The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  “My own career should provide proof enough of Spiritualism’s falsity. As part of my showman’s training very early on I myself learned the secrets of their pernicious practice; I have never claimed to possess powers verging on the supernatural, as many wicked practitioners regularly do. The study of conjuring, stage-magic, and legerdemain has allowed me to reveal to the public every method employed at so-called séances by erstwhile mediums, or media, to be pedantic. These mediums ply their trade with the sole purpose of defrauding the poor, the grief-stricken, the sick-at-heart. I do not consider it a violation of the magician’s oath to unmask these parasites. A true magician seeks only to enlighten, amaze, amuse, and entertain, whilst mediums, seers, psychics, and prophets are mere confidence artists in pursuit of monetary gain based upon the exploitation of sorrow. Therefore, in addition to my speech, tonight I shall conduct a small experiment with random members of the audience gathered here and thusly demonstrate how easily trust and hope may be abused by the skilled mountebank. This portion of the discourse, I must add, is currently part of my performance at the Princess Theatre, tickets there starting at the very reasonable price of fifty cents, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Houdini smiled. The audience tittered and applauded politely. Houdini cleared his throat and shuffled the papers at his lectern. He took a sip of water and grimaced. I’d never seen him before in the flesh, only depicted in newspapers and on hoarding posters. He’d suspended himself upside-down from the cupola of the World Building on Pender Street in Vancouver and escaped from a straitjacket but I’d missed that, down with the chicken pox. Houdini wasn’t overly tall and was surprisingly thick. He had an enormous flattish head with greying hair parted strictly down the middle.

  The cocaine was providing me what I was pleased to pretend were insights into Houdini’s personality based upon his physiognomy. The man’s entire career was perhaps what they termed a compensation for his diminutive size, his physical bulk the result of the highly developed musculature necessary for the tremendous exertions demanded by his trade as escape artist. In Houdini’s movements were the grace of the practised showman and performer, even in the gentle manner with which he set down the water glass. From the man’s face, however, I thought to glean the most about his psychology. His features were marked with the striving of an absolute will. A commanding visage, well-nigh imperious and trained to be such in order to overawe and cow recalcitrant audiences into submission and credulity. Houdini could hint at intimate knowledge of the arcana mundi, show wonders, make an elephant disappear before our eyes.

  The massive brow denoted a large cerebrum. The magician would be a phrenologist’s delight. It couldn’t be doubted that he was intelligent, his fame resident on escape from impossible scenarios. Therefore: cunning, craft, a genius for self-promotion. If not for their total difference I could be describing Jack beside me.

  Houdini began to speak again in his high-pitched voice, the sole incongruity in an otherwise distinguished make-up. My interest started to sparrow around the room. On the far wall a gigantic oil of Lord Dorchester peered down on the audience nearsightedly.

  “What’re we doing here?” I whispered.

  “Came to see Smiler, for one.”

  Jack tapped the breast pocket of his coat meaningfully, the place he’d hidden the vial of cocaine. That little bastard Smiler. Here I was expelled from the school and Union for suspected narcotic theft and in my absence the rotten piker’d horned onto my racket as a going concern. I shifted uneasily in my seat, conscious that former dons might be amongst the crowd and recognize me. Looking for Smiler I found his smug face just offstage right, seated on a cane chair as part of the group that’d enticed Houdini to give his lecture. Smiler pulled at a chain to palm a ’watch from his waistcoat pocket and another bolt of envious fury shot through me.

  Houdini raised his hands and suddenly there twinkled something silver between his sinister thumb and forefinger, a needle. His oration continued: “Many if not most Spiritualist practices originate from the Indian subcontinent, where the ignorant and gullible are legion, prey to shamans, fakirs, and other so-called holy men. Some of their claims are preposterous enough to be seen for what they are and rejected outright. Others may be easily demonstrated and thus discounted. Numbered amongst these latter are claims of complete mastery over pain and bodily discomfort through supernatural succour. We see it in such explicable activities as walking over hot coals unshod or the piercing of the flesh with skewers or needles, like so.”

