. . .
At dinner, the conversation was amusing and the food uniformly excellent. The mood was sufficiently light that even Max Friz smiled once or twice. There were toasts to Carter and the show, telegrams to read from Houdini and Thurston and Goldin and Raymond. Ledocq had to leave the table early—he had to get to the theatre, he felt, or the earth would open up and a giant hand would yank the whole show into a chasm. But before he left, Carter read aloud a brief telegram. “TO MONSIEUR LEDOCQ BREAK A LEG OR I’LL BREAK IT FOR YOU SINCERELY BENNY LEONARD.” Ledocq, touched to the point of tears, took the telegram and put it in his breast pocket and left without a word.
There was also a chatty message in French from a Leonetto Cappiello, whose name Carter didn’t recognize. This caused James to lecture the guests on his brother’s inadequacies in social situations, as Monsieur Cappiello had designed the “Everywhere” poster, and Carter was about to make a tired response—for he no longer wanted to be teased—when James finished with something close to an apology. “My brother has been so busy designing illusions that will confound us all that I’m proud to be the one who keeps track of his things on earth for him.” The conversation segued into banter about Carter’s obviously smitten self, and Phoebe’s charms. Mrs. Ledocq in particular said she’d never seen Charlie Carter looking so happy. Philo asked to be excused during the main course. He went and sat alone in the living room.
For a while, it was six people at the table, telling stories and asking questions of each other—for instance, Max wanted to know if Phoebe had a dog, which mystified her until, with the intervention of Tom (who’d heard about such a thing), she learned that the veterans blinded in the gas attacks were now able to walk on the most crowded sidewalks with the aid of trained guide dogs.
Over salad, discussion went back and forth about whether this was prudent or dignified, and as Phoebe learned more and more from Max—the blind in Germany could take their dogs on riverboats and buses and trains—she announced that she would get a dog, and furthermore she hoped it was a completely imprudent and undignified dog with a name like Bowser or Jingles, for only that type would suit her.
The table’s laughter was met with the choral sounds of Handel’s Messiah, which came from the living room. Then Philo walked to the table and sat down in his chair as if he’d done nothing. Tom shouted “Hallelujah,” and, beside himself, ruffled Philo’s hair.
For an hour, Carter sat amid friends and family. With the music playing, and the wine to drink, and a woman with whom he occasionally held hands under the table, this was his last time tonight to relax. It was well known among magicians that a man awaking to love was vulnerable to deadly mistakes.
The last thing Griffin did before he left Denver was to send a certified parcel to his attorney in Bethesda, with instructions to open it if he went missing for more than a week. It contained all of his notes on the Carter investigation, including his suspicions that his superiors might be protecting the magician. He had scrawled at the bottom of the last sheet of paper: “The wine bottle enclosed is visible in the uncropped Examiner photographs found herein. Its label is a ‘cabalistic’ type visual puzzle that when viewed from an extreme angle shows the name of the vintner (Charles Carter), his profession (Magician), his places of residence (San Francisco, Oakland), and other phrases irrelevant to this investigation. Research confirms he received title to vineyards in Napa County at land forfeiture in December 1897. Witness Alhino saw a man (possibly Carter) delivering said bottle to Harding room that night.”
Even Griffin had to admit it was just a wine bottle. No trace of poison. But it put Carter in the room, maybe, and Carter hadn’t mentioned being there. It wasn’t enough to convict him, but Griffin was sure he could confront him and, if he had to, beat something out of him.
He was required to report for duty at 6 A.M. He telephoned the Northern Line train station and requested a one-way ticket on the 9:15 A.M. express, asking them to hold it for Jack Griffin. When agents swarmed the station, they hovered around the ticket office to no avail—Jack Griffin never arrived and his ticket went unclaimed. There being much gossip among the train crews, however, a Pullman porter heard the fuss and mentioned that a Mr. Jack Griffin actually boarded the 7:25 and paid for a ticket to New Orleans.
