Curiosity (9 page)

A
LL THAT WEEK, I DID MY CHORES IN
the workshop even more cheerfully than usual, knowing that, when the afternoon came, I would have my moment in the sun—or rather in the dark. For a short while, I would be transformed from servant to master, from pawn to queen. I was like some perverse species of prisoner who felt free only when he was locked inside a tiny cell. It made me think of poor Ezra's attempt to escape the House of Refuge by cramming himself into a packing crate.

As I swept up sawdust and shavings and dumped them into the bin in the earth closet, I hummed the Mechanical Trumpeter's march. I noticed Jacques eyeing me suspiciously, as though wondering whether I was right in the head. “If you like work so much,” he growled, “I can always give you more.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I'm just trying to do as I was taught: accept my situation with good grace.”

“Hmm. And I suppose you think I do not.”

“Well . . . no.”

“Of
course
I do not! Nor would you, if you had lost all the things I have lost!”

I was tempted to tell him that I'd had my share of losses—my mother and my surrogate mother, Fiona, and my home and my pleasant, privileged life—but I didn't. I might have pointed out that my father was in debtors' prison with no hope of gaining his freedom, but I didn't. No doubt it would have only earned me another blow.

Jacques pounded at his chisel for a time and then said, a bit more civilly, “If you always accept things as they are,
Bébé
, then nothing changes.” That reminded me of Ezra, too.
It don't
mean you have to just give up,
he'd told me.
Sometimes you got to fight back.

“But some things
can't
be changed,” I said.

“No. Some can only be mourned and regretted.”

“Or accepted.”

He turned on his stool and, to my surprise, hiked up the legs of his trousers to reveal his wooden limbs. “When they took off my legs, I could have accepted it and been a beggar on some street corner in Paris, surviving on people's pity. Instead, I got
these
. When the Turk burned, we might have let him die. But we resurrected him and made him better than ever.”

I stared at him, openmouthed. This sudden spate of speech contained more words than he usually uttered in an entire week. Seeming surprised himself by the outburst, he went back to his work.

At the risk of inviting his curses, I said, “Was it the Battle of Trocadero?”

“Who told you that?”

“Mulhouse.”

“Mulhouse knows nothing about it,” he said contemptuously. “The only battles he ever fought were on a chessboard.” He chiseled away for a few moments, then went on. “
Oui.
It was at Trocadero. An artillery shell. Otso put tourniquets on the stumps and carried me to safety. I owe him my life . . . such as it is.”

And I owed my situation—such as it was—to Otso's namesake. If it hadn't been for the Turk, I'd have been the one begging on a street corner. Of course, I might have had better luck getting money from random passersby than from Maelzel.

Now that he knew I could handle the job, he added an extra show each evening. I continued to play my part well but, if Maelzel could be believed, we were still not drawing big crowds. After Saturday afternoon's performance, he gave me a very different sort of task—refilling the lamps beneath the Moscow diorama. This surprised me; normally he didn't trust anyone but Jacques to maintain his machines.

As I was taking out the last lamp, the door that led to the adjoining exhibition hall opened. I expected to see Mr. Barnum again. Instead, a stranger entered, a slender fellow with a gloomy expression and a pale complexion that was accentuated by his dark hair and mustache and black clothing; his only resemblance to the boisterous showman was in his forehead, which was every bit as massive as Mr. Barnum's.
Another prime phrenology subject,
I thought. If I'd had to guess his occupation, I would have said undertaker. But as it turned out, he was a poet, and apparently one of some repute, for when he introduced himself, Maelzel clearly recognized the name.

I am sure you recognize it, too; in recent years, his works—“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Raven”—have made Edgar Allan Poe a household name. I am sorry to say that the man was less admirable than his stories. In fact I found him downright unpleasant. He gazed about the hall with a rather disdainful expression, as though he were used to more elegant surroundings. The Southern flavor of his speech added to that air of haughtiness. But seen close up, he looked a little shabby. The cloth of his frock coat was threadbare and shiny at the elbows; I suspect he had rubbed soot onto some of the worst spots.

“How did you make your way in here, Mr. Poe?” asked Maelzel, a bit peevishly.

“Mr. Barnum let me in. I thought I might write something for the
Inquirer
about your . . .
show
.” The way he said it, the word sounded slightly unsavory.

Maelzel didn't seem to notice. In fact, his manner suddenly became much more cordial. “The
Inquirer
, eh? Yes, yes, of course. I shall be happy to show you around and answer any questions.” He glared at me as though I were the intruder. “Please get your broom and finish sweeping, now.” He shook his head and smiled wearily. “It is so difficult to find a boy who is willing to work; they would rather stand about gaping at the exhibits.”