  With a swift motion Houdini plunged the needle into his cheek. The audience gasped and a woman let out a small cry. He pulled another pin out of thin air and stuck himself again, seemingly. Houdini smiled and even from the furthest corner of the hall I could see how wan and aged he looked. The hard bone of the skull was visible beneath the stretched skin. Heavy creases marked his forehead. He wore an air of exhaustion as he summoned Smiler to pluck the needles from his face. At this we all clapped our hands together.

  My thoughts once more fixed on that bastard Smilovich soaking in his unearned applause and I began gnashing my teeth, the chemical flavour of the drug dripping down into my pharynx. Houdini moved on to something about Theosophy and faery photography, chiding Sir Conan Doyle for his credulity. He then commenced a mind-reading display. Another of my former confederates, a chemist named Jacques Price, helped Houdini with his mentalism. Various things happened: a man was told he had a pomegranate in his pocket, another what he’d eaten for luncheon at Hausmann’s, for a third Jacques Price wrote a phrase in Italian on a chalkboard.

  “Should you be so kind as to attend my performance this week I will be able to demonstrate further,” said Houdini. “You will forgive me for not revealing the means by which I was able to demonstrate mind-reading here tonight but please rest assured that no occult power was invoked. The abilities claimed by mediums are no more than the stock-in-trade of the magical arts from the time of Moses to our present day. With sufficient training any one of you here could accomplish the same feats as I...”

  I felt Jack tense next to me of a sudden, his interest sharpened.

  “On the other hand...”

  There was a flash of light and Houdini was gone. For near on twenty seconds we sat dumb in shock until another startling explosion heralded the man’s return. He roared: “This week at the Princess Theatre you will see a complete medium’s séance with clear explanations of such erstwhile supernatural phenomena as table-rapping, the ringing of phantom bells in enclosed spaces, and ghostly apparitions including ectoplasmic forms. I will also then field a number of questions, as I do now. The floor is open, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The first question came from a weedy-looking shrimp who stood and asked: “Mr. Houdini, what have you to say about the unusual occurrences recorded by the American Charles Fort?”

  “It is my belief that Mr. Fort is in fact as skeptical of any dubious claim as I am and his documentation of the inexplicable is in aid of scientific truth and not sensationalism.”

  “Mr. Houdini, do you believe in reincarnation? In life after death?” asked a thin dark girl in spectacles.

  “I do not. Consider this: in almost every instance a medium will aver her client the returnèd incarnation of Caesar Augustus or Marie Antoinette, never slave or village idiot. Draw what conclusions you may. As for your second question: I have left secret instructions to be opened upon my death. Every year on the day of my passing a series of particular questions that only I know the answer to must be asked at a séance. Should the response be correct then we may say there is a world beyond and that Houdini has escaped from it!”

  “Mr. Houdini, are you a Jew?”

  “I am. My father was a rabbi. What possible relevance your question may possess is beyond my ability to descry.”

  He stood erect, all majesty, his hands now gripping the lectern with enormous force. It was strange; not the magician, but Jack. Why’d he risen and posed Houdini that particular question?

  The session taile
d off with a few pathetic queries on ghosts and vampires, questions Houdini batted away as equally insignificant. It was a poor showing from a supposedly well-educated audience. Houdini bowed stiffly to our applause and gathered his papers. He walked to where Smiler, Price, and others were milling in a group. Smiler was spouting philosophy, a regurgitated piece of conventional wisdom. Jack went towards my former companions. I followed, and saw their surprise as I approached. Houdini’s face tightened when Jack came to him.

  “What may I do for you?” asked Houdini, coldly.

  “Your servant, sir,” Jack said. “Pray forgive the personal nature of the question earlier. I wonder, Mr. Houdini, if you will be patient with me.”

  Very slight stress on the word “patient” and when Houdini gripped Jack’s proffered hand the escape artist’s attitude shifted.

  “What may I do for you?” Houdini asked once more.

  “I’m given to understand that you own a copy of The Curious Experience of the Patterson Family on the Island of Uffa,” Jack said.

  “I do,” said Houdini.

  The group had fallen silent, entranced by this cryptic dialogue. I saw Smiler glaring at Jack. Price had hands in pockets and was surreptitiously scratching at his groin. Jack squared his feet and continued heedless, he and Houdini sharing an understanding.