Local authorities at every stop were alerted, and agents mobilized, but they needn’t have bothered. Jack Griffin had learned a thing or two recently about misdirection: he disembarked from the 7:25 after one stop and walked a mile to an airstrip on which he saw a single Jenny. He entered the barracks and awoke the pilot, who’d been napping on his cot, and asked the groggy man how fast he could get to San Francisco. Half-awake, the pilot began his speech about how safe flying was and how many combat missions he’d flown in France—all Jenny pilots had exactly the same story, and it was built to suss out how much they could gouge their passenger—stopping only when Griffin started counting out ten-dollar bills.
“Dusk,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
Carter’s driver dropped him at the Orpheum stage door at 6:30, and from that moment—for there was a page boy waiting for him on the sidewalk, and the page boy held a list of complaints—he dealt with crises. The red gels used on the stage lights were casting shadows unlike those they’d thrown during rehearsals. A water pipe over the stage had chosen that moment to leak. The lion was anxious. Cleo was unsure of her part in the Egyptian illusion: Could she try something called the Stanislavski method?
This last request was odd enough that Carter, supervising the loading of paper flowers into a cone, asked her to explain.
“You see,” she said, her voice much more exotic-sounding than it had seemed hours ago, “I am not pretending to be an Egyptian princess—I actually am an Egyptian princess.”
“I follow. That would be fine.”
“It increases believability,” she added.
“Yes.” He dismissed her, watching the sequins on her headdress sparkle as she walked under the lights.
The stage manager approached. “Mr. Carter. The lion.”
And so Carter attended Baby, who indeed seemed more agitated than usual. He calmed down after a few reassuring words and one of James’s baked potatoes with cheese.
The leak over the stage was taped up, the gels were swapped, and, though there was no end to the problems, Carter began to fade from the here-and-now into a quiet place where nothing could reach him.
He collared Albert and Esperanza and told them the company needed to block out a television-less version of the Devil’s entrance just before act three; hence the interval following act two would be longer than usual. Would they mind performing the juggling bit from “A Night in Old China” on the apron to cover for him? They were delighted: Did Carter have flash paper? He told them to hound Ledocq until they found some.
Then Ledocq moaned aloud to Carter about that development—the flash paper he’d made was volatile and tended to heat up by itself. Did they really want to risk Albert going up in flames? Carter paid enough attention to direct the conversation, but he was also listening to the other side of the curtain, where the orchestra, whom he was paying seventy dollars an hour, tuned up and read through the sheet music he’d provided.
Outside the theatre, on the sidewalk, boys paced back and forth, swinging school bells and wearing sandwich boards on which half-sheets of Carter’s “Everywhere” poster were pasted. The opening night audience, spilling a moderate way off the sidewalk, was waiting for the doors to swing open. Of the several hundred people who’d arrived early, there were men who wore diamond studs in their blouses, escorting women wearing pearl necklaces secured to their bodies the way Parisians did, with secret binding chains that discouraged theft. The thieves who worked in bump-and-run teams, impressed, stole the men’s wallets instead.
There were street entertainers with their hats in front of them, among them: Nessie the blind accordion player, who attended each opening night, all over the city; and a young hobo, a boho hobo, a professor of
hobology, he announced, who declaimed Shakespeare for anyone who would stop to listen.
Carter’s complimentary tickets had gone far and wide, from Captain Willow, who hobbled along the sidewalk with his wife, to Philo, who came with Max Friz and Mrs. Ledocq, to Jossie Dover, who looked smashing in a tuxedo, to the Chong family, whose daughters would play a small part in the show. Mayor Davie of Oakland and Mayor Rolph of San Francisco nearly collided, and after feigned politeness, tried to determine which of them had been given a better seat in the house.
