Touch of Magic Read online

  "Hey. He should have his parents here if you want to question him," Channing said angrily.

  With a great clearing of his nasal passages the behemoth swung on her.

  "You want a lawyer, you get one, lady. 'Cause I got some questions for you."

  Behind the detective, dwarfed by him, the boy looked frightened. His eyes were somber beyond his years, and his collarbone stood out under a shirt meant for someone larger. Channing couldn't stand hunger, couldn't stand suffering; it was why she'd chosen the work she had -- to fight it. Her heart reached out to the boy.

  "A witness says the magician pulled a gun," the detective said. "What happened to it?"

  Channing looked at him levelly.

  "People think they see a lot of things -- especially in crowd situations." The words just tumbled out. "It's a phenomenon well known by illusionists. I never saw anything."

  She'd felt she owed it to Yussuf to hide the gun. There was probably some perfectly logical explanation for it. He'd gotten used to carrying one because of so much travel, maybe. If the press learned about it, though, there'd be innuendos. She wasn't going to let that happen to Yussuf's name. Not just to help this vacuum-nose, she wasn't.

  He glared at her and she relaxed deliberately. Her gaze was clear to telegraph her confidence. She savored his moment of recognition as angry red suffused his face. It wasn't the first time some overbearing official had realized he couldn't budge her; she'd run some real gauntlets getting drilling permits in foreign countries.

  The detective grilled her with a few more questions, then turned back to the boy. After a few minutes he flipped his notebook shut in disgust.

  "Go on. Both of you."

  They walked out together, neither speaking. As they reached the street the boy, whose name was Serafin, hunched his shoulders.

  In a flash, and because she was watching him, Channing recognized the gesture. She knew that wary glide of a gaze up the street. She'd seen that look on children sleeping in doorways, on children clamoring to watch her Jeep for a few baht or piasters in some foreign city.

  He had nowhere to go. His grief over losing Yussuf must be as great as her own -- even worse, considering his age. She heard him swallow a dry sob. He didn't look as though he'd had a meal in a week.

  "You lied about where you lived. You don't live anywhere, do you?"

  She wondered why she had to work to keep her voice from shaking.

  He squinted at her. His legs were preparing for flight.

  "My mom moves a lot."

  "Uh-huh."

  In the instant he leapt from the steps, Channing jerked him back by the waist of his pants.

  "Listen, if I have to turn you in to Children's Services, neither one of us will get any sleep tonight. It would be a lot simpler if you came home with me. Yussuf came to my house a lot."

  Still wiggling, he looked at her in surprise.

  Well, now I've done it, Channing thought. There were probably laws against this. But she knew he must feel lost and sick at heart tonight. So did she. It seemed right for them to be together. She was sure those clothes on Yussuf's couch had been for the boy. It seemed right to do something for him.

  Besides, she'd always felt slightly guilty about all the unused space in the big house she'd inherited in Altadena.

  * * *

  "You've lot a lot of blood, Mr. Ellery. We're going to admit you."

  "Jesus Christ, no!"

  Bill Ellery came to with a start. He'd been trying to figure where Ballieu might go, letting them fix his shoulder. Now a childhood panic hit him in the gut. He struggled to sit.

  A rubber tube jerked him back. He was in a curtained-off cubicle of the emergency room. They had some kind of IV hooked to him. Trapping him, like before.

  He'd been eleven then, left alone for a week in a foreign hospital where he couldn't speak the language. His leg in traction. Vomiting and having to lie in the mess because he couldn't move. A huge nurse slapping him. Helpless. And worst of all ...

  "You said the bullet was out -- a clean wound."

  He fought his irrational fear, ashamed at his loss of control. So much for hitching a ride with the local police to get to the hospital, he thought.

  The doctor, a woman, was frowning over a chart.

  "It is out -- and you've lost three pints of blood."

  "Yeah, well. I've always been careless."

  He tried to grin.

