He smiled a skeptical smile and held his lapels of his sport coat a little more tightly together.
“And you are certain of this?”
“Absolutely. I have a great deal of experience.”
“You bury many grandfathers at sea?”
“No, I work professionally as an illusionist.”
“Vraiment?
An
illusionniste?
You are a magician?”
“Well, I make a scantily clad assistant disappear, so I must be.”
“How very charming!”
“Just watch me carefully,” said Emma, anxious to get back to the matter at hand. “When I'm ready, I'll nod, then you'll shout ⦠?”
“âI love San Francisco.' Very loud.”
“And you'll throw your arms up in the air. You'll make it really bigâlike this great feeling for San Francisco has just come over you, and you have to share it with the entire world. Got it?”
“I will make it really big.” He nodded, clearly amused by the whole situation.
Did he really understand? He looked suspiciously relaxed, considering
the circumstances. Maybe he was too sophisticated to make a good distraction. Or too French.
“Pretend you're a cowboy,” said Emma. “Pretend you're Jerry Lewis.”
“Ah.” He nodded.
“Afterward, I'll go belowdeck, and you'll come down and meet me there in a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Wait for my nod.”
“Okay.”
He was still grinning as Emma walked back over to her knapsack. She took out the shoe box and, concealing it with her body, got it up to the railing. Despite his small size, Jacques Passant had been very solid. Emma was surprised at how light the package in her hands was. Considering the brick.
This is it, she told herself. The moment had finally come. She supposed she should say something, but what was there left to say? “A promise is a promise,” seemed hopelessly sentimental and melodramatic. “Good-bye forever, Pépé,” sounded equally silly.
“I've got to be out of my mind,” Emma whispered under her breath, casting an anxious eye toward the four blonds on the port side.
As a magician, she rehearsed even the simplest routines for weeks and still she was always a nervous wreck on stage. This performance she had to do perfectly the first timeâplus worry about a stranger of unknown reliability. One of the women in the peroxide of blonds was now facing Emma, her interest in Alcatraz apparently waning. It was now or never. Emma turned her head to the Frenchman and nodded.
“I love!” he screamed, waving his arms wildly in the air. “San Francisco!”
Then he did a little dance.
The blonds at the rail spun around to see what the commotion was, their startled expressions quickly giving way to smiles. In
that same instant Emma wordlessly let the box slip from her fingers, then walked briskly across the deck, between the Frenchman and the two couples, and made her way below.
She didn't breathe until she had parked her empty knapsack beneath one of the hardwood benches and sat down, her heart racing. In her overdeveloped imagination she could actually hear alarms going off and see crewmen come running to the windows and anxiously scrutinize the waves. None did. A few minutes later her accomplice descended into the cabin, wearing an admiring grin. A very handsome admiring grin.
“Thanks,” said Emma, letting out a deep sigh as he sat down beside her. “Promise accomplished. I can't believe I actually did it. But you were great. Pépé would have loved it.”
“Pépé?”
“That's what I called my grandfather. He raised me after my parents died. I'm Emma, by the way. Emma Passant.”
“Henri-Pierre Caraignac,” he said, shaking her hand. “Passant is a French name, yes?
Vous parlez le français?”
“I understand the language a little from listening to my grandfather,” she said, “but I don't really speak it. Pépé only spoke French when he was upset, which wasn't often. He was a very sweet man.”
The Frenchman nodded soberly.
“You must have loved your grandfather very much, to do this thing for him.”
Emma smiled.
“When I was seven years old, Pépé took me to Sausalito on the ferry for the first time,” she said, staring at the approaching island, which was bathed in the morning's crystalline light. “We stood together at the side of the boat and looked at the water and the people and the city. Suddenly, from out of the blue, he began to cry. âWhy are you crying, Pépé?' I asked. I had never seen my grandfather cry before, and I was frightened.”
“And what did he answer?”
Emma didn't say anything for a moment, fighting back tears of her own. She had cried enough when she had come back from the morgue last week, cried as if she would never stop. But Jacques Passant wouldn't have wanted to be remembered with tears, she knew.
“He said,” said Emma after a moment, “that he had stolen the most precious treasure of the sea and could never go back.”
The Frenchman raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.
“My grandfather had been a sailor, you see,” she continued.
“He'd traveled all over the world before settling in San Francisco. When I asked him what treasure he had stolen, he wouldn't answer. He just kept saying, over and over, âI can never go back. I can never go back again.' âYes, you can,' I told him. âI promise you can.'”
“And so today,” said Henri-Pierre, nodding his head, “you made sure that he did.”
“A promise is a promise,” said Emma, suddenly feeling something deep inside of her finally relax. “And this was my last chance to keep it.”
Â
Â
“
I
wear a man's top hat, white tie, and tailsâwith the pants, mind you, not fishnet stockings,” said Emma, daintily dunking her doughnut into black coffee as the ferry pulled away from the pier on its return trip to San Francisco.”I'm billed simply as Emma.”
Emma had assumed that Henri-Pierre Caraignac would get off once they reached Sausalito. He hadn't. It would hardly have been polite to refuse his invitation to breakfast, she told herself, after all the help he'd been. Or particularly rational, considering her recent dating history.
