The Vanished Man

already lost. The hardest part isn’t having the balls to fight. It’s knowing when to fight and when to just let it go.”
    Pride and power . . .
    “Like us, I guess. My business. But if you’re good, if you can bring in audiences, management’ll hire you. It’s a catch-22 though. You can’t prove you’ll draw crowds if they don’t hire you, and they won’t hire you if you can’t bring in door receipts.”
    They walked closer to the massive, glowing tent and Sachs watched the young woman’s eyes light up as she gazed at it.
    “This the sort of place you’d like to work?”
    “Oh, man, I’ll say. This’s my idea of heaven. Cirque Fantastique and doing TV specials.” After a moment of silence as she gazed around her, she said, “Mr. Balzac has me learning all the old routines and that’s important—you’ve got to know ’em cold. But”—a nod toward the tent—“this is the direction magic’s going. David Copperfield, David Blaine. . . . performance art, street magic. Sexy magic.”
    “You should audition here.”
    “Me? You’re kidding,” Kara replied. “I’m nowhere near ready yet. Your act has to be perfect. You have to be the best.”
    “Better than a man, you mean?”
    “No, better than everybody, men and women.”
    “Why?”
    “For the audience,” Kara explained. “Mr. Balzac’s like a broken record: you owe it to the audience. Every breath you take onstage is for your audience. Illusion can’t be just okay. You can’t just satisfy—you have to thrill. If one person in the audience catches your moves you’ve failed. If you hesitate just a moment too long and the effect is dull you’ve failed. If one person out there yawns or looks at his watch you’ve failed.”
    “You can’t be at a hundred percent all the time, I’d think,” Sachs offered.
    “But you have to be,” Kara said simply, sounding surprised anyone would feel different.
    They arrived at the Cirque Fantastique, where rehearsals for the opening show tonight were under way. Dozens of performers were walking around, some in costumes, some in shorts and T-shirts or jeans.
    “Oh, man. . . .” came a breathy voice. It was Kara’s. Her face was like a little girl’s, eyes taking in the brilliant white canvas of the sweeping tent.
    Sachs jumped at the sound of a loud crack above and behind her. She looked up and saw two huge banners, thirty or forty feet high, snapping in the wind, glowing in the sunlight. On one was painted the name CIRQUE FANTASTIQUE.
    On the other was a huge drawing of a thin man in a black-and-white-checkered bodysuit. He was holding his arms forward, palms up, inviting his audience inside. He wore a black, snub-nosed half-mask, the features grotesque. It was a troubling image. She thought immediately of the Conjurer, hidden by masks of disguise.
    His motives and plans hidden too.
    Kara noticed Sachs’s gaze. “It’s Arlecchino,” she said. “In English, that’s ‘Harlequin.’ You know commedia dell’arte?” she asked.
    “No,” Sachs said.
    “Italian theater. It lasted from, I don’t know, the fifteen hundreds for a couple of hundred years. The Cirque Fantastique uses it as a theme.” She pointed to smaller banners on the sides of the tent that displayed other masks. With their hook noses or beaks, arching brows, high serpentine cheekbones, they appeared otherworldly and unsettling. Kara continued, “There were a dozen or so continuing characters that all the commedia dell’arte troupes used in their plays. They wore masks to show who they were playing.”
    “Comedy?” Sachs asked, lifting an eyebrow as she looked at a particularly demonic mask.
    “We’d call them black comedies, I guess. Harlequin wasn’t exactly a heroic figure. He had no morals at all. All he cared about was food and women. And he’d just appear and disappear, sneak up on you. Another one, Pulcinella, was way sadistic. He played really mean pranks on people, even his lovers. Then there was a doctor who’d poison people. The only voice of reason was this woman, Columbine.” Kara added, “One of the things I like about commedia dell’arte was that her part was really played by a woman. Not like in England, where women weren’t allowed to perform.”
    The banner snapped again. Harlequin’s eyes seemed to stare off slightly behind them as if the Conjurer were easing up close, an echo of the search at the music school earlier.
    No, we don’t have a clue who or where he