Carter Beats the Devil (30 page)
Carter put his hand to his chin. “The most beautiful—”
“Uh-uh. Nope.”
“The strongest, fastest, smartest . . .”
But Annabelle was shaking her head, her hat’s absurdly huge feather wiggling in his face, for each of these guesses. Finally, she said, as if it were obvious, “The most resourceful woman you ever met.”
“How was I supposed to guess that?”
“Because I found out you got company tonight. Kellar.”
“No! He hasn’t set foot out of Los Angeles for years.”
“He heard something about some nut that impressed him.” Annabelle took off her hat and handed it to Carter. “Capwell’s,” she said. “I figure I deserved something with a giant, foolish feather.”
Carter tickled his palm with the feather. He didn’t know whether to be happy or frightened. Kellar, a very cordial man, had made Thurston his successor, and since then had shown little interest in magic. Was the Phantom War Gun that good an illusion? “Are you going to tell me how you found out?”
Annabelle took her hat back. “You are so lucky you know me it’s frightening.”
There was a whistle from across the stage. Ledocq, pointing at his watch.
“My man has to get to temple. Can you stay?”
“Hey,” Annabelle said quietly. She brought her lips to Carter’s ear. “What if you drop that chump Toots Becker for tonight? She’s a tart if you ask me.”
“Are you proposing that I fire a sack of sand through a brick wall?”
“No, I’ll go for a ride.” She took two steps onto the stage and jumped up, pawing for the safety net. “But only once. Kellar’s here. It looks fun and I figure I wouldn’t mind doing it one time before I retire from this racket.”
“Are you sure?”
“Only if it’s safe.”
“Of course it’s safe.” Carter ushered her two steps back, to the wings.
“A lot of men would tell their wives that.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t trust me if I were you.” Carter whistled. “Ledocq! We need to change the bag.”
. . .
Annabelle was sixty-nine inches tall, and proportionately heavier than Toots Becker. There wasn’t quite time to make up a new bag, but weight was a more important variable than height, so another twenty-five pounds of ballast was added as Carter consulted with the script girl for revisions to the committee business.
“Places!” Carter was thinking about Harry Kellar, the magician’s magician. Houdini was better known to the outside world, but Kellar! Before he retired, all Kellar had going for him was fifty years of performing a seemingly endless array of tricks with either the simplest or most complex equipment, and an unmatched understanding of the audience’s need to be mystified.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, five men died in bringing this terrifying weapon to the United States for our edification.” The committee was inspecting the wall and finding it solid. Then they were signing the sheets of paper which Carter’s aides were pasting to the wall. “This remarkable young lady will follow a trajectory into history.” As the bag was lowered into the cannon, Carter considered the word
trajectory.
He was twenty-five years old, the youngest magician ever to tour the world with an evening-length show. But this illusion, the Phantom War Gun, when he used it tonight, could—
could
—catapult him into a new category entirely, one of the top three or four magicians in the world. At age twenty-five. “Hold!” he cried. Everyone onstage froze. “Positions! Is everyone exactly where they should be?” From all around, behind him, below him, in the seats of the house, calls of “clear!” from people he could or couldn’t see. The committee was holding the wall. The sack of sand was in the cannon. The cannon was aimed at the wall. “Committee—could you feel the wall vibrating?”
A chorus of
nos
in response. And then a final no from Ledocq, who had been drifting around the stage, looking for angles from which some audience member might be disappointed; at that moment, he’d been touching the wall. “It just feels like shaking from the cannon rolling forward.”
Carter checked his watch, then looked to the wings, where Annabelle was watching and smoking. The beauty of this illusion was that the person set into flight was passive, absolutely safe, needing only a child’s gymnastic skills to complete it unharmed. But there was the matter of size and weight—what if she missed the net entirely? Best to use the sack now, test carefully.
