Houdini's Last Trick (The Burdens Trilogy)

by Khalaf, David

  The rest of the trip was a blur. They got off in New Orleans, then took a train northeast toward Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, New York.

  Manhattan. Home.

  Once they got off the train at Grand Central, the past couple of weeks sloughed off the magician like a dry, old skin. The Houdinis took the subway to Harlem, and walked the final block to their brownstone. Houdini entered their home first, just to be safe, but everything appeared to be in order.

  While Bess showered, Houdini bought groceries and prepared their favorite dish, chicken paprikash with spätzle. He had cut up the dough for the dumplings, and was checking the water to see if it was hot enough when Bess entered the kitchen, her hair still wet.

  She took his hand.

  “Where’s my kiss?” she asked.

  “Your kiss?”

  “When you left here two weeks ago you promised two kisses. One for then and one for now. I’m collecting on the second one.”

  “But aren’t you furious with me?”

  “There will be plenty of time for hurt feelings, for arguments, for accusations of betrayal,” she said. “But not today. Today we are home, and we are safe, and I couldn’t be any happier.”

  Houdini pulled her in tight and kissed her like he’d never kissed anyone before. There were beauties out there in the world, but none of them compared to Bess. Bess was his.

  “Go,” she said. “Clean up and I’ll finish supper.”

  Houdini turned but stopped in the doorway.

  “You’re feeling better, then?”

  “I’m learning to control your gift,” she said. “To balance the internal and the external. Your talent, it really is magic.”

  “You know I don’t believe in the supernatural.”

  “Maybe it’s not supernatural,” Bess said. “Maybe it’s simply natural. The way I see it, your gift, and the gifts of the others, are what we all should be, and it’s the rest of humanity that has fallen short.”

  Houdini thought his wife even more insightful than himself.

  “We should go into hiding for a while,” Houdini said. “And I think we should give up magic. For our safety.”

  Bess approached him and held a wooden spoon under his chin, wielding it like a knife.

  “We will not hide from the world,” she said. “You have a gift, and we will protect it at all costs—except at the cost of not using it.”

  She patted him lightly on the cheek with the spoon.

  “We will continue your magic, you and I. Even if it kills us.”

  Houdini was never more proud of his wife, and never more frightened for her safety.

  When he went upstairs, he found their luggage from the trip laid out on the bed, including the newspaper they had picked up in Dallas. What concerned him about the story of the MGM backlot was not what the article said, but what it didn’t.

  There was no mention of a giant man, alive or dead.

  INTERLUDE II

  CALAMITY JANE POURED a tumbler four fingers high of Gilbert & Parsons Hygienic Whiskey, and thrust it into Harry Houdini’s hand.

  “I only drink whiskey,” she said. “Hard liquor for a hard life.”

  Jane would bet a gold nugget that there was more alcohol in that one glass than the magician had consumed in his entire twenty-six years of life. Houdini brought the glass to his nose, gave it a whiff, and suppressed a gag.

  “You better work on your tolerance, boy,” Jane said. “You may need it some day.”

  “I can’t see what for,” Houdini said.

  Jane poured herself a glass, downed it, then poured herself another.

  “You drink too much,” Petey told her.

  Jane ignored the voice in her head and set to loading the rifle on her cot. When she finished, she set it on her lap, pointed at the small wooden door at the front of the train car.

  She shared a car with both the cook and the seamstress of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. It was cramped and cluttered, but the colorful blankets Jane had hung for privacy gave it the intimate feel of a child’s play fortress.

  Houdini, who was sitting in the only chair, forced himself to take a sip of the whiskey. By his expression it looked as if he’d just swallowed gasoline, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Gilbert & Parsons was what you bought for quantity, not quality.

  As the sun set south of Cheyenne, Jane adjusted the flame of the kerosene lamp with her arthritic fingers. She looked out across the flat plains on which she had grown up. This stretch of track was thirty miles from the closest town, and the isolation made her uneasy.

  “Four years ago I asked you what your real talent was,” Jane said. “You remember?”

  The two hadn’t seen each other since their short encounter in Minnesota. Houdini was still on the vaudeville circuit, but from what Jane heard he had dropped the cards from his act and was gaining a reputation for his dramatic escapes.

  She had seen his name on the marquee across the street from the Wild West show. It was a small theater, but Houdini was the headlining act.

  He nodded.

  “I remember.”

  “Well?” she asked. “Are you just a great magician, or is there something more?”

  He stared into his glass. There was a thoughtfulness in his expression that had been absent a few years ago.

  “I spend long hours thinking,” he said. “About magic, life, all sorts of things. The longer I sit the more aware I become of myself. My heartbeat, my breathing, the functions of my body. And then, it’s as if I can see myself from the outside.”

  “It’s your Burden,” Jane said. “Your unique gift, and your unique challenge.”

  “And you,” Houdini said, “you said you get hunches. About what?”

  Jane looked out the window and took in the hard-packed land along the tracks. Her eyes weren’t good, but patches of grass along the tracks appeared to be flattened, as if horses had been there.

  “All sorts of stuff,” she said. “Mostly danger.”

  Houdini looked up at her, his eyes blazing.

