closed, she is masturbating with a duck neck. She has cooked the rest; there is a lovely odor of roasted turnips wafting through the room.
His mind on the assembly of the circuit boards that are passing between his hands, Dieumercie has a vague feeling of unease. In spite of his efforts to think about other things, images of his wife fussing at his penis play through his mind on a loop. Again he sees her insert the thin, plastic hose into the bag of serum, then hang it from the hook in the bathroom. She pulled on latex gloves, snapping them against her wrists. You’d think she had been doing this forever. A professional. Finally, she got down on her knees in front of him, disinfected him with ether, and stuck a long hypodermic needle into the skin of his balls. Having secured the catheter with surgical tape, she connected the needle to the other end of the hose. Scrotal infusion, my dear . . . A poisonous-sounding term that had not seemed to give Carmen pause, but that had made his back prickle with sweat. She made him sit on the edge of the tub, and he waited there while the liquid flowed in. Good Lord, a liter! When he began to panic, seeing his scrotum swell to the size of a handball, she reassured him from afar, her eyes never straying from whatever crappy game show she was watching on TV: it was normal, the serum was going to filter gradually into his cock, and the next evening his engine would be all revved up. He heard her blowing her nose, then she added, laughing: And I’m all stuffed up!
She was right, but also wrong. What he now has between his legs looks just like a large beer can, but a soft one. Dieumercie is worried. Besides the fact that at this very moment he is having trouble walking normally to leave his post, he knows already that this plan is going to fall to pieces.
When the carriage dropped them off at 7 Cheapside, High Road, in front of the marquee at the Wood Green Empire, they were fifty minutes late. They hurried through the doors; under the colored poster announcing the show, in big red letters: “Chung Ling Soo, the marvelous Chinese magician, inimitable and rare jewel, remnant of the Yellow Empire.”
Holmes showed their tickets to an usher. They followed her up the grand staircase, ran down the deserted corridors, then cautiously took their seats in the central box that Lady MacRae had reserved for them.
Chung Ling Soo was on stage, which was sumptuously decorated with painted canvases meant to represent the interior of the Summer Palace by means of lanterns and views of pagodas. He was wearing a robe of embroidered silk that touched the ground; his hair, which he had shaved from his most of his head, fell in a long braid that he had draped over his right shoulder. The audience burst into applause. The magician had just pulled a live goose out of the gutted drum that hung from his waist, a fowl that joined—next to an aquarium full of red fish—an improbable number of rabbits, bouquets, and multicolored umbrellas. Chung Ling Soo bowed, his hands together, not moving a single muscle of his face, and then the curtain fell.
“Topping show,” murmured Holmes. “We should have gotten here on time!” And, reading the program over his glasses: “There is only one number left before the end.”
The lights had come back on for a short intermission. As was typical of Edwardian architecture, the interior of the Wood Green Empire gave the impression of both luxury and rococo exuberance. The hall was a jewelry box hung with red velvet, in which the stucco, gilding, crystal chandeliers, and Ionic columns decorating the arches over the loges seemed to exist only to illustrate the line from Shakespeare that was embossed on the cornice: All the world’s a stage. Welcomed into the show, the spectators felt lifted into the same halo of glory as the actors, as if they, too, were transfigured by the limelight. The audience could see, on the trompe-l’oeil canvas at the front of the stage, an imaginary proscenium flanked by twisted columns and stairs leading up to a tableau curtain at the back, whose heavy cloth was gathered up at the sides of the stage.
Knowing that the change of scenes would last only ten minutes or so, the spectators had not gotten up, but were stirring in their seats, loosening stiff muscles, carrying on about the virtuosity of the acts, or trying to explain the tricks. The audience was certainly not fit for an opera, but neither were they the patrons of vulgar music halls. They were dressed up, and in the orchestra, amid the tailored frock coats, certain young women would easily have outshone those who were watching through their binoculars from the twilight of the galleries.
“I am going to start being bored very soon,” said Canterel, massaging his temples. “Are you sure we need to attend this . . . thing?”
“Absolutely certain,” replied Holmes. “It’s the only way. He’s been informed about us, we are going to meet him backstage after the show.”
“But really, shouldn’t it be possible to track down this Martyrio Circus by some other means?”
“I checked,” said Grimod, “and as strange as it seems, this circus is no more real than the Ananke brand of shoes. And it was Chung Ling Soo himself who insisted that the journalist mention that particular detail.”
“If you say so,” grumbled Canterel, fanning himself with his program.
In the orchestra pit, the musicians were finishing up their tuning. The lights and the conversations died away gradually. A few prudent coughs accompanied the first bars of a dramatic overture in which the dissonance of the flutes mimicked a Chinese chorus. The spotlights came up, and at the crash of a gong, the curtain rose.
The set had changed completely, the action now taking place in the heart of Peking, beneath the walls of the Forbidden City. Preceded by standard-bearers, a band of Chinese drummers streamed onto the stage and arranged themselves in the background. Finally there appeared a squadron of Boxers in almond-green turbans and black tunics, all armed with rifles and led by a rebel officer from the imperial army. Decked out in a winged helmet topped with a plume, the man was wearing a thick belt of red silk from which his saber hung. The participants lined up on the left while a series of gong and cymbal crashes accented the appearance, stage right, of an ornate palanquin. Chung Ling Soo emerged from it slowly, wearing a buttercup-yellow Mandarin cap and a robe of yellow silk embroidered with dragons. He planted himself in front of his enemies, challenging them with his noble comportment. On the officer’s order, four of the soldiers stepped forward to form the firing squad.
An assistant, also dressed in the Chinese fashion, stepped toward the spectators.
“The Great Chung Ling Soo speak no language but his ancestors’, he send to you by my mouth his lamentable apologies. During Boxer Rebellion, His Excellency choose to stay true to Emperor Guangxu’s youth. Imprisoned by rebels, he was sentenced to horror of fiery squad. Exceptionally, he agree tonight to show you how he escape death, thanks to front teeth’s magic power.”
He went on in the same pidgin to convince two people from the audience to come up on stage and examine the ammunition, the powder, and the rifles, then asked them to identify the bullets by putting on each of them a mark of their choosing. With this done, the assistant loaded the weapons under their watchful eye and invited them to go back to their seats.
“Officer,” he pleaded, turning to the Boxer leader, “mercy for Chung Ling Soo!”
A drum-roll accentuated the officer’s scorn and the slowness with which he lifted his saber to give the order to fire. In this moment of extreme tension, the assistant crossed the stage and came to a halt for a moment by Chung Ling Soo. He saluted in farewell, then handed him a china plate. Smiling, the magician covered his torso with it, like an ersatz shield.
“Aim!”
