“Yes?” said Halsted. “Just what?”

  “Just in real life,” said Larri, smiling and attempting to toss off the remark lightheartedly.

  “Just a minute,” said Trumbull, “but we don’t let that pass. If there has been a disappearance in real life you can’t explain, we want to hear about it.”

  Larri shook his head, “No, no, Dr. Trumbull. It is not a mysterious disappearance or an inexplicable one. Nothing like that at all. I just lost—something, and can’t find it and it—saddens me.”

  “The details,” said Trumbull.

  “It wouldn’t be worth it,” said Larri. “It’s a—silly story and somewhat…” He fell into silence.

  “Goddamn it,” thundered Trumbull, “we all sit here and voluntarily refrain from asking anything that might result in your being tempted to violate your ethics. Would it violate the ethics of the magician’s art for you to tell this story?”

  “It’s not that at all…”

  “Well, then, sir, I repeat what Geoff has told you. Everything said here is in confidence and the agreement surrounding these monthly dinners is that all questions must be answered. Manny?”

  Rubin shrugged. “That’s the way it is, Larri. If you don’t want to answer the question, we’ll have to declare the meeting at an end.”

  Larri sat back in his chair and looked depressed. “I can’t very well allow that to happen, considering the fine hospitality I’ve been shown. I will tell you the story and you’ll find there’s nothing to it. I met a woman quite accidentally; I lost touch with her; I can’t locate her. That’s all there is.”

  “No,” said Trumbull, “that’s not all there is. Where and how did you meet her? Where and how did you lose touch with her? Why can’t you find her again? We want to know the details.”

  Gonzalo said, “In fact, if you tell us the details, we may be able to help you.”

  Larri laughed sardonically, “I think not.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Gonzalo. “In the past…”

  Avalon said, “Quiet, Mario. Don’t make promises we might not be able to keep. Would you give us the details, sir? I assure you we’ll do our best to help.”

  Larri smiled wearily. “I appreciate your offer, but you will see that there is nothing you can do sitting here.”

  He adjusted himself in his seat and said, “I was done with my performance in an upstate town—I’ll give you the details when and if you insist, but for the moment they don’t matter, except that this happened about a month ago. I had to get to another small town some hundred fifty miles away for a morning show and that meant a little transportation problem.

  “My magic, unfortunately, is not the kind that can transport me a hundred fifty miles in a twinkling, or even conjure up a pair of seven-league boots. I did not have my car with me—just as well, for I don’t like to travel the lesser roads at night when I am sleepy—and the net result was that I would have to take a bus that would make more stops than a telegram and would take nearly four hours to make the journey. I planned to catch some sleep while on wheels and make it serve a purpose anyway.

  “But when things go wrong, they go wrong in battalions, so you can guess that I missed my bus and that the next one would not come along for two more hours. There was an enclosed station in which I could wait, one that was as dreary as you could imagine—with no reading matter except for some fly-blown posters on the wall—no place to buy a paper or a cup of coffee. I thought grimly that it was fortunate it wasn’t raining, and settled down to drowse, when my luck changed.

  “A woman walked in. I’ve never been married, gentlemen, and I’ve never even had what young people today call a ‘meaningful relationship.’ Some casual attachments, perhaps, but on the whole, though it seems trite to say so, I am married to my art and find it much more satisfying than women, generally.

  “I had no reason to think that this woman was an improvement on others, but she had a pleasant appearance. She was something over thirty, and was just plump enough to have a warm, comfortable look about her, and she wasn’t too tall.

  “She looked about and said, smiling, ‘Well, I’ve missed my bus, I see.’

  “I smiled with her. I liked the way she said it. She didn’t fret or whine or act annoyed at the universe. It was a flat, good-humored statement of fact, and just hearing it cheered me up tremendously because actually I myself was in the mood to fret and whine and act annoyed. Now I could be as good-natured as she and say, ‘Two of us, madam, so you don’t even have the satisfaction of being unique.’

