Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “Yes, Mr. Houdini.”

  Houdini laughed. “Oh, you needn’t call me Mr. Houdini. Call me Houdini.” They shook hands. Houdini’s grip felt like a leather-lined vise. “Are you sober enough to join me onstage?”

  “Yes. You know, I only had a few sips—”

  Houdini waved his hand, shushing Carter. “We’ll discuss that later. It’s a disgusting habit, and it causes weak men to make strong excuses. Come.”

  It was no use trying to contradict Houdini, so he followed. He wasn’t exactly sure what Houdini had in mind. He had a naive, childish feeling that Houdini would announce that Mysterioso was out, and Carter was in. A miracle: an hour after being fired, he would be anointed by the most famous man in the world. He and Houdini—Houdini!—stood by the still-trussed-up Mysterioso, who had finally succumbed to exhaustion, and lay still on the stage. The air smelled of smoke from the jugglers’ torches, and Carter wasn’t sure whether to make eye contact with any of Mysterioso’s crew. Houdini patted Carter on the back, hailing the audience with his other hand. Some people watched the stage, but most of the audience was conversing with each other, and, Carter noted, a few young men had recovered themselves enough to exchange calling cards with the girls in rows G and H.

  “Maestro, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ again,” Houdini said, “but sotto, sotto.”

  Carter was fairly sure he meant pianissimo, but nonetheless, the orchestra struck up the theme, quietly, and gradually the audience began to pay attention again.

  “Lay-dies and Gen-tile-men,” Houdini cried. “I bring to your attention Carter! Carter the Great!” A few people cheered and there was some applause, which Houdini impatiently interrupted. “He is a very good magician.” Houdini shook Carter’s hand again. Carter tried to press this moment permanently in his mind’s eye, from the firm and sweaty pressure of their palms and fingers together, to how the clear gelatin Houdini had painted on his face to wrinkle it was now beginning to peel; he registered the expectant gaze of his fellow performers in the wings, as well as his own excitement. For the first time all evening, he even allowed himself to look up to his parents’ box high above stage right: his mother and father and James and Tom were standing, applauding, waving to him—what pride Carter felt! what a moment in his life! “Thank you all for coming,” Houdini said. “Good night. Curtain, please.”

  The curtain dropped in front of them with the speed of a falling tree. Houdini broke their grip, patting Carter on the arm. “Really, Carter, you are a fine magician.”

  “Thank you.”

  Houdini nodded and walked off. Carter stared after him, drawing a slow and steady breath, and then, as though he had added up a long column of figures, he realized the sum of what had happened: Houdini had praised him. The curtain had dropped. Nothing more. He was still fired.

  A stagehand found Carter: his family was waiting for him by the orchestra pit, and anxious to meet Houdini.

  The dancers filed offstage to remove their paint, except for Annabelle, who was still in her frilly white dress. She settled down by the lion’s cage to roll a smoke. Stagehands tore down the scenery, and a crowd formed around Houdini, who had already taken out a stack of cream-colored calling cards, which he had presigned, “Best—Houdini!!!” As people approached him, he passed them the cards instead of engaging in conversation. He tossed a set of keys to some of Mysterioso’s men, and told them that if they wanted to free their boss before midnight, they should start now.

  Then Houdini approached Carter again. “Blackmail was an extravagant illusion,” Houdini said. Carter prepared a “thank you,” but was suddenly unsure of how to take the word extravagant. Houdini continued, “It was wonderful how you humiliated that scoundrel, but it’s not as if you can find new enemies with dogs night after night.”

  That concept. It sounded familiar. “So I’ve heard.” Clearly, Houdini had talked with Murdoch. He knew, then, that Carter had been fired.

  “On the other hand, Houdini has enemies.” Houdini stroked his chin, approximating thoughtfulness.

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Are you familiar with my brother Hardeen?”

  Carter had seen Theo Hardeen perform twice, but wasn’t sure if he should admit it. Hardeen was notorious for his deeply felt appreciation of his brother’s act, meaning he stealthily used copies of Houdini’s illusions six months after Houdini had debuted them. The brothers frequently, and vehemently, denounced each other.

