Circus

They travelled to down-town Washington in an official but unidentifiable car, Pilgrim and Fawcett in the back, the driver and a fourth man in the front. The fourth man was a grey, balding anonymity of a person, raincoated, with a totally forgettable face. Pilgrim spoke to him.

‘Now, don’t forget, Masters, you better be sure that you’re the first man on that stage.’

‘I’ll be the first man, sir.’

‘Picked your word?’

‘Yes, sir. “Canada.”’

Dusk had already fallen and ahead, through a slight drizzle of rain, loomed an oval, high-domed building festooned with hundreds of coloured lights that had been programmed to flicker on and off in a pre-set pattern. Fawcett spoke to the driver, the car stopped and, wordlessly and carrying a magazine rolled up in one hand, Masters got out and seemed to melt into the gathering crowd. He had been born to melt into crowds. The car moved on and stopped again only when it had reached as close to the building entrance as possible. Pilgrim and Fawcett got out and passed inside.

The broad passageway led directly to the main audience entrance of the big top itself – a misnomer, as the days of the great canvas structures, at least as far as the big circuses were concerned, had gone. Instead they relied exclusively on exhibition halls and auditoriums, few of which seated less than ten thousand people, and many considerably more: a circus such as this had to have at least seven thousand spectators just to break even.

To the right of the passageway glimpses could be caught of the true back-stage of the circus itself, the snarling big cats in their cages, the restlessly hobbled elephants, the horses and ponies and chimpanzees, a scattering of jugglers engaged in honing up their performances – a top-flight juggler requires as much and as constant practice as a concert pianist – and, above all, the unmistakable and unforgettable smell. To the rear of the area were prefabricated offices and, beyond those, the rows of changing booths for the performers. Opposite those, in the far corner and discreetly curved so as to minimize the audience’s view of what was taking place back-stage, was the wide entrance to the arena itself.

From the left of the passageway came the sound of music, and it wasn’t the New York Philharmonic that was giving forth. The music – if it could be called that – was raucous, tinny, blaring, atonal, and in any other circumstances could have been fairly described as an assault on the eardrums: but in that fairground milieu any other kind of music, whether because of habituation or because it went so inevitably with its background, would have been unthinkable. Pilgrim and Fawcett passed through one of the several doors leading to the concourse that housed the side-show itself. It covered only a modest area but what it lacked in size it clearly compensated for in volume of trade. It differed little from a hundred other fairgrounds apart from the presence of a sixty-by-twenty, garishly-painted and obviously plywood-constructed structure in one corner. It was towards this, ignoring all the other dubious attractions, that Pilgrim and Fawcett headed.

Above the doorway was the intriguing legend: ‘The Great Mentalist’. The two men paid their dollar apiece, went inside and took up discreet standing positions at the back. Discretion apart, there were no seats left – The Great Mentalist’s fame had clearly travelled before him.

Bruno Wildermann was on the tiny stage. Of little more than average height, and of little more than average width across the shoulders, he did not look a particularly impressive figure, which could have been due to the fact that he was swathed from neck to ankle in a voluminous and highly-coloured Chinese mandarin’s gown, with huge, billowing sleeves. His aquiline, slightly swarthy face, crowned by long black hair, looked intelligent enough, but it was a face that was more pleasant than remarkable: if he passed you in the street you would not have turned to look after him.

Pilgrim said, sotto voce: ‘Look at those sleeves. You could hide a hutchful of rabbits up them.’

But Bruno was not bent on performing any conjuring tricks. He was confining himself strictly to his advertised role as a mentalist. He had a deep carrying voice, not loud, with a trace of a foreign accent so slight as to make its source of origin unidentifiable.

He asked a woman in the audience to think of some object then whisper it to her neighbour: without hesitation Bruno announced what the object was and this was confirmed.

‘Plant,’ said Pilgrim.

