Carter Beats the Devil (51 page)

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said in a monotone, “would you like to try our tetraethyl-leaded Blue Stripe gasoline, with a higher specific gravity than any other premium brand?”

“Yes,” said the well-groomed man behind the wheel. Jimmy filled the tank, checked the oil, and wiped the windows of the truck, remembering to smile cheerfully at each and every passenger even though his friends were getting to see the motorcycle. Keeping one eye on the tank, he also watched the aviation fuel pump, from which joy and laughter seemed to radiate.

“Jeez, this is the worst day of my life,” he moaned. He tabulated the bill on his chit of yellow paper and said to the driver, “Forty cents.”

The driver handed him a dollar, eyes focused elsewhere. Jimmy followed his gaze.

“Yeah,” he shook his head, making change, “that’s some swell motorcycle.”

“Right, son.”

Son? The driver and all his passengers weren’t that much older than he was. And why were four men wearing Brooks Brothers suits all riding in a bread truck, anyway?

Then he heard a hypnotic sound—the BMW starting up. “Wow,” he said. Carter rode in a wide circle around the whole station, waving at the boys, who turned with him as if he were magnetic north, and then he merged into the Lake Shore traffic; seconds later, the bread truck followed.

. . .

One of James’s messengers slumped on the staircase to Carter’s Hillgirt Circle apartment. Though he’d been prepared for an exciting afternoon—delivering an urgent message to a magician!—he had long ago gotten bored enough to take out his Jew’s harp and lean against the masonry.

His afternoon had almost become interesting to a degree he wouldn’t have liked, as Samuelson and Stutz had debated whether to detain him and replace him with Hollis, who would deliver a bogus message to Carter—“Meet me at the docks, urgent, James.” Though Stutz found excellent reasons for replacing the boy—several times he mentioned, as if making a rhetorically perfect argument, that he had enough chloroform—Samuelson stuck to his guns: even proposing a kidnapping was illegal, and his vision of the Service did
not
include illegal activities. He didn’t add the more accurate dictum that suggestions that were not his own stood little chance of adoption.

The plan was to intercept the magician at his apartment garage, but when Carter left the gasoline station, he turned right on Lake Shore—he
should
have turned left—and the men followed him as he rode to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, then right on Harrison, and into Lakeside Park, then out on Grand again, in other words making a complete loop around the lake.

“He’s onto us,” Stutz growled. “He’s trying to shake us,” later adding, “He’s making monkeys out of us,” and so forth until Samuelson ordered him to be quiet.

On their third circuit around the lake, when conversation had
otherwise fallen into a confused rut, Hollis made a valuable observation: if they parked the truck at the eastern end of Lakeside Park, they could watch Carter’s entire route without having to follow him and risk detection.

“He’ll get away,” said Stutz, and Samuelson, who’d been expecting Stutz to make that prediction, set the parking brake, folded his arms, and announced it was better not to be toyed with. If Carter made a break for it, they’d catch him somehow.

For a full fifteen minutes, the men watched Carter whiz around the lake, and when the air was just right, they could hear the chuffing sound of his motor accelerating. They discussed whether he was in fact making fools of them, with emphasis placed (by Samuelson) that since he was a magician, he was likely up to
something
. “Luckily, we have all of
that
,” he said, pointing a thumb toward the back of the truck, where O’Brien, the final member of their team, dozed among the sundry equipment they had rounded up that morning from the Treasury, the Postal Authority, and other San Francisco federal offices.

Just as it seemed Carter could ride in circles forever, he broke the pattern: entering the park and passing the truck, as he had a dozen times before, he rounded the bend in front of them and slowed. He disappeared behind a clutch of oak trees.

A moment later, he was in plain sight again. On a rise behind a hillock planted with daffodils, he had turned and was puttering back toward them. He put the bike on its stand and killed the engine.

“He sees us,” said Samuelson, for Carter was now walking directly toward the truck.

“No, hold on,” Stutz waved that suggestion away, “we might have a shot here.”

“Well, aren’t you the blankety-blank optimist,” Samuelson snapped, and Stutz shrugged his narrow shoulders.

