Carter Beats the Devil (32 page)

“Oh, dear God . . .”

“She woulda had the baby in two months, about.”

A sickly feeling snaked through Carter’s whole body. He focused on his car, which was still filled with presents.

“That’s awful,” he whispered.

“It’s worser.” Borax wiped at his eyes. He started to say one thing, then said another: “That devil, he’s gone. I got some friends who know more than the coppers, and this man, he’s gone. Mexico. No one’s gonna make him pay.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I sent her right into his arms. I made her go.”

It could have ended there—Carter could have simply said “I’m sorry for your loss” and left, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked to his car, walked slowly, for he felt like he’d been drained of three quarts of blood. He asked Borax for help with bringing gifts into the house, for the girls. Borax held open the twenty-foot oak door, leaning against it as Carter ferried armfuls of gaily wrapped boxes inside. It felt wrong and right at the same time.

On the final trip, Carter put a hand on Borax’s shoulder. “I know you feel guilty. You shouldn’t.”

Borax moved his lips for a moment before he responded. “If I told you that about Sarah, would that make you feel better?”

Carter shook his head.

“What happened to my girl,” Borax continued, “what he did to her, it’s worse than you can imagine.”

Carter nodded. And he kept moving. He spent the day at Arbor Villa, and walked the grounds, feeding the birds, sensing mourning that had overtaken the estate, like the whole world had died on Black Christmas.

But life cannot so easily grind to a standstill. When Carter returned from an hour’s contemplation by the river in the late afternoon, he listened to the sounds of babies awaking, and he smelled bacon cooking, and was suddenly ravenous.

To draw a straight line, then, from one moment to the next: on New Year’s Eve, Borax put his thirty best chairs into his smaller ballroom, and before an audience of most of the unfortunate women who lived at Arbor Villa, Carter appeared in his evening clothes for the first time in over two years.

Each and every one of the women wore a black mourning dress, and some had dyed their bonnets and veils black to match. Carter had for so long depended on seeing delight or suspicion on the faces of his audience, he didn’t know where to look as he nervously took the low-rise of the stage. He began with pantomime—he had no idea what to say. He pulled scarves from the air, and they became doves, and some hats tilted back to see better. He heard several pleased gasps, and adapted: he would have to
listen
to his audience. How strange.

When he had exhausted all the silk tricks he could remember, he made a small bow, and measured the applause, the muffled sound of gloves patting each other. He opened his mouth to introduce his next trick. For a moment, a hollow, yearning moment, as he looked out at the sea of veils, he felt how his audience, each and every member, had survived the very worst things in the world. He wanted to say, “As some of you may know, my wife died.” His mouth trembled.

Then: a pack of cards was in his hand. He looked at it like spoiled fruit. Still, he said cheerfully, “This next trick requires two volunteers.” He couldn’t imagine why anyone in this room would want this frivolity. “Could I have two volunteers? Please?” The response caused him to take an involuntary step backward. Their hands went up. All of them. So many of them, two dozen or more white-gloved, slender hands, asking to be picked. And there was a sweet sound—their voices. He’d never
heard any of them speak before, but he could hear them now, “Me,” they called. “Pick me.”

He surveyed them, with a smile breaking across his face. And there was something breaking inside of him, too, something old and titanically heavy, as he said, “Wonderful! So many of you!”

Griffin rolled his head back, toward the ceiling. He massaged his neck muscles, which had long ago begun to cramp. The final five pages of clippings detailed Carter’s several world tours. There were updates from the United States, and China and India and Ceylon. There was nothing fabulous documented here, nothing on the scale of pirate invasions or being given islands or tragic deaths. Each performance, Carter said, “I shall give it my all tonight, as I do every night.”

There was a very small article dated July 20 of this year, promising two weeks of vaguely described delight at the Curran, and then a final piece dated July 25, “President Harding to Attend Carter the Great Performance of Magic and Mystery.”

Griffin read this last article carefully for clues to an assassination plot spoken as if in all innocence.

“Charles Carter, who couldn’t care less . . . no, Charles Carter, who, had he been brought up less well, would proclaim how uneventful it is that the beloved President will attend his show . . . no, how’s this—”

“Charlie,” Ledocq said, knowing he wouldn’t get another word in.

“Charles Carter retires,” Carter said blankly. Then he looked at Ledocq for a reaction.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.” He shrugged. “I’ve said before: Pull the trigger, be done with it. What do I care?”

This particular conversation was unraveling in an East Oakland warehouse on the evening of July 24, 1923, a night off from the run at the Curran. Weeks ago, they’d planned this evening as a break from performances—“No show on the evening of the 24th” was written on the schedule—because of an unusual fixation held by Ledocq.

Carter had grown to love his effects builder, not just because of their complementary vocations, nor what they’d so far suffered through
together, but because Ledocq was, like him, an odd kind of egg. Through some bizarre alchemy, Ledocq had been born into a family of moneylenders with a mission in life unheard of in their clan: he wanted to build things. Clocks. Watches. Adding machines. Automata. He took firsts in all his physical science classes, and he wanted so badly to construct his strange and complex objects he was prepared to leave home to do it, but he needn’t have bothered—no one in Belgium or its neighbors would hire a Jew to engineer anything.

