Carter Beats the Devil (40 page)

“So you should have fun, too.”

Carter fished for a witty rebuttal until James finally continued:

“I really do appreciate entertainers and artists. It’s why Tom and I live here instead of Pacific Heights. There’s so much more vitality to be had over dinner with a mezzo-soprano than with a bank president. But honestly, why does this cloud follow you offstage and down the alley and all over the world? I know what happened with Sarah destroyed you. But that’s almost ten years now. I think you love the idea of being wounded like you’re St. Sebastian. Which is all well and good, because it keeps you from pursuing nice young blind girls.”

Carter steepled his fingers again. He was troubled that his younger, richer, unimpressed-by-his-famous-sibling brother had more insight into him than the reverse. The Klimt painting, trees half hidden in a golden and copper tunnel of leaves, was just visible out of the corner of his eye. He began to think of an illusion: a valuable painting is found cut out of its frame, slashed to ribbons and vandalized with rude graffiti. It has been ruined; restoration cannot fix it. Carter would appear, cover the frame with a cloth, and remove it, showing the painting miraculously restored. Applause. It could be done.

Carter cleared his throat. “I’m becoming, by the hour . . . by the minute, awake to possibility.”

“That’s wonderful. That’s the spirit.” James threw something at him, a key, which Carter caught without looking.

“What is this?”

“It’s a key.”

“One day, I will in fact murder you.”

“The Bayerische Motoren-Werke is a small company in Germany. They used to make aircraft engines, but the Treaty of Versailles prevents them from doing that anymore. Lovely man runs it, Max Friz, the jowly,
sour
Herr Max Friz. They’re trying desperately to export something, anything, and so they’ve built a motor vehicle. See if you can use it.”

“I won’t use it in the act.”

“Don’t. Whatever idea you say you have is probably better.”

“I’m not really ready to discuss it. It will cost money to develop, so I need—”

“I’m sorry, did I ask you what it was? I’m not interested in the slightest. Go to the docks, there’s a present waiting for you from Germany,
drive it around in the open air, and that should inspire you to come up with a new trick.”

“Okay. All right.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a spirit illusion,” he said as flatly as possible. “A new method. I think it can be used for mind reading, too, and transportations, and productions. Vanishes, of course. And if Ledocq can make all the mechanics of it work, it might even allow me to do close-up for the whole house.”

They sat, James flicking pastry crumbs into the fireplace. “So, after nine years, you have a new method that will revolutionize every type of magic there is.” He sounded like he was trying to talk his brother down off a high ledge.

“It has no impact on penetration or immolation illusions.”

“Charlie, did you come up with this out of nowhere? Was it trial and error? Or inspiration?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Annoyed, James asked, “So a man came up and handed you a piece of paper with the idea written on it?”

“Yes.” Carter snapped his fingers. The cigar tube was now between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He placed it on the table. It was white all over, except for a crest: a formal-looking eagle holding arrows in its talons.

James stared at it. “Please tell me that design isn’t the Presidential Seal.”

“President Harding gave me this on the night of the performance. It’s undoubtedly what the thugs are searching for.”

For a full fifteen seconds, James was silent. “Can’t they get their own cigars?” he asked weakly.

Carter pushed the cigar tube toward James.

“What’s inside?”

“Open it.”

James covered his eyes. “Why couldn’t we have one of those distant, spiteful relationships? Just so I’m firing on all sixes here—am I to understand the President gave you a magic trick worth murdering him for?”

“Open the cigar tube. It should explain everything.”

James sniffed at it, eyes troubled, as if it were a dubious piece of fish. He popped the top off the cigar tube and shook out its contents—eight
sheets of onionskin paper. They were covered in script, diagrams, and equations stacked with Greek letters. He looked at them for a moment. Then at his brother. Then back at the sheets, which he turned upside-down, and back upright. “I have absolutely no idea what this is.”

“To tell the truth, I need it explained, too.”

“So?”

“If you aren’t busy, we have an appointment this evening with a certain Belgian, Benny Leonard-loving Jew.”

