The Last Illusion (34 page)

“Always rushing around. It’s not healthy.”

“Sid and Gus said the same thing.”

“Dear Sid and Gus. I must go to visit. They’ll cheer me up if nobody else can. I haven’t been out for days.”

“Then you won’t have heard any gossip about what happened to Houdini?” I asked cautiously.

He shook his head. “I haven’t spoken to a soul,” he said.

“If you do speak to a soul in the near future, do try to find out what the theater people think has happened to him,” I said,

Ryan shrugged. “As I told you before. He is vaudeville, I am legit. Never the twain shall meet, my dear. Now I’m feeling weak again and must take to my bed, if you don’t mind.” He lay down with great drama and I made my exit.

I tried to control my frustration as I came out and went to sit in Washington Square for a few minutes to calm down. Nothing seemed to be working out today. I turned the pages of the scrapbook, staring at the pictures and willing the words to make sense. Here and there I picked out a name, but it seemed that in German half the words in a sentence started with a capital letter. Houdini shaking hands with the Kaiser. That much I could understand, and some kind of picture of a courtroom, under which he had written, “Houdini triumphs again.”

The branches of the tree above me moved in a sudden breeze and the sun shone full on the page of my book, bringing the characters in the sketch on the page into harsh focus for me. It was a group standing onstage and a face at the back of that group stirred something in my memory. I had seen that face recently, or a face that resembled it.
Somewhere else in the scrapbooks, perhaps? I flicked through page after page, but the face didn’t appear again. I scanned the article, trying to pick out a name I recognized but in the end I had to give up, frustrated. So I’d have to wait for Leopold to translate for me this evening after all. And I never was good at being patient.

Twenty-eight

S
o what to do next? Go to the theater and find out about Signor Scarpelli’s residence or visit the press that published
The Dramatic Mirror
magazine? It was not the sort of weather to go rushing around any more than necessary. The humidity today made it feel like wading through a Turkish bath. Actually I had never been in a Turkish bath since they are strictly reserved for gentlemen, but I had read about them. Every step seemed an effort. Clothing stuck to me in an unbecoming manner. I could feel the sweat trickling down the back of my neck and my hat felt like a deadweight on my head. Patchin Place was so close by. I could go home, have a cool splash of water, and a cold drink. I stood up, tempted, then turned resolutely to my task. Theater and magazine were not too far from each other—one on the Bowery, the other on Pearl Street.

I decided on the magazine first. Theater folk are notoriously late risers and I’d probably find the place deserted until at least eleven. So I caught the trolley south down Broadway. Although it was crowded, its sides were open and it was more pleasant traveling than in the closed carriages of the El. As we neared the southern tip of Manhattan we
picked up a hint of cooler breeze coming in from the ocean. As I alighted I stood, breathing in the air with a hint of sea tang and picturing myself standing on the cliffs at home, feeling that cool, salty wind in my face. How long ago that all seemed now, as if it was a distant dream.

As I went into the office of
The Dramatic Mirror
a loud clatter of machinery was coming up from the basement, so that I had to shout my request to the young woman who came to greet me.

“An article by Houdini?” she shouted back. “Yes, he often writes for us.”

“Do you have his latest articles here for me to look at?”

“May I ask what this is about?” she asked.

I decided this was a time for straight talk. “You’ve heard that he has disappeared and has probably been kidnapped,” I said.

“Yes, I read it in the papers. Shocking, isn’t it? Whatever next?”

“I am a detective, working with Houdini’s family and the police on trying to trace him. We’d appreciate any help you can give us.” I produced my card that read, “P. Riley Detective Agency. M. Murphy Co-Owner.” I had taken the liberty of having the cards printed after Paddy Riley died and I was left holding the baby, so to speak. So I wasn’t really co-owner, just owner by default.

She looked at the card, then at me. “Wait here please,” she said. “I’ll get Mr. Goldblum.”

She went into a back office while the machinery downstairs clattered on. I wondered how anyone could get work done with that sort of noise nearby, but then the whole city was full of workshops and small factories. It was hard to find a quiet backwater like Patchin Place.

Mr. Goldblum looked tired and stooped. “You’re asking about Houdini, miss?”

“I am. I know he wrote regular articles for your magazine. I have the latest edition but I wondered if there were any articles you’ve received from him that are not yet published.”

“We have an edition going to press, even as we speak. You can hear the noise, no doubt.” He gave a tired smile. “And, yes, he has an article that will appear in that edition.”

My hopes rose. “May I see it?”