  “‘So much the better,’ she said, ‘We can talk and pass the time that much faster.’

  “I was astonished. She did not treat me as a potential rapist or as a possible thief. God knows I am not handsome or even particularly respectable in appearance, but it was as though she had casually penetrated to my inmost character and found it satisfactory. You have no idea how flattered I was. If I were ten times as sleepy as I was, I would have stayed up to talk to her.

  “And we did talk. Inside of fifteen minutes, I knew I was having the pleasantest conversation in my life—in a crummy bus station at not much before midnight. I can’t tell you all we talked about, but I can tell you what we didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about magic.

  “I can interest anyone by doing tricks, but then it isn’t me they’re interested in; it’s the flying fingers and the patter they like. And while I’m willing to buy attention in that way, you don’t know how pleasant it is to get the attention without purchase. She apparently just liked to listen to me, and I know I just liked to listen to her.

  “Fortunately, my trip was not an all-out effort, so I didn’t have my large trunk with the show-business advertising all over it, just two rather large valises. I told her nothing personal about myself, and asked nothing about her. I gathered briefly that she was heading for her brother’s place; that he was right on the road; that she would have to wake him up because she had carelessly let herself be late—but she only told me that in order to say that she was glad it had happened. She would buy my company at the price of inconveniencing her brother. I liked that.

  “We didn’t talk politics or world affairs or religion or theater. We talked people—all the funny and odd and peculiar things we had observed about people. We laughed for two hours, during which not one other person came to join us. I had never had anything like that happen to me, had never felt so alive and happy, and when the bus finally came at 1:50 A.M., it was amazing how sorry I was. I didn’t want the bus to come; I didn’t want the night to end.

  “When we got onto the bus, of course, it was no longer quite the same thing, even though it was sufficiently nonfull for us to find a double seat we could share. After all, we had been alone in the station and there we could talk loudly and laugh. On the bus we had to whisper; people were sleeping.

  “Of course, it wasn’t all bad. It was a nice feeling to have her so close to me; to be making contact. Despite the fact that I’m rather an old horse, I felt like a teen-ager. Enough like a teen-ager, in fact, to be embarrassed at being watched.

  “Immediately across the way were a woman and her young son. He was about eight years old, I should judge, and he was awake. He kept watching me with his sharp little eyes. I could see those eyes fixed on us every time a street light shone into the bus and it was very inhibiting. I wished he were asleep but, of course, the excitement of being on a bus, perhaps, was keeping him awake.

  “The motion of the bus, the occasional whisper, the feeling of being quite out of reality, the pressure of her body against mine—it was like confusing dream and fact, and the boundary between sleep and wakefulness just vanished. I didn’t intend to sleep, and I started awake once or twice, but then finally, when I started awake one more time, it was clear that there had been a considerable period of sleep, and the seat next to me was empty.”

  Halsted said, “I take it she had gotten off.”

  “I didn’t think she had disappeared into thin air,” said Larri. “Naturally, I looked about. I couldn’t call her name, because I didn’t know her name. She wasn’t in the rest room, because its door was swinging open.

  “The little boy across the aisle spoke in a rapid high treble—in French. I can understand French reasonably well, but I didn’t have to make any effort, because his mother was now awake and she translated. She spoke English quite well.

  “She said, ‘Pardon me, sir, but is it that you are looking for the woman that was with you?’

  “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did you see where she got off?’

  “‘Not I, sir. I was sleeping. But my son says that she descended at the place of the Cross of Lorraine.’

  “‘At the what?’

  “She repeated it, and so did the child, in French.

  “She said, ‘You must excuse my son, sir. He is a great hero-worshiper of President Charles de Gaulle, and though he is young he knows the tale of the Free French forces in the war very well. He would not miss a sight like a Cross of Lorraine. If he said he saw it, he did.’

