Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “Mr. Carter,” she said, “do you follow fashion?”

  “I’m not much of a clotheshorse.”

  “I mean ladies’ fashions. I hear there’s a new fad for girls, the flapper sort. Knee-painting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve heard that girls paint pictures of their sweethearts on their knees, and walk around town that way. Is that true?”

  “I’m sorry—I don’t look much at ladies’ knees.”

  “You’ll have to pay better attention.”

  “Miss Kyle?”

  “Just tell them you’re allowed on account of a blind girl.”

  “Miss Kyle?”

  “Phoebe.”

  “Phoebe.” He watched Baby ambling toward them, blinking and moving his tongue around his whiskers. “Let’s walk to my garage, and I’ll put Baby away for the night, and then I’ll drive you to your home. Unless that would cause talk.”

  “Well. Some parties could benefit from talk.” When they continued walking, she said, “Thank you.”

  They took a path paralleling the avenue, a few feet into the woods so that Baby wouldn’t startle other pedestrians. Their conversation was sporadic, and throughout, he could neither get her to reveal information nor be relaxed and gracious himself.

  As she surmised, many women wanted to make his acquaintance. Several times since the War, he’d half considered assignations he couldn’t quite explain, with a chorus girl or an heiress, and it always ended badly before it had even begun. He’d concluded that he was quite clumsy when it came to love, and for the past several years had flirted out of politeness, but nothing more.

  When they were climbing the final hill that met the base of the public stairs next to One Hilgirt Circle, they stopped to let Baby into the garage entrance, and she said, “You are a suave man, but you are not bubbling.”

  Closing and locking the door to Baby’s lair, Carter said, “Wasn’t I bubbling just now?”

  “No. No, you tell jokes, but they’re not bubbling. Your voice, your posture, and I suspect your face, too, all suggest you are a suave and sad mahatma, I think. Why is that?”

  “Carter! Carter!” Amanda and Amy Chong, the ten-year-old twins who lived next door, were on his stairs, descending in great excitement. It was after nine o’clock, and they were in their nightgowns.

  “You’re about to meet some children.” Carter turned to Miss Kyle, quickly, too quickly, colliding with her—she let out a gasp as her glasses slipped off her nose. He caught them in midair. “I have them,” he said.

  “Carter!” He was used to hearing his name shrilled from all sides on weekend afternoons, when the neighborhood children wanted him to do tricks. His time in the limelight would last until the bells from the ice cream wagon sounded.

  But tonight there were no other children, and the Chongs weren’t asking him to do tricks. They grabbed for his hands, the better to pull him up the staircase. Carter began to say something apologetic to Miss Kyle as she took her spectacles back. And then, before the perfectly round lenses found their place again, he caught a glance of her face in distress, her green eyes wide. He wanted a second glance.

  “Carter . . .”

  “. . . men came . . . Carter, come on . . .”

  “Two fat men . . . come on.”

  “. . . see the rope, it’s still hanging, Carter . . .”

  He followed the two girls, who ran with their hands holding on to the hems of their nightgowns. When they got to his front door, they simultaneously told their story to him. “. . . just went to bed, and we were looking out the window, looking for Baby . . . over there . . . they didn’t see us . . .”

  Carter had excellent home defenses. Otherwise rival magicians might break in to steal his notes (most of which were in a safety deposit box) or his illusions (all of which were dismantled after a tour, the key mechanisms kept under Ledocq’s supervision). Also, society pages inevitably announced Carter’s departures overseas and his triumphant returns, with speculations as to what treasures he had accumulated. Carter knew that if he were a burglar, he would read the society pages, and so his houses in San Francisco and Oakland were fortified.

  A rope with a frayed end was hanging down in front of his front door. When he looked for them, he found black heel marks, showing one man had ultimately dragged the other away.

  “They didn’t get in,” Amanda said.

  “I see,” Carter replied. “Did one of the men try to force the door open?”

