Carter Beats the Devil (25 page)
“You sounded excellent tonight—”
“Can you imagine being the best in the world, you feel music like it’s another one of your senses, and one day, you wake up, and you’re only excellent?”
Carter shook his head.
“You’re supposed to get better. And I didn’t. When I found you tonight, I was . . .” She swallowed. “Oh, I was proud of you. You did good tonight, with the Blackmail bit, and Mysterioso, and Houdini, and the girls, and everything. You’re just a real straight-up guy. I thought maybe I could show you something without getting screwed, and there was the piano, so.” Her voice, which was still woolly, rose and fell almost musically, Carter realized. From calm to passionate, and now, slumped over, elbows on her knees, she went full bore again. “Why did I follow you? I am such an idiot.” She put her head in her hands. “I am
stuck
on you, Charlie. I can’t stand it.”
“You like me?”
“God! I can’t even be
mad
at anyone right now. Do you know what that’s like for me?” She kicked the ground, hard. “God!”
Carter watched everything: her limp red hair hanging around her face, the anguish she wore, her insistence that there had to be something in the bay worth looking at, the fists she had pressed into her knees. And the dew on their bench, the grass beside them, the smells of rosemary and basil and sage in the Italian gardens all around.
She would not meet his eye. “It is
torture
to be with you. You’ve been teasing me all night long.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “really.” And he was overwhelmed. “I didn’t know you liked me. I thought the only joy you took in men was violent.”
And then she looked at him. The backs of her hands were swollen and knotted, her palms rough like burl, and he took her head in his hands, and her lips touched his, chapped, but sweet. They kissed long enough for Carter to feel all the tender possibilities of contact: kissing! touching! feeling! and then, with a flood of happiness, he realized he was kissing Annabelle Bernhardt, and she was exactly the right person to kiss.
“I could look at you all day, I think,” Carter said. He shook his head, smiling. Around them was the city and the world and the universe in all its known and as-yet-unexplored parts, and with them, the future.
. . .
Astonishingly, the meeting with the performers would start in just half an hour; Carter and Annabelle had to rush. He took her down side streets and through alleys, until they found a cable car. Inside, crushed together in the crowd, they had trouble taking their eyes off of each other.
He was a headliner, he had stood side by side with Houdini, who had named him Carter the Great, and he was holding hands with a woman who thrilled him.
Annabelle said, “Is your name really Carter?”
“Yes.” They pushed together as the car lurched to a stop.
“Charles Carter is your real name?” They had to draw even closer together, the workaday crowd pushing in on either side of them, as the trolley resumed up the hill.
“Charles Carter the Fourth. Who would make up such a dull name?”
“Well, my last boss’s name was Mysterioso, and you were just talking to Houdini tonight, and that’s not his real name—”
“True.”
“And Minnie Palmer changed her last name from Marx so she wouldn’t seem related to her act, and I bet those parlor girls all have different real names, so it’s just in the air.”
“No, my name is just Charles Carter. Is your name Annabelle Bernhardt?” The trolley jerked to a stop, then picked up again. The cab man rang the trolley’s bells in double time.
“No.”
Carter said, “No?”
She shook her head. Her red hair rustled, flowed, calmed down again. “Well, Bernhardt is. Annabelle’s my middle name. But I could never perform under my first name, because it’s the name of someone famous, and I might get sued.”
She stopped here. Carter stared at her dumbfounded. He felt chills like someone was running a fingernail up the back of his neck. Even as he began to suspect the answer, he asked the question. “Your first name—”
“It’s Sarah.”
A
N
I
NQUIRY INTO THE
S
PIRIT
W
ORLD
1923
Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.
—HOWARD THURSTON
When it comes to the requirements for pleasing an audience, all the knowledge and instruction and apparatus in the world is worth less than one ounce of soul.