  “I thanked them and then went forward to the bus driver and asked him, but at that time of night, the bus stops wherever a passenger would like to get off, or get on. He had made numerous stops and let numerous people on and off, and he didn’t know for sure where he had stopped and whom he had left off. He was rather churlish, in fact.”

  Avalon cleared his throat. “He may have thought you were up to no good and was deliberately withholding information to protect the passenger.”

  “Maybe,” said Larri despondently, “but what it amounted to was that I had lost her. When I came back to my seat, I found a little note tucked into the pocket of the jacket I had placed in the rack above. I managed to read it by a street light at the next stop, where the French mother and son got off. It said, ‘Thank you so much for a delightful time. Gwendolyn.’”

  Gonzalo said, “You have her first name, anyway.”

  Larri said, “I would appreciate having had her last name, her address, her telephone number. A first name is useless.”

  “You know,” said Rubin, “she may deliberately have withheld information because she wasn’t interested in continuing the acquaintanceship. A romantic little interlude is one thing; a continuing danger is another. She may be a married woman.”

  “Or she may have been offended at your falling asleep,” said Gonzalo.

  “Maybe,” said Larri. “But if I found her, I could apologize if she were offended, or I could reassure her if she feared me; or I might cultivate her friendship if she were neither offended nor afraid. Rather that than spend the rest of my life wondering.”

  “Have you done anything about it?” asked Gonzalo.

  “Certainly,” said Larri, sardonically. “If a magician is faced with a disappearing woman he must understand what has happened. I have gone over the bus route twice by car, looking for a Cross of Lorraine. If I had found it, I would have gone in and asked if anyone there knew a woman by the name of Gwendolyn. I’d have described her. I’d have gone to the local post office or the local police station, if necessary.”

  “But you have not found a Cross of Lorraine, I take it,” said Trumbull.

  “I have not.”

  Halsted said, “Mathematically speaking, it’s a finite problem. You could try every post office along the whole route.”

  Larri sighed. “If I get desperate enough, I’ll try. But, mathematically speaking, that would be so inelegant. Why can’t I find the Cross of Lorraine?”

  “The youngster might have made a mistake,” said Trumbull.

  “Not a chance,” said Larri. “An adult, yes, but a child, riding a hobby? Never. Adults have accumulated enough irrationality to be very unreliable eyewitnesses. A bright eight-year-old is different. Don’t try to pull any trick on a bright kid; he’ll see through it.

  “Just the same,” he went on, “nowhere on the route is there a restaurant, a department store, or anything else with the name Cross of Lorraine. I think I’ve checked every set of yellow pages along the entire route.”

  “Now wait a while,” said Avalon, “that’s wrong. The child wouldn’t have seen the words because they would have meant nothing to him. If he spoke and read only French, as I suppose he did, he would know the phrase as Croix de Lorraine. The English would have never caught his eyes. He must have seen the symbol, the cross with the two horizontal bars, like this.” He reached out and Henry obligingly handed him a menu.

  Avalon turned it over and on the blank back drew the following:

  “Actually,” he said, “it is more properly called the Patriarchal Cross or the Archiepiscopal Cross, since it symbolized the high office of patriarchs and archbishops by doubling the bars. You will not be surprised to hear that the Papal Cross has three bars. The Patriarchal Cross was used as a symbol by Godfrey of Bouillon, who was one of the leaders of the First Crusade, and since he was Duke of Lorraine, it came to be called the Cross of Lorraine. As we all know, it was adopted as the emblem of the Free French during the Hitlerian War.” He coughed slightly and tried to look modest.

  Larri said, a little impatiently, “I understand about the symbol, Dr. Avalon, and I didn’t expect the youngster to note words. I think you’ll agree, though, that any establishment calling itself the Cross of Lorraine would surely display the symbol along with the name. I looked for the name in the yellow pages, but for the symbol on the road.”

  “And you didn’t find it?” said Gonzalo.