  “Yeah, one of them did, and then . . .”

  “And when the trap went off, did the other man have to cut him down?”

  “Right . . . and then . . .”

  “One of them touched the doorknob. Then what happened?”

  Amy said, “Boom!” And she and her sister danced from foot to foot and shook their arms and legs, giggling.

  Phoebe Kyle had come up the stairs, and stood near the girls. “Boom?”

  Amy sang out, “Everyone knows you don’t touch Carter’s door!”

  “Not on a dare!” Amanda added.

  “Or else—Boom!” Amy did her little dance. The girls told Carter how the man who touched the door had to be carried away by the other man, and how they hadn’t come back. When they had told the story a few times to each other, and had each gotten an opportunity to say “Boom!” again and perform terpsichorean dramatics and collapse, and had begun to digress about how they were taking swimming lessons, and had already gotten their dolphin badges, Carter thanked them, and gave them each a dime, and they raced off home, to get back into bed before their parents found out.

  “Children. So cheerful,” Miss Kyle said, as if she’d heard the word used successfully.

  “They’re sweet girls. Children are a terrible audience for magicians. It’s very hard to make them look where they’re supposed to. So they also make—”

  “Good neighbors?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Carter deactivated his defense system and entered his house. He led Miss Kyle to a chair, and then walked from room to room. Everything was the way he’d left it.

  When he returned to the foyer, Miss Kyle’s chair was empty—she was standing, her fingertips darting in and around an ornate vase.

  “Miss Kyle, I should get you home as soon as possible. You could be in great danger if you stay.”

  “Really?” she said, curious and perhaps even delighted.

  “I’m serious. You might dislike your life in the Home, but the truth is, there are desperate people in the world.”

  She continued to explore the foyer with her hands, then stepped left carefully, following the wall: hands on the table, then on to the shelves in his living room, then to his desk, where she found his telescope. She seemed to linger here.

  “It’s pointing upward, I assure you.”

  Still, she felt around its base, and on the reeded edge of its eyepiece. “It’s pointing toward the Tribune building.”

  “What a remarkable guess,” Carter said, as astonished as if she’d produced a bouquet of flowers. “How—”

  “I wasn’t guessing,” she interrupted. “So tell me how you feel about all this.”

  “All what?”

  “Thugs. Desperate men.”

  His heartbeat was at eighty, his breathing was normal. “I feel fine.”

  “I see. Mr. Carter, how do you feel about strange men being electrocuted on your doorstep?” Because he was sure he’d just answered that question, he stared at her until she continued, “While you think about it, I’ll look at your books.”

  “Good luck.” It came out of his mouth before he’d even considered what he was saying. Miss Kyle turned slowly, very slowly from the bookshelf; it seemed to take an hour and a half for him to see her face. And what a radiant face it was. She was smiling, wonderful red lips parting to show off dazzling white teeth, the first smile she had directed at him.

  Then back to the shelves. She picked up and felt and replaced an ivory letter opener. She had him at sixes and s
evens—and without even seeming to pay full attention to him. The letter opener back on the shelf, then fingers darting over and around a set of gimmicked cups. She could be here all night.

  And so Carter put his mind to it: besides fine, how did he feel about being pursued by thugs? If he had a new challenge on his hands, it was one for which he was remarkably prepared. He had evaded the Secret Service once, and had just put some idiots down without effort. He knew he had something they wanted—but they couldn’t be sure he had it, for he was outwitting them at every moment in ways they hadn’t even discovered—misdirection! The truth was: he didn’t just feel fine.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and then brought two glasses from the kitchen. He passed one to Phoebe, who had pulled out the oldest book on the shelf—incunabula—spells the Inquisition suspected were used to conjure up demons.

  “What on earth is this binding made of ?”

  He took it from her. “Human skin. Listen carefully. I would like to toast something.”

  She smelled the glass. “Oh, water. I can drink water, I suppose. What sort of thing are we toasting?”