“It would still be down with the typesetters, but I expect I could retrieve it. But may I ask on whose authority you are here and what you hope to achieve?”

“I’m here with the full backing of the Houdini family and the police,” I said, although this wasn’t quite true. In fact, Daniel had said in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t my case any longer, but Chief Wilkie and the Secret Service counted as police, didn’t they? “And as to what I hope to achieve—we can leave no stone unturned to find Mr. Houdini. It’s just possible that something he saw or did in Germany has put him into this current danger. Some kind of feud with another magician, maybe.”

“I see.” He frowned. “I remember reading the article and it seemed perfectly harmless to me. But I’ll go and see if I can retrieve it for you. Anything to help Houdini’s family—and the police, of course.”

He was gone quite a while. Nobody offered me a seat, and indeed there didn’t seem to be an extra chair in that outer office. The girl had gone back to her filing duties and nobody else appeared. At last Mr. Goldblum came up the stairs, huffing and puffing a bit.

“Not as young as I used to be,” he said. “Here you are. Here is Houdini’s article, literally hot off the press.”

I read it, my disappointment growing. It was little more than a list of which performers were touring the Continent from America and where Houdini himself would be playing when he returned. “And I expect to have some new tricks up my sleeve when I return,” he concluded. “There are some kinks to be worked out but I think you’ll all be suitably surprised and impressed.”

The amazing underwater trick, I thought. He was going to perfect it. Was it unique enough to make someone kill him to get their hands on it? I handed the paper back to Mr. Goldblum.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing there that could help me,” I said. “I’ll have to try the other magazines he wrote for. Do you happen to know where
Mahatma
is headquartered?”

“Up in Boston, I believe,” he said.

That was a long way to go just for a magazine. I thanked him and
was about to leave when a young man, his face and hands smudged with ink, came up the stairs.

“Here you are, sir,” he said, and handed some papers to Goldblum. Goldblum smiled, then handed the booklet to me. “Here’s the entire new edition, with my compliments,” he said.

I came out into the deep shadow of Pearl Street where tall buildings blotted out the sun and made my way though to the waterfront at the South Street Pier. I put down my bag, and stood for a while, watching the commerce on the East River, listening to the sounds of a busy dockland—the toot of tugboats and sirens of bigger ships coming in from a long ocean voyage mingled with the shouts of stevedores as they unloaded sacks of coffee, crates of bananas. Above these sounds came the squeals of small boys jumping off the docks into the cool water. At which of these docks had Houdini’s trunk washed up? I wondered. I should have asked Daniel, but then he’d only have reminded me that it wasn’t my case.

I stared at the river, at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the almost completed East River Bridge and wondered exactly where his captors had dumped him into the river. It was always so busy, even at night when ships were unloaded by the glow of lamps as ships’ companies employed their own police forces to keep the merchandise safe. Why had nobody seen or heard the splash of something heavy being thrown in? Perhaps they had, but surely the police would have pursued this line of inquiry.

I sat on a packing case, enjoying the rich, rank smell of the river and the cry of the gulls overhead, and looked through the magazine I had been given. I knew that sometimes Houdini wrote anonymously and even placed advertisements. And to my growing excitement I saw there was an article from “Our Berlin Correspondent, Herr N. Osey.”

After a few lines of gossip about life in Berlin, I read a passage that caught my attention. “Expect an invasion of German talent on the New York scene in the near future. German magicians plan to take America by storm—just as Houdini and his like have become the darlings of Europe. Look out and prepare to be surprised by the amazing underwater escape trick.”

I stood there, my heart beating very fast. There. Absolute proof that Houdini had written the article. But what did it mean? Could it possibly mean what I thought it might—that Germany was planning to invade New York soon? Not our enemies yet, Mr. Wilkie had said, but the Kaiser was ambitious and sought to expand his empire. That’s rubbish, I thought. They wouldn’t dare test the might of the United States. The sound of some kind of machinery across the river set my teeth on edge—the whine of metal cutting metal. I looked across at the Brooklyn shoreline. A large ship was out of the water in a dry dock and men were working on its hull. And at the back of the ship was something similar to the flower shape that Harry Houdini had drawn on his underwater device. I stood and stared, trying to understand the implication of this. The strange bullet-shaped device, the motor, the hatch, the flower-shaped addition at the rear that obviously must propel it . . . It wasn’t an illusion at all. What this had to be saying was that Germany planned to attack using a new submarine that Houdini had witnessed when he toured German factories.

Twenty-nine