The Vanished Man

suspense and refrain for the moment from mentioning the name of the illusion. But I’ll give you one clue: when Selbit was performing this routine he instructed his assistants to pour fake blood into the gutters in front of the theater to tantalize passersby and get them to buy tickets. Which, naturally, they did.
    Enjoy our next routine.
    I hope you will.
    I know of one person who most certainly won’t.

Chapter Ten
    How much sleep? the young man wondered.
    The play had ended at midnight then there’d been drinks at the White Horse until who knew when, home at three, on the phone for forty minutes with Bragg, no, maybe an hour. Then the ridiculous plumbing had started up its ridiculous banging at 8:30.
    How many hours’ sleep was that then?
    The math eluded Tony Calvert and he decided that it was probably better not to know too much about the extent of his exhaustion. At least he was working on Broadway and not doing advertising shoots, where you started work sometimes at—heaven help us—6:00 A.M. His afternoon call at the Gielgud Theater tidily made up for the fact that he had to work Saturdays and Sundays.
    He surveyed the tools of his trade and decided he needed some more tattoo concealer since chisel-chin boy was standing in today and the ladies from Teaneck and Garden City might wonder about the credibility of a leading man who lusted after the ingenue starlet when his ample biceps said “Love Forever Robert.”
    Calvert closed the big yellow makeup case and glanced in the mirror by the door. He looked betterthan he felt, he had to admit. His complexion still retained a bit of the tan from the glorious March trip down to St. Thomas. And his trim build belied the dumpy sluggishness churning in his belly. (God’s sake, keep it to four beers. Okay? Hello, can we live with that?) His eyes, though: yep, pretty red. But that’s easily taken care of. A stylist knows hundreds of ways to make the old look young, the plain look beautiful and the weary look alert. He attacked with eyedrops and then followed through with the coup de grâce—a swipe or two with an under-eye touch-up stick.
    Calvert pulled on his leather jacket, locked the door and started down the hallway of his East Village apartment building, quiet now, a few minutes before noon. Most of the people in the building, he guessed, were outside, enjoying the first truly nice spring weekend this year or were still sleeping off their own debaucheries.
    He used the back exit, as he always did, which deposited him in the alleyway behind the building. Starting for the sidewalk, forty feet away, he noticed something: motion down one of the culs-de-sac leading off the alley.
    He stopped and squinted into the dimness. An animal. Jesus, was that a rat?
    But no—it was a cat, apparently injured. He looked around but the alleyway was completely deserted, no sign of its owner.
    Oh, the poor thing!
    Calvert wasn’t a pet person but he’d sat for a neighbor’s Norwich terrier last year and remembered the man telling him that, just in case, Bilbo’s vet wasaround the corner on St. Marks. He’d take the cat in on the way to the subway. Maybe his sister’d want it. She adopted children. Why not cats?
    Lingering in alleys wasn’t the best idea in this neighborhood but Calvert saw that he was still completely alone. He moved slowly over the cobblestones so he wouldn’t spook the animal. It was lying on its side, meowing faintly.
    Could he pick it up? Would it try to scratch him? He remembered something in Prevention about cat-scratch fever. But the animal looked too weak to hurt him.
    “Hey, what’s the matter, fella?” he asked in a soothing voice. “You hurt?”
    Crouching down, he set his makeup case on the cobblestones and reached out carefully in case the cat took a swipe at him. He touched it but then drew his hand back in shock. The animal was ice-cold and emaciated—he could feel stiff bones beneath the skin. Had it just died? But, no, the leg was still moving. And it uttered another faint meow.
    He touched it again. And, wait, those weren’t bones under the skin. They were rods, and inside its body was a metal box.
    What the fuck was this?
    Was he on Candid Camera ? Or was some asshole just ragging him?
    Then he glanced up and saw someone ten feet away. Calvert gasped and reared back. A man was crouching—
    But, no, he realized. It was his own image, reflected in a full-length mirror sitting in the corner at the end of the dark alley. Calvert