Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “Of a terrible scandal, yeah, I know.”

  Carter smiled, sincerely proud. “You do know. There were so many scandals brewing around him, and he wanted to tell me all of them and, well, he wanted to tell everyone about them. He was quite afraid he would be murdered by his men. He felt that if they didn’t get him, his wife would.” Carter hesitated. “I hope you knew that he had affairs.”

  “Go on.”

  “As a rule I tend not to get involved with world leaders. They have problems. But he would only give me the television blueprints if I helped him out of his jam. He kept saying, ‘Mr. Carter, surely you can make a President disappear.’” Carter rubbed at his ruined hand and whispered, “‘When I see Thurston next, I bet he could do it.’ A very wily man, that Harding, when he wanted to be.”

  “I don’t believe this Shinola.”

  “That’s perfectly fine. I thought about it during my act, how to make a man who was so universally loved, and also in such danger from so many places, vanish off the face of the earth. And I hit on a wonderful solution—pit the sides against each other. He’d been asking so many people ‘what would you do’ about his problems that he was annoying his cabinet. I realized that if he were dead, they wouldn’t ask any questions.”

  “They had me asking questions,” Griffin said.

  Carter’s blue eyes softened with empathy. “That’s exactly right, Mr. Griffin. You were absolutely the most qualified agent they wanted going anywhere near the evidence.”

  “Oh.” Whatever else Griffin was going to say caught in his throat.

  “After the show, I went to the hotel. My plan involved Harding confessing all to his wife. Of course, she knew all, the Duchess isn’t a fool. He had a diary I asked him to make an entry for—did you see his diary? Never mind. After midnight, she called that Starling and—do you like Colonel Starling?”

  “None of your business.”

  “He’s a dangerous man. I don’t understand him, but he’s dangerous. But that’s neither here nor there. She just told Starling rather coldly that Warren had stopped breathing, and she supposed he should send up a doctor when he could. Just like that. ‘When he could.’ It was magnificent. He could tell, right over the phone wires, she’d poisoned him. You know what he did? He sent for a doctor twenty minutes later! And when the doctors came, she wouldn’t let them near the body. She announced that her Warren was dead, and that she was grieving, then she closed the door.”

  “Carter, you expect me to believe that none of those physicians even examined the body? They signed oaths that—”

  “When they asked—meekly—about collecting the body, she told them she’d already arranged for cremation. Then slammed the door right on them! They didn’t ask questions. What could they assume but she’d poisoned him. And that was a family matter—a first family matter. Best to keep a distance and ask no questions. I watched from the closet.”

  “So you’re saying everyone—my boss included—wanted the President dead.”

  “So he wouldn’t discuss the scandals, yes.”

  “Why all the manpower chasing you down to Baja, then?”

  “I fled, that’s why.”

  “And if you didn’t kill the President, why did you flee?”

  A brilliant smile, a payday smile. “Misdirection.”

  Griffin said nothing else. He had nothing else to say about this insane story. The band finished their tune and received generous applause from those on the lawn. “So is this a confession or what?”

  “The next morning, I took Mr. Harding to my flat and he waited there until the arrangements I made panned out. I knew a place he could go. You know, he truly loved his wife. Truly. It was incredible to see how much she loved him. She agreed to go to Washington and Marion and burn everything that could incriminate him. People will always think she poisoned him, but she risked all that just so she could join him again later.”

  Griffin wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Later?”

  “Soon enough, the Duchess will die. She’ll choose a hot news day when everyone’s forgotten her. Then, she’ll join him quietly, to live their lives out. It was the least I could do for a man who gave me such an interesting illusion. Well, two illusions if you count his death.” Carter produced an envelope. He patted it against his lips. “Do you know what a deadman’s switch is? Of course you do. From the moment I agreed to make the President disappear until I was assured I wouldn’t be hurt by anyone, I had a deadman’s switch kind of arrangement. I have a man who pretends to be my florist who does small favors for me, and he held on to this. If anything had happened to me, it would have gone right to Hearst. And elsewhere, in case Hearst wasn’t interested. Would you like to see it?”

