by John Case
“I do apologize for any… zeal… in describing the effects. I wouldn’t want my grandson to perform the basket trick.”
I nod and DeLand continues. “Where was I?”
“The grief-stricken magician was pleading with the audience to bring the boy back to life.”
“Right, yes. Then he does some chanting, something to concentrate his power. Finally, the magician is ready, he removes the top from the basket and voilà! – the boy climbs out, good as new.”
“Hunh.”
“It’s a resurrection, you see, a person brought back from the dead. Really, this is the basis of an enormous number of tricks, a tradition that goes back as far as we can go in the history of magic. I suppose such tricks hearken back to the days when magicians were priests. Even Houdini’s stunts, where he’d be lowered into the sea, manacled and in chains, would be classified as this type of effect. Or at least I’d argue that point.”
“Really?”
“A symbolic, if not a real death. The lone figure, inviting death to take him, the crowd holding its breath in tandem with the submerged magician, waiting impossibly long minutes with no sight of him. Would this be the time he went too far? Would this be the time death claimed him? And then, at last, the heroic resurfacing. That was received as a kind of miracle, a sort of resurrection.”
“Resurrection or not, people didn’t like Carrefour’s basket trick?”
“No, they didn’t. As I said, Carrefour is a gifted actor, and I’m afraid it was just too powerful. His rage, the blood, the screams – it was all too real. That was his entire problem. He scared people. Of course he did have his admirers.”
“What admirers?”
DeLand frowns. “Hmmm. Let me think. I remember a little Thai fellow and a Russian woman. Olga something. There was a sheikh. A few Goth types – quite harmless really, but they do like blood.” He sighs. “This was years ago and I don’t remember names. Maybe somebody would. I could ask. Oh, except one: Mertz. I almost forgot Mertz – and he was Carrefour’s biggest fan. A real devotee. I don’t think he ever missed a night when Carrefour was on. And they usually left together, after the show. I only noticed because they were quite the odd couple.”
“What do you mean?”
“Carrefour, you know, he’s a tall fellow and quite striking to look at. Mertz, on the other hand, is short and powerfully built, bald as an egg and almost as wide as he is tall. Rich as hell. Drove a Rolls. ’Course they were both Europeans, so that was a bond.”
“What do you mean? Carrefour’s real name is Byron Boudreaux, and he’s not European. He’s from Louisiana.”
DeLand is shocked. “No. He’s French.”
I shake my head.
“You never knew Carrefour was a stage name?”
“Alain Carrefour – that was the only name I ever knew him by. Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve been around the block a few times, even spent a couple of years in France. I never would have suspected… I told you Carrefour was a gifted actor.” He shakes his head. “Maybe Mertz is a gringo, too,” he says, with a little laugh.
“Was Mertz a member of the Castle?”
The curator shakes his head. “I don’t know. I can check. He didn’t perform, but he may have been an associate member. Certainly, he was a regular. And he was quite serious about magic. And I don’t think, by the way, that he was really an American unless he, too, was a brilliant actor. French or something. Maybe Belgian.”
“How was he… serious about magic?”
“He collected rare books on the subject. Mostly about the old Indian rope trick. We talked about it a couple of times. He had some exceptional books in his collection. Things that were hard to find. And extremely expensive.”
“The rope trick?”
“Ah, yes,” DeLand says. “The legendary Indian rope trick. Marco Polo mentioned it in his journal – that’s thirteenth century, but it’s thought to be much older than that. Originated in China, probably, then brought to India on the Silk Road.”
The watch on his wrist emits a series of sharp beeps, and he peers through his reading glasses to find the right button to turn it off. A sigh. “I have to go. My periodontist beckons.”
DeLand stands. “Why don’t you come back tonight?” he says. “You can take in the show if you like. I’ll be back here in time to put together whatever info we have in the archives about Carrefour. Mertz, too, if we’ve got anything. I’ll have it ready – you can pick it up.”
DeLand’s phone rings. It’s his taxi. I follow him down the stairs. “And there’s a fellow who knew Carrefour – he’s on stage tonight: Kelly Mason. You might want to talk to him. He probably knew Mertz as well, because they had an interest in common.”
“What was that?”
“The rope trick – Mason’s written several articles about it and I believe Mertz allowed him access to his collection. So he might know where Mertz is, and then if you find Mertz…”
“Right,” I tell him. “Look – Mr. DeLand…”
“Oh, please. John.”
“John. Look, I really, really appreciate your help. This information about Carrefour and Mertz and any addresses you might have – that would be just great. And I’d be very interested to talk to Kelly Mason.”
“Happy to help,” DeLand says. I’ve followed him down the steps and outside. His taxi waits in the oval drive. “I’ll arrange a ticket for you,” he says. “You can pick it up at the box office.”
“What time?”
“Earliest show is at seven, but shall we say… eight? I’ll meet you in the bar.”
“Fine.”
“I should warn you,” DeLand says. “We have a dress code. Suit and tie.”
I lift my hand as the taxi rolls off, then watch the bright yellow car, now visible, now invisible, as it winds down the hill.
