Carter Beats the Devil (68 page)

Carter extended his fingertips and she floated over the heads of the
first rows of the audience just long enough to confound them. He beckoned to the airborne girl, making slow and gentle motions, and she floated back to him.

“You are free!” he exclaimed, and pulled away the bandages. They fell to the stage, revealing something impossible: empty space. She had vanished!

There was raucous applause throughout the house, cut short when two spots swept to the back of the house, where the Princess now stood, arms extended over her head, dressed in long and extravagant Parisian silks, the hems of which she held in her hands—she appeared to have wings. “Here I am, and I’m
free
!” She threw her head back and laughed gaily, and began a modernistic dance that took her down the center aisle, and back onto the stage, with the applause continuing the whole way.

With all eyes upon her—not only was her dancing impressive, but frankly, she was a choice piece of calico—the bald man standing by the back row frowned. Of course Carter would pull an “It’s Me”–type chestnut that produced a box jumper at the back of the theatre. He walked among the standing bodies—for Cleo was now bowing to a standing ovation—until he determined exactly where she’d appeared. He found it: a simple trap cut into the carpeted runner in the empty standing-room-only section. With the entire theatre otherwise occupied, he found it an easy matter to gimmick the trap open and drop down inside. He was in a tunnel. He had to crouch, but the pathway was illuminated by phosphorescent tape that clearly marked the route to the backstage area.

. . .

The main drape had come down; Carter pushed through it and, smiling, addressed his audience as they found their seats.

“Truth be told, Ladies and Gentlemen, dodging curses all the livelong day strikes me as a bit of a chore. I am a lazy man.” He removed the pith helmet and smoothed back his hair. “I prefer the quiet life,” he said, producing a leather helmet and goggles, “that of a stunt rider.” He wound a scarf around his neck and saluted the audience with a riding crop.

When the curtain opened next, the Egyptian tomb had been completely struck, and in its place was a very clean, almost ascetic set: a single large panel upon which a cold grey cityscape had been painted, Bauhaus style. The only props were a long wooden rampway and a metal platform fifteen feet in the air, the latter suspended over a shallow tank of water.

Carter crossed the stage, circling the tank, which came up to his knees.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are lucky to have with us tonight a magic cauldron, straight from the European continent. It is a good ten feet in
diameter, but just eighteen inches deep. Nonetheless that is eighteen inches of
magic
water. But how exactly, you ask, is it magic? Please indulge me—welcome Miss Amanda Chong.”

Carter gestured upward, to the platform, where Amanda stood, in a robe. She wore a swim cap, and she gave a huge and fluttery wave to the audience, and she said, “Hi! Hello!”

“Miss Chong,” Carter said, “have we ever met before?”

“You live next door, Carter,” she cried, which received a big laugh.

“Are you on my payroll?”

She nodded with enthusiasm.

“Ah, you honest little girl. What am I paying you to do?”

She mimed making a dive into the tank.

“I’m paying you to dive off a fifteen-foot platform into eighteen inches of water?”

“Five dollars,” she grinned.

“Well, then, what are you waiting for? Oh, the incantation, of course.” The orchestra struck up a jaunty movement from
Water Music,
while Carter waved his arms over the tank, and said
“Ergo jubilatio, vivat floreatque media, media!”
then, to Amanda, “Dive!”

She dropped her robe to the platform, showing off her fashionable black and red wool swimsuit. Bending her knees once, twice, three times, she bounded off the platform and with a perfect needle-nosed arc of her arms, swan dove into the tank.

The reaction was more a generalized gasp than enthusiasm, as it looked like Amanda had to have hit the bottom with some great force. Yet there was no sign of her, not even a bubble. While the audience was still craning their necks to see what had happened to her—she hadn’t broken the surface—Carter rolled up his sleeves, and then threw both arms violently upward, in the direction of the platform, from which there was a puff of smoke. Almost immediately, people began to clap, slowly, because they could plainly see up there, waving charmingly, young Amanda Chong all over again, in her swimsuit, which was bone dry.

“Hi, Carter!” she called. Then the applause came, lengthy and relieved.

