Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  Arm now down, feeling began to return—he hadn’t even been aware how blessedly numb he’d been. He couldn’t look. He touched his left fingertips to his right hand and confirmed he had ripped a hole from his palm upward and through the line of bones and cartilage between his fingers, which seemed to hang inappropriately from his hand. With the crème-colored silks in his pocket, he improvised a bandage that immediately became a map of another world, red oceans spilling over white continents. Mechanically, his left hand went up his right sleeve and pulled out a wire. He inserted it and the cuffs fell to the ground.

  He looked at the knife in the board and thought about ripping it out. Too difficult. He saw Mysterioso overhead leaping from the ladder and onto the top of a piece of the Egyptian scenery, walking across it.

  The props table. No matches. No self-lighting candles. The other five throwing knives were gone. Albert had used them all during the show. Albert who was such a fire bug.

  Carter touched his pockets. Flash paper. The three sheets he’d taken from Albert. He had those. They only worked intermittently, with the right friction, and had less flame than a match head, perfect when you needed to dazzle the eye. But Albert had juggled torches without igniting these three papers—they were almost useless. The bullet-catching pistols, where were they?

  Looking overhead—Mysterioso was spiderlike, crawling up a ladder stealthily; Carter couldn’t see Phoebe, but he hoped she had found cover somewhere impenetrable. Carter returned to the middle of the stage, where Mysterioso had laid the pistols down. He looked on the black-matted floor, under a triad of spotlights that gave perfect illumination for yards, but they were gone. He remembered Griffin had kicked them away. He heard quick footsteps overhead, two kinds, one light, the other in heavy boots. One-handed, bleeding, armed with three sheets of flash paper, he set off toward the rafters, where his last battle awaited.

  Rather, he tried. He ended up making a wide circle. Things were getting fuzzy. Climbing a ladder one handed? There was an elevator, but it was parked at the top of the highest catwalk.

  He looked upward. There were levels of catwalks and flies crossing like tree branches. There were banks of lights. He saw, suspended over the stage, the statues from the Egyptian illusion. He stared at them. Brilliant, golden, heavy.

  . . .

  The rope ladder Phoebe had found went several vertical yards up to an iron walkway that felt cold against her feet. She padded along, hands on the waist-high railing, attuned to the slightest vibrations in the metal. She could hear small aquatic sounds, hollow and echoing, which meant she was over the water tank. What was near that? What was useful?

  A sudden clang of boots on metal. The close seasick smell of gasoline. She clutched at the railing. She was forty feet in the air.

  “I’m unarmed,” she said in a small voice.

  “Good,” he replied and drew back his fist. But there was a turbinelike sound of the Ramses statue dropping on its cable, and Mysterioso turned his head in anticipation of seeing it crash to the stage.

  There followed a panoply of things in motion, taken together as inevitable as the figures on a giant village clockworks striking the hour: Mysterioso’s head turning downward, toward the stage, and Charles Carter, riding the Fairbanks rope, propelling upward. Mysterioso, ready to wrestle with him, took a step toward Phoebe, who tripped, yelling as she fell onto the catwalk. Mysterioso gripped the railing so that if Carter pried him away, they would fall forty feet together. The natural motion of the rope forced Carter up and out, in a parabola, and he jumped, feet planted just outside the railing, on the edge of the catwalk, and grabbed Mysterioso in a bear hug, one arm under the armpit, the other squeezing him around the neck. With arms linked, jerking with his own dead weight, Carter pulled him over the railing.

  The plaster statue smashed onto the stage, coming apart into chicken wire and powder. Phoebe was alone. She held tightly to the still-shaking catwalk. She had no idea what had happened. She didn’t hear the impact of bodies.

  “Charlie?”

  Below the catwalk, spread out in all dimensions, with wires and filaments as translucent and complex as a spider web, was the asrah levitation device that Carter, not Kellar, had designed. Despite its delicacy—under the stage lights, it was of course invisible—it was as strong as high-tensile fishing wire. It was a net stretched between springs tense enough to launch boulders over distant battlements. Carter and Mysterioso had landed in its embrace, bouncing slightly, and safely, twenty-five feet over the stage. But each was tangled in threads they couldn’t see. Two bloody, contorted men seeming to float in the ether as if waiting for a giant arachnid.

