Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  His family and Ledocq all asked him if he should be performing again so soon, and Carter said, “Yes.” Rather, his lungs made the intake of air, his larynx and vocal cords made the word on his exhalation. Meanwhile, his astral body floated in the clouds overhead, sending back occasional faint whispers of pain along the silver cord connected to his earthly body, which moved, and smiled, and conjured.

  In May 1915, he and his entourage steamed from nine weeks of performances in Sydney, Australia, to a set of shows scheduled in Tokyo. In the Molucca Sea, the ship changed course to answer a distress call from a ship that turned out to be a perfectly functional decoy vessel. The crew was overpowered quickly, and the steamer boarded by the Indonesian pirate Tulang. Unlike his mother, Madame Darah, Tulang stayed clear of political intrigue and hostage taking. His only interest was money.

  After stripping the passengers and crew of their valuables, Tulang’s men began hauling cargo out of the hold. Initially excited by the tremendous weight and sturdy crating of some of the storage boxes—the pirates had learned that lately steamers carried weaponry or ammunition shown on the manifest as, for instance, farming equipment—they unloaded onto the deck all of the heavy devices and props used in Carter’s act. Prying open the boxes, they were disappointed to find that beyond some fine costumes they might give to their wives, there was little they could sell on the black market.

  Carter, who was held on the forecastle at gunpoint, separate from everyone else, imagined his astral self suspended over the proceedings like a kite. It was blazingly hot, yet he felt dry and cool as he looked down at the deck from a great height. Here, in the shadow of the bridge, were some pirates going through his wardrobe, there, outside the mess, were other pirates pointing their rifles at the sailors and the members of his troupe, who were hugging themselves with fear. There was Ledocq, watching everything intently, hands fluttering whenever it looked like one of the devices he’d built might get damaged. Carter wasn’t worried; he was floating. The pirates used the bayonets on their brand-new rifles to root through the extravagant silks used by Miss Aurora, his young mind reader and spiritualist. While one pirate comically held up a nightgown to his own chest and wriggled his hips to make the others laugh, another, beefier man tested for hidden compartments, thumping a pole against an oak table Carter used for his levitation act.

  When the last shipping box was emptied, Tulang had Carter brought to him for questioning. He knew Carter was some sort of performer who had played to a packed house for just over two months. Where were all the gross receipts?

  Tulang, a small rust-colored man with hooded black eyes and long, fine black hair tied into a knot, spoke perfect English with an accent Carter couldn’t place; it was in fact Dutch.

  “Where were you educated?” Carter asked.

  Tulang’s right hand came up from his hip efficiently, slapping Carter across the face with exactly enough force to knock him down. Carter rose to one knee, feeling his face sting. He was back in his body again, unexpectedly, fetched on wings of pain. His palm, cool against his cheek, was shaking. Thirty men saw him, some of them his troupe, some sailors, and Carter wondered if he now looked to them just a little smaller. He met Ledocq’s eye, and tried to wink, but couldn’t.

  “Where are the gross receipts?” Tulang asked again.

  From the deck, Carter wondered if he could stand or if Tulang would hit him again. “The receipts, net, were deposited in Sydney. The bank has an arrangement with my bank in San Francisco.” He turned his palms up, empty, as if he were showing there was nothing up his sleeve.

  Tulang glared at Carter’s hands, then Carter’s face. Carter knew how to overcome an audience’s reluctance to be persuaded. But Tulang’s downward gaze was something far more probing and disbelieving than he’d experienced.

  “Stand up.” Tulang called for his men to bring the “package” from belowdecks. A moment later, they brought up Aurora, who struggled against them as they pushed her up the stairs. Carter hadn’t counted on this. The sight of her in danger made him suddenly feel ill. She was a foolish girl, just twenty years old, given to offstage theatrics and endless complaints about the accommodations. At Ledocq’s urging, Carter had been planning to pay off her contract once the Tokyo performances were over.

  Since she spent an undue amount of time reading romantic potboilers, she had dressed herself in knee pants, an oversized man’s shirt, and a tweed cap, as if she could fool the pirates into thinking she was a boy.

