He showed in his right hand a deck of green Bicycle cards. There was almost complete silence of the uncertain sort, as it seemed an unassuming way to begin.
“May I have a volunteer from the audience?”
Carter picked a man from the fourth row, aisle seat, who trotted onto the stage as if he owned it.
“Good evening,” Carter said. “What is your name, sir?”
“Patrick Smyth, with a ‘y.’ ”
“Mr. Smyth with a ‘y,’ please pick a card.” He fanned out his deck. “Any card, of course, not just the card I want you to pick. Now don’t show it to me. Thank you. Please put it back in the deck. Excellent.” One second later, Carter held up a nine of spades. “Is this your card?”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Carter said, bowing completely out of proportion to the effect on the audience. The applause was akin to the sound of a newspaper rustling in the breeze. He came to a full upright posture, looking into the house with one eyebrow flexed. “You know,” he said, as if in confidence, to Mr. Smyth, “the audience doesn’t strike me as thrilled.”
Smyth shook his head.
“And it is my job to thrill them.”
“Indeed.”
“It did seem awfully easy, didn’t it?”
“It wasn’t a remarkable trick,” Smyth allowed. Carter had picked well, a man who had helpful critiques.
Carter shuffled the deck, looking lost in thought. “Perhaps they suspect you’re a confederate. Magicians, or so I’m told, use confederates. Have we ever met?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you on my payroll?”
“No, sir.”
“Walking down the street, have you ever seen me? I look something like this.” Carter turned in profile, as if that might help.
“I have not.”
“I’m not sure I believe you. I might be paying you to say that.”
“I’m perfectly trustworthy.”
“Which is the problem. If I had a confederate, he’d be perfectly trustworthy. How do I know then that you are not my confederate? I can’t possibly amaze a sophisticated San Francisco audience until they know who my confederates might be.” Carter put his hand to his chin. “We must do something to flush all possible confederates out of the audience.” He snapped his fingers. “Mr. Smyth, you may return to your seat. A round of applause for the man who claims not to be on my payroll.”
Mr. Smyth looked like he had a great deal more to discuss, even as he reluctantly took his seat back.
“Will everyone in the audience—and this goes for everyone—please look under their seats? One of you has five thousand dollars in gold bullion hidden there.” This last statement was an ad-lib. He imagined, somewhere backstage, James flipping through his showbook frantically. In the audience, Carter heard murmurs, and several isolated cries of astonishment as fingertips all over the theatre found that there was indeed something secreted under their seats. Carter continued, “I’m sorry, did I say five thousand dollars in gold bullion? I meant everyone has decks of playing cards.” He heard groans and laughter, and returned to the regular script. “Please unwrap your souvenir decks of cards. You’ll notice they’re rather thin. Hold them up. Thank you.”
It made a lovely sight, almost two thousand hands waving decks in the air. He directed everyone to open the boxes up and remove the twenty-one cards inside. “They’re normal playing cards except there’s a rather plain-looking charlatan on the back. He’s wearing a turban. He’s drawn by Monsieur Leonetto Cappiello of Paris, France,” he added, another ad-lib he hoped James heard.
When everyone had removed their cards, he told the audience to pick a card from their decks. “Now, please don’t show it to me. You, sir, in Row S, five seats in, you’re showing me your card! All right, I’m closing my eyes.” Carter put on a blindfold and continued. “Now, I want you all to put your card back, right in the center of your decks. Exactly ten cards from the top, please. I’m going to make you do some math this evening, but it shouldn’t be too frightening. I want you to cut your decks into piles.” He held up two fingers. “Two piles. That’s the math.”
All around the audience, men and women looked into their hands, following Carter’s instructions, and making piles on their palms or on their knees. “Actually,” Carter said, “there is more math. Take the first three cards off the bottom . . . now take five from the top . . .” He continued in this vein. The audience shuffled and discarded pips as directed. The house was alive with the sounds of people counting as instructed. But far in the back of the theatre, in a seat in the third gallery, a man performed the maneuvers as if following the orders of a jail guard. And with each new instruction (“Cast aside the bottom card . . . now shuffle again . . .”), the man was heard to hiss, “Oh, please,” until his neighbors told him to hush.