CHAPTER 11

At dusk, the Carter brothers took James’s Ford roadster along a route that avoided hills (James was positive he would stall on them; Carter, eager at first to encourage him to take a chance, quickly remembered what a timid driver James was, and agreed to the most sober path). They took Bay Street (absolutely flat) through North Beach, then went up Van Ness (a moderate hill during which James refused to let his car, in Carter’s words, “see what she can do”), and then straight along Ellis (flat again) until they hit the Jewish section of town, which this pleasant evening, as the electric streetlights were coming on with audible pops, seemed to be populated entirely by families ambling from one of many kosher restaurants to one of many soda fountains.

Mr. and Mrs. Ledocq’s house sat on a narrow slice of property on Byington, a block-long tree-lined street just off Fillmore. It was a railroad-style three-story museum of reconstructed automatons, old newspapers in four languages, and a dozen rooms that were half-workshop, half-living quarters, custody of which Ledocq had wrestled from his wife, who valiantly tried to keep things clean. The backyard fared little better, home to a kiln, a crucible furnace, an annealing oven, and three or four incomplete sets of bocce balls that made interesting dents in the garden of weeds. Ledocq was the master of the “It’s Around Here Somewhere” school of mechanical engineering. Carter had once found a set of screwdrivers in the icebox.

This evening, Carter sipped iced tea and looked at the mementos of their tours Ledocq had tacked or taped to his walls: postcards and photographs, banners and reviews clipped from
Billboard
. He looked at the testimonials to the Phantom War Gun, the rights to which they had
licensed to other magicians. Nine years had passed, but seeing its name still made him turn away.

Carter, Ledocq, and a fidgeting James stood in a playroom completely taken over by miles of track for model trains that ran from floor to ceiling. A half-dozen trains at a time could hustle through tiny alpine villages and industrial towns with real smokestacks.

“The President asked me what I would do if I knew of a secret, I told him that I was a magician, and I’d taken a vow, but he wasn’t impressed by that. He wanted to
do
something about his secret.” Carter stirred his tea so the lemon wedge danced around. “Eventually, we settled on how he would participate in the show, and then he returned to the topic. What would I do if I knew of a terrible secret?”

Ledocq squinted. “Why did he keep asking this?”

“That’s exactly what I asked,” James murmured. He was examining a silver O-gauge sleeper car Ledocq had populated with hand-painted wooden passengers.

“He was desperate. He thought someone was going to be murdered.”

“And then he died,” James added.

“What was his problem, Charlie? Did he tell you?” Ledocq took the train car from James and put it on the tracks.

“He listed off a great many scandals, something to do with the Post Office, and oil leases, and so forth, I rather stopped paying attention. He was a nice man, but it was like being cornered by a drunk in a barroom. They all sounded the same to me—stealing public money, profiting on secret information, the usual business. And they didn’t much bother him, it was just boys being boys, except for one. A scientist had invented something that Harding thought was quite wonderful, and had brought it to the White House at one of those meet-the-public Sundays Harding was so fond of.”

“Oh,” Ledocq said with disappointment. “That’s it? Another mad scientist.”

“No—a nice scientist. Harding said he was very sweet.”

“So he was a sweet mad scientist.”

“That’s just what I said. We’re on the same pathway here,” James added. “Poor Harding was never the most acute judge of anything. Have you done anything new, Ledocq?”

“Have you seen the mirror tunnel?” When James shook his head, Ledocq flicked on his transformer. “Send a train right here,” he pointed to a trestle suspended between two snowcapped peaks about eight feet off the floor. James settled in at the controls. Carter watched a train leave the
yard, heading for the mountains. He was nonplussed at how Ledocq was taking this, for it was his way to concentrate on the matter at hand by looking everywhere else.

When the train had traveled for a while, Carter added, “Harding went to his friends and told them about the invention and the sweet man who had the idea, looking for investors, and that’s where the scandal comes in.”

“I’ve heard about this kind of thing,” Ledocq said, eyes still on the trains. “They were going to buy out his patent and sit on it?”

“That would be a normal scandal,” Carter said. “Harding told me they were going to steal his idea and then kill the inventor.”

Ledocq squinted at Carter. “Kill the inventor?” he frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean killing the inventor.”

