Carter Beats the Devil (33 page)

Carter looked over his shoulder. Standing in the middle of the warehouse, under the main lights, was a woman. She had brunette, wavy hair in a permanent that must have cost at least four dollars. She wore a cloche hat, a tweed jacket and skirt, and a necktie. Her eyes were flicking from place to place, like she was memorizing her surroundings.

“Bernie,” she said. “Are you Carter?”

Carter swallowed twice, successfully clearing his throat the second time. Bernadette, he thought. “Hello,” he said. He wiped his hands on a towel. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Nice shack,” she said, squinting all around her. She shook his hand. She had extremely dramatic brown eyes, and so the flicking and squinting effects worked much to her advantage.

Carter swept his tongue around his mouth again, feeling one hundred thousand poppy seeds in his teeth. “Please do make yourself at home.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Bernie said. “I saw your show last night, so I have the skeleton. I just need a few nice quotes from the mage himself, and we’ll be set. How’s the fight?”

“Leonard’s winning,” Ledocq said.

“No one can muss his hair,” Carter added.

“Yeah, I heard you saying that.” She’d already looked somewhat amused, but now the volume of her delight increased. “So what do you think of Harding visiting you, Mr. Carter?”

“Well, it’s an honor,” Carter said, “to be visited.” He had more to say, but he was looking at his visitor. She was a modern girl, and he was thinking absently about suffrage, employment, freedom, hemlines, and how she had managed to find a gloss of lipstick that was actually hypnotic.

“Yes?” she prompted.

“Yes. Harding is a great man. It will be an honor to have him in my theatre,” Carter said. “I’ve played many heads of state, and Harding is of course one of them. It’s good.”

Mercifully, Bernie nodded. She turned on her heel and approached a wall, which was draped with Carter’s eight-sheet posters. Carter looked at Ledocq, who bugged out his eyes, and made small shoveling motions with his hands, which meant
Go
!

Carter approached slowly, preparing the way he would onstage. He had a checklist to tick through in unusual circumstances: if he felt too cold, the lanolin on his palms could cause the coins to stick; if a stage light crashed to the boards while he was throwing a knife, he would be startled, and perhaps miss his mark. For Carter, the shorthand question was simple
, How do I feel
? And the answer came back today as it had every single day for years,
I feel fine
.

So Carter, feeling fine, feeling charming even, approached Bernie, who was apparently captivated by the nearest poster. It showed a wraith-like Carter flying out of a noose, enraging a colorful crowd of imperial Chinese who’d plainly come to see him executed.

She read aloud, “Carter, condemned to death for witchcraft, cheats the gallows.” She chuckled.

“Yes,” Carter said, “that’s an effect we borrowed from a Goldin review. It’s, well, it’s not in the current show, but—”

“I like your show.”

“Thank you.”

“And I like your posters. They’re romantic.”

“Ah, yes—oh, they—excuse me?”

She smiled at him, and her eyes switched back and forth across his own, taking readings of voltage. “Romantic,” she repeated. “You know. Like from a bygone era.”

“Oh.” He felt a thud in his chest.

She pouted, “Ah, I’m only joshing you. I mean romantic as in the good kind of romantic.”

Relief. “Thank you.”

“You yourself, Carter, are you the romantic sort?”

He had no response. Her demeanor was entirely too brassy. She was obvious, and had but one pathway, the confrontational. Still, she could play a man like Carter all evening long as effectively as with a rod and reel. There were ways to extricate himself. What were they again?

“Well.” She pulled out a pad of paper. “We should get the quotes over with.”

“Yes, that would be heroic. Can I offer you, well, all we have is beer and sandwiches, but—”

“Another time.” Her tone had changed; Carter had failed a test, and now she was here to do a job. “So what’s your magic about?”

“Pardon?”

“Well, any schmoe can pull a rabbit out of a hat. I asked Thurston why he does it, and he said he does it for the kids. And Houdini says his job is to show the world that man can escape from any circumstance. So what’s your take on it?”

“Well.” Her pencil was ready for him to talk. His patter, however, was missing, and what he felt in its place, the truth, was inadequate. How could he say he’d become a magician because he felt abandoned once in a lonely house? How he’d returned to soothe abandoned women? How he’d fought off loneliness so many times by picking up a deck of cards that now it was simply rote? That if he weren’t a magician, he’d be nothing much at all? “It’s a way,” he murmured, “of turning back the darkness.”

“Excuse me?” Her face contorted. “Excuse me very much?”

“What I mean is, the world is an awful place, isn’t it? Magic makes it less awful for a moment or two.” He felt like he’d torn away a bandage, and confirmed that an old wound was indeed still there. “If I can shake the world off a man’s shoulders, I feel better.”

All over Bernie Simon’s features, lights were dimming and doors politely closing.

“I mean,” he rallied, “there’s joy and wonderment to be had. I love
to perform. It fights back the loneliness. It’s all I really know how to do anymore.”

“I see,” she said. There was no reason she should understand him. He had in his way cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted across a canyon, hoping she’d heard.

When she left, Carter waved good-bye.

“Well,” Carter said to Ledocq, smiling, “how was that?”

“
Quelle catastrophe
.”

“What?”

Ledocq pointed both palms out to Carter, and, at a loss, slapped them to his forehead. “I don’t even know where to begin. No, not true. You have mustard on your collar. It’s been there the whole time.”

“That’s hardly a disaster.”

“It’s highly symbolic,” Ledocq said.

“Just because I was too rusty to flirt with her—”

“Ah, Carter. You’re a lost young man.”

