Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  . . .

  When the curtain raised on the second act, the audience was treated to the same set as before—Carter’s study. Nothing had changed—the knife still stuck straight from Thurston’s face—but several more coatracks had appeared. Carter entered from stage left, causing a few quick, condensed laughs, as he was hard to see, obscured by much unusual hatwear.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, putting the hats on top of an unobtrusive table. “Magic is a difficult business.” The words felt misshapen in his mouth. He delivered his patter like he was back in Macao and speaking it phonetically. He took aim with the brim of a bowler hat and tossed it onto the hook of the coatrack beside him. It was a toss of about six feet. He had scripted this act as if it were just fantasy, and yet his patter struck him like body blows. It was creeping in on him: he’d spent too much money. “Each year the business gets harder.” He felt a lady’s hat, with a short crown and long feather, hefting it for balance, then tossed it onto another hook. “It’s not as if I have many nonmagical skills.” A Stetson, black, whizzed from his fingertips, landing atop the bowler perfectly. Before it had even settled, Carter had tossed a beret to join them. The audience laughed, and he spoke as if begging to differ with them. “I know, throwing hats, quite a skill. So you’d think!” And without even looking, he threw a Greek fisherman’s cap directly behind him, where it alighted perfectly on another coatrack. In quick succession, each time without caring to look where he aimed, Carter threw a golfing cap, a flapper’s cloche hat, a sombrero, and something quite silly, a coxcomb, onto the racks behind him, the coxcomb actually changing direction twice in midair before finding its place.

  He held his next bit of patter for a moment, as the applause was unexpectedly generous. Then:

  “See, that would be a magical skill and not one I could find gainful employment with. For I’ve often wondered whether I should retire.” He had rehearsed this sentence for weeks, it was as impersonal now as anything he had said onstage, and yet he was suddenly struck by how peculiar it felt to say. It was like he’d been psychic. Or like he’d known all along he was heading for disaster. “If I couldn’t be a magician,” he removed his turban, which made him feel more naked than he knew it would, “I would be, of course,” he put on a government-issue canvas sunhat, “a postman.”

  This caused a roar—it was, he admitted to himself, a silly bit. He invited several young men onstage, asking them to remember, as they came forward, the seat numbers of people they wished to write letters to. He promised “instantaneous delivery” anywhere within the theatre. The service, Carter promised, would be free the first time. As the men stood and wrote with fine Watermen pens Carter had provided at $2.49 each, he gave them final instructions: they should address the letters as they wished—say, to the blonde-haired girl with the pixie hat in row G; to the occupant of seat R16; even to a friend simply by name, no seat number. Each message was put into an envelope, sealed, and Carter vanished them all.

  “You, sir,” he said to the first volunteer, “look into my eyes. Ah, you are sending a letter to a Mr. . . . a Mr. William Harcourt, orchestra, row R. Seat 6 . . . no, seat 9!”

  The man clapped his hands together and he shook his head as his friend in row R, seat 9 retrieved a letter he found under his chair.

  “Sir, Mr. Harcourt, if you are Mr. Harcourt, will you please stand and read us all what your friend has written?”

  Harcourt was a chubby sort, with a loose tie and jowls, and he read slowly, “Dear Bill: I’m on stage! Best, Jim.”

  Murmurs of acknowledgment, and then Carter repeated the routine with the next young man, who had apparently sent a drinking invitation to Mayor Davie, whose seat was in row F (one row ahead of an unimpressed-looking Mayor Rolph). Davie took up more time than necessary, bowing from the waist to all points on the globe before taking his seat, and while he acknowledged the Mayor with applause, Carter was thinking, This is my Viking funeral.

  He pulled the third volunteer forward to better show him off under the lights. He stared deeply into the man’s eyes. “Your letter goes to the first gallery, row AA, seat 10.” He pointed his wand to the back of the house. “The young lady there should find the note by her armrest.” The spotlights swept back just as a startled “Oh!” came from that vicinity.

  “What does your letter say, young lady?”