Ledocq fumbled with his glasses, and wiped them on his shirt. “Killing? As government policy? That can’t be so.”

“I’d like to tell Harding that, but he seems to have died.”

James asked, “Are you saying you think he was murdered, too?”

Carter watched the train. “He was ill from bad fish, that much I know. But have you ever looked his wife in the eye?”

Ledocq took off his glasses and polished them on his shirttails. “
Degoutant
. This is exactly why I voted for Cox.”

“Harding said the invention was so clever it seemed like a magic trick, and he begged me to hear about it. So I did. From what I could understand, it seems highly sophisticated, quite raw, but it has possibilities. With some imagination, we could refine and use it onstage, if we could get exclusive licensing rights. What do you think?”

Ledocq said, “It’s hard to evaluate without a technical—”

“Here you go.” Carter extended the cigar tube toward him.

Ledocq stared at the tube, then at Carter. “You can’t just let an old man play with his trains? Oh, boy.” He took the tube from Carter and shook out the pages of onionskin, shiny and slippery. James switched the tracks in several places, and the train continued its climb through alpine meadows where pigtailed maidens were milking wooden cows.

“Where is that magnifying glass?” Ledocq approached his workbench.

“Where it’s always been,” Carter observed.

“I knew that.” It was hinged; Ledocq pulled on it so it extended and its lightbulb flickered to life. “What kind of tumult do we have here, my friends?” The first page was a letter, handwritten. Ledocq read its opening aloud. “‘Dear Mr. President: As we discussed, my name is Philo Farnsworth. I have invented a device . . .’ blah blah blah. Everyone has an
invention.” He squinted at the next page. He turned it upside down, then back up. It was a diagram covered in notations. The remaining pages were also diagrams and figures, showing parts of a device at rest and in use. Ledocq thumbed through them slowly, his face betraying little but concentration.

Carter said, “This is the only place this is written down.”

“Excuse me?” Ledocq asked.

“The inventor was afraid of writing it down.”

“So why did he give it to a schnook like Harding?”

“Read the letter.”

Ledocq recited, “‘Who can you trust if you can’t trust the President of the United States?’” He shook his head. “Oh boy. Oh boy. Now there’s a judge of character. So Harding sees magic, you’re a magician, he gives you this.” Ledocq nodded.

James, guiding the train cars, was chewing on a thought. “Has anyone else noticed how things have changed recently? Since the war, perhaps. Every time we come back from abroad, I try to read the atmosphere, and it’s gotten very odd.” Ledocq continued reading, and Carter stood, stretching his legs. It was warm and misty; the curtains were drawn, and he knew enough not to pull them back, for he would be outlined very well, and he thought,
Yes, things have changed
. So he leaned against one of Ledocq’s workbenches—this one for glass-blowing—and with his fingernails he tapped out a metallic
ting-ting-ting
melody on the various pontils, gathering irons, pucellas, jacks, and tongs.

“What I mean is this,” James continued. “You read the newspapers and maybe it began with mustard gas, you know? No one could believe anyone would do something so awful, and then there were more terrible gasses unleashed every day. Ever since, it’s become a daily contest for people to behave terribly, and then other people say, ‘Ah, yes, I knew that would happen.’ There’s a jaded feeling in the world, so why not kill the President? Why not kill an inventor?”

“But that’s not all of it,” Carter said. “People are also wonderfully naive.”

“Maybe in 1910 they were naive,” James replied.

“When was the last time someone at a dinner party sat you and Tom across from two delightful young ladies?”

James sighed. “Point taken. But I stick by what I said, too. I suppose it’s a paradox.”

“It’s your national character,” Ledocq said, putting the papers down for a moment.

“Ours?” Carter asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Belgians believe in idling and progress, no more, no less. But Americans, everyone here, they all say, ‘I seen everything, you can’t pull one on me, I’m a real wise guy,’ and then two minutes later, we show them a chess-playing automaton, and they lose every ounce of savoir faire. ‘Hey, that automaton is marvelous, what’s that?’ and the truth is, they
really
don’t want to know how it works.” He flattened out the papers again. “The naive and the knowing, that’s our audience, boys, that’s how we make a living.”