I knew he was passing me off as a common chore boy so that Poe wouldn't suspect my real role. I drifted off in search of a broom. When I found one, I drifted back within earshot. “The truth is, Mr. Maelzel,” Poe was saying, “I'm mainly interested in the chess-playing automaton. I've heard that it's quite extraordinary.” He glanced around in search of the Turk.

“I like to think so,” said Maelzel, with unaccustomed modesty.

Poe was not quite so modest. “I consider myself a fairly accomplished chess player. I would like to play a game against your . . . machine; it would add a great deal of interest to my newspaper piece.”

“That may easily be arranged. If you will come back tomorrow, just before we close, I shall have everything prepared.”

“Oh. I was hoping you could oblige me now.”

“My apologies. In this afternoon's performance, the Turk's joints were squeaking a little; we need to lubricate them before he plays again. I would like him to be in top form when you take him on.”

“I see. Well. I'll return tomorrow afternoon, then.”

“Excellent. I should warn you, sir, the Turk is . . . what do you Americans say? A
crack
player?” Though Maelzel wasn't exactly praising me, it was the closest he was likely to come, and I felt a small swell of pride. “You may want to practice your chess moves in the meantime.”

“Thank you. But I hardly think that'll be necessary.”

When Poe was gone, I said, “I didn't notice the Turk squeaking.”

“No, no, of course not. It was only an excuse to put him off. If I had let him play now, how would we have gotten you inside the machine without his noticing?” Maelzel rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “A newspaper article about the exhibition could do us much good. Now, here is the plan: After the two o'clock performance tomorrow, you remain inside the cabinet, you understand? I announce to the audience that the Turk will be playing a complete game, and anyone who wishes may stay and watch; it is always more impressive if there are people standing about oohing and ahhing when the machine makes a clever move.
But,
” he said sternly, “remember this: You must be especially careful when you play Mr. Poe. He is not your ordinary
dummkopf
, who wants only to be entertained. I do not know how skilled he is at chess, but I have read his work, and he is a shrewd and intelligent fellow; if you make the slightest blunder he will notice.”

After several weeks of concentrating strictly on endgames, I would have liked to play a few complete games, just to get back in practice, but Maelzel was too busy and Jacques didn't offer much of a challenge. I hoped Mulhouse might come around, but it didn't seem likely. We'd seen no sign of him for weeks.

“What do you suppose has become of him?” I asked Jacques. I'd been breaking the rule of silence quite a lot lately, and I usually got away with it.

“I have no idea. And I care even less.”

“You don't like him?”

“He is not . . . what is the word?
Fiable.
”

“Reliable?”

“
Oui
. He is not reliable. When he ran the Turk, he often failed to show up. And once he nearly gave away the secret.”

“On purpose?”

“No. We were at a hall in Baltimore. It was a very hot day. The moment the audience left, Mulhouse burst from the cabinet, gasping for air. There were two boys outside, looking through the window; they saw it all, and they told the newspaper.”

“Did the paper report it?”

Jacques nodded. “But Maelzel said it was all a . . .
comment dit-on
? A
stunt.
He said he had put the boys up to it, just to get publicity. Everyone believed him.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe. A machine that runs by itself is a curiosity; one that is run by a person is just a trick.”

Though Mulhouse's blunder had done no real damage, it might well have turned Maelzel against him. What if my friend had met the same fate—whatever it was—as the Turk's other operators? And what if the same fate awaited me, when I had outlived my usefulness? I said before that I felt I'd stumbled into water that was over my head; now I began to suspect that the situation was even worse, that I was mired in a deadly morass from which there was no escape. My only hope was to make myself indispensable—and make sure I did nothing to incur Maelzel's displeasure.

I missed Mulhouse and his kindness, but I didn't really need him as a sparring partner; I could always play against myself. I did just that all the next morning, and Jacques didn't object. In fact, several times I caught him surreptitiously watching my moves when he was supposed to be repairing the male rope dancer, who had broken an arm.

The men who challenged me that afternoon, whoever they were, didn't offer much of a challenge. After the performance, instead of wheeling us behind the curtain, Maelzel left the Turk in place. I knew he was inviting the real chess lovers to stay for the main event—Otso the Turk vs. Poe the Poet.

Poe claimed to be a strong player but, like many of the men I had played at the Chess Club, he wasn't quite as strong as he thought he was. Oh, he was competent, even clever, but certainly not in the same league as Mulhouse. His style was nothing like Mulhouse's, either. I thought
I
was slow and cautious, but compared to Poe I was a jackrabbit. I began to worry less about my ability to beat him than about my ability to sit there, cramped up and breathing in candle smoke, for two or three hours.

An hour into the game, I was already feeling light-headed, and my poor stooped shoulders were aching. I felt a cough welling up in my irritated throat, and it was all I could do to suppress it. I could have masked it by cranking the noisemaker, but I was afraid the sound might make Poe suspicious. I swallowed hard and soldiered on. Hoping to speed up the game, I took only a few seconds to consider each move, which put me at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, I managed to back Poe into a corner.