“But surely it is not just Emma?” said Henri-Pierre, sipping his own coffee, to which he had added both sugar and cream in unsettling quantities. “Surely it is the Amazing Emma. Or Emma the Magnificent. Do not all magicians in America have something optimistic attached to their names?”
“Not me,” said Emma. “I'm insecure. I don't want to press my luck.” Coffee was practically her only vice, but this coffee was weaker than she liked it. And not hot enough. The slatted bench
on which they sat was as cold and hard as ice.
“You are insecure, and yet you walk out before an audience and make things disappear.
Merveilleux!
You must be very talented.”
There were only a few other passengers in the cabin with them, bored-looking men reading newspapers, women doing their nails âcommuters, by the look of them. How could anybody ever get tired of being out on the bay? Emma wondered.
“I don't know about talent,” she said. “But I rent only the best illusions from the very best people.”
“Illusions are for rent?”
“Sure. And they're not cheap, either. The good ones aren't, anyway.”
“But how can making someone to disappear be rented?”
“A nearsighted but darling girl magician with a long braid places her muscle-bound assistant, Sergio, into a cage,” Emma explained. “She puts a drape around the cage and turns it around three timesâit's on a little wheeled stand. When she takes off the drape, Sergio is gone and in his place is a big, fat, ugly Saint Bernard. We were watching all the time. The stand is obviously too thin to conceal Sergio. How did the darling girl do it?”
“Magic?”
“Do you really think so?”
“I want to.” Henri-Pierre smiled.
“Which is why I can charge five thousand dollars for a night's work,” said Emma with a sly expression, taking a ladylike nibble of her doughnut.
“How then does she make the muscle-bound assistant disappear?” said the Frenchman, leaning forward with an eager expression that Emma had seen too many times before.
“I'm sworn to secrecy.”
“Please.”
“Sorry. You'll just be disappointed. They're only tricks. It's much better to keep believing in magic.”
“That may be so,” said Henri-Pierre, “but I will keep on buying you more doughnuts and you will become very fat unless you tell me.”
“Well, let's put it this way,” said Emma. “What's for rent is the cage and the stand.”
“So your assistant is somehow concealed, even though it appears that there is no room for him to be.”
“That's why they're called illusions,” she said. “The art is making it look like it really could have happened.”
Through the window Emma could see people on deck unbuttoning their coats. The temperature must already have warmed considerably, though the wind was still brisk enough to keep the ensign dancing and make the caps of the waves as white as snow.
“It must be a very glamorous life,” said Henri-Pierre with an innocent-looking smile.
Emma turned her attention away from the seascape in the window and did her best to smile back. “Glamorous” was hardly the word she would have used for spending her Saturday nights trying to coax a big, smelly animal into a trick box. And besides Sergio, there was also the dog to worry about.
“It's more like endless rehearsals, drafty hotel rooms, and no money,” she said simply.
“In New York we would say that five thousand dollars for a night's work is not exactly chopped livers.”
“That's just my gross. I'm lucky to get one booking a month. Five thousand dollars doesn't go very far when out of it you have to rent illusions, lease rehearsal space, buy costumes, pay your assistant and the stagehands, and take care of transportation, taxes, and insurance. Considering the price of hamburger, I think the dog makes more than I do.”
Emma judiciously dunked the last bit of doughnut into her cup and attempted to convey it into her mouth without incident. When she was finished, she nonchalantly cleaned up the coffee on her chin with her sleeve. Henri-Pierre pretended not to notice.
Angel Island loomed into view to port. A bell buoy rang in the distance.
“I'm certain that you do very well,” the Frenchman said politely.
“What I do,” said Emma, sighing, “is office temp work and waitressing on the side to make ends meet.”
“But you are pursuing your dream.”
“I wish that were true.”
“But I don't understand,” said Henri-Pierre. “You don't want to be the
illusionniste?”
“Oh, I'm not complaining,” said Emma. “It just isn't something I've always dreamed about doing, if you know what I mean. A few years ago I stumbled into a job as assistant to the Great Martiniâbasically because I look good in a bathing suit. One night the Great Martini got together with a cocktail shaker of little martinis, and I ended up doing the show alone. Somehow folks liked it. Somebody offered me another booking. I was stuck.”
“So what then do you really want to do, if not to make magic?”
“Actually I was going to be a dancer, but I screwed up my knee in my senior year of college, and that was the end of that. I don't know if I even had the talent to do it. But I still would have liked to try.”
“I am sorry,” said Henri-Pierre, concern replacing the impish twinkle in his eye. “I would have loved to see you dance.”
“Thanks. Anyway, being a magician's more fun than selling lingerie or driving an ambulance, believe meâI know. I even tried to be a model for a few days until I fell literally flat on my face. There aren't a lot of jobs for the choreographically kaput. What about you? What do you do?”
“I am a dealer of antiques.”
“Really? What kind? I love antiques. I have a wonderful Eastlake chair that I found at a thrift shop for only thirty dollars. It's probably a hundred years old.”