—OTTAWA KEYES
Once upon a time, Jack Griffin had been lean and hungry enough to slither down a chimney, and had in fact done so in 1901 on his first assignment, in Mochnacz Flats, Cleveland. It was a terrible area, home to the dregs of the melting pot, dangerous even in midday, and he went there alone, at midnight. His mission was to eavesdrop on a meeting held on the top floor of a boardinghouse on the corner of Broadway and Fleet.
He was a twenty-two-year-old Treasury agent, serving the first year of his Secret Service duties. So far, he had attended classes in counterfeiting and pension fraud (dull to him, deathly dull), the use of fisticuffs and armaments (far more gripping), and information gathering and interrogation. His scores in the last areas were so dizzying that Chief Wilkie had pulled him aside to ask if he would perhaps enjoy a special assignment.
Griffin had heard rumors of these assignments; they were why he had joined the Service in the first place. When Chief Wilkie’s hand fell on his shoulder, and the twinkling black eyes looked up into his, Griffin stood straight, as if ready to salute an unseen flag.
“Sport,” Wilkie creaked, for all green agents were “Sport” to him, “I have a plan. It ain’t in the budget yet. But one day, it will be. Especially if you do good.” Wilkie had a vision that only a fool or a politician, he was fond of saying, couldn’t see: the Secret Service would one day protect the Commander in Chief. For years, he’d lobbied Congress, which didn’t believe the threat of assassination was real. “High-and-mighty,
primrose-picking, harp-playing bastards on the hill,” Wilkie moaned, voice popping from the excitement.
There would be no pay for it, Wilkie explained to Griffin, and the duties would be hazardous and thankless. Griffin was to follow all leads, especially foreigners, and a very good lead was what brought him to Mochnacz Flats, where anarchists would gather in less than an hour.
His plan was to climb the fire escape, to sit outside the window, and listen carefully for incriminating schemes. But as he circled the building twice, he discovered there was no fire escape. He had never in his life seen a boardinghouse without a fire escape. He felt sorry for the people of Mochnacz Flats, but not sorry enough to excuse plots to overthrow the government. Then he saw it: a broken clothesline hanging off a spool anchored into the bricks. He tested it for strength. It held. Scaling two stories to the roof was as easy and quick as the ropes at the Treasury’s obstacle course.
But once on the roof, he realized the lack of a fire escape meant there was no place from which he could watch the anarchists’ meeting. The roof itself was almost featureless—very few places to hide in case someone came up the stairway: only the chimney, which he could crouch behind, and the hooded accessway to the stairs. Without a noise, Griffin stepped around the perimeter of the roof, looking out and over the edge. One top-floor room glowed, lights on. The windows were closed. Voices carried upward faintly, but he couldn’t hear much.
How could he listen to the meeting? He leaned back against the chimney, and chewed on the ends of his mustache. He ran his tongue across the back of his teeth, and counted off the ways to infiltrate a cell: disguise; paid informants; listening from a common wall; secretion within the room. All of these required preparation he no longer had time for. He butted the back of his head against the red bricks as if the proper ploy could be dislodged like the last bean in a frying pan.
The chimney. Low, squat, wide. Wider than his shoulders? Removing his jacket, he went in, feet first. His clothes would be ruined, and there were men at the Treasury, the sons of rich men, for whom that would be no consideration. Griffin could in no way afford a new pair of trousers, and yet that very thought propelled him into the chimney. Let it be a sacrifice.
Arms over his head, he slithered, he squirmed until his whole body was stuffed snugly like a rag into bottle. He had one moment of panic, but only one, the moment he lost sight of the roof. The walls were tight around his chest, and he couldn’t breathe deeply. He thought,
I wouldn’t want to breathe deeply here anyway.
The descent, once he created a system for it, required that he stretch out the points of his shoes, find a rough piece of mortar, hook into it, then, simultaneously, push down from above with his hands. Two, three inches at a time. When he was done with this assignment, he would be covered in soot, and his clothes would be tattered. He would report to Chief Wilkie like that, just to see what the old man said.
