Free The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington Page B

Boxes and Automata and all sort of thing. So Jean becomes magician. Sometimes you no choose books. Books choose you.”
    “What the hell kind of stupid shit story is that?” demanded Rudolfo in German, the hard sounds and diminutives making him sound petulant and childish.
    “He make his name ‘Jean Robert-Houdin.’ He was the greatest magician of his day,” Jurgen switched to German.“That’s what you must do; that’s all that counts. Being the greatest magician of the day. And then another day comes, but that’s all right.”
    “And you are the greatest magician of your day,” said Rudolfo.
    “No.”
    “You are,” insisted Rudolfo. “Who else is there? Preston the Unsightly? He’s nothing. He’s no better than a gypsy playing three-card monte. Who else? The asshole? Kaz is shit and he knows it! He’s got all those people helping him. Half the audience are sticks, you know that.”
    “It’s not that Kaz is or isn’t good,” said Jurgen. “It’s that I am bad.”
    “Act of the Year, four years in a row.”
    “I’m so scared every time I do an effect. Even one I’ve done a thousand times, I’m afraid that people will see that it’s a trick and point at me and laugh and say,
Jurgen Schubert, you big fake
.”
    “Everyone’s a
fake
,” argued Rudolfo. “Magic is a fake. That’s why
showmanship
is so important.”
    But Jurgen had turned away, and no longer seemed to be listening.

Chapter Six
    Having not seen them for a while—had he ever seen them, other than on television?—Preston decided to go to the Abraxas Hotel and catch the Jurgen and Rudolfo Show. He had to cancel his own evening’s performance, which he did simply enough. He telephoned Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley and advised her to stay home. She grunted groggily on the other end, having been newly woken. Preston offered to pay her nightly salary anyway, at which point she hung up.
    For a man who dressed as poorly as he did, Preston spent a lot of time thinking about wardrobe. He considered wearing the morning suit he had worn the day before, the one that had belonged to his father, Preston the Magnificent. But he had sweated the garment out—there were dark skunky stains emanating from the armpits. He next considered wearing his show clothes, a sweatshirt with the images of the moon and stars stitched on and a pair of jeans that kept a crease because he only wore them for two hours a night. But Preston decided that this garb was too ostentatious. He opened his closet door and surveyed his apparel. He selected an ornate and colourful Hawaiianshirt and put it with the trousers from the morning suit, which had not been damaged too badly by perspiration. Then he forced his fat and puffy feet into a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots.
    Preston went through the door of his apartment and descended into the theatre.
    The George had been built in 1917, during a brief boom. Badgered out of the sands by the obdurate Helen Stewart—widowed on account of a duel in which her husband Archibald had been forced to defend her honour—Las Vegas was a random stop on the tracks being laid along the Mormon Trail. The George Theater lay in the heart of Block 16, the haunt of faro players and horny railway workers. It had been erected by a theatrical Englishman, Ivor Thicknesse, who was surely suffering from heatstroke, the skin on his pate perpetually blistered by the merciless sun. Thicknesse opened the George with a production of
Hamlet
, taking the lead himself, spinning about the stage in a state of advanced delirium. He managed to put on quite a few shows, even persuading some of the prominent thespians of the day—George Arliss, Edmund Breece, Lumsden Hare—that the George in “Ragtown” represented a fruitful and gratifying stop on any transcontinental tour. Thicknesse himself always took a part, at least he did until an audience member, caught up in the duel taking place before him, shot Thicknesse’s Tybalt in the back of the head.
    The theatre