Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “Boss?” Carlo couldn’t have heard that correctly.

  Carter stared inside the safe. He put the wine down.

  “What?” Carlo left his post. He looked over Carter’s shoulder. “Huh,” he said. “It’s another safe.”

  Inside the Schlage was a second safe, smaller in all dimensions, and secured to the larger model with a dry lather of mortar.

  “Borax,” Carter whispered, “where did you get an Olson Failsafe?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Carter held up his palm. They remained frozen, Carter holding his breath, quite literally, while Carlo’s eyes darted from his boss, whose face was reddening, to the interior of the safe.

  It wasn’t much to look at—simply a metal door, a discolored bronze finish with a pattern of bulky oak leaves. To the left was the handle, to the right the familiar spinning knob, and above them, running the width of the door, an archaic-looking crest that read “Failsafe” on a banner flanked by candelabras.

  “Okay.” Carter drained his wine glass in a gulp. “We’re in trouble.”

  “Can’t you hear the tumblers on this one?”

  “That would be the least of our problems.”

  “You didn’t bring a stethoscope, eh, Carter?”

  “Stethoscopes are the magic wands of the cracking business.” He took a small leather pad from his pocket and flipped through pages of figures printed in his neat engineer’s grid. As he ran his finger down the numbers, he began to explain their predicament: safecracking was a sham perpetuated by safecrackers. If they didn’t physically blow a safe open somehow, it was more a matter of mathematical possibility, and patience.

  “Safes are forgiving. If you enter a number within a couple of digits of the right one, you’ll do fine, eventually.” He shook his head. “And, generally speaking, it never even comes to that. Most people buy a very expensive safe, and then never change the factory preset.” He waved his pad. “These are the presets I know of. Olson is of course a Norwegian design. Here we are. From the serial number, you can determine which progressions the Olson factory used, then you look on this table here . . .” He swallowed. “So, for this model, the preset is five, fifteen, twenty.” He made no move. Instead, he continued to stare at the dial. “The Schlage certainly was still at the preset,” he murmured, “so the odds would be . . .”

  He looked over at Carlo, who put on the same patient half-smile he wore during rehearsals. He’d been interested for a moment, but when it came down to details, his mind flew up, around the room, and out the window.

  So Carter explained it more directly: “This safe was designed to discourage safecrackers. You only have three chances to enter the right combination.”

  “What happens if you just keep guessing?”

  Carter didn’t respond. The fact was, if some idiot entered the wrong combination on a Failsafe three times, the door would open on its own accord, and a vial of sulfuric acid would drop directly onto a plate treated with chlorate of potash and sugar. The resulting explosion would at the very least destroy the safe’s contents. They were safes of last resort, designed at first for Russian nobility who lived in fear of ancestral documents falling into the hands of rioting peasants, and now exported mainly to diplomats from nations in which suicide was preferable to capture by the enemy. They were illegal in America; even bootleggers disliked them, for they often had to open their safes while intoxicated.

  “Let’s not think about that. Let us think,” Carter leaned forward and turned the dial to five, “positively. And hope that Borax was lazy.” He spun the dial left, to fifteen, then right to twenty. Somewhere out on the great, untended lawns, a peacock cried out twice, then Carter pushed the handle downward.

  Nothing happened.

  “Damn.” He poured a little more wine and took a sip. “Borax doesn’t know his birthday, so that’s out.”

  “Why not some lucky numbers he liked?”

  “It could be, but Borax is a sentimental man. He’d choose a date that meant something to him.” A snap of his fingers. “Teel’s Marsh. March 16, 1875, the day God spoke to him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That isn’t helping me, Carlo.” He spun the dial freely, feeling the reeded edge between thumb and forefinger, stopping at three, then sixteen, then the long trip, more than 180 degrees, to seventy-five. His hand fell on the lever. He brought it down firmly.

  There was an unsatisfying clink in response. He stood up and stretched and sighed, balling his fists up, and crossing his arms tightly across his chest. He paced, eyes on the mementos hanging from Borax’s walls like he was in a museum. “I’m open to possibilities for a third number,” he murmured.