“It sounds like you have a very good eye,” said Henri-Pierre without a trace of condescension. “I am interested in period French furniture, Louis Quinze and Louis Seize mostly, but also certain European decorative pieces on occasionâporcelain, metalwork, some Fabergéâonly the best quality, of course.”
“Of course,” said Emma. “Do you have a shop or something?”
“In New York I have a gallery, yes. And one in Paris. But much of my business is import/export. I buy in the States for clients in Europe and the Far East. I buy in Europe and the Far East for clients here. I do the major shows. Atlanta. Dallas. London twice a year. You know the life.”
“Sure,” said Emma. But she didn't.
An awkward silence fell between them, the first of many over the next thirty minutes as the ferry made its way back to San Francisco. Emma gave the Frenchman her recipe for apple pandowdy and tried to explain why she was still living with her grandfather at her age. (“Do you know how expensive apartments are in this town?”)
For his part Henri-Pierre described how the season at Sotheby's was going (“Still slow, though Old Master drawings are on the upswing”); why he preferred the Dorcester in London to Claridge's (firmer mattresses); and what a schuss was, in case she ever found herself on new powder in Aspenâabout as likely, it seemed to Emma, as her meeting a piece of chocolate she didn't like.
A long time before the boat pulled into its moorings at the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, it was painfully clear that the only thing they had in commonâor were ever likely to have in commonâwas a brief episode of illegal dumping. Emma was genuinely sorry that they were from such different worlds. His sounded very nice, though obviously too rich for her blood. Perhaps it was just as well, she told herselfâmen who looked like Prince Charming were usually trouble anyway.
“Can I give you a lift back to your hotel?” she said, just to be
polite as they crossed the gangplank and headed toward the street.
Instead of gracefully declining the invitation, as she had expected him to do, Henri-Pierre flashed a toothpaste-commercial smile.
“Thank you,” he said, “that would be most convenient.”
Emma tried not to show her surprise.
“Are you sure you don't want to take a cable car? It's very scenic.”
“I wouldn't want to impose, of course. If you don't really want to ⦔
“No, no, no. I'd be delighted.”
They walked in silence the two blocks to the lot where her five-year-old Nissan was parkedâlegal places were impossible to find on the waterfront at this hour, and Emma couldn't afford another parking ticket. Looking at the discarded articles of clothing, fast-food containers, and paperback books that littered her back seat, she felt even more self-conscious and out of her league.
“I'm staying at the Alhambra,” said Henri-Pierre happily as he squeezed into the battered little car.
It figured. The Alhambra was one of the city's oldest and ritziest hotels. Jacques Passant, who had been famous for his oblique turns of phrase, had called it “the hole on Nob Hill down which fools throw money.”
“How do you like it there?” Emma asked.
“Very nice,” replied the Frenchman. “The mattresses, they are very firm.”
Emma nodded. It was suddenly obvious what was on Henri-Pierre's mind.
“I hope I can persuade you to join me for lunch,” he said, confirming her suspicions. “It's nearly noon, and there's a very nice restaurant in the hotel. That is, if you're not getting sick of me.”
At least he proposed to feed her before the mattress lesson. Emma was embarrassed at how tempted she was.
“I'd love to have lunch with you,” she said, narrowly missing a
truck as she pulled out into traffic. “Only I'm afraid I have a show in Phoenix tomorrow night with Sergio. I have to make a one o' clock plane. I've got my luggage in the trunk.”
“I see.”
“I suppose I could try to take a later flight ⦔
“Please do not put yourself out on my account.”
“It's just that we need some time to set up and rehearse before the show,” Emma rattled on. “We haven't been able to get together since my grandfather died, and Sergio's probably forgotten how to levitate already.”
“No need to explain. You will be gone long?”
“Three days.”
“Alas, I am long overdue to be back in New York already, so I probably shouldn't stay and wait for you, should I?”
Wait for her? Why on earth would he wait for her? Emma wondered. Did he really think she was the kind of woman worth waiting three days in a strange city for, just so he could see her again?
“Probably not,” she sighed.
“But perhaps I can see you the next time you are in New York. Yes?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
Like it would ever really happen, Emma said to herself unhappily, seeing her last chance with Henri-Pierre slip away. She would look ridiculous anyway, having lunch at the Alhambra in her jeans. And the food was probably overpriced and fattening.
“Do you get there often?” asked Henri-Pierre, interrupting her sour grapes.
“Where?”
“New York City.”
“I was there exactly once, to do a convention. I stayed in a ratty hotel in Times Square. Somebody stole my favorite wand.”
“Well, next time when you come, you will stay at the Plaza and
have a wonderful time, I promise,” said the Frenchman. “It will be my pleasure to show you the town.”
Emma started to say something else, but finally managed to button her lip with an idiotic smile. She was making a total fool of herself. And why? Because a debonair older man had invited her to lunch. She was really going to have to do something about her self-esteem. Maybe she should clean up the car.
At least Henri-Pierre didn't try to break the silence with more conversation as Emma navigated up and down the city's steep streets to the Alhambra. Though he did smile at her periodically. And wink.