'I set foot again on French soil on December 5, 1918, hung-over, unshaven, in a cold rain. My phony papers had never been questioned, not even looked at twice. I did see, after a few weeks in Paris, that a newspaper had managed to identify the 'miracle doctor' as one Lieutenant Charles Nightingale, who had unreasonably vanished from an English village shortly before his release from the army and was now AWOL. But by then the doings of Lieutenant Nightingale were no more important to me than those of General Pershing.
'Speckle John was living in rooms in rue Vaugirard, and I took a room directly below him. You entered the building through huge wooden doors on the street and came into an open court surrounded on all sides by high gray brick walls. Smaller doors let onto staircases. To your right was the concierge's office; straight ahead, the stairs to Speckle John's rooms. This building was so rundown it was moldy, but to me it looked beautiful. Now I can almost see it before me. And so, I think, can you.'
The boys looked down the funnel of trees and saw the suggestion of high gray walls in the fog. Dark windows stared down at a tall figure in a hat and Burberry. Then a black figure, his face in shadow, emerged from a door in the brick.
'My mentor, my guide, and my rival was waiting for me.'
The man in the hat and long Burberry walked through the swirling fog toward the black figure. Then another door opened, and a slender girl hurried past both men. Rose.
'On that first day, I saw a girl walking past us but did not look closely at her. Later I found that she was named Rosa Forte, that she was a singer, and that her rooms were on the ground floor just below mine.'
Rose had disappeared into the trees; the two men had vanished too; the scene at the end of the tunnel of trees went black.
'At first I thought that she was the most enchanting girl I'd ever known, brave and intelligent, with a face that delighted me more than any painting. Within weeks I had fallen in love with her. Once I saw a shepherdess that had her face in a provincial antique shop, and because I had no money to buy it, I stole it — slipped it into my pocket and took it home. When Speckle John and I toured, I took it with me. Stared at it; stared into it, as if it knew mysteries Speckle John did not.'
Down in the narrow space between the trees, Rose Armstrong appeared, dressed in a long white garment of indeterminate period. She held a shepherd's crook, froze like a statue, and looked at Tom with unfocused eyes.
'Mysteries, yes. Mystery is always duplicitous, and once you know its secret, it is twice banal. In time I came to think that Rosa Forte was like some maiden in a fable, blank to herself for all her surface charm, the property of anybody who listened to her tale.' Collins lifted his bottle, and Rose Armstrong disappeared backward into fog and trees.
'Ah. Speckle John and I began working almost immediately. We booked ourselves into theaters and halls all over France. I was afraid to stay long periods in England because of the 'miracle-doctor' business, but we did cross England several times to perform in Ireland. We proceeded to invent an entirely new kind of performance, using the skills we had, and eventually worked our way up toward the top of the bill. What we were after was extravagance, and we could twist an audience around so that they could not be sure by the end of the performance exactly what had happened to them. When they saw us, they knew no other magician could come near us. One of our most famous illusions was the Collector, which began almost as a joke of mine. It was not until eighteen months later that I decided that I had the necessary power to use a real person as the Collector.'
Del gasped, and the magician raised his eyebrows at him. 'You have a moral objection? So did Speckle John — he wanted to stick with the less successful toy I'd invented earlier. But once it had occurred to me that I could fill up my toy, so to speak, with a real being, the toy began to look inadequate. The first Collector was a gentleman named Halmar Haraldson, a Swede who came upon us in Paris and wanted nothing more than to be a magician. He saw it as an avenue of revenge against a world which had not welcomed his abilities; and Halmar saw in us something more powerful than the usual run of stage magicians. What he saw, quite rightly, in magic was that it was antisocial, subversive, and he hated the world so badly that he hungered and thirsted for our power. Haraldson dressed always in cheap anonymous black suits above which his bony Scandinavian peanut-shaped head floated like a skull; he took narcotic drugs; he was the most extreme exponent of the postwar nihilism that I knew. Consciously or not, he resembled one of those apparitions in Edvard Munch's paintings. So I met him one night and collected him, and thereafter my toy glowed with a new life. Halmar lurked inside it like a genie.'
'What happens to the person you use?' Tom asked. 'What happened to Halmar?'
'I released him eventually, when he became a liability. You will hear, child. Speckle John would have insisted on abandoning the Collector altogether, but I had gained control of the act. After all, I was his successor, and my powers were soon the equal of his. He could not insist with me, though I could see him growing unhappier and unhappier as we toured together. I am talking about something that happened over a period of years.
'It's a commonplace irony, I imagine. Partners work together and achieve success, but fall out personally. He began to make it clear that he thought I was a mistake — that I should never have been chosen. Speckle John, to my disappointment, was not large-minded. His ambitions were small, his conception of magic was small. 'The test of a mature magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life,' he said; and I said, 'The test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life.'
'Rosa joined our act after a time. Her singing had never led to anything, and she needed a job. Speckle liked her, and because she had performed, stage fright did not cripple her. We taught her all the standard tricks; she was adept at them, and her gamine quality was effective with audiences. My partner took a paternal attitude toward her, which I thought ridiculous. Rosa was mine, to do with as I wished; but I did not object to their having talks together, for it helped reconcile her to her position. The other reason I did not object was that my partner's care with the girl proved to me that it was he, not I, who had been the mistake. My little shepherdess was porcelain through and through, beautiful to look at, but only a reflector of borrowed light.'
Wind pushed at the fog, swirled it. A deeper chill entered the clearing.
'When you travel as we did, you begin to know a community of all the others who play the same theaters. Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, Maidie Scott, Vanny Chard, Liane D'Eve . . . One group interested me, Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys. There were six 'Boys,' tumblers and strongmen, rough characters. I think they had all been in prison for violent crimes at one time or another — rape and robbery, assault. Other performers left them alone. In fact, their tumbling was only adequate, not nearly good enough for them to be headliners, and they broke it up with comic songs and staged fights. From time to time they let the fighting wander offstage. I know of a couple of occasions when they beat men nearly to death in drunken brawls. They were rather like an unevolved form of life. I wanted to hire them, and when I approached their leader, Arnold Peet, he immediately agreed — better to be second stringer in a successful act than to wither on your own. And he agreed also that his 'boys' would work as my bodyguards when we were not performing. Eventually they feared me — they depended on me for their bread — they knew I could kill them with a glance and they did anything I wanted them to do. Our act immediately became stronger, too, wilder and more theatrical, because it took its direction from me.