The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) Read Free Page B

“No problem.”
    “Brilliant,” he said, turning to follow us as we continued toward the main room. The three of us stood in the archway for a moment, marveling at all the costumed attendees; a truly exotic turnout. I heard Clive cluck his tongue loudly as he looked around the room.
    “These people,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side as he jotted illegibly in a small notebook. “They look ridiculous.”
    Pete and I exchanged a glance but kept our mouths shut.

      
    “Okay, folks, we’re going live in five minutes,” the smiling television host told the assembled audience from his position near the front of the stage. The host wore his usual get-up—a tweed sport coat with a plaid scarf—but for once the scarf made sense in the crisp, cool constant fifty-five  degrees of The Caves.
    The floor manager gestured at him and he looked down at small stack of index cards in his hand as if he’d forgotten he was holding them.
    “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve been asked to remind you of a couple of housekeeping notes. So, how many people here have ever been to The Vatican? You know, the one in Rome?”
    This apparent non sequitur produced some puzzled looks in the crowd. A few audience members raised their hands tentatively.
    “Okay, good, a few of you,” the host continued. “Well, for the rest of you, when you go to The Vatican and visit the Sistine Chapel—which my wife and I did about five years ago, just stunning, don’t miss it, get in line early, that sucker fills up quickly…they tell you the moment you enter the Chapel that you’re not allowed to touch the walls. Da Vinci or Michelangelo or whoever it was who did all the painting in there, he did the whole thing, walls and ceiling. Just stunning. And they don’t want you to touch the walls, because apparently they don’t want the oils from your skin to get on the painting.”
    “Well,” he said , unaware that the audience didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, “the same is true here in The Caves, but for a slightly different reason. I’ve been asked to request that you don’t touch the walls in here because they’re made of sandstone and are very soft. They say that it doesn’t take much to damage them. So, hands off the walls.”
    He added a laugh to emphasize this point and then flipped through his index cards for his next housekeeping note. “Also, be sure to get your questions into the crystal bowl…where is the bowl?”
    The floor manager gestured toward the bowl, which was at the host’s feet.
    He grinned broadly and pointed at the bowl. “Yes, there’s the bowl. You need to get your questions for Grey into this bowl before the start of the show. They tell me there’s paper, pens, and envelopes up here and also on a table in the back of the room. Is that right?”
    He looked to the floor manager for confirmation, received a quick nod, and continued with his pre-show warm-up.
    An audio engineer had found me and was in the process of clipping a wireless lavaliere microphone to my sport coat. I ran the cord under my shirt and slid the small transmitter he handed me into my back pocket.
    “So what’s going on here tonight?” Pete whispered as the TV host cracked some more jokes and gave the audience a few more final instructions. Pete still held the deck of cards in his hands, which he fingered badly in what looked to be his sad attempt at a double lift.
    “The local PBS station is doing a live remote, as part of their weekly local news magazine show. This week’s special is a Halloween show,” I explained. “They’ve got a psychic medium who is going to perform, and then, in the name of fairness or something, they want to bring me on.”
    “The voice of the opposition?” Clive suggested.
    “Something like that,” I agreed.
    “So who’s the psychic?” Pete asked.
    “A performer named Grey,” Clive answered before I could. He double-checked his notes. “Yes, that’s it. Grey.”
    Pete