“Now, square your decks. This is the moment of truth. Take the top card off your decks, and look at it. Is that your card?”
The theatre sounded like the woodlands, as little trills and cries came through the air. For Carter had indeed led every person in the audience—save one, who had deliberately disobeyed—right to the card they’d chosen. He took off his blindfold. Almost two thousand cards were swinging in the air, a deep lawn of white and red and black flowers, people turning to each other to ask, “How did that happen?”
“Have I chosen everyone’s card then?” Carter smiled. “Then it is as I’d hoped. You are all my confederates.” He bowed.
In the gallery, the bald man elbowed the woman to his right. “What a blowhard,” he whispered.
“Shhh!”
“Don’t you think the man’s a blowhard?”
“Excuse me, sir.” It was an usher. He had a flashlight, and he pointed it directly in the man’s face. “Can you come with me, please?”
“I paid for this seat. Fifty cents.”
“Sir, please come with me.” The usher pulled his jacket back, showing off a blackjack. The bald man’s eyes went from it to the usher’s face.
“My, my. Two saps,” he said, and before inviting more dialogue, he stood. The usher was exactly his size, well over six feet. “All right. I’m coming with you.”
He walked to the aisle, and as he passed, audience members grabbed at their ankles where he’d stepped on them. The usher pulled at his bicep.
The man regarded the usher’s fingers. “You should remove your hand.”
The usher said nothing more as he guided the man out of the gallery.
They made it like that as far as the staircase, which was dark, soundproofed, and curtained off. It was a staircase that led not only to the lobby, but to the roof.
. . .
“Would anyone here like to learn how to do magic tricks?” Carter asked brightly. As he spoke, his eyes were on the crippled children. Before the show, the nurses had informed him which children were sturdy and mobile enough for what he had in mind. Many of their hands went up, and they cried out in excitement. He listened carefully for those voices that would carry deep into the theatre.
To his delight, he heard one of them had deep gravel in his voice—he sounded like a gangster. He gestured that the boy should come join him onstage.
“What’s your name?”
“Jake,” the boy growled. He was indeed a little gangster, perhaps seven years old, hands jammed down into trouser pockets undoubtedly stuffed with frogs and string and a pocket knife, eyeing Carter like he was figuring the odds on a dog fight.
“Jake, you sound like you’re from New York City.”
“Naw. Lowah East Side.”
The audience roared, as it always did at children’s misconceptions. Jake looked out at them as if he’d remember each and every one of their faces and take his revenge later.
“What are you doing in California, Jake?”
“I got az-mer.”
More laughter, which Carter hadn’t wanted. He’d created this illusion to make a child happy to be onstage. It was vital to turn
the tide in Jake’s favor.
“Jake, let’s teach you some magic to keep that asthma from bothering you, shall we?”
. . .
Phoebe Kyle was in the wings, listening, standing by the handrail, using it for balance. Onstage, Carter was teaching the boy how to hold a deck of cards “just like a magician does.” But no matter how he gripped the deck, Jake couldn’t make a card jump out the way Carter could. Just as it seemed Jake was about to become upset, Carter reassured him that magic was a long-term process, that practice and perseverance were the keys.
“I have every confidence in you. You must practice and practice and practice till sore. Only then are you ready to practice once more,” Carter half-said, half-chanted.
Phoebe heard someone treading lightly behind her. There had been light treads all evening long, so she paid this little attention until there was a hand at her elbow.
“Are you Miss Phoebe Kyle?” A young man’s whisper. “Western Union,” he whispered. “Telegram.”
“Telegram?” The word seemed no more real when she said it. In fact, it seemed unlikely. “For me?”
“Mr. Ledocq, he pointed you out.”
She felt him putting a piece of paper in her hand. “What does it say?”
