Carter Beats the Devil (75 page)

Mysterioso fought to get his hand in his pocket; the wires around his wrists cut into him, but he was able to pull out his knife. Carter was bound in a nearly fetal position, facing him, neck and feet just out of reach of the knife that Mysterioso swung. He swung it again, closer.

“Holy—” Mysterioso suffered an unexpected shake and bounce. He’d accidentally severed some of the lines that kept him from falling headfirst onto the stage. He froze.

Carter felt himself bob. It was almost soothing. He’d been greatly excited a moment before, but the ascent and tumble had brought a fresh spray of blood from his hand; it was actually trickling now, draining out, dripping down his sleeve, and it was hurting less by the minute. That wasn’t good. But it was very very hard to fight. Around the edges of his eyes, the sights were breaking into dots and dashes. He saw between these particles something eternal, warm and quiet.

“Phoebe,” Carter said calmly. He had a plan. He had better say it now. “Go to the end of the catwalk. There’s an elevator there. Take it down to the stage, and go get help.”

He was watching the slow passes Mysterioso made at him with his knife. In spite of the care he took, the blade severed another filament, and Carter felt tension in the net increase. It felt ready to pull apart, but still Carter was feeling warm, and safe, and very numb. In the fading footlights of his vision, he could see how everything he’d ever known was just props and scrim, how reality wasn’t action and friction and motion, but a winding down. Entropy, Ledocq’s evidence of the creator. Carter could see it, and it was all right. He looked at the man wrapped up with him and tried to broadcast those feelings forth. Mysterioso’s eyes narrowed and then, violently, he lunged at Carter, regardless of the consequence to himself. Carter was thrown right and left and down as cords were cut, and there were curtains drawing shut in his mind. He wanted to go home, to sleep. It would feel much better to give up, give in. Then he remembered faintly that this was exactly the Devil’s advice. What if all this sweet winding down was the way the Devil buried
wonder
? Wonder was life. The knife came at him again. He had one piece of business left. He reached into his pocket after Mysterioso’s knife arm thrust forward. The blade came close, right to the point of Carter’s chin, and that’s when Carter rubbed flash paper vigorously against Mysterioso’s stabbing arm.

There was a fizzle of white magnesium sparks, which went out
immediately. But now in their place was a low blue flame. The gasoline that had soaked Mysterioso’s clothing caught fire, igniting like a gas jet, and he screamed. The smells of scorching cotton and burning rubber brought Carter to full attention—since he had bear-hugged Mysterioso on the catwalk, there was gasoline on him, too. He struggled in the net, trying to put distance between them. Mysterioso jerked around like a puppet, and then in horror Carter realized the mistake he’d made, for the remaining asrah wires were burning like candlewicks, tiny flames traveling along the supports. He was tossed to the left, then flung upward. He flailed in the air, flying, limbs madly grabbing at nothing. He hit a wall face first, then dropped to the stage.

Instead of swinging out, Mysterioso dropped straight down and into the water tank. Aviation fuel will burn on water, but not underneath; the initial splash revived him, and he gulped down a breath, lay under the surface, and shed his burning clothes. He would stay under as long as he could, and as a magician, Mysterioso could hold his breath for a very long time indeed.

When Mysterioso surfaced, there were small patches of flaming cloth on the water, but the rest had extinguished. He took stock: he was dirty, and cut, and clawed, and had minor burns—otherwise he was at peak capacity. Though the edges of the tank were only eighteen inches deep, it sloped inward so he stood in about four feet of water. He felt the bottom with his toe until he located one of the throwing knives that had fallen in with him. He heard echoing sounds—footsteps, clapping, like hesitant applause. He caught his breath. He peered out—there were curls of smoke in places and, under the lights, they were impenetrable.

“Hello?”

Mysterioso heard Phoebe’s voice. She was close by. He said nothing. Carter, unconscious and in a heap, couldn’t answer her.

“Carter?” Her voice, sounding slightly panicked. “Are you in the tank?”

Mysterioso splashed around, then, splashed long and hard. Where was she?

“I’m over here. Take my hand,” she said calmly. He watched for her through the smoke—there she was, drumming on the side of the tank. She smiled. “Let’s get out of here.”

He walked over to her, his right hand extended, left hand loosely wrapped around the butt of his throwing knife.