Around the corner, in the alleyway, which had been kept scrupulously clean for the arrival of equipment and animals, the boys from the Shell station smoked cigarettes and drank gin with the girls they’d met in the graveyard, freshlings from Mills College who wore cloche hats and turned-down hose. “Sure I know Carter,” Jimmy was saying to the girls. “He’s a good egg, he tells me how he does all his tricks.”
Exactly no one believed him. “G’waaan,” the girls cried together.
A line of taxicabs two rows deep dropped passengers off under the marquee lights. From some of them came irritated men from the War Department and from others, shooting them the evil eye, came junior executives from RCA and Westinghouse. Word had come down that even though the plans for television were destroyed, smuts low on the totem pole had to report back with their own eyes that Carter was empty-handed. To one side of the entrance was a line of crippled children and their nurses, and to the other the fifty-cent ticket holders who talked about the great shows they had seen two or three seasons before, and which movie stars compared favorably to Mr. Carter, and whether he’d actually killed the President, or whether it had been the widow Harding or his cabinet or the Reds, and, in a debate as old as the Phantom War Gun, was Charles Carter more a glamorous figure or tragic? Had he ever been as good a magician since his wife had died?
At 7:30, Carter took a final walk around the stage and the backstage and then locked the door to his dressing room. This was a routine dating back many years—his final preparations would take him until two minutes before showtime.
He stripped to his undershirt and shorts. His work clothes hung from a hook just over his makeup mirror. He sat down and stood again, for his chair was unexpectedly yielding. He exclaimed aloud in simple happiness, as there was a large silk pillow on his seat. He reflected for a moment about the pleasures that headlining could bring, and then sat again, his makeup kit in front of him. Eye shadow, eyebrow pencil. He applied red dots to the corners of his eyes so they wouldn’t disappear under the lights. Then on went the flexible greasepaint, mild as possible, capped with his secret weapon: Max Factor Society Makeup, a perfectly glareless powder. As it was made for civilians rather than the stage, other magicians hadn’t caught on to it yet. The idea was for the audience to not even know he was wearing makeup.
He checked every pocket in his jacket, ready to resew or tear the seams of anything he needed to. But it was perfect, as, in a burst of industry three days ago, he’d lovingly stocked his clothes. With the familiar black wool suit around him, and his black tie done just so, the final step was to adjust his turban, just so. He felt around the folds of damask, ensuring nothing hidden was about to drop onto the stage.
When he was quite finished, he shot his sleeves, and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw an unremarkable man from whom he would not expect miracles.
But it was only 7:45. Somehow, he’d prepared too quickly. He had nothing to do for fifteen minutes. Immediately, an anxiety so potent it had its own color—it seemed pinkish—rose in his chest and shoulders.
To combat that, he let out a contented-sounding sigh and put his feet up on his dressing room table in an approximation of looking relaxed. He attempted nostalgia: Ah, when had he last seen this dressing room? Four or five years ago, he’d had a nice week here, and he’d headlined here twice when he was still on Keith-Orpheum time. And 1911, now that was a remarkable show. He remembered his parents hovering over him here just before he’d debuted Blackmail, and how he’d exasperatedly wished they would just stay away on opening night.
They weren’t here tonight. He couldn’t in fact remember the last time they’d seen his show. They’d meant to come when he was in Rio nine months ago. He shrugged: he had James and Ledocq and a burgeoning romance, and yet, he’d once hoped to impress his parents, long ago. When you got older, did you actually need your parents less or did you just learn how to replace them?
The stage would be empty. He could go there. He folded up shop in the dressing room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. He walked down the narrow corridor, stagehands and property men shuffling past him and whispering to each other. He kept his head down until he passed Ledocq, whereupon he muttered that he was going to work now.
“You have your wallet?”
Carter patted his trouser pocket. “Yes.”
“Good. Always take your wallet onstage.”
With that ritual finished, Ledocq patted him on the back.
The stage floor was built at a cunning angle, two degrees oblique from the audience point of view, so that it looked shallower, as if there would be no room for hiding, say, assistants or a second set of boxes. It was a collage of tape, traps, and marks to hit, and Carter could feel as he strode across it which places gave way slightly and which were reinforced.