  Houdini took Carter by the arm and led him far from the rest of the crowd. He spoke quickly, but with perfect enunciation. “He and I have an arrangement and it’s good to escalate it from time to time. If he were to get a dog and parade it around for a few months, I could use your Blackmail effect at the Hippodrome, and it would certainly up the ante. Six thousand people would see it, every night.” Houdini spoke as if he’d planned this out months beforehand, and Carter was free to be amazed. “I’ll pay you well for the illusion. How much did it cost you?”

  Carter didn’t blink. “It cost me two thousand dollars.”

  “Two thousand—” Houdini pursed his lips. Then, smiling, he admonished Carter with a fingertip. “That will never do, you must come clean with me, Carter. I’ll pay you eight hundred dollars for it, right now.”

  Carter looked at the barrel-vaulted ceiling far, far in the shadows. Houdini was swooping in with a lowball offer. Prolonged exposure to one’s heroes wasn’t necessarily a treat. “No,” he finally said, pursing his lips.

  “No?” It was as if Houdini had never heard the word before.

  From across the stage, cutting through the stagehands chattering as they struck the set, Baby suddenly cried out. It wasn’t a mighty or fearsome sound—it was a weak, frustrated complaint.

  “Excuse me,” Carter said.

  “Of course,” Houdini said, bowing slightly.

  Carter pushed through the crowd. The word no had exhausted him. He needed a moment to think. What kind of an idiot turned down money when he needed it so badly? His father would kill him.

  He met Annabelle, who looked with concern into Baby’s cage.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “I was just talking to him, trying to get him to stop pacing. Something’s really killing him.”

  Baby gave his anguished moan again, closing his eyes in what looked like a wince, pacing two body lengths in one direction, turning, toenails clacking against the iron floor. Carter walked around the cage, which was divided in half by a false wall. There was a turntable built into the bottom so Mysterioso, in a lion skin, could replace Baby. Carter saw the lion skin heaped in the hidden side of the cage, the side Mysterioso usually crouched in.

  First making sure there was no way Baby could get around the false wall, Carter climbed into the cage.

  “Hey,” Annabelle said. She climbed in after him, holding up the hem of her dress with one hand. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to know how he’s made to roar.” He rolled the lion skin up—it was real, and smelled of paint and formaldehyde—and looked where the wall met the cage’s rubber-matted floor.

  Annabelle crouched next to Carter. “I liked your trick.”

  “Thank you. It got me fired.”

  “Yeah, but you gotta admit, it was worth it. Did you like doing it?”

  Carter looked at her with surprise. “I never thought about that. Yes, very much, except the guilt afterward.” Annabelle said nothing, no “easy meat” comments, so Carter continued. “Do you like scrapping every night?”

  “Yeah. Why’s Houdini still here, anyway?”

  “He wants to buy Blackmail.”

  Annabelle gazed at Houdini, who was now approaching. She whispered, “Don’t let him get it too easy.”

  Carter’s fingers brushed against the rubber matting, and he simply said, unhappily, “Oh, no.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  Carter listened carefully. Baby was pacing in the other side of the cage, click-click-click of his toenails. Carter didn’t need to lo
ok any further. He’d figured out what made Baby roar. He sat down. Here came Houdini.

  Houdini gripped the cage’s bars. “Carter, walking off won’t get me to raise my price. In fact, I think seven hundred fifty makes a fine offer, too.”

  “You might be interested in this, Houdini.”

  “In what?”

  Carter explained that there was a mystery he’d just solved: every night, as Mysterioso crouched in this cage, in his lion skin, behind his false wall, the lion, just on the other side of the cage, was made to roar.

  Houdini chuckled, “Not much of a mystery, Carter, either a voice or visual command—”

  “It’s not.”

  “Or it’s . . .” Houdini stood back, comparing the two sides of the cage. “Good heavens,” he muttered. He looked under the cage. He looked back at Carter, mouth forming words, color coming to his face. Then Houdini turned away, shouting at the stagehands, “Get him loose! Get Mysterioso loose right now!”

