Carter Beats the Devil (16 page)

He would not talk to her. He was too afraid of the very quality he’d seen in her green and gold-flecked eyes, the quality that made her an asset to Mysterioso’s company. Her eyes reflected volcanic anger.

Her first night onstage, in Topeka, she had fought—truly fought—the men approaching her, throwing one aside and kicking another in the stomach and knocking the wind out of him. Then, as if it had been a passing summer cloudburst, she lost interest and let herself be kidnapped. The crowd had never seen a woman who could fight before. They went wild. At the closing curtain, unbidden by anyone, she took her own bow, getting a glare from her employer, and even more applause.

Word trickled down from Mysterioso’s camp that after the first performance he had actually fired her, but that a dozen women of Topeka had lined up at the stage door to bless Mysterioso for showing the world that they could fight Indians, too. The women said they were telling all of their neighbors to come to the next evening’s show, and they told him “God bless you” so many times he rehired Annabelle and made her performance part of the act. When his men complained, he chuckled, and said he was now doubly sure he was making the right decision. He told them to choreograph a mock fight.

Had Carter been interested in watching her (he wasn’t—his position on this was so strong he wrote it down), he could have stood in the vacant lots behind the theatres and seen Annabelle and the men rehearsing
an increasingly athletic and complex battle. The men were reluctant, but as Annabelle bought drinks for any man she knocked unconscious, they became firm supporters of her place in the act.

. . .

Whenever the tour intersected with another vaudeville circuit’s show, Carter watched performances by other magicians, usually taking notes. He saw full-length shows at the legitimate theatre: the Great Raymond (in his journal, Carter wrote, “he was good”); Adelaide Herrmann, last of the great Herrmann family (“good”); Thurston, successor to Kellar, and named by his peers as the world’s greatest magician (“not bad,” Carter wrote); T. Nelson Downs, the King of Koins (Carter made no mention of Downs’s act, but wrote a page defending his own act, concluding, miserably, that he had to find a new effect).

The only performance that he considered at length was at the Boston Keith’s theatre. Houdini. “Last night,” Carter wrote James, “I saw the most famous man in the world give what I suppose is a typical performance. It is now three
A
.
M
. and I am still trying to comprehend what I saw: a short, muscular man with a precise way of speaking, like a Dutchman who speaks the Queen’s English, in a dirty tuxedo—I was in Row S, and I could see soot on him—botching ten minutes of card tricks before tossing the deck aside and getting to the real business: being Houdini. Have I mentioned that he is the most famous man in the world? He did, for ten minutes. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, George Bernard Shaw said that the three most famous men in the history of the world are Jesus Christ, Sherlock Holmes, and Houdini. Only one of us could be here tonight. . . .’ He listed all of the things he has escaped from in the last twelvemonth: handcuffs, straitjacket, sea bag, jail cell, convict ship, crazy crib, coffin, glass box, padlocked case, giant football, witch’s chair, chains, ropes, etc. Then he explained, for another ten minutes, all the old stories of how many foolish imitators he has destroyed. ‘If you are a handcuff king, beware of me,’ he said, ‘for I am unveiling a new weapon.’ Then he showed a motion picture show of him jumping manacled into the Mississippi River and escaping and then construction crews roping him to a girder of the Heidelberg Tower in Manhattan; he escaped that, too.

“Then the lights went up and he proceeded to perform the most amazing stunt I have ever seen in my life.”

Two hot-water boilers were brought onstage, one empty and the other full of warm water. Men from the Albert Mann Boiler Works shackled Houdini with chains and handcuffs they’d brought themselves.
Houdini walked up a platform and stepped into the empty boiler, which came up to his neck. Then the men began draining the warm water into the boiler Houdini stood in. This took quite a long time, an interim that Houdini filled with jokes: “It’s not even Saturday night,” and “If I escape, this will be a good trick. If not, buy an Albert Mann Boiler tomorrow—I vouch for its integrity.”

When the water was level with the top—spilling over, in fact—two men carried the boiler cap across the stage, and Houdini took a great gulp of breath and ducked under the surface as the cap was placed on top and the bolts tightened. Immediately, the orchestra struck up “Asleep in the Deep.”