  “I’ve long wished to read the account but have never been able to find it. Have you a copy with you here in Canada?”

  “I do,” said Houdini, reluctantly.

  “I’m a quick reader and would esteem it a high honour should you lend it to a poor widow’s son. I’ll happily provide you with any surety you require.”

  “None will be necessary,” Houdini said.

  “Very well. Where may I call for it?”

  “The volume will be left for you at the front desk of my hotel, the Windsor. Your name, sir?”

  Jack gave one.

  “Thank you, Mr. Houdini.”

  They shook hands a last time. Smiler escorted the magician away. Sycophants dispersed. Jack stood still as though mesmerized.

  “Jack,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Let’s go.”

  The hall echoed as we returned to the rain. Lubie squatted on the steps, snuffling like a swine. Jack broke from his trance.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We walked quiet in the dark to the gates on Sherbrooke. True to form Jack was plotting, and I could almost hear the gears at work.

  “I’ve never heard of that book,” I said. “Who wrote it?”

  “No one.”

  “What?”

  “No one wrote it. Well, someone did, but he doesn’t exist.”

  “Who?”

  “James Watson,” Jack said.

  “Dr. Watson?”

  “The same.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “But he did.”

  “The other thing, your calling him out as a Jew and that. He’s on the level.”

  “And the square,” Jack said, hailing a taxi.

  The ’cab went uphill and along Pine to a large stone house, all stern wealth. We curled along a drive and under a porte-cochère, where Jack paid off the driver. Here spread an aroma of the nearby mountain green and rich, wet red leaves soaking in the dark, the dim spread of the city below with a suggestion of the river beyond. Not for the first time I yearned for the clean vastness of the sea. I felt a deficit of fresh oxygen in the East and I sucked up two lungfuls, closed my eyes a moment, and tried to simply exist.

  Jack whistled, gestured from between the white pillars of the portico and without further ado opened the front door, from whence issued the smell of strangely scented cigaret smoke, cloves, and a sweetish spice. In the vestibule a pretty girl tottered towards us, giggled, and vomited into a large Chinese vase. Behind her followed a tuxedoed blade, his white tie askew. He grinned stupidly and dragged the girl away. We followed a noise down the hall to its source in an expensive salon. Fifteen or twenty people made up the party and a Victrola played jazz, with barefoot couples dancing on the Turkey rug and gin bottles piled on a table. They were all young and loaded, high society nitwits. Eyes turned to Jack as he entered and swept off his hat in a gallant gesture. There were squeals from a few girls and a mild tumult.

  I hung back and scanned the vapid faces of the bright young things. Louche forms in short dresses and bobbed hair draped themselves over Chesterfields. Quasi-Valentinos wearing pulled-apart eveningwear drank and puffed at little cheroots. On a far chaise in the corner I recognized Bob’s blond head. He was talking to a copper-topped woman, her back to me and his hand high up on her thigh. As I was about to turn away I heard a laugh like a cork pulled from a bottle and felt my scrotum constrict. A face revealed itself, throat extended, mouth open with pleasure, lips a red circle. The eyes opened and looked into mine and it was her, Laura.

  I stepped into the room.

  “And what’s this?” drawled a lazy voice.

  A ponce wearing a monocle stood before me, cocktail glass in his soft pink hand.

  “He’s with me,” Jack said.

  “Does it have a name?” asked the invert.

  Fury, embarrassment, and fear clammed me up. I went dead cold.

  “How very gauche,” the monocle said. “Send it away! Back out the tradesman’s entrance!”

  No one spoke. The only sound was a scratching from the Victrola’s funnel. I was being looked at and felt a flush of heat in my damp suit, followed by a quick, choking rage.

  “Easy, Roger,” said Jack. “Welcome your guests. Be a pal.”

  The eyeglass turned to his coterie and their murmur. Someone changed the black disk and I saw Bob smirking my way but his hand was gone from touching her body. She looked in my direction, not at me but at Jack. The needle found its groove and out came Jelly Roll Morton. I could feel myself an object of scorn, persona non grata, a goat. Roger the pederast looked poison at me and his sentiment spread through the room. My true talent, Isis unveiled, the ability to provoke an instant dislike and to return the sentiment with interest. Weight of the Webley at the small of my back, six bullets ready to release. I opened my case and lit a cigaret. Jack had his overcoat off and was being poured two drinks by a flirt. He brought the mouthwash over and handed one to me, took the cigaret out of my mouth and placed it in his own.