Then he heard of Robert-Houdin and his mysterious toys, and he learned that since it involved deception, the world of magic was open to him. He moved to England to work for Maskelyne. “We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works,” he told Carter shortly after they met, “and that’s the clockworks, that’s what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That’s inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It’s that one percent mystery that’s the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that’s how you and I make our living.”

When he was building something, a spirit cabinet, a new way to spin cards, a production box, he could be awake all night, lecturing Carter while adding shellac to a surface with a fine bristle brush. He was quite the scholar on the appearances of magic in the Old Testament, and could discuss its resurgence in the Middle Ages, along with, for instance, early engineering in stone mills, but none of this philosophical stew was remotely as attractive to Ledocq as was—to the surprise of everyone who knew him—boxing.

As befit a European Jew, Ledocq cared not a fig for American sports. Baseball, football, and their ilk meant nothing to him. Yet he felt an intemperate excitement about boxing, one boxer in particular. Benny Leonard, “The Professor,” the twenty-seven-year-old Jew from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had been lightweight champion, but had lost his crown and tonight, July 24, he was fighting Lew Tendler to get it back.

Ledocq had shown more interest in planning to listen to the fight than he did the latest manifestation of the Carter extravaganza. He wanted to sit with Carter in the props warehouse, drinking beer and eating sandwiches, away from the rest of the world, and no one—meaning Mrs. Ledocq—would bother them. Sports had no appeal for Carter, but he enjoyed Ledocq’s enthusiasm, and so the evening began to mean something to him as well.

Thus it was with disappointment that Carter received a telephone call
informing him that President Harding would be attending the final show of the run. The
Examiner
was sending a reporter to meet with him the night of the fight to get his opinions on the nation’s great man. It was publicity, so he couldn’t avoid it.

When Carter arrived at the warehouse, it smelled of freshly hewn pine and a thrill of sawdust, as Ledocq was running boards through his lathe. Ledocq turned off his tools to hear Carter’s announcement that they would be visited by some genius of the cigar-stub-and-rye variety, which quickly devolved to Carter complaining, which ended up with Ledocq staring at him.

“I’m sorry,” Carter said, “I’m being petulant.”

“That you are.” Ledocq yawned. “Let me show you something.” He walked to this workbench, where his radio was waiting. It was a Crosley, and just weeks ago he and Carter had used it to listen to Benny Leonard’s fight with Kepler, the giant Swede.

“It’s your radio.”

“Yes. And next to it, what do you see there?”

Carter saw another radio, but unlike any one he’d seen before. Whereas the old Crosley was simply a metal plate with two dials and a crystal receiver—it looked at home with the lathe and Ledocq’s drill bits—this was an elegant, richly polished wooden box. It had
three
dials, all emerald green with brass trim. On the front, on a polished metal plate, it said “Crosley” in cursive. Carter felt mildly sorry for the old radio, which looked bald and utilitarian, a combustion engine’s innards side by side with a Durant touring car.

Ledocq opened the new Crosley up. Inside were vacuum tubes, which surprised Carter. “Tubes?”

“And the reception? One thousand times better. Not only that, it has separate speakers. Six months, they changed it like that.”

Carter whistled. “The world is changing.” And he saw it clearly enough—radios no longer belonged on a workbench but in the living room, beside the couch, like a vase of flowers or a phonograph.

“Guess what the third dial is for. Tuning,” he answered, beaming like he’d built it himself. “Many different stations, at once.”

“Well, then. What station is Mr. Benny Leonard on?”

“K-U-O,” Ledocq said, turning on his radio, and tuning it.

For a few minutes, their evening went as planned. They drew chairs up, and huddled together, talking while KUO played phonograph records. The ubiquitous and vastly annoying “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” followed by a faceless rhumba. A summer night, crickets outside, and
inside, two men, leaning in, listened to each other and the radio, under an orange light in a drafty warehouse decorated with old posters and long-disused scenery. It should have been peaceful for Carter. Ledocq explained how scientific Leonard’s style was, and Carter checked his watch, for Bernie was late.

A voice on the radio said, as if not quite sure he believed it himself, “To you fifty thousand persons now sitting in on the ether wave, the
Examiner
sends its greetings. This is your operator, Sparks Gaal. You’ve been listening to top music, truly top-flight music. And if you want to buy the music you’ve been listening to, go to Doeflinger’s Music Shop, on Jackson Street. Please buy your phonograph records from them.”

“Advertising on the radio waves. Who knew?”

Carter nodded. “It’s a good gimmick.”

“And now,” Sparks Gaal said, “The Benny Leonard–Lew Tendler fight. In progress.”

Both Ledocq and Carter groaned aloud as the fight, in its fourth round, suddenly reached them. Thrown into the mix like that, it was hard to understand what was going on, and the announcer was having trouble with his microphone, but Leonard was in the lead. Soon, they were swamped with the language of fistiana, with cheering swells and rapid-fire descriptions of a brute struggle between two cherubic assassins on cauliflower row, each landing pancake blows that knocked the gallery gods cuckoo.

At the end of the fifth round, Carter attacked his corned beef sandwich while Ledocq popped the top off another beer. “What sportsmen! Neither of them are ham-and-eggers,” Carter said, repeating a phrase he’d heard the first time three minutes before. He was quoting an adage about Leonard, “No one can even muss the man’s hair,” when Ledocq said, “Hello.”