Saving Houdini (17 page)

“He did rescue us from juvie, remember.”

They sat in silence, watching for him. He was gone for longer than two minutes, but then he came jauntily around the corner with a red packet of thin cigars in his hand. He had just tapped
one out when his face changed and the cigar fell from his fingers. He broke into a run.

Instinctively, both boys leapt up, as a voice behind them roared in triumph: “AHA!” Two thick hands with hair sprouting from their knuckles came down like hammers on each of their shoulders. “Here you are
again
!”

They turned to see the owner of the knuckles. Officer Blackwell. Dash noticed his bruise wasn’t exactly healing. It was the colour of an eggplant now.

Herman Blumenthal skidded to a stop in front of them. “Getcher hands off these boys!”

“A regla coupla tramps, aren’t they?” He shook them. “Howdja get out of Mrs. Alphonsine’s hotel anyway?” He looked like he wanted to kill them.

“
I
sprung ’em!” said Blumenthal. “Now let go!”

“And who are you?”

“I’m their father.”

“Sure you are. You look a right father to scuts like these.”

“Let us go!” Dash shouted, yanking against him.

“Which train were you family of hobos all planning to hop this fine afternoon?”

“We have tickets,” said Blumenthal. He held them up to the man.

Blackwell let go of Dash to take them. “You think you’re all just going to go home now, eh?” he said. He studied the tickets and then folded them roughly and put them into his breast pocket.

“Hey, hold on, those belong to us!”

“We’ll see how their value holds up against the cost of the boys’ grub and lodging at the house on the hill. Maybe you’ll
all
have to do a spell there.”

“Please,” said Walter. “You don’t understand.”

Blackwell got his cuffs out and snapped them on his wrist.

“Leave him alone!” cried Dash. There was a small crowd forming, blue uniforms scattered throughout it like dark berries among leaves. And there was another one of those men with a plain black ring on his lapel. Dash saw it and felt himself relax. They had the same eyes, but in different faces.

“He won’t be alone,” said Blackwell, producing a second pair of cuffs. “The stationmaster’s in his office, dying to meet you. And you too, sir! Your boys have earned themselves quite a name!” He grasped the chain connecting them and pulled Walt and Dash together like a brace of dead partridges.

“Do you need shackling?” Blackwell called over his shoulder, whereupon Blumenthal the Believer began to follow solemnly behind.

They waited on a hard, wooden bench inside the stationmaster’s office. Three men in guard uniforms stalked the space in front of them, discussing the situation with each other, and occasionally shooting their prisoners a disdainful glance. Officer Blackwell was behind a frosted door in the rear wall with the stationmaster.

“We’re in major crud,” said Dash. The clock on the wall showed it was creeping up on 2:45.

“Crud?”

“Poop. We’re up to our necks in poop. We’re going to miss the train.”

“We’ll get another train.”

“This is the only train that matters anymore.”

“Stop complaining,” said Blumenthal. “And let me do the talking.”

Five more minutes passed. The train was leaving in ten. Dash let out a groan.

One minute after that, the door in the back flew open, and out strode a colossus in a dark blue uniform with a stiff cap riding high on his head. He had to bend down under the door frame. The stationmaster. How excellent that he was this large and appeared so unhappy.

Behind him, two men in suits, the policeman Blackwell, and a woman in a grey wool skirt appeared, jostling in the doorway. The lady was holding a clipboard against her chest. Another official whose jurisdiction was children.

“These are they?” the stationmaster asked.

“Indeed,” said Officer Blackwell. He had a proud look on his face, like the cat who ate the canary, as Dash’s mother would have said. By the door, a small cadre of station guards and police officers had gathered and they were standing in a semicircle, looking in. “I knew there was something amiss when I ran into them Wednesday.”

“Thank you for a job well executed …”

“Call me Eudorus,” said Officer Blackwell.

“Eudorus. Well, a job well done indeed,” he said. He went to the outer door in a single stride and shut it hard, crowding out the onlookers. Dash heard at least one nose conk the door. “In any event, I will take it from here.”

“Will you need my name and badge number?” Blackwell asked eagerly.

“Of course, of course,” the stationmaster said. He nodded to a man behind him. “Give him a penny or two.” Another
man stepped forward and put one coin into the constable’s hand.

He looked down at it, then up at the stationmaster. “Just doing my job,” he said with a disappointed-but-smiling expression. He removed the cuffs and put them back on his belt. “See you around … boys.”

Blackwell left, and the stationmaster’s three prisoners watched him turn his large, sturdy frame in their direction. He trod toward them on powerful legs. The man’s body seemed to blur in Dash’s vision and he felt dizzy for a moment; a pang of nausea shot through him. The stationmaster’s voice sounded far away.

“Well,” it said. “We have something very curious here, now don’t we?”