Carter, who had been impressed with the beginning of this illusion, was suddenly let down: of course the cap could screw off. But then two more workmen came out of the wings holding menacing-looking rivet guns. With the snap and retort of metal piercing metal, the boiler cap was riveted shut in twenty places. The men walked off and the curtain swung shut on the sight of the boiler trembling slightly from whatever motion the entrapped Houdini was making inside.

The audience began talking excitedly. The man to Carter’s left was holding a watch. “It has been two minutes since he held his breath,” he said quietly.

“That long already?”

“Yes. Do you think there was air between the surface of the boiler and the cap?”

“I think so, but not much.”

“The cap looked concave.” The man stared at his watch.

Behind Carter, women were discussing with their husbands how they had seen Houdini escape from nested automobile tires and snow chains.

“I hear he can undo locks with his toes,” one woman said.

“He keeps a full set of tools down his throat. He can bring them up at will,” her husband answered with the authority of one who has heard a rumor.

“It’s been four minutes,” the man with the watch said.

“He escaped from a paddy wagon in Russia, and he was nude then, so the only way was if he had the keys down his throat.”

At five minutes, the orchestra finished playing “Asleep in the Deep.” There was brief consulting between the conductor and a stagehand, then they struck the song up again, from the beginning. Carter sensed that something had gone wrong.

Conversations dried up as the rest of the audience began to catch the
same sense, the sense that the disaster awaiting Houdini, the one he tempted with every escape, might have finally caught up with him.

Carter thought Houdini must be taking precautions—there was no way he could actually be risking death—and yet, as the seconds ticked away, his concern grew and he rolled and rerolled his program between his hands. He consulted his watch. He thought about the date. He could tell his grandchildren that he was in the audience the night Houdini failed to escape. How long could someone hold his breath? Three minutes? Four? It had been eight minutes—the musicians in the orchestra looked worried.

A tremble of red velvet, the curtain parted slightly, and Houdini, soaking wet, his shirt torn, staggered toward the footlights. His hands were bloody. The crowd burst into applause and cheers as the orchestra shifted into “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”

“Eight minutes, forty seconds.” The man put his watch away.

Houdini held his arms up for a moment, as if about to speak, but then he shuddered and sank to one knee. With the audience gasping, nurses draped a blanket over Houdini’s shoulders. They helped him to his feet. The rounds of applause were overpowering. Carter, shaking his head, clapped till his hands stung as a hunched-over Houdini made a supreme effort, threw the blanket off, and raised his arms in victory. And the whole house, as if with one voice, screamed his name, “Houdini!” Houdini’s hand went to his brow, and the nurses came to his aid, taking him into the wings.

The curtain was raised and the boiler was shown still to be riveted shut. Applause continued throughout the demonstration, with calls for Houdini finally answered when the manager announced that Houdini had been taken to the hospital due to the exertions of the escape. If people wanted to see him again, he would be escaping from a giant lightbulb, provided by the Edison Power Company, at noon the next day.

Carter left the theatre feeling exhilarated, caught in the great flood of people who all chattered about the spectacle, the suffering, the triumph. Houdini had escaped, somehow, at great personal sacrifice. As Carter filed through the double glass doors, he felt a hand at his elbow.

“You were very impressed, Carter.”

That voice. He stopped, regarded the fingers locked around his elbow, and then looked up into a grinning, unpleasant face. Mysterioso wore a black silk suit, wool overcoat, and black silk scarf. He was about six inches taller than Carter. He stood so close that Carter had to turn his
head back uncomfortably to meet his eyes. “You were applauding.” It was a condemnation.

Carter freed his elbow. “It was a fine show.”

“The man risked nothing. He is the worst sort of charlatan,” Mysterioso boomed, ignoring the dirty looks of patrons, “getting a houseful of people to pay for his bleating like an egomaniac before that phony stunt with the boiler.”

“I respect the serious danger—”

“Oh, please: those men fired phony rivets—”

Carter, whose cheeks were burning, tried to hush him. “You know the walls have ears.”

“I don’t care who hears this—Houdini is a fake.” Mysterioso looked down on the hats of other patrons as they filed around him, and announced, “He got out of that nice bathtub in five seconds, and sat backstage reading a newspaper while children like you sweated and prayed and felt tremendous sympathy for the third-most-famous man in the world as he painted up his hands with fake blood and counted up the house receipts.”