  “His birthday?” Carlo suggested quickly.

  Carter stared at him.

  “Wife’s birthday?”

  “Married twice. Loved them both.”

  “Sixteen minutes,” Carlo said.

  “That’s no longer an issue. We’ll be out of here one way or another.”

  Carlo slumped against the wall and started fishing in his mouth for a corn kernel lodged between his molars. He felt Carter’s focus begin to shift from the safe to him, as if he were doing something wrong. So he stood straight. “Can I do anything?”

  “Yes. Here’s an idea. There are two pathways back to the house, front and rear. The rear path is cleared of debris, and that’s how Borax usually comes and goes, but sometimes if the girls carry him, they go out the front.” He gave concise directions for how Carlo should go to the hall, turn right, then go up one flight of stairs—there was a narrow hallway from which one could see both paths, all the way to the main road. “Go quickly, and come back more quickly.”

  Carlo pushed the bookcase forward on its casters, and graceful as a dancer, bounded from the room. Stairways tended to creak in their centers, so he padded up the edges of the frayed carpeting. The third-floor hall had windows facing the rear access road, which Carlo could see plainly, and Fourth Avenue on the north side. Far behind the loose tapestry of branches and dying leaves, cars and trucks whizzed on the boulevard.

  Then he saw people on a pathway. Carlo, who had a quick eye, counted nineteen: a man in a wheelchair, a clergyman, and the rest all women wearing bonnets. The women stood in a semicircle, and the clergyman was jabbing his finger in the air. They were about a quarter-mile distant.

  He sprinted back to join Carter, who had the book of presets open in his lap. “Company,” Carlo said. He described what he’d seen.

  “Lecturing by the front road? By the railcar, maybe? That’s the one on vanity, and I believe it lasts less than five minutes. Help me with a date,” Carter said. “Or duck.”

  “Duck?” This caught Carlo’s interest. “Why?”

  Carter hesitated. “Try not to worry about this too much, but if we get the combination wrong, the safe will explode.”

  Carlo stood upright, now impressed with the possibilities life had to offer. “Explode?”

  “Oh, yes. Any ideas?”

  “Not his birthday,” he said slowly. He recalled the image of the old man in the wheelchair, listening to the sermon. “Okay. Okay. A psalm, or a verse. Like 3:16, or . . .”

  Carter nodded. “A Bible verse. I wonder if there’s a place where God says to Be Good.”

  “Yeah, everywhere,” Carlo chuckled. Carter however faced him stonily, and so Carlo looked at his shoes.

  A few awkward moments later, Carlo began to step backward, putting his toe against his other heel, arms extended like he was tightroping it. He looked at the walls. Here was an old photo of the Arbor Villa tennis courts. And there was a cute poster of a small white dog routing a huge bull mastiff, and Carlo squinted, reading the legend aloud, “‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that counts!’ Yeah.” He looked at Carter, who was frowning, arms folded, at the safe.

  “Damn it,” Carter whispered.

  There was something written on the wall, in red ink. Carlo squinted at it. “She never died.”
/>   Carter turned his head slowly toward his assistant. “Pardon?”

  “Here,” Carlo flicked his forefinger toward the wall. “What does that mean?” Someone had printed, crudely, with a fine bristle brush, that haunted phrase directly onto Borax’s wall. She never died. Letters neither large nor small, just below eye level.

  “Oh. That’s a long story,” Carter began, and Carlo’s face automatically receded into a mask of paying attention. “A few years ago—” Then a smile broke across his face. “Carlo, you’re brilliant!”

  “Thank you.”

  “I could kiss you!”

  “Eh,” he winced.

  “That’s just the sort of man Borax is. Black Christmas, which was 1917,” he said, hunched over the safe. “Just the date he would commemorate. Twelve, twenty-five,” he said, drawing each syllable out as he spun the dial. Then he stole a glance at the now very involved Carlo, who hunched right behind him. “Seventeen,” he said finally, and his hand reached out for the lever.

