Carter Beats the Devil (63 page)

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered. He put his hands around her waist so that they met behind her. She stiffened.

“You can’t mean that.”

He continued to hold her, until she finally let go of the railing and draped her hands on his shoulders. He felt her body releasing tension—he envisioned a picnic blanket catching the breeze, settling down toward the cool autumn grass.

“Are you telling me the truth?” she sighed. “I can’t see you, so . . . can you tell me again, maybe I’ll hear it then.”

“You’re a beautiful woman.”

She gripped his back with her hands. James knocked on the window again. Carter glared until he went away.

Her voice muffled by their hug, Phoebe asked, “Is your brother mad at you?”

“He thinks I’m going to go bankrupt tonight.”

“Are you?”

“I think so.”

She murmured, “That’s good. I’ve had bad luck with men whose prospects are excellent.”

“I’m sorry but I have to ask you this—Phoebe, has Borax sent you to spy on me?”

“Really? You’re serious? No. I haven’t talked to him since I met you.”

“I robbed his safe this afternoon.”

“You’ve led a very interesting life.”

“I think you have, too.”

She put her lips against his throat, and he with no conscious thought
began to stroke the back of her neck, which caused her whole body to press against his. Her lips touched his ear and her glasses scraped his cheek. “I worry I’m not good enough for you.”

“Phoebe—” He closed his eyes.

“I can’t see what you love doing the most in the world.”

“I know. But that forces me to behave differently. I can’t be clever or simple.”

“I worry you might hurt me.”

He hesitated. “You know that I—was—I was responsible for my wife dying.”

“That was an accident.” She said this with conviction, the same way she’d told him she knew he wasn’t a ghost. He realized he’d needed to hear her say it. He’d needed that for longer than he knew. He brought his mouth to hers and they kissed until he realized the thundering sound in his ears was actually coming from inside the house, where there was a table full of company, on their feet, whistling and letting loose with randy applause.

. . .

At dinner, the conversation was amusing and the food uniformly excellent. The mood was sufficiently light that even Max Friz smiled once or twice. There were toasts to Carter and the show, telegrams to read from Houdini and Thurston and Goldin and Raymond. Ledocq had to leave the table early—he had to get to the theatre, he felt, or the earth would open up and a giant hand would yank the whole show into a chasm. But before he left, Carter read aloud a brief telegram. “
TO MONSIEUR LEDOCQ BREAK A LEG OR I
’
LL BREAK IT FOR YOU SINCERELY BENNY LEONARD
.” Ledocq, touched to the point of tears, took the telegram and put it in his breast pocket and left without a word.

There was also a chatty message in French from a Leonetto Cappiello, whose name Carter didn’t recognize. This caused James to lecture the guests on his brother’s inadequacies in social situations, as Monsieur Cappiello had designed the “Everywhere” poster, and Carter was about to make a tired response—for he no longer wanted to be teased—when James finished with something close to an apology. “My brother has been so busy designing illusions that will confound us all that I’m proud to be the one who keeps track of his things on earth for him.” The conversation segued into banter about Carter’s obviously smitten self, and Phoebe’s charms. Mrs. Ledocq in particular said she’d never seen Charlie Carter looking so happy. Philo asked to be excused during the main course. He went and sat alone in the living room.

For a while, it was six people at the table, telling stories and asking
questions of each other—for instance, Max wanted to know if Phoebe had a dog, which mystified her until, with the intervention of Tom (who’d heard about such a thing), she learned that the veterans blinded in the gas attacks were now able to walk on the most crowded sidewalks with the aid of trained guide dogs.

Over salad, discussion went back and forth about whether this was prudent or dignified, and as Phoebe learned more and more from Max—the blind in Germany could take their dogs on riverboats and buses and trains—she announced that she would get a dog, and furthermore she hoped it was a completely imprudent and undignified dog with a name like Bowser or Jingles, for only that type would suit her.

