Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  Just as it seemed Carter could ride in circles forever, he broke the pattern: entering the park and passing the truck, as he had a dozen times before, he rounded the bend in front of them and slowed. He disappeared behind a clutch of oak trees.

  A moment later, he was in plain sight again. On a rise behind a hillock planted with daffodils, he had turned and was puttering back toward them. He put the bike on its stand and killed the engine.

  “He sees us,” said Samuelson, for Carter was now walking directly toward the truck.

  “No, hold on,” Stutz waved that suggestion away, “we might have a shot here.”

  “Well, aren’t you the blankety-blank optimist,” Samuelson snapped, and Stutz shrugged his narrow shoulders.

  A word about Agent Stutz: he owned a sap and had among his belongings wherever he traveled a small bottle of chloroform, as well as a Skinner mask, for in all of the lectures he’d attended in the academy, the only one that had appealed to him was “abduction procedure.” He frequented newsstands to purchase the weekly adventures of the Yarrow Twins, one of whom was always “going under the cloth” after gloved hands darted from behind Egyptian pilasters. That he could actually get to use his anesthetic in the course of duty thrilled him in ways he could hardly contain, and so Carter’s slow approach—it was really sort of an amble—toward their van seemed like a gift from heaven that he wasn’t quite willing to dismiss.

  Carter had turned, and was now on the dirt pathway that ringed the lake. He stood with one arm against a eucalyptus tree, leaning into it, as if he were holding it up, and he regarded a pair of geese that waddled past him.

  “What’s he doing?” Hollis jockeyed between his peers. “His mouth is moving.”

  “Is he singing?” A frowning Stutz rolled the window down, listened, and then whispered, “He’s singing.”

  Carter was indeed singing, for he was overcome with how he felt for Miss Phoebe Kyle, and he was using his voice—so well trained for speaking in large theatres—to attempt the popular ballad, “Oh That Brown-Eyed Girl.” It was a difficult song for even the most skilled singer, and Carter, no matter how sweet he might have been on Phoebe, had an awful relationship with melody.

  Ahead was the bench where they’d met, and longing, an ache, had brought him here again. How she wouldn’t ask his help. How she’d said “the suave and sad mahatma.” He remembered a song he’d heard in his vaudeville days, but never since, “Mysterious Melanie,” which had high praise for the curve of a woman’s throat, an area he’d not previously considered fascinating.

  The humidity was increasing, the sky thickening with the Midwestern-style summer storm clouds that never seemed to trouble San Francisco. Carter welcomed the idea of warm rain. He sat on the bench, which looked out over the eastern arm of Lake Merritt, a hundred feet of dirty water, ducks swimming through tendrils of widgeon grass, and as he looked into the ripples, what he saw with anxious clarity was Phoebe Kyle, leaning forward, and how she had shown off her collarbone. What an amazing display of light and shadow gathered in that hollow.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes?” Carter looked over his right shoulder. His head exploded in pain as something collided against it.

  “O’Brien!”

  It was a voice to his left this time. Carter lurched up and backward by instinct, trying to avoid whatever had hit him, his hands at his head, eyes tearing with pain. Something large stepped up and clouted him in the head a second time, then punched him in the stomach, dropping him as neatly as clipping the head off a rose.

  “Stop it, O’Brien, stop it!” A third voice.

  “What?”

  He was on all fours. Someone rushed to his side, he knew no friendly aid was coming his way, that he had to move, but his body wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t breathe, the wind was knocked out of him, he couldn’t even grunt. His stomach had collapsed, it felt like a vacuum, how could he ever fill his lungs again? Something papery with leather straps went over his head, and now he realized he could move a little, but what his body wanted more than anything was to turn and see, stupidly, what was going on behind him. But everything was pointillistic and dissolving into flashes.

  “It’s over his ear,” he heard, and then, “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” and then hands went past his face.

  “He’s not breathing.”

  “You punched him in the stomach, you moron!”

  “You said to ace him.”

  “I told you to distract him.” Samuelson threw his hands up.

  Stutz, in the meantime, crouched near Carter, his hands darting around the Skinner mask like he was trying to keep a vase from falling off a shelf. Carter tried to sit up on his heels then he sprawled sideways into the dirt. Stutz noted how the impact pulled the mask half off, so he replaced it and watched.