  All was silent.

  With his free hand, Carter gestured that Carlo should back away, to stand back from the safe, “The corner,” he finally added, “go all the way to the corner.”

  Fascinated, Carlo walked backward.

  “Here we go, success or failure, we’ll know soon enough,” Carter said, and he pushed the lever down; it made a wonderful sighing sound, a sound of gears disengaging.

  After all that intense effort, the room seemed lighter as the door swung open. Carlo noticed something was strange—Carter wasn’t even touching the safe, but it was swinging open, easily, under its own power in fact.

  “Down!” Carter jumped backward, tripped and fell, wrists out, to the stone floor, and Carlo threw himself to the side just as he heard a sound like a marble rolling down a tin chute. Something shattered, then a quiet puff of black smoke the size of a cabbage rolled lazily out of the safe, drifting toward the ceiling. It took less than a second.

  Shakily, Carlo stood to see Carter, who was approaching the charred safe mouth slowly, his feet dragging along the floor. “Oh,” Carter murmured. Inside the safe were charcoal-colored scraps of paper, some fringed with a word or two that had escaped, but otherwise all was ashes. Carter poked through the documents. He found ashes. He looked at his hands, which were smeared with soot.

  “That was—that was something!” Carlo exclaimed, reminded of vaudeville sketches, where a tramp gives a prosperous man a loaded cigar. “That was incredible . . . that was, hey—everything was destroyed! The plans are gone! Are you okay?”

  “No.” Carter’s eyes were all blue, the irises just the tiniest of pinpricks. He put his hand to his chin. “What have I done,” he said. “What have I done?” When his hand fell away, there was a smudge on his chin.

  “Boss?” He’d never seen Carter with a smudge on his chin before.

  “We have to get out of here.” But he made no move. “Damn,” he said. “I’m a damned fool.” His eyes began to well.

  “We should get out of here. People will be coming.”

  “It’s just—” Carter peered into the safe again, eyes watering like a boy who’s lost his prized baseball down the sewer grating. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  Carlo pushed things into the satchel, muttering, “Here’s the wine, here’s the fake notes, come on, Carter,” and put the whole package into Carter’s arms. Carter accepted it, and said, “Thank you,” and then, sounding numb, “What have I done?”

  He allowed Carlo to guide him out of the room, and as there were noises downstairs, he picked up the pace and by the time they’d found the room with the Navajo blanket in the window, Carter, cursing to himself, was all but racing to get away.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Miss Olive White of the public library had a chore to perform. Since Carter the Great was opening, reporters had checked out many of the books that involved magic or magicians. She returned them to the shelves, flipping through them to look for pencil marks and stains left by shot glasses, clear signs they’d copied straight from the books rather than generate their own language to describe the show. As magic was magic to the average reader, no one much cared if the paper told them Carter would be performing a repertoire actually executed by Frederick Powell in 1890.

  “Oh, you lazy men,” she murmured as she thumbed over a copy of a book by Robert-Houdin, its spine newly broken in many places.

  Then the book fell open to an illustration of Robert-Houdin’s business card. It was reproduced on the frontispiece of his Memoirs, with the legend “macedoine calligraphique.” Spiderwebbed, illegible, its form was somehow very familiar. But Miss White couldn’t remember why. She would not have known it was a business card until she read the instructions the editors had provided. “Bring this book right up to your nose, tilt the page away from you and look down it with one eye, like a telescope, from the bottom. What do you see? Turn it 45 degrees. What do you see? Keep turning. And what do you see?”

  She followed the instructions with curiosity, and when she did so, she had such a start she actually dropped the book to the floor, cracking its poor spine yet again. She put her hand over her mouth.

  “Wild surmise, Olive, wild surmise,” she murmured. She retrieved the book.

  She closed the door to her office, opened up a letter she kept in a locked drawer, and placed a telephone call. Within a minute, she was talking to an operator at a switchboard in a Denver hotel.