The table’s laughter was met with the choral sounds of Handel’s
Messiah,
which came from the living room. Then Philo walked to the table and sat down in his chair as if he’d done nothing. Tom shouted “Hallelujah,” and, beside himself, ruffled Philo’s hair.

For an hour, Carter sat amid friends and family. With the music playing, and the wine to drink, and a woman with whom he occasionally held hands under the table, this was his last time tonight to relax. It was well known among magicians that a man awaking to love was vulnerable to deadly mistakes.

The last thing Griffin did before he left Denver was to send a certified parcel to his attorney in Bethesda, with instructions to open it if he went missing for more than a week. It contained all of his notes on the Carter investigation, including his suspicions that his superiors might be protecting the magician. He had scrawled at the bottom of the last sheet of paper: “The wine bottle enclosed is visible in the uncropped
Examiner
photographs found herein. Its label is a ‘cabalistic’ type visual puzzle that when viewed from an extreme angle shows the name of the vintner (Charles Carter), his profession (Magician), his places of residence (San Francisco, Oakland), and other phrases irrelevant to this investigation. Research confirms he received title to vineyards in Napa County at land forfeiture in December 1897. Witness Alhino saw a man (possibly Carter) delivering said bottle to Harding room that night.”

Even Griffin had to admit it was just a wine bottle. No trace of poison. But it put Carter in the room, maybe, and Carter hadn’t mentioned being there. It wasn’t enough to convict him, but Griffin was sure he could confront him and, if he had to, beat something out of him.

He was required to report for duty at 6
A
.
M
. He telephoned the Northern Line train station and requested a one-way ticket on the 9:15
A
.
M
. express, asking them to hold it for Jack Griffin. When agents swarmed the station, they hovered around the ticket office to no avail—Jack Griffin never arrived and his ticket went unclaimed. There being much gossip among the train crews, however, a Pullman porter heard the fuss and mentioned that a Mr. Jack Griffin actually boarded the 7:25 and paid for a ticket to New Orleans.

Local authorities at every stop were alerted, and agents mobilized, but they needn’t have bothered. Jack Griffin had learned a thing or two recently about misdirection: he disembarked from the 7:25 after one stop and walked a mile to an airstrip on which he saw a single Jenny. He entered the barracks and awoke the pilot, who’d been napping on his cot, and asked the groggy man how fast he could get to San Francisco. Half-awake, the pilot began his speech about how safe flying was and how many combat missions he’d flown in France—all Jenny pilots had exactly the same story, and it was built to suss out how much they could gouge their passenger—stopping only when Griffin started counting out ten-dollar bills.

“Dusk,” he said.

CHAPTER 5

Carter’s driver dropped him at the Orpheum stage door at 6:30, and from that moment—for there was a page boy waiting for him on the sidewalk, and the page boy held a list of complaints—he dealt with crises. The red gels used on the stage lights were casting shadows unlike those they’d thrown during rehearsals. A water pipe over the stage had chosen that moment to leak. The lion was anxious. Cleo was unsure of her part in the Egyptian illusion: Could she try something called the Stanislavski method?

This last request was odd enough that Carter, supervising the loading of paper flowers into a cone, asked her to explain.

“You see,” she said, her voice much more exotic-sounding than it had seemed hours ago, “I am not pretending to be an Egyptian princess—I actually
am
an Egyptian princess.”

“I follow. That would be fine.”

“It increases believability,” she added.

“Yes.” He dismissed her, watching the sequins on her headdress sparkle as she walked under the lights.

The stage manager approached. “Mr. Carter. The lion.”

And so Carter attended Baby, who indeed seemed more agitated than usual. He calmed down after a few reassuring words and one of James’s baked potatoes with cheese.

The leak over the stage was taped up, the gels were swapped, and, though there was no end to the problems, Carter began to fade from the here-and-now into a quiet place where nothing could reach him.