I’m thinking about Mertz as I get into my rental and head down the hill myself. I drive toward my hotel, which is way down Santa Monica near Venice, thinking about the whole idea of Boudreaux having fans.
And then it hits me. Boudreaux has fans, of course he has fans – and not just for performances at the Magic Castle.
I remember the medical examiner in Vegas telling me he thought Clara Gabler’s body had been severed by a table saw, and how odd that had seemed to him because a chain saw would have done the job. Barry Chisworth – he sat across from me, mojito in hand, speculating about how hard it would have been to transport the table saw, a platform to hold it, and a power source to run it, all the way up to Conjure Canyon. The M.E. had been baffled. Why would anyone bother? Even when I puzzled it out – that the murderer went to all that trouble because the Gabler twins were killed in the course of a performance – I never gave a thought to a key element of any performance.
The audience.
Byron Boudreaux may have stopped performing magic in public. But he didn’t stop performing. There would have been an audience on hand to see Clara Gabler sawn in half. A circle of spectators to witness the murders of Julio and Wilson Ramirez. Just as there will be an audience on hand to witness the spectacle when he murders my sons.
It must be that these hideous inversions of standard magic tricks are what Byron meant on his postcard to Diment, what he meant by the phrase real magic.
Do the members of this audience know that the illusions are not illusions? That lives are sacrificed in the course of the show? I think they do. I think they must. I think that’s the point.
Mertz. Mertz. What had DeLand said about him? He was French or something and rich and he collected books about the rope trick.
The rope trick. What I know about the rope trick could be written on the back of a postage stamp: It’s something they used to do in India. They threw a rope into the air, and it hung there. Then they climbed it or something.
And then I have a terrible sequence of thoughts. Mertz is Boudreaux’s biggest fan. Mertz is obsessed with the rope trick. And what did the Sandling boys tell me about what they did in the “humongous house”
before they escaped? They exercised. For hours, every day. They… climbed… ropes.
CHAPTER 42
I drive to my hotel, a one-star joint down Santa Monica toward Venice. I check in, throw my stuff down, and take a look in the phone book under the heading Magic. I find two listings for bookstores specializing in books about magic and the occult.
The closest one is on Hollywood Boulevard, and it turns out to be the kind of place you have to ring a bell to enter. It’s small, and crammed floor to ceiling with old books. That old-book smell, an amalgam of disintegrating paper and surface mold, pervades the air. The man who buzzed me in sits at a desk in the back, talking on the phone. He raises his hand to acknowledge my presence.
A central table holds bins of artwork and pamphlets, each poster or booklet protected by a plastic sleeve. I leaf through the pamphlets, most of them vintage booklets describing how to perform different illusions, while I wait for the man to finish his call.
A minute later, he joins me. He’s young, with long dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a gold hoop in one earlobe. “Help you with something?”
“I’m looking for a book about the rope trick.”
“Are you a collector?”
“No, I just need something that describes it, talks a little about its history.”
“Okay, I think I can find something.” I follow him down a narrow aisle and watch him ascend a library ladder. He comes down with a battered paperback encased in a plastic sleeve. “This is a compilation of famous effects in the history of magic. The book itself is not in great shape, but it has a nice little chapter on the rope trick.” He cocks his head, smiles. “Anything else?”
“One more thing. I’m looking for a guy. Used to live in L.A. Worked at the Magic Castle?”
“Okay.”
“His stage name was Carrefour. Maître Carrefour.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Or a guy named Mertz? European guy, maybe French. Collects books about the rope trick.”
“Sorry.” (Is it my imagination, or does he answer too quickly?) “But I’m just the hired help. It’s my uncle’s shop.”
I know I’m being way too blunt. Normally I don’t go head on like this. Normally I’d schmooze this guy, get him to like me, seduce him a little. That’s how you get people to tell you things they shouldn’t. I tell myself this, I give myself a little pep talk – but I can’t summon the will to charm this guy. Maybe I’m all played out on the charm front.
“Could I get your uncle’s telephone number? It’s important… Since this guy Mertz was a collector, and he lived here in L.A., this is exactly the kind of place he-”
“No,” the kid says. He looks down at his hands, and once again I detect a slight hesitation before he answers me. “I’m sorry, but Uncle Frank’s in Croatia.” A pause. “Traveling. He doesn’t have a phone.”
“Hunh,” I say. “When will he be back?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“I guess just the book then,” I tell him, sure from his body language that the kid is lying. He’s heard of Mertz. I’ve done so many interviews I know the signs.
I follow him to the cash register, and he rings up the book ($9.25), then slides it into a paper bag. “Receipt in the bag?” he asks.
“That’s fine. Let me ask you – you know of any other bookstores or magic stores I might try? I really need to find this guy Carrefour.”
This seems to relax him, the chance to pass the baton. “Sure – there’s Magic Magic, over on Sunset. You might try there.”
But Magic Magic turns out to be closed. The sign posts the weekday hours as ten until two. I’ll have to return tomorrow.