I would have checkmated him in three more moves, but then something odd happened: Several of the metal disks dropped suddenly, indicating that the pieces on those squares had fallen over or been removed. At the same time, I felt the cabinet tremble, as though the hall were in the grip of a mild earthquake.

Ordinarily, I couldn't hear anything at all from outside the machine, but now I became aware of a faint rumbling, as though dozens of feet were pounding across the floor. Barely audible over the rumble was a sound that might have been a scream, and a voice shouting a single word over and over. By putting one ear up against the wall of the cabinet, I could just make out what it was.

“Fire! Fire!”

A
S I'VE SAID, MAELZEL WAS FANATICAL
about anticipating and preparing for anything that could conceivably go wrong. But he'd never told me what to do in case of a fire, or if he had, I'd forgotten it. All I could remember was how many times and how emphatically he'd said, “No matter what happens, do
not
leave the cabinet until I give you the all-clear signal.” Once he'd added, “If some frustrated chess player should pull out a pistol and shoot me dead, what will you do?”

“I'll stay in the cabinet,” I had dutifully replied.

But it wasn't Maelzel's death I had to worry about; it was my own. And Otso's, of course. If the other exhibits were going up in flames, I wasn't sure I could count on Maelzel to save us. The rear door opened from the inside, so I could let myself out, but I held off, hoping desperately that Maelzel would send me a sign. When several minutes passed and he neither spun the dial nor knocked on the cabinet nor wheeled it off, I began to panic.

Though I certainly had no desire to be burned alive, I believe I was more worried about the Turk's welfare than my own. If he went up in smoke, so would my career as his operator, and along with it my best hope of freeing my father. And yet I had to be cautious; I couldn't just come bursting out of the cabinet, the way Mulhouse had once done. Though at this point the spectators were surely more concerned with saving themselves than with learning the Turk's secret, I couldn't risk being seen.

I took a deep breath to calm myself, then blew out the candle and eased the door open a crack, hoping to get some sense of how immediate the danger was. Instantly, the door slammed shut again, pinching my fingers. Startled, I gave it another push, but it wouldn't budge; something was blocking it. A fallen beam? A dead body?

I'd always tried to follow my father's advice and accept with good grace whatever befell me. But I wasn't sure that advice applied to my current situation. I could hardly be expected to sit there and wait stoically for the flames to consume Otso and me; I was going to have to
do
something.

I flopped down flat on my back and cocked one leg in the air, meaning to kick the big chessboard loose and squirm out through the hole. But just as I was about to deliver the blow, the cabinet began to move. I cried out in alarm, fearing that the floor was collapsing beneath us. Then I realized that someone was pushing us, presumably to safety. We stopped rolling, and there was a moment of stillness in which I sat motionless, waiting to see what would happen next.

The rear door swung open and a voice said, “You may come out now.”

I started to emerge from the cabinet, then abruptly stopped myself. What if this was some sort of perverse experiment conducted by Maelzel to test me? Instead, I slid forward into my fetal position and stayed there, barely able to breathe. A long moment passed, and then someone rapped on the cabinet: three, three, two. With a sigh of relief, I unfolded myself and crawled through the opening. The hall was bright, but not with flames, only with ordinary daylight. Squinting, I peered upward to see who my savior was. “Monsieur Mulhouse!”

“Are you all right, Rufus?”

“I will be, once my heart leaves my throat and goes back in my chest.”

Laughing, he helped me to my feet. “As you see, there was no fire, just some audience member playing a trick—probably hoping to flush you out. I spotted the culprit and went after him, but in the confusion he made his escape.”

“What did he look like?”

“A strongly built man, perhaps thirty years of age, with curly hair.”

“That sounds like Mr. Barnum.”

“I doubt it could be him. He's taken his exhibition to New York.”

“Well, whoever it was, his trick nearly worked.”

“I know. I am sorry I had to hold the door shut. I knew there was no danger, but you did not.”

“Where's Maelzel?”

“Outside, reassuring everyone. I thought you could use some reassurance, too.”

“Thank you.” I was more reassured than he knew. I nearly told him how, when he disappeared for such a long while, I began imagining that he had suffered some dire and mysterious fate. But now that he was here, safe and sound, my fears seemed a bit fanciful and foolish, so I didn't speak of them. I only glanced about the empty hall and said, “Well, Mr. Poe will have plenty to write about.”

Mulhouse smiled wryly. “I am sure he was grateful for the interruption. A few moves more, and you would have checkmated him.”

“If I didn't suffocate first. You haven't by any chance found a Carcel lamp, have you?”

