Two for the Show by Jonathan Stone Page A

with the performance. “You wonder how he does it,” said Dave. “You really do.”
    The next night, as if purely to be polite, I asked if he’d like to watch Wallace the Amazing again. He nodded that he would.
    On the third night, I tune it in without asking. It seems to have become part of our routine. A routine significantly disrupted by a simple question.
    “You work for him, don’t you?”
    My mind seizes. My blood pulses. “Work for who?”
    “For him. Wallace.”
    “What are you talking about?” I am struggling to remain calm.
    “You didn’t think I was watching that first night. But I was watching, and watching you watching. Watching you watching intensely. Not the watching of a man who had casually been flipping the channels a minute before. Or pretending to casually flip them.
    “You see,” says Dave, “I heard the two of them talking about going to Wallace’s show. Dave and his companion. Going to catch the famous act. That must be where you saw them. And then you followed them to get to me. Why would you risk being so involved? You’re a decent guy, but no humanitarian. For you, there was something more to it. I could sense that. So yes, I think you work for him. You may even be what makes the Amazing amazing.”
    And then I sense something too. I pick up on something, just as my shriveled recovering guest has.
    That his insight is a little too insightful. A little too knowledgeable from him.
    I leap up, run to my computer, slamming my office door behind me, bring up onto the computer screen and look again, more closely now, at the official passport and driver’s license photos of the real Dave Stewartson.
    And the poor, shriveled-up, unrecognizable wraith I have rescued from the bathtub? Who I have nursed back to health?
    I see it’s not him.
    Blowing up the photos to full screen. Letting a retouching program fill in missing pixels for a close-up, hyperrealistic look.
    Goddamn it! It’s not him.
    “Who are you?” he asks once more, calmly, as I emerge furious from the office.
    “No,” I say, grabbing him by the arm, by the shocking skin and bones that my grip closes around, the end of frustration, the edge of violence. “Who are you ?”
    He looks at me—blank, unblinking.
    “Archer Wallace,” he says.
    Archer Wallace.
    The real Archer Wallace?
    Wallace the Amazing, indeed.
    (Remembering, of course, that I’m not using, can’t risk using, real names here. Maybe I will ultimately. But not yet.)
    I am reeling.
    Everything changes.

FIVE
    “That little coincidence that you notice, smile at, half dismiss . . . the person you were just thinking about, calling you out of the blue . . . an unusual word you just said to someone, suddenly there on the page in front of you . . . someone you were just thinking about, suddenly driving by in his new convertible . . . The kind of little coincidence that makes even the practical, the pragmatic, the faithless, wonder for a moment about the inner clockworks of the world .  . .”
    I am a half step, a full step, two steps ahead as he tells it. After being for the past week a half step, a full step, two steps behind. It’s so painfully clear how I had assumed amid the shock of it that the shriveled, bare-skulled, shrunken form in the tub was the real Dave Stewartson, but now it is Wallace—the real Archer Wallace—who had been stumbled onto serendipitously or, more likely, discovered by the careful sleuthing of this couple (in which case they are detectives of a sort, with skill sets a mirror of my own), who saw the opportunity to kidnap this hidden Wallace, and then to blackmail Wallace the Amazing with the discovery. To threaten the rich Wallace, the Wallace who stole for some reason (convenience? revenge? to avoid a scandal? to cause one?) the identity of this cut-off, shriveled, strange, isolated, actual Wallace.
    I would now bet there’d been contact beforehand between Wallace the Amazing and the “Stewartsons,” leading up to the