The Last Illusion (13 page)

Daniel sighed. “We’ve been through this before. Don’t you see? It’s your house, not mine. I’d be the interloper, the intruder. It wouldn’t be the right place to start a new life together. I’d never feel quite at home.”

“Sure you would,” I said. “You’d bring in all your furniture. We’d make the downstairs back room into your den. We’d buy a new bed.” And I smiled up at him as I said this.

“Don’t try your feminine wiles with me, Molly Murphy,” he said, but he was smiling. “We’ll talk about this when we have more time. I am already late for work.”

I picked up the food basket from where it had been left on the table. “I’ll put this in your kitchen then, shall I? The pork and the salad should go in the ice chest or they’ll spoil.”

He took it from me. “You’re good to me sometimes.” He leaned toward me and kissed me gently on the lips. Then he kissed me again,
not so gently this time. “September, Molly. My next day off we’ll go up to Westchester and set a date.”

“Westchester?”

“You’d like to be married from my family home, wouldn’t you? It would make a lovely setting in the garden and there’s St. Benedict’s Church close by.”

“You want us to get married in the Catholic Church?”

“Well, I thought—my mother will probably expect it and we were both raised in the faith.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

We left the house together and parted with an amicable kiss. But inside my head was whirling. Did I want to get married in church after having rejected it for so long? Did I want a wedding in Daniel’s house, where it would be his family, his friends? I had pictured a wedding in the city, with Sid and Gus as my bridesmaids and Ryan looking flamboyant in a long black cape and all my other friends in attendance. But Daniel was picturing the traditional wedding in the country—at his mother’s house, no less! As I had said, I’d have to do some thinking about this.

Eleven

A
fter I left Daniel I went straight to the theater. I didn’t expect to find the Houdinis there, but I hoped that there might be some activity at this hour and someone could tell me where they lived. The Bowery was a regular hive of activity, with women doing their morning shopping, pushcart vendors crying out their wares, and small boys dodging between carts as they played some game. The street itself was clogged with a jam of horse-drawn drays, hansom cabs, the occasional automobile, and trolley cars. The smell of fresh manure and the slops tipped into the gutters were overpowering in the sticky heat, and I was glad when I saw the theater marquee rising above the shops and saloons. The front doors were locked but I went down the alley to the stage door and found Ted, the doorkeeper in attendance.

“You again?” he said. “You keep turning up like a bad penny—and speaking of bad pennies, I’d keep well away from Mr. Irving, the manager, if I were you. He was in some fearful bad temper last night. Not only did he have to stop the show for the second time in a week, and give some people their money back, but it turned out that someone
had unloaded quite a few forged banknotes on us. My but he was hopping mad.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “So what was everyone saying about the accident last night?”

“You know theater folks—superstitious, that’s what they are. They were saying that the place is jinxed. First Lily and then Bess.”

“And what do you think?” I asked him.

“I’m not paid to have an opinion,” he said, “but if you really want to know, I think these illusionists take crazy risks and something’s bound to go wrong sometime. Give me a nice song-and-dance act any day.” He realized he was chatting with me, stopped, and frowned. “Now what did you want this time?”

“I was upset about what happened to Bess Houdini last night. I wanted to go and see her to make sure she’s all right. She quite took to me, you know. So I wondered if you could tell me where they are staying?”

He looked at me appraisingly. “I’ve been doing this job for a good while and I’ve learned a thing or two about people and there’s something about you I just can’t quite fathom out. Something that doesn’t quite add up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.

“The first time you showed up, you came back here to collect your lost shawl,” he said. “A shawl that had been used to cover a dead girl. What young lady would want her shawl back after that? Any young lady that I know wouldn’t want to touch it again, even if it wasn’t covered with blood. And then the next time you show up you’re supposedly the bosom buddy of Bess Houdini. And you know what else?” His eyes narrowed as he squinted at me. “Every time you’ve been at this theater, something’s gone wrong. So I’m thinking that maybe someone has sent you here—someone who has it in for our theater.”

“You think I might be the one who caused the accidents?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Some of these criminal types, they’ve used pretty young ladies to do their dirty work before now. So perhaps someone’s paid you to settle a score with Houdini.”

I glared at him. “Settle a score with Houdini. Who might want to do that?”

He touched his nose in a confidential way. “Remember that affair with Risey on Coney Island? That left bad blood, didn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I haven’t been in this country for long. Who is Risey?”

“Risey—he’s a big noise on Coney Island. He was badmouthing Houdini and calling him a fraud, so Houdini challenged him and locked him in a trunk at Vacca’s theater. Risey panicked and they only just got him out in time.”

I nodded, digesting this. So Risey, a shady character, had been made to look a fool by Houdini.

“And Risey was heard to say that Houdini better not show his face anywhere near him again,” Ted added.

“I see,” I said. “Well, I assure you that I am not working for anybody. The first time I came to this theater was with my young man and we witnessed that horrible scene with Scarpelli. My intended went onstage immediately after the tragedy happened to see if he could help. I went with him. Bess Houdini saw all the blood and had hysterics. I took her away and calmed her down and she became instantly attached to me. She came to my house to thank me and invited me to come and watch the show. That’s the whole truth.”