  “Is he out?”

  “When do you take that thing off him? Stutz?”

  Stutz had never actually seen someone chloroformed before, and if Carter were indeed unconscious, the results disappointed him. Carter looked relaxed, half-smiling like he was getting forty winks. Stutz had expected to see him collapse “like a marionette with cut strings,” then “lay as helpless as a fish in a net” as was frequently the case for the freckle-faced Yarrows.

  Stutz unbuckled the mask and pinched Carter’s cheek, hard enough to leave a mark.

  “He must be out,” O’Brien said.

  “Let’s load him.” Hollis looked around the park anxiously.

  “He might be faking,” Stutz said. He removed the sewing needle he kept in the leather case with his chloroform.

  “What are you doing?” Samuelson checked for pedestrians. A pair of kids riding bicycles were on a distant path.

  “Testing,” Stutz replied, rolling up Carter’s sleeve. He jabbed the needle in and removed it. There was no reaction, unless one counted bleeding.

  “Is he out?”

  “I guess he’s out,” Stutz said. He shook Carter’s shoulder; the magician’s head lolled, and his arm fell down, wrist out, smashing his watch crystal in the dirt. “Hmm. I should put the mask back on him.”

  The rest of the men, who had no patience for Stutz, voted to gather Carter up and throw him in the back of their truck, where the equipment awaited.

  While Hollis drove them over the trolley tracks, and down Broadway, and through downtown, toward the estuary, and Stutz hovered in case more chloroform was needed (twice, he reapplied a rag to Carter’s nose, “just in case”), Samuelson and O’Brien began to wrap up the unconscious magician, with much arguing and second-guessing by all four agents.

  The first issue over which they disagreed was the four pairs of handcuffs—three standard-issue plug eights, and the fourth an interesting pair Samuelson had brought back from his trip to England. Whereas Stutz felt they should be applied immediately, Hollis yelled, from the driver’s seat, that they should strip him down, in case he had tools hidden on his person.

  Once Hollis said it, the idea was clearly a clever one, but since he was their junior, he was told to keep his yap shut and keep driving. Carter’s shirt was removed, and his belt, and his many trouser pockets were thoroughly searched, and all items removed, from the obvious tools (keys and picks) to objects probably designed to look innocuous (a cigar tube, for instance). There were no hidden aids sewn anywhere into his clothing.

  While awaiting crosstown traffic on Fourteenth Street, much debate occurred about removing his boots before cuffing his ankles together. Barefoot, the manacles would go on much tighter, but the prevailing wisdom was that he could probably undo knots with his toes, and so his boots stayed on, with the English cuffs around them. Two pairs went around his wrists, and the final set was used to link the wrist and ankle cuffs so that Carter was doubled-over.

  Then it was time for the seventy-five feet of rope. Samuelson had heard about Houdini escaping from seventy-five feet of rope, which sounded impossible, and he wished to attempt the feat properly, with a team of trained professionals. But they ran into
problems almost immediately. Traffic was terrible on Broadway, and the stop-and-start progress of the bread truck caused the men standing in the back to frequently jostle each other. Carter’s dead weight was difficult to turn over in such a cramped space, and as the coils began to surround him, it occurred to Samuelson first, then O’Brien, that if bound, he would no longer fit in the sack, which was next.

  Samuelson said, “We have to untie him.”

  “We can skip the sack.” O’Brien had already invested tremendous sweat in the ropes.

  “No, the sack,” Hollis called. “I vote for the sack. It’s impressive.”

  This brought on another round of arguing—which would be more impressive, the sack or the rope, culminating in a cursing O’Brien bringing out his Bowie knife to cut through the fifteen or so feet of cord they’d managed to tie around Carter. He finished just as they passed under the ionic columns that marked the entrance to the Port of Oakland.

  It had begun to rain. The truck’s windshield wipers went on, and in the back, Stutz held the mouth of the mail sack open while Samuelson and O’Brien banged into each other and yelled repeatedly in the process of securing Carter inside of it. First, his heels kept catching on the mouth, then the handcuffs, and finally there were problems getting his head fully past all the eyelets at top.

