Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [75]
“How did you get in?” won.
“Rather easily,” answered the magician with a little gesture, dismissing the question as having very little interest.
“Where’s Sybil?” said Brentford, advancing toward him.
“Ms. Springfield, you mean? Not here, apparently. But I do not think the message you read ever said she would be.”
Brentford had to admit that, literally speaking, this was true.
“Were we here to talk about magic, I’d say that’s lesson number one,” said Handyside. “Most of the trick is founded on what the spectator infers.”
“Thanks for the lesson. When will I get to see her?”
“You missed a good chance in my dressing room, actually.”
“You were still there?”
“Of course. In the trunks. Rather cramped, if I may say so. And I had to stifle my laughter when Tommy bit you.” Handyside smiled, pointing at Brentford’s bandaged hand.
“That damned puppet.”
Handyside chuckled.
“This is what happens when you assume things are what they seem to be. Tommy is indeed a very mischievous contraption,” he added, almost tenderly.
Brentford had once again been misdirected, and tried to retrace his tracks.
“We were talking about Sybil.”
“Do not worry. She’ll be restored in time. That will be my little wedding gift. Provided, of course, this conversation leaves us both satisfied.”
Brentford sat down with a sigh in the armchair in front of Handyside.
“You’re not one to be trusted, I would say,” he replied.
“You’d offend me if you thought otherwise,” answered Handyside, with a bow. “Deception is my trade, as you know. But then, if I deceive people, I do not disappoint them, I hope. Look in your right pocket.”
Brentford reached into the pocket of his smoking jacket. Much to his surprise he pulled out a crumpled scaly brown leather thing he instantly recognized: it was the pineapple-shaped mask worn by Angry Andrew, the former master of the Greenhouse, in the heyday of Pineapples and Plums. And suddenly Brentford also recognized in Spencer Molson, the Clumsy Conjuror he had seen tonight, Angry Andrew’s personal assistant and master of ceremonies.
“My real name, you will be interested, if not pleased, to know, is Adam Arkansky. I am the son of Ananias Andrew Arkansky and I have come to claim my inheritance,” he said, putting in his own pocket the mask Brentford handed him back.
“Your inheritance?”
“The greenhouses my father ran.”
“I do not own this place, Mr. Arkansky, and neither do you. A lot of things have changed since your father ran it. For one thing, it is now a branch of the Arctic Administration. Even if I were inclined to give it back, it would not be in my power to do so.”
“I know that, of course. But were you to resign, I have reasons to think the Council of Seven would consider my application with benevolence.”
“I do not doubt they would,” Brentford said, darkly remembering the presence of that cumbersome Gentleman of the Night in front of the backstage door. “But I am not sure you would like the job. I spend most of my time calculating ratios of sand, ashes, local soil, compost, and nitrogen, making sure steam pipes or Tesla coils warm the soil sufficiently, finding ways to fan out or recycle the heat when it’s too hot because of the long periods of daylight. It bores me as an engineer, and I doubt it would have for you the glamour of stage magic.”
Actually, Brentford delegated most of those tasks, but he wanted to know what Handyside, well, Arkansky, was aiming at.
“Stage magic is more math than glamour. But anyway, there’s one word you said that sums it all up for me: sand, Mr. Orsini.”
“Sand is not that fascinating, I assure you.”
“But imagine we replace it with local psylicates. Would not that give a certain flavour to our local production?”
That was it, then. A return to Ananias Andrew Arkansky’s old way of using the Greenhouse as a drug factory. When affordable food was so damn hard to find