Mysterioso reached out toward Phoebe, and he took into his hand
not her hand but the 240-volt power line she had located by its buzzing on the floor.

A power line against the bars of a cage may not be grounded, but a power line in water is grounded very well indeed. Mysterioso’s eyebrows stood on end, his teeth jammed shut on his tongue, and every muscle in his body clenched beyond their limits, curling and contorting. In his last five seconds of consciousness, he felt his eardrums burst and the vitreous in his eyeballs begin to melt away. Then, though strictly speaking, dead, he continued to stand with his hand wrapped around the line until gravity made him keel over, and the water around him boiled.

. . .

Carter awoke with jumbled impressions of where he was. In a crate? Lights in his eyes. Onstage. Someone was saying he was fine. His head felt like it had been crushed, and he was afraid to move it, remembering a long-forgotten fear of Tug accidentally stepping on him.

“Charlie, it’s okay, you’re fine.”

“Phoebe?”

“Yes. We’re safe. We’re okay.”

He considered this. “Are you safe?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

It was a large stage. There were many obstacles all over it. “How did you find me?”

“I clapped, and Baby more or less towed me here.” Carter was on his back, his head in her lap. Baby was stretched out behind them like they were relaxing at a picnic. “Then I heard someone moving in the water tank—”

He remembered his hand. “I’m bleeding to death.”

“I don’t think so. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

“Oh.” His vision was blurred, so he blinked, and it cleared. “You clapped and Baby got up?”

“Yes.”

“He must like you.” He could hear a percolating sound, like bubbles, and there was a sweet odor in the air. “What’s that smell?”

“Mysterioso, boiling,” she said.

He tried to get a sense of her face, but given his blurry vision, it was difficult.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m very good. You hurt your hand.”

“Is he dead?”

“I killed him,” she said, swallowing. If he hadn’t been listening for it, he wouldn’t have heard the catch in her voice.

“And you’re all right?”

She shrugged.

He remembered more. “Where’s Griffin?”

“I opened the stage door. There was a man out there, someone named Chase. He called for an ambulance.”

Carter sat up. He held his head, which throbbed.

Leaning on Phoebe, he limped the dozen steps to Griffin’s side, and knelt.

Griffin, pale, looked at him. He moved his hands, still cuffed. He was weak. He tried to bring his hands up. Carter noted that Griffin was holding the bullet-catching pistol. He couldn’t quite lift it.

“You’re under arrest,” Griffin whispered.

That Griffin was holding the pistol with a blank round in it made Carter feel a yearning in the back of his throat. He put his hands up in the air. “I’ll go quietly now,” he said.

CHAPTER 10

The next morning’s headlines could—perhaps—easily be imagined. When a magician once implicated in murdering the President is found with a dead rival (electrocuted), a dead assistant (decapitated), another assistant bound and gagged (Willie, unconscious in the wardrobe), a dead usher (broken neck, and in semi-undress), and a wounded Secret Service agent, the accumulation of details is almost hypnotic. If you added sex—and there was
indeed
sex, in the form of a blind woman in a torn evening dress pushed up into her waistband—an almost holy silence would overcome the managements of the
Call-Bulletin,
the
Chronicle,
and the
Examiner.

So the headlines of November 5, 1923, were in their way revealing. The
Chronicle
’s front page described Secretary Mellon’s scandalous new plan for taxation. There was also a scientific report on the supernormal effects of sodium dihydrogen phosphate, an energy drink given to German shock troops during battle. One man apparently held back a tank while on “Peppo,” as they called it. The
Call-Telegram
focused on the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at which Sir Ernest Rutherford deflated all hopes of ever bombarding
atoms so as to drive away electrons and thus create vast supplies of energy. The
Examiner,
in a daring exposé, revealed that a Fifth Avenue storefront in New York was actually a “birth control” clinic and chided citizens for its existence.

Carter was mentioned nowhere. The
San Francisco Law Journal
in its biweekly
Police Blotter,
listed a homicide/justifiable homicide at the address of the Orpheum Theatre, but there were no further details. Of course, there were whispers . . .

. . .

