The Vanished Man

to build rapport with the audience. And to disarm and distract them too.
    After the fire, Malerick cut off most contact with fellow human beings, and his imagined Revered Audience slowly replaced them, becoming his constant companions. The patter soon began to fill his waking thoughts and dreams and threatened, he sometimes felt, to drive him completely insane. At the same time, though, it gave him intense comfort, knowing that he hadn’t been left completely alone in life after the tragedy three years ago. His revered audience was always with him.
    The apartment smelled of cheap varnish and a curious meaty aroma rising from the wallpaper and floors. The place had come lightly furnished: inexpensive couches and armchairs, a functional dining room table, currently set for one. The bedrooms, on the other hand, were packed—filled with the tools of the illusionist’s trade: props, rigs, ropes, costumes, latex molding equipment, wigs, bolts of cloth, a sewing machine, paints, squibs, makeup, circuit boards, wires, batteries, flash paper and cotton, spools of fuse, woodworking tools . . . a hundred other items.
    He made herbal tea and sat at the dining room table, sipping the weak beverage and eating fruit and a low-fat granola bar. Illusion is a physical art and one’s act is only as good as one’s body. Eating healthy food and working out were vital to success.
    He was pleased with this morning’s act. He’d killedthe first performer easily—recalling with shivery pleasure how she’d stiffened with shock when he’d appeared behind her and slipped the rope around her neck. Never a clue he’d been waiting in the corner, under the black silk, for a half hour. The surprise entrance by the police—well, that’d shaken him. But like all good illusionists Malerick had prepared an out, which he’d executed perfectly.
    He finished his breakfast and took the cup into the kitchen, washed it carefully and set it in a rack to dry. He was meticulous in all his ways; his mentor, a fierce, obsessive, humorless illusionist, had beaten discipline into him.
    The man now went into the larger of the bedrooms and put on the videotape he’d made of the site of the next performance. He’d seen this tape a dozen times and, though he virtually had it memorized, he was now going to study it again. (His mentor had also beaten into him—literally sometimes—the importance of the 100:1 rule. You rehearse one hundred minutes for every one minute onstage.)
    As he watched the tape he pulled a velvet-covered performing table toward him. Not watching his hands, Malerick practiced some simple card maneuvers: the False Dovetail Shuffle, the Three-Pile False Cut then some trickier ones: the Reverse Sliparound, the Glide and the Deal-Off Force. He ran through some actual tricks, complicated ones, like Stanley Palm’s Ghost Cards, Maldo’s famous Six-Card Mystery and several others by the famous card master and actor Ricky Jay, others by Cardini.
    Malerick also did some of the card tricks that hadbeen in Harry Houdini’s early repertoire. Most people think of Houdini as an escapist but the performer had actually been a well-rounded magician, who performed illusion—large-scale stage tricks like vanishing assistants and elephants—as well as parlor magic. Houdini had been an important influence in his life. When he first started performing, in his teens, Malerick used as a performing name “Young Houdini.” The “erick” portion of his present name was both a remnant of his former life—his life before the fire—and an homage to Houdini himself, who’d been born Ehrich Weisz. As for the prefix “Mal” a magician might suspect that it was taken from another world-famous performer, Max Breit, who performed under the name Malini. But in fact, Malerick had picked the three letters because they came from the Latin root for “evil,” which reflected the dark nature of his brand of illusion.
    He now studied the tape, measuring angles, noting windows and the location of possible witnesses, blocking out his positions as all good performers do. And as he watched, the cards in his fingers riffled together in lightning-fast shuffles that hissed like snakes. The kings and jacks and queens and jokers and all the rest of the cards slithered onto the black velvet and then seemed to defy gravity as they leaped back into his strong hands, where they vanished from sight. Watching this impromptu performance, an audience would shake their