The angrier Carter became, the calmer and more observant he was. He noticed Mysterioso had a fresh bruise just under his eye.

Carter had learned the signs of Annabelle’s presence on the tour: Leonard, Minnie Palmer’s eldest son, had been found knocked unconscious backstage; Walter Huston, who usually did a soft-shoe and sang “I Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi,” was, after making a play for Annabelle, reduced for a week to shuffling across stage on his one good foot. It was astonishing to Carter that men didn’t know some women just didn’t like them. The bruise on Mysterioso’s face was exactly the size of Annabelle Bernhardt’s fist.

“You know,” Carter murmured, “raw beefsteak is a wonder—”

“You mind your business,” Mysterioso hissed. He narrowed his eyes, rubbing the lapel of Carter’s topcoat between his fingertips. “Did your father buy you this coat?”

“I’ve been buying my own clothes for several years now.” Carter knocked the fingertips away, wishing for a baseball bat to do the job effectively. “As for Houdini, it happened as you say. He had all of us feeling pleased with ourselves, just because he fooled us. If I think about it, I suppose he’s well enough to escape from a lightbulb tomorrow. But I don’t want to think about it.” Mysterioso smirked and Carter continued. “That’s right, that’s right—that’s the magic of it.”

“Oh,” Mysterioso moaned, clutching at his heart as if Carter had shot
him there. “Magic. Of course,” He shook his head. “I’d been wondering exactly what kind of idiot you are, rich boy.”

The crowd had tapered a bit. Mysterioso gave one last sad shake of his head and walked away.

Carter called after him, “Mysterioso,” but got no response, so he continued, “how do you make the lion roar?”

Mysterioso called over his shoulder, “Magic, you moron,” as he turned his collar up and merged with the crowd.

CHAPTER 10

The tour looped the northeastern states in early spring. The New England crowds, as if leaving their houses for the first time since fall, seemed the most grateful in the country. The circuit traveled west along the Highline, crossing back and forth into Canada, where the crowds were reserved and polite, which was never a good combination for a magician. Far better to tour the northern climes in winter, when the audience applauded anything and everything just to stay warm. As they entered rougher territories—Montana, the Dakotas—Carter noticed a change in Mysterioso’s behavior.

When they set up in a new town, acts from the program would give a free demonstration, a ballyhoo, in the largest public square. Mysterioso would give a brief speech decrying his skills, passing behind a curtain to show how quickly he could change uniforms—a fifth of a second! This, followed by throwing handfuls of his copper “Mysterioso” tokens into the mob. In Butte, an astonishing thing happened. After Mysterioso changed from buck private to colonel, there was a unified call from a group of cowpokes: “Annabelle!”

Carter watched as Colonel Mysterioso stared daggers at them. “Yes,” he said “Annabelle Bernhardt will be at the theatre tonight. She is the most fantastic furious female fighter ever to be tamed. Bring your wives!”

The men, who were leaning against a gate at the edge of the square, called again, “Annabelle!”

Whenever Carter thought of this moment, and he thought about it often, he put himself in Mysterioso’s place. Carter would have encouraged the calls for another member of his company. But, instead, Mysterioso ignored the men and barked out an order to an assistant. A moment later, a pile of chains and handcuffs clanked onto the stage.

“Watch,” Mysterioso cried, “and learn!” This was a new moment in Mysterioso’s public repertoire. He was bound with a dozen pairs of handcuffs, inviting as many people to examine him as the stage could hold. When he shrugged once, twice, three times, the cuffs fell off of him.

The crowd cheered. Mysterioso, surveying his subjects, called out: “I am the master!” There were hollers for more, and Carter could almost see the magician weighing his words as he said them. “I am the king of escapes!”

The crowd continued their clapping, someone yelling, “Down with Houdini,” and Mysterioso, pumping his hands in the air, seemed to realize the heavens had not darkened. He laughed. “Yes, down with Houdini!”

This was suicidal behavior, akin to spitting on the Cross, but with the threat of more immediate retribution.

For the next week, Carter waited cautiously for reports of reaction from Houdini, who had been known to appear unannounced at a rival’s show and embarrass him onstage. Other times, Houdini, a born scrapper, simply ambushed other magicians in alleyways and beat the tar out of them.