Bruno called for three volunteers to come to the stage. After some hesitation three women did so. Bruno sat all three at a table, provided them with foot-square pieces of paper and envelopes to match and asked them to write or draw some simple symbol and enclose them in the envelopes. This they did while Bruno stood facing the audience, his back to them. When they had finished he turned and examined the three envelopes lying on the table, his hands clasped behind his back. After only a few seconds he said: ‘The first shows a swastika, the second a question mark, the third a square with two diagonals. Will you show them to the audience please?’

The three women extracted the cards and held them up. They were undeniably a swastika, a question mark and a square with two diagonals.

Fawcett leaned towards Pilgrim: ‘Three plants?’ Pilgrim looked thoughtful and said nothing.

Bruno said: ‘It may have occurred to some of you that I have accomplices among the audience. Well, you can’t all be accomplices because then you wouldn’t bother to come and see me, even if I could afford to pay you all, which I can’t. But this should remove all doubt.’ He picked up a paper plane and said: ‘I’m going to throw this among you and although I can do lots of things I can’t control the flight of a paper plane. Nobody ever could. Perhaps the person it touches would be good enough to come to the stage.’

He threw the paper plane over the audience. It swooped and darted in the unpredictable fashion of all paper planes, then, again in the fashion of all paper planes, ended its brief flight in an ignominious nose-dive, striking the shoulder of a youth in his late teens. Somewhat diffidently he left his seat and mounted the stage. Bruno gave him an encouraging smile and a sheet of paper and envelope similar to those he’d given the women.

‘What I want you to do is simple. Just write down three figures and put the sheet inside the envelope.’ This the youth did, while Bruno stood with his back to him. When the paper was inside the envelope Bruno turned, but did not even look at the paper far less touch it. He said: ‘Add the three numbers and tell me what the total is.’

‘Twenty.’

‘The numbers you wrote down were seven, seven and six.’

The youth extracted the paper and held it up for the audience to see. Seven, seven and six it was.

Fawcett looked at Pilgrim, who had now adopted a very thoughtful expression indeed. Clearly, if Bruno were not genuine then he was either a consummate magician or an extraordinarily devious character.

Then Bruno announced his most difficult feat of all – that of displaying that he was possessed of a photographic memory, that of identifying, given the location, of any word in a double-spread of any magazine, irrespective of language. Masters left nothing to chance or the impetuousness of any eager beaver who might care to forestall him for he was on stage even before Bruno had finished his explanation. Bruno, slightly lifting amused eyebrows, took the opened magazine from him, glanced at it briefly, handed it back and looked interrogatively at Masters.

Masters said: ‘Left page, second column, let me see now, seven lines down, middle word.’ He looked at Bruno with a half-smile of triumphant expectation.

Bruno said: ‘Canada.’

The half-smile vanished. Masters’s nondescript features seemed to fall apart then he shrugged his shoulders in genuine disbelief and turned away.

Outside, Fawcett said: ‘I hardly think that Bruno is likely to have the inside track on the CIA. Convinced?’

‘Convinced. When does the performance start?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘Let’s go and watch him on the high wire or whatever. If he’s half as good out there – well, he’s our man.’

The exhibition hall that housed the three-ring circus was completely full. The air was alive with music, this time more than tolerable music from a very competent orchestra, an air that was charged with tension and excitement and anticipation, with thousands of young children transported into an enchanted fairyland – almost, indeed, to the extent their grandparents were. Everything glittered, but it was no cheap tinsel glitter, but a background that seemed the integral and inevitable part of everything a circus should be. Apart from the dun-coloured sand in the three rings, a dazzling rainbow of colours caught the eye even more than the music the ear. Circling the ring were beautiful and beautifully dressed girls on the most outrageously caparisoned elephants and if there was any colour in the spectrum that the designer had omitted it wasn’t apparent to the eye. In the rings themselves clowns and pierrots vied with each other in the ludicrousness of their antics and the ridiculousness of their costumes, while both of them vied with the tumblers and the stately procession of stilt-walkers. The audience watched it all in fascination – albeit with an element of impatience, for this spectacle, magnificent as it was, was only the warm-up, the prelude to the action to come. There is no atmosphere in the world quite like that of the charged atmosphere in the big top just before the performance begins.