  She stood, looking confused, a frown on her face as she read silently, and then she exploded, “Yes! Yes! Oh, Billy, yes, of course I’ll marry you!”

  The applause was wild, and heaped upon it were “awwww!” and “how about that!” and “congratulations,” and the young man onstage accepted handshakes from his fellow volunteers. Carter thought of Phoebe and imagined curling into her, holding her for comfort, but then he thought of Borax’s telegram, and then mystery and suspicion; everywhere he turned something prevented him from finding comfort. And magic? Carter wondered if he’d been thinking magic would step in and save him or if all along he’d wanted a grand immolation.

  He stood alone, and then a page brought him a glass of water. This was unscripted but he was indeed thirsty, so he drank it down. The page whispered, “Stage door, library press pass, someone calling himself Griffin.”

  Inwardly, Carter relaxed. It was only Griffin. Emergency canceled. Though he was onstage, Carter had no problem conducting a hushed conversation, as the audience would assume it would lead to business. “Rumpled, right? Rather a bulldoggish sort?”

  “No, bald. But we turned him away.”

  Carter finished the glass of water. Griffin was traveling in disguise, then. He held the glass out as if asking for more. The page shrugged, as he didn’t have a pitcher on him, and had felt clever for thinking of a way to go onstage. Carter said, with enough resonance that the audience could hear, “Ahh, no matter. I’ll do it myself.” He waved a hand over the glass and it was full again.

  He addressed the house: “Another occupation,” he said, holding the glass aloft, “eternal optimist.” He tossed the glass at the page, who reached out to catch it, but it had turned to a trail of glitter. There was light, appreciative laughter, and Carter thought, Lovely bit, keep it in, and then realized he had nothing to keep it for. So he thought, Enjoy it now. Enjoy it all now.

  When he was alone again on the apron, he flipped the postal worker’s hat onto the rack and donned a pith helmet. “Perhaps,” he said, “I am better suited for the life of an Egyptologist.”

  The orchestra, cued, began its fifteen-minute melange of Middle Eastern themes and Orientalia, and at the same time, stagehands were heaving on the ropes, sandbags rose into the air, and flats dropped down into position. The heaving of scenery was performed by a group of stagehands who were rugged. On the off season, they trained with weights, and their society behind the curtain was closed to the timid or the infirm. The six who worked tonight truly loved being on Carter’s team.

  Each piece of the set was on a winch and pulley, bag-dropped, counterbalanced by nests of fifty-pound bags of sand. The setup was called a “Fairbanks,” for the reason that when a stagehand so wanted, he could stand upon a knot on the rope, untie as few or as many bags of sand as he wanted, and ride nearly to the rafters like Zorro as the scenery lowered.

  There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter’s team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalks and down to the stage again, simply because they could.

  . . .

  The sidewalk in front of the Orpheum was close to deserted. The crowds were gone, and the easels with the window cards had been brought into the lobby. The hobo was still there, picking with fingerless gloves through the change he’d received. A tall, bald man walked briskly away from the backstage entrance to the alley’s mouth, and then stood there, hands on his hips, loo
king over his shoulder to deliver a devastating riposte to the stage-door buffoon who had turned him away.

  He heard the sounds of running feet. “Well!” he exclaimed, as Jack Griffin, necktie askew, raced past him.

  Griffin slowed, put his hand out to the metal lip of the box office cage, and caught his breath. He was still trying to get his legs under him. Captain Berger had finally recognized a rectangle they’d passed a dozen times as the marina landing strip. From the marina, a taxi ride with a mad cab driver, and then the sprint down Market Street.

  Griffin knew he couldn’t show his badge to anyone, or give his name up, not with Carter’s connections. And he wasn’t about to try and force his way in. The easiest way inside would be simply buying a ticket.

  He looked up, into the cage, which was empty. The girl had closed early.

  “Oh, great! That’s great!” He looked around. “Hey, pal!”

  “Yes?” The tall, bald man answered with some curiosity.

  “You wouldn’t have a ticket, would you?”

