‘Where was this?’

‘In front of her apartment house, the Coventry Arms.’

‘Your stepmother followed her there?’

‘Yes. She made me wait in the car down the block, but I followed her. I know what she’s trying to do to me, and no one will believe me.’

‘Justin, I really am on your side.’ The boy seemed unconvinced. ‘I know something that will cheer you up.’ He gathered up his house keys from the drawer of the desk. ‘Let’s go down the basement. But no music this time – only magic.’

As they walked into the hallway, Mallory was disappearing into the elevator with no goodbye, no I’ll see you this evening. She was not usually inclined to unnecessary words. But, she never missed appointments. The sun might not come up in the morning, but Mallory would come back at eight of the clock for dinner.

Now, in some part of his brain, he was recalling each bit of small talk on the subject of Malakhai, and wondering what to make of this deviation in her.

He and the boy walked down the hall in the silence of their separate thoughts. Charles looked down on Justin, who was clearly miserable. But not frightened. This time, the boy led the way down the winding staircase to the room below, drawn along by the stored remains of Maximillian Candle’s Traveling Magic Show.

When the wall partition was pulled to one side, Justin was first in, not waiting for the light of the globe to go exploring. The dull light caught up to the wandering boy and cast a fuzzy moving shadow on the trunks of props and costumes.

‘Oh, cool!’ said Justin from the other side of the tall Chinese screen. And he knew the boy had discovered the guillotine. But as Charles rounded the panels of rice paper, he could see it was the knife set that had Justin’s attention. Charles touched another globe and another light came to life as the boy was staring at the rack of knives.

He looked up at Charles and then to the old, much punctured red-and-white bull’s eye which was propped on an antique easel. One hand reached out to the knife rack, hovering tentatively, as his eyes shot up to Charles to ask permission.

He nodded. ‘You will be careful with them, won’t you?’

Justin picked up the first knife and missed the target, though it was large and close.

‘Don’t feel bad. It takes a bit of practise. Max had many years of practise.’

‘I can tell,’ said the boy, approaching the target, which was pocked with scars. His finger traced the outline of a human body surrounding the area free of knife holes. ‘That was where his assistant used to stand, right?’

‘Right.’

‘He cut it close, didn’t he? I can see the holes of the knife points between the fingers. Can you do it?’

‘Yes I can. Once, when I was your age, I stood in the target center. It was a birthday present from Max.’

‘You’re kidding. Weren’t you scared?’

‘No. Then Max gave the knives over to me, and he stood in the center of the target.’

‘So you can really do it. Really?’

‘Really.’

The boy moved into the center of the target and flattened out on the rings of the bull’s eye. ‘Do it. I trust you. Go ahead.’

‘Actually, you would only have to trust me not to let go of the knives. The blades come out of the target, they don’t go into it. You pretend to throw the knife, but you really drop it into this pocket.’

He turned a small table so Justin could see the black velvet bag which hung just below the table top. He pointed to the black lever by one leg, and the wire trailing away from the table and toward the target.

‘The trigger for the knives is in the foot pedal. See? Then the hilt of the blade springs out from inside the target with a springload. But the audience sees what it’s conditioned to see. A knife is thrown, and a knife appears on the target. It would take me a few minutes to set the springs. It’s perfectly safe once you know how the trick is done.’

If Justin was the one who rigged the flying objects, this might be a practical application for his gift. He was wondering how he was going to sell a future in the magic trade to the boy’s father when Justin walked away from the target, all interest in it lost.

The boy looked up to the guillotine. ‘And that’s only a trick too, right?’ as if he were asking if this was only another lie, a cheat.

‘Yes, sorry. It has a failsafe mechanism. It’s wicked looking, but harmless.’

As a child, Charles remembered being enthralled by the trickery, not the danger. Justin was of an opposite bent. He seemed disappointed at the lack of danger. Perhaps the magic trade was not the right area for Justin’s intellect. Whose then? The stepmother? The father?

‘Justin, I know you’ve been told what your IQ is. Have you given any thought to the future, what you might do with it, how you might develop it?’

‘What’s to develop? A brain is a brain. And if you believe me when I tell you I don’t make things fly around the house, then I don’t have any talent either.’

‘Well, you might have a talent for observation and deductive reasoning. That’s something we can test for. And it might even be fun. Suppose I help you figure out how the objects fly. Then you’ll know what to look for. So you work with me for a while, and we’ll help each other. Deal?’ as Mallory would put it.

‘Deal,’ said the boy, his small hand thrust into Charles’s for a handshake.

‘Good.’ He was lifting a black ball with holes in it from a box at his feet. ‘This was one of the few floating illusions in Max’s act. It only takes a few minutes to set it up.’ Where was the fluid container?

He found the bottle he sought in a neighbouring box covered with dust. While Charles pondered the shelf life of chemicals, Justin was examining another box, and apparently he had tripped the spring, for now bright colored scarves exploded from the box, shooting straight up and then billowing out, flowing on to the floor in a loam of silk.

Justin was trying to smash the scarves back into the box as quickly as he could pluck them from the air. He looked over his shoulder to Charles, guilt and apology on his face, and fear was there too. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right, Justin. Just let them be. There’s no harm done, really.’

‘You’re not angry with me?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You know your partner hates me.’

‘Oh, I doubt that.’ He trained the beam to another dark quarter of the basement, searching out a trackline post. Ah, there it was, and it was still set with the running wires. ‘Now why would Mallory hate you?’

‘My father says people hate other people for what they hate in themselves.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s sometimes true. But what might that be in Mallory’s case?’ Matches? Oh, yes. He pulled an old box from the chest of drawers in the open steamer trunk.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know much about her.’

‘Well, she’s a loner, like you,’ said Charles, disappearing into the dark at the edge of the globe’s small circle of light, and then reappearing with empty hands. ‘She doesn’t mix well with people.’

Other qualities in common? He had to wonder. There was something between her and the boy, a mutual understanding he could not understand.

‘All right, Justin. Ready?’

The boy nodded.

Now there was a bright flash of light, and a glowing ball of flames was hurtling straight toward them. It stopped three feet short of its targets, man and boy, and then rose over their heads and was extinguished in the darkness beyond them.

Justin whistled and clapped his hands.

‘Now that’s a flying object,’ said Charles. ‘And miles more fun than pencils, don’t you think? It runs on a track of wire. It’s the only floating illusion I know, but there are crates full of books on magic if you want to look through them.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the less I know about this stuff the better off I am. Why did everyone assume I made the pencils fly?’