“Thank you. I’ll see you back in Oakland,” he said as she climbed to the catwalk and left the stage.

“So,” Carter said, “magic water,” with a shrug. “Causes instantaneous transportation. Which doesn’t matter as I’m not a magician anymore. I’m a stunt rider.” He was enjoying himself. He felt relaxed and
loose
, as if he could do no wrong.

Quietly, the motorcycle was wheeled in from the wings.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, behold a triumph of European engineering,” he cried. “The BMW R32, an extravagant machine, reliable, steady, and true at speeds of eighty miles per hour. It is the preferred mount for those of us who are no longer magicians but stunt riders.”

As he spoke, he walked around the motorcycle, flicking on the petcock.

“I should tell you a bold fact: this is the only BMW in all of America. They are just now making their debut in Paris, and eventually some clever rich men here will find one. But for now, I have the
only
BMW in all of America.” He used the riding crop to trace an imaginary pathway. “I am going to ride this motorcycle in a spiral, increasing my speed steadily, until I have achieved full velocity, eighty miles per hour, at which point, I will go up the rampway you see before you, and fly through the air, landing on that six-foot-square platform that hangs from the rafters. And I shall come to a full stop immediately. At least,” he added, “that would be prudent.”

In the audience, in a row seven back from the stage, Max Friz squirmed between Philo and Mrs. Ledocq. Friz shook his head. “Eighty miles per hour? He cannot go that fast in this small space.” Mrs. Ledocq put her finger to her lips, and Max turned to the audience members behind him. “He cannot go eighty miles per hour in this small space,” he explained, but his protest was cut short as Carter, mounting, lowered his goggles and kicked the engine over and gunned it to a thunderous roar. Easing off on the throttle, Carter nodded at the conductor, who gestured to the trumpet section. They launched into the opening of the
William Tell Overture
and Carter began his slow and steady spiral outward.

The spotlights swirled around the stage in circles as if he were hard to find. With full attention on him, only the extremely canny noticed, and puzzled at, drapery arising around the platform hanging over the stage. If Carter were going to ride onto the platform, wouldn’t he crash into the curtains?

Carter spiralled from tight circles to wider arcs, suddenly swinging out to the very lip of the stage, and then back to the wings, and then with a mighty roar, he was on the rampway, motoring upward, accompanied by flashes from small red and green and blue fireworks, and the motorcycle was climbing through the air, describing a perfect parabola toward the platform, the audience holding its breath, some already moving their palms together to applaud, the orchestra blasting the
Overture
’s brassy crescendo, and then rider and machine came down, fatally short, missing the platform entirely and splashing into the water tank. The impact sent
tidal waves cascading over the sides, washing across the stage. Those in the first three rows were treated to sprays of water as if they were standing on the prow of a boat.

For long seconds, the surface of the tank churned, and just as the depth of this accident became apparent—Max Friz was frozen solid, hands clutching his head—there was a puff of smoke, and high over the stage the drapery around the platform fell away to reveal Charles Carter and motorcycle, unharmed.

He waved, and he called out, “Magic water,” and bowed from the waist; the orchestra played out the finale of the Rossini piece while the audience, standing for the second time that night, gave up their applause and their cheers.

When some time had passed, and he was able to be heard over the clapping, Carter declared, “You let me know I’m a magician after all. Thank you.”

. . .

Outside the theatre, Griffin paced. He couldn’t even pace in silence, for the hobo on the sidewalk had decided Griffin seemed like a good mark, and had started mangling Marc Antony’s soliloquy. He managed only a few lines before losing steam, and he started complaining instead. “I played here. This was before the movies, back when a man’s voice was his ticket. I had excellent diction. The women, I tell you, they were all over me, Tessie Wall’s girls,
and
Jessie Hayman’s. Murdoch, hated him. He was a mean man. That honey pot. He was, he was, Iago.” He paused here, eyes batting back and forth as if trying to retrieve a suitable monologue from
Othello
. Finally, he looked at Griffin. “Spare a nickel?”

“I’ll give you a quarter if you be quiet for a minute.”

The hobo nodded. Griffin dug in his pocket and handed over a quarter. The hobo opened his mouth to say thank you, then thought better of breaking his vow of silence. Instead, he sat down on the curb and absently cupped his elbows in his palms.

