The Confabulist

by Steven Galloway

  “Then I will make the sign of the cross.” She drew a large cross on the top of the paper, and then, as though seized by a force outside of herself, began to write page after page of frenzied transcription.

  “Who is standing here, alongside Houdini?” Doyle asked. “Is it his mother?”

  Lady Doyle again hit her hand three times against her leg. Houdini was at once filled with both rage and joy. He knew they were playing him, but what if he was wrong? What if his mother was really there, about to speak to him? He felt a sliver of hope wedge its way into him.

  Doyle placed his hands on Lady Doyle’s shoulders, gently rubbing them, as though trying to mollify the spirit that was controlling her. He then reached down and began handing Houdini the papers on which his wife had been scrawling.

  You have answered the cry of my heart—and of his. God bless him a thousandfold for all his life and for me. Never has a mother had such a son. Tell him not to grieve, soon he’ll get all the evidence he is so anxious for. Tell him I want him to try to write at his own home. He is so, so dear to me. I am preparing so sweet a home for him which one day in God’s good time he will come to.

  I am so happy in this life. My only shadow has been that my beloved one hasn’t known how often I have been with him. He gave me so much in my life, beyond the fine clothes and an apron full of gold. He may no longer be able to hear the beating of my heart but I am still with him.

  It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful. So lofty. Sweetness all around one. Nothing that hurts and we see our beloved ones on earth. Tell him I love him more than ever. His goodness fills my soul with gladness and thankfulness. I want him to know only that, that I have bridged the gulf. Now I can rest in peace.

  Lady Doyle collapsed. Sir Arthur helped her up, prying the pencil from her hand. Houdini still held the papers in his hands. He didn’t know what to do. It was not real. He knew this. But he was stunned. These words were the words he longed to hear. There was nothing he wanted more in the world, even if they were false.

  “She wants a grandchild.” Lady Doyle’s voice was weak, but he heard her with absolute clarity.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your mother. She said to tell you to consider Bess’s request, that there is no shame in adoption.”

  Doyle and his wife exchanged a brief look. He knew this look, because he had exchanged it with Bess many times during his act. The look said, “You are going too far.”

  He wanted to smash every last thing in the room into splinters. He wanted to squeeze the life out of Doyle and his wife. He stood, shook Doyle’s hand, and walked out of the room.

  “Houdini! Wait!” Doyle called. He went downstairs and through the lobby of the hotel, out onto the boardwalk, where he looked at the lights of the hotels and casinos, watched the people walking by. For a long time he stared, not caring when the occasional person recognized him.

  His mother would never have been pacified by the sign of the cross. She was a Jew, devout until the moment of her death. She spoke no English whatsoever, and none of her patterns of speech were present in the words. She said nothing of her husband and failed to mention that today was her birthday.

  He could not believe that Bess had told Lady Doyle that she had asked him to consider adoption. It had never occurred to him that Bess would discuss their marriage with anyone else. If he couldn’t trust Bess, he was finished.

  His stupor began to break. Doyle had tried to deceive him. He had played on his deepest hopes and desires. For what purpose he didn’t yet know, but it didn’t matter. Sir Arthur was no Sherlock Holmes. If anything he was a Moriarty.

  He turned back to the hotel. A plan was forming. Only now did he fully understand what he himself had done to Harold Osbourne all those years ago. There was nothing genuine to be found with these people. They were magicians without consent. They were grave robbers, but they weren’t interested in the corpse. They took what was true and real in life, and put something of their own in its place. They stole from the dead their memory in the living. He could not imagine a more horrible thing.

  He had been wrong to give Doyle, or anyone else, the benefit of doubt. He knew how they did every cheap trick, every graft, every lie. He would expose them all for the frauds they were. He would become their strongest enemy.

  When he returned to New York, he tracked down Rose Mackenberg. He met her in a diner, in disguise, and made his proposition.

  “Why do you want to do this?” she asked.