A word about Agent Stutz: he owned a sap and had among his belongings wherever he traveled a small bottle of chloroform, as well as a Skinner mask, for in all of the lectures he’d attended in the academy, the only one that had appealed to him was “abduction procedure.” He frequented newsstands to purchase the weekly adventures of the Yarrow Twins, one of whom was always “going under the cloth” after gloved hands darted from behind Egyptian pilasters. That he could actually get to use his anesthetic in the course of duty thrilled him in ways he could hardly contain, and so Carter’s slow approach—it was really sort of an amble—toward their van seemed like a gift from heaven that he wasn’t quite willing to dismiss.

Carter had turned, and was now on the dirt pathway that ringed the
lake. He stood with one arm against a eucalyptus tree, leaning into it, as if he were holding it up, and he regarded a pair of geese that waddled past him.

“What’s he doing?” Hollis jockeyed between his peers. “His mouth is moving.”

“Is he singing?” A frowning Stutz rolled the window down, listened, and then whispered, “He’s singing.”

Carter was indeed singing, for he was overcome with how he felt for Miss Phoebe Kyle, and he was using his voice—so well trained for speaking in large theatres—to attempt the popular ballad, “Oh That Brown-Eyed Girl.” It was a difficult song for even the most skilled singer, and Carter, no matter how sweet he might have been on Phoebe, had an awful relationship with melody.

Ahead was the bench where they’d met, and longing, an
ache
, had brought him here again. How she wouldn’t ask his help. How she’d said “the suave and sad mahatma.” He remembered a song he’d heard in his vaudeville days, but never since, “Mysterious Melanie,” which had high praise for the curve of a woman’s throat, an area he’d not previously considered fascinating.

The humidity was increasing, the sky thickening with the Midwestern-style summer storm clouds that never seemed to trouble San Francisco. Carter welcomed the idea of warm rain. He sat on the bench, which looked out over the eastern arm of Lake Merritt, a hundred feet of dirty water, ducks swimming through tendrils of widgeon grass, and as he looked into the ripples, what he saw with anxious clarity was Phoebe Kyle, leaning forward, and how she had shown off her collarbone. What an amazing display of light and shadow gathered in that hollow.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?” Carter looked over his right shoulder. His head exploded in pain as something collided against it.

“O’Brien!”

It was a voice to his left this time. Carter lurched up and backward by instinct, trying to avoid whatever had hit him, his hands at his head, eyes tearing with pain. Something large stepped up and clouted him in the head a second time, then punched him in the stomach, dropping him as neatly as clipping the head off a rose.

“Stop it, O’Brien, stop it!” A third voice.

“What?”

He was on all fours. Someone rushed to his side, he knew no friendly aid was coming his way, that he had to move, but his body wouldn’t obey.
He couldn’t breathe, the wind was knocked out of him, he couldn’t even grunt. His stomach had collapsed, it felt like a vacuum, how could he ever fill his lungs again? Something papery with leather straps went over his head, and now he realized he could move a little, but what his body wanted more than anything was to turn and see, stupidly, what was going on behind him. But everything was pointillistic and dissolving into flashes.

“It’s over his ear,” he heard, and then, “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” and then hands went past his face.

“He’s not breathing.”

“You punched him in the stomach, you moron!”

“You said to ace him.”

“I told you to
distract
him.” Samuelson threw his hands up.

Stutz, in the meantime, crouched near Carter, his hands darting around the Skinner mask like he was trying to keep a vase from falling off a shelf. Carter tried to sit up on his heels then he sprawled sideways into the dirt. Stutz noted how the impact pulled the mask half off, so he replaced it and watched.

“Is he out?”

“When do you take that thing off him? Stutz?”

Stutz had never actually seen someone chloroformed before, and if Carter were indeed unconscious, the results disappointed him. Carter looked relaxed, half-smiling like he was getting forty winks. Stutz had expected to see him collapse “like a marionette with cut strings,” then “lay as helpless as a fish in a net” as was frequently the case for the freckle-faced Yarrows.

Stutz unbuckled the mask and pinched Carter’s cheek, hard enough to leave a mark.

“He must be out,” O’Brien said.

“Let’s load him.” Hollis looked around the park anxiously.

“He might be faking,” Stutz said. He removed the sewing needle he kept in the leather case with his chloroform.

“What are you doing?” Samuelson checked for pedestrians. A pair of kids riding bicycles were on a distant path.

