LITMIR.BIZ

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stops by to talk over old times. I get the same rumors as everybody else. I heard Parker did it.”

      “Mason sent him?”

      “Parker doesn’t shit unless Mason tells him it’s okay, so yeah, Mason must have told him to do it.”

      “Why? After all these years, why would he do that?”

      “I don’t known, man. Seriously.”

      I stare into Kasabian’s eyes and know he isn’t lying. He’s absolutely panicked as I come over to him. When I take the burning cigarette out of the ashtray and let him finish it, he looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry.

       My Alice is dead and I’m alone.

      “Tell me about the store,” I say. “How many employees are there?”

      “Four or five. College kids. They come and go. It changes with classes and holidays. Allegra is the only one with any brains.”

      “Who’s she?”

      “She manages the place. I don’t like being down there with the customers.”

      “She runs the place so you can stay up here and bootleg movies.”

      “We do what we have to do to get by. I bet you did some dirty trick or two when you were in Hell.”

      “You have no idea,” I tell him. “What time do you open in the morning? Does Allegra open the place?”

      “Ten. Yeah, she does.”

      There’s a closet behind the door to the stairs. I push the stairs door closed and open the closet. It’s mostly empty, except for waist-high metal storage shelves. I drag the body into the back of the closet, then bring in Kasabian’s head. I set him on top of the shelves. He says, “I’m a little claustrophobic.”

      I look around the room. He can’t stay out in the open, in case someone comes up here. There’s a small bathroom, but there’s no way that I’m having Kasabian share my morning pee. Sitting on the bottom of one of the shelves is a small portable TV. I plug it in and turn it on while fiddling with its old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. A local news show comes on and I put the set on the shelf with Kasabian.

      “Maybe this’ll ease your pain.”

      Kasabian frowns. “You’re a real prick, Jimmy.”

      “But I wasn’t always, was I?” I close the closet door halfway and stop. “You ever call me Jimmy again, I’ll nail this door shut. You can complain about claustrophobia for the next fifty years in the dark.” I close and lock the closet door.

      I sit down on the bed, exhausted and in pain. It’s been an eventful day. I landed here with nothing and ended up with a nice new jacket and a pocket full of cash. I even have somewhere to crash and wash my face. The American dream.

      I stretch out full on the bed and something else occurs to me. “I guess I’m in the video biz.” Damn, I even have a job.

      I want to go and wash off the blood that’s drying on my belly and chest, but when I try to stand, my cracked ribs shoot to the top of my pain threshold and convince me that I can wait until morning. I shrug off Brad Pitt’s jacket and lie back carefully. The moment my head hits the pillow, I’m out.

      Alice had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We’d been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, “I can do magic. Want to see?”

      “Of course.”

      She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom.

      She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. When she came back to bed, she had a top hat and a deck of cards. She sat down and put on the hat, straddling me on top of the covers.

      “Pick a card,” she said. I took one. It was the jack of diamonds. “Now put it back in anywhere you want. Don’t let me see it.” She made a point of closing her eyes and turning her head away.

      “It’s back in, Merlin,” I said.

      She waved a hand over the deck and mumbled some made-up magic mumbo jumbo and fanned out the deck across my stomach.

      “Is this your card?” she said, holding up one of the cards.

      It was the jack of diamonds. “Right as rain,” I told her. “You’re the real thing, all right.”

      “Know how I did it?”

      “Magic?”

      She flipped the deck so that I could see the cards. It was fifty-two identical jacks of diamonds.

      “That’s not real magic,” I said.

      “Fooled you.”

      “Cheat. You distracted me.”

      “I have the power to cloud men’s minds.”

      “That you do.”

      She slid under the covers still wearing the top hat and mustache and we made love that way. The top hat fell off, but she wore the mustache until morning.

      The night after her card trick, I told Alice about magic. I told her it was real and that I was a magician. She liked me well enough by then not to fifty-one-fifty me to the cops, but she looked at me like I’d just told her that I was the king of the mushroom people. So, I pinched the flame off one of the candles she’d lit and made it hop across my fingertips. I charmed old magazines, dirty shirts, and Chinese-restaurant flyers up from the floor, formed them into a vaguely female shape, and had them strut around the apartment like a fashion model. I made my neighbor’s yowling cat speak Russian and Alice’s tattoos move around like little movies under her skin.

      She loved it. She was like a kid, shouting, “More! More!” What she didn’t want was anything serious. Every civilian I’d ever shown magic to had the same response—how can we use it to get rich? Let’s manipulate the stock market. Turn invisible and rob a bank. Throw on a glamour so that cops can’t see us.

      Alice didn’t ask for any of that. I showed her magic and that was enough for her. She didn’t instantly wonder what the magic could do for her. She loved the magic itself, which meant that she could love me because I wasn’t likely to make anyone rich. We hadn’t been going out that long and she wasn’t sure about me yet. It didn’t matter. I was already nine-tenths in love with her and could wait for as long as it took for her to come around.

      It took two more days.

      She showed up at my door with a box from a run-down magic shop in Chinatown.

      “I can do magic, too,” she said.

      “Let’s see.”

      The magic box was about the size of two matchboxes. She lifted the top off. Her middle finger lay inside the box, wrapped in bloody cotton around the bottom. The finger wiggled. Stiffened. She held up her hand so the severed finger flipped me the bird, the cheapest of cheap gags. Of course, she hadn’t chopped her finger off. She’d slid it up through a hole in the bottom of the box that already had cotton and fake blood inside. It was about the stupidest thing I’d ever seen.

      I kissed her and took her inside. We never talked about her moving in. She just came in and never left, because she knew this was where she should be.

      Later, when Alice and I were in bed and still drunk from our one month anniversary party, I told her that I had a dream where we were on a road trip, eating lunch in some anonymous little diner. She told the waitress that we were driving to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator and held up her engagement ring for everyone to see. It was the magic store box, still

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