“Ready! Set!” He cleared his throat. “Action!” Then: “With a simple twist of these dials,” he declared, “this woman is reduced to a stream of electrons, neutrons, protons, and is beamed like X rays through solid matter. More power! More power!” Backstage, stagehands shook pieces of tin, and a violin bow was drawn across a saw to give the eerie sound of scientific equipment overloading. “Three!” The lights came down to bright spots on the cannon, the wall, the net. “Two!” In the orchestra, a snare drum rattled furiously. “One! Let the infernal device roar!”
A magnesium flare ignited, simulating a fuse, and, offstage, a shotgun blank round was fired simultaneously with the sack of sand being launched, thrown by the tension of retracting shock cords out of the mouth of the cannon, accelerating instantly to a velocity of 140 feet per second, tearing through the first sheet of paper, passing through the space now opened in the wall, then tearing through the second sheet of paper, landing almost soundlessly in the canvas netting, which gave in its frame to a surprising extent, bowing toward the floorboards. It worked, Carter thought, and What will Kellar think? and Will it work twice? all in the space of time it took for the force of the falling sack to rip one of the six support braces from the net’s frame. The metal brace—fist-shaped, eighteen pounds of steel—swung like a pendulum and on the upswing made an audible crack as it hit Annabelle squarely in the forehead.
Her head snapped back; her arms flew up and she fell backward to the stage.
“Annabelle!” For one second, Carter wasn’t quite worried except for the dumb wonder of how she could go onstage tonight. And then, a feeling like he’d never known: like the earth in motion under his heels, like he wasn’t walking but tripping. “No!” He ran to her, sickened and skidding, the stage was miles wide, and he fell by her side. Her skirts were twisted, arms and legs twisted. The broken brim of her hat was smashed under her head. There was no blood. Her eyes were closed. He hoped that the impact hadn’t been as bad as it looked, he hoped it was a trick, but when he touched her cheek he felt nauseous. He could feel her blood rushing up from primal, buried places, blood flooding places it wasn’t supposed to go, filling in pools and pressing up under her skin. It was swelling, darkening. He reached out, about to cradle her head. But if her neck were broken, was that the right thing to do? He was helpless. He was yelling “No!” and realized he’d been yelling it repeatedly. Then, because he didn’t know what to do, he yelled, “Help!”
The shout was feeble. Darkness. Blurs. He was on his knees, asking again and again, with diminishing voice, for help. Ledocq was by his side,
yelling for people to call a doctor at once. People moved around. They were above him, around him, he wasn’t sure where. Misery welled up in the pit of his throat—he could feel it taking him over as he hunched down, whispering into her ear, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
There were a half dozen articles about that terrible night. Griffin read them all, then got up from his chair and walked a full circuit of the empty reference room, sat back down and read them again. He wrote “June 1914, Annabelle (wife) dies.” It was hard to read between the lines, to suss out what had actually happened. Drumming his fingers on the hard hat that rested on the table before him, he sent his pen to the word
dies
and hesitated for several seconds before adding, just below it, “murdered?” and then he turned the page.
An insurance adjuster’s report. He began to read it.
In 1915, the world was treated to a sense of acceleration. Spools of electric, telegraph, and telephone wire were uncoiling faster than the eye could follow, and the chirps, dots, dashes, and shouted conversations were all inescapably about the War. Land, air, and ocean speed records were broken weekly and the most popular conjurer, suddenly, was Horace Goldin, who performed a new trick every minute he was onstage. When Carter returned to stage a scant two months after Sarah Annabelle’s funeral, he latched on to Goldin as an inspiration.
His family and Ledocq all asked him if he should be performing again so soon, and Carter said, “Yes.” Rather, his lungs made the intake of air, his larynx and vocal cords made the word on his exhalation. Meanwhile, his astral body floated in the clouds overhead, sending back occasional faint whispers of pain along the silver cord connected to his earthly body, which moved, and smiled, and conjured.
In May 1915, he and his entourage steamed from nine weeks of performances in Sydney, Australia, to a set of shows scheduled in Tokyo. In the Molucca Sea, the ship changed course to answer a distress call from a ship that turned out to be a perfectly functional decoy vessel. The crew was overpowered quickly, and the steamer boarded by the Indonesian
pirate Tulang. Unlike his mother, Madame Darah, Tulang stayed clear of political intrigue and hostage taking. His only interest was money.