I sit on the bed in my hotel room and read about the rope trick. The chapter is long and begins by describing how very old the trick is. The trick is mentioned in an offhanded way in the Upanishads. A bit later, chronologically, sacred Buddhist texts mention the rope trick as one of the entertainments performed in a (failed) attempt to raise a smile from the young prince who later became the Buddha – a boy who had never smiled in his entire life. The trick became so famous during the time of the British Raj that the wonder of it, and other such tricks, was considered a recruiting tool for enlistment in the British army. Indian officers were offered a year’s pay as reward for finding a practitioner of the trick. In 1875, a magician’s society in London offered a huge award to anyone who could perform the trick before an audience.
There’s a long sequence about the trick’s parallels with Hindu cosmogony, and also to the English folktale Jack and the Beanstalk and other stairway-to-heaven myths. There’s even a Freudian take on the trick, focusing on the rope’s unexpected rigidity.
And finally, I come to an excerpt from the 1898 edition of The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette:
The conjuror took a large ball of rope, and after having attached one of the ends of the rope to his sack, which was lying on the ground, hurled the ball into the air with all his might. (In many versions, the ball repeatedly thumps back down to the ground before the conjuror succeeds.) Instead of falling back to the ground, the ball continued slowly to ascend, unrolling all the while until it disappeared high into the clouds. There was no house (or other structure)… where it might have fallen… A large portion of its length remained rigid.
The magician [then] ordered his son, who was his assistant, to climb the rope. Seizing the rope in his hands, the little boy climbed… with the agility of a monkey. He grew smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the clouds as the ball had done. The conjuror then ceased to occupy himself with the rope and did several minor tricks. After a little while he told the audience that he required the services of his son and called up to him to climb down. The voice of the little boy replied from above that he did not want to come down. After having tried persuasion, the magician became angry and ordered his son to descend under penalty of death. Having again received a negative answer, the man, furious, took a large knife in his teeth and climbed up the rope and disappeared… in the clouds.
Suddenly a cry rang out and to the horror of the spectators, drops of blood began to fall from the place where the magician had disappeared into the sky. Then the little boy fell to earth, cut into pieces: first his legs, then his body, then his head. As soon as the boy’s head touched the ground, the magician slid down the rope with his knife stuck in his belt. (In many accounts the magician is, at this point, inconsolably sad. “Oh what have I done,” etc.)
Without undue haste [the magician then] picked up the parts of the child’s body and put them under a piece of cloth [atop a basket]… He gathered together his magician’s paraphernalia (often performing a ritual or muttering magic incantations), drew aside the cloth [from the basket] and (mirabile dictu!) the little boy [emerged]… perfectly intact.
A subsequent essay explains how the trick was thought to have been accomplished. It was always performed in rugged terrain, with a braided catgut cord or cable strung between two promontories. Platforms were thought to be erected on either side from which unseen assistants could pull on the cross support and thus hold the rope rigid. An acrobat or rope walker would wait above, in the mist and out of sight. When the rope was thrown, its weighted end would loop it around the cable. The assistant would walk out, and secure it. Then with the help of an assistant on the opposing platform, the rope would be pulled tight. The trick was always performed at dusk or dawn and in a location where fog was common, so as to obscure the area where the rope, and then the child, and later the magician, disappeared. If the nature didn’t cooperate by producing fog or mist, smudge pots or braziers were employed.
As to the rest of it, opinions varied. Some thought the audience was subjected to mass hypnosis or that hashish and opium were aerosolized in the fires common at such performances – the hallucinatory air pushed out toward the audience by the vigorous salaaming of the magician. Some thought the performance venues were meticulously chosen so that at a particular point in the performance,
the sunlight would blind the audience. Some thought the bloody parts of the child were actually pieces of a dismembered monkey, shaved of fur, the face smeared with blood and obscured by a turban. Some thought the pieces thrown down were parts of a wax effigy, ingeniously identical to the child assistant. In these cases, the child was thought to descend the rope hidden in the magician’s loose robes.
One historian held forth on the origins of magic, in “the tabernacles of ancient religions.” These were faiths in which sacrifice, even human sacrifice, were commonplace, part of the liturgy. “And what is sacrifice but a ritual in which the forces of destruction, those that cause death, are transformed into the forces of life and creation?”
According to this historian, the “magic” that we see on stage is a reenactment of these ancient religious rites. The defiance of natural laws embodied in the most famous effects (levitation, dematerialization, etc.) are restagings of ancient religious miracles – and so remain mysterious and powerful even after they have been rendered safe.
Gods, he went on to say, have supernormal abilities – it’s one of the things that define them. The Buddha, while not exactly a god, often demonstrated his perfection by floating yards above the earth. The god of Abraham commanded nature. Not only was he capable of producing a voice in a whirlwind, or the spontaneous combustion of a bush, he could part the waters of a sea. Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated his power by multiplying loaves, by walking on water, by healing the sick and raising the dead.
As to the rope trick, in the course of its performance a boy dies and is later restored to life. Accordingly, it represents the most profound of these sacred reenactments.
And then the expert drily opined that the reason no one accepted Lord Northbrook’s challenge – the offer of ten thousand pounds sterling (a fortune in 1875) to anyone who could perform the rope trick – was that the “key ingredient to the trick is a set of identical twins, and such are hard to come by. The secret is of course quite simple: one of the twins is sacrificed in the course of the proceedings.”