  “For the same reason you do it,” he said. “They’re lying to people.”

  “That’s not why I do it.”

  “Then why?”

  She took a drink of her coffee, thick as mud. “I believed in them once, like others. My sister died, and medium after medium promised me a chance to speak to her again. But it was never right. Eventually I saw what was happening, how they were using my grief against me.”

  “They did the same thing to me with my mother.”

  “All right, I’ll work with you. I have conditions.”

  “Name them.”

  “My methods are my own. I am not a magician, but I have ways of accomplishing what needs to be done. I don’t need anyone telling me how to operate.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “There will be expenses. I’ll try to keep them down as much as possible, but to do what you suggest is beyond my means. I trust that you will cover these expenses?”

  “Spare no cost, Rose.”

  She folded her napkin and placed it on the table. “This last one is a deal breaker. You will, at no time, make any romantic advances toward me. If you do, I will immediately leave your employ.”

  Houdini feigned surprise. She was shrewd, he thought. He’d been admiring the smoothness of her neck, wondering if she would be as businesslike and matter-of-fact in bed. “I can assure you I would do nothing of the kind.”

  The waitress interrupted them to take their plates away, and when she was gone Rose put her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm. “I’d like it if we were honest with each other. I’m not a fool, Houdini. I know you. I’ve known you since the night we met. And I’m still here about to go to work for you. But let’s not pretend that the world is other than how it is. That’s what we’re fighting against.”

  Houdini felt like a schoolboy caught in a lie. A part of him wanted to get up and walk away from this woman who had pegged him, seeing through all his misdirection and showmanship. But he knew that if she could see through him, she could see through almost anyone.

  “I agree to all your conditions.”

  He had decided Rose wasn’t going to show when her car raced around the corner and pulled up out front. Houdini went to the basement to unlock the door leading up to the street.

  “Sorry, boss,” she said as she met him. “They were watching me. It took me a while to lose them.”

  Of course they were watching her. His organization was unraveling. He pointed to a stack of file boxes. “We need to move these to the safe house.”

  Rose picked up a box. She had been good to her word, and he had been good to his. They’d exposed several prominent mediums, but the two of them could only do so much. They needed to expand.

  As any magician knew, it’s one thing to make something disappear. If you really want to wow people, make it reappear. So he contacted his old friend Grigoriev. The spiritualists were now watching him as closely as he was watching them, but they were no match for him when it came to deception.

  Grigoriev had been in hiding ever since Melville had been removed. The communists who ran Russia now were intent on eliminating anyone connected to the Romanovs. He’d been in Appleton for the past five years, living off the jewels he’d sewn into his clothes when he fled Russia. Houdini had bought him a small house there and when called to do more, Grigoriev had agreed without hesitation.

  Houdini put him through barber school and rented a small shop in the Bronx. From there Grigoriev managed a
team of thirty investigators, all of whom had been secretly trained by either Rose or himself. Most were magicians who had fallen on hard times, and some had been hurt by the frauds they now pursued.

  Every so often Houdini would go for a haircut and while he sat in the chair Grigoriev would update him on their progress. He’d slip him coded information if possible. They never met outside the barber shop. Houdini thought that his old friend Chung Ling Soo would be proud of the lengths he’d undertaken to maintain this deception.

  Houdini, Rose, and Grigoriev began to realize how ingrained into the halls of power the spiritualist movement had become. Rose and other operatives had observed congressmen, senators, judges, mayors, and their wives at séances, where they were advised on matters of state, and had seen the wonder in their eyes as they listened intently to the advice they later acted upon. Margery Crandon, the witch of Beacon Hill, managed to capture the ear of some of the leading power brokers of Boston society as well as more than one former skeptic. Through Walter, her deceased brother and erstwhile guide to the afterlife, she became a central figure in the overall movement.