  Griffin shook his head. No, he didn’t want to see it. Carter stood. He tapped the envelope against the table.

  “Well, I’m going to give this to you. Starling once told me that you’d tried very hard to protect the President—Mr. McKinley—and that you’d failed. I can imagine how that hurt.”

  “You can’t—”

  “If we’d met under different circumstances, I’d have stories to tell. But it’s my wedding day. I’ll leave you this envelope. And perhaps you’d like to use it to protect the President. It’s up to you.”

  Carter dropped it on the table, by the centerpiece, white roses with a candle at the center. Griffin watched him walk back onto the lawn, where he met up again with his wife.

  The envelope was sealed shut. With the music playing and couples dancing under the lights, Griffin tore open the end and pulled out a strip of negatives and one eight-by-ten print. There, on the deck of a house he recognized, with Lake Merritt in the background, stood Warren Gamaliel Harding. He wore dungarees and a workman’s jacket. He held a newspaper, the Examiner, from Friday, August third, with the tremendous headline announcing his death. His expression was that of a man who had just been rescued and was not sure he deserved it.

  Griffin looked up—Carter was dancing with Phoebe, the band was playing, people were in line for more drinks. He had no idea what to do.

  He saw Olive. Not for the first time, she made a beckoning gesture, for she was sure he was a fine dancer, and she had made him promise to be good today. He looked at the photograph. He stood. He nodded at Olive. She yelled at him, through the crowd, “That’s the spirit!”

  Before he left the table, he put the photograph and negatives back in the envelope, which he held in his hand just high enough over the candleflame so that it caught almost immediately. The emulsion on the film made excited green and violet sparks, and when it was fully consumed, Jack Griffin draped his jacket over his chair, for the night was young.

  . . .

  At stroke of eight, Howard Thurston whispered into Carter and Phoebe’s ears that it was time for them to leave. Carter protested the method. “I was hoping for a life of quiet dignity.”

  Phoebe said, “This is what you’re getting instead, so love it.”

  With a fanfare of trumpets and trombones, the newlyweds were led onto a platform at the edge of the lawn, where Thurston and junior members of the Golden Gate Assembly shackled them together. “Matrimony!” Thurston yelled, “the one trap from which there is no escape.”

  The couple was turned into a regular hardware store of chains and restraints. They were helped into a black and red lacquer cabinet decorated with dragons and Chinese sages, and finally, a huge iron ball was rolled into the cabinet, and its length of chain wrapped around them both.

  “Maestro,” Thurston signaled, and a snare drum began to roll. Thurston shut and bolted the cabinet. There was a puff of smoke, and as he threw the door open, there was a loud clang as manacles hit the floor: Carter and Phoebe were gone!

  Thurston rolled back his sleeves and extended his magic wand toward the road by the lawn, and there was the sound of an engine starting and a clatter of tin cans as a brand-new Willits-Overland convertible pulled into view. It was frosted with wedding wishes, and wisecracks, and was chauffeured away, i
ts backseat overflowing with three passengers: Lili Marlene, nose into the breeze and, looking behind them and waving until they could no longer be seen, Charles and Phoebe Carter, waving good-bye, good-bye everyone, on the road to performing the greatest trick of them all, that of living happily ever after.

  And here this story of Charles Carter comes to an end, but for one detail:

  On November 20, 1924, with the newspapers obsessing over Calvin Coolidge winning the general election, Florence Harding, the Duchess, died.

  There was little notice. She was by all accounts an unknowable woman, and with so few clues to go on, the obituary artists reserved both judgment and comment. Her death marked yet another end to the troublesome Harding reign, so: the sooner she was gone, the better. There was no funeral train, there were no hymns sung by strangers. Services were brief and private.

