The Vanished Man

out of the tent and into Central Park. He’d change out of the medical worker’s uniform and into a new disguise and would return under cover of night, becoming, for a change, a member of the audience himself and finding a good vantage spot to enjoy the finale of his show.

Chapter Forty-four
    Families, clusters of friends, couples, children were slowly entering the tent, finding their seats, filling in the bleachers and box seats, slowly changing from individuals into that creature called an audience, the whole becoming very different from the parts.
    Metamorphoses . . .
    Kara turned away from the sight and stopped a security guard. “I’ve been waiting for a while. You have any idea when Mr. Kadesky’ll be back? It’s really important.”
    No, he didn’t know and neither did the two other people she asked.
    Another glance at her watch. She felt heartsick. An image came to her of her mother, lying in the Stuyve sant home, looking around the room, pierced with clarity and wondering where her daughter was. Kara wanted to cry in frustration at being trapped here. Knowing that she had to stay, do what she could to stop Weir, yet wanting so desperately to be at her mother’s side.
    She turned back to the brightly lit interior of the huge circus tent. Performers waited in the wings, getting ready for the opening act, wearing their eerie commedia dell’arte masks. The kids in the audiencewere wearing the face gear too, overpriced souvenirs from the stands outside. Pug and hooked noses, beaks. They gazed around, mostly excited and giddy. But some were uneasy, she could see. The masks and otherworldly decorations probably made the circus seem to them like a scene from a horror movie. Kara loved performing for children but she knew that you had to be careful; their reality was different from adults’ and an illusionist could easily destroy youngsters’ shaky sense of comfort. She only did funny illusions in her young children’s shows and would often gather the kids around her afterward and tip the gaff.
    Looking at all the magic around her, feeling the excitement, the anticipation. . . . Her palms were sweating as if she herself were about to go on. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to be standing in the prep tent right now. Content, confident, yet wired, feeling the accelerating heartbeat of anticipation as the clock ticked toward showtime. There was no sensation like that in the world.
    She laughed sadly to herself. Well, here she’d made it to Cirque Fantastique.
    But as an errand girl.
    She wondered now, Am I good enough? Despite what David Balzac said, sometimes she believed she was. At least as good as, say, Harry Houdini during his early shows—the only escapism at those had been the audience members who snuck out of the halls, bored or embarrassed to watch him flub simple sleights. Robert-Houdin was so uncomfortable in his initial performances that he ended up offering the audience clockwork automatons like a windup Turk who played chess.
    But as she gazed backstage, at the hundreds of performers who’d been in the business since childhood, Balzac’s firm voice looped through her mind: Not yet, not yet, not yet . . . She heard these words with disappointment yet comfort. He was right, she decided with finality. He was the expert, she was the apprentice. She had to have confidence in him. A year or two. The wait would be worth it.
    Besides, there was her mother. . . .
    Who was maybe sitting up in bed right now, chatting with Jaynene, wondering where her daughter was—the daughter who’d abandoned her on the one night when she should’ve been there.
    Kadesky’s assistant, Katherine Tunney, appeared at the top of the stairs and gestured toward her.
    Was Kadesky here? Please. . . .
    But the woman said, “He just called. He had a radio interview after dinner and he’s running late. He’ll be here soon. That’s his box in the front. Why don’t you wait there?”
    Kara nodded and, discouraged, walked to the seat Katherine indicated, sat down and gazed back at the tent. She saw that the magic transformation was finally complete; every seat was filled. The children, the men, the women were now an audience.
    Thud.
    Kara jumped as a loud, hollow drum resonated through the tent.
    The lights went down, extinguished completely, plunging them into a darkness broken only by the red exit lights.
    Thud.
    The crowd was instantly silent.
    Thud . . . thud . . . thud.
    The drumbeat sounded slowly.