Carter Beats the Devil (35 page)

“James, I need to see you.”

“Tremendous. I picked up some trinkets for you in Europe, and, anyway, we have accounts to settle, with the tour over. Madame Zorah, for
instance—” And James said something about her salary demands, profit shares, interest on a note coming due. But Carter was paying less than strict attention. His eye was caught by the imps portrait again; he crouched before the package and, holding the receiver between his ear and shoulder, he tore away the brown wrapping paper. Finally, he interrupted his brother.

“Excuse me, James. You know my imps portrait?”

“The Otis? We paid eight and a half cents each for them, and you believe one of the imps is telling you to kill yourself. Is that the one?”

“I think one of the imps has started whispering to me about a new illusion.”

“I’m sure he is. One of Selbit’s?”

“I have a new illusion in mind. My own.”

Silence on the telephone, made rougher by the static and yawning of a call across the bay.

“I mean it. An original effect. Completely original.”

“Is this another version of those ‘She Never Died’ kinds—”

“No, no, and I think I need to apologize for making you listen to all of those. No, a good illusion. Finally.”

A pause. Then, carefully, “Come over and talk to me, Charlie. Tomorrow at eight. No, nine. Bring me panettone.”

They hung up. Carter looked again at the docking tower atop the Tribune building, and reached for a necktie that was draped around his telescope. At some point, his younger brother had started acting disturbingly like an older brother. He knotted the tie with one hand and used the other to dial his second telephone, the new one, with the separate base, and combination ear and mouthpiece. Most importantly, it had its own dial: no operator to connect you.

“Yes?”

“Is this the florist? This is Charles Carter.”

The voice on the other end—which in no way belonged to a florist—was chipper. “We’re looking into your order, Mr. Carter. We haven’t found the flowers you’re looking for.”

“Have you looked everywhere?”

“Every possible place in San Francisco and Alameda Counties. We actually completed the search this morning. No flowers by that name, anywhere. We’ve checked with all the florists.”

Carter wondered if the person he was looking for might go to a boardinghouse rather than a hotel. “What about nurseries?”

“Those, too. And Mr. Carter?”

“Yes.”

“You have esoteric tastes in flowers—no one else has been asking for that type.”

That was excellent news. “Thank you. Keep looking.”

. . .

Minutes after that phone call, Carter put some utensils, magazine clippings, and a light meal into a leather bag. He rode the trolley to the top of Piedmont Avenue. To his left was a stonecutter’s, and to the right, an actual florist, industries for the dead. Straight ahead was the Mountain View Cemetery.

Mountain View was large, green, and uncrowded, with sections set aside near the entrance, by the flatlands, for the poor, the Jews, the Chinese, the Portuguese. There were foothills thereafter, and pathways that snaked around reflecting pools and fountains. A quiet knoll planted with lilies, representing innocence, was reserved for the unbaptized babies, and a U-shaped valley for the Spaniards who wanted to be buried facing their ancestral home. There were rows of eucalyptus and sycamores placed so the wind would produce a soft rustling noise designed to aid contemplation.

Carter walked briskly, eyes to the pathway. Around him, resting on marble benches or stepping from tombstone to tombstone, or standing with eyes downcast in contemplation, were dozens of young men and women. Perhaps one in ten was actually acquainted with someone buried here. The rest had come to meet members of the opposite sex.

Carter had chosen Mountain View because it was out of the eye of people. That had changed with the war and the flu pandemic. There had been so many burials at Mountain View that services were scheduled around the clock, and families had to wait, sometimes for hours, sometimes in the pitch of night, for mourners from the previous funeral to disband. And because there were weekly trips to remember the war dead, young people learned that it was a way to meet without their parents’ chaperoning them. A boy laying flowers at a gravestone was obviously of high moral standing, and if he were honoring a hero, the girl could tell her family that he was a patriot.

Carter counted many young women sporting the same Sears, Roebuck catalogue silk mourning dress, with decorative belts, sashes, and tassels. When worn with a flirty hat and vamp button boots, the dress looked just playful enough to show that the mourner might receive company.

Carter tried to come to Mountain View at times when it was not a playing field for courtship. Though today was Monday, it was summer, and
so it was crowded with youth. He walked briskly to the top of the cemetery, the highest hill with the best view of the bay, the site of Millionaires Row, where the crypts and mausoleums were in the shape of Gothic cathedrals or Masons’ pyramids. Passing the monuments to Crocker and Ghiradelli, he took a shortcut through some underbrush and approached the monuments one row below, those of slightly lesser ostentation. He scrambled up an oak, and dropped from a low branch onto a tomb whose granite flagstones had one word spelled out in obsidian chips:
CARTER
.

From the front, it looked like a small Greek temple, with a pitched roof to show off a pediment. It had once held a marble frieze of the gods at rest, until vandals had taken it. One name, with space below it for another, was engraved in marble:
SARAH ANNABELLE CARTER
, 1888–1914.

The roof behind the facade was flat. Using the triangular form of the facade as a windbreak, a sunscreen, and a backrest, Carter cored an apple with a penknife, then wiped the blade with his handkerchief.

The sky overhead was a rich blue, and the apple was good, and when he had last been here, ten days ago, he had lain on his back and reported all the good stories from his tour. Mishaps. Close calls. Small pleasures. His parents’ travels. Of late they were in South America. The Carters all seemed attracted to that continent, though they never managed to visit each other there. In fact, Carter hadn’t seen his parents in several years, but he wasn’t thinking much about them today. Today, he was exhausted but still his mind was firing on all eight cylinders.

