Magician's Fire Read online

  They set off across the park. Billie reached for her ukulele, strung across her back as usual, but seemed to change her mind, and Harry knew why. She, like him, had seen the first signs of that familiar kink forming on their friend’s forehead. At the same time, Arthur’s left hand was reaching down to his jacket pocket, drawing out a little ribbon of paper with letters and dots running along it. Harry kept walking and tried to think of what to say.

  “Heading off to Chicago, is he?” Billie got there first. “Like you expected?”

  “First thing tomorrow.” Arthur ran a finger along the dots. “He sent this message through from his office yesterday, telling the servants. The machine in the hallway hammered it out, along with the usual stuff about stocks and shares. Servants read it and left it in the wastepaper basket, as usual.”

  “I just don’t get it.” Billie put her hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “He just got back from a trip to… Where was it again?”

  “Washington,” said Arthur. “He was gone three weeks.”

  “I mean, it’s one thing to spend all your time in an office in the city where you actually live—but traveling all over the country?” Billie shook her head.

  “He’s got meetings, hasn’t he? That’s what it’s like if you come to America to set up a brand-new bank.” Arthur frowned. “It’s been this way ever since we moved to New York, and that’s eight months now. Mind you, he totally ignored me in London too. As long as I can remember, he’s been just the same. Work comes first, a nice expensive house comes second, and having a bunch of servants who do exactly what he wants is important too.” He swung back toward the house. “Me, I’m just expected to tag along.”

  His eyes narrowed. Harry swung around too and saw why. As daylight faded, lamps were being lit inside the grand front room of the brilliantly white building. Inside stood Lord Trilby-Roberts, Arthur’s father. Tall, stiff, and wearing an immaculately tailored suit, the rich banker was standing perfectly straight and talking on a new invention called a telephone, while staring out through the window with an expression that, even at this distance, seemed cold and aloof. Around him, various servants busily gathered papers and files, no doubt in preparation for the trip to Chicago.

  “So he’s just going to…leave you again?” Harry turned back. “To hang around in that house?”

  “Along with all his other stuff.” Artie kept staring at the window. “Antique furniture, clocks from Switzerland, that sort of thing.”

  “Good thing he installed the ticker-tape machine,” Billie said. “Least that way you get warning of what he’s planning.”

  “I know,” said Arthur. “I know.”

  He reached back into his pocket and drew out another ribbon, gripping its end with particular force.

  “Actually, the machine hammered out another message this morning.” His hand tightened until the knuckles were white. “Something I wasn’t expecting—today of all days.”

  “Really?” Peering at the ribbon, Billie looked hopeful.

  “Found it crumpled up in the trash, just like the others. Do the servants really think I won’t find them?”

  “It was from your father in his office? To the servants back home?”

  “Of course.”

  “And it arrived today? The seventeenth of September?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s about you?”

  “Certainly is.”

  “So what is it? What does it say?”

  “It’s instructions to the servants about contacting another boarding school,” said Arthur, and he crumpled the ribbon into a tiny, hard ball. His eyes were curiously bright as his thumb and finger gripped the tiny paper ball. Harry wasn’t sure what to say at all, and neither, from the look of her, was Billie.

  “Boarding school?” She managed something, at last. “Sounds grim. Still, at least that’s taking some kind of interest in you…”

  “Not really. There are different sorts of boarding schools, for a start. The one Father has in mind is the sort of place you send someone if you specifically intend to take no interest in them whatsoever for as long as you possibly can. Hard for me to be even the tiniest distraction to him if I’ve been sent miles away.” Arthur held up the ball of paper and glared at it. “The school’s in Dayton, Ohio. So that’s 452 miles away, to be precise.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Billie looked genuinely worried. “We don’t want you disappearing anywhere, Artie.”

