CONTENTS
THE LAST ILLUSION
page 1
THE LIFE OF DEATH
page 74
HOW SPOILERS BLEED
page 122
TWILIGHT AT THE TOWERS
page 165
THE BOOK OF BLOOD
(a postscript)
ON JERUSALEM STREET
page 209
WHAT HAPPENED THEN - when the magician,
having mesmerised the caged tiger, pulled the
tasselled cord that released a dozen swords upon its
head - was the subject of heated argument both in the
bar of the theatre and later, when Swann's performance
was over, on the sidewalk of 51st Street. Some claimed to
have glimpsed the bottom of the cage opening in the split
second that all other eyes were on the descending blades,
and seen the tiger swiftly spirited away as the woman in
the red dress took its place behind the lacquered bars.
Others were just as adamant that the animal had never
been in the cage to begin with, its presence merely a
projection which had been extinguished as a mechanism
propelled the woman from beneath the stage; this, of
course, at such a speed that it deceived the eye of all but
those swift and suspicious enough to catch it. And the
swords? The nature of the trick which had transformed
them in the mere seconds of their gleaming descent from
1
steel to rose-petals was yet further fuel for debate. The
explanations ranged from the prosaic to the elaborate,
but few of the throng that left the theatre lacked some
theory. Nor did the arguments finish there, on the
sidewalk. They raged on, no doubt, in the apartments
and restaurants of New York.
The pleasure to be had from Swann's illusions was,
it seemed, twofold. First: the spectacle of the trick
itself - in the breathless moment when disbelief
was, if not suspended, at least taken on tip-toe.
And second, when the moment was over and logic
restored, in the debate as to how the trick had been
achieved.
'How do you do it, Mr Swann?' Barbara Bernstein
was eager to know.
'It's magic,' Swann replied. He had invited her
backstage to examine the tiger's cage for any sign of
fakery in its construction; she had found none. She had
examined the swords: they were lethal. And the petals,
fragrant. Still she insisted:
'Yes, but really . . .' she leaned close to him. 'You can
tell me,' she said, 'I promise I won't breathe a word to a
soul.'
He returned her a slow smile in place of a reply.
'Oh, I know. . .'she said,'you're going to tell me that
you've signed some kind of oath.'
That's right,' Swann said.
'- And you're forbidden to give away any trade
secrets.'
'The intention is to give you pleasure,' he told her.
'Have I failed in that?'
'Oh no,' she replied, without a moment's hesitation.
'Everybody's talking about the show. You're the toast
of New York.'
'No,' he protested.
'Truly,' she said, 'I know people who would give their
eye-teeth to get into this theatre. And to have a guided
tour backstage . . . well, I'll be the envy of everybody.'
'I'm pleased,' he said, and touched her face. She had
clearly been anticipating such a move on his part. It
would be something else for her to boast of: her
seduction by the man critics had dubbed the Magus
of Manhattan.
'I'd like to make love to you,' he whispered to her.
'Here?' she said.
'No,' he told her. 'Not within ear-shot of the
tigers.'
She laughed. She preferred her lovers twenty years
Swann's junior - he looked, someone had observed,
like a man in mourning for his profile, but his touch
promised wit no boy could offer. She liked the tang of
dissolution she sensed beneath his gentlemanly fagade.
Swann was a dangerous man. If she turned him down
she might never find another.
'We could go to a hotel,' she suggested.
'A hotel,' he said, 'is a good idea.'
A look of doubt had crossed her face.
'What about your wife . . .?' she said. 'We might be
seen.'
He took her hand. 'Shall we be invisible, then?'
Tm serious.'
'So am I,' he insisted. 'Take it from me; seeing is
not believing. I should know. It's the cornerstone of
my profession.' She did not look much reassured. 'If
anyone recognises us,' he told her, Til simply tell them
their eyes are playing tricks.'
She smiled at this, and he kissed her. She returned the
kiss with unquestionable fervour.
'Miraculous,' he said, when their mouths parted.
'Shall we go before the tigers gossip?'
He led her across the stage. The cleaners had not yet
got about their business, and there, lying on the boards,
was a litter of rose-buds. Some had been trampled, a few
had not. Swann took his hand from hers, and walked
across to where the flowers lay.
She watched him stoop to pluck a rose from the
ground, enchanted by the gesture, but before he could
stand upright again something in the air above him
caught her eye. She looked up and her gaze met a slice
of silver that was even now plunging towards him. She
made to warn him, but the sword was quicker than her
tongue. At the last possible moment he seemed to sense
the danger he was in and looked round, the bud in his
hand, as the point met his back. The sword's momentum
carried it through his body to the hilt. Blood fled from
his chest, and splashed the floor. He made no sound, but
fell forward, forcing two-thirds of the sword's length out
of his body again as he hit the stage.