  His parents had left him in that Swiss hospital because he hadn't met their specifications -- too average in school, too inward and tongue-tied, an annoyance to them, unlike his brother, Reid. Yet maybe it was lying there, scared shitless, that had taught him grit, he thought. Grit was the one thing he had in abundance.

  Not the zeal to make a million bucks before he was thirty, as his father had done. Not the knack for trite conversation that might have pleased his mother. Not Reid's thirst for power. The rest of the family thought he was a poet, a dropout, an underachiever. It gave him a perverse satisfaction.

  "We need to observe you for twenty-four hours," the doctor said crisply.

  Ellery shook his head, dislodging a cowlick of brown hair.

  The State Department needed him. Was depending on him. And a long time ago he'd come to see how much difference one man could make in the world. He'd been working the film case since it had popped ten days ago. He owed it to the department to see things through -- to Sammy, too, he thought grimly.

  Sam had promised his oldest a ten-speed for Christmas. Ellery made a mental note to make sure that happened.

  "Could I have my shirt?"

  He raised himself on an elbow that wobbled. A nurse was appraising his naked torso with undisguised interest. The doctor, making notes on a chart, flicked a look at him.

  "Who's your next of kin, Mr. Ellery?"

  Jesus Christ, did he have to promise he'd eat liver three meals a day?

  "No next of kin. I'm in town on business." He held his impatience, made the words sound reasonable.

  Henri Ballieu was out there somewhere, waiting for that film, and he was going to see Ballieu didn't get it. Last year Ballieu's group had blown up a department store full of people. Six months ago they'd kidnapped and killed a woman with kids just because her father happened to be a politician. If they got the capacity to make U.S. passports, they'd be turning up everywhere.

  As a kid, Ellery had daydreamed a lot. He'd wondered how you insured justice and freedom and all the other things no one else around him seemed to talk, or even think, about. Even in three years of law school not many people talked about them. They seemed too intangible. Too elusive, maybe. But in his work, he'd come to learn some of the answers.

  "Unhook me, will you?"

  He swung his legs over the edge of the gurney that held him.

  The nurse and an intern looked nervous. They'd seen his identification, he guessed. Or his gun.

  The frosty little doctor gave a jerk of her head, and the intern reached for a hypodermic needle. Oh, Christ. They'd sedated him when he'd been that scared little kid too. He could feel a cold sweat starting.

  Then a deep voice barked on the other side of the curtains.

  "I don't care where I'm supposed to be. You treating a man who was shot in the shoulder?"

  Bill Ellery's fists unclenched at the familiar voice. He knew with relief that he'd get out of there. He wouldn't have to lie awake, tense, stalked by the memory of the orderly in that expensive hospital all those years ago who had tried to sodomize him.

  Grinning at the doctor, who didn't seem to be taking defeat very well, he reminded himself to tell his boss about that girl in black who'd made the magician's gun disappear.

  * * *

  The house in Altadena was white and two stories high and captured the graciousness of a bygone era. Channing's parents had died in an accident when she was five, and she had grown up here. She couldn't bring herself to part with the house. Maintaining it seemed the most fitting memorial possible to the couple who'd reared her. I
n this house her grandfather, The Great Sebastian, had held her on his knee and taught her magic tricks from the time her fingers could hold cards. In this house her grandmother, a diminutive New England lady as fragile and strong as fine porcelain, had fed a constant stream of less successful magicians and set a daily example of tolerance for those around her.

  Serafin looked at the house and shook his head. Channing guessed he was thinking of money. Gramps had left some. Her own income was good. She'd made wise investments. There wasn't any problem maintaining the house.

  An elderly houseman, features puckered as though he'd been sucking limes, met them as the door opened. Channing had inherited him from her grandfather too. Or so it seemed to her. He was caretaker in her absence, critic when she was present.

  "Now what?" he demanded, peering along the bridge of his hooked nose at Serafin.

  Channing tossed her evening bag toward a table.

  "This is Serafin. Get him something to eat and show him a room. Yussuf was shot tonight. He's dead."

