Free Touch of Magic by M Ruth Myers Page A

uncle's print shop. Day after day he'd worked his muscles sore while his cousin of a similar age, who would own the shop someday, spent his afternoons drinking tea with girls and reading poetry. Seething at the inequity, Ballieu had become aware that there were individuals in the streets who spoke aloud of such injustices between the classes. Mostly they were university students, little better off than he was himself.
    Gradually he had become a part of one of their groups. They had needed political pamphlets run. Ballieu had run them on his uncle's press. His uncle had fired him.
    One of the students thought he could make plates for currency.
    "Do it and I'll run them," Ballieu said.
        He himself studied paper and ink that would give an authentic effect. They needed financing for a people's revolution. It would rob men like his uncle of their bloated status and carefully guarded wealth. It would put bread in the mouths of hungry children, dignity in the labor of workers.
    When his uncle came in unexpectedly in the midst of their venture, Ballieu raised a gun and shot him. He had been a bit too close. The blood had splattered his arm.
    Commended for his work, Ballieu had been spir ited out of the country. A larger, more organized group than the students had taken him in. It meant nothing to him to see his mother again. The passion for equality was in his blood.
    He was eager to please his new comrades, eager to rise in their ranks. He had killed a policeman in a public square, the act well planned and calmly exe cuted. He had kidnapped a municipal official. He was not yet nineteen.
    The following week he had been approached by a well-dressed man smoking strong cigarettes.
    "Why are you wasting time on provincial officials?" he asked. "Come to Paris. We can give you better targets. We can bring whole governments to their knees."
    That had been thirty years ago. In the decades between, Ballieu had never felt so acutely the cold deliberateness that filled his veins now. He had felt it raising the gun to shoot his uncle -- a sense of fate. Now it was underlaid by years of experience.
    Ballieu smoothed his collar.
    It was eight in the morning. By now a few golfers and tennis players would be stirring, eager to have their games before the heat of the day. He would not attract notice. Picking up a small tape recorder, shifting his cigarette package so his finger rested on the blade inside it, he walked toward the elevator.
    He would ride two floors down. He would see whether anyone was watching the hallway. If they weren't, he'd discover whether the female helping him had, in spite of last night's blunder, recovered the tape.
    "Well?" he demanded as she opened her door to him.
    Her mouth was defiant.
    "How was I to know some stupid worker would go in first? How was I to prevent it?"
    No apology, no nervousness at her failure, only her sullenness daring him to upbraid her. She wore bright shorts, looking the part of a girl on holiday. Her black hair was free on her shoulders.
    "The cassette?" Ballieu asked coldly.
    She turned her back on him and crossed the room.
    The cassette was hidden under a false bottom she'd glued into a leather bag. She ripped it free with fingers Ballieu knew were strong enough to strangle a man. She was not completely without qualifications. He snapped the tape into place, and they sat warily on either side of the low table with the tape player between them, the female's resent ment now dying down into curiosity.
    At first, as the words coming off the machine began to sink in, Ballieu thought they must be a trick. Disbelief, followed by a fleeting sense of disgrace and then anger, crowded out other feelings inside him.
    "... and the king of hearts is upside down ...."
    The magician's voice mocked him.
    Everything mocked him. The way things were starting. The pain that cut suddenly into his belly. The look on the girl's face.
    Her head tipped back, and laughter issued from her throat.
    "A magic trick! You