  “The unknown.”

  She considered this, and then held out her glass. He gently tapped his against it.

  “To the unknown.” She sipped from her glass. “And how, Mr. Carter, do you feel about the unknown?”

  “I feel very, very good about it.”

  When he said that, she extended her glass again, for a second toast.

  CHAPTER 8

  Man cannot survive by bread and water alone, but bread and water and hate? It was time for afternoon prayers in Cairo, and the mosque across the street from the Ezbekieh Theatre broadcast the call from a newly installed gramophone, with speakers situated on the second story. There was one bitter man waiting outside the theatre for Bechara Hemaidan, the promoter. The man hated the sun-baked day and the shrill singing of Arabic.

  Until prayers were over, he could not see Hemaidan, so he looked at the plain lobby cards that were mounted in the dusty old windows. “Prescott!” The cards were printed in two colors, red and blue, and were not illustrated because the man who called himself Prescott could no longer afford it. They did not say he was a magician because he was convinced he could not risk being found, even here, eight thousand miles from nowhere.

  He smoked. He wore a new fedora and a cream-colored silk suit with a bow tie. His head was shaved every morning and every evening, and he bleached his Vandyke blond. He wore two types of cologne, one for morning, one for evening. Even so, with the wind beginning to pick up, he could smell the stench of human excrement, and he winced as a small dust devil in the street collapsed nearby, sending detritus tumbling toward him. He ducked into an alcove behind the ticket taker’s booth to protect the $100 python-skin shoes that he had taken from an unlucky man in Rhodesia.

  He noted with disdain the waxed canvas dropcloths that were pitched over the top stories of the unfinished office buildings on either side of the mosque. A stagehand had explained all the incomplete buildings to him, in the formal-sounding market English spoken among Arab entertainers. When the construction boom had hit Cairo, the government levied a property tax on completed buildings—only completed buildings—so in the downtown area, four out of five structures stood with bare girders, unfinished walls, entire stories naked to the elements.

  Presently, the prayers ended, and there was silence on the street and then the people of the city began to spill out again into the scorching sunlight. The shade over Hemaidan’s window rustled and spun up on its roller.

  Prescott rapped on the frosted glass immediately. He was here to extend his run for another two weeks.

  Hemaidan, short and thick around the middle, showed no sign of emotion when he let Prescott into his office. Seeing what Prescott cradled in his arms, he murmured, knowing the answer already, “Would you leave your animal outside?”

  “I think not.” Prescott found and sat in one of the two leather chairs on the visitors’ side of Hemaidan’s desk. Like promoters’ offices around the world, this one was deliberately shabby, decorated with posters of long-forgotten acts and furnished with hand-me-downs from defunct productions that could not finish out their contracts. The message sent was that Hemaidan had no money to spare, and furthermore would not hesitate to take your livelihood should you fail him.

  Hemaidan eased into his own chair, making eye contact with the dog that shivered in Prescott’s lap. “You are lucky I understand the pleasure pets bring to their owners.”

  “Handsome is not a pet,” Prescott said. When he showed no signs of elaborating, Hemaidan cleared his throat and continued.

  “We need to discuss this note you have passed on to me. I’m afraid that what you have asked for is not possible.”

  Prescott blinked. It was standard procedure to be put through torture, to be told you were not needed, before the real offer was on the table. He stroked his dog’s back and haunches.

  But then Hemaidan told him something he hadn’t expected. “I have booked a new act into the theatre beginning tomorrow night. It is a man and a woman. Acrobats and comedians.”

  “And the attraction of their act?”

  “My brother-in-law in Carthage wrote me about them. The man acts drunkenly and the woman throws many, many dishes at him. The crowds find it hilarious.”

  “Of course.” Prescott looked at his nails. They were perfect. His voice, while always smooth, like a woodwind, became more consonant, as he added, “But you still have an obligation to me that you’ll be no doubt fulfilling.”

