Headless Lady

by Clayton Rawson

  “Well!” he said in a faintly, surprised voice. “A grift show.”

  He fanned the three purses and then flipped them open one at a time, looking at the identification cards behind the celluloids. As he glanced at the second, his voice showed real surprise.

  “That,” he said, “is definitely a bloomer. I wonder—”

  “Now what?” I asked. “Not clues already?”

  He stuffed the billfolds into his pocket, bent quickly, lifted the side wall, and said, “Come on.”

  He held the canvas up as I ducked in behind him. We emerged between two of the dozen or more low platforms that were set at even intervals around the interior. A tall square-shouldered man in an ankle-length, gaudy, somewhat soiled red and yellow robe, was arranging on the table before him a glittering assortment of long knives and swords. He turned, hearing us, and scowled ill-naturedly. His forehead had a Neanderthal slant, and his bony underjaw projected belligerently.

  “Where the hell duh ya think you’re going, Mac?” he growled.

  “Nowhere,” Merlini said calmly. “We’re here. We’re with it.”

  The reception committee was skeptical. “Oh, yeah? Since when?”

  “Since now.” With his customary deftness, Merlini produced a cigarette from thin air, reached again, and got a paper of matches. “Magician,” he explained somewhat unnecessarily. “Where’s the mitt camp? I’m looking for Gus and Stella Milbauer.”

  The sword-swallower’s suspicion melted slightly. “Over there,” he said, jerking his head to the left. We stepped out from between the platforms and saw a small tented structure of awning-striped canvas down the line. Above its entrance hung a large drawing of Cheiro’s chart of the hand. Merlini started toward it.

  There were twenty or thirty customers within the side-show tent, mostly gathered in a group at the far end listening to a five-piece Negro band that was playing with more fervor than harmony, and watching a buxom, coffee-colored, undulant wench who shouted a faintly off-color lyric to one of Mr. Handy’s Blues. She wore a skin-tight scarlet evening gown, and her hips operated on the principle of the universal joint.

  Just beyond the band there was a platform surmounted by a square boxlike enclosure formed of dark red drapes, the front curtains tightly drawn.

  Merlini pointed. “Success,” he said. “That’s it.”

  The singer stopped just then, and the band music faded. From outside on the midway came the leathery exhorting voice of the opener shouting, “… and the weirdest sight of all, my friends, the sci-un-tific mahvel of ouah time—Mademwahselle Christine, the lady without a head! Positively living and buh-reathing! While the big show is going on you see it all for the one price—fifteen cents! Step right up … ”

  Gus, standing by the mitt camp, greeted Merlini with pleased surprise. He was a skinny little man with a scrawny neck, thinning gray hair, a black-rimmed pince-nez, a rather hammy dignity, and a warm smile.

  “Stella,” he exclaimed, turning. “Look who’s here!”

  A middle-aged, completely ordinary-looking woman sat on a camp chair before the tent. She wore a black evening gown, too much eye shadow, and an abstracted air. She looked at Merlini with faded blue eyes and nodded politely but with little enthusiasm.

  Gus and Merlini, however, burst into a rapid-fire exchange of reminiscences. “Haven’t seen you since Coney-Island in ’33 … played the Orpheum circuit together … remember the Curtises? … They’re on the Russell show this season …”

  I looked interestedly around the tent at the silent gaping crowd and at the blasé matter-of-fact freaks, and performers who were awaiting their turns. Hoodoo, the Headhunter from the Amazon, an inky-black, fuzz-topped colored man with war paint on his face, sat on a campstool before his collection of war clubs and shrunken human heads, cleaning his fingernails with a jack-knife. One of the grass-skirted cooch dancers was knitting busily at a small pink sweater.

  My attention shifted suddenly back to Merlini and Gus, as I heard the former ask, “When did the Headless Lady join up?”

  “Friday, I think,” Gus replied. “Wasn’t it, Stella?”

  Stella, the woman who, according to the inscription on the chart behind her, knows all, sees all, and tells all, answered, “I guess so.”

  “Who is she?” Merlini continued off-handedly. “Anyone I know?”