  “Take your hands off me! Take your filthy hands off me, you brutes!” No one was touching Aurora; most of the pirates had never seen an American woman before, except in advertisements, and so they stood back, shielding their eyes against the sunlight as they stared at her, unsure how to treat her until Tulang gave them direction. Tulang, who’d grown up in a brothel, and who’d watched as a toddler while his mother disposed of hostages whose ransom wasn’t paid (her favorite method was to line them up tied to an anchor chain, which she pitched overboard so that one man after the other was yanked off the deck in a synchronous rhythm that had made little Tulang clap his hands), said that people were all basically the same. He would do what it took to make Carter give up his money.

  Carter, cheek still smarting, did not now know his own limits. Had it been a year ago, he would have been plotting her rescue, but an angry, willful pride settled on him now like bad weather. Even though it was dangerous, he would not let Tulang humiliate him again.

  “Charlie! Are you going to let them treat me like this?”

  Carter ignored Aurora. Tulang lit a cigarette. At the time, machine-made cigarettes were uncommon, and this one was a Player’s Navy Cut from a shipment Tulang had just hijacked. While he smoked, he unfolded a playbill from Carter’s act. “If you played nine weeks at the Palace, you must have made about forty thousand.”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “Good.” Tulang laughed. “I saw Horace Goldin last year.”

  “The mile-a-minute conjurer,” Carter noted.

  “A busy man.” Tulang made circles with his wrists. “So much work. I think you sent some of that money to the bank, but you didn’t want to pay the war tax on all of it. I think you hid fifteen, maybe twenty thousand.”

  Carter said nothing. He was thinking about Goldin’s posters, which mimicked the surreal portraits painted by Giuseppe Archimboldo, seventeenth-century court painter of Prague. Goldin’s portrait looked like a colorful lithograph of his face and upper torso. If you looked closely, his face and dinner jacket dissolved into a collage of scarves, doves, spirits, flags, flowers, coins, cards, and imps, the bare bottom of one making up Goldin’s nose. What a genius idea, Carter thought.

  “Charlie!” Aurora stamped her foot.

  Tulang waved the program at her. “Are you the mind reader?”

  Carter hoped she understood that she should say nothing.

  “Yes,” she said, eyes squinting. “I am Aurora.”

  “What am I thinking?” Tulang took a drag on his cigarette.

  “I don’t care, you animal.” She started to walk away from him, but Tulang’s men blocked her way.

  Tulang whispered to Carter. “I could retire on thirty thousand.”

  “According to you, I’m only hiding twenty.”

  “There is a place in Jakarta that would pay me thirty for her.” Tulang stretched and yawned.

  “Then she’ll be worth more to you than she ever was to me.”

  Tulang blew a smoke ring, laughing again. “You are a cold-blooded man. Aurora, come here.”

  Because Aurora made a show of resistance, she was finally carried by two of Tulang’s men until she stood, defiant, just next to Carter and the pirate. She began to speak, but Tulang quieted her by waving his hand near her face.

  “Watch.”

  He extended his left hand toward her, then, with his right hand, ground his cigarette into his palm until extinguished. Aurora screamed. Her legs buckled, and she slid to the deck. Tulang waved his palm at her, showing off the unh
armed flesh, and the copper coin he’d hidden there.

  “It was a trick,” he said, relighting the cigarette because he was not a wasteful man. Watching her cry into her hands, he muttered to Carter, “She’s easily upset. Life in Jakarta would be very hard on her.”

  “As I said, I can’t stop you.” Carter spoke slowly, his demeanor beginning to frighten him. He felt a stab of shame. Aurora was just a child who needed his help. With an effort, he spoke in his normal voice. “Can you kidnap an American girl without consequence?”

  Though the pirate only shrugged in response, pursuit by the United States and British navies didn’t appeal to him. Nonetheless, he wasn’t leaving the boat without Carter’s money. He offered Aurora his hand to help her up, and when she took it, she was looking straight at Carter with an accusatory stare—as if he should have done something better to protect her—when Tulang drove the tip of the lit cigarette into the back of her hand.