  “Me neither. What, and not see the two people who do actually take an interest in me? I don’t think so.” Artie flicked the ball furiously away. “I’ll use the normal tricks. I’ve foiled all the other attempts to send me away and I’ll foil this one too, don’t you worry. It’s just it’s a bit much, him doing this. On my… On my b…”

  He stopped. He sat down on a bench, hard. The paper ball was bouncing down the path, and he stared after it, his hands shoved in his tweed trouser pockets. As bad as we’ve ever seen him, thought Harry, and he turned back to the white house again. The tall, rigid figure was still there, the telephone in his hand, his servants bustling obediently around him. Harry’s eyes narrowed, just as his friend’s had done. Then he turned back to Billie who, with a determined look on her face, had plunked herself down on the bench, right next to Arthur.

  “Don’t worry, Artie.” She thumped him on the shoulder. “We’ve got you a birthday treat. Pass the blindfold, Harry!”

  “Birthday—how d’you know it was my birthday? Oof!”

  The blindfold was from Harry’s shoeshine box. A perfectly clean rag, he had bought it specially, and he swiftly pulled it over Arthur’s eyes and knotted it around the back of his head. Arthur’s hands flailed as Billie hoisted him over her shoulder and staggered off across the park.

  “Where are you taking me? What’s going on—Hey! That tickles!”

  “You’ve always said you wanted to be a magician’s assistant!” Harry ran on ahead. “Wearing the occasional blindfold’s part of it. Ready to row, Billie?”

  He jumped into the little boat moored at the edge of the pond. Billie tottered up to it and Harry helped her in, catching Arthur and propping him on one of the seats. Billie leaped in and grabbed an oar, and Harry grabbed one too. Together, they started to row, picking up speed quickly and passing various ducks.

  “What is going on?” Arthur, still blindfolded, was laughing now.

  “You’re in the hands of an expert, birthday boy.” Billie sculled to the left. “Not as if I haven’t blindfolded someone before. Tied her up too! The owner of my orphanage, down in New Orleans.”

  “You’ve told us this, Billie!” Harry rowed faster.

  “Now that was a real rough business, and I’d only just gotten started then—the Knotted Sheet Dangle, that’s what I call it—not only did I have to deal with the scariest owner of an orphanage there ever was, next I had to jump out the window and climb down a rope of knotted sheets, all the way down to the street below and—Watch out!”

  The boat thudded into the side of the dock. Harry threw the mooring rope, lassoed the mooring post, and helped Billie pull Arthur out. It was Harry’s turn to hoist the younger boy onto his shoulder now, and he stumbled out through the park gate and climbed onto a horse-drawn omnibus. He and Billie sat down, and for the next twenty minutes, they clattered across Manhattan, watching the city shudder past the window and laughing at the odd looks the other passengers were giving them, two scruffy street kids with a blindfolded boy in a tweed suit squashed between them. The omnibus tilted to a halt, and together they hoisted their friend and carried him out onto the street. On the other side, they saw their destination.

  A small, rather grimy-looking diner.

  They burst in through the door, the bell somersaulting above them. They carried Arthur to a table, propped him on a chair, and drew up chairs of their own. Harry nodded to a waitress, who rattled a little wooden
cart over to them. She picked up what was on it and lowered it onto the table. At the same moment, Harry and Billie removed Arthur’s blindfold.

  “Happy birthday, Artie!”

  A cake. Chocolate icing spiraled on its sides. Cream oozed from its center, spilling onto the plate, and three layers of sponge cake could be detected, each one sitting on a thick layer of yet more icing. Blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light, Artie took in all these details, but one seemed to affect him in particular: written on the cake’s top in sugary sprinkles was his name, along with a skillfully frosted picture of a stack of interesting-looking books.

  “But how did you afford this?” Arthur gasped.

  “The money from the trick, silly,” Billie replied.

  “But…that’s Harry’s money, really. He stood in front of th—”

  “That’s not how we do things, Artie. You know that,” Harry interrupted. “You calculated the train time, didn’t you? Billie found the chains, and both of you ran around drumming up that crowd…”

  “With no crowd, there wouldn’t be any money,” agreed Billie, grabbing a spoon.

