Carter Beats the Devil (17 page)

It turned out, however, that Houdini had just undergone one of his periodic transformations, and was touring under a banner that read “No Handcuffs.” Because of their sheer number, he was no longer able to assassinate the characters of the dozens of self-proclaimed Handcuff Emperors, Kings, and Wizards one by one. So, instead, Houdini had lobbed a bomb into their midst, a book called
Handcuff Secrets
, which explained in detail exactly how everyone else’s tricks were accomplished. From now on, the world was welcome to the monkeys who monkeyed with shackles, he proclaimed. Houdini would escape exclusively from devices of his own creation, such as the padlocked Milk-Can and Chinese Water Torture Cabinet.

So it seemed after all that Mysterioso had risked nothing that day in Butte. But on a Monday afternoon in Vancouver, most of the performers were lazing and dozing in a park, enjoying a rare clear and cloudless day. August Schultz, who had his arm in a sling—Annabelle’s work—was playing pinochle with Leonard from Fun in Hi Skule. Carter sat on the grass a few yards away, sketching illusions and crossing them out. A signature effect, something for the public to identify a magician with, was a direct reflection of personality. He asked himself,
Am I the type of magician who would like to be known for . . . pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Escaping from handcuffs? Turning into a lion?

There was just a slight breeze and then an odd sputtering sound
came from above the treetops. Carter spotted an airplane on the horizon. Aware of the distance between himself and everyone else, he cleared his throat.

“Look, everyone,” he said, “an airplane.”

An airplane was such an uncommon sight that people stirred from their naps, put down backgammon boards and guitars, to stare at the strange machine. Carter knew a little about airplanes because, only months beforehand, Houdini had become the first man to fly one in all of Australia. As this one approached, a hollowed-out rectangular box for the wings and a square box for the tail with what looked like a ladder connecting them, it looked exactly like the one Houdini had flown: a Voisin, made in France, with an English engine. These were so expensive and unusual that the sight of it made Carter’s heart beat faster—could it be Houdini himself? Of course! A dramatic entrance en route to confronting Mysterioso! The engine sputtered and droned, the plane not fifty feet off the ground. August Schultz yelled, “That plane—it looks like Houdini’s.”

Carter wished he’d said that, for the whole company jumped to their feet, waving their hats, and calling out encouragement to this daring aviator. As it circled clockwise, a great, disappointed groan arose from the crowd. Painted on the rear assembly was one huge word: MYSTERIOSO! The magician continued circling long after the troupe had gotten the message, and then he disappeared over some trees.

. . .

Two weeks passed, and the company began the final leg of the tour, the trek down the West Coast. In Portland, a package arrived for Carter from the brothers Martinka: the apparatus for the aga levitation he had settled on. It was simple and almost impressive.

The tour played the Portland Galaxy, a small, dreary stone theatre that had once been a Lutheran church. Just after dawn on the morning before the first show, Carter stood onstage and unpacked the materials, consulting the instructions the Martinkas had included. Within an hour, he had levitated a waxworks Beefeater he’d taken from the property room. He swung a hoop down from its tall black hat, over its body, to its scuffed black boots, and addressed himself to the empty seats: “You see? No wires. The rational mind exclaims—there must be strings! Wires! And I would have to agree, Ladies and Gentlemen, but . . .” He fell silent. Dreadful. Boring. He might as well shoot himself.

He took from his pocket one of Mysterioso’s throw-out tokens. Baby was on the back, and the legend below him read: “Will You Have Her As Your Bride?” He looked up, then left, then right. The backstage storage
area for Mysterioso’s property was mere feet away. Every night, the lion was put back into its cage and left alone.

He made sure the theatre was absolutely empty, and to ensure privacy, he jammed the locks from the inside with some picks and putty. Mysterioso’s storage area was accessible only by one door, steel plate, with a two-key locking mechanism that would stump most thieves. Carter opened it, went inside, and closed and locked it quietly.

For long moments, he let his eyes adjust to the dark. There was a single window about twenty feet up, with bars over it. All of Mysterioso’s props were stored in crates stacked chest high to make aisles one could walk up and down. The lion’s cage was straight ahead, but crates obscured Carter’s vision as he approached on tiptoe. He didn’t want to startle the animal, though he suspected it was difficult to sneak up on a lion.