  Aurora was so startled she couldn’t even cry out. Because she was still glaring at Carter as the pain took hold of her, he saw something few people get to witness: experience invading the gaze of an innocent.

  He thought from a great distance, I’m sorry. The world inflicted pain that began to vibrate along that silver cord, bringing him closer to his body. Tulang released her and she took a step back, staring at her hand in amazement. She could not even think to faint. And Carter felt awful, as Aurora now understood what he did: to be placed in jeopardy did not mean to be rescued.

  Aurora stumbled away, whimpering, and cupping her injured hand against her chest. Carter focused on Tulang and awaited the end of this game. If his hands were shaking, so be it—he clasped them behind his damp and dripping back.

  Tulang said that since he and his men were leaving empty-handed (not counting, of course, the passengers’ valuables), they might as well get something other people had to pay for: he wanted to see this performance that was worth fifty-five thousand dollars. At first, Carter was relieved. Tulang was leaving his own realm and entering the place where Carter ruled. Of course, in broad daylight, on the rolling deck of a rusting steamer, without makeup, without unpacking many of the props, performing at gunpoint, the act would have to be a failure. But Carter was determined to beat the odds.

  At the time, his act consisted of Goldin-paced imitations of Ching Ling Foo, the Chinese magician who worked with the materialization of doves and full bowls of water. Carter had no doves here, and because of the slow pitching of the boat, he couldn’t balance the water jugs—he tried a small, simple set piece, and was rewarded with a shower of water down his face and neck. He focused on his stage patter, which was excellent, but because of the poor acoustics on the boat, and because most of the pirates didn’t understand English, he got no reaction.

  He was allowed to set up the levitation table, with Ledocq as the volunteer to be levitated—Aurora was sitting in a daze by the matron’s feet with a cold compress on her hand. Every time his gaze fell on her, he thought again, I’m sorry, the phrase ringing off-key. But just as Carter made the table fall away, the pirates chattered: they could plainly see the wires holding Ledocq up.

  At a loss, he returned to the simplest tricks, close-up, relying on his own skills, not on props or machinery. He produced coin after coin well enough, but one gold piece slipped between his sweaty knuckles and rolled across the deck, to the pirates’ tremendous laughter.

  “I’m sorry,” he said aloud.

  He tried to turn that into a joke, but he was flustered. He couldn’t think of another trick to perform. And what was the point? Cards, scarves, flags—Goldin’s portrait, all the imps, the coins, the flowers so carefully wedged into place—give it a good shake, and see how all the detritus of illusions would tumble away until not even the faintest outline of the magician would remain. He realized he had been relying on his skills in misdirection for six months, not to earn a living, but to prevent a dark thought from coming into focus.

  It was such a surprising thought he found himself saying it aloud, just once, “I am no one.”

  He could hear voices faintly, like ghosts. They weren’t real voices. They were memories and doubts. He felt things spilling out of him, nameless and amorphous things slipping away, every precious thing he could call his own. Without magic, he was an empty screen onto which but one image fit: an iron fist put into pendulous motion, and Sarah Annabelle’s head snapping back.

  He walked away from the makeshift stage and sat on the edge of the deck, by the hand railing, his legs dangling over the sea. At once, he was cool, kissed by salt. At once, the heat did not bother him, and when Tulang approached, Carter looked up with dull, beaten eyes. He said that there was twelve thousand hidden in the levitation table, and then he said nothing more; he simply watched the swells as they swept past the boat.

  He could hear behind him the sounds of pirates attacking the table with axes, and protests from his company as one by one all of the illusions were thrown into the Molucca Sea, where they would sink a mile or more and be covered in silt, where huge sea anemones would close around crooked decks of cards and moray eels would find a home in the brightly painted spirit cabinet.

  . . .