Piano recitals, gossip. “I have a letter here where Mom says . . .” or “James is very . . .” The animals—how was Baby feeling? Old. And Tug was a sweetheart, and he had recently discovered she liked apple butter, and that was a story he could tell. Instead, he said, with a thrill, like confessing a crime, “I need to tell you. I have an idea for an illusion.” He paused. He could feel her already granting him permission to pursue it.

He held his breath. Had it been that simple? Of course she would want him to do it. He could see how her eyes would close to slits as she barked, “Don’t be a dope, Charlie!”

Now he felt something so strange it took him several tries to identify it. Because it was neither pain nor melancholy he distrusted this new feeling, yet here it was, a feeling like he had been given tickets to the circus.

He pulled a cigar tube from his pocket. He tossed it skyward, catching it a moment later by its tip, and tossing it again. “So. If you knew of a great and terrible secret, would you, for the good of the country, expose it or bury it?”

Footsteps below him, and voices. He palmed the cigar tube, and peered over the edge of the monument. A young couple crouched in the shade of a willow. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was apparent: a lovers’ spat, fueled by the flask tucked into her Russian boot. The young woman’s hands went to the hips of her sailor dress, then one finger jabbed the air—she was clearly outraged. The young man hung his head, ran his hand through his gleaming hair, and said something, then the woman declared, with great feeling, “You can go cook a radish!”

She stomped between the tombstones with the indignation only an irate flirt could muster, and the young man leapt off the bench to pursue her. “But, baby! I was just fooling!” he cried.

Good luck to you,
Carter thought, easing down onto his slab. He loved that couple, and all couples like them who were walking down sweet roads everywhere. It was an avuncular sort of love, the sort a retired boxer would have for the ring.

If you knew of a secret, what would you do, Sarah Ann? She would milk it. Every drop. He had some ideas. First—

Another interruption: “You are my baby vamp.” The boy’s voice. Carter, flat on his crypt, looked down the road at the girl and her beau returning, arms around each other already, the girl accepting the flask as they took to the bench. Carter should have looked away then, but the boy was making love like a madman, falling to one knee to declare something iambic, and the girl’s eyes softened. They were drunk and in love. And then the boy, reaching a crescendo, showed the girl a ring. The girl threw her head back and screamed, “Billy! Baby! Yes!”

Carter sank back down behind the cornice. The true love of the drunk. He hadn’t really wanted to see that. In five years, a messy railway flat, father at the speakeasy, mother breaking table legs over the behinds of her crying children.

On the other hand, here he was, having a rational conversation with his dead wife. The couple was petting, so he looked up at the sky.

He drummed his fingers against the tube in a jazzy syncopation. The world was vast. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d known that but it seemed like a fresh idea: the world was vast, and he was equal to it. He had a wonderful secret in his hands and all he needed was unfettered time to focus.

When the chapel bell chimed five o’clock, he dropped from the crypt to the grass and joined the rest of the mourners in leaving the grounds, which were closing for the night.

He was not expecting, and did not notice, the two men who followed him.

As the sun began to set over Oakland, citizens in a metropolitan area two thousand miles east were lodging complaints for the third night in a row.

The skies of Marion, Ohio, were choked with ashes. The Marion
Star,
which President Harding had once owned, did not publish an account of events, but the
Press-Telegram,
its rival, noted that on the first night, Marion authorities professed to be baffled by homeowners’ charges that their houses, their lawns, and their automobiles were blanketed by cinders and ash. On the second night, the police responded with “no comment,” and the
Press-Telegram
itself stopped reporting the evenings’ “black rains.”

There was more. The skies over the warehouse district of Alexandria, Virginia, a time zone away, were also afflicted. Since it was not a residential neighborhood, the only complaints came from the wholesale produce market, where buyers backed their trucks into stalls before dawn, only to find, hours later, their fruits and vegetables smudged with ash.

A. J. Vaughn, who owned the market, took a few of his cronies to find the source of the pollution. It came from a four-story public storage facility with a six-story brick smokestack at its eastern end. Attempting to enter, Vaughn and his crowd were turned away by policemen who appeared from within the warehouse.

Vaughn knew when he was licked, and so he returned to his business, and erected a canvas awning to keep away the ashes, which continued in the predawn hours for just over a week.

Fires also burned at the White House. The Duchess had started burning Warren Harding’s personal papers. In the Oval Office were two steel filing cabinets, with a separate key for each drawer. On the first night, the Duchess burned all of the papers and all of the hanging file folders.

It was no longer her home, and yet the current residents made no moves to stop her. Calvin Coolidge was a silent man who took long naps and whose favorite phrase was “steady as she goes.” The rest of the White House took his lead.

So, while a pair of assistants tended the fireplace in the Lincoln Bedroom, the Duchess appeared with a full, locked suitcase. She made the others in the room turn their backs, then added items from the suitcase into the fire.

The next day, strong boxes stamped with U.S. Army stenciled letters stood in the center of the Oval Office. The Duchess sat on the floor with a glazed expression, sorting papers into two piles. Ultimately, she burned both of them. She allowed no one to see the papers or to aid her in destroying them.

The Duchess asked to have a pit dug in the garden behind the White House. Here she made an enormous bonfire of files and boxes and personal effects, and as it burned, she muttered to herself, “It’s all for the best, Wurr’n, it’s all for the best.”

She had to rest in her old dressing room frequently. A great many public men visited, to pay their respects: Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who expressed his condolences, staying until he managed to communicate to the Duchess his innocence of all charges relative to the leasing of the naval oil reserves. She told him, “that’s all behind us,” and with a sigh of what could only be construed as relief, he left. Next were Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair, oilmen, who wanted the Duchess to know—after paying their respects—they had only accidentally profited from certain deals her late husband had known about, that there was nothing scandalous involved, and she assured them that she knew this.