Saint Mary’s was the hospital closest to the theatre, but their physicians were undistinguished. Carter requested that the ambulance take Griffin and himself to a small facility at the crest of Lone Mountain, the least developed of San Francisco’s hills, the one with the best views. The hospital there, in the shape of a Spanish cross, had but thirty-two rooms on two floors. Many faced the ocean, and all had excellent sunlight and breezes. The floor in the transepts was done in hexagonal tilework, and at the center, a two-story open and airy plaza, there was mosaic of a Mucha princess, Saint Agatha, patron of nursing. There was a grand piano, too, for during the War, this hospital had answered speculation about which amenities most aided convalescence: it encouraged music, sunlight, a view of the ocean, mobility, and an ancient form of exercise called “
t’ai chi.
”

Carter was X-rayed. No fractures were found in his skull, though he was warned to stay awake for twenty-four hours in case of concussion. Then he was given morphine, and his wound was topically treated with cocaine and cleansed with flavine compounds by a doctor who, while stitching up his hand and fitting him with a Thomas splint, kept repeating, “Well, it looks like God got a piece of you.” Carter began exactly two minutes after his last injection to think of the doctor as fascinatingly handsome, skilled, and spiritually enlightened.

Griffin was taken to surgery. The bullet had caught him below his navel, lodging in his intestine. Before the War, he would have died, as no one had operated on the gut. It was as mysterious an example of God’s work as the brain. Luckily, Dr. Boone, who operated on Griffin, had trained on the battlefields of Flanders.

Boone debrided the wound and irrigated it with Dakin’s solution of sodium hypochlorite and boric acid. Then he was free to operate on the bowel, remove the bullet, and primary-suture the damaged lengths of intestine with kangaroo thread. The final layering of plaster of paris immobilized the wounded area, and as he applied it, Boone drew deep
sighs of relief, for he was never sure a patient would survive such an operation.

At five o’clock in the morning, Griffin was pronounced stable. He was sent to a room with a saline-glucose drip. Boone showered and joined his fellow surgeons—doctors Wilbur and Cooper—in the chapel, where they saw in the dawn with prayers.

At the same time, Carter sat on the piano bench under the skylight. He was dressed in clean clothes he’d had sent from his house, but he’d forgotten to ask for shoes, so he wore the same smoky, scuffed dress boots from the night before. He ghost-fingered chords and watched the chapel doors. Soon, they opened and out came doctors Boone, Wilbur, and Cooper.

“Gentlemen,” he called, saluting them with the arm that was now splinted and bandaged to his elbow. “A word?”

Carter introduced himself and asked for the best possible care for Jack Griffin. The doctors dismissively agreed to this: all patients received excellent care here. They might have added that they as physicians were used to very important patients.

“He’s a Secret Service agent,” Carter said, “wounded in the line of duty.”

At this there were illuminated cries, “of course” and “yes,” for they were all very patriotic.

“His superiors have been informed, and they know he’s going to make a full recovery,” Carter said, stressing “full recovery” so much that it seemed insulting.

Dr. Boone, who had a long face and a beard like Lincoln, intoned, “How was the agent wounded?”

“He was in the process of arresting me.” Carter grinned. His audience shifted on their feet, betraying a confusion that he enjoyed. “He was arresting me for the murder of President Harding.”

Doctors Boone, Wilbur, and Cooper exchanged silent glances. Wilbur, who suffered gastric distress under even mild circumstances, hiccupped.

“Oh, yes!” Carter said as if remembering. “You’re the doctors who signed the late President’s death certificate.”

“Sir,” Cooper said, saying it as slowly as a one-syllable word could be said, for he had a Kentucky accent, “I must say I’m confused about our priorities. Shouldn’t we have you arrested?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely, I’d be very excited to present all I know about
the case.” Carter beamed. “But perhaps the most sober course is to let Griffin present his evidence to his superiors and let justice take its course.”

He gave them time to work this out silently; eventually they all realized Carter was assuring them, rather arcanely but persuasively, that they would be safe. Carter had a great deal to say, more than usual, and after he began to repeat himself on the topic of how he was sure Griffin had distributed his evidence in a great many places in case he didn’t make a full recovery, the doctors said Carter was free to be discharged whenever he wanted, but instead Carter followed Boone down the hallway (he was strangely attracted to the man’s Lincoln beard) and, close to tears, told him, “Do look out for Griffin,” concluding, meaningfully, “he’s the best audience I’ve ever had.”