The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"From that day on, Bony was my shadow. He adopted my enthusiasms, and in doing so seemed almost to become a different person. There were times, in fact, when I fancied he was becoming me; that here before me was the part of myself for which I had been searching in the midnight mirror.

"What I do know is that we were never in better form than when we were together; what one of us couldn't do, the other could accomplish with ease. Bony seemed to have been born with a fully formed mathematical ability, and he was soon unveiling for me the mysteries of geometry and trigonometry. He made a game of it, and we spent many a happy hour calculating upon whose study the clock tower of Anson House would fall when we toppled it with a gigantic steam lever of our own invention. Another time, we worked out by triangulation an ingenious series of tunnels which, at a given signal, would collapse simultaneously, causing Greyminster and all its inhabitants to plunge into a Dantean abyss, where they would be attacked by the wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots with which we planned to stock the place.”

Wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots? Could this be Father speaking? I suddenly found myself listening to him with new respect.

"How this was to be achieved," he went on, "we never really thought through, but the upshot of it all was that while I was getting chummy with old Euclid and his books of propositions, Bony, with a bit of coaching, was turning out to be a natural conjurer.

"It was the fingers, of course. Those long white appendages seemed to have a life of their own, and it wasn't long before Bony had mastered completely the arts of prestidigitation. Various objects appeared and vanished at his fingertips with such fluid grace that even I, who knew perfectly well how each illusion was done, could scarcely believe my eyes.

"And as his conjuring skill grew, so did his sense of self-worth. With a bit of magic in hand, he became a new Bony, confident, smooth, and perhaps even brash. His voice changed too. Where yesterday he had sounded like a raucous schoolboy, he seemed now, suddenly—at least, when he was performing—to possess a voice box of polished mahogany: a hypnotic professional voice which never failed to convince its hearers.

"'The Resurrection of Tchang Fu' worked like this: I decked myself out in an oversized silk kimono I had found at a church jumble sale, a beautiful bloodred thing covered with Chinese dragons and mystical markings. I plastered my face with yellow chalk and stretched a thin elastic round my head to pull my eyes up at the corners. A couple of sausage casings from Carnforth's, varnished and cut into long, curving fingernails, added a disgusting detail. All that was needed to complete my getup was a bit of burnt cork, a few wisps of frayed string for a beard, and a frightful theatrical wig.

"I would call for a volunteer from the audience—a confederate, of course, who had been rehearsed beforehand. I would bring him onstage and explain, in a comic singsong Mandarin voice, that I was about to kill him, to send him off to the Land of the Happy Ancestors. This matter-of-fact announcement never failed to fetch a gasp from the audience, and before they could recover themselves, I would pull a pistol from the folds of my robe, point it at my confederate's heart, and pull the trigger.

"A starter's pistol can make a frightful din when it's fired indoors, and the thing would go off with the most dreadful bang. My assistant would clasp his chest, squeezing in his hand a concealed paper twist of ketchup, which would ooze out horribly between his fingers. Then he would look down at the mess on his chest and gape in disbelief.

"'Help me, Jacko!' he would shriek. 'The trick's gone wrong! I'm shot!' and fall dead flat on his back.

"The audience would, by now, be sitting bolt upright in shock; several would be on their feet, and a few in tears. I would hold up a hand to quiet them.

"'Sirence!' I would hiss, fixing them with an awful stare. 'Ancestahs lequire sirence.'

"There might be a few titters of nervous laughter, but generally there was a shocked hush. I would fetch a rolled-up sheet from the shadows and drape it over my apparently dead assistant, leaving only his upturned face visible.

"Now this sheet was quite a remarkable object; one which I had manufactured in great secrecy. It was divided lengthwise into thirds by a pair of slender wooden dowels sewn into two narrow pockets that ran the length of the sheet and were, of course, invisible when the thing was rolled up.

"Squatting down and using my robe as cover, I would slip my assistant's shoes from his feet (this was easily done, since he had secretly loosened his laces just before I chose him from the audience) and stick them, toes up, on the end of the dowels.