“Sir, please. This is a misunderstanding,” said Walt. “It’s important that you let us go. Right away, in fact.”

“Important? Right away? It must also be imperative.”

“Yes, yes, it is. It is
very
imperative.”

“Must you go IMMEDIATELY?” he roared. He leaned in and his eyes seemed as large as billiard balls.

“Sir,” said Blumenthal, rising confidently, but the stationmaster put a hand out and Blumenthal bumped into it.

“You will go to a place of my choosing,” the man said quietly now to all of them. “Because this is my house, and you have beset it recklessly; you have besmirched it. You set
upon it
a herd of wild animals!”

“They were only pigs,” said Walt quietly. “Harmless pigs …”

“SILENCE!” The man’s upper lip thinned. He pushed Walt back against the bench with a giant index finger. “I will have you
both
in Mrs. Alphonsine’s home for—”

He didn’t finish his sentence: there was instead a tremendous flash of colour and sound. A holler of red and white and black with a blur of freckles within it. The stationmaster’s eyes retreated and became as still as a photograph and to Dash’s astonishment Walt was frozen in the air. Beside him, Blumenthal’s mouth was stilled in an expression of shock, and everyone in the office had turned into statues. It was suddenly silent.

Oh, Dash heard himself say in his own head, and then a disembodied voice announced: “
Ladies and gentlemen, it is one thing to vanish without a trace, but it is quite ano … ther … to—
” And it broke off. And Walt landed on the stationmaster’s chest with a resounding thud amid cries and protests.

“Go!” Walt shouted to Blumenthal through a cyclone of limbs. “Get out of here! Get him home!”

Then Dash was on his feet, his legs working furiously. He grabbed Blumenthal by the front of the shirt and the two of them tore the door open. Twenty faces jolted in surprise and then parted and let them through. They were on the station’s concourse, flailing, and they stopped and looked back: Walt was throwing himself around inside the office. Dash stumbled backwards, astonished.

“We have to go in there and get him,” said Blumenthal, straining forward at the back of the crowd.

“No,” said Dash.

“You’ll leave your friend in—”

“Well, I see you are forced to hoof it,” said a voice.

They spun to see Harry Houdini in a wooden wheelchair. Standing behind was Bess in a black fur ruff and a rather wonderful hat with flowers and draped lace. Houdini was wearing a pair of heavy steel sunglasses. He took them off.

“Bess, these are the other gentlemen I was telling you about.”

She held out her hand and they each took it in turn, anxiously, giving their names. Dash was distracted by the silence behind him: the door to the stationmaster’s office was closed again.

“Walt is in there,” said Blumenthal, hooking his thumb toward the stationmaster’s door.

“He is? Well, we’ll have to get him, then. The train is about to leave.” He attempted to get out of the chair, but the instant he came into contact with the palm of Bessie’s hand, he sat right down again.

“Behave,” she said. “And put your sunglasses back on. You have to rest your eyes. You know what Dr. LaFleur said about too much light.”

“But we may have to effect a rescue, missus.”

Sol Jacobson appeared behind Bess. Dash locked eyes with him.

“It would seem Master Woolf prevented Master Gibson from making his 10 a.m. train.”

“Well, good thing they ran into us, isn’t it, Sol? They’d better make this one.”

“Excellent,” he said sourly.

So Sol was still in Harry’s employ, Dash noted. What could that mean?

Houdini’s driver, Dmitri, was coming into the station through the glass doors. The light, reflecting off the kiosks, the floor, and the high windows made Dash feel like he’d tumbled into a kaleidoscope.

“Come with me,” Sol said to Dmitri. The driver saluted his boss.

“You’ll bring him to the train, Dmitri?”

“Yes,
maestro
, the boy will be on the train.”

The two men strode toward the stationmaster’s door.

“Sometimes people think we’re brothers,” said Houdini, “but we didn’t even grow up in the same state.”

“Come on now,” said Bess, her face a mask of exasperation, “we’ve five minutes to make the train!”

“Well, then,” said Houdini, rising out of the chair, “we had better run for it. Leave the wheelie, my darling! We’ll telegraph the hotel tomorrow to come pick it up.
Quai
Seven!”

Dash and Blumenthal each grabbed one of Houdini’s suitcases; Houdini, over his wife’s protestations, tucked one under his arm and grabbed two others by their handles.

“I cannot carry you as well, my love,” he said to her, and started off toward the
quai.

She came after, with heavy, angry footfalls. Dash cast a single backwards glance—what choice did he have now? He’d have to trust Jacobson.

The first-class steward looked at Herman Blumenthal’s clothes, and then the expensive suitcase he was carrying, and then his clothes again. “They’re
his
,” said Blumenthal, holding up Houdini’s things. “Can you just put them on the train?”