  “What obligation is that?”

  “Payment for the next week, as that is how long I had been scheduled to perform.”

  Hemaidan folded his hands over his belly. “Your contract says you are on a night-to-night basis, and can be fired at my discretion, immediately. It is quite standard. I’m allowing you an extra twenty-four hours because I feel sorry for you.”

  Prescott fixed Hemaidan with eyes that, for only one second, widened. “My goodness. Sorry for me. That’s generous, Mr. Hemaidan. Why, may I ask, are you sorry for me?”

  “Your show is a mess. I’m not even sure it’s magic. I do not understand it. Your audience does not understand it.”

  “Perhaps you should be finding a better class of audience.”

  “I do not think so. You perform tricks, if that’s what they are, that make no sense. You talk to invisible people. I thought it would be spiritualism when I booked you, but it seems to be invisible people.” Hemaidan leaned forward and, with his hands, described the shape of a hat. “And when you take a man’s hat from the audience and put the milk and the eggs and the flour into it—you’re supposed to make a cake. What kind of magic is it when you leave that mess, and slap it back onto his head?”

  “It’s the magic of teaching people not to trust anyone.”

  “I do not find this amusing, Mr. Prescott. You have several interesting tricks. I would even write you a letter of introduction referring to them. Like the card throwing. Throwing a playing card through a candle, and then an orange, and then bamboo—that is impressive. But this is a family theatre and I do not like when you abuse that mannequin.”

  “It’s not a mannequin. It’s a dummy.”

  “It makes people confused to see you yelling at it and pretending to dash its brains out on the stage. It is not family entertainment when you saw it in half. No one cares to see such a weird thing. Here.” Hemaidan reached behind him and brought Prescott’s dummy onto his desk, its limbs scattershot, its outfit of evening clothes in disarray. Prescott made no move to take it. Instead, he scratched his dog behind the ears and regarded the dirty black yarn that was the dummy’s hair, the faded blue buttons that were its eyes, and he smiled with the air of a man who has heard he is about to be crowned king.

  “You should cancel your comedians,” Prescott said. “Once word of mouth spreads about my act, your theatre will be overflowing with crowds as they did in Tangiers.”

  “You haven�
�t sold out one of the performances. The last two days, I’ve been begging all of my wife’s relatives to come, but none of them want to anymore.” Hemaidan halted here, and then, by speaking again, made a mistake. “You know, you have a stage presence and those few good tricks. You just need to study more, follow the important magicians—”

  “Important—I’m sorry. I interrupted you. Which magicians are important?”

  Hemaidan looked toward the low ceiling of his office. “You’ve heard of them. Houdini. Thurston. Nicola. My brother-in-law saw Carter the Great last year, and said he was marvelous.” He nodded with enthusiasm.

  Prescott said, “Your brother-in-law, he certainly has all the luck in the family.”

  “I’m sorry I cannot book you for another night, Prescott, but be a good fellow and get your things. My men have already put them together backstage.” Hemaidan looked down at his desk and began to shuffle papers around.

  Prescott, holding Handsome tightly, stood but did not leave.

  “I suggest on your way out you leave me your card.”

  Prescott said, “Excuse me?”

  Hemaidan looked up. “Leave me your card.”

  “As you wish.”

  . . .

  There was no taxi to meet Olian and Bugeau, the acrobatic husband and wife, when they arrived at the train station that evening. Their contract had stipulated there would be a taxi, and its absence triggered an argument. They bickered as they loaded their luggage into a cab, which they paid for out of their own grouch bag, and went to the Ezbekieh Theatre, where their pounding on the promoter’s door went unanswered.

  It wasn’t until the stage manager appeared that the door was unlocked, and that was how Bechara Hemaidan’s body was found. He had not died easily; chairs and bookshelves were knocked over, playing cards were scattered across the floor, blood was everywhere. Someone had slashed his throat and his wrists and had stabbed him dozens of times in the stomach.