  Then, Annabelle noticed it herself. “There’s something different about this side. Hey, there’s rubber on this side. The floor of the other side is iron—”

  Amazingly, Annabelle had an eye even keener than Carter’s, and found, now that she knew what she was looking for, that two sets of wires were sticking out through the floor. All one had to do was touch one set of wires to the other, and—

  Annabelle said, “He shocks Baby. He shocks him. Every single goddamned night. That son of a bitch!”

  She shot out of the cage while Carter added it up: the lion was pacing because he knew that when he was rolled onstage, he would be shocked, and tonight, he thought his torture was being prolonged.

  Mysterioso, finally freed, now wobbled to his feet, rubbing his bleeding wrists. The dozen workers onstage had put their backs to him the way schoolchildren ignore the dunce the teacher has punished. Houdini, a full head shorter than he, reached up to his lapels and shook him.

  “This is the end of you, Mysterioso! Do you hear me!” Houdini had more to say—when dressing someone down, Houdini always had more to say—and Carter was amazed to hear what it was. With a blunt force French accent, Houdini intoned: “‘Puisque toutes les créatures sont—’” but got no further; a red-headed blur ripped Mysterioso from his grasp and pinned him onto the stage.

  “Coward!” Annabelle shouted, righting herself, pinning Mysterioso’s arms down with her knees. “Coward!” She punched his face, knocking his head from side to side, alternating blows with her left and right fists, then changing to open-handed slaps.

  Carter stood near Houdini, each of them poised to stop her, but neither quite willing to intervene.

  “Coward!” she cried again. She grabbed his ears and banged his head against the floorboards.

  From a distance, Houdini called out to Mysterioso, “Yes, you’re a coward. You’ve broken a cardinal rule, you may no longer perform as a magician, I’m having you barred from the Society of American Magicians,” and continued in that vein. Carter had never heard another magician refer to Keyes’s rules as cardinal, but now wasn’t the time to ask about it.

  Carter approached Annabelle. “Annabelle,” he whispered.

  She looked up with Mysterioso’s head still in her hands. Her green and gold eyes were awake with anger. Then she stood, kicking a toe against Mysterioso. “He’s alive,” she said, sounding disappointed. She shook her right hand out, and sucked on a finger. “I need some ice.” And she walked away, breathing hard.

  “Well, she’s spirited,” Houdini declared, as soon as she had left the stage. “Is she your sweetheart?”

  “No.” As Carter said it, he felt regret. “When men get fresh, she tends to punch them.”

  “I see. Have you been punched?”

  “No.”

  Houdini clapped him on the back. “Good man! If you can keep the drinking under control, you’ll be a fine magician until you’re a hundred and one. Now, Carter, about Blackmail—”

  “I can’t sell it outright.” Aware that it didn’t pay to rankle Houdini, Carter continued. “I’m flattered, of course.”

  Houdini smiled grimly. “One doesn’t get offers every day from Houdini.”

  “But without an income in the future,” he said carefully, “it’s my only asset and I should consider licensing it instead. If I had five or six or seven magicians using it—”

  “Five or six with enemies?” Houdini’s eyebrows arched.

  “It could become the new trend in magic. It could become quite common, Houdini.”

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Houdini said, grimacing as if he’d just tasted spoiled milk. Carter, who had concocted a full-scale plan by now, was gazing over Houdini’s shoulder. Houdini turned and saw that Carter was looking at the lion, who, as if satisfied by the sight of Mysterioso’s beating, now sat quietly, tip of tongue sticking out, his paws between the bars of the cage. Houdini looked at the stage. He looked at the lion again. He looked at Carter, who was regarding the props remaining onstage with proprietary interest, and Carter thought as loudly as he could: Make me the headliner. Let me do the job I was born for.

  Houdini said, “I see. I see. Yes. Perhaps I can help you. But tell me honestly—we will work something out on this Blackmail illusion? You’ll be fair about it?”

  Carter nodded.

  “So then. Where are you from?” Houdini asked. The question sounded innocuous and sly at the same time; it wasn’t what he actually wished to discuss.

  “San Francisco.”

  “I see. And is your mother still with us?”

  “She is.”

  Houdini took in a great breath. “Is she a wonderful woman?”

  Carter responded forcefully: “Oh, yes.”