He shrugged. “We don’t read ’em, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m blind. Can you read it to me?” She passed it back to him.
“Oh.” A rustling. “Huh. There’s some mistake here. It’s blank.” He passed it back to her. “Sorry about that.” He turned on his heel with a squeak and trotted off.
Onstage, Carter was saying, “Jake, you’re ready for the next step, I think.”
Phoebe, who had many fears generally, was terrified by the idea of someone sending her a blank telegram. She held it like it was an envelope filled with scorpions, and then hesitantly she touched her fingertips to it. What she found made her more frightened: it wasn’t blank at all. It was Braille.
. . .
“Now, Jake, cards are very difficult to practice with. So I’m going to move on to magic you can perform excellently and immediately. What do you say, sport?”
Jake nodded. Carter paid him close attention: he was patient, and serious, and hadn’t yet cracked a smile. When he’d planned illusions for this show, Carter’s earliest designs were scenarios for two small boys in a snowstorm, learning magic tricks, but raw autobiography never satisfies when half-disguised as entertainment—the important part was that, as a boy, he’d wanted to perform incredible illusions quickly. He engineered an effect that could turn a child into a sorcerer instantly.
An assistant wearing a fez—Albert—carried a table onstage and placed it near Carter. On the table was a bundle draped in velvet.
“This is the easiest type of magic to do right the first time.” Carter unwrapped the bundle and held the contents aloft in both his hands. “Throwing knives at a living target.”
The curtain went up, showing off a set designed to look like Carter’s study. Piles of books, the suit of armor from his last show, ancient lithographs and animal heads mounted on the walls. To the far left was a scholarly-looking desk on which there was a wise-looking stuffed owl. Behind the desk, along the wall, framed portraits of some of Carter’s fellow magicians.
Carter took off his jacket and draped it over a coatrack just as Willie wheeled a backdrop painted with imps and devils on stage. “So, here are your knives. I’ll stand right here and you throw them at me.” Carter positioned himself against the backdrop, legs spread and arms akimbo.
Jake stood in the middle of the stage, uncertain what was expected of him. The table piled with knives was right behind him. He took in a shallow breath, a terrible little wheeze.
A second later, Carter exclaimed, “What am I doing! I’m sorry, Jake, I didn’t prepare you for this, did I?” He left the backdrop and went down on one knee, right next to Jake. “This could have been very dangerous if I hadn’t done this.” He took out a blindfold and showed it, both sides. The audience rumbled, half with laughter, half with horror, so Carter took the opportunity to murmur, “Young man, you won’t hurt me. No matter what you do, it’s magic. I promise.”
“Okay.” Jake looked toward Carter trustingly, just like that. Carter wanted to hug him. He secured the blindfold around Jake’s eyes so that its point hung down below his chin.
Carter returned to his pose, and, seeming to realize Jake couldn’t find the knives when blindfolded, clapped twice. The assistant with the fez came to the boy’s side.
“Just let your arm follow Albert’s,” Carter called out. “Just let it go limp, and he’ll guide you.”
Albert’s hand wrapped around Jake’s, which was wrapped around the butt of the knife, then Jake’s arm went back once, twice, and with the old heave-ho of a baseball pitcher, he threw with all of his might, right at Carter. There was a muffled impact, and a spotlight swept the stage for a few moments, finally discovering that Jake’s first knife had gone considerably wide, in fact hitting a glossy, framed photo of Thurston square in the forehead.
There was considerable laughter from the front of the house. Carter called, “Albert, those are the magic knives, aren’t they?”
When it was confirmed that the knives were indeed magic, Jake was given a second chance. With Albert’s arm guiding his, Jake’s next throw hit the backdrop against which Carter stood, right between his elbow and his body. Carter was the first to applaud. “Very good. Keep going!” he cried.
Jake’s next four throws hit outside the knee, inside the knee, by the upstage elbow, and the last one popped a balloon Carter held in his teeth. Each of the impacts was accompanied by shrieks from the house—they generally diminished, save for a man in the seven-dollar seats who laughed himself into such red-faced hysteria that Carter actually addressed him from the stage. “Sir, I don’t know you, but I invite you to attend every one of my shows from now on.”