  She saw a kaleidoscope of emotions across Rundell's face. He was shocked by the news about Yussuf, who had come here often; he was at an utter loss confronting a child. His expression settled quickly into a practiced glare of disapproval.

  Rundell disapproved of almost anything she did. Even now, jangled as she was, Channing loved his predictability. He'd been part of the household ever since she could remember, and it had seemed unconscionable to separate him and the house -- another reason for not selling. At his age, with his disposition, he'd never find another job. And he'd wither away without someone to harp at. Knowing full well she wouldn't escape his grilling for long, Channing climbed the curved central staircase to the room she'd occupied since she was a child.

  Closing the door, she leaned against it and let out her breath. She was tired -- more tired from yesterday's long trip home than she'd realized. Abu Dhabi to Riyadh. Riyadh to Paris. Finally the transatlantic flight, and the last leg, New York to California.

  Action. Action was the key to keeping your mind from troubling thoughts. Pushing herself briskly from the door, discarding her kunjar, she let her black magician's dress slide to the floor. She spread its folds out over the back of a chair. She would hang it tomorrow.

  Why had someone killed YussufP

  A sense of anger and loss pushed through in spite of her efforts. Yussuf had been an old man, a magician, his very life devoted to making people happy.

  She winced a little from the thought.

  Ten years ago that hadn't seemed enough to her. She'd wanted to make the world better. Gramps couldn't understand. He'd never grasped how deeply their trip to Egypt the year she was sixteen had affected her. That terrible village. People starving because there was no way of growing food. Babies dying from dehydration. And out in the desert, the signs of water coming, but not fast enough for most of those people.

  Science had always been easy for her. She'd decided then, at sixteen. But Gramps hadn't taken her seriously, not even when she got her degree in hydro-geology. Not until she'd told him she'd been approved for a graduate program abroad and she was accepting.

  She'd tried to make him understand that she loved magic, but that she somehow had to give a better accounting of her life. After all, she'd survived the accident that killed her parents. Shouldn't one Stuart out of four generations do something besides entertain?

  He'd raged, yelled bitterly that she wasn't a Stuart. It felt like a curse. In the end she'd gone off, anyway, and two weeks later Gramps was dead.

  Yussuf had been en route to an engagement and had brought the news to her. It had been the start of the visits and the tricks they played on each other. In a way they'd never known each other well, yet there'd been a bond.

  Action.

  She outraced the emotions that wanted to claim her, drew on a white silk robe, and went downstairs.

  The living room still bore her grandmother's imprint. Good quality seascapes hung on the walls. A sofa and chairs were upholstered in moss-green velvet. A writing desk and other pieces in the comfortable room were authentic Sheraton.

  It was a room that soothed Channing. She sat down in a wing chair. Picking up a quarter, she let it dance back and forth across the backs of her fingers. That act also steadied her.

  A footstep sounded. Rundell padded in at a majestic totter.

  "This isn't some sheikhdom, madam," he began severely.

  He'd started calling her madam the day she'd signed his first paycheck. This opening was one of his favorites. It led to a lecture on rashness, and Channing realized if he'd omitted it, she'd have been disappointed. She grinned in spite of herself.

  "How's Serafin?"

  "Splendid -- but you can't afford to feed him." Rundell's teeth clicked shut. Subject closed. He grunted as he bent to turn on a lamp. "Where did you find him?"

  "He was hanging around to see Yussuf. He didn't have a place -- "

  "I'll make a nightcap. You can start at the beginning," he said, interrupting.

  Channing wondered briefly how they'd ever come to this ritual. She really wasn't fond of liquor late in the evening. Rundell was -- and she supposed he liked to feel that he was coddling her.

  "Make one for both of us," she said. That was part of the ritual, too, the urging. You had to make allowances if you wanted to keep an adversary as good as Rundell.

  As he splashed whiskey and soda into glasses she summarized her visit with Yussuf and all that had happened afterward. Feeling as though she'd been in a nightmare, Channing brushed a hand across her eyes.

  "God. I stole a gun, too ... Police evidence."