  “And you love her?”

  “I love her. She gets hooked on the latest fashions in psychology, but—” Carter paused. Houdini obviously hadn’t been after a critique.

  “Can you swear an oath by your sainted mother to be loyal to me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Swear it, then.” Houdini took Carter’s hands between his. “Swear loyalty to me in your mother’s name.”

  The conversation had turned bizarre, but this was not altogether surprising. Houdini, Carter had long heard rumors, was fixated on such oaths among magicians; Carter felt dizzy with pride—he was worthy of an oath. “I swear on my mother’s, on my mother’s life—”

  “Good! Excellent!”

  “—loyalty to Houdini.” Carter finished.

  Houdini broke their grip. “Have you had your supper yet?”

  Carter shook his head.

  “Let’s go find Albee. He knows the best restaurants in San Francisco.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Back in the dressing room, Carter introduced Houdini to his parents, to James and Tom. Houdini took special care with Mrs. Carter, praising her for raising such a fine young man. Mr. Carter asked once, and only once, about what would happen next season. Carter was prepared to tell him that they would need to wait and see, but Houdini said, “I will make Charles Carter the next headliner—all he needs is to follow my lead!” With that, Houdini turned on his heel, beckoning Carter over his shoulder, and striding masterfully out of the dressing room.

  Carter looked behind him. His family was ecstatic, James and Tom exchanging “can-you-top-that” type comments, his parents holding hands. He’d never seen them excited like this before, and his career had certainly never caused them this kind of reaction. The sight was thrilling and yet oddly melancholy, like it promised him some kind of loss. But he didn’t know why. “Dad,” Carter said.

  “I know.” His father nodded. “Go on with him.”

  He had so much to say. He wanted to describe how hard he had worked to engineer an escape from an ordinary life. But Houdini came back in, looking cross. “Where are you, Carter? We have an appointment.”

  They left together, Carter nodding as Houdini outlined their strategy, but inwardly wondering if by winning, he’d left his parents, particularly his father, behi
nd somehow.

  At dinner—Wallach’s, on Hyde and Ellis, the French restaurant with duck à l’orange so fine homesick Parisians were known to weep after one bite—Carter declined Albee’s offer to have his kard-and-koin contract reinstated for the three weeks of the tour. Instead, he expressed an interest in the legitimate theatre and shared his ideas for an evening-length performance. He said, as if he needn’t explain further, that as the son of a rich man, he could get funding for a show immediately. Houdini asked if perhaps there might be some compromise: Carter would agree to play for Albee for the remainder of the tour, but in Mysterioso’s place, testing out a selection of illusions before moving up. Carter expressed his uncertainty—after all, there was the matter of having been fired earlier in the evening. With a wave of his hand, Albee said that had been entirely Murdoch’s decision. He, Albee, hadn’t known a thing about it. Albee added that he was thinking of backing other kinds of shows, as it seemed the nickelodeon was eating into vaudeville’s profits.

  This led to an animated discussion of the merits of the picture show; the consensus among them was that even if it were just a passing fancy, a wise man should investigate purchasing a theatre or two, perhaps even producing entertainment for them. Within moments, Houdini had an oral agreement that Albee would finance a half dozen shorts featuring Houdini, in exchange for a percentage of the profits.

  When Carter sensed that he had lost their attention, he declared that, anyway, there had to be other magicians on the circuit who were skilled and imaginative enough to take over the headliner act. Houdini confessed that he didn’t know of any. He added that in fact, the legitimate theatre had taken all of them—if Albee didn’t do something to keep Carter around, vaudeville would lose its best chance for wholesome, high-class mystery.

  “You think he’s that good?” Albee asked.

  Houdini sent an eagle’s gaze across the table. “Albee, it takes me a heartbeat to know if a man is poor, fair, or in the middle somewhere. Our Mr. Carter—is—” His eyes lit up. “Yes, Carter is great.”

  At the end of dinner, Houdini had sewn up Carter’s Blackmail act, Albee had extracted a reluctant promise from Carter to headline for a year, and Carter had been granted a salary of a thousand dollars a week—the sum Albee paid most first-time headliners—from which he had to pay his staff.