The Vanished Man

bed. One of the rattan chairs too.
    Soon the fire would climb up the bedclothes and begin devouring his body, which he wouldn’t feel, and then his face and head, which he horribly would. He turned to the Conjurer but the man was gone, the door closed. Smoke began to sting Rhyme’s eyes and fill his nose. The fire crawled closer, igniting boxes and books and posters, melting CDs.
    Soon the blue and yellow flames began lapping at the blankets at the foot of Lincoln Rhyme’s bed.

Chapter Twenty-six
    A diligent NYPD officer, perhaps hearing an odd noise, perhaps seeing an unlocked door, stepped into a West Side alleyway. Fifteen seconds later another man emerged, dressed in a lightweight maroon turtleneck, tight jeans, baseball cap.
    No longer in the role of Officer Larry Burke, Malerick began walking purposefully up Broadway. Glancing at his face, noting the flirtatious way he glanced around him—a cruisin’ look—you’d suspect that he was a man on the prowl, heading for some West Side bar to defibrillate his ego and his genitalia, both in arrest lately as he approached middle age.
    He paused at a basement cocktail lounge, glanced inside. He decided this would be a good place in which to hide out temporarily until it was time to return briefly to Lincoln Rhyme’s and see how much damage the fire had done.
    He found a stool at the far end of the bar, near the kitchen, and ordered a Sprite and a turkey sandwich. Looking around: the arcade games with their electronic soundtracks, a dusty jukebox, the room smoky and dark, smelling of sweat and perfume and disinfectant, the liquor-induced brays of laughter and hum of pointlessconversation. All of which transported him back to his youth in the city built from sand.
    Las Vegas is a mirror surrounded by glaring lights; stare at it for hours but all you’ll ever truly see is yourself, with your pocks, squinty wrinkles, vanity, greed, desperation. It’s a dusty, hard place where the cheery illumination of the Strip fades fast just a block or two from the neon and doesn’t penetrate to the rest of the city: the trailers, sagging bungalows, sandy strip malls, pawnshops selling engagement rings, suit jackets, prosthetic arms—whatever can be transformed into quarters or silver dollars.
    And, everywhere, the dusty, endless, beige desert.
    This was the world that Malerick was born into.
    Father a blackjack dealer and mother a restaurant hostess (until her growing weight put her behind the scenes in a cash room), they were two of the army of Vegas service people treated like ants by casino management and guests alike. Two of the army who spent their lives so inundated with money that they could smell the ink, perfume and sweat on the bills, but who were forever aware that this astonishing flood was destined to pause in their fingers for only the briefest of moments.
    Like many Vegas children left on their own by parents working long and irregular shifts—and like children living in bitter homes everywhere—their son had gravitated to a place where he found some comfort.
    And that place for him was the Strip.
    I was explaining, Revered Audience, about misdirection—how we illusionists distract you by drawing attention away from our method with motion, color, light, surprise, noise. Well, misdirection is more than a technique of magic; it’s an aspect of life too. We’re all desperately drawn toward flash and glitz and away from boredom, from routine, from bickering families, from hot, motionless hours on the edge of the desert, from sneering teens who chase you down because you’re skinny and timid and then pound you with fists as hard as scorpions’ shells. . . .
    The Strip was his refuge.
    The magic shops specifically. Of which there were many; Las Vegas is known among performers around the world as the Capital of Magic. The boy found that these shops were more than just retail outlets; they were places where aspiring, performing and retired magicians hung out to share stories and tricks and to gossip.
    It was in one of these that the boy learned something important about himself. He might be skinny and timid and a slow runner but he was miraculously dexterous. The magicians here would show him palms and pinches and drops and conceals and he’d pick them up instantly. One of these clerks lifted an eyebrow and said about the thirteen-year-old, “A born prestidigitator.”
    The boy frowned, never having heard the word.
    “A French magician made it up in the