  “Make sure you seal it right,” Samuelson said. The top of the mail bag was like a cold and stiff mouth—its lower lip was a metal bar with buckles, and its upper was a perforated metal plate. When Samuelson closed the two sides together, O’Brien fed a leather strap through all the buckles, securing it with the U.S. Postal Service Regulation Rotary padlock.

  “Hey,” Stutz called out, “he flinched.”

  “What are you doing down there?” Samuelson gave him a shove. “Why did he flinch?”

  “He just—jerked.”

  Samuelson could hardly believe Stutz hadn’t provoked that somehow, but there was no time to investigate. They were at the docks. “Into the crate, quickly.”

  It was a standard sixty-four-cubic-foot U.S. Customs crate in which gin rummies had once smuggled Canadian Club. It lay atop a pair of chains that crossed exactly under its center. Once they dropped the sack in, they began nailing the three narrow planks on top of it. The sound of hammers put to use in the truck’s payload was as deafening as rifle shots.

  Finally, as they backed to the end of the last pier, the one farthest from the mouth of the bay, they threw the truck doors open, and fastened the chains together with a ratcheting band, which Hollis connected to a dockside winch.

  The rain made their labor that much more difficult. With great shouts of excitement, they sent the winch to work, careful that nothing slipped, and soon the crate went up overhead, and then outward, over the choppy green waters. Upstream were the marshlands of the slough, and downstream, dozens of piers with loading docks and men at work. The crate spun on its chain, which quickly beaded with raindrops.

  “Let ’er go,” said Samuelson, and then the grappling hooks were removed, and the box plunged into the saltwater, a ring of spray blossoming as it broke the surface. It bobbed, gradually listing to the side.

  The four men stood on the dock, all grinning madly, waiting for something interesting to happen. Samuelson had brought his umbrella, but the other three didn’t mind standing in the warm rain.

  “I thought it was going to sink,” Hollis said.

  “Customs crate,” Stutz responded. “Guess it’s airtight.”

  Samuelson took out his revolver. He put a corner of the crate into his sites and fired one round that immediately sent splinters into the air.

  “Sam!” O’Brien yelled, holding his ears.

  “Holy cow, Sam!” Stutz’s jaw dropped.

  “Well, it’s sinking now.”

  “What if you hit him?”

  “What if I did?”

  Gradual, ascending laughter, the sounds of disbelief.

  Carter hadn’t been hit. The bullet had simply clipped out an inch or so at the very corner of the crate. The port had recently been dredged, so the waters were deep but muddy. The tide was waning, the estuary emptying into the great San Francisco Bay, and as early pelicans dropped like meteorites, looking for fish, the crate began to find the current and drift into the channel. It was a slow drift, perhaps ten feet a minute. As the crate eased away, the men followed it.

  When nothing had happened for enough time that they began to get bored, O’Brien remembered that as they were all members of the Legal Tenors, the Treasury Choir, he could start a round robin.

  Oh what do we do with a drunken sailor

  What shall we do with a drunken sailor

  What shall we do with a drunken sailor

  Ear-lie in the mor-ning?

  CHAPTER 22

  Until noon, the Berkeley campus was quiet, as it was summer session. The intensive language workshops had ended a week ago, and so the only early morning activity was in the agricultural studies department, where goats and lambs and cows were fed their breakfast, then taken to the Oxford Street pasture.

  But after the campanile chimed twelve, trucks drove up Telegraph, through Sather Gate, and pulled up to the loading docks behind Wheeler Hall. Crews unloaded crates and sent them on their way to the classrooms and auditoriums, where they were unpacked for the poor soul who had rented his share of space.

  Since the War, summers had been lucrative for the University of California, as its lecture halls were excellent venues for inventors to meet with investors. The university neither judged nor encouraged the men who sent in their twenty-five-dollar reservations, but did require a brief description of the marvel to be demonstrated. Occasionally, a clerk might feel genuine pity when yet another eager man was to display yet another perpetual motion machine, but the 1922 brochures proclaimed that “the University of California is committed to excellent thought, even the heterodox.” As this phrase encouraged checks to rain down like manna, the 1923 brochures highlighted it. Inventors were a paranoid lot, so the university published no schedules, and distributed no publicity, and every communication was stamped “confidential” in red ink, which seemed to please everyone.