She would have screamed, but that her attention
was claimed by a sound from the clutter of magical
apparatus arrayed in the wings behind her, a muttered
growl which was indisputably the voice of the tiger. She
froze. There were probably instructions on how best to
stare down rogue tigers, but as a Manhattanite born
and bred they were techniques she wasn't acquainted
with.
'Swann?' she said, hoping this yet might be some
baroque illusion staged purely for her benefit. 'Swann.
Please get up.'
But the magician only lay where he had fallen, the
pool spreading from beneath him.
'If this is a joke -' she said testily,'- I'm not amused.'
When he didn't rise to her remark she tried a sweeter
tactic. 'Swann, my sweet, I'd like to go now, if you don't
mind.'
The growl came again. She didn't want to turn and
seek out its source, but equally she didn't want to be
sprung upon from behind.
Cautiously she looked round. The wings were in dark-
ness. The clutter of properties kept her from working
out the precise location of the beast. She could hear it
still, however: its tread, its growl. Step by step, she
retreated towards the apron of the stage. The closed
curtains sealed her off from the auditorium, but she
hoped she might scramble under them before the tiger
reached her.
As she backed against the heavy fabric, one of the
shadows in the wings forsook its ambiguity, and the
animal appeared. It was not beautiful, as she had
thought it when behind bars. It was vast and lethal and
hungry. She went down on her haunches and reached
for the hem of the curtain. The fabric was heavily
weighted, and she had more difficulty lifting it than
she'd expected, but she had managed to slide halfway
under the drape when, head and hands pressed to the
boards, she sensed the thump of the tiger's advance.
An instant later she felt the splash of its breath on her
bare back, and screamed as it hooked its talons into her
body and hauled her from the sight of safety towards
its steaming jaws.
Even then, she refused to give up her life. She kicked
at it, and tore out its fur in handfuls, and delivered a hail
of punches to its snout. But her resistance was negligible
in the face of such authority; her assault, for all its
ferocity, did not slow the beast a jot. It ripped open her
body with one casual clout. Mercifully, with that first
wound her senses gave up all claim to verisimilitude,
and took instead to preposterous invention. It seemed
to her that she heard applause from somewhere, and
the roar of an approving audience, and that in place
of the blood that was surely springing from her body
there came fountains of sparkling light. The agony her
nerve-endings were suffering didn't touch her at all.
Even when the animal had divided her into three or
four parts her head lay on its side at the edge of the
stage and watched as her torso was mauled and her limbs
devoured.
And all the while, when she wondered how all this
could be possible - that her eyes could live to witness
this last supper - the only reply she could think of was
Swann's:
'It's magic,' he'd said.
Indeed, she was thinking that very thing, that this
must be magic, when the tiger ambled across to her head,
and swallowed it down in one bite.
Amongst a certain set Harry D'Amour liked to believe
he had some small reputation - a coterie which did
not, alas, include his ex-wife, his creditors or those
anonymous critics who regularly posted dogs' excrement
through his office letterbox. But the woman who was on
the phone now, her voice so full of grief she might have
been crying for half a year, and was about to begin again,
she knew him for the paragon he was.
'-1 need your help, Mr D'Amour; very badly.'
'I'm busy on several cases at the moment,' he told her.
'Maybe you could come to the office?'
'I can't leave the house,' the woman informed him.
Til explain everything. Please come.'
He was sorely tempted. But there were several out-
standing cases, one of which, if not solved soon, might
end in fratricide. He suggested she try elsewhere.
'I can't go to just anybody,' the woman insisted.
'Why me?'
'I read about you. About what happened in Brooklyn.'
Making mention of his most conspicuous failure was
not the surest method of securing his services, Harry
thought, but it certainly got his attention. What had
happened in Wyckoff Street had begun innocently
enough, with a husband who'd employed him to spy
on his adulterous wife, and had ended on the top storey
of the Lomax house with the world he thought he'd
known turning inside out. When the body-count was
done, and the surviving priests dispatched, he was left
with a fear of stairs, and more questions than he'd ever
answer this side of the family plot. He took no pleasure
in being reminded of those terrors.
'I don't like to talk about Brooklyn,' he said.
'Forgive me,' the woman replied, 'but I need
somebody who has experience with . . . with the
occult.' She stopped speaking for a moment. He could
still hear her breath down the line: soft, but erratic.
