There is a star on the door, and under it, painted on a strip of card, the words “Mr. Misterioso.” Tom’s uncle, Max Mayflower, has never missed a curtain before. Indeed, his entire act is timed to the half second, tailored and endlessly readjusted to suit the abilities and, increasingly, the limitations of its star. His unheard-of tardiness has caused Big Al to fall silent, and Omar to utter a string of oaths in a barbarous tongue. But neither has the nerve to disturb the man they call Master. It is Miss Plum Blossom, the costumer, who has pushed Tom toward the door. Naturally, the ageless Chinese seamstress is widely believed to be secretly in love with Max Mayflower. Naturally, she is secretly in love with him. There are even rumors about these two and the somewhat misty parentage of Tom Mayflower, but though he loves Miss Blossom and his uncle dearly, Tom takes these rumors for the idle gossip they are. Miss Blossom would never dare disturb the Master in his dressing room before a show either, but she knows that Tom may penetrate certain of the man’s mysteries and humors in a way that no one else can. Behind him, she gives another gentle push at the small of his back.
“It’s Tom,” the young man says, getting no answer. And then takes the unprecedented liberty of opening the dressing-room door unbidden.
His uncle sits at his dressing table. His body has grown fibrous and tough, like a stalk that hardens as it withers. His wiry legs are already clad in the skintight dark blue stuff of his costume, but his upper torso remains bare and freckled, lightly traced with the dull orange wisps that are the sole reminders of the ginger thatch that once covered him. His flaming orange mane has become gray stubble. His hands are wildly veined, his fingers knobbed like bamboo. And yet, until tonight, Tom has never seen a trace in him—not in body, voice, or heart—of the triumph of age. Now he sags, half naked, his bare head gleaming in the lighted mirror like a memento mori.
“How’s the house?” he says.
“Standing room only. Can’t you hear them?”
“Yes,” his uncle says. “I hear them.”
Something, some weary edge of self-pity in the old man’s tone, irritates Tom.
“You shouldn’t take it for granted,” he says. “I’d give anything to hear them cheering that way for me.”
The old man sits up and looks at Tom. He nods. He reaches for his dark blue jersey and pulls it over his head, then tugs on the soft blue acrobat’s boots made for him in Paris by the famous circus costumer Claireaux.
“You’re right, of course,” he says, clapping the boy on the shoulder. “Thank you for reminding me.”
Then he ties on his mask, a kind of kerchief with eyeholes, which knots at the back and covers the entire upper half of his skull.
“You never know,” he says as he starts out of the dressing room. “You may get your chance some day.”
“Not likely,” Tom says, though this is his deepest desire, and though he knows the secrets, the mechanisms, procedures, and eventualities of the escape trade as well as any man alive save one. “Not with this leg of mine.”
“Stranger things have happened,” the old man says. Tom stands there, watching in admiration the way the old man’s back straightens as he walks out, the way his shoulders settle and his gait becomes springy, yet calm and controlled. Then Tom remembers the button he found lodged in the wheel of the water tank, and runs after his uncle to tell him. By the time he reaches the wings, however, the orchestra has already struck up the Tannhäuser overture, and Misterioso has strode, arms outspread, onto the stage.
Misterioso’s act is continuous—from first bow till last, the performer does not leave the stage to change costume, not even after the drenching he receives during the Oriental Water Torture Trick. Entrances and exits imply flummery, substitutions, switcheroos. Like the tight costume that promises to betray any concealed tools, the constant presence of the performer is supposed to guarantee the purity and integrity of the act. Thus it causes considerable alarm in the company when—after the roar of applause that follows Misterioso’s emergence, unchained, untied, unshackled, right side up, and still breathing, from the Oriental Water Torture tank—the performer staggers into the wings, hands pressed to a spreading stain, darker than water and sticky-looking, at his side. When, a moment later, the water tank is wheeled off by the five union stagehands, sharp-eyed Omar quickly discerns the drizzled trail of water it has left on the stage, which he traces back to a small—a perfect—hole in the glass of the front panel. A pale pink ribbon twists in the green water of the tank.
“Get off me,” the old man says, staggering into his dressing room. He pushes free of Omar and Big Al. “Find him,” he tells them, and they vanish into the theater. He turns to the stage manager. “Ring down the curtain. Tell the orchestra to play the waltz. Tom, come with me.”
The young man follows his uncle into the dressing room and watches in astonishment and then horror as the old man strips away the damp jersey. His ribs are beaded with a lopsided star of blood. The wound beneath his left breast is small, but brimming like a cup.
“Take another one from the trunk,” Max Mayflower says, and somehow the bullet hole gives even greater authority to his words than they would have ordinarily. “Put it on.”
Immediately, Tom guesses the incredible demand that his uncle is about to place on him, and, in his fear and excitement and with The Blue Danube vamping endlessly in his ears, he does not attempt to argue or to apologize for not having fitted the tank he built with bulletproof glass, or even to ask his uncle who has shot him. He just gets dressed. He has tried on the costume before, of course, secretly. It takes him only a minute to do it now.
“You just have to do the coffin,” his uncle tells him. “And then you’re done.”
“My leg,” Tom says. “How am I supposed to?”
That is when his uncle hands him a small key, gold or gold-plated, old-fashioned and ornate. The key to a lady’s diary or to a drawer in an important man’s desk.
“Just keep it about you,” Max Mayflower says. “You’ll be all right.”
Tom takes the key, but he doesn’t feel anything right away. He just stands there, holding the key so tightly that it pulses against his palm, as he watches his beloved uncle bleed to death in the harsh light of the dressing room with the star on the door. The orchestra launches into their third assault on the waltz.
“The show must go on,” his uncle says dryly, and so Tom goes, slipping the gold key into one of the thirty-nine pockets that Miss Blossom has concealed throughout the costume. It is not until he is actually stepping out onto the stage, to the frenzied derisive happy waltz-weary cheering of the audience, that he notices not only that he has left the crutch behind in the dressing room but that, for the first time in his life, he is walking without a limp.
Two Shriners in fezzes drape him with chains and help him into a heavy canvas mailbag. A lady from the suburbs cinches the neck of the mailbag and fixes the ends of the cord with a ham-sized padlock. Big Al lifts him as if lifting a swaddled babe and carries him tenderly to the coffin, which has been carefully inspected beforehand by the mayor of Empire City, its chief of police, and the head of its fire department, and pronounced tight as a drum. Now these same worthies, to the delight of the house, are given hammers and big twenty-penny nails. Gleefully, they seal Tom into the coffin. If anyone notices that Misterioso has, in the last ten minutes, put on twenty pounds and grown an inch, he or she keeps it to himself; what difference could it make, anyway, if it is not the same man? He will still have to contend with chains and nails and two solid inches of ash wood. And yet among the women in the audience, at least, there is an imperceptible