  . . .

  That day was a busy one for the Treasury Department. After months of effort, agents had finally captured the Billie Dove, a lightweight powerboat with an engine modified so that even when laden down with barrels of hootch, it could outrun anything the government put in the water.

  There was jubilation at the Mint, and at posts across the nation, as every agent, even those on the take, liked the feeling of a good capture. Late in the afternoon, however, a wire from the Denver office to Washington put a damper on things. It was an urgent message and was in no way related to magic: an agent had disappeared.

  There was no indication of foul play, but the central office was deeply divided on whether this particular agent was one to go deliberately away without leave. So, noting that there was no cause for alarm yet, the bulletin was cautiously distributed throughout the nation: Agent Jack Griffin was missing.

  CHAPTER 4

  At four o’clock—four hours until curtain—James’s dinner party was to begin. Generally, James’s relationship with parties was similar to Carter’s with magic shows: he lived for them. This afternoon, however, he felt quite differently. Before Carter’s arrival, he’d been consulting his watch every five minutes. Soon after his brother came to the door and told him the story of the failed safecracking, James put his watch away, sat on the couch, and placed a cold washcloth over his eyes.

  “We don’t have time to worry about this,” Carter said.

  James made no reply, which made Carter sorry. A bit of back-and-forth with his brother often made things seem better.

  “You know, it will be all right.”

  James sighed into his washcloth, and made a strange beckoning gesture with his fingers, as if inviting the fates to cast more down upon him.

  Carter found himself annoyed. He’d reached deep into his imagination to present an all-new set of illusions, illusions quite beyond television, and was frankly dying for some appreciation. He said, “Not everything has to rely on the television box.”

  When James finally spoke, he did so slowly. “There are two hundred unsold seats for tonight. And that’s with all the comps we passed out. I swear that every nun and crippled child in the seven counties has a ticket to the show, and there are still two hundred . . .” He stood, rubbing his temples. “And don’t even ask me about the rest of the run.”

  “Word of mouth—”

  “If you put an elephant on a poster, the audience comes looking for an elephant. If you put a television on it, even if they don’t know what a television is, they come looking for a television. It
doesn’t matter how great a magician you are, Charlie, but you are neither an elephant nor a television!”

  Carter said quietly, “I have other new illusions.”

  “But nothing important!” With this, James froze, as if even he were startled at what he’d said.

  Carter folded his arms. “You know . . .” he said. And then nothing else.

  “I’m sorry,” James sighed. He continued as he left the room, “I’m just concerned for you.”

  A few seconds later, Carter heard the shower start. He was left alone in the grand living area, feeling strangely like he was falling backward. He focused on various things: the vase of fresh lilies, the small Roman marble bust, then he realized his eyes were alighting on things he could accidentally knock over. But no—he was going some place beyond petty retributions now. He was beginning to gird himself for public performance, which meant shutting down small and social emotions.

  The table was set for eight, using the cheap but festive Bauer plates. A large stew pot gently hiccupped in the kitchen. There were bouquets from opening-night well-wishers, all of them gathered around the maquette for the “Everywhere” poster. Candles were lit, even though there was still the afternoon light, and red wine from Carter’s own stock was breathing on the sideboard. Even though James had yelled, he had also prepared a feast and made the room feel like home.

  Carter hadn’t a clue whom James had invited tonight, and he knew better than to ask or even to attempt to wheedle the information out of Tom. Years ago he’d learned the excited, mock-pity look Tom could produce, with the accompanying, “I’m sorry, that’s a secret.”

  He hoped Phoebe was invited. He hadn’t seen enough of her in the past weeks. She lived in Oakland, and the recent burst of stagecraft required him to spend days and some nights at the Orpheum. He imagined introducing her to James. Then he imagined telling her how much James was annoying him, and even that minor intimacy made him feel a bit dizzy. It made shutting himself down for the performance that much harder. He imagined looking into her face, just to say “hello,” and he felt slightly afraid; if he started talking to her he might never stop.