  Grigoriev had argued that she was of more value to them unexposed, that the files they were amassing in investigation of her held information that was of greater importance than the exposure of any one medium. Now, Houdini wished he’d listened to the cagey Russian.

  As Houdini sat in Margery Crandon’s downstairs sitting room waiting for the rest of the Scientific American committee on the existence of psychic phenomena to join him, he considered what to do next. These five men, assembled because of their scientific backgrounds and ability to distinguish fact from falsehood, had one by one fallen under her spell. They all clearly believed they had just been visited by the spirit of Margery’s dead brother, Walter. They had forgotten they were there to test the veracity of her claims.

  He could see how it had happened. Margery Crandon was much more ingenious than most mediums, and definitely talented. Though not conventionally beautiful, she was alluring in a way that was hard to resist. When she looked you in the eye, you could not look away, and there was a hint of salaciousness in the way the corner of her mouth turned up when she smiled. She was small and strong, and unusually athletic.

  Her husband, Dr. Le Roi Crandon, was in almost every way her opposite. Dour, ugly, and devoid of charm, his presence propelled people toward her. They were making a fortune, and while Margery didn’t seem to care about money, the same could not be said of Dr. Crandon. Houdini wondered how certain women manage to get entangled with men who are in every way their inferior.

  Rose had been to several of Crandon’s séances, and believed she was engaged sexually with members of the committee, particularly Malcolm Bird, the secretary. Houdini assumed that her husband put her up to it.

  He heard footsteps approaching. He had not yet decided whether to announce his conclusion here at the house or if it might be wise to wait until he got back to New York. Boston was not his town, and there were people here who wished him harm.

  Malcolm Bird appeared in the doorway, paused as though surprised to see Houdini there, and then continued into the room. Never had a man been so incorrectly named. Malcolm Bird resembled a bespectacled ferret. He was tall, lean, and awkward, and his suit did not quite fit. It was possible, Houdini decided, that the fault lay not in the garment but in what was holding it up.

  Behind him followed Orson Munn, the editor in chief of Scientific American. He was a marked contrast to Bird: sharply dressed; his silver hair receding with dignity; a smooth, confident stride that identified him as a man of intelligence. He seemed unusually flustered.

  Houdini waited for the two other members of the committee, Hereward Carrington and Daniel Comstock, to join them. Munn sat down in the chair beside him, while Bird loomed like the oversized weasel he was.

  “Where are the others?” Houdini asked.

  “They’ve gone back to the hotel to begin preparing our report,” Bird said in an excited tone.

  “Shouldn’t we at least discuss what we saw?”

  Orson Munn looked at him, incredulous. “What is there to discuss?”

  Houdini didn’t want to cause a scene, not here in the Crandons’ home, but he could under no circumstances allow them to include him in any report that verified Margery’s claims as true.

  “I saw no evidence of psychic ability,” he said in his most measured tone.

  Munn’s jaw hung farther open, reminding him of a dead fish. “But you saw it the same as I did,” he said.

  “He doesn’t care about the truth,” Bird said. “There’s too much money at stake for him.”

  Houdini ignored this obvious attempt to bait him. He turned to Munn. “What did you see?”

  Munn closed his mouth enough to wet his lips. “Walter rang the bell box. He threw the megaphone across the room, and he tipped over the table. We were there, and Margery was under our control at all times. There is no other explanation.”

  “There is another rational explanation for each of these things, and indeed I can reproduce these phenomena right now, if you like.”

  “Preposterous!” Bird was almost in flight. Houdini would have laughed if there wasn’t so much at stake. “This is slander, nothing more. He’s had it out for her since the very beginning.”

  “Enough, Bird,” Munn said, warning him away with a dismissive wave. “Tell me, Houdini, if this is a ruse, what her method was.”