  The man’s face seemed to expand, eyebrows raising and mouth opening, all with pleasure. “Ah, yes, thank you for reminding me. I do have a ticket.” And with that, the man walked to the entrance, and with a wave to Griffin, handed his ducat to an usher, after which he stood in the lobby and waved again.

  Griffin watched as if someone had slipped him a dead fish. “San Fran-goddamn-ciscans,” he said.

  . . .

  Meanwhile, inside, the bald man had a dry chuckle. He moved toward the doors to the orchestra section, but was turned away by the very usher who’d torn his ticket. “You’ll have to wait for the interval, sir.”

  “I know that,” he sighed.

  Seconds later, however, the usher said “Hey!” as an infuriated Griffin was trying to muscle his way inside. In a phalanx, ushers from all points of the compass rushed toward the entryway to repel him. It took but a few seconds for Griffin to back off, straightening his jacket. He muttered, “All right, all right, don’t get excited on me,” and backed away, into the night.

  When the usher in charge of the orchestra doors returned, he looked around, puzzled, as the lobby was empty. The bald man was gone.

  . . .

  A single oboe played sinuously with scant percussion, a triangle bell, perfect snake charmer music, while Carter prowled about the stage, holding aloft a torch that had been dipped in smokeless pitch.

  “I’ve been reading much this past year about my namesake Howard Carter. He is, by the way, no relation, though I wish he were, for I’d like him to hire me. Excavator of Bani Hassan. And el Amarna, capital city of the glorious sovereignty of Akhenaten. Plunderer of Deir el Babri, the burial place of Queen Hatshepsut.” The stage around him was dark, though there were hints of statues and gold leaf inscriptions on towering obelisks. The oboe was joined by violins, which made an eerie screeching. “He hunted up and down the Valley of the Kings like a man possessed, in search of the thrice-cursed tomb of the child king, Tutankhamun, Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. He worked all day long and so as to discourage robbers, he slept at night in the caverns, with the bats. A year ago, he broke open the tomb, but we never heard what actually happened when he went into the three-thousand-year-old stygian darkness. Until tonight.”

  Carter’s torch went out. It was velvet black in the house, and silent. Not even a cough.

  Finally, Carter spoke. “Howard Carter’s men asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, wonderful things.’”

  A dazzling burst of white light as all the spots in the house came up to show off stone walls on which hieroglyphs etched in gold extended to the high arch over the stage. Tremendous golden statues of Isis and Ramses flanked a great sarcophagus inlaid with precious stones, its head that of a great cat, caught in mid-snarl. Bats hovered and darted, leathery wings flapping.

  Carter said mystic incantations, and this caused the life-sized portraits of mummies to come to life, shrieking and groaning until he said a second set of incantations that caused them to turn to dust.

  Carter had the sarcophagus rolled toward him and rotated 180 degrees. He asked aloud what sacred mysteries this three thousand-year-old mummy would be protected by, and then he and his men threw open the lid. They jumped backward, and the audience gasped, for the inhabitant was in fact a roaring African lion.

  “Let’s close that back up,” Carter said and then, gingerly, they lowered the lid, and opened it again a heartbeat later. The lion was gone, and in his place was a towering and lovely woman who wore a jeweled headdress. She stepped out of the coffin with an imperious manner, ramrod straight and haughty, and when she paced around the stage, she walked Egyptian style (something Carter hadn’t scripted, but he noted his approval of this Stanislavski method).

  She stated that she was the one whom the Greeks called Thea Phiopater, reincarnation of Princess Akhanothep, of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and that her sleep having been disturbed, she was ready to curse Carter for all eternity unless he was able to set her spirit free.

  Carter courageously accepted the challenge and had his men wrap her in bandages. When she was fully mummified (the winding movements around her limbs and torso were set to the whirling type of music preferred by dervishes), Carter stood her in the dead center of the stage. With his hands, he tilted her backward, and levitated her into the ether.

  He ran a brass hoop over and around and past her floating form, gazing at her without blinking, as if she were held aloft by his concentration alone. He snapped his fingers and, like she was riding air currents, Princess Akhanothep drifted hither and yon, pacific, while the orchestra played the melancholy Le Cygne by Saint-Saëns.

