The Confabulist (19 page)

“Let’s move on and look at some techniques for getting out of ropes.”

Chung Ling Soo was dead. Houdini read the news in a telegram from London sent by Soo’s wife, Dot. When he told Bess, she’d given him a look that could fry an egg and walked out of the room. Her reaction didn’t surprise him. Despite the official explanation, he knew Chung Ling Soo’s death was no accident.

Chung Ling Soo had been one of the top-drawing magicians of the last fifteen years. His show was a spectacle of what a Western audience imagined Chinese magic to be. He was billed as far away as Australia as “the Original Chinese Conjurer.” Chung Ling Soo performed a dazzling array of illusions, including a bullet catch. It was a terrific trick, one that few magicians would dare risk. Even Houdini was hesitant to perform a bullet catch.

Chung Ling Soo’s bullet catch was the best one around. Two audience members, preferably soldiers, would be chosen. They would each select a bullet from a box of bullets, which were then taken by Soo’s assistant to two different audience members. Using a knife
these audience members scratched a mark into the bullets that they would later be able to recognize. Then two assistants dressed as Boxer soldiers would bring out the rifles. They were old-fashioned muzzle-loaders, ornately decorated and well polished. The volunteers would inspect the rifles, stare into the barrels, pull the triggers. When they were ready to pronounce the guns as real, an assistant would bring out a tin of gunpowder, pour some of it onto a tin plate, and hold a match to it. It would explode with a cloud of smoke, and all would agree that it was real gunpowder. The gunpowder was poured into the rifles. Each rifle had a ramrod housed in a tube underneath the gun’s main barrel. The ramrod was removed and used to tamp the powder down with a cotton wad. The bullets were brought to the volunteers, who looked at the marks closely so that they could verify them later, and each dropped a bullet down the rifle barrel. The bullets were tamped down with another cotton wad and the ramrods placed on a table for inspection. Percussion caps were placed into the breeches and the guns were handed to the Boxer soldiers.

“Silence! Quiet for Chung Ling Soo,” the assistant, a man named Kametaro, would call. He pointed to the volunteers. “You have seen the marked bullets. You have loaded them into the rifles. Now watch closely.” He turned and waved a hand at the audience. “Everyone must watch very closely.”

The Boxer soldiers took up a position on the left of the stage. Chung Ling Soo stood on the right of the stage. He was presented with a porcelain plate, which he gripped in his hands. Kametaro stood between them, a sword held high above his head, and addressed the crowd.

“During the Boxer Rebellion, Chung Ling Soo was sentenced to death for defying his cruel and brutal oppressors. He faced a firing squad that day many years ago in Peking, but he triumphed over their bullets. We will now see if he can do so again.”

Chung Ling Soo braced himself as if against a coming train and raised the plate until it was in front of his heart. He waited until the tension in the room was almost unbearable. Then he nodded at Kametaro. Kametaro lowered his sword and the harsh crack of gunfire ricocheted through the theatre. Chung Ling Soo stepped back and in one fluid motion rotated his plate down and away from him. As the echo of the gunshots faded away, the sound of the bullets rolling around the rim of the plate could be heard all the way to the back of the room.

The volunteers would be brought up to verify that the bullets in the plate bore the same marks as the ones they dropped into the rifles, and were invited to keep them as souvenirs. Chung Ling Soo would bow gracefully and the show would be over.

It was a remarkable exploit. What made it even more remarkable was that Chung Ling Soo had no more escaped the Boxer Rebellion than Houdini had been born in Appleton, Wisconsin; Chung Ling Soo wasn’t even Chinese.

William Robinson had come up through vaudeville at the same time as Houdini and Bess, and they had become fast friends with Will and Dot. Both Bess and Dot were small, built like pixies, and the four of them spent many fond times together. Robinson was never able to achieve success as a magician, but as a stage assistant and builder he was possibly the best man around.

For a while, Robinson worked as an assistant for Alexander
Herrmann and Harry Kellar, two of the world’s finest magicians, rivals who would each periodically hire Robinson away from the other in an attempt to learn the other’s secrets.

Then he vanished. It was as if he’d simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Houdini knew that William had done this before, in a way. He had been married to another woman before Dot, and they had a daughter. William had more or less abandoned her to be raised by her grandfather when he met Dot.

Houdini told Bess about this almost offhandedly. The colour drained from her face and she stared at him.

“I don’t know how anyone could do that,” she said. “How could you walk away from your child?” She raised her head to look at him. “But I suppose it’s no surprise. He’s a magician. They disappear. Isn’t that right?”

He smiled, hoping she was making a joke, but she wasn’t. “Not all of them,” he said.

“Enough of them,” she answered. “It’s what happens when you believe in a mystery.”

Houdini didn’t know what to make of Robinson’s disappearance until one day, a year later, he stumbled upon a pamphlet titled
Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena
, written by Robinson. It was published a few months before he disappeared and contained different techniques for secret writings using invisible inks. Houdini knew immediately that it was just the sort of thing John Wilkie and William Melville would be interested in. About six months later he was walking down a street in London and passed a lithograph advertising a Chinese conjurer. He stopped, backed up, and took a closer look at the man in the picture. His old friend William Robinson had become known to the world as Chung Ling Soo.

And now he was dead. When the guns fired, Chung Ling Soo dropped the plate, fell backward, and clutched his chest in agony. His assistants stood dumbfounded. And then the man who most people had been told did not speak a word of English shouted, without a trace of an accent, “Oh my God, something’s happened. Lower the curtain.” The band played “God Save the King” and the crowd left, wondering what they had just witnessed. When they awoke the next morning it was to the news that Chung Ling Soo, aka William Robinson, was dead.

Robinson had known full well how dangerous the bullet catch was. When working for Harry Kellar there had been an incident that Kellar had been extremely fortunate to escape from without serious injury. But he had, he believed, designed a nearly foolproof version of it. The marked bullets were palmed, taken backstage, and their markings duplicated. The original bullets were given to Robinson and the duplicates taken to be loaded into the muzzle of the rifle. The gunpowder was real, and the bullets did indeed enter the barrel of the gun.

When a muzzle-loading rifle is fired, the trigger causes a hammer to hit a percussion cap, directing a small explosion down a narrow hole and into the barrel of the rifle, where it ignites the gunpowder and propels the bullet out of the gun.

The conventional method for performing a bullet catch was to somehow ensure that no bullets were loaded into the gun. Robinson, however, used guns that had been modified so the percussion cap’s charge was instead directed into the ramrod tube, a smaller cylinder of metal underneath the main barrel. In Robinson’s modified guns, the ramrod tube contained a second charge of gunpowder only, which when ignited would create the illusion that the gun had fired, but the
tube was not large enough in diameter to accommodate a bullet. There was, as far as he knew, no way for the bullet that sat inside the gun to leave it, because there was no way for the spark from the percussion charge to reach it.

Yet Robinson was dead, shot by his own guns. Houdini did not know how it had happened, but he didn’t believe it was an accident. And remembering how Wilkie had treated him after his refusal to work for the czar, he wondered whether Robinson had been working for Wilkie too.

“Tie it as tight as you can,” he said. The soldier grinned and wrapped the rope around him again and tied another knot. Houdini was seated in a chair with his hands tied behind his back and his feet tied at the ankles. His students were gathered around him in a circle.

The soldier tying Houdini wrapped the long rope around his torso and secured a final knot at the back of the chair. The rest of them looked at the knots.

“So you’d agree that I’m tied up pretty well, then?” Houdini said. “Terrific. Now I want you to observe a few things. The first is how I positioned my body when the ropes were being secured. If possible, cross your hands behind your back. Flex your muscles as much as possible, but try not to have it look like that’s what you’re doing. You want to appear casual, but the entire time you should be doing an undetectable dance, a half inch this way, an inch that way, thinking what space you will be able to use later. Arch your back. Roll your shoulders forward. Breathe in as deeply as you can—a deep breath will increase the size of your chest. Then breathe short, shallow breaths, even while speaking, making sure you never let out all your
air. When you finally empty your lungs you will be able to gain enough slack to work with.”

The soldiers watched as the rope loosened around his chest.

