Carter Beats the Devil (34 page)

The Colonel asked, “The photograph in your drawing room, is that your wife?”

“She was my wife. I’m a widower.” He said this in his stage voice, calmly.

“I’m sorry,” Starling responded.

While Starling massaged a mint leaf and brought his fingertips to his nose, Carter weighed another question, and found it innocuous enough. “Was the President in trouble?”

“That depends,” Starling said. “Is there anything else I should know?”

Carter shrugged. “I had but five minutes with the President. Being a magician is an odd thing. I’ve met presidents, kings, prime ministers, and a few despots. Most of them want to know how I do my tricks, or to show me a card trick they learned as a child, and I have to smile and say, ‘Oh, how nice.’ Still, it’s not a bad profession if you can get away from all the bickering among your peers about who created what illusion.” Carter ended here, satisfied that he’d in no way answered the question.

But Starling’s eyes changed. Carter realized he’d somehow stepped in a bear trap, and Starling was walking around him, looking for the best place to amputate his leg. “I see. You put on a thrilling show yourself, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, I’m just an admirer here, and I hope this question isn’t rude, but have I seen some of those tricks before?”

“Those effects? Not the way I do them, no.”

“So you yourself are the creator of all of those tricks. Because Thurston—I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Thurston—does that trick with the ropes as well. Doesn’t he? And I saw Goldin several years ago, and he had two Hindu yoga men. Is there any part of your act—”

“No, there isn’t,” Carter replied briskly. “The fact of the matter is, Colonel Starling, there are few illusions that are truly original. It’s a matter of presentation.” He hoped that might stop this conversation; when Starling only stared in response, Carter continued, “In other words, I didn’t invent sugar or flour, but I bake a mean apple pie.”

“So then you’re just as respected in the business for the quality of your presentation as the magicians who actually
create
illusions,” Starling said.

Carter suddenly felt like Starling had knowingly drilled into a live
nerve. He wanted to shout at him, “Yes, it’s true, I’m not that well respected the way I once was, I’m a fraud,” but in the heartbeat it took him to recover, he folded his arms, and smiled. He said, “At some point this stopped being about President Harding.”

“My fault. I’m intrigued by all forms of misdirection.” Starling reached into his vest pocket, then withdrew his business card, which he looked at for a moment before handing it to Carter. “If you think of anything else—”

“I’ll call you.”

Starling joined Griffin. They walked several steps before Starling turned around. “Oh, Mr. Carter?”

“Yes?” Carter felt a wave of exhaustion, as if the finishing line of a long race had just been yanked into the distance.

“Did the President say anything about a secret?”

“A secret? What sort of secret?”

“A few people told us that in his last weeks, the late President asked them . . .” Starling opened a notepad, and read, “‘What would you do if you knew an awful secret?’”

“How dramatic. What on earth could that be?” He said this as great fatigue welled up on him, and Starling faced him with one of those icy stares. This time, Carter almost folded. He was that tired.

But his facade was apparently composed enough, for Starling simply said, “We’ll find out. Thank you.” Then he and his silent compatriot Griffin left Carter alone.

CHAPTER 6

For several seconds after agents Griffin and Starling left him, Charles Carter stood in his dressing gown, his forehead tilting against the door, one hand on the doorknob, the other hand thrown lazily over his head so that his elbow pointed toward the high beams of the ceiling.

Once he had assured himself there was no possible reason for anyone to approach his door again, he let his knees give way until he was more or less sitting on the floor with his legs bent at the knee. “Thank God that’s finally over,” he said to no one in particular. He had gotten ten hours of sleep in the last three days, so he was prepared to stay on the floor as long as was necessary.

And yet he was now face to face with—himself. Stacked against a
coatrack, peeking out of half-torn-away brown paper was a bundle of fifty window cards. It was a design that lacked originality: the standard bust portrait, three-quarter profile, a turbaned-and-tuxedoed Charles Carter with imps whispering in his ears. Ever since Kellar, all magicians had adopted this poster—it told audiences, “Come see a man to whom the Devil himself whispers advice.” Every foreign land knew the imps meant the performer was a magician, the way three balls aloft meant a pawnshop.