If his fellow agents asked what had happened, Griffin would dummy up. He knew how to play it. There were already a dozen stories circulating about Griffin and the first was true: when he was just four months old, he had become an orphan. He and his parents, crossing the usually tranquil Appleton Ridge in their wagon, had been caught in a freak summer storm. The wagon tumbled off the trail and into a ditch, instantly killing the horses, and pinning his parents underneath. The afternoon turned to evening, and the rains continued, bringing flash floods. When a search party arrived the next morning, they saw the wagon wheels turning as the muddy river rushed past. There was no immediate sign of survivors.
But they soon saw a sight the whole county would discuss for the next ten years: upstream, beyond the islands made by the drowned snouts and broken legs of the two geldings, baby Jack was suspended in the air, dirty and asleep, exhausted and safe.
They thought he had come to rest in the branches of a tree. It wasn’t until they waded to the middle of the river to rescue him that they saw he was held in his drowned mother’s hands.
Griffin, when joining the Service, said that he admired beyond all other qualities the following: sacrifice, tenacity, and the application of will against overwhelming odds. He was no stranger to performing the impossible. Tonight, he would climb down a chimney. Tomorrow, he would do something new: find counterfeit money secreted in a hive of bees, perhaps, or disarm a man with a bomb.
His eyes stung with dust and grit; he had kept them closed most of the way down, as the only sight was the increasingly distant opening to the evening sky. His hands ached where he’d cut them. To keep the pain away, he imagined bringing flowers to Lucy, Senator Hartley’s daughter—caught in the act, he would confront the Senator, who might chide the lovers at first, but be so impressed with Griffin’s tenacity, he would give their union his blessing, and then agree with Griffin’s sudden and inspired soliloquy: “By gum, you’re right, pension fraud and counterfeiting are important, but the Service should also be allowed to protect the President.”
Griffin’s feet found empty air: he was at the bottom of the chimney. The chamber belled out a little. He lowered himself into the firebox,
where he could crouch and catch his breath without being seen by the room’s occupants. His eyes, caked and clogged with soot, were almost useless; blinking made them worse. He willed them to fill with tears, to wash them out.
He could hear women, two of them, speaking in a foreign language, but haltingly, with long pauses, as if each found her companion terribly dull. Griffin chanced dipping his head down for a moment. Sitting in chairs with their backs to him were two stout women, hair up, in widow wear. They faced the door to the room. One of them talked glumly, showing off the backs of her hands.
Age spots,
Griffin thought.
She’s complaining.
Two informants had promised him there would be a meeting tonight. What kind of a meeting was this?
The women stopped talking. Footsteps in the hall, then three quick knocks on the door and, a heartbeat later, a fourth knock. A code! When the door opened, Griffin let his head hang down again. A group of dirty-looking men filled the hallway.
“Thank you for coming,” one woman said, in English, like it was a phrase she’d been forced to memorize. Then she added, “Go downstairs.”
Griffin couldn’t hear the response, but apparently there was one, for she continued.
“Leon said up here was maybe a bad thing. People listening here. Maybe. Something. So, in basement.” She shut the door, and addressed her companion. “
Schmucks
.”
Griffin noticed the Colt Peacemaker the other woman cradled in her lap. It was an old gun, and she looked ill trained in its use, but that was hardly a comfort. Griffin had to get to the basement, and a frightened woman with a gun was harder to predict than a trained killer.
Somewhere below him, the meeting of anarchists had begun. If he dropped to the floor, he would probably be shot before he said a word, and if not, the women undoubtedly had a way to send an alarm.
Up, he thought. Back up the chimney. He regarded the flue wearily, the way a logger who has just felled a mighty oak might size up the long mile to the sawmill.
The ascent was where Griffin, tugging with his hands, inching up, then securing footholds, pushing from there, repeating, began to tire. When the placket of his shirt gave way, the stones tore freely into the skin on his chest and back, and he no longer imagined Lucy Hartley enjoying his guitar serenades—he wondered if he would get to the roof alive. He started to hope the meeting would be over before he could find it.