  “Exactly. So we split the money three ways.” Harry leaned forward and jabbed a finger on the tablecloth. “Anyway, who knows where I’d have gotten with my tricks if it hadn’t been for you encouraging me, Artie. Remember when you saw me trying to cross Sixth Avenue by leaping between speeding streetcars? I was going nowhere then. Just some shoeshine boy, leaping about—no one else was noticing. But then you wandered up and told me all about that book you’d been reading in the library…”

  “Fire Dances in the Amazon,” said Arthur quietly.

  “Magicians there prove their skills by dancing through pits of fire! Why not do the same, flying through the showers of sparks from the streetcars?” Harry turned to Billie, his finger still firm on the tablecloth. “Same goes for you, Billie. You saw me practicing tightrope-walking along the back of that park bench—”

  “Waved my arms around, trying to make you lose balance.” Billie smiled.

  “Like I say, at least you noticed. And you also had the idea of stringing a rope way up high between two trees and getting me to walk along it while muttering spells and wriggling my arms free of no less than twenty-five knots. Helped me practice it over and over too, and that was how we drew our first crowd.” The finger was hurting now from all the jabbing. “So anyway, that’s why we split stuff in three. And because it’s your birthday, Artie, me and Billie decided to spend our shares on something you’d like.”

  “So that just left your bit. And we decided to throw that in too, if that’s all right by you,” Billie added.

  “Yes, of course…” Arthur’s voice had gone very quiet indeed. “Thanks, folks…”

  For some time, he said nothing more. He just sat there, staring at the cake. Uncertain what to do next, Harry didn’t move either. The silence went on for so long that the icing melting under the top layer of the cake began to tilt it to one side. Harry and Billie exchanged worried looks. Then, finally, Arthur reached out a hand and picked up the knife.

  “Father can ignore me as much as he likes and send as many messages as he wants about boarding schools too.” He smiled. “The three of us—we’ve got some serious eating to do.”

  The cake flew apart. Arthur cut the first slice, and then cut two more for Billie and Harry, and then kept cutting more slices for all three of them, in between gobbling down what was on his plate. Spoons flashed, hands grabbed, bits of sponge cake bounced across the table, and Harry saw one of the customers at a nearby table duck as a blob of icing hurtled right by him.

  Finally, no more slices were left, just a few crumbs and smears of icing, and these were busily devoured as well, Billie even holding her plate up to her face and rotating it so that her tongue could lick up every last trace. At last, they were done, and they tilted back their chairs and wiped a few last smears from their mouths.

  “Deee-licious!” said Billie.

  “The best cake I’ve ever tasted.” Arthur nodded. “And it’s the best birthday I can remember as well.”

  “And that, Artie,” said Harry, leaning back in his chair farthest of all, “was well worth standing in front of a hurtling train for!”

  He meant every word. He had meant the words earlier too. And he wasn’t the only one who felt that way, it seemed, because just then he felt his hand grow warm and realized that Arthur had taken hold of it. The tweed-suited boy also took hold of Billie’s hand, and then Billie reached across and grabbed the only hand that remained on the table, Harry’s other one. The three of them sat there, the business of the diner clattering around them. No trace of sadness on Artie’s face now. It was smiling all over, and Billie was smiling as well, and Harry felt his own face break into a grin.

  His eyes flicked up to the diner’s clock. Then to the grimy window. Through it, a familiar spindly shape could be seen, hovering by a lamppost.

  “Your birthday treat’s not over yet, Artie!” Harry scraped back his chair. “It’s only just beginning!”

  “Really?” Arthur looked around, confused.

  “I think I know what Harry’s talking about.” Turning, Billie could clearly see the spindly shape too. “I see him,” she said.

  “See him? See who?” Arthur swiveled around in his seat, trying to see.

  “Herbie,” said Harry. “He came!”

  Chapter 3

  Harry, Arthur, and Billie raced across the street toward the elderly figure by the lamp post.

  “Hello, Herbie!”

  The old man turned around. His gray hair drooped, his movements were slow, and his clothes billowed around his limbs as he gripped his walking cane. Harry leaped onto the curb, balanced there, and waited for the complicated wrinkles of Herbie’s face to arrange themselves into a smile.

  “Harry.” There it was. “Half past six, just as we agreed.”