'I need you,' she said. He had already decided, in that
pause when only her fear had been audible, what reply
he would make.
Til come.'
'I'm grateful to you,' she said. 'The house is on East
61st Street -' He scribbled down the details. Her last
words were, 'Please hurry.' Then she put down the
phone.
He made some calls, in the vain hope of placating two
of his more excitable clients, then pulled on his jacket,
locked the office, and started downstairs. The landing
and the lobby smelt pungent. As he reached the front
door he caught Chaplin, the janitor, emerging from the
basement.
'This place stinks,' he told the man.
'It's disinfectant.'
'It's cat's piss,' Harry said. 'Get something done about
it, will you? I've got a reputation to protect.'
7
He left the man laughing.
The brownstone on East 61st Street was in pristine
condition. He stood on the scrubbed step, sweaty and
sour-breathed, and felt like a slob. The expression on
the face that met him when the door opened did nothing
to dissuade him of that opinion.
'Yes?' it wanted to know.
'I'm Harry D'Amour,' he said. 'I got a call.'
The man nodded. 'You'd better come in,' he said
without enthusiasm.
It was cooler in than out; and sweeter. The place
reeked of perfume. Harry followed the disapproving
face down the hallway and into a large room, on the
other side of which - across an oriental carpet that had
everything woven into its pattern but the price - sat a
widow. She didn't suit black; nor tears. She stood up
and offered her hand.
'Mr D'Amour?'
'Yes.'
'Valentin will get you something to drink if you'd
like.'
'Please. Milk, if you have it.' His belly had been
jittering for the last hour; since her talk of Wyckoff
Street, in fact.
Valentin retired from the room, not taking his beady
eyes off Harry until the last possible moment.
'Somebody died,' said Harry, once the man had
gone.
'That's right,' the widow said, sitting down again.
At her invitation he sat opposite her, amongst enough
cushions to furnish a harem. 'My husband.'
Tm sorry.'
'There's no time to be sorry,' she said, her every look
and gesture betraying her words. He was glad of her
8
grief; the tearstains and the fatigue blemished a beauty
which, had he seen it unimpaired, might have rendered
him dumb with admiration.
'They say that my husband's death was an accident,'
she was saying. 'I know it wasn't.'
'May I ask . . . your name?'
'I'm sorry. My name is Swann, Mr D'Amour.
Dorothea Swann. You may have heard of my husband?'
The magician?'
'Illusionist,' she said.
'I read about it. Tragic.'
'Did you ever see his performance?'
Harry shook his head. 'I can't afford Broadway, Mrs
Swann.'
'We were only over for three months, while his show
ran. We were going back in September . . .'
'Back?'
'To Hamburg,' she said, 'I don't like this city. It's too
hot. And too cruel.'
'Don't blame New York,' he said. 'It can't help
itself.'
'Maybe,' she replied, nodding. 'Perhaps what hap-
pened to Swann would have happened anyway, wherever
we'd been. People keep telling me: it was an accident.
That's all. Just an accident.'
'But you don't believe it?'
Valentin had appeared with a glass of milk. He set it
down on the table in front of Harry. As he made to leave,
she said: 'Valentin. The letter?'
He looked at her strangely, almost as though she'd
said something obscene.
'The letter,' she repeated.
He exited.
'You were saying -'
She frowned. 'What?'
'About it being an accident.'
'Oh yes. I lived with Swann seven and a half years,
and I got to understand him as well as anybody ever
could. I learned to sense when he wanted me around,
and when he didn't. When he didn't, I'd take myself off
somewhere and let him have his privacy. Genius needs
privacy. And he was a genius, you know. The greatest
illusionist since Houdini.'
'Is that so?'
'I'd think sometimes - it was a kind of miracle that he
let me into his life . . .'
Harry wanted to say Swann would have been mad not
to have done so, but the comment was inappropriate.
She didn't want blandishments; didn't need them.
Didn't need anything, perhaps, but her husband alive
again.
'Now I think I didn't know him at all,' she went on,
'didn't understand him. I think maybe it was another
trick. Another part of his magic.'
'I called him a magician a while back,' Harry said.
'You corrected me.'
'So I did,' she said, conceding his point with an
apologetic look. 'Forgive me. That was Swann talking.
He hated to be called a magician. He said that was a word
that had to be kept for miracle-workers.'
'And he was no miracle-worker?'
'He used to call himself the Great Pretender,' she said.
The thought made her smile.
Valentin had re-appeared, his lugubrious features rife
with suspicion. He carried an envelope, which he clearly
had no desire to give up. Dorothea had to cross the
...
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