Houdini rushed up behind. “They’re with me,” he said, and the steward’s face seemed to be paralyzed between two expressions.

“Are you Mr. Harry—?”

“Yes. Take our things, will you?”

Bess went past and tucked a dime into the man’s vest pocket.

“Be quick, youngster,” she said to Dash.

Houdini took the first empty compartment. “That’s not ours,” said Bess, but he’d needed to sit down. He was winded.

Bess went ahead with Blumenthal.

“Don’t get old,” Harry said to Dash, and he laughed good-naturedly.

“You’re not old.”

“Not as old as some, no.”

“Sir?”

“Whatever it is you know, young Dashiel, keep it to yourself.”

“I wish you believed me.”

Houdini rested himself against the back of the train seat. “I do believe you, Master Woolf.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” He closed his eyes. “I even know why the trick works. I don’t purport to know
how
, but I think I understand why. You see, if your Blumenthal performs the vanish tonight, it will be the first time it is ever performed. But if you step inside it, it will be the second time it has been performed on
you.
” He opened his eyes and looked into Dash’s. They were like two small glowing coals. “That is a paradox: it’s perfectly impossible. But it is a paradox that somehow works. Both sides of it, however contradictory, are true. And when you step into the trick, Dashiel, you are like a battery that turns it on.”

“Come see it, then!”

Houdini’s expression shifted. He looked frightened now. “No.” Dash lowered his head. “I have a show in six and a half hours, Dashiel. How can I stop in Toronto?”

“You’ve gone this far,” he replied. “Why not see it through?”

“I wish I could. But I won’t disappoint my public. Now, let us talk of more interesting things.”

“Like what?”

“Like, when will we start visiting the moon?”

“A long time from now.”

“When I am old.”

Dash looked away. “There will be rockets that go way past the moon too.”

“How far?”

“They’re still going.”

“Come on now, what else?” The conductor was blowing his whistle out on the platform.

“Electric cars. Instant photographs. You’ll be able to put your eyeglasses right into your eyes. Watches get really interesting. And people live longer.”

Houdini smiled at him and his eyes sparkled. Dash looked up, and Sol was standing on the other side of the door, one hand clamped down on Walt’s shoulder.

Houdini leaned forward and patted Dash’s cheek. “I enjoyed meeting you, Master Woolf. Now, take my advice: work hard! And if you can, make others happy.” He rose to open the door. Sol was about to protest, but Houdini said, “I know. This is not their car. Go along, both of you. Mr. Blumenthal will join you in your compartment. I would like to get to know my business associate better.”

Dash passed Herman Blumenthal in the passage. “Get him to the theatre!” he rasped at him. “He says he believes me now!”

He and Walter stepped down to the platform just as a voice boomed: “TORONTO! QUAI SEPT. EN VOITURE, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT. LE TRAIN PARTIS. TORONTO. PLATFORM SEVEN! ALL-LLL ABOARD! THE DOORS ARE CLOSING!”

Their car was two doors away. The conductor whistled again and the wheels on the rail scraped into motion. Dash and Walt jumped up on a step. Another agent, this one an older man with a gentle smile, unhooked the metal chain and let them through. He took their tickets and saw them to their seats. Through the windows, the posts fixed in the platform between tracks seven and eight began to move.

The train was leaving the station.

In their compartment a mother and daughter faced each other by the door. The girl had long blond hair with a red ribbon in it. She was six or seven. They all greeted each other politely, and Dash and Walter took the window seats and sat facing each other. They were motionless, still half in shock, wondering if their luck was going to turn sour again. The train picked up speed and the squealing of the wheels gave way to chugging and clattering.

Dash was staring backwards into the retreating train station. “That’s it,” he whispered to Walt. “We’re going.”

“Will he come? To see the trick?”

They watched the city thin outside the window.

“I don’t know,” said Dash.

“You should be careful with him. I mean Blumenthal. He’s liable to send you to Pompeii.”

Dash sighed. “Thank you for what you did back there, Walt. I’m really glad you were with me here. I don’t think I would have been able to get through this without you.”

Walter hid a proud smile.

As the train swayed west out of the city, the little girl kept pointing out things of interest to her mother, objects in the compartment, the landscape beyond the window. Dash smiled at her.

“May I ask you a question?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Was that Houdini? In the station?”

“Oh … well, I suppose it might have been.”

“Houdini was in Montreal! Mama brought me to see him.”

“Ah. Did you like the show?”

“I thought it splendid!”

“We also saw him.”

“Oh, how very lucky for you.” Her mother was smiling down at her. “Did
you
enjoy the show?”

“Very much.”

“Did your brother like it?”

Dash looked over at Walt. His eyes were closed and his head was nodding against the window in time to the movement of the train.

“Yes,” said Dash. “He liked it very much.”