  “As I’ve already said, I didn’t. I was desperate enough to consider things I didn’t think the kid could possibly have seen at night. I thought, who knows how sharp young eyes are and how readily they may see something that represents an overriding interest. So I looked at signs in windows, at street signs—even at graffiti, damn it.”

  “If it were a graffito,” said Trumbull, “then, of course, it could have been erased between the time the child saw it, and the time you came to look for it.”

  “I’m not sure of that,” said Rubin. “It’s my experience that graffiti are never erased. We’ve got some on the outside of our apartment house…”

  “That’s New York,” said Trumbull. “In smaller towns, there’s less tolerance for these evidences of anarchy.”

  “Hold on,” said Gonzalo. “What makes you think graffiti are necessarily signs of anarchy? As a matter of fact…”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” And as always, when Avalon’s voice was raised to its full baritone splendor, a silence fell. “We are not here to argue the merits and demerits of graffiti. The question is: How can we find this woman who disappeared? Larri has found no restaurant or other establishment with the name of Cross of Lorraine; he has found no evidence of the symbol along the route taken. Can we help?”

  Drake held up his hand and squinted through the curling smoke of his cigarette. “Hold on, there’s no problem. Have you ever seen a Russian Orthodox Church? Do you know what its cross is like?” He made quick marks on the back of the menu and shoved it toward the center of the table. “Here…”

  He said, “The kid, being hipped on the Free French, would take a quick look at that and see it as the Cross of Lorraine. So what you have to do, Larri, is look for some Russian Orthodox Church en route. I doubt that there would be more than one.”

  Larri thought about it, but did not seem overjoyed. “The cross with that second bar set at an angle would be on the top of the spire, wouldn’t it?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And it wouldn’t be floodlighted, would it? How would the child be able to see it at four o’clock in the morning?”

  Drake stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, now, churches usually have bulletin board affairs near the entrance. I don’t know, there could have been a Russian Orthodox cross on the…”

  “I would have seen it,” said Larri firmly.

  “Could it have been a Red Cross?” asked Gonzalo feebly. “You know, there might be a Red Cross headquarters along the route.”

  “The Red Cross,” said Rubin, “is a Greek Cross with all four arms equal. I don’t see how that could possibly be mistaken for a Cross of Lorraine by a Free French enthusiast. Look at it…”

  +

  Halsted said, “The logical thing, I suppose, is that you simply missed it, Larri. If you insist that, as a magician, you’re such a trained observer that you couldn’t have missed it, which sounds impossible to me, then maybe it was a symbol on something movable—on a truck in a driveway, for instance—and it moved on after sunrise.”

  “The boy made it quite clear that it was at the place of the Cross of Lorraine,” said Larri. “I suppose even an eight-year-old can tell the difference between a place and a movable object.”

  “He spoke French. Maybe you mistranslated.”

  “I’m not that bad at the language,” said Larri, “and his mother translated and French is her native tongue.”

  “But English isn’t. She might have gotten it wrong. The kid might have said something else. He might not even have said the Cross of Lorraine.”

  Avalon raised his hand for silence and said, “One moment, gentlemen, I see Henry, our esteemed waiter, smiling. What is it, Henry?”

  Henry, from his place at the sideboard, said, “I’m afraid that I am amused at your doubting the child’s evidence. It is quite certain, in my opinion, that he did see the Cross of Lorraine.”

  There was a moment’s silence and Larri said, “How can you tell that, Henry?”

  “By not being oversubtle, sir.”

  Avalon’s voice boomed out. “I knew it. We’re being too complicated. Henry, how is it possible to gain greater simplicity?”

  “Why, Mr. Avalon, the incident took place at night. Instead of looking at all signs, all places, all varieties of cross, why not begin by asking ourselves what very few things can be easily seen on a highway at night?”

  “A Cross of Lorraine?” asked Gonzalo incredulously.