  “It’s been getting stronger.”

  Jane nodded and twisted uncomfortably on the edge of her cot. Her sciatica was worse every day.

  “Petey used to be an occasional whisper,” she said. “Now he damn near runs my life.”

  “Petey?”

  Jane pointed to her head. She didn’t try to explain Petey to anyone, but she didn’t bother to hide him anymore, either. Her intuition had become sharper as the years went on, which meant that Petey became more talkative. It had gotten to where he almost never shut up anymore.

  “I listen to Petey whether I’m keen to or not,” she said. “I don’t have much choice.”

  The train chugged along rhythmically, the slow heartbeat of a mighty beast. They’d reach Denver by noon the next day, perform two nights of shows plus a matinee at the local vaudeville theaters, then turn right back around for Wyoming, all in under seventy-two hours. It was a grueling schedule on Jane’s broken-down body.

  Out the small window, she could see a knoll up ahead, the only change in landscape for miles around.

  “Ask him my question,” Petey said.

  Jane hocked a mouthful of mucus into a spittoon she kept by her cot.

  “Of course I’ll ask him!” she said to the air. “Why do you think I brought him here? And before you lay into me, Imma drink as much as I want.”

  Whiskey was the only thing that would shut Petey up. She knew it would kill her sooner rather than later, but it was worth the few minutes of silence.

  Houdini sipped his drink in an effort to ignore whatever argument Jane appeared to be having with herself.

  “Petey wanted me to ask you a question,” Jane said. “What’s on your gravestone?”

  It was a nonsense inquiry, even to Jane herself. But when Petey was insistent about something, it was best to give him what he wanted.

  “My gravestone?” Houdini asked. “I don’t know, and I hope not to for some time. Why do you, er, why does he ask
?”

  “I dunno,” Jane said. “Just a hunch, I s’pose.”

  It sounded like a riddle, sleight-of-hand for the mind. Petey had become increasingly inscrutable, as if he didn’t even trust Jane.

  “I imagine my gravestone will have my name,” Houdini said. “And below that, perhaps it will say ‘The Greatest Magician on Earth.’”

  Jane shrugged.

  “I reckon it might.”

  She saw little brown specks appear on top of the knoll, like fleas on the back of a dog—except these fleas grew larger as they charged the train. Jane yawned.

  “You don’t seem impressed,” Houdini said.

  “I think there’s more to you than that,” Jane said. “I get a sense about you. Petey does too.”

  Houdini was a showman, but Jane could tell he took little pleasure in the attention. He performed for the love of magic itself. There was something pure in his motivations, something virtuous about the man himself.

  “Tell him what I told you about magic,” Petey said.

  Jane grimaced and brushed him off. She became aware of hooting and hollering from somewhere nearby.

  “Tell him.”

  “Petey wants me to tell you that magic is important, but it isn’t the meaning you’re looking for. Magic is the means. Remember that. Magic isn’t the meaning, it’s the means.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Houdini said.

  Petey started to explain but Jane downed the rest of her glass. It was enough to confuse him and shut him up.

  “Think of it like this,” Jane said. “Magic is a train. It will get you places. But the destination is never the train itself.”

  “Then what is my destination?” Houdini asked.

  The car door burst open and a filthy man, eyes wild with fear and excitement, pointed his gun at the magician. Jane pulled the trigger on the rifle that was already aimed at his chest. The crack of her firearm bounced off the walls, drowning out the screams of the cook and seamstress in the back half of the car. The man staggered from the impact, hit the wall behind him, and died before his body hit the floor.

  “You must protect your talent, and cultivate it,” she said, casually popping the bullet casing out of the rifle. “Use it, but don’t boast about it. Men would kill for talent like yours. Don’t you ever let them.”

  Houdini had his hands over his head, cowering into his seat. Eventually the magician mustered the courage to look up. He took in the dead man, a six-shooter in one hand and a burlap sack in the other.

  “Train robbers?”

  Jane nodded. It was the reason she had invited Houdini for a drink when she heard he had hitched a ride on the train. A city slicker like him, clean cut in a nice suit, would get fleeced by a gang of outlaws, and probably killed. Jane had a hunch it was her duty to protect the young magician, even if she didn’t quite know why.

  “Maybe you should give some more thought to that gravestone,” Jane said. “You never know when you’re going to need it.”

  Houdini couldn’t tear his eyes away from the robber.

  “And you?” he asked, his voice still shaky. “What will yours say?”

  “That’s easy,” she said. “It’ll say, ‘Here lies Calamity Jane. Most of her stories were hogwash, but the best ones were true.’”

  She drank straight from the bottle.

  “I reckon I’ve lived enough stories to make myself a legend,” she said. “I got a hunch you’ll have your share of stories too. Maybe next time we meet you’ll have some to tell me.”

  “I’d like that,” Houdini said.

  “You’ll never see him again,” Petey said. “You’ll be dead. I told you, you drink too much.”

  Jane paused. A smile broke out across her face. She let out a long, rasping laugh before erupting into a painful fit of coughing.

  “Are you all right?” Houdini asked.