Griffin looked down the alleyway. A fire escape. He turned his head back—it went all the way to the roof. The roof had to have a fire exit, then. Access. He made a pyramid of garbage cans—harder to balance than he’d expected—and stood on the top one, which was just high enough to pull himself onto the fire escape.

The whole way up, he found some small relief in how assiduously he’d been doing push-ups and sit-ups lately. When he reached the roof, he was hardly fatigued. There were taller buildings that hulked over the roof. The huge Orpheum Theatre sign, with its thousands of white lightbulbs,
hummed. He saw the hump of the fire exit door and a pile of rags in front of it.

He jogged across the tar paper, shoes sticking, and then he slowed when he realized the pile of rags had arms and legs.

Griffin reached inside his jacket to unsnap the strap of leather that ran across the butt of his Colt. The theatre sign blinked on one letter at a time, then all the letters shimmered before the whole cycle started again, so the rooftop structures—air vents, mostly, and the fire exit—were thrown first into light, then darkness.

Griffin could see the man’s body, clothed only in an undershirt, shorts, socks, and garters. The head lay at an unnatural angle, neck broken, eyes open. No, not open. The sign lit up, O-R-P-H-E-U-M, and Griffin saw pennies against the dead man’s eyes.

Something was wrong with those pennies. He picked one up. It was a copper token the size of a quarter. On one side was a lion, rampant. “Will You Have Her As Your Bride?” was the inscription. On the other side was a profile portrait of a proud-looking man holding a small canine, surrounded by the legend, “The More I Know of People, the More I Love My Dog.”

Griffin’s heart sickened. What kind of a freak had done this? He tried the fire exit door. It was, as per his usual luck, locked from the inside.

He walked around the roof carefully, recalling he hadn’t seen windows as he’d come up the fire escape.

His eyes alit on a structure that he took at first for an airshaft. Then he thought it was something else, and then he explained it to himself as an airshaft again, for there was no reason for a theatre to have anything other than a ventilation device up here.

But this was too large for an airshaft. “What the hell,” he murmured as he approached it. He shook his head. By the time he was six feet away, he had confirmed exactly what it was.

Not again
, he thought.

. . .

The backstage area, from the very rear wall to the closed fire curtain, and from wing to wing, was boiling over with people carrying things, no better sign that this was indeed opening night. Carter stood in his shirtsleeves (he’d torn his jacket at the shoulder and a seamstress busily repaired it), directing his cast and crew with a precision that was in no way cold. Despite what James had said, he could hardly accept that this was his last night, especially when he was enjoying himself so much.

“All right, we need military discipline, my friends. Esperanza, Albert,
the audience will be patient for about nine minutes, so wait until then, then go to the apron with your props and put on your routine.”

“Sure,” Esperanza said. Albert, who was a cutup, curtseyed toward his boss and started to run off hand-in-hand with Esperanza until Carter called to him:

“No, not yet, we need you for a moment. We’re reblocking the Devil’s entrance.”

“Hey, that’s me!” Albert raced back, and walked through his cues patiently, with Carter’s hands on his shoulders, directing him where to stand. They were surrounded by electricians, the script girl, and the stage manager, who was ready to write down new items for the prop schedule. Ledocq hovered, but did not participate. He drank a glass of water.

Carter said, “If we’re introducing the Devil by conventional means, we should at least use a splashy kind of lighting. We’ll base it on last season’s rigging. Do we still have the schematics? Excellent. Tell me, how are the electrics?” Carter asked his grips and, to a man, they said there was no danger of fuses blowing, as the Orpheum had been refitted with novel and highly sophisticated knob-and-tube wiring.

Carter blinked. “All right, I’ll take your word for it,” he said, looking over their shoulders at Ledocq, who nodded in confirmation. “Splendid. What’s next?”

The stage manager reminded him they had to drain the water tank that night, which made Ledocq clear his throat, and explain, blushing, it was a lot of water, and the plumbers had asked them to only attach it to the sewer drainpipe when the theatre audience had departed and the toilets were no longer flushing.