“No shit,” she said. “I just took a screen capture by the way. I have your face.”
“What do you mean ‘you people’？ Did somebody else ask about your scar?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Please.” I pulled out my driver’s license and held it up to the camera. “I promise I’m not trying to scam you or pull some kind of prank. I’m just trying to solve a mystery.”
She stared at me for a moment, and then asked me to hold up my license again while she took a screen cap.
“You have two minutes,” she said.
“Who asked you about this photograph?”
“He didn’t give me his name, said he needed to remain anonymous for security purposes.”
“Did he say anything else? Maybe something about a game?”
“No. What the fuck is going on?”
“I promise I’m not crazy,” I said, “and I’m not doing this to bother you. I really just need to know what happened to your arm. It’s hard to explain, but—like I said—I think it might be really important.”
Silvana stood up and moved into another room. It was a large foyer. She flipped her camera around and pointed it at a huge photograph that covered the entire back wall of the room. It was the image of Silvana leaning over the famous actress. However, in this version of the image, there was no scar on Silvana’s arm.
She turned the camera back around and held up her right arm. Her skin was perfectly smooth and clear. No scar.
“I don’t have a scar. I’ve never had a scar. You need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
I described the event with Jeff Goldblum in detail, but left out the fact that I had a copy of that video. A weird photograph was one thing, but if I sent her a potentially fake and extremely violent video featuring her likeness, I had the feeling she was probably going to hang up and call the police. I certainly would.
Silvana told me she remembered working on the movie, but that no attack like the one I’d described had taken place. She said if I wanted a better look at that particular image, it had been included in a book the photographer had released earlier this year. She gave me the photographer’s information and told me that back then she went by her maiden name, Silvana Mitchell.
Just as she was about to hang up, I thought of something.
“After I sent you that picture, you took a screen capture of my face.”
“You’re damn right.”
“I understand completely. Did you happen to do the same thing with the other person who called about that photograph with the scar?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Would you be willing to send me that image?”
“If I still have it.”
I thanked her for her time and hung up.
It wasn’t hard to find the book of photographs Silvana was talking about. I typed the photographer’s name into Google, and that picture was suddenly everywhere. Silvana didn’t have a scar in any of the images of that photograph that came up.
I saved the highest-resolution image of the photograph to my computer and compared it side by side with the version I’d found online earlier.
They were identical except for the scar.
As I leaned forward to double-check those images, I felt something shift in my living room. It was as if the shape of the room had suddenly changed, and the quality or consistency of the air had been altered somehow—like the cabin of an airliner pressurizing, or that moment of silence in a horror film just before a black cat jumps out from behind a trash can and scares the shit out of the audience.
That’s when a text alert shattered the silence and I almost fell off my chair.
It was from Silvana. She’d forwarded a picture of the man who’d called her asking about that video.
It was the Magician.
I waited until seven a.m. and then called Chloe again. She eventually picked up.
“What?”
“I need to show you something.”
“It had better not have anything to do with Rabbits.”
“Are you coming, or what?”
Nothing from Chloe.
“Hello?”
“I’ll come by tonight after work. We can order food.”
She hung up.
* * *
—
Chloe showed up at five thirty.
“Don’t get mad,” I said, “but I found Silvana, and she told me something about the Magician.”
“Who the hell is Silvana?”
“Promise you won’t be mad.”
“I promise I’m already mad,” she said.