  "I suppose you want me to put it down the gar- bage disposal?" Rundell said sourly. He clunked her glass down beside her and lowered himself to a chair facing hers. "Madam, you're -- "

  "Impulsive, spoiled, hardheaded, and too old to behave like a tomboy. Did I forget anything?"

  Rundell hated it when she stole his thunder. She heard him sniff.

  "Sloppy. You drop your clothes everywhere." He knocked back half his drink. "I wish you'd find a man to tumble around with. You'd be a hell of a lot less trouble."

  * * *

  Her passport said Annette Lewis, but her real name was Khadija. Her hair was black. Her lips were full, alluring in their sultry discontent as she stood in the customs line. Inside the lining of the sable coat slung over her shoulders she carried two million dollars. Inside her belt she wore enough plastic explosive to destroy herself and the money, should it be discovered.

  The man at the customs gate closed her suitcase. She was in Los Angeles.

  She moved toward the taxi area, smiling at the stupid American pigs who tried to flirt with her. Bringing in the money Ballieu needed had been her responsibility. She had volunteered for the job. Volunteered because she wanted to meet Henri Ballieu.

  He was an old man, almost fifty. Too old for this job, too cautious, the younger members of the cell in Paris said.

  Khadija flexed lithe muscles, their deadly skills hidden beneath the tight jeans and expensive capitalist whore boots that her mission required as disguise. She was here to advance herself, to report any flaw in Ballieu's judgment -- and to make sure nothing went wrong.

  She slung her coat into the back of a taxi that opened its door to her.

  Though no one knew it, she had a personal reason for wanting to cause the downfall of Henri Ballieu.

  * * *

  Near a boarded-up fish house in Topanga Canyon, Ballieu stepped out of a phone booth. Pain twisted his belly. Three years ago they'd said they'd cut the pain out of him, but they hadn't.

  It was why he was going to get this piece of film at any cost -- as a memorial to himself. And nobody knew. His pale eyes scanned the twisting two-lane road that led through the canyon. It was almost deserted at this hour. His car, left where it was expected by American comrades, was hidden in shadows. He was satisfied he hadn't been followed.

  Ballieu smoothed back thinning blond hair, the legacy of his Fr
ench father. It had been an easy matter to call the still frantic nightclub, say he wanted to book the girl who had helped with the magic act, get her name and telephone number. Tomorrow it would be equally easy to get rid of her.

  He started toward his car, reflexes quickening as another car pulled off and stopped. A youth in shorts and a sweatshirt got out and started toward the telephone booth. He glanced at Ballieu. Innocent, probably, but Henri Ballieu didn't believe in taking risks.

  "Excuse me," Ballieu said. "I'm trying to find a friend's house."

  Americans were so fawningly accommodating. Ballieu plunged his knife in as the youth turned.

  The knife was better than using a bullet, which could be linked and identified. As soon as the death shudder came, Ballieu pulled on surgical gloves. He picked money out of the dead man's wallet to make it look like robbery and extracted the knife.

  Judgment, he thought with a vicious triumph. Judgment was what gave him an edge. There were those who thought he was growing too old for his work, but he would show them. He had taken care of the greedy magician. He had lost the men in the alley. In little more than forty-eight hours he could get the film.

  The single problem remaining was the woman who had received that cassette tape.

  Ballieu wiped his knife on his victim's sweatshirt and, with his tongue, absently licked away a warm stain that remained at the hilt.

  Three

  Bill Ellery rolled over and felt the fire dart in jagged bolts through his shoulder. He opened his eyes on a standard hotel clock-radio. Eight o'clock. When had he ever slept until eight in the midst of a crisis? Why had Oliver let him?

  He swung his hips from the bed and sat for a moment, clad only in narrow white briefs. Good old basic Bill, he thought bitterly. No colored jocks, no after-shave, because your brother, the smart young senator, always chose both so carefully.

  A lot of good the basics had done him last night. He'd still lost Sammy. His throat knotted so he could hardly swallow. He remembered that feeling. It was how you held in tears.