  Like her late husband, she was cremated and, like her late husband, there was no autopsy; the death certificate promised she had died of myocarditis and chronic nephritis. A funerary urn was placed in a crypt in Marion, Ohio, next to the urn that was etched “Harding, Warren Gamaliel,” and that was still guarded, as a courtesy, by the Tenth Infantry detachment.

  Soon after, workmen chipped her final resting date into a marble slab, and this was the quiet end of the Hardings’ sad public dynasty.

  . . .

  History records that in 1925 the Mergui Archipelago, east of the Andaman Sea, was the twilight habitat of the pirate Tulang. He was no longer the man who had faced down Charles Carter. Ravished by syphilis, his skin withered as if aging a decade for every human year that had passed, Tulang had good days and bad. His crew was tired.

  In late January 1925, a poorly armed narrow-seas ocean freighter was about to drop anchor in the leeward bay of a small island off the Thai peninsula when it was seized by Tulang. He pointed the tip of his sword to the Captain’s chin, and for that moment, it was as if the old days were back, but then a fog settled onto the pirate, and he had to be led through the manifest twice before remembering what he had come aboard for.

  “Your wares!” cried Tulang. “We will help ourselves to what you bring to the market.” Because the ship had come all the way from the United States, the men were excited—who knew what treasures might be aboard? The pirates brought the crew to the deck, along with an elderly woman who was being sent away from America to live with distant relations.

  Tulang’s second in command, Samuel, a newly Christian Thai with genuine fondness for his leader, took control here, grabbing the Captain of the ship by the neck and rough-handling him belowdecks, past the sweltering heat of the engines, boilers, and fuel bunkers to the cool, stale air of the cargo hold. Reluctantly, the Captain took him to the packing crates containing the majority of their shipment: fifty gross of rake heads.

  Samuel pried open the first crate with a crowbar. He didn’t know what a rake was. The Captain demonstrated—when the factory in Thailand fashioned the right kind of dowel, it would fit here, and when you needed to make a pile of leaves, it worked like so.

  “That’s all you have? Oh, Jesus Christ!” Samuel cried. “These rakes aren’t even complete? Just the heads?”

  “Just the heads.”

  “Jesus Christ! What else do you have? Guns?”

  The Captain shrugged. “We were supposed to get fifty gross of hoe heads, too. They were too late.”

  “What’s in there?” Samuel waved at another part of the hold, which was padlocked.

  The Captain jangled some keys.

  When the metal door opened, Samuel winced from the odor of dung. Inside the hold was an elephant. “You’re bringing an elephant to Thailand?” The Captain solemnly nodded. Samuel said, “Who brings an elephant to Thailand? They have enough elephants.”

  The Captain explained that this was a retired animal owned by a magician who would no longer use her in his act. They were anchored at this island, in fact, to drop the elephant here. The elephant and the old woman.

  Moving into the hold, but still keeping his distance from the elephant, for he was unsure how well it was trained, Samuel noted it had no tusks, which meant no ivory, and if it were retired, it was too old to work, so what use was it?

  He touched his hand to his pistol. Shooting it would teach the captains of freighters to carry better things in their holds than rake heads and elephants.

  The elephant raised one foot, which was shackled to a length of chain, and stamped it on the floor of the hold. If he shot and killed it, how would the freighter crew ever get it out of the hold? The effort would be immense. It would make the crew very angry. This ship might next time travel armed.

  Still, the idea of shooting it was attractive, for Samuel couldn’t remember the last time he’d shot his pistol, and Tulang would be excited to know what he’d done.

  “There’s also wine,” the Captain said, grudgingly.

  “What?”

  “A case of it. But it’s from America. It isn’t from France.”

  Samuel considered this. “What kind of wine?”

  The Captain took Samuel across the hold, to a packing crate that had on it, like all wine from America, the stenciled notation “For Sacramental Use Only.”

  “Jesus Christ! This is—is this for communion?”

  “I don’t know. It’s also from the magician.”

  “It says sacramental. That’s holy wine.”