  Carter extended his fingertips and she floated over the heads of the first rows of the audience just long enough to confound them. He beckoned to the airborne girl, making slow and gentle motions, and she floated back to him.

  “You are free!” he exclaimed, and pulled away the bandages. They fell to the stage, revealing something impossible: empty space. She had vanished!

  There was raucous applause throughout the house, cut short when two spots swept to the back of the house, where the Princess now stood, arms extended over her head, dressed in long and extravagant Parisian silks, the hems of which she held in her hands—she appeared to have wings. “Here I am, and I’m free!” She threw her head back and laughed gaily, and began a modernistic dance that took her down the center aisle, and back onto the stage, with the applause continuing the whole way.

  With all eyes upon her—not only was her dancing impressive, but frankly, she was a choice piece of calico—the bald man standing by the back row frowned. Of course Carter would pull an “It’s Me”–type chestnut that produced a box jumper at the back of the theatre. He walked among the standing bodies—for Cleo was now bowing to a standing ovation—until he determined exactly where she’d appeared. He found it: a simple trap cut into the carpeted runner in the empty standing-room-only section. With the entire theatre otherwise occupied, he found it an easy matter to gimmick the trap open and drop down inside. He was in a tunnel. He had to crouch, but the pathway was illuminated by phosphorescent tape that clearly marked the route to the backstage area.

  . . .

  The main drape had come down; Carter pushed through it and, smiling, addressed his audience as they found their seats.

  “Truth be told, Ladies and Gentlemen, dodging curses all the livelong day strikes me as a bit of a chore. I am a lazy man.” He removed the pith helmet and smoothed back his hair. “I prefer the quiet life,” he said, producing a leather helmet and goggles, “that of a stunt rider.” He wound a scarf around his neck and saluted the audience with a riding crop.

  When the curtain opened next, the Egyptian tomb had been completely struck, and in its place was a very clean, almost ascetic set: a single large panel upon which a cold grey cityscape had been painted, Bauhaus style. The only props were a long wooden rampway and a metal platform fifteen feet in the air, the latter suspended over
a shallow tank of water.

  Carter crossed the stage, circling the tank, which came up to his knees.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are lucky to have with us tonight a magic cauldron, straight from the European continent. It is a good ten feet in diameter, but just eighteen inches deep. Nonetheless that is eighteen inches of magic water. But how exactly, you ask, is it magic? Please indulge me—welcome Miss Amanda Chong.”

  Carter gestured upward, to the platform, where Amanda stood, in a robe. She wore a swim cap, and she gave a huge and fluttery wave to the audience, and she said, “Hi! Hello!”

  “Miss Chong,” Carter said, “have we ever met before?”

  “You live next door, Carter,” she cried, which received a big laugh.

  “Are you on my payroll?”

  She nodded with enthusiasm.

  “Ah, you honest little girl. What am I paying you to do?”

  She mimed making a dive into the tank.

  “I’m paying you to dive off a fifteen-foot platform into eighteen inches of water?”

  “Five dollars,” she grinned.

  “Well, then, what are you waiting for? Oh, the incantation, of course.” The orchestra struck up a jaunty movement from Water Music, while Carter waved his arms over the tank, and said “Ergo jubilatio, vivat floreatque media, media!” then, to Amanda, “Dive!”

  She dropped her robe to the platform, showing off her fashionable black and red wool swimsuit. Bending her knees once, twice, three times, she bounded off the platform and with a perfect needle-nosed arc of her arms, swan dove into the tank.

  The reaction was more a generalized gasp than enthusiasm, as it looked like Amanda had to have hit the bottom with some great force. Yet there was no sign of her, not even a bubble. While the audience was still craning their necks to see what had happened to her—she hadn’t broken the surface—Carter rolled up his sleeves, and then threw both arms violently upward, in the direction of the platform, from which there was a puff of smoke. Almost immediately, people began to clap, slowly, because they could plainly see up there, waving charmingly, young Amanda Chong all over again, in her swimsuit, which was bone dry.