  “Trials of Job, Mick me lad,” he said.

  “Why’d you bring me to this fandango? There’s a time you’ll go too damn far.”

  “That I’d like to see. So far you’re rock steady.”

  “I’m being tested,” I said.

  “You might call it that.”

  “And who are you to set the examination?”

  “Calm yourself, Mick. Play nice with others. Talk to some girls, make her jealous.”

  Again that amusement in his eye. He wanted me uncomfortable and off-balance. Winding me up like a tintoy. Why did I put up with it? Because he delivered. I was in the same room as she.

  A pretty little number dragged Jack off to turn a hoof. I went to the bottles by the window box and poured neat gin, my back to the revelry. I saw my reflection in the glass darkly, and felt my heart beating like a malfunctioning furnace. Ignore your parasympathetic nervous system, the baiting and humiliation. Forget it all, turn, and look at her from across the room. See her here, now. Drink it all up. Raw spirit burned going down.

  There was Roger the lord of the manor covered in his leeches, Jack with another twist dancing close to a slow foxtrot. A roar of laughter, the tumble of bottles. Laura was gone. She’d left the salon, and so had Bob. A nerve jumped along my face and twitched at my left eye. The cigaret coal burned at my knuckle and I let the stub fall, let it smoulder and burn this house down and all within it. I cut out to the hallway to find the once-retching girl passed out on the marble with her idiot chaperone beside her. The front room was empty; another door was locked with no light through the k
eyhole. Had they left the house together?

  Above my head the ceiling moaned. I climbed the carpeted stairs carefully, flanked by hanging tapestries: brass rubbings from Crusaders’ tombs. It was too dark to see until the second-storey corridor. This wing had bedroom doors left and right, all locked tight except at the end. I could hear quiet voices and a muted squeal, a grunt and a gasp. The door was open a crack and a line of light led me as I came closer. Sway of a single candle flame with shadows thrown on the wall. A canopied bed. They were on their knees on the fabric spread in an indecent posture. I felt myself looming and fading into nothing, dead. My gun was infinitely heavy, too heavy to lift. Out of the orange glow I sensed the gaze of an eye pierce out and it was hers but I turned away and walked back from the gallows. She’d left the door open. She’d wanted to be seen.

  Without knowing how it happened I found myself down in the cellar, somehow having passed through the kitchen and entered this subterrain by a fatal gravity, seeking a grave. A deep must and fungus filled my nostrils and around me ’ranged in racks were cobwebbed bottles from before the war. I wanted one, wanted an oblivion, anything but this numb agony. I selected a vintage and cracked it open with the butt of the Webley in lieu of a corkscrew but the whole thing splintered and broke, coursing staining wine over my hands as I dropped the mess to the flagged floor. Wine dripped from my fingers and mixed with blood from where the glass had cut my hand. An animal reaction guided the wound to my mouth and I tasted salt, copper, rot, death.

  It was her pure hypocrisy, her feigned virtue and purity that wounded most. All that prudery, the dry passionless kisses and timid caresses broken off. There’d been no moral principle at work in her repeated denials, her frigid refusals, her contempt. It’d simply been me, me and me alone. She’d lie with others, but not with me. The wicked, evil, two-faced liar. The love of my life, squirming with another. The whore.

  There was a thump above my head as they danced a Turkey Trot. Hunching in the basement I turned small and cold. I staunched the flowing blood with a rag. To the left was a passage elsewhere and I picked up two bottles to take with me. I followed the tunnel to an old barred door, locked from within. Wrenching the rusty bolt open started the blood again and my concern turned to a fear of contracting tetanus. Ozone poured over me. I was out on a street sloping downward into the city. There was a wind up, blowing east. The windows behind me filled with silhouettes swaying and moving. I took out the Webley, taking careful aim at a black figure in the window. Roger, fate willing. Instead I turned my back on them, pushed the cork down one bottle’s neck, and drank until near-bursting.