  “Did you bring the tickets? It’s Artie’s birthday, remember!”

  “Of course.” The smile hung there as three rectangular stubs of paper flowered in Herbie’s hand. He handed them over and started walking slowly down the street, his cane tapping. “Three tickets for tonight’s performance. I assume you wish to watch me for the usual reason?”

  “You bet, Mr. Lemster!” Billie hurried up, Arthur just behind. “Why else would Harry want to see a magician?”

  “Maybe we could go into the theater with you? Seeing as it’s my birthday?” Arthur walked along, trying to sound innocent. “Just to have a look backstage…”

  “Ah, that would be quite against the rules, Arthur.” The old man gripped his cane. “I never let anyone behind the curtain. You know that. You won’t attempt to meet me at the stage door after the show either, I trust?” He stopped. “That is our agreement. What if your keen eyes spotted some trace of a trick, a clue, that might remain upon me… That would be most unfair…”

  “Harry’d be looking, that’s for sure.” Arthur nodded. “He’s seen a whole bunch of other magicians since we last met, Herbie—Chinese conjurers, Russian tricksters, Indian illusionists, you name them. Discovered something from pretty much every one of them too.”

  “Stole, you mean,” said Billie, laughing.

  “Oh, it’s not stealing, young Billie.” Another smile from Herbie. “It’s the whole business of trickery. A game that’s been going on nearly a thousand years, I’d say. We magicians, we’re all studying each other, watching each other, keenly hunting for the slightest clue, the slightest trace of each other’s devices. The flick of a thumb? The dart of an arm? An ingeniously placed trapdoor? Whatever it is, if we find it fair and square, it’s ours to use.” A scratching sound from his pocket and his hand rose, a flaming match gripped between finger and thumb. “A game. And young Harry’s got the knack for it.”

  “Sure do.” Harry watched as the flame quadrupled in size and then flew into the magician’s mo
uth. He also saw the tiny flutter of a finger, which snuffed out the flame just as the lips closed. “I spotted that trick first time I met you, Herbie.”

  “Ah, but perhaps I saw you looking?” The old magician winked as he drew the match, flaming even more brightly, out of his ear. “Perhaps I spotted you in the crowd, with your ragged clothes and shoeshine box. Perhaps I observed, from the shape of your face and the accent in your voice, that you might come from the east of Europe too, a region most famous for its tricksters and illusionists.” Another wink. “Perhaps I decided to angle myself so that you saw the device. To introduce you to the world of magic and all that it can be…”

  “Doesn’t explain how I picked it up so quickly.” Down by his side, Harry’s fingers were twitching, mimicking the device, that deft finger flutter, and his body flinched too, as he remembered the time of that first meeting in the middle of last winter, just a few weeks after he had arrived in New York. A penniless shoeshine boy, that was all he had been then, without a friend in the whole city, struggling to earn a living on the freezing sidewalks.

  “Stayed up late that night, practicing the trick, and woke up with a few scorch marks on my lips the next morning. Right away, I started doing it! Bit of a shock for the gents whose shoes I was shining, to look down and see… Herbie?”

  He peered closely at the old man. He always seemed a bit frail, but this was something different. Herbie’s collar was damp with sweat, even though the evening air was perfectly cool, and the tips of his fingers were trembling. Tiny signs, and neither Billie nor Arthur seemed to have noticed them. But Harry had, and he tried to look for more, only to find the old magician staring straight back at him. The trembling stopped, and Herbie Lemster’s eyes started flicking over Harry instead.

  “Miraculously escaped from an oncoming train, did we?” The old man walked on.

  “How’d you know that?” Billie butted in.

  “Faint bruising around Harry’s wrists, Billie. Some tightly looped chains, I’ll wager…” Herbie lifted a finger, almost steady now, and pointed. “Although the main clue is the distinct smell of engine oil drifting from young Harry’s clothes, mingling with the usual boot polish. Given that, and knowing our young friend’s tastes for excitement…” He managed a smile. “Spotting little clues, tiny traces—that’s what we magicians are good at, you see.”