  But Gus didn’t get to answer just then. A lean, lantern-jawed gentleman with a pair of innocent brown eyes and his hat brim turned up all the way around, stepped from the crowd and touched Merlini’s arm.

  “Pardon me, brother, but can you tell me how soon the big show starts?” His voice was that of the country yokel, but there was a knowing grin on his face.

  “Holy jumping camelopards!” Merlini ejaculated. “Farmer Jack!” They shook hands energetically. “Ross, step over here. I want you to meet the dean of the broad tossers, the best three-card-monte man in the business. If he offers you a little bet on a sure thing, run for the nearest exit! Tell me something, Farmer. Last I heard this was a Sunday School show. When did the grift come back?”

  Farmer grinned. “It’s coming back on a lot of shows. Last season was a bloomer for one thing, and the grift’s a sort of insurance. And then, too, when the fixer walks into Johnny Tin Plate’s office and says, ‘No grift at all this year, Chief,’ for an answer he gets, ‘Oh. That’s nice. But how the hell do I get mine?’ And the fix has to be paid off anyway. So why not frame a store or two?”

  “I can’t think of a real good answer for that one, Farmer. You’re on the payroll then?”

  “Yeah. I think so. But maybe I’m wrong. Orders came through to lay off a few days. But if I don’t get the office soon, I’m blowing. Seems like every time I take a vacation the chumps walk right up asking for it.”

  “Why the layoff? Too much heat in these parts?”

  “No. There aren’t many beefs the way I dust ’em off. Don’t know what it is. Something goin’ on around this outfit that I’m not hep to.”

  “It’s the advance crew for one thing,” Gus put in disgustedly. “Kelley and Edwards. They’ve gone nuts. Here, look at this route card.”

  26th Annual Tour—Season 1940

  MIGHTY HANNUM COMBINED SHOWS

  Winter Quarters—Peru, Indiana

  Mon. Stroudsburg, Pa. 29

  Tue. Newton, N.J. 33

  Wed. Morristown, N.J. 24

  Thu. Newark, N.J. 19

  Fri. Bridgeport, Conn. 66

  Sat. Peekskill, N.Y. 48

  Mon. Kings Falls, N.Y. 58

  Tue. Waterboro, N.Y. 92

  Wed. Norwalk, N.Y. 80

  Thu. Watertown, N.Y. 77

  Fri. Ogdensburg, N.Y. 59

  Sat. Winchester, Canada 35

  Total miles for season 2,820

  Gus continued, “Seventy-, eighty-mile jumps every day, and a lot of wrong towns. Waterboro’s a grass town. Show this size hadn’t oughta be here. We won’t come close to making the nut. Norwalk tomorrow, and that’s worse. I don’t get it. We even played Bridgeport less’n two weeks after the Big Show.”

  “And,” Farmer added, “we just got out of mine-strike territory in Pennsy, and we’re heading smack into a milk strike upstate. But it’s not the advance crew, Gus. They don’t know no more about it than we do. Couple of them back on the lot Sunday and crabbin’ about it. It’s orders from the old man.”

  “Salaries paid up?” Merlini asked.

  “Yes,” Gus said, “but that’s funny, too. We were six weeks behind up until Saturday. Lots of folks were all set to blow. Three or four big top acts did leave. Then we got the whole thing up to date, all at once. Like that.”

  “The Major land an angel?” Merlini asked.

  “Looks like it,” Farmer answered. “High-class sucker, too. I’d like to have his phone number. But say, hasn’t anybody told you—”

  The lecturer’s voice cut in above Farmer’s. “Over here, ladies and gentlemen—the strangest, most startling scientific exhibition ever shown, Mademoisel
le Christine, the Headless Lady.”

  Merlini gave me a glance. “Christine,” he said. “Perhaps we’d better watch this.” He started toward the crowd that stood before the speaker.

  “Two years ago,” the lecturer stated in a brisk clinical tone, “a terrible railway accident occurred near Paris, France. Many of you doubtless read about it. Mademoiselle Christine, who you are about to see, was in that accident. They found her among the dead and dying in the twisted wreckage with the bony structure of her skull horribly crushed. But she still lived! By a fortunate chance, the accident happened close to the private villa and research laboratories of the great surgeon, Dr. Josef Veronoff, world famous, as you all know, for his wonderful experiments in keeping human and animal tissue alive in chemical solutions. He saw at once that Mademoiselle Christine’s head injuries could never be repaired by any surgical means. He kept her alive for three days with adrenalin and serum injections, while his technical assistants hastily constructed the marvelous apparatus you are about to see. Then Dr. Veronoff completely amputated the young lady’s head! And substituted his astounding machine!”

