“What the hell, Smalls.” Teddy glanced at the door, making sure Buddy wasn’t standing there.
The agent raised his eyebrows. “They still don’t know?”
“Jesus Christ. It’s none of your business.”
“All right, let’s set aside the children for now,” Smalls said. “I have a different question.”
“You know, we could have had this entire conversation on the phone, and you wouldn’t have had to drive all the way over here with this pint-size William Howard Taft.”
“This is important,” Smalls said. “I want you to—”
“And how’d you get here so fast?” Teddy asked. “You two bunking at the Hinsdale Oasis or something?”
“Would you stop interrupting for one gosh darn second?”
“There’s no call for language,” Teddy said. Archibald chuckled.
Smalls took a breath. Then, in a quieter voice, he said, “I told you Star Gate was closing down.”
“And I bet Archibald’s wallet is still in mourning.”
“There’s only a couple agents left,” Smalls said. “You remember Clifford Turner? He’s detected an enormous spike of psychic energy in this area.”
Teddy laughed. “Cliff? He’s sweet, but he couldn’t detect an armchair if he was sitting on it.”
“Teddy, this is important. We’re trying to help you.”
“Help me?”
“Your children, at least. What if the Russians picked up that spike? What if, at this very moment, they’re homing in on this area?”
“Looking for my children?”
“No,” the agent said. “The next Maureen.”
Teddy laughed.
“Just because the Cold War’s over doesn’t mean the world’s any safer,” Smalls said. “In fact, with all this instability, threats can come from—”
“Destin. Please.”
“What?”
“Has it crossed your mind that you’re inventing all this spy drama because you’re terrified of retirement?”
“Inventing it?”
“Archibald’s in it for the money. But you, you need this for different reasons. You’ve been put out to pasteurize, you’ve lost the love of your life, your dreams have died—”
“You’re talking about me now?”
“So your life didn’t turn out the way you thought. So you didn’t change the world. So what? It was a pretty good run. And now you’ve got only one choice.”
Smalls raised an eyebrow.
“Embrace mediocrity,” Teddy said. “That’s my advice to you, my friend. Lower the bar. Accept the C-minus. Give up on the rib eye and order the hamburger.”
Smalls stared at him for a long moment, annoyed now but putting a lid on it. God damn, it was fun to wind the ol’ G-man up. Just like the old days. Having Archibald as an audience was the bonus.
Finally Smalls said, “I wish I was making all this up, Teddy. The world’s getting more dangerous by the day. Our enemies aren’t in submarines and bomber jets anymore. It’s not about missile silos, though God help me, the idea of a fragmented Soviet Union keeps me awake at night. No, our enemies are fanatics with fertilizer bombs. How can we protect ourselves against another Oklahoma City? How can ordinary intelligence suss out two men in a truck?”
Oh, speeches. Square-jawed Smalls was hell on speeches.
“Are you going to give me that address or not?” Teddy asked.
Smalls handed him the folded slip of paper. Teddy studied it without opening it. He thought Archibald would appreciate the move.
“So she does live in Oak Brook,” Teddy said.
Smalls seemed surprised.
“Educated guess,” Archibald said.
Smalls stood up. “I’m serious, Teddy,” Smalls said. “The stakes are high.”
Archibald said, “Another Maureen could make all the difference.”
“There is no other Maureen,” Teddy said, tucking the paper away. “And no next Maureen, just like there was no one before her. She was one of a kind. The Ace of Roses.”
He’d never seen a smoother operator, and the topper was the photograph gag Maureen pulled on that last day in Dr. Eldon’s lab. This was the third or fourth week in October 1962. The campus trees were ablaze, and the air had taken on that amber shimmer of a fall afternoon. Or perhaps it was only the stage lighting of faulty memory. It could have been gray and overcast, and his mind would have cast a golden haze over that last episode of unbridled play before Dr. Eldon’s program was yanked out from under him and everything got serious.
And it was play. A few months into the experiments, the subject pool was down to just Clifford, Teddy, and Maureen, and protocol had broken down completely. They still performed in a “controlled environment,” an observation room with a one-way mirror, behind which an assistant filmed them. But within the observation room it was anything but controlled. Teddy had nudged Dr. Eldon into abandoning his original test plans in favor of an “improvisational approach.” Cliff still did solo sessions, but Maureen and Teddy would come into the room together (another protocol breakdown that Teddy had encouraged, noting that psychic activity seemed to be stronger when they were in the same room), and do whatever popped into their heads. “What do you feel like doing today?” Dr. Eldon would ask them, and then Teddy (most often it was Teddy) would propose some new experiment, which of course he’d prepared for.
In short, the inmates had taken over the asylum.
A newcomer to the scam biz might suppose that scientists were the hardest to fool, but the opposite was true. Each letter after a name imparted a dose of misapplied confidence. PhDs believed that expertise in one field—say, neuroscience—made them generally smarter in all fields. Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers. And if the suckers wanted the results you were giving ’em—if they were already imagining the publications and fame that would come from proving psychic abilities were true? Everything would have been different if Eldon’s career depended on debunking Teddy and Maureen instead of confirming them. Hell, all the man had to do was hire a stage magician to watch them work and the psychics would be sunk.
Well, Teddy would be. Maureen he wasn’t so sure. What amazed him was how she could outperform him, even when he set up the scams. He’d practice pencil reading all week, come in with prepared envelopes, his pockets crammed with blanks and dummy cards—and Maureen would toss off some feat of casual clairvoyance that would knock his socks off.
“You’re killing me,” he told her. “Absolutely killing me.”
She laughed. Oh, he liked that laugh. They were strolling around that improbably sunny courtyard, on break after spending a couple of hours fascinating Dr. Eldon and the invisible assistant.
“You’re the one who’s killing them,” Maureen said. “You saw Dr. Eldon’s face when you guessed all three wishes.”
This morning it had been mostly Teddy’s show. He’d started with some matchstick divination, followed up with his go-to shtick with the hat and paper. The doc had been suitably impressed.
“Oh, that?” he said. “That’s just billet reading.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“One of the first tricks I learned. There was a kid in my neighborhood who did nothing but read magic books all day and get beat up on the weekends. Tiny little guy. I kept him from getting his noggin caved in, and he showed me the ropes.”
“So how’s it done?” she asked. “The billet reading?”
“The hardest part is palming the first slip. The rest of it’s just reading ahead.”
“I didn’t see you palm anything,” she said. “You never even touched the papers except when you held them to your forehead. Unless…”