  Carter retired from magic. No performances, not even private shows, no sleight of hand for the neighborhood children. He moved back to his parents’ home, and lived in his old room, and he whittled sticks into abstract shapes. If, by accident, they became too representational, he destroyed them.

  His mother encouraged him to see a psycho-analyst; analysis was all the rage now, she said. And because she understood him, she added, “Don’t hold its popularity against it.” But he declined. While psychotherapy had saved her—in fact at the very same time it had saved her—magic had saved him. And it had also, after promising so much, been the thing that killed his wife.

  For a year, there was a pattern: Carter thinking of Sarah Annabelle, Carter swamped by a wave of grief, and collapsing on the floor like he was praying to Mecca. He cried so much he ruined the rug and it was replaced.

  Jenks was gone now. A drinker to the end, he had died during one of Carter’s vaudeville tours. Mrs. Carter recognized the excellent light in his cabin, and converted it to a painting studio, should she ever be inspired. Carter took to standing in this cottage in those beautiful afternoon hours and wondering about the nature of triumph. His old enemy was dead. How hollow the world seemed, even on balmy days when the light came in the window to illuminate particles that could only be called golden.

  Jenks’s gardening tools hung in a tiny, spider-infested shed. Carter planted tomatoes and herbs, and sweet-smelling flowers, and got dirty every day. Nothing pleased him more than uncovering the upper roots of a complicated weed, and following them to their terminal points and ripping them to pieces.

  There was a war coming. The news was full of it. He took hikes through the Presidio hills because the vistas were said to be thrilling, but all he could look at when he’d reached one summit or the other were ships departing for Europe. Every time he saw one, he waved. “Good luck,” he said. “Good luck over there.”

  His mother had started a hobby, photography, and had joined a women’s club that took weeklong wilderness excursions to better capture unspoiled beauty. His father, too, was gone—business trips, again. But he had an apprentice: James had streaked through Yale and begun building a fortune, and for several years he supervised Chilean metallurgy interests for Carter & Company.

  So Carter was alone in his childhood home. He could hardly stand it, so he went often to the picture shows. He shunned the Market Street houses, the big theatres with live orchestras. He frequented instead the neighborhood haunts, the Red Wagon or the Glitter, tiny and dirty theatres, home to single, out-of-tune upright pianos, one step more permanent than a tent show. Comedies, melodramas, it didn’t matter which. It was dark, and there was entertainment going on.

  For long hours he had no idea what to do. He couldn’t say when he began to pay regular visits to Borax Smith, but he
found himself, twice a week, taking the ferry boat to Oakland, and wandering up the long meanders that took him from the gates of Arbor Villa to the house of fallen women. Borax lived there surrounded by terrible stories, and perhaps that was what drew Carter there.

  There was a massive house in the center of the property, and a dozen cottages surrounding it, all of them active with women who were expecting, or who had covered bassinets on their porches and smoke coming from their chimneys. Some set up easels for landscape painting; others, following the style of the day, took to dancing in the woods. They had classes in the arts, or useful occupations, such as secretarial work or domestic services. At all times, they wore huge bonnets with white veils, and remained silent around visitors, to protect their identities and to save them from being judged on the day that they returned to society.

  When Carter began coming, the old man encouraged him to talk about his sorrows. And this was a place where Carter could talk. This house understood loss. Borax knew how to talk about the hard matters that wore people down to the bone. Carter shared stories of Annabelle while they drank tea served by silent figures cloaked like beekeepers.

  “You know,” Borax finally said one summer afternoon, sitting beside Carter in their lawn chairs, “the girls would enjoy a magic show from you. Something small. It would cheer them up.”

  “Of course. Yes,” Carter said.

  Summer turned to fall. Borax gently brought up the idea a second time. “I’d enjoy it, too,” he said, stroking his long white beard. He was a patient man. He’d held on to property by the estuary for twenty-two years rather than sell at a loss.

  When Carter came on Boxing Day, he had a motorcar filled with small presents, trinkets he thought the women might like. But the house and all the cottages were dark. The previous day had been the worst in Arbor Villa history, and was forever after called Black Christmas.