  Samuel felt a light growing inside of him. Cracking open the crate, as gingerly as a crowbar would allow, brushing aside the straw bedding, it was like a manger scene to him. The glint of glass. He pulled forth a bottle, with its strange cabalistic markings, and felt a hand on his shoulder that he could only call divine. There was plunder in this world, and then there was the world beyond this one. What were the odds of finding a case of communion wine? The air in the hold suddenly smelled sweet. This wasn’t luck, it was a blessing to share. He wanted to spare the elephant’s life, and the lives of everyone he could.

  “Help me with this,” he said to the Captain, squatting down to better get a grip on the crate.

  On deck, Tulang was asleep in the sun. His crew and the freighter’s stood in small groups, telling stories of misfortune, while the elderly woman, who had found shade, cored and ate an apple.

  When Samuel brought up the wine, there was rejoicing all around, for the pirates had seen little alcohol recently. Samuel tried to describe why this wine was different than the rest, that they shouldn’t gulp it, but as his mates seized bottle after bottle from the packing straw, breaking them open and singing old songs as they drank, even he had to admit that God’s plan was infinitely odd—the most mysterious element of them all, joy, could enter this life profanely.

  Soon, the pirates felt friendly enough to share their wine with the freighter’s crew, and by the time the sun had swollen at the western horizon, the two crews had begun to visit each other’s ships. There were rowdy bunches of newly made friends wrestling playfully on both ships’ decks and card players were in both sets of crew quarters, and someone on the pirate’s ship broke out guitars and accordions and drums that were passed around so all the old songs could be played. The ships were anchored side by side, and the tide was waning so that the bay below them grew a paler blue with each passing moment. Tiny Koh Pheung Thawng was the site of the largest party it had ever witnessed.

  As for the witnesses themselves—the only spectators at first were goats and dogs and pigs who came out of the tangle of palm trees and tall grasses to scratch themselves and watch the commotion with puzzled eyes. Then the island’s few human residents, a married couple and another man, all elderly, all white people who’d been baked brown by the sun, came to the beach.

  Finally, when the heat had given way to a cooling breeze, and torches were lighted on the beach, the pirates and the freighter crew decided in the spirit of cooperation that now was the perfect time to send the elephant on its way.

  Getting an elephant from a freighter at anchor to a beach was a surprisingly simple task.
The ship’s pilot, who had been a mahout in youth, brought the elephant from the hold and walked her to the bow of the ship, where he climbed onto her shoulders and waited for exactly the right wave to pass. He prodded her outward, into the waves, and then man and elephant fell together into the ocean with a tremendous splash that doused the groups on the ship and caused those on the beach to cheer.

  She swam the remaining hundred yards while, at the same time, a dinghy was lowered from the ship and crewmen began to row the old woman to shore. In the end, it was a good-natured race: which would get to the beach first? It was a busy beach now, as the dogs and pigs were in a frenzy of early evening play. There was a campfire, and the husband played guitar as the wife clapped her hands to the simple tune that rolled across the bay, “Three Blind Mice.” And there was the other man, the one with a high stomach, a nut-brown and happy man with a thicket of grey hair, waving and smiling. Walking into the surf, the breakers foaming past his hips, he waved at the pirates and the freighter crew, at the elephant and the woman in the dingy, he waved at everything in his view.

  . . .

  At the same time, on the ship, Tulang slept. Exhausted into dementia, he’d been carried to his bed, and his men had lovingly placed a bottle of wine next to him.

  He awoke to the familiar throbbing of the engines. At this moment, his mind was back, completely, with an acuity that alcohol had once brought him in his youth. He was unsure what year it was. His eyes fixed on the wine bottle, and from this angle, he could clearly see the phrase: Charles Carter, Magician.

  Carter the Great, he mused, now drifting out of clarity and into the past. “Bring up the package,” he said aloud. Then, grinning, “Life in Jakarta would be hard on her.” With a chuckle, Tulang slowly fell back into his dream, one he had almost nightly, about a day so many years ago, the day of the greatest magic show he had ever seen.