“Testing,” Stutz replied, rolling up Carter’s sleeve. He jabbed the needle in and removed it. There was no reaction, unless one counted bleeding.

“Is he out?”

“I guess he’s out,” Stutz said. He shook Carter’s shoulder; the magician’s head lolled, and his arm fell down, wrist out, smashing his watch crystal in the dirt. “Hmm. I should put the mask back on him.”

The rest of the men, who had no patience for Stutz, voted to gather Carter up and throw him in the back of their truck, where the equipment awaited.

While Hollis drove them over the trolley tracks, and down Broadway, and through downtown, toward the estuary, and Stutz hovered in case more chloroform was needed (twice, he reapplied a rag to Carter’s nose, “just in case”), Samuelson and O’Brien began to wrap up the unconscious magician, with much arguing and second-guessing by all four agents.

The first issue over which they disagreed was the four pairs of handcuffs—three standard-issue plug eights, and the fourth an interesting pair Samuelson had brought back from his trip to England. Whereas Stutz felt they should be applied immediately, Hollis yelled, from the driver’s seat, that they should strip him down, in case he had tools hidden on his person.

Once Hollis said it, the idea was clearly a clever one, but since he was their junior, he was told to keep his yap shut and keep driving. Carter’s shirt was removed, and his belt, and his many trouser pockets were thoroughly searched, and all items removed, from the obvious tools (keys and picks) to objects probably designed to
look
innocuous (a cigar tube, for instance). There were no hidden aids sewn anywhere into his clothing.

While awaiting crosstown traffic on Fourteenth Street, much debate occurred about removing his boots before cuffing his ankles together. Barefoot, the manacles would go on much tighter, but the prevailing wisdom was that he could probably undo knots with his toes, and so his boots stayed on, with the English cuffs around them. Two pairs went around his wrists, and the final set was used to link the wrist and ankle cuffs so that Carter was doubled-over.

Then it was time for the seventy-five feet of rope. Samuelson had heard about Houdini escaping from seventy-five feet of rope, which sounded impossible, and he wished to attempt the feat properly, with a team of trained professionals. But they ran into problems almost immediately. Traffic was terrible on Broadway, and the stop-and-start progress of the bread truck caused the men standing in the back to frequently jostle each other. Carter’s dead weight was difficult to turn over in such a cramped space, and as the coils began to surround him, it occurred to Samuelson first, then O’Brien, that if bound, he would no longer fit in the sack, which was next.

Samuelson said, “We have to untie him.”

“We can skip the sack.” O’Brien had already invested tremendous sweat in the ropes.

“No, the sack,” Hollis called. “I vote for the sack. It’s impressive.”

This brought on another round of arguing—which would be more impressive, the sack or the rope, culminating in a cursing O’Brien bringing out his Bowie knife to cut through the fifteen or so feet of cord they’d managed to tie around Carter. He finished just as they passed under the ionic columns that marked the entrance to the Port of Oakland.

It had begun to rain. The truck’s windshield wipers went on, and in the back, Stutz held the mouth of the mail sack open while Samuelson and O’Brien banged into each other and yelled repeatedly in the process of securing Carter inside of it. First, his heels kept catching on the mouth, then the handcuffs, and finally there were problems getting his head fully past all the eyelets at top.

“Make sure you seal it right,” Samuelson said. The top of the mail bag was like a cold and stiff mouth—its lower lip was a metal bar with buckles, and its upper was a perforated metal plate. When Samuelson closed the two sides together, O’Brien fed a leather strap through all the buckles, securing it with the U.S. Postal Service Regulation Rotary padlock.

“Hey,” Stutz called out, “he flinched.”

“What are you doing down there?” Samuelson gave him a shove. “Why did he flinch?”

“He just—jerked.”

Samuelson could hardly believe Stutz hadn’t provoked that somehow, but there was no time to investigate. They were at the docks. “Into the crate, quickly.”

It was a standard sixty-four-cubic-foot U.S. Customs crate in which gin rummies had once smuggled Canadian Club. It lay atop a pair of chains that crossed exactly under its center. Once they dropped the sack in, they began nailing the three narrow planks on top of it. The sound of hammers put to use in the truck’s payload was as deafening as rifle shots.