  The lecturer pulled a cord; the curtains drew apart. “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce Mademoiselle Christine, the Lady Without a Head! The eighth wonder of the world of science!”

  The display was obviously the lecturer’s favorite. He really went to town and put oomph into his buildup. He did it well; the spectators, up to this point, had expected to see something falling as far short of the painting on the banner outside as did some of the other exhibits. But they were fooled. The side-show banner artist had, for once, found it impossible to gild the lily. The Headless Lady was exactly that.

  Her body, dressed in brief shorts and brassière, sat on a high hospital stool made of metal tubing. Her figure was Grade A plus in all respects—except that it simply stopped short at the base of her neck. A cup-shaped rubber attachment was fixed between her shoulders, and six slender glass tubes rose upward from it, curved in a half-circle, and terminated in six descending tubes of rubber. Three of these were attached, on the left, to a radiolike apparatus, the front panel of which was covered with rheostat dials and electrical switches. The other three tubes led off to a chemico-electrical apparatus on the right, fitted with pressure gauges of strange design, an electric motor with visibly moving eccentric parts, and a complex hookup of chemical glassware—beakers, retorts, and flasks in which a red fluid bubbled. The same liquid could also be seen circulating through the glass tubes that led into the body at the base of the neck. A green light pulsated at a respiratory rate.

  Above the girl’s shoulders there was simply nothing but the curved glass tubes and empty space!

  “This apparatus,” the lecturer went on, “substitutes for all the physical activities of the missing brain. It supplies nervous stimulation to the body, and feeds it with a carefully regulated chemical diet and a steady flow of blood.

  “The machine on your right is Dr. Veronoff’s elaboration of the diagram you see here.” With a perfectly straight face, the lecturer exhibited a framed, glass-covered Sunday Supplement double-spread. The article was headed: Carrel Keeps Tissues Alive in Serum; and the diagram he indicated was a schematic drawing of the Lindbergh heart.

  The lecturer continued, “Many people, when they see Miss Christine, are skeptical. They have said that her body is merely a cleverly constructed dummy. I’ll let you decide that for yourselves.” He lifted a limp arm and pressed his thumb for a moment against its flesh. He removed his thumb, and we saw that its pressure had left a white spot on the arm which gradually faded away as the blood returned.

  “I will now,” he said dramatically, “turn on the nerve exciter.” He threw a switch and moved several of the dials on the electrical equipment. A four-inch spark suddenly spit and leaped with a bright flash between two copper electrode terminals.

  The body moved for the first time. The fingers of the hands twitched. Slowly the lecturer turned a rheostat, and slowly the sputtering, intermittent crackle of the spark grew faster. The girl’s arms moved upward from their position on her thighs; her fingers jerked spasmodically in a clawing, galvanic movement that accelerated with the spark’s increasing frequency. This continued for half a minute; then the crackling subsided; the finger jerks slowed; the arms settled again into their former position, and finally came to rest. The spark ceased abruptly.

  “Her arms always return to their former position,” the lecturer explained, “because, having been in this condition now for nearly two years, Mademoiselle Christine’s muscles have become set to a certain extent. If any of you have any questions to ask I will be happy to try to answer them for you.” He stepped forward and drew the curtain to behind him.

  “Do you have any questions?” I asked Merlini.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do; but I doubt if the lecturer is the man to ask. I still want to know who the girl is. I’ve a feeling in my bones that this Millie Christine is not the one we had the pleasure of meeting. Did you like the illusion?”

  “If I didn’t know it as an illusion, and if I failed to realize, as many of this audience seem to, that no bona-fide scientific marvel of this caliber would ever be on tour in a side show, it would give me the creeps, the fantods, and the willies. Look at that woman over there. She’s a kind, sympathetic soul; and it’s obvious that she is feeling sorry as hell for poor Miss Christine. It’s a bit thick, isn’t it?”