  Mysterioso fought to get his hand in his pocket; the wires around his wrists cut into him, but he was able to pull out his knife. Carter was bound in a nearly fetal position, facing him, neck and feet just out of reach of the knife that Mysterioso swung. He swung it again, closer.

  “Holy—” Mysterioso suffered an unexpected shake and bounce. He’d accidentally severed some of the lines that kept him from falling headfirst onto the stage. He froze.

  Carter felt himself bob. It was almost soothing. He’d been greatly excited a moment before, but the ascent and tumble had brought a fresh spray of blood from his hand; it was actually trickling now, draining out, dripping down his sleeve, and it was hurting less by the minute. That wasn’t good. But it was very very hard to fight. Around the edges of his eyes, the sights were breaking into dots and dashes. He saw between these particles something eternal, warm and quiet.

  “Phoebe,” Carter said calmly. He had a plan. He had better say it now. “Go to the end of the catwalk. There’s an elevator there. Take it down to the stage, and go get help.”

  He was watching the slow passes Mysterioso made at him with his knife. In spite of the care he took, the blade severed another filament, and Carter felt tension in the net increase. It felt ready to pull apart, but still Carter was feeling warm, and safe, and very numb. In the fading footlights of his vision, he could see how everything he’d ever known was just props and scrim, how reality wasn’t action and friction and motion, but a winding down. Entropy, Ledocq’s evidence of the creator. Carter could see it, and it was all right. He looked at the man wrapped up with him and tried to broadcast those feelings forth. Mysterioso’s eyes narrowed and then, violently, he lunged at Carter, regardless of the consequence to himself. Carter was thrown right and left and down as cords were cut, and there were curtains drawing shut in his mind. He wanted to go home, to sleep. It would feel much better to give up, give in. Then he remembered faintly that this was exactly the Devil’s advice. What if all this sweet winding down was the way the Devil buried wonder? Wonder was life. The knife came at him again. He had one piece of business left. He reached into his pocket after Mysterioso’s knife arm thrust forward. The blade came close, right to the point of Carter’s chin, and that’s when Carter rubbed flash paper vigorously against Mysterioso’s stabbing arm.

  There was a fizzle of white magnesium sparks, which went out immediately. But now in their place was a low blue flame. The gasoline that had soaked Mysterioso’s clothing caught fire, igniting like a gas jet, and he screamed. The smells of scorching cotton and burning rubber brought Carter to full attention—since he had bear-hugged Mysterioso on the catwalk, there was gasoline on him, too. He struggled in the net, trying to put distance between them. Mysterioso jerked around like a puppet, and then in horror Carter realized the mistake he’d made, for the remaining asrah wires were burning like candlewicks, tiny flames traveling along the supports. He was tossed to the left, then flung upward. He flailed in the air, flying, limbs madly grabbing at nothing. He hit a wall face first, then dropped to the stage.

  Instead of swinging out, Mysterioso dropped straight down and into the water tank. Aviation fuel will burn on water, but not underneath; the initial splash revived him, and he gulped down a breath, lay under the surface, and shed his burning clothes. He would stay under as long as he could, and as a magician, Mysterioso
could hold his breath for a very long time indeed.

  When Mysterioso surfaced, there were small patches of flaming cloth on the water, but the rest had extinguished. He took stock: he was dirty, and cut, and clawed, and had minor burns—otherwise he was at peak capacity. Though the edges of the tank were only eighteen inches deep, it sloped inward so he stood in about four feet of water. He felt the bottom with his toe until he located one of the throwing knives that had fallen in with him. He heard echoing sounds—footsteps, clapping, like hesitant applause. He caught his breath. He peered out—there were curls of smoke in places and, under the lights, they were impenetrable.

  “Hello?”

  Mysterioso heard Phoebe’s voice. She was close by. He said nothing. Carter, unconscious and in a heap, couldn’t answer her.

