not stir. From the darkness at the back of the hall came the slow clapping of a single pair of hands and then more handclaps drew out a whispered hiss that swelled in an instant into a wave of jeering.

Devil held up his hand. ‘The performer is ill.’

He looked over two rows of grinning heads into Eliza Dunlop’s eyes.

‘Dead?’ someone bawled.

‘Dead drunk,’ another hollered.

‘Must be living. ’E’s still got ’is ’ed on.’

Devil waved his hand to the wings.

‘Bring down the curtain.’

When they were screened from the booing and stamping he knelt at Carlo’s side. The dwarf had fainted. Devil shook the wicker cage and his eyes rolled up in his head.

‘God help us,’ Devil muttered.

Even the stagehands, the roughest of men, were disconcerted. Between them Devil and one of the men easily lifted the dwarf’s body with the dangling stilts still attached, and the others bore the cabinet into the wings. Jacko Grady was seething there.

‘Christ Jesus, Wix, what game are you playing now?’

‘Does it look like a game?’

The roar of the audience battered the curtain.

‘Get the next act on. Where are the bloody acrobats?’ the manager yelled. Bascia and her brother ran past, bells tinkling. They somersaulted into the lights as their music struck up. Backstage Carlo was carried into the airless dressing space. They laid him on the floor, took off the costume trappings and Devil stooped to unfasten the stilts. It was awkward enough to do and yet the dwarf had to carry out the manoeuvre in seconds beneath the stage trapdoor before he flew to take up his cramped position in the cabinet.

‘Get some water,’ Devil commanded but no one in the little crowd of gawping performers made a move. They stood looking down at the unconscious dwarf as if they too could not quite believe that this was not part of a new trick.

There was a movement at the edge of the circle.

‘Let him breathe, for God’s sake’, Eliza Dunlop said. She knelt to place her hand on Carlo’s forehead and then lifted his wrist to feel his pulse.

‘He is burning up with fever. How long has he been ill?’ Her eyes met Devil’s again, across the prostrate body.

‘Two days.’

‘He should not be here. He should be in his bed.’ Her rebuke was crisp. Even in his anxiety Devil was irritated by her assumption that he and Carlo had any choice in the matter of where to be.

‘Thank you for your opinion,’ he snapped.

‘Not at all.’ She leaned closer to Carlo and as if her proximity communicated itself to him the dwarf’s eyelids fluttered open. His chest heaved as he tried to cough. Eliza held up her hand and a cup of water was at last passed through the knot of spectators. As she gently supported Carlo’s shoulders and raised the cup to his lips Grady appeared, crimson in the face and furious.

‘Move, all of you. It’s a sick dwarf here, not a peep show. This performance is already a catastrophe. Get on and give ’em their money’s worth.’

The other performers slid aside, leaving only Devil and Heinrich Bayer beside Eliza and Carlo. Grady planted his legs apart and his belly jutted over them like a ship’s prow. Carlo breathed out a tiny sigh and turned his head away from its shadow. His horsehair wig was forced askew and Eliza removed it, stroking the dwarf’s matted hair back from his face.

Grady said, ‘I hope whatever plague the creature has is not infectious. Take him away, Wix. And get yourselves back for tomorrow’s matinée if you want to go on working for me.’

‘Wait one moment,’ Devil countered. He stepped across Carlo and brought his face up close to Grady’s, although the man’s breath was foetid enough to drive him back again. ‘We have a contract to discuss. You owe me—’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.