By the time the illusion was over, Jake was certainly not ready to leave the stage. Because Carter knew children delighted in the mess of it, he and Jake baked a cake in a man’s hat. A great fog of flour spread into the audience while Jake’s friends laughed the deep guffaws of children.
The finale of the first act, in which an upright piano was rolled onto the stage, was one Carter had birthed through sheer stubbornness, as Ledocq thought it was crazy. “You put a piano onstage, you vanish it! You must vanish it! You must not”—his hands flew in the air as if describing exploding popcorn—“it’s a disaster.”
Carter had said, “Anyone can make a piano vanish.”
When the piano was in place, Carter asked Jake if he knew how to play.
“Nah,” Jake rasped. With a few tricks under his belt, he seemed as virile as a cowboy.
“Are you sure? Have you had lessons?”
Jake shook his head.
“Have you ever played on a magic piano? No? Jake, have a seat on the bench there. Good lad. Can you reach the pedals?” His feet were in fact a good foot away from the floor. Carter spread his hands out on the keyboard. “Just move your hands on the keys. Give it a try.”
Jake tentatively touched down his fingers on a few keys. It didn’t sound particularly magic.
“Thank you, Jake. Now, be a good boy and play something for me, say, a nice, slow piece. It’s all right, go ahead.” Jake fished for a key or two and looked up in astonishment as the piano began to make the most beautiful sounds. A nocturne.
“Hey!” His face twisted in delight.
“Very good. Familiar, too, isn’t that Chopin?”
“Yeah?” Jake looked up at him.
“Keep moving your hands.” Carter asked Jake for a waltz and a rag, both of which he played impeccably. Just as the audience was sensing the kind of fraud it might be, Carter tugged loose the piano’s paneling to show off the absence of a printed roll—this wasn’t a player piano. He called for requests. Audience members called out for Irving Berlin tunes, then the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Lost in the Moonlig
ht.” But then someone called out for Liszt, and when Carter said this aloud, the piano began to play the Benediction that Sarah had played for him long ago, and Carter was pulled into his past. He saw two beautiful women running upstairs, hand-in-hand, and felt a dog putting her chin on his hand. He had woken up to discover the love of his life. He snapped back to the present, and he felt the demonstration had gone on long enough.
“Jake,” he said, “you’ve become an excellent magician in twenty minutes, which is only twenty years less than it took me to reach adequacy.” As he spoke, he accepted a rolled-up purple velvet cloak from Willie. “We’re going to send you back into the world with all the arcane knowledge of the mystic arts at your disposal, but there’s one more illusion you have to master before you can take my place here onstage.”
“Can I throw the knives again?”
“You never repeat anything onstage,” he said, and Jake nodded. They were having a conversation in front of two thousand people. How easy it was for a child if he was made comfortable. “No, the skill I’m talking about is defeating the ordinary. For instance, here—” He gave the cloak a violent shake that scattered flower petals across the stage, and then he held it stiffly to his side, like a matador, and removed it—revealing a beautiful, smiling woman. She was dressed in a blue-sequined silk dress that ended just below the knee—not above, as Carter did not run that kind of show. She waved to the audience.
“See, Jake, that was unexpected. I struck a blow against the ordinary. This is my assistant, Madame Esperanza.” Carter took her by the hand and paraded her across the apron. He called over his shoulder, “Now, young man, go to the piano bench and open it up and bring me what you find.”
All eyes were on Jake as he opened the bench and tugged at something. It took him two hands, but eventually he withdrew a long, heavy crosscut saw, a saw that stood almost as tall as he did. When he turned downstage to show it off, its lower end dragged on the boards. It was a two-man sort of saw.
Carter took it from Jake and stood it on its end. They made a pretty line-up just in front of the footlights: Jake, Carter, the saw, Esperanza.
Carter Beats the Devil Page 50