  That such precautions inevitably led to small audiences never seemed to bother the inventors, who relied exclusively on their own bizarre invitations. “Dear William Randolph Hearst,” one such read, “I am going to make you a fortune. How, you ask, well, I will tell you how. Euphonics!”

  This afternoon, Wheeler Hall’s dozen classrooms hosted an engine powered by seawater, a grain harvester, a new type of newspaper printing press, several poorly designed automobile accessories, and a number of other production methods and devices, most of which had been presented in summer 1922 and the summer before that.

  The inventors stood outside on Wheeler’s wide stone staircase. During the 4 P.M. to 5 P.M. break, they smoked cigarettes and feigned enthusiasm at seeing their colleagues again. Mostly, each wanted to know if anyone had stolen his mailing list of widows and relatives, and each in turn wanted to know if he himself were suspected of stealing anything.

  While they talked, university workers carried in crate after crate stenciled with Ogden, Utah, shipping marks. This caused great mirth, as these belonged to a “newbie,” who had made all the mistakes they had once made: he brought far too much equipment, which meant paying extra workmen; he had made a stab at camaraderie early that morning by asking them what their inventions were; he had volunteered, in front of all of them, that he had a fine invention called television; most amusingly, he had rented the large lecture hall, no doubt ready to fill it to the rafters with capitalists who would shower him with money.

  The man with the grain harvester, who was a great wit, blew a smoke ring, and said, “Television? What a terrible thing to call it—the word’s half-Greek, half-Latin!” During the ensuing laughter, he went pale. “My God! Is that James Carter?”

  To a man, the inventors turned to see, indeed, James Carter, vest stretched over his stomach, sauntering up the stairs
in step with his partner Tom Crandall. They trailed a bespectacled Hebrew man who breezed past the group without a word.

  “Which one of you got James Carter to come? And . . . that’s Grossman.” Passing through Sather Gate, Aggie Grossman of Bank of Italy, right-hand man of A. P. Giannini, waved an envelope before his sweating face.

  To say that the small group fell into silence wouldn’t give proper respect to the rapid mental calculations each man made—who was worth the time of Grossman and Carter and . . . wasn’t that James Fagan from W. W. Crocker, and how many men from Borax Smith’s firm?—who were all these businessmen now coming up the steps? The man with the seawater engine recognized scientists from RCA’s San Francisco labs, but why was Colonel French from the Presidio here with two lieutenants?

  Tiny raindrops began to fall, making dusty marks on the stairs. The inventors ground out their cigarettes and, as an afternoon downpour began, they followed the crowd and found to their horror that the lecture hall was filled to standing-room only.

  In short, Farnsworth had rented exactly the right-sized venue to give his public lecture on television. By the time the campanile chimed five o’clock, Pem counted 110 people, which caused her to jump up and down behind the side curtain until she regained her composure. Philo for his part looked glum and pale. Few people in the world had ever heard Philo Farnsworth present his ideas, but those who had all made similar comments: before he spoke, he seemed bright, obviously, but nervous and ill-prepared, ready to be judged poorly.

  He had lain the groundwork for this day a year ago, sitting in public libraries with issues of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, copying out addresses of men who aided inventors. On a family trip to Washington, he had on a Sunday excused himself after church and traveled to the White House. Sunday was Harding’s afternoon to answer the door there himself. Philo had vowed he would remember every detail of the visit, but all he could remember was a wilting bunch of daisies on the low, scuffed coffee table in front of the couch Harding had him sit in. Philo soon enough identified with those daisies—in high spirits, he had revealed his design to the President, who had reacted badly—he seemed to want the boy to limit the number of people who knew about it. Where was the glory in that? Philo had left the White House drooping, stoically accepting Harding’s proposed meeting with Borax Smith, but had all along wanted to debut television before as impressive an audience as possible. Harding’s death, shocking as it had been, freed him in good conscience to use the lecture hall he had reserved so long ago.