  “Carter?” Her voice, sounding slightly panicked. “Are you in the tank?”

  Mysterioso splashed around, then, splashed long and hard. Where was she?

  “I’m over here. Take my hand,” she said calmly. He watched for her through the smoke—there she was, drumming on the side of the tank. She smiled. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He walked over to her, his right hand extended, left hand loosely wrapped around the butt of his throwing knife.

  Mysterioso reached out toward Phoebe, and he took into his hand not her hand but the 240-volt power line she had located by its buzzing on the floor.

  A power line against the bars of a cage may not be grounded, but a power line in water is grounded very well indeed. Mysterioso’s eyebrows stood on end, his teeth jammed shut on his tongue, and every muscle in his body clenched beyond their limits, curling and contorting. In his last five seconds of consciousness, he felt his eardrums burst and the vitreous in his eyeballs begin to melt away. Then, though strictly speaking, dead, he continued to stand with his hand wrapped around the line until gravity made him keel over, and the water around him boiled.

  . . .

  Carter awoke with jumbled impressions of where he was. In a crate? Lights in his eyes. Onstage. Someone was saying he was fine. His head felt like it had been crushed, and he was afraid to move it, remembering a long-forgotten fear of Tug accidentally stepping on him.

  “Charlie, it’s okay, you’re fine.”

  “Phoebe?”

  “Yes. We’re safe. We’re okay.”

  He considered this. “Are you safe?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  It was a large stage. There were many obstacles all over it. “How did you find me?”

  “I clapped, and Baby more or less towed me here.” Carter was on his back, his head in her lap. Baby was stretched out behind them like they were relaxing at a picnic. “Then I heard someone moving in the water tank—”

  He remembered his hand. “I’m bleeding to death.”

  “I don’t think so. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “Oh.” His vision was blurred, so he blinked, and it cleared. “You clapped and Baby got up?”

  “Yes.”

  “He must like you.” He could hear a percolating sound, like bubbles, and there was a sweet odor in the air. “What’s that smell?”

  “Mysterioso, boiling,” she said.

  He tried to get a sense of her face, but given his blurry vision, it was difficult.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m very good. You hurt your hand.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I killed him,” she said, swallowing. If he hadn’t been listening for it, he wouldn’t have heard the catch in her voice.

  “And you’re all right?”

  She shrugged.

  He remembered more. “Where’s Griffin?”

  “I opened the stage door. There was a man out there, someone named Chase. He called for an ambulance.”

  Carter sat up. He held his head, which throbbed.

  Leaning on Phoebe, he limped the dozen steps to Griffin’s side, and knelt.

  Griffin, pale, looked at him. He moved his hands, still cuffed. He was weak. He tried to bring his hands up. Carter noted that Griffin was holding the bullet-catching pistol. He couldn’t quite lift it.

  “You’re under arrest,” Griffin whispered.

  That Griffin was holding the pistol with a blank round in it made Carter feel a yearning in the back of his throat. He put his hands up in the air. “I’ll go quietly now,” he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  The next morning’s headlines could—perhaps—easily be imagined. When a magician once implicated in murdering the President is found with a dead rival (electrocuted), a dead assistant (decapitated), another assistant bound and gagged (Willie, unconscious in the wardrobe), a dead usher (broken neck, and in semi-undress), and a wounded Secret Service agent, the accumulation of details is almost hypnotic. If you added sex—and there was indeed sex, in the form of a blind woman in a torn evening dress pushed up into her waistband—an almost holy silence would overcome the managements of the Call-Bulletin, the Chronicle, and the Examiner.

  So the headlines of November 5, 1923, were in their way revealing. The Chronicle’s front page described Secretary Mellon’s scandalous new plan for taxation. There was also a scientific report on the supernormal effects of sodium dihydrogen phosphate, an energy drink given to German shock troops during battle. One man apparently held back a tank while on “Peppo,” as they called it. The Call-Telegram focused on the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at which Sir Ernest Rutherford deflated all hopes of ever bombarding atoms so as to drive away electrons and thus create vast supplies of energy. The Examiner, in a daring exposé, revealed that a Fifth Avenue storefront in New York was actually a “birth control” clinic and chided citizens for its existence.

