Balazar almost believed it himself.

Claudio Andolini pulled his arm back. His fingers came out of Eddie Dean’s asshole with a plopping sound. Claudio’s mouth twisted like a fishline with knots in it.

“Hurry up, Jack, I got this junkie’s shit on my hand!” Claudio yelled angrily.

“If I’d known you were going to be prospecting up there, Claudio, I would have wiped my ass with a chair-leg last time I took a dump,” Eddie said mildly. “Your hand would have come out cleaner and I wouldn’t be standing here feeling like I just got raped by Ferdinand the Bull.”

“Jack!”

“Go on down to the kitchen and clean yourself up,” Balazar said quietly. “Eddie and I have got no reason to hurt each other. Do we, Eddie?”

“No,” Eddie said.

“He’s clean, anyway,” Claudio said. “Well, clean ain’t the word. What I mean is he ain’t holding. You can be goddam sure of that.” He walked out, holding his dirty hand in front of him like a dead fish.

Eddie looked calmly at Balazar, who was thinking again of Harry Houdini, and Blackstone, and Doug Henning, and David Copperfield. They kept saying that magic acts were as dead as vaudeville, but Henning was a superstar and the Copperfield kid had blown the crowd away the one time Balazar had caught his act in Atlantic City. Balazar had loved magicians from the first time he had seen one on a streetcorner, doing card-tricks for pocket-change. And what was the first thing they always did before making something appear—something that would make the whole audience first gasp and then applaud? What they did was invite someone up from the audience to make sure that the place from which the rabbit or dove or bare-breasted cutie or the whatever was to appear was perfectly empty. More than that, to make sure there was no way to get anything inside.

I think maybe he’s done it. I don’t know how, and I don’t care. The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t like any of this, not one damn bit.

6

George Biondi also had something not to like. He doubted if Eddie Dean was going to be wild about it, either.

George was pretty sure that at some point after ’Cimi had come into the accountant’s office and doused the lights, Henry had died. Died quietly, with no muss, no fuss, no bother. Had simply floated away like a dandelion spore on a light breeze. George thought maybe it had happened right around the time Claudio left to wash his shitty hand in the kitchen.

“Henry?” George muttered in Henry’s ear. He put his mouth so close that it was like kissing a girl’s ear in a movie theater, and that was pretty fucking gross, especially when you considered that the guy was probably dead—it was like narcophobia or whatever the fuck they called it—but he had to know, and the wall between this office and Balazar’s was thin.