“I thought I was very honest.”

“Exactly.” Ledocq wrestled internally for a moment, and then turned off the fight, which was in the tenth round. “Tell me honestly, then, what do you need from this life?”

“What do I—”

“Need. Need,” he repeated, and blinked. Without the hissing excitement of the Leonard fight, the room seemed airless.

“I don’t know. Nothing? I’m content,” Carter said. “I’m fine, you know.”

“Ehhhh.” Ledocq shrugged, producing a silver dollar. “You’re content like the Kaiser. Watch this.” He held the coin by its edge, and then placed it in his palm. He squeezed his palm shut, made a pass over it, and opened his hand again. Carter stared. In Ledocq’s palm was a silver dollar.

“Have I missed something?”

“Yes.” Ledocq did it again. And a third time. Finally, Carter noticed: the date on the coin changed from 1921 to 1923.

“That’s a tedious sort of trick,” Carter sighed.

“That is true. But why?”

“If you do a trick that the audience doesn’t notice—”

“Ah! Yes! I’ve got you! An audience. You need an audience.”

“Oh, that sounds awful.”

“No, not much. We all need love. When you’re ready, you’ll find it somewhere else, like in a pretty girl.”

“I don’t need that.”

“Yes you do, I saw you a minute ago.”

“I need
Bernie
? Please!”

“No, you don’t need her, she’s
a nishtikeit,
a
pitsvinik,
who cares? But the truth is there’s a man under all that magic somewhere, Charlie, we’ll dig him out for sure.” Nodding like he’d come to the end of a geometric proof, Ledocq turned the radio back on. There was haze and static, a turbinelike whining, and then the sounds of a crowd, and announcers.

Carter listened long enough to learn that Leonard was still ahead. In fact, he became absorbed in the narrative of the fight, the rights and the lefts, the devastating uppercut that,
Oh,
Leonard dodged with intelligent footwork. And then a brutal assault by Leonard, who wasn’t known for his hard hitting, but he was peppering Tendler, just peppering him with blows, and then with a gasp, “Leonard has laid Tendler among the sweet peas!” and there was the sound of bells, and Ledocq cried, “Yesss!” for Leonard, at the end of fifteen rounds, was the only man standing.

“You know,” Carter said, as the cheering faded, hoping this would solve everything, “I
do
love magic. By itself, for its own sake.”

Ledocq nodded. “So. If you do a trick and no one notices, does that satisfy? Or is it like a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it?”

Carter sighed. His curse in life was to be attracted to people who understood him. With a sip of beer, he said, “I feel sorry for that tree.”

. . . Though the President is said to be fatigued, there will be no worries at the Curran Theatre on the night he pays his respects to favorite son Charles Carter. For Carter the Great promises effects to confound the imagination. Quothe he, “There’s joy and wonderment to be had.” The President himself may have spent weeks on his Voyage of Understanding, but Carter has been traveling for years. Even after all his world tours, Carter says, “I love to perform.” And if delights await our beloved Commander-in-Chief, the responsibility for such massive entertainment never for a moment affects the suave and bubbling mahatma. With a wink and a nod, he says, “If I can shake the world off a man’s shoulders, I feel better.”

—Bernie Simon, staff

By the time Griffin finished the holdings on Charles Carter, it was dinnertime. The workmen had come back, and their hammering and sawing sent out clouds of plaster dust. In the shafts of light that moved
across the library, it almost looked like it was snowing. Miss White had brought Griffin many glasses of water, and even though he had sucked on mints almost continuously, his new tooth still hurt.

When he was done, he closed the journals, and his own notes, and sat quietly for a moment. He thanked Miss White, returned the hard hat at the door of the library, and walked outside. The rising certainty of a hunch made younger agents excited. They ran too quickly to tell their superiors about half-baked theories. But the more Griffin had to go on, the calmer he got. Carter had stolen another magician’s show in vaudeville. He claimed to have consorted with the Japanese military. His wife had died in a mysterious accident. There was some kind of insurance scam in Indonesia, which he’d tried to cover up with a story about pirates. Griffin couldn’t quite figure out the island for retired animals, though using it for smuggling was a possibility. They didn’t have much liquor in that part of the world, but they did have opium. Maybe Carter ran dope.

Carter had performed for President Harding, who had died of causes that were being covered up. Shaking the world off a great man’s shoulders. What did Carter mean by that?

Griffin sat at dinner with his findings, unmoving except to flick his tongue against his tooth, which still tasted pungent, like metal. Carter couldn’t have acted alone. Someone had to have prompted him—the players behind the Veterans Bureau, maybe. Or Fall’s Springs. Or the Post Office. Or even the Duchess, simply tired of her husband’s affairs. And the Service had helped him, and wanted dirt on their new ally.

Or Carter was completely innocent, and they were looking for a patsy.

After he’d eaten everything on his plate, Griffin flipped through his notes. Harding had asked several people, “If you knew a secret, would you for the good of the country expose or bury it?” No matter how he looked at it, Griffin had trouble imagining a man like Carter wanting any kind of secret exposed.

When he returned to his hotel room, there was a message from Starling. Would he, Agent Griffin, accompany him on an interview tomorrow morning? He believed he had found Charles Carter in Oakland, and would like Griffin’s help in questioning him.

On Monday, August 6, 1923, Carter stood on the stairs of his Oakland property, his fingers playing of the tips of his Thai basil plants, and
his agile mind trying to keep up with Colonel Starling, whom he was beginning to find troublesome.