To Carter, the imps meant something different. They were whispering, “You can sit here, Charles Carter, and never move again until your heart stops beating.”

To an exhausted man resting on the walnut-stained floor of his Oakland pied-à-terre, this suggestion, the voice of the devil himself, was very attractive. However, Carter straightened himself and walked forcefully to the kitchen and did dishes. As the sink filled up, he said, “Ha!” as though the effort were the same as conquering the Alps. He was hopeless at all domestic chores, from beating the rugs to dusting his shelves, and when Bishop was gone, Carter couldn’t leave a drinking glass spotless for one million dollars in gold.

Nonetheless, he now worked assiduously, making plans for many activities he would perform today and tomorrow and the next.

He washed out his orange-juice glass, telling himself, “Mr. Carter, your presentation of Goldin’s trick was quite remarkable.” He imagined he was scrubbing clean a human skull and hiding it beneath the dishwater. Should anyone ask again, he would say, “I have performed many illusions, gentlemen, which are unique and compelling. And original.”

But when, Carter the Great, did you last perform such an illusion?

Recently.

And what was it?

His eyes flared. In frustration, he actually said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” Regardless of Ledocq’s advice about trees falling in the forest, Carter had performed a trick for which there had been no audience. This made Starling’s needling that much worse. Not only were his recent stage illusions stale, the sole and singular
good
one had occurred after the show, offstage, as if it had never happened, and no one could ever know it had happened at all.

His internal interrogator, which knew how to ask questions more effectively than any Secret Service agent ever would, continued:
Now then—when was the last time you performed a completely original illusion, an illusion for which there was an audience, not just a tree falling in the forest, but an advancement of your vocation?

Under the water, two hands that were extremely skillful at magic—not dishes—slowed. He said, quietly, “1914.” He did not say the rest aloud: The Phantom War Gun.

He dried his hands, realizing the rack beside him was now filled with wet dishes.

He pulled a leather-bound ledger from the shelf. Here was red ink; there was black ink. He had performed in seventy-two theatres on this last tour, in eighteen countries, and had seen beautiful and exotic lands.

And his net profits were off. Again.

His two weeks at the Curran had been marvelous, but then again he was San Francisco’s native son. Ending his tour here was a present he’d given himself to help forget that, increasingly, universally, he was playing to houses in which more and more seats were empty.

Thurston was probably doing well, still, and Houdini was of course beyond any sort of decline. Nicola and Goldin debuted so many new illusions with each tour that they, too, were probably turning profits. But except for that short list, the magic business was getting harder every year. For instance, Grover George,
George el diablo,
clearly knew when he was beaten. These days, he toured overseas, in Andean terrains and remote villages that had never seen the enemy: motion pictures.

So, Mr. Charles Carter,
he continued silently,
have you even tried to come up with new illusions?

But of course. And based on real life, too, which is always the best kind, he answered glibly, as if he could fool himself.

Shortly after Black Christmas, a phrase had begun to appear, usually—but not always—in a feminine hand, all over Borax’s estate. It had been written on trees, on the walls of cottages, in the dust beside the pigs’ feeding pens. It was something many of the unfortunate women wrote,
She Never Died.
It was a quiet cry, a reference to the nameless unfortunate woman murdered on Christmas Day, 1917.
She Never Died
was a way to say her life had not been in vain. Women tended to walk to the edges of the property and write it when they felt depressed.

But just before the election of 1920, the saying began to show up all over Oakland buildings and train yards, even once or twice in San Francisco, sometimes with a second phrase below it,
Don’t waste our suffrage.
The phrase had grown into a feminist declaration that as long as one woman was still alive, then that unknown woman was indeed still alive. The
Tribune
had commented on it in the same breath as their condemnation of the Reds, the Drys, and other forces eroding the American way of life. “Now that women have the vote, can they be trusted to use it?”