After stripping the passengers and crew of their valuables, Tulang’s men began hauling cargo out of the hold. Initially excited by the tremendous weight and sturdy crating of some of the storage boxes—the pirates had learned that lately steamers carried weaponry or ammunition shown on the manifest as, for instance, farming equipment—they unloaded onto the deck all of the heavy devices and props used in Carter’s act. Prying open the boxes, they were disappointed to find that beyond some fine costumes they might give to their wives, there was little they could sell on the black market.
Carter, who was held on the forecastle at gunpoint, separate from everyone else, imagined his astral self suspended over the proceedings like a kite. It was blazingly hot, yet he felt dry and cool as he looked down at the deck from a great height. Here, in the shadow of the bridge, were some pirates going through his wardrobe, there, outside the mess, were other pirates pointing their rifles at the sailors and the members of his troupe, who were hugging themselves with fear. There was Ledocq, watching everything intently, hands fluttering whenever it looked like one of the devices he’d built might get damaged. Carter wasn’t worried; he was floating. The pirates used the bayonets on their brand-new rifles to root through the extravagant silks used by Miss Aurora, his young mind reader and spiritualist. While one pirate comically held up a nightgown to his own chest and wriggled his hips to make the others laugh, another, beefier man tested for hidden compartments, thumping a pole against an oak table Carter used for his levitation act.
When the last shipping box was emptied, Tulang had Carter brought to him for questioning. He knew Carter was some sort of performer who had played to a packed house for just over two months. Where were all the gross receipts?
Tulang, a small rust-colored man with hooded black eyes and long, fine black hair tied into a knot, spoke perfect English with an accent Carter couldn’t place; it was in fact Dutch.
“Where were you educated?” Carter asked.
Tulang’s right hand came up from his hip efficiently, slapping Carter across the face with exactly enough force to knock him down. Carter rose to one knee, feeling his face sting. He was back in his body again, unexpectedly, fetched on wings of pain. His palm, cool against his cheek, was shaking. Thirty men saw him, some of them his troupe, some sailors,
and Carter wondered if he now looked to them just a little smaller. He met Ledocq’s eye, and tried to wink, but couldn’t.
“Where are the gross receipts?” Tulang asked again.
From the deck, Carter wondered if he could stand or if Tulang would hit him again. “The receipts, net, were deposited in Sydney. The bank has an arrangement with my bank in San Francisco.” He turned his palms up, empty, as if he were showing there was nothing up his sleeve.
Tulang glared at Carter’s hands, then Carter’s face. Carter knew how to overcome an audience’s reluctance to be persuaded. But Tulang’s downward gaze was something far more probing and disbelieving than he’d experienced.
“Stand up.” Tulang called for his men to bring the “package” from belowdecks. A moment later, they brought up Aurora, who struggled against them as they pushed her up the stairs. Carter hadn’t counted on this. The sight of her in danger made him suddenly feel ill. She was a foolish girl, just twenty years old, given to offstage theatrics and endless complaints about the accommodations. At Ledocq’s urging, Carter had been planning to pay off her contract once the Tokyo performances were over.
Since she spent an undue amount of time reading romantic potboilers, she had dressed herself in knee pants, an oversized man’s shirt, and a tweed cap, as if she could fool the pirates into thinking she was a boy.
“Take your hands off me! Take your filthy hands off me, you brutes!” No one was touching Aurora; most of the pirates had never seen an American woman before, except in advertisements, and so they stood back, shielding their eyes against the sunlight as they stared at her, unsure how to treat her until Tulang gave them direction. Tulang, who’d grown up in a brothel, and who’d watched as a toddler while his mother disposed of hostages whose ransom wasn’t paid (her favorite method was to line them up tied to an anchor chain, which she pitched overboard so that one man after the other was yanked off the deck in a synchronous rhythm that had made little Tulang clap his hands), said that people were all basically the same. He would do what it took to make Carter give up his money.