He winced and shook his head. “I am sorry. It completely slipped my mind. I did make inquires about your friend Fionnula. “

“Fiona.”

“Yes. No luck yet.”

“And my father?”

He patted me on the shoulder. “We will talk later. You need to go now, in case anyone should slip past Maelzel.”

I was in no hurry to return to the workshop and Jacques's sullen company. I wandered about the large outer workroom for a while, examining the multifarious projects spread out on the tables. They made up a fascinating exhibit of curiosities all by themselves: miniature body parts, human and animal; tiny trees of every species; piles of birdshot-sized boulders and toothpick-sized boards; articles of clothing too small even for fairies.

When neither Mulhouse nor Maelzel appeared, I pushed open the door to the exhibition hall a few inches, curious to know what they were up to. The door was masked by the same curtain that concealed the Turk, so I couldn't see much, but I could hear voices. At first, I couldn't make out the words; gradually they increased in volume and in vehemence.

“I am not a rich man, Mulhouse. I cannot keep supporting your laudanum habit forever. If the Chess Club has fired you, then you will have to find something else.”

“What do you suggest? I have no skills whatsoever, aside from playing chess.”

“Then take a position as a crossing sweeper; that takes no skill. In any case, it is not my problem.”

“I would not need laudanum if I had not ruined my lungs sitting inside your machine, which would serve equally well as a smokehouse.”

Maelzel gave a scornful laugh. “Oh, well, if you did not use laudanum, then your only vices would be liquor and gambling. You may as well admit it, Mulhouse: No matter much money you have, you will always find some means of throwing it away.”

“And no matter how much
you
have, you will not part with any of it. I think you owe me something, just for keeping the Turk's secret all these years.”

“I paid you a fair wage for most of those years! You cannot expect me to go on paying you for all eternity!”

“You want me to go on keeping the secret, do you not?”

There was a pause, then Maelzel said, in a voice so low I could barely hear, “That sounds suspiciously like a threat, Monsieur Mulhouse.”

“It is not. It is merely a possibility.”

“It had better not be. I hope I do not have to remind you what became of Mademoiselle Bouvier.”

“What
did
become of her, exactly? I have never been certain.”

“Surely you do not expect me to give you all the details. There is one way to find out, however.”

“And what is that?”

“Sell the Turk's secret, as she did, and you will come to the same unenviable end.”

“Now, that
does
sound like a threat.”

“Good. I meant it to.”

There was a silence, then Mulhouse's voice again. “So, you are not willing to give me any support at all?”

“I would be happy to write a letter of recommendation. I am even prepared to lie a little, and say how reliable you are.”

That seemed to be the end of the discussion. Hearing footsteps headed my way, I closed the door softly and retreated to the inner workshop.

In the wake of the quarrel, Monsieur Mulhouse, who had only just reappeared, vanished from my life again. I had not only lost the nearest thing I had to a friend, I had also lost the sole link to my father. I knew that Maelzel would never take me to visit him nor let me go on my own, and there was no use in asking Jacques.

I told myself that Mulhouse would be back, and I tried my best not to let those same foolish fears worm their way back into my head. But the fact was, this time I had far more cause for concern; this time Maelzel had actually threatened him. Though the nature of the threat wasn't completely clear, what else could “an unenviable end” mean, except murder? Mulhouse had said that he would put nothing past Maelzel. And even if Maelzel himself wasn't capable of killing anyone, I had little doubt that Jacques was.

In the week that followed, my prospects of getting paid began to look brighter. The
Inquirer
printed a lively account of the duel between man and machine and how it had been left undecided when participants and spectators fled in panic. “We may be thankful,” wrote the reporter, “that the alleged fire was nothing more than some puerile jokester's idea of an amusing prank. The Turk, for all its astounding skill, is only made of wax, and wax and fire do not make a good mix.”

There's nothing like a good scare to get people's attention. After the piece appeared, our audience doubled, and it went on growing. I had discovered a hole in the fabric of the curtain large enough to peer through, and I saw the phenomenon for myself. Maelzel would never admit we were doing well, of course; he preferred to pretend that we were just scraping by. But the boost in business put him in an uncharacteristically good mood; he even called me by my name occasionally, instead of just addressing me as “boy.” If I ever hoped to pry some money out of him, there would be no better time.

I knew it was no use just asking him nicely. Financial negotiations are like a chess game—to win, you have to be in control of the board. Well, now that the Turk was drawing record crowds, I was in a good position to make my move. After all, how long would people keep coming if Otso just sat there, looking impressive and making clockwork sounds? He needed someone to bring him to life. He needed me.

I pointed this out to Maelzel, though not in those words. I foolishly expected him to react as he had when I beat him at chess; though he wouldn't be happy, he'd see that he was defeated and would grudgingly concede. He did no such thing. Instead, he responded the same way he had when Mulhouse asked him for money. