The Confabulist (10 page)

I would vanish as completely as any man had ever done, if I could. Disappearing was all that mattered to me now.

HOUDINI

1904

M
ORE THAN FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE CAME TO
L
ONDON
’
S
Hippodrome that day. They didn’t come to see the world’s most opulent theatrical building. They didn’t come for the stage large enough to present a circus complete with elephants or for the grand replica ship’s saloon. They came to see only one thing.

Six performers opened the bill. The audience had no interest whatsoever in them. As three o’clock drew closer their fidgeting and whispering became louder. The ushers and attendants grew nervous, and the manager wondered aloud in front of the gallery of a hundred journalists whether this was a good idea after all.

The last act finished and the stage was cleared. Onto it was carried a wooden cabinet about three feet tall and equally wide. The front was covered with a red velvet curtain. At the sight of the cabinet, the crowd cheered, startling the stage dressers and nearly causing them to drop it.

A man came onstage. He was tall and thin with a pale face, his long charcoal coat unbuttoned. His shoes were a deep black and polished to a fine lustre. The man walked with the confidence affected by someone who is in fact frightened. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly deep—he appeared more the sort of man to have a thin, reedy voice.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.” The crowd applauded with limited enthusiasm. They weren’t here for this man. “Please allow me to introduce to you Mr. Harry Houdini.”

All eyes focused on the wings, but Houdini did not emerge. Then the doors at the back of the Hippodrome were thrown open, their weight echoing down toward the stage, and at once the entire audience turned to see Houdini, in a black dress coat and white high-collared shirt, stride down the aisle like a marching soldier. By the time he reached the front row, everyone was standing, and their ovation lasted long after he leaped to the stage. He bowed once or twice to acknowledge them, but his trademark ebullience was not on display.

He surveyed the crowd. These people were London’s finest. The past four days had been a flurry of promotion and preparation. He had barely slept.

Houdini made his introductory remarks. There was no lock that could hold him. He was Houdini, the Handcuff King. He lauded the London public for their appreciation and dared all imposters to duplicate his feats. “I am ready,” he said finally, “to be manacled by the
Mirror
representative if he be present.”

The man who had introduced him, the only other person on the stage, stuck out his hand. “I am Richard Kelley. I represent the
Mirror
.” Houdini shook his hand and smiled at the man. Of course he
had known who he was. It was all a game. He could see Bess off to the side, watching him. She was wearing black knickerbockers, which he didn’t like and which she wore, he suspected, to irritate him.

They each called on the audience for a committee of citizens to ensure fair play, and one by one nearly a hundred people came forward. Once the committee was assembled, Kelley brought out the handcuffs from his coat pocket. Houdini held out his wrists and Kelley fastened them. The key itself was over six inches long, and Kelley had trouble getting it into the keyway. He had to turn it a full six times to fully lock the cuffs. Houdini closed his eyes as Kelley struggled to lock the cuffs. The man was a fool, and he was showing himself as such to the world.

When the cuffs were locked, Kelley removed the key and placed it in his inside coat pocket. He moved a few steps away from Houdini, sweating, his hand routinely darting into his coat to verify the presence of the key.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Houdini said in his loudest voice, “I am now locked up in a handcuff that took a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best.”

The cheers were cacophonous, and while various members of the committee examined his cabinet he heard shouts of encouragement. The enthusiasm of the audience amazed and frightened him.

Once all were satisfied that his cabinet was as it appeared, he entered it and drew the curtain. The sounds from outside were somewhat muffled, but the feeling of four thousand sets of eyes trained upon the curtain was ever present.

The cabinet was a tight fit and he had to kneel. In his opinion
this made his escapes seem more dramatic—a large cabinet would have given the impression that he was free to do whatever he liked and also would have admitted into the viewer’s mind the possibility that it held a confederate.

He inhaled until his lungs were as full as they could be. Tonight would be the culmination of his years of hard work. He had become Houdini, the Handcuff King, had escaped from every lock put before him. He’d toured America, Europe, and Russia with top billing, made more money than he’d ever dreamt of. After this challenge he planned to return to America and buy a fine house and pour gold into his mother’s apron, as he’d promised his father he would. Things with Bess would settle down too—without the demands of the road for a few months they’d be able to get back to their old selves. She’d see that he had done what had to be done to succeed, and that any dalliances along the way were not really his fault but simply a result of the pressure he was under; none of them meant anything anyway. She would forgive him everything.

Today was a nasty piece of business. Four days ago Richard Kelley had brought these damnable handcuffs to his show and asked him, onstage, to open them. He’d tried to shrug him off—they weren’t regulation cuffs, and the terms of the open challenge were that he would escape from any cuffs of regulation issue.

He had good reason to insist on these terms. Months earlier in Blackburn, a man named Hodgeson had fooled him and chained him up with plugged locks. There was no key or pick on earth that could open them—once they were closed, they were unworkable. It had taken him hours to free himself, tearing chunks of flesh off in the process. The show would have been a complete disaster, if not for a file passed to him by Bess.