  The séance had begun with them sitting in a circle of chairs. Houdini controlled one side of Margery, his hand holding hers, and their legs touching. Bird did the same on the other side, and Munn sat between Bird and Houdini in similar fashion. Once each person had a hand and leg in physical contact the lights were extinguished. The bell box, a small wooden box with an electric bell inside that rang when the box’s lid was pressed down, had been placed under Houdini’s seat. The idea was that the ringing of the bell would announce Walter’s presence.

  “Through a series of small movements,” Houdini said, “Mrs. Crandon moved herself toward me, shifting her leg against mine enough so that she could ring the bell with her foot. It’s a simple trick, hard to detect, but one that is easily replicated.”

  Bird snorted. “How was it, then, that you were able to detect it?”

  Houdini leaned down and rolled up his pant leg. His leg was red and swollen. “I have, since this morning, been wearing a rubber bandage around my leg. I removed it immediately before the séance, but it has left my leg raw and extremely sensitive to movement. Even the subtlest shift from Mrs. Crandon’s leg was immensely painful and easy to detect.”

  “Says you.”

  “Yes, says I. Do you suppose I am not on this committee for a reason?”

  “Fine,” Munn said. “It is possible she rang the bell in this way. What about throwing the megaphone?”

  The megaphone, a large wooden cone, amplified spirit voices when required. At one point Walter, speaking through Margery, had asked for an illuminated plaque to be placed on top of the bell box. Then Walter had said that the megaphone was floating in the air, and Houdini should tell him in what direction he wanted it thrown. Houdini asked that it be thrown at his feet, and it was. They then reconvened in the dark around a table. With her hands and feet still under control, and sitting well back of the table, Margery/Walter caused the table to lurch violently up in the air and land again with a frightening crash.

  “The megaphone was the cleverest of her deceptions. As a magician I cannot help but admire it. Mr. Bird, do you admit that when, on Walter’s request, you left to retrieve the illuminated plaque for the bell box you released control of Margery for a moment?”

  “I did,” Bird huffed, “But the megaphone didn’t fly through the air until well after I had regained control.”

  “I agree,” Houdini said. “The plaque gave off just enough light for us to see the floor, but not much else. So we were unable to see that Mrs. Crandon had, while her hand was free of yours, placed the megaphone on her head
. It was a simple matter for her to tip her head in whatever direction I selected and let the megaphone fall to the ground.”

  Bird glared at him. He was in on the whole thing. Houdini knew that Rose had been correct—Bird was sleeping with Margery Crandon.

  “And the table?” Munn asked.

  “An old trick. We assume because she sat back from the table that this decreased her ability to move it. All she had to do was lean forward, place the back of her head underneath the edge of the table, and then sit up sharply. I felt her do exactly this, as plain as day.”

  “You’re a liar, Houdini, and you know it.” Bird’s voice reminded him of a petulant child denied a sweet.

  “I think we all know what’s gone on here,” he said. “My reputation will remain intact, sir.”

  “Enough.” Munn stood up. “The committee can meet tomorrow in full to discuss the matter.”

  Houdini stood, and with Munn he moved toward the door. Bird stayed still.

  “Will you be joining us?” Munn asked.

  Bird shook his head. “I am lodging here as a guest of the Crandons.”

  Houdini snorted, though only for show. He had known Bird was a houseguest of the Crandons. “And you have the nerve to question my credibility.”

  Outside, in the hall, Dr. Le Roi Crandon stood motionless. Houdini met his gaze as he passed him. He could feel Crandon’s eyes on him as he made his way to the door.

  “Have a safe trip back to New York, Houdini.”

  The committee met late the next morning, and they bickered through lunch. Houdini let them shout it out. He planned to resign the moment he’d written letters to the Times and a half dozen other papers explaining the Crandons’ subterfuge.

  When he returned to his room there was a note waiting, slipped under his door.

  Lennox Hotel, room 314, 4 p.m. Please come alone. MC

  A few hours later, at precisely 4 p.m., Houdini knocked on the door. There was a light shuffling from inside and then silence. The lock clicked and the door opened inward.