He collared Albert and Esperanza and told them the company needed to block out a television-less version of the Devil’s entrance just before act three; hence the interval following act two would be longer than usual. Would they mind performing the juggling bit from “A Night in Old China” on the apron to cover for him? They were delighted: Did Carter have flash paper? He told them to hound Ledocq until they found some.

Then Ledocq moaned aloud to Carter about that development—the flash paper he’d made was volatile and tended to heat up by itself. Did they really want to risk Albert going up in flames? Carter paid enough attention to direct the conversation, but he was also listening to the other side of the curtain, where the orchestra, whom he was paying seventy dollars an hour, tuned up and read through the sheet music he’d provided.

Outside the theatre, on the sidewalk, boys paced back and forth, swinging school bells and wearing sandwich boards on which half-sheets of Carter’s “Everywhere” poster were pasted. The opening night audience, spilling a moderate way off the sidewalk, was waiting for the doors to swing open. Of the several hundred people who’d arrived early, there were men who wore diamond studs in their blouses, escorting women wearing pearl necklaces secured to their bodies the way Parisians did, with secret binding chains that discouraged theft. The thieves who worked in bump-and-run teams, impressed, stole the men’s wallets instead.

There were street entertainers with their hats in front of them, among them: Nessie the blind accordion player, who attended each opening night, all over the city; and a young hobo, a
boho
hobo, a professor of
hobology
, he announced, who declaimed Shakespeare for anyone who would stop to listen.

Carter’s complimentary tickets had gone far and wide, from Captain Willow, who hobbled along the sidewalk with his wife, to Philo, who
came with Max Friz and Mrs. Ledocq, to Jossie Dover, who looked smashing in a tuxedo, to the Chong family, whose daughters would play a small part in the show. Mayor Davie of Oakland and Mayor Rolph of San Francisco nearly collided, and after feigned politeness, tried to determine which of them had been given a better seat in the house.

Around the corner, in the alleyway, which had been kept scrupulously clean for the arrival of equipment and animals, the boys from the Shell station smoked cigarettes and drank gin with the girls they’d met in the graveyard, freshlings from Mills College who wore cloche hats and turned-down hose. “Sure I know Carter,” Jimmy was saying to the girls. “He’s a good egg, he tells me how he does all his tricks.”

Exactly no one believed him. “G’waaan,” the girls cried together.

A line of taxicabs two rows deep dropped passengers off under the marquee lights. From some of them came irritated men from the War Department and from others, shooting them the evil eye, came junior executives from RCA and Westinghouse. Word had come down that even though the plans for television were destroyed, smuts low on the totem pole had to report back with their own eyes that Carter was empty-handed. To one side of the entrance was a line of crippled children and their nurses, and to the other the fifty-cent ticket holders who talked about the great shows they had seen two or three seasons before, and which movie stars compared favorably to Mr. Carter, and whether he’d actually killed the President, or whether it had been the widow Harding or his cabinet or the Reds, and, in a debate as old as the Phantom War Gun, was Charles Carter more a glamorous figure or tragic? Had he ever been as good a magician since his wife had died?

At 7:30, Carter took a final walk around the stage and the backstage and then locked the door to his dressing room. This was a routine dating back many years—his final preparations would take him until two minutes before showtime.

He stripped to his undershirt and shorts. His work clothes hung from a hook just over his makeup mirror. He sat down and stood again, for his chair was unexpectedly yielding. He exclaimed aloud in simple happiness, as there was a large silk pillow on his seat. He reflected for a moment about the pleasures that headlining could bring, and then sat again, his makeup kit in front of him. Eye shadow, eyebrow pencil. He applied red dots to the corners of his eyes so they wouldn’t disappear under the lights. Then on went the flexible greasepaint, mild as possible, capped with his secret weapon: Max Factor Society Makeup, a perfectly glareless powder. As it was made for civilians rather than the stage, other magicians
hadn’t caught on to it yet. The idea was for the audience to not even know he was wearing makeup.