  “I know,” Merlini said. “He played it straight from start to finish. The illusion is so perfect that it would still be a socko draw if it were announced as an illusion instead of as the real thing. But the lecturer is a circus man and a showman. The townspeople, to him, are chumps, linguistically and literally. It hasn’t occurred to him that he’s doing his bit toward making science our modern superstition. If it did, he’d say, ‘What the hell! My job is to pack ’em in.’ He has, of course, a notable precedent in Phineas Taylor Barnum. I think, however, that I will tell the Major that the Carrel-Lindbergh patter is not only a little too far over the edge, but quite unnecessary as well.”

  Gus, who stood beside us, said, “Then I was right. You haven’t heard. Farmer started to tell you a few minutes ago that you won’t be seeing Major Hannum this trip—or any other.”

  Merlini turned on his heel, sharply. “Why not?” His words were definitely apprehensive.

  Gus said, “They shipped his body back to Indiana this afternoon. He was killed last night. He—”

  The lecturer led the crowd in our direction. He spoke to Gus. “Let’s go. You’re next.”

  “Right,” Gus said, and to us, “Sorry. See you later.”

  “The woman who sees all, knows all, and tells all,” Merlini commented thoughtfully. “I do wish that wasn’t just another snare and delusion.”

  Chapter Three

  Gun Talk

  “If he’s old enough to enjoy the show, lady—he’s old enough to need a ticket.”

  MERLINI watched Gus mount the low platform before the mitt camp and stand waiting beside his wife as the lecturer rattled off his introductory talk. “Ross,” he said after a moment, “the Mighty Hannum Shows have attractions that aren’t mentioned in the advertising.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “The way things are shaping up, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what I’ll have to report to your wife that you’ve run off and joined a circus for the duration of the summer.”

  “That’s quite possible,” he said seriously. “The side show could use a magician. And you can sign on as a punk around the elephants. Come on. Let’s go ask questions.” (A punk is anything young, as a boy.)

  We turned toward the entrance and went out just as Gus tied a blindfold over his wife’s eyes and launched into the second-sight act that sold Madame Stella as a seer and preceded the later request for “the small sum of twenty-five cents more that entitles each and every one of you to a personal horoscope, a private reading, and a full and complete answer to any question concerning the Future, Love, Travel, Busi
ness—”

  Before the side-show top and the line of violently colored, somewhat Dali-esque banners that pictured a “positively unequaled display of Believe-It-or-Not freaks and oddities from the four corners of the earth” stood a raised platform, flanked on either side by an umbrella-covered ticket box. A talker walked back and forth on the platform, mopping his brow with a damp handkerchief and trying with little success to get a reaction from the scattered groups of townsfolk who stood stolidly watching him.

  “Lot-lice,” Merlini said. “Folks who stand around with their hands in their pockets and don’t buy.”

  On the opposite side of the midway, reading from left to right, were a frozen custard stand, a grab joint, the ticket wagon, a grease joint, and a juice joint. In the center of the midway on the left a pitchman was selling balloons, whips, and replicas of Charlie McCarthy. We turned right, toward the canopied marquee above which, in ornately serifed letters, were the words, Main Entrance, THE MIGHTY HANNUM COMBINED SHOWS.

  “This,” Merlini said, determined to see that I was properly educated, “is the front door. And the performer’s section of the lot behind the big top is called the back yard.”

  As we came up to the entrance, we were accosted by a short and extremely wide man who had been constructed, through some error, according to architectural specifications intended for a hippopotamus. He held out a large hairy paw and said, “Tickets, please. You’ll have to hurry. The big show is now going on.”

  “Is Mac Wiley around?” Merlini asked.

  The hippopotamus gave us a sour and speculative once-over.

  “No,” Merlini said, apparently reading the man’s mind, “no attachments, no damage suits, no shakedowns. I just want—”

  One of the two men sitting inside the enclosure on folding camp chairs suddenly hopped to his feet and stepped briskly forward, hand out. “Well, you old son of a gun! Come in! Come in! Been wondering why you hadn’t showed up before now.” He took Merlini’s hand in both of his own and pumped at it enthusiastically.