  Carter was mentioned nowhere. The San Francisco Law Journal in its biweekly Police Blotter, listed a homicide/justifiable homicide at the address of the Orpheum Theatre, but there were no further details. Of course, there were whispers . . .

  . . .

  Saint Mary’s was the hospital closest to the theatre, but their physicians were undistinguished. Carter requested that the ambulance take Griffin and himself to a small facility at the crest of Lone Mountain, the least developed of San Francisco’s hills, the one with the best views. The hospital there, in the shape of a Spanish cross, had but thirty-two rooms on two floors. Many faced the ocean, and all had excellent sunlight and breezes. The floor in the transepts was done in hexagonal tilework, and at the center, a two-story open and airy plaza, there was mosaic of a Mucha princess, Saint Agatha, patron of nursing. There was a grand piano, too, for during the War, this hospital had answered speculation about which amenities most aided convalescence: it encouraged music, sunlight, a view of the ocean, mobility, and an ancient form of exercise called “t’ai chi.”

  Carter was X-rayed. No fractures were found in his skull, though he was warned to stay awake for twenty-four hours in case of concussion. Then he was given morphine, and his wound was topically treated with cocaine and cleansed with flavine compounds by a doctor who, while stitching up his hand and fitting him with a Thomas splint, kept repeating, “Well, it looks like God got a piece of you.” Carter began exactly two minutes after his last injection to think of the doctor as fascinatingly handsome, skilled, and spiritually enlightened.

  Griffin was taken to surgery. The bullet had caught him below his navel, lodging in his intestine. Before the War, he would have died, as no one had operated on the gut. It was as mysterious an example of God’s work as the brain. Luckily, Dr. Boone, who operated on Griffin, had trained on the battlefields of Flanders.

  Boone debrided the wound and irrigated it with Dakin’s solution of sodium hypochlorite and boric acid. Then he was free to operate on the bowel, remove the bullet, and primary-suture the damaged lengths of intestine with kangaroo thread. The final layering of plaster of paris immobilized the wounded area, and as he applied it, Boone drew deep sighs of relief, for he was never sure a patient would survive such an operation.

&nbs
p; At five o’clock in the morning, Griffin was pronounced stable. He was sent to a room with a saline-glucose drip. Boone showered and joined his fellow surgeons—doctors Wilbur and Cooper—in the chapel, where they saw in the dawn with prayers.

  At the same time, Carter sat on the piano bench under the skylight. He was dressed in clean clothes he’d had sent from his house, but he’d forgotten to ask for shoes, so he wore the same smoky, scuffed dress boots from the night before. He ghost-fingered chords and watched the chapel doors. Soon, they opened and out came doctors Boone, Wilbur, and Cooper.

  “Gentlemen,” he called, saluting them with the arm that was now splinted and bandaged to his elbow. “A word?”

  Carter introduced himself and asked for the best possible care for Jack Griffin. The doctors dismissively agreed to this: all patients received excellent care here. They might have added that they as physicians were used to very important patients.

  “He’s a Secret Service agent,” Carter said, “wounded in the line of duty.”

  At this there were illuminated cries, “of course” and “yes,” for they were all very patriotic.

  “His superiors have been informed, and they know he’s going to make a full recovery,” Carter said, stressing “full recovery” so much that it seemed insulting.

  Dr. Boone, who had a long face and a beard like Lincoln, intoned, “How was the agent wounded?”

  “He was in the process of arresting me.” Carter grinned. His audience shifted on their feet, betraying a confusion that he enjoyed. “He was arresting me for the murder of President Harding.”

  Doctors Boone, Wilbur, and Cooper exchanged silent glances. Wilbur, who suffered gastric distress under even mild circumstances, hiccupped.

  “Oh, yes!” Carter said as if remembering. “You’re the doctors who signed the late President’s death certificate.”

  “Sir,” Cooper said, saying it as slowly as a one-syllable word could be said, for he had a Kentucky accent, “I must say I’m confused about our priorities. Shouldn’t we have you arrested?”