LITMIR.BIZ

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some very bad men. When they could not collect on their loans, these men instead kidnapped young Max and held him for a ransom so exorbitant that the revenue from it easily would have funded their secret intention, which was to gain control over all the crime and criminals in the United States of America. This would in turn enable them, they reasoned, to take over the country itself. The men abused Max violently and laughed at his pleas for mercy. The police and the federals searched for him everywhere but failed. Meanwhile, Max’s father, the richest man in the state of which Empire City was the capital, weakened. He loved his profligate son. He wanted to have him back again. The day before the deadline for payment fell, he came to a decision. The next morning the Eagle newsboys hit the streets and exposed their veteran uvulas to the skies. “FAMILY TO PAY RANSOM!” they cried.

      Now, imagine that somewhere, says Uncle Max, in one of the secret places of the world (Tom envisions a vague cross between a bodega and a mosque), a copy of the Empire City Eagle bearing this outrageous headline was crushed by an angry hand emerging from a well-tailored white linen sleeve. The owner of the hand and the linen suit would have been difficult to make out in the shadows. But his thoughts would be clear, his anger righteous, and from the lapel of his white suit there would have been dangling a little golden key.

      Max, it turns out, was being held in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Empire City. Several times he tried to escape from his bonds, but could not loosen even one finger or toe. Twice a day he was unfettered enough to use the bathroom, and though several times he tried for the window, he could not manage even to get it unlatched. So after a few days he had sunk into the gray timeless hell of the prisoner. He dreamed without sleeping and slept with his eyes open. In one of his dreams, a shadowy man in a white linen suit came into his cell. Just walked right in through the door. He was pleasant and soothing and concerned. Locks, he said, pointing to the door of Max’s cell, mean nothing to us. With a few seconds’ work, he undid the ropes that bound Max to a chair and bid him to flee. He had a boat waiting, or a fast car, or an airplane—in his old age and with death so near, old Max Mayflower could no longer remember which. And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others. At that moment, one of Max’s captors came into the room. He was waving a copy of the Eagle with the news of Max’s father’s capitulation, and until he saw the stranger in white he looked very happy indeed. Then he took out his gun and shot the stranger in the belly.

      Max was enraged. Without reflecting, without a thought for his own safety, he rushed at the gangster and tried to wrestle away the gun. It rang like a bell in his bones, and the gangster fell to the floor. Max returned to the stranger and cradled his head in his lap. He asked him his name.

      “I wish I could tell you,” the stranger said. “But there are rules. Oh.” He winced. “Look, I’m done for.” He spoke in a peculiar accent, polished and British, with a strange western twang. “Take the key. Take it.”

      “Me? Take your key?”

      “No, you don’t seem likely, it’s true. But I have no choice.”

      Max undid the pin from the man’s lapel. From it dangled a little golden key, identical to the one that Max had given Tom a half hour before.

      “Stop wasting your life,” were the stranger’s last words. “You have the key.”

      Max spent the next ten years in a fruitless search for the lock that the golden key would open. He consulted with the master locksmiths and ironmongers of the world. He buried himself in the lore of jailbreaks and fakirs, of sailor’s knots and Arapaho bondage rituals. He scrutinized the works of Joseph Bramah, the greatest locksmith who ever lived. He sought out the advice of the rope-slipping spiritualists who pioneered the escape-artist trade and even studied, for a time, with Houdini himself. In the process, Max Mayflower became a master of self-liberation, but the search was a costly one. He ran through his father’s fortune and, in the end, still had no idea how to use the gift that the stranger had given him. Still he pressed on, sustained without realizing it by the mystic powers of the key. At last, however, his poverty compelled him to seek work. He went into show business, breaking locks for money, and Misterioso was born.

      It was while traveling through Canada in a two-bit sideshow that he had first met Professor Alois Berg. The professor lived, at the time, in a cage lined with offal, chained to the bars, in rags, gnawing on bones. He was pustulous and stank. He snarled at the paying public, children in particular, and on the side of his cage, in big red letters, was painted the come-on SEE THE OGRE! Like everyone else in the show, Max avoided the Ogre, despising him as the lowest of the freaks, until one fateful night when his insomnia was eased by an unexpected strain of Mendelssohn that came wafting across the soft Manitoba summer night. Max went in search of the source of the music and was led, to his astonishment, to the miserable iron wagon at the back of the fairgrounds. In the moonlight he read three short words: SEE THE OGRE! It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls. He determined then and there to purchase the Ogre’s freedom from the owner of the sideshow, and did so with the sole valuable possession he retained.

      “The key,” Tom says. “The golden key.”

      Max Mayflower nods. “I struck the irons from his leg myself.”

      “Thank you,” the Ogre says now, in the room under the stage of the Palace, his cheeks wet with tears.

      “You’ve repaid your debt many times, old friend,” Max Mayflower tells him, patting the great horny hand. Then he resumes his story. “As I pulled the iron cuff from his poor, inflamed ankle, a man stepped out of the shadows. Between the wagons,” he says, his breath growing short now. “He was dressed in a white suit, and at first I thought it must be him. The same fellow. Even though I knew. That he was where. I’m about to go myself.”

      The man explained to Max that he had, at last and without meaning to, found the lock that could be opened by the little key of gold. He explained a number of things. He said that both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.

      “And tonight,” Tom says.

      “Yes, my boy. And tonight it was them again. They have grown strong. Their old dream of ruling an entire nation has come to pass.”

      “Germany.”

      Max nods weakly and closes his eyes. The others gather close now, somber, heads bowed, to hear the rest of the tale.

      The man, Max says, gave him a second golden key, and then, before returning to the shadows, charged him and the Ogre to carry on the work of liberation.

      “And so we have done, have we not?” Max says.

      Big Al nods, and, looking around at the sorrowing faces of the company, Tom realizes that each of them is here because he was liberated by Misterioso the Great. Omar was once the slave of a sultan in Africa; Miss Plum Blossom had toiled for years in the teeming dark sweatshops of Macao.

      “What about me?” he says, almost to himself. But the old man opens his eyes.

      “We found you in an orphanage in Central Europe. That was a cruel place. I only regret that at the time I could save so few of you.” He coughs, and his spittle is flecked with blood. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I meant to tell you all this. On your twenty-first birthday. But now. I charge you as I was charged. Don’t waste your life. Don’t allow your body’s weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.”

      These are the Master’s last words. Omar closes his eyes. Tom buries his face in his hands and weeps for a while, and when he looks up again he sees them all looking at him.

      He calls Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom to

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