When he was but five feet from the cage there was no time for him to process the ramifications of an unassailable fact: the cage was empty and the door stood open. He did, however, have enough time to think,
They must keep the lion somewhere else at night
, before he heard a cough behind him. It wasn’t a human cough.

The door to the storage unit was fifteen feet away, three or four strides. In theory, it was possible to make it that far, but Carter had locked himself in. He had heard that lions could smell fear. He had heard that if a lion charges you, you should punch him in the nose as hard as you can. Make sure you don’t accidentally find your hand in his mouth.

He couldn’t see the lion, which was no doubt crouching somewhere in one of the aisles made by all the boxes. There was a light whipping sound, which was probably his tail flicking against a crate. He measured his heartbeat: eighty, no, ninety, no, one hundred twenty beats a minute. He thought,
Puisque toutes les créatures sont au fond des frères . . .
knowing that nothing in that friendly thought guaranteed the lion would respond in kind. He turned from the waist to look 360 degrees for a sign of him. He took one step backward.

He’s seen something on the floor, poking out of the aisle closest to him: a pair of feet. Someone lying on the ground? Yes, there were legs, and beside them, a pair of shoes. He leaned forward to look farther down the aisle. Annabelle, on her side, lying half up against the wall among scattered packing materials.

The lion was crouched by her head. Carter recognized the posture: his father had once owned a hunting dog that didn’t like to be approached when it was about to gnaw on a soupbone. He took one step
back, and the lion followed with one step forward, huge ropes of muscle trembling and flexing under his gold coat.

As the lion stepped over her body, paws the width of her face, the punching-the-lion-in-the-nose advice struck Carter as woefully inadequate.

“Annabelle?” hissed Carter. She didn’t stir. “Annabelle?” In his life, he had heard few noises so low and deep they were felt before they were heard: the first rumbles of an earthquake, the full throttle of an express train, and now the roar of the lion, a raw bellow with an underlying ticking sound, like a metronome counting down seconds. The lion was going to kill him. The lion crouched, gathered on his haunches, and propelled himself forward, up, in a perfect parabola, falling toward Carter, jolting strangely in midair. Annabelle stood behind the lion, holding his tail with both hands and delivering with all the force in her body a hard, swift jerk so that the lion’s momentum carried him to the floor, where he toppled a stack of crates.

There was a moment of quiet while the three of them gathered their wits.

“Miss Bernhardt!” Carter exclaimed. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she swallowed. “You aren’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t move.”

The lion’s eyes were fixed on Carter’s throat, and his shoulders were rapidly falling toward the floor.

“Oh, for godsake,” Annabelle muttered. She barked, “Baby!”

Carter looked toward her; the lion did not.

With an air of disgust, Annabelle hissed, “Don’t make me come after you.” The lion’s tail thumped against the floor. Then Annabelle made one simple motion: she put her hands on her hips. At once, all tension seemed to drain out of the lion, who licked his lips. “That’s better. You know it ain’t worth it.” She put a hand under his collar and towed him to his cage.

When she returned to where Carter was still frozen, she gave him the once-over. “What the hell you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“I was sleeping.”

“Why aren’t you at the hotel with Mysterioso?”

“You sleep at the hotel with Mysterioso.” She took out a cigarette. “What time is it?”

“Maybe seven-thirty.”

She put the cigarette back. “What are you doing here at the crack of dawn, anyway?”

“I’m . . . trespassing.” Carter felt a bit ill. When he realized he could move, he righted a crate that Baby had knocked over. “I was hoping to find out how the lion roars on command.”

Annabelle finally lit the cigarette. Her dirty red hair hung down in her face. She looked over her shoulder, at the cage. “Hey, Baby, how do they make you roar?” She glanced back at Carter. “He ain’t cooperating. Maybe you should get rough with him.”

Carter squared his shoulders, approached the cage, and pointed his finger, the way the Indian Chief did, and replicated his tone. “Will you have her as your bride?” But nothing happened. Carter looked at Annabelle. “Aren’t you curious?”

She shrugged. “It’s not my act.”

“Why was his cage open?”

“I let him out so we could play. Me and him are friends.”