“All you need is a little room to work with. If you are able, release your hands first. If this isn’t possible, try your feet next. Always wear your shoes or boots loosely so that they can be slipped off if needed.”

He wriggled his feet until his shoes came off, which allowed him to pull his ankles and feet free.

“If you’re tied to a chair, that will be of some help. Usually you can break the chair, but this particular chair is US Army property, the destruction of which is a crime. So I won’t do that.”

He leaned forward, stood, and then tipped the chair to the side, toppling to the floor.

“Work the rope from side to side, up and down, until you have enough slack to slip out. It is particularly helpful if the rope’s been tied to the chair, as that will give you a force to oppose.”

The soldiers watched as Houdini slipped out of the ropes that held him to the chair. He rolled over, got his feet under him, and stood, his hands still bound behind his back.

“Now for the tricky bit. If you have crossed your arms at the wrists and the person tying you has allowed you a little slack, it’s no problem to get out. Just raise your hands up toward your shoulder blades, push your chest forward, tuck in your thumbs, and slide your hands away from each other.”

He turned around and the soldiers watched as his hands slithered free.

“Sometimes, though, they won’t let you cross your wrists. If this is the case it will be necessary to get your hands to the front of your body.”

He had the soldiers line up and one by one he tied their hands behind their backs.

“This takes some practice. You will need to lean your body forward and then, inch by inch, work your arms down and over your hips until they are behind your knees. Sit on the floor, cross your legs, and work your left arm down over the knee and withdraw your left foot, and then your right. You should then be able to untie the knot with your teeth.”

He could see from their faces that they didn’t think they could do it. It would be difficult for them, and painful at first. But it could save their lives.

“Before we begin, are there any questions? Just raise your hand. No? Good. Let’s see who can get free first.”

After the
Mirror
challenge he had phased handcuff challenges out of his act. He still used handcuffs but not as a challenge, and they weren’t the focus anymore. Audiences had grown tired of them, and so had he. He’d also begun doing bridge jumps as an alternative to breaking out of jail cells. The bridge jumps could be unpleasant but the publicity was magnificent, and he didn’t need Wilkie or anyone else to pave the way for him with the police anymore.

Wilkie had officially left the Treasury Department in 1908, but was more active than ever. The US government believed that war was only a matter of time, but Wilkie’s espionage activities ran counter to the country’s official position of neutrality, so Wilkie had taken his operations underground. In the lead-up to the war, Houdini willingly provided intelligence to both Wilkie and Melville—he knew the insides of nearly all the prisons in Germany and Austria
and provided detailed drawings of these for his masters. Since the war began he’d stayed in America, focusing on selling war bonds, entertaining the troops, and giving training sessions. He hadn’t had any communication with Melville for nearly three years, and even Wilkie had left him alone the last while. He was now quite likely the most famous man on earth, and his career was beyond their reach.

Houdini added more exciting and potentially dangerous acts to his show. His first successful stage escape was the Milk Can escape. In it he would be submerged in a large milk can filled to the top with milk, or whatever else would get him some free advertising. Sometimes it was beer, though that left him stinking for days to come. A committee of audience members would be given an opportunity to inspect the can before he entered it. He’d then lower himself inside and the lid would be placed on top. The committee would then be allowed to lock the lid on, each person given a padlock to secure and the key to open it. A curtain would be lowered so that the committee and the audience couldn’t see the can, and Houdini would emerge a few minutes later, dripping but unharmed. The locks securing the lid would still be fastened.

The trick wasn’t as dangerous as it appeared. The locks were for show—the entire top third of the can came off. It was held in place with false rivets, which were easy enough to undo from inside. There was a bit of air available at the top of the can—the lid was slightly rounded, allowing enough air for a couple of breaths if necessary.

In 1912 he added the Water Torture Cell. In it he was hung upside down in what amounted to an oversized coffin with a see-through front. As with the Milk Can, a curtain concealed the apparatus from the audience at the key moment. An assistant would stand at the side of the stage with a fire axe as a safety feature. The
key to the trick was for him to take long enough that people wondered if something had gone wrong but not too long that it was obvious in hindsight he’d been drawing it out.