  Jane took another swig from her bottle and knocked hard on the side of her head, right on the spot where that incessant voice lived.

  “I’ve never been better.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IF MAGIC WAS Houdini’s train, it had derailed.

  He and Bess holed up in their cabin in Vermont for the next three months, weathering a blizzard of bad press. There were no shows for the magician to do because of the fiasco in Hollywood. Fairbanks had painted Houdini as old and incompetent, and the large theaters that once welcomed the magician now found excuses not to book him.

  The blackballing ultimately worked out in the magician’s favor. Smaller, less picky venues were still glad to host the world-renowned entertainer, and they required little advance notice for their shows. Often ads in local newspapers would appear only the day before a show, if at all. Sometimes the performances were simply word of mouth.

  In this way, Houdini and Bess traveled the Northeast, performing in small towns at vaudeville halls they would have scoffed at a year ago. They always stayed under false names, and never disclosed their hotel to anyone, not even the theater owner or stage manger.

  During those days, Houdini’s act wasn’t needlessly risky. He revived some of his classic escapes, and even returned to some of the intricate sleight-of-hand tricks he had been forced to abandon in the larger venues. His illusions were as complex as ever, but they lacked the flamboyance he once felt pressured to give an audience. The magic he performed was for himself, not for the insatiable expectations of others.

  Houdini heard whispers that he had lost his touch, that he was afraid to perform anything dangerous after his failed stunt in Hollywood. He let the comments pass over his head like harmless wisps of clouds. During the Hangman’s Death, he had very nearly died, and by no fault of his own. Bess would have found out the next day when she picked up the morning newspaper. What an awful way to discover your husband’s death.

  What is worth dying for? Bess, and only Bess.

  He no longer felt the need to push himself to the brink for the amusement of others. Whatever legacy he left in magic, Houdini wanted his greatest legacy to be his devotion to his wife. If magic was the means, Bess was the meaning. As a precaution for her safety, Houdini insisted that Bess wear the Ring of the Fisherman whenever she wasn’t on stage assisting him. She scoffed the first few times but eventually gave in.

  Despite their public shows, they weren’t careless; Houdini became as detail-oriented over security as he was about his performance. He left long lists of written demands for the stage manager the day before a show—doors to be locked, windows to be secured, doormen to be posted at all entrances. Every evening when he entered his dressing room, he checked to make sure a fresh white carnation had been placed on his vanity. Once, in Punxsutawney, when it had not, he grabbed Bess and led her out.

  “No show,” Houdini told the stage manager as they stomped through the foyer.

  “We have to!” the frazzled man said. “We have guests arriving in thirty minutes!”

  “You made promises…” Houdini said.

  He walked to a side door that led to an alley. He pushed it, and it opened, unlocked. Furthermore, there was no doorman there to guard it.

  “…That you didn’t keep.”

  “Some minor oversights,” the manager stammered. “We meant to do them.”

  “An honest ‘no’ is safer than a dubious ‘yes.’”

  The magician and his wife exited the theater.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “The carnation,” Houdini said. “It’s the last to-do item on my checklist. If it isn’t there, then I can’t count on any other item being completed.”

  The Houdinis left that town and never returned.

  After months in hiding, and the subsequent months on the road, furtively hopping from town to town, Houdini began to feel that life could start getting back to normal. It had been more than a year since his trip to Hollywood, and large venues were now extending invitations to perform after public memory had faded. For the first time since his visit to California, he allowed himself to
hope that perhaps Atlas really had been killed.

  Charlie Chaplin had done as he had promised, and had convinced Pickford and Fairbanks to help in the search for a Burden who might be able to destroy the Eye. Last Houdini heard, Chaplin was in Texas scouting out a young engineer who had an unusually keen sense of how machines and other processes worked.

  Of Pickford and Fairbanks, Houdini heard nothing.

  During long periods of travel, Houdini took the opportunity to put his expertise down on paper. His book, Houdini on Magic, would reveal all of his illusions, would explain every sleight-of-hand movement and detail every escape. Houdini decided that his secrets would not go to the grave with him in the manner of so many magicians before him. If his illusions revealed raised up a generation of magicians more talented than he, all the better. He would live his life with an open hand, not a closed fist.

  One late October evening in Montreal, Canada, the tap of his typewriter was interrupted by a soft rap at the door. Houdini and his wife were staying down the street from the Imperial Theatre on Bleury Street, in a posh hotel with glittery chandeliers and floor mosaics so intricate the tiles looked as if they had been laid in by elves with forceps.

  The hotel commissionaire announced himself, and Houdini answered the door. The man’s cheeks were ruddy from being out in the biting autumn wind. He held a cream-colored envelope in his hand.

  “This came for you by air mail,” he said. “It must be urgent.”

  “Thank you.”

  Houdini took the letter and tipped the young man generously. The magician had all of his mail delivered to a post office box, then had the commissionaire stop by each evening to pick it up.

  The piece of mail was made out to him, with no return address. He opened it up and read:

  Mr. Houdini,

  I’ve been trying to contact you, but you are as elusive as one might expect of an escape artist. I must speak to you about rather urgent matters. It concerns something I have. Something very valuable.