“I see. Then you fell asleep?”

Annabelle nodded. “Did you think you were rescuing me?”

“No,” Carter said, “but I would have punched the lion in the nose if I had to.”

“What?”

“You know, the way you’re supposed to when . . .”

Annabelle seemed to be wrestling with a smile, and the smile lost. She gathered up her hair, binding it with the frayed ribbon he’d often seen her wear. Between lips that held her cigarette, her voice came out low and raspy like an oboe under a wool blanket. “You haven’t thanked me for saving your life.”

Carter frowned. “Well . . .”

“‘Well’ what?”

“The lion seems fairly docile. All you had to do was look at him right, and he put his tail between his legs.”

She stood up so fast that Carter actually flinched. “No, pal, all I had to do was look at him. You coulda looked at him all day long, sooner or later from inside his rib cage. He took one look at you and saw meat. Easy meat.” Grinding out her cigarette, she sat back down in the aisle where he’d found her. “Exactly what Mysterioso sees.”

He bowed. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

Her eyes were closed and she put her hand over her mouth as if yawning. “Try and pick the lock quietly on your way out.”

. . .

Throughout the day, it rained, and Carter paced in his room, thinking of pithy things he should have said to Annabelle.

When he went back to the theatre, he discovered, with a certainty that made his stomach turn, that someone had opened, then repacked, his new Martinka devices. It had been a careful burglary; had he not been so concerned with how he would customize his aga levitation, he might not even have noticed the way the spool had been repackaged, just to the left of where he’d put it. Had Annabelle done this? Unlikely. There was a very short list of people capable of opening the lock Carter used.

Because he sometimes thought best while walking, he walked in the rain, eventually finding a small carnival set up near the Lewis and Clark statue in Three Bridges Park. Most of the attractions had been canceled. The rides were closed, and the animals were penned off at the wettest corner of a leaky, sour-smelling tent where a few jugglers unhappily tossed batons back and forth, marching in place to keep warm. Carter gave a quarter to a fortune-teller, a beautiful, young Chinese woman with a terrible cold. She threw a fistful of twigs onto a folding table and looked at them, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief, and announced that, very soon, he would marry a woman named Sarah.

Carter folded his hands in his lap. He looked away from her, to a place in the grass that the rain was trampling. There had to be a handbook of prophecies, somewhere. “What if I told you Sarah had already moved away? Am I supposed to follow her?”

She blew her nose. “I don’t know.”

“Or something else?”

“I don’t know.”

Carter leaned back, letting his jacket open slightly, so that his pin from the Society of American Magicians showed. Rain pelted the roof as the woman took a lingering look at the pin, and nodded to show she’d seen it. She could, if she wanted, speak freely about whether she was simply following a handbook.

She shrugged. “I just have a gift, mostly.”

“Of course,” he sighed, “a gift. Wonderful.”

. . .

In bed that night, he fell into a restless sleep, waking at 4 a.m. with a disappointed, fading feeling: he’d dreamed of a new illusion Annabelle had performed. Unfortunately, it was a variation on a Robert-Houdin device,
hardly original. Worse, it was a spiteful kind of trick, unworthy of consideration. Nonetheless, he sketched it in his notes and returned to bed.

And yet he did not sleep. He mentally turned the pages of Robert-Houdin’s
Confidences d’un Prestidigitateur,
then
Les Tricheries des Grecs Déviolées,
then
Les Secrets de la Prestidigitation et de la Magie,
then
Magie et Physique Amusante;
Annabelle’s trick wasn’t in any of them. His eyes snapped open.

He looked at his notes again by lamplight, drawing the bedsheets to his neck. He had just dreamed a completely original illusion. The device would be sloppy, ugly, and expensive, and would require several assistants, and only a fiend would use it. He almost was ashamed of dreaming it. Almost. With clear, bold letters, Carter wrote down a name for his new device: BLACKMAIL.

At 5
A
.
M
. Carter dashed to the telegraph office, waking the operator in order to send a wire to the Martinkas. An emergency order. Three more optical mirrors. Another winch and pulley. Black magic, yards and yards of it. A flash pot. A table with a steel trap built in. A platform, hinged. And modify the aga to an asrah, hang the expense.