Kelley hadn’t been deterred by his insistence on regulation cuffs. Houdini had been fettered by three other challengers, and within moments had freed himself, to everyone’s delight. Kelley then asked him for a pair of the handcuffs from which he’d just escaped. Houdini had assumed that Kelley wanted to see if they were gaffed, which they weren’t, so he handed him a locked pair.

Kelley took the cuffs, walked over to the stage stairs, and slammed them on the tread. The cuffs fell open. “Regulation cuffs such as these?”

The audience jeered and hissed.

“Mr. Houdini, you claim you are the Handcuff King. Yet you refuse to wear these handcuffs, the result of five years’ labour by Birmingham locksmith Nathaniel Hart using good British steel and bought with British gold. Hart says no mortal man can pick this lock. If you are unwilling to try, then you are not the Handcuff King.”

He was trapped. Without examining the handcuffs closer he couldn’t agree to the challenge—there were a hundred ways to make a cuff unopenable. But he couldn’t very well refuse. He was lost for words and happened to look into the wings. Standing with his arms crossed, a cigar drooping from his lip, was Alfred Harmsworth. Houdini recognized him as the owner of the
Daily Illustrated Mirror
.

Harmsworth nodded at him just slightly, and Houdini knew that he had to accept Kelley’s challenge.

“I am sure that you and the
Daily Illustrated Mirror
will understand that a pair of handcuffs such as these will require me to prepare myself. I therefore agree to your challenge, set for four days from now. I will do my very best to open your handcuffs, Mr. Kelley. Houdini has never yet failed.”

Harmsworth was waiting for him as he came offstage. He was a tall, heavyset man with a child’s face and shrewd eyes. At thirty-eight years of age he was fast becoming the most powerful man in British publishing. He’d come from poverty and understood what the masses wanted and how to give it to them. He could control what people thought, how they remembered events, how history was written.

“Scared of a pair of handcuffs, are you?”

Houdini half smiled, unsure of what Harmsworth was up to. “They’re not regulation cuffs.”

“No, they’re not. So we’re on?”

Houdini paused. Harmsworth could be a dangerous enemy. “I don’t see as how you’ve left me any choice.”

Harmsworth laughed. “No, I don’t suppose I have.”

Houdini said nothing. He took a coin from his pocket and began to work it back and forth in his hand, starting at his thumb and progressing to his pinky finger and then back again with increasing speed.

“This will make both of us,” Harmsworth said. “The publicity will solidify the
Mirror
as the foremost paper in London and you as the foremost performer. You should be thanking me.”

The song the orchestra had launched into when he entered his cabinet was one of his favourite waltzes, “On the Beautiful Blue Danube.” Houdini listened to it in the dark, with four thousand people watching. He thought about all the challenges he’d faced and met with hard work and ingenuity. And luck. He hated the idea of
luck, because luck allowed for the idea of chance, and chance admitted the possibility of failure. For every way most men knew to unlock a lock Houdini knew of three. He had backup methods for his backup methods. Only by killing chance had he been able to make this life for himself.

But he also knew that circumstances largely beyond his control had contributed to his success. It was six years since he’d broken out of a police holding cell in Chicago, engaged in what he often thought of as his greatest talent—publicity. One of the officers who handcuffed him was Lieutenant Andrew Rohan, who told Houdini to leave the station and never come back. “We don’t want you in our jail,” he’d said.

Two weeks later Rohan came to see him with a proposition. He took him to a nondescript building that could have housed an inept accountant or an unsuccessful lawyer or a clientless tailor. Once inside, he was taken up a side staircase to a sitting room with a large fireplace and several chairs positioned around a circular table. Rohan motioned for him to sit and then left. After a few minutes the door opened again and a tall man entered, wearing a pin-striped suit and spectacles. He was clean-cut with a well-waxed moustache, and walked across the room with a casual grace and confidence.

“Good afternoon,” the man said, extending his hand for Houdini to shake and then sitting opposite him. “I’m John Wilkie.”

Houdini knew the name. Years ago, as a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
, Wilkie had written an account of having witnessed the apocryphal Indian rope trick. Every magician knew it was a trick that didn’t exist and had never been performed, but which the more credulous members of the public read as fact. Multiple reports of
seeing such a trick soon spread across the world, and the article became an object lesson, for magicians, of what, if properly convinced, people will say, and even believe, they have seen.

“You’ve become a magician?”

Wilkie shook his head. “Amateur, I assure you. I have turned my attention to other areas. I am the director of the Secret Service.”

Houdini was speechless. He knew that Rohan had been upset with him, but it was all part of an act. “I haven’t done anything illegal. The jailbreaks were approved by the police.”

Wilkie smiled. “You misunderstand, Mr. Weisz. You’re not in trouble.”

“It’s Houdini. Harry Houdini.”

“Exactly. We know all about you. Born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest. Interestingly, when you came to America the spelling of your name was changed and your date of birth is recorded as April 6. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. My parents changed the spelling of all our names, and the birthday must be a mistake.”

“But now Ehrich Weiss has become Harry Houdini. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on April 6, 1874.” Wilkie reached into his pocket, pulled out an American passport, and slid it across the table toward him.