Fawcett and Pilgrim sat together in excellent viewing seats, almost opposite the entrance of the main ring. Fawcett said: ‘Which is Wrinfield?’

Without appearing to do so, Pilgrim indicated a man sitting only two seats away in the same row. Immaculately clad in a dark blue suit, matching tie and white shirt, he had a lean, thoughtful, almost scholarly face, with neatly parted grey hair and pebble glasses.

‘That’s Wrinfield?’ Pilgrim nodded. ‘Looks more like a college professor to me.’

‘I believe he was once. Economics. But bossing a modern circus is no longer a seat of the pants job. It’s big business and running it requires corresponding intelligence. Tesco Wrinfield is a highly intelligent man.’

‘Maybe too intelligent. With a name like that and on a job like this it’s going to be – ’

‘He’s a fifth-generation American.’

The last of the elephants left the arena and then, to the accompaniment of a blare of trumpets and the suddenly amplified effects of the orchestra, a golden chariot, drawn by two magnificently adorned black stallions, erupted into the arena at full gallop, followed by a dozen horsemen. From time to time these horsemen retained some form of contact with their horses, but for the most part performed a series of acrobatic feats as spectacular as clearly suicidal. The crowd yelled and cheered and applauded. The circus had begun.

The performance that followed more than bore out the circus’s claim that it had no peer in the world. It was superbly arranged and superbly presented and, as was to be expected, it numbered among its acts some of the best in the world: Heinrich Neubauer, an all but incomparable trainer with an uncanny power over a dozen very unpleasant Nubian lions; his only equal, Malthius, who treated the same number of even more unpleasant Bengal tigers as if they were kittens; Carraciola, who had no trouble at all in making his chimpanzees look a great deal more intelligent than he was; Kan Dahn, billed as the strongest man in the world, which, on the basis of his extraordinary one-handed feats on the high wire and trapeze while seemingly unencumbered by the presence of several attractive young ladies who clung to him with a touching degree of devotion, he might well have been; Lennie Loran, a high-wire-walking comedian, who would have made any insurance agent in the country jump on his pen; Ron Roebuck, who could perform feats with a lasso that a rodeo cowboy wouldn’t even dare dream about; Manuelo, a knife-thrower who could extinguish a lit cigarette at twenty feet – with his eyes bandaged; the Duryans, a Bulgarian teeterboard team who made people shake their heads in wonder; and a dozen other acts, ranging from aerial balletists to a group who climbed up tall ladders and balanced there entirely unsupported while they threw Indian clubs at each other.

After an hour or so of this Pilgrim said graciously: ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. And here, I take it, is our star turn.’

The lights dimmed, the orchestra played suitably dramatic if somewhat funereal music, then the lights came on again. High up on the trapeze platform, with half a dozen coloured spotlights trained on them, stood three men clad in sparkling sequinned leotards. In the middle was Bruno. Without his mandarin’s gown he now looked singularly impressive, broad-shouldered and hard and heavy muscled, every inch the phenomenal athlete he was reputed to be. The other two men were fractionally slighter than he. All three were blindfolded. The music died away, and the crowd watched in eerie silence as the three men pulled hoods over their blindfolds.

Pilgrim said: ‘On balance, I think I would prefer to be down here.’

‘That’s two of us. I don’t think I want to look.’

But look they did as The Blind Eagles went through their clearly impossible aerial routine – impossible because, apart from the occasional roll of a solitary drum in the orchestra, they had no means of knowing where each other was, of synchronizing their sightless movements. But not once did a pair of hands fail to smack safely and securely into another and waiting pair, not once did an outstretched pair of hands appear even remotely liable to miss a silently swinging trapeze. The performance lasted for all of an interminable four minutes and at the end there was another hushed silence, the lights dimmed a second time and almost the entire audience was on its feet, clapping and shouting and whistling.

Pilgrim said: ‘Know anything about his two brothers?’

‘Vladimir and Yoffe, I believe they’re called. Nothing. I thought this was going to be a one-man job.’

‘It is. And Bruno has the motivation? The incentive?’