He stood dead center, by a small X fashioned from electrical tape beside which Albert had written, “Here standeth our boss.” He smiled. There was a fire curtain behind him, green velvet, and, before him, a pair of musty draperies that would part in just minutes and show him off to the audience.
Carter was perfectly alone, and the isolation appealed to him. The orchestra was playing its preshow selections, a medley of waltzes and popular tunes. They came through the curtains muffled and mixed with the sounds of the audience, happy sounds, Carter thought. He fought back the urge to crack his knuckles.
“Hey.” Phoebe’s voice. It took him a moment to locate her—she was standing in the wings, stage right. She was holding on to a handrail. Carter could hear the orchestra finish its final waltz. There was some applause, probably from the higher galleries, where the audience was unafraid to be excited. “I’d kiss you for luck,” she said, “but your makeup smells awful. Dear God, is that Society by Max Factor?”
“Shhh.”
“Have you tried Helena Rubinstein? She’s very clever.”
He half-listened, unsure whether he had a deck of cards. He patted his jacket pocket, and found them.
“Is there any trick you do tonight that’s dangerous?”
“Didn’t you ask me that? They’re all dangerous.”
“No, I mean, severely.”
He looked over his shoulder. When had the overture begun? It was in full swing now, and he had but a moment left before curtain. “I’ll have knives hurled at me at eight fifteen, and at eight twenty-five—”
“Please don’t say that. I can’t hear that kind of thing.”
“Well . . . bullet catching. That’s the dangerous one.”
“Why is it?”
The music was swelling to a crescendo. Thirty seconds left. “It’s killed a few men onstage. Basically, there’s a loaded gun, but you switch it with one that fires blanks. Chung Ling Soo used—never mind, we have a foolproof method to—”
“Please don’t do it.”
“It’s safe, Phoebe.” He touched her arm. “Really. I don’t take risks.”
She wrapped both her hands around his. “I’m not letting you go until you at least consider it.”
He looked from her to the curtain, then back. The whole bullet-catching gag took two minutes and was deep into the third act. In fact, it was yesterday’s business, a simple repeat of an effect he’d held over from last season. “I can leave it out.”
Her shoulders dropped. “I owe you something.”
“And what would that be?”
“The music’s stopped,” she said, and smiled at him.
CHAPTER 6
&n
bsp; The lights slowly dimmed and a single bonbon spotlight was brought up so it shone on the red velvet curtain. The focus drew narrower, tightening as there was a final explosion of kettledrums, and then, for the first time since the decade began, the grand draperies at the Orpheum Theatre parted for an evening-length show.
The spotlight fell on empty space. Carter the Great came to his mark from stage right, making small, sultanic salutes to the audience as the orchestra played the most familiar bars from “Pomp and Circumstance.”
Between the time he found his mark and the time he spoke, he surveyed the audience in full. He had been through many opening nights, more than he could remember. On few of them had he felt like this. He mentally brought out the old checklist, . . . am I too hot, no; am I too cold, no . . . attempting to name the feeling, and then realized that the oddity was simply that he was feeling. He could feel Phoebe in the wings—he hadn’t had someone waiting backstage for him in years. And there, the very back of the house, he saw empty seats. The sight struck him with weird urgency, as if his duty to entertain were quickly tripled.
The applause died down. He put his hands in his pockets. He curled and relaxed his toes inside his well-polished shoes.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming tonight.” The curtain closed behind him, so he was left on the apron to perform in-one. “This is a very large theatre, and it deserves only the most massive and splendid illusions that cost many thousands of dollars to construct. I invite you all to witness this stupendous effect, an awe-inspiring spectacle ne’er before seen by human eyes. It will stun you. Behold,” he held on to the pause, “a deck of cards.”
Carter Beats the Devil Page 49