The phrase resonated, too, with Carter. He opened a second leather-lined volume, this one thick with pen-and-ink drawings, ideas for new effects. Here, in 1919, he’d begun to design an effect called She Never Died. He looked at it closely, as he hardly remembered it. He would make an assistant vanish, and when he tried to bring her back, everything else on the stage would, with each pass that he made, vanish, too. Finally, he himself would vanish. The end.

He stared at this illusion dumbly, confirming that he’d thought enough of it to record it. How exactly was that an exemplar of She Never Died? He looked at another illusion of the same title: a woman tears scarves in halves, then in quarters, and then Carter passes a cloth over her. She disappears and the scarves are shredded into tatters. The end. Another one: he calls up the spirits of the dead and they confirm that everything is just fine on the other side of the spectral veil. Then they come back to life. The end.

As he flipped through illusion after illusion, all of them equally depressed, incomplete, and joyless, and perhaps half of them called She Never Died, he finally admitted to himself something he had long denied: though he liked the name of the illusion, he couldn’t trick himself into feeling the hope it expressed.

He turned to a recent page. “If I were to perform a truly original trick,” he had written, “it should be a metaphysical one.” He had divided the page into thirds: on the uppermost tier, he had drawn himself as a stick figure in a turban, with a wand, and written beside it, “For my next trick, I shall, without benefit of wires or mirrors, change my mood from sour to genuinely happy.” In the middle tier, he had sketched the stick figure now stiff with concentration, beads of sweat spraying off of its body. And at the bottom of the page, there was the figure, sour mood intact, now being pelted with rotten vegetables.

When had he drawn this monstrosity? It was undated. It seemed to have appeared on its own, as if elves had done the work.

He thought,
I feel fine.

He stood in his study, poring over his sketchbook of ridiculous ideas for illusions, feeling
fine,
and also feeling a churning dissatisfaction. It wasn’t as if ideas for tremendous illusions simply dropped out of the sky, he reasoned.

Except, perhaps, now.

He looked out the bay window; the wind blew on his trellises so that green leaves and jasmine flowers shook wildly. In his study was a
telescope, an Alvin Clark nautical model. It was fixed in place with verdigris, for Carter was keeping it trained on the Tribune building in downtown Oakland. During the war, in a burst of optimism, the
Tribune
had built a sixty-foot mooring mast in case dirigibles should dock there. It was quite a dream, which the newspaper had presented in a spectacularly illustrated special edition that showed off the monorails and transbay bridges and tunnels and trains and subways that the future held. Furthermore, the forward-looking newspaper had already rented rooftop space all over town, where it painted advertisements that only sky-bound passengers of the future would ever see.

The plan worked as well as most Oakland civic dreams and, to date, the mast was unused, and the advertisements mostly forgotten. But three times a day, Carter looked southward, to the top of the Tribune building, in case a zeppelin, the best of all possible worlds, had arrived in his adopted city. But typically, there was just a crow, if that.

He glanced again through the telescope. The naked mast; that was all he saw. He could stand right here at his desk and watch that mast for a very long time. Someday they would find vines wrapped around his skeleton. “Him?” they would ask, “wasn’t he Carter, the magician who at one time performed original tricks?”

Then he picked up the telephone. The black candlestick felt clumsy in his hand.

A moment later, a sprightly voice answered. “James Carter.”

“Is this Carter the Great’s little brother?”

“Charlie! Say, this doesn’t sound like a ship-to-shore call.”

“I performed a small substitution illusion. James—”

“Where are you?”

“Oakland.”

“Tom and I came back from four months in Europe, ready to see you, and we thought you were hightailing it for Greece.”

“I know. James, look out your front window. Is there anyone standing on the street, trying like a saint to look inconspicuous?”

A moment passed. “There’s a pious young man looking right at my window. Shall I ask him in for coffee?”

“He’s from the Secret Service, and hasn’t gotten the all clear yet.”

“What’s all this in the papers about you and the President?”