The Vanished Man

a long way but he needed to do something to bleed off this mad anxiety. He’d do some window shopping, stop for dinner, work on his sermon.
    As he oriented himself for the walk he sensed that he was being watched. He glanced to his left, into the alley next to the hotel. A man stood half hidden by a Dumpster, a lean, brown-haired man in overalls, holding a small toolkit. He was looking the priest up and down in a way that seemed purposeful. Then, as if he’d been caught, he turned and receded into the alley.
    Reverend Swensen tightened his grip on the attaché case, wondering if he’d made a mistake not staying in the safety of his room—foul and noisy though it was—until it was time for the recital. Then he gave a faint laugh. Relax, he told himself. The man had been nothing more than a janitor or handyman, maybe an employee of the hotel itself, surprised to see a minister step out of the sleazy place.
    Besides, he reflected as he started walking north, he was a man of the cloth, a calling that surely had to give him some degree of immunity, even here in this modern-day Sodom.

Chapter Twenty-one
    Here one second, gone the next.
    The red ball couldn’t possibly get from Kara’s outstretched right hand to the spot behind her ear.
    But it did.
    And after she’d plucked it away and tossed the crimson sphere into the air it couldn’t possibly have vanished and ended up inside in the fold of her left elbow.
    But it did that too.
    How? Rhyme wondered.
    She and the criminalist were in the downstairs lab of his town house, waiting for Amelia Sachs and Roland Bell. As Mel Cooper was setting the evidence out on examination tables and a CD pumped jazz piano into the room Rhyme was being treated to his own sleight-of-hand show.
    Kara stood in front of a window, wearing one of Sachs’s black T-shirts from the closet upstairs. Thom was currently washing her tank top, removing the Heinz 57 bloodstain from her improvised illusion at the crafts fair.
    “Where’d you get those?” Rhyme asked, nodding at the balls. He hadn’t seen her take them out of her purse or pocket.
    She said with a smile that she’d “materialized” them (another trick magicians enjoyed, Rhyme had wryly observed, was transforming intransitive verbs into transitive ones).
    “Where do you live?” he asked.
    “The Village.”
    Rhyme nodded at some memories. “When my wife and I were together most of our friends lived down there. And SoHo, TriBeCa.”
    “I don’t get north of Twenty-third much,” she said.
    A laugh from the criminalist. “In my day Fourteenth was the start of the demilitarized zone.”
    “Our side’s winning, looks like,” she joked as the red balls appeared and disappeared, moved from one hand to the other, then circulated in the air in an impromptu juggling act.
    “Your accent?” he asked.
    “I have an accent?” she asked.
    “Intonation then, inflection . . . tone. ”
    “Ohio probably. Midwest.”
    “Me too,” Rhyme told her. “Illinois.”
    “But I’ve been here since I was eighteen. Went to school in Bronxville.”
    “Sarah Lawrence, drama,” Rhyme deduced.
    “English.”
    “And you liked it here and stayed.”
    “Well, I liked it once I got out of the ’burbs and into the city. Then after my father died my mother moved out here to be closer to me.”
    Daughter of a widowed mother . . . like Sachs, Rhyme reflected. He wondered if Kara had the same problems with her mother as Sachs’d had with hers.A peace treaty had been negotiated in recent years but in Sachs’s youth her mother had been tempestuous, moody, unpredictable. Rose didn’t understand why her husband wanted to be nothing more than a cop and why her daughter wanted to be anything other than what her mother wanted her to be. This naturally drove father and daughter into an alliance, which made matters worse. Sachs had told him that their refuge on bad days was the garage, where they found a comfortably predictable universe: when a carburetor didn’t seat it was because a simple and just rule of the physical world had been broken—machine tolerances were off or a gasket had been cut wrong. Engines and suspensions and transmissions didn’t subject you to melodramatic moods or cryptic diatribes and even at the worst they never blamed you for their own failings.
    Rhyme had met Rose Sachs on several occasions and found her charming, chatty, eccentric and proud of her daughter. But the past, he knew, is nowhere as present as it is