Ted stared at me again, then nodded. “Maybe it is, and then again maybe it isn’t. I’ve always found that women make the best liars.”

“So you’re not going to give me the Houdinis’ address?” I asked. He was now beginning to annoy me—partly because he could see through me, I suppose. “I just thought it would be the friendly thing to do to go and check on Bess, seeing that I was there as her guest last night and I was supposed to be meeting her for lunch today, an appointment which she obviously won’t be well enough to keep.”

This last was a lie, of course, that came to me in a flash of inspiration.

“They’ve taken a house up in Harlem, from what I hear,” he said, “but as to the address, you’d have to ask Mr. Irving, and like I say, he’s in no mood to talk nice to anybody today.” He turned away, then
looked back at me. “Your best bet would be to come back to the theater tonight. Houdini will be doing his act whether his wife is fit to join him or not.”

This made sense, but it was Bess I wanted to see and I had seen how protective Houdini was of her. She was now my client, as far as I was concerned. She had hired me to do a job and from what I had seen last night, that job had become all the more urgent.

“Why don’t you write her a note and I’ll make sure that one of them gets it,” Ted said, seeing my frustration.

“That’s not going to be any use for my luncheon appointment today, is it?” I said. “Still, I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

He handed me paper and a pencil and I wrote, “So sorry about what happened last night. If you’d like to talk about it, you know where I live. Yours fondly, Molly.” I suspected that Ted would snoop and read it so I left it at that.

As I came out onto the Bowery I passed the front of the theater and saw that a door to the box office was now open. I went inside. A crowd had gathered around the ticket counter and voices were raised. “But we were told we’d be able to see the show for free after it was stopped!” a woman was shouting. “Who is going to give us our money back if the show is sold out?”

I sneaked past them and tried the doors to the theater. They didn’t open but there was a passageway down the side, leading to the balcony and the boxes. I went down this, and to my delight found a door that opened into the orchestra stalls. The door closed behind me and I stood, blinking in almost complete darkness. I felt my way forward, row by row, until the orchestra pit opened up in front of me. Then I felt my way around that to the steps at the right and the pass door. It yielded to my touch and I was through to the backstage. Silence and darkness greeted me. The smell of fresh paint mingled with sawdust and stale coffee made me want to sneeze and I put up my hand to my nose to stop myself. I passed through the wings and tiptoed up the little staircase that led to the dressing rooms. There was a glimmer of light coming from somewhere on this hallway and I located the Houdinis’ dressing room by the star on the door. It wasn’t locked and I went inside.
I wasn’t quite sure what I hoped to find in there. I closed the door carefully and turned on the electric light switch. Blinding light flooded the room from the bulbs around the mirror and I had to stand with my eyes squeezed shut until I dared to open them again. To be honest I still wasn’t used to the glare of electricity, having only gas at my house, which gave a softer and gentler glow.

As I looked around, I was again struck by how Spartan the dressing room was: the counter below the mirror with its jumble of grease paints, cotton wool, and patent medicines; the rack holding Houdini’s frock coat and Bess’s page-boy outfit; the couch in the corner, a couple of rickety chairs—that was about it. None of their props, I noticed. They were all locked away safely.

I tried the drawer in the dressing table. And then I went through the pockets in the jacket. All they contained was a card: the nine of spades. I smiled to myself. Then I noticed that the waste basket hadn’t been emptied. I sorted through cotton wool caked with vanishing cream and makeup, an empty tonic bottle, and then I hit pay dirt. An envelope, addressed to Mr. Harry Houdini, 178 E. 102 Street, New York.

Having had such a stroke of luck, I looked inside to see if perhaps it might have contained something useful like a threatening letter from a gangster—but it was empty. No matter. I had achieved my purpose and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I made my exit from the theater without being detected. There was still a vociferous crowd around the ticket kiosk and I pitied the person inside it.

From the Bowery I took the Third Avenue El, traveling north. It felt as if I were traveling to the ends of the earth, stuck in that hot, crowded compartment with frequent stops and plenty of jostling and shoving. On the way I had time to think about what had happened to Bess and why. I had overheard something that had sounded very much like a threat last night at the theater, when Houdini had told the young man that he was going to hand over something only to his boss. And now today Ted had told me that someone called Risey, who was a big man on Coney Island, had been humiliated by Houdini and had vowed to get even. I knew how New York gangsters bore a grudge and what kind of thing they might do to get even. So Bess had been quite right
in her suspicions and had almost paid with her life. If an ax hadn’t been nearby, it would have been too late for her.

We crawled northward painfully slowly until finally I alighted at Ninety-ninth Street station. It wasn’t a part of the city with which I was familiar and I was interested to see it had the same distinctly Jewish feel to it as the streets of the Lower East Side but without the pushcarts, cacophony of sounds, and ripe smells. I heard Russian and Yiddish spoken and passed a synagogue where old bearded men in black caps stood on the steps in heated conversation with a lot of hand gestures.

The house the Houdinis had rented was nothing fancy—a modest brownstone on a quiet street. Children were playing jump rope on the other side, chanting the same sort of rhymes that we had chanted back in Ireland. This made me wonder whether the Houdinis had any children or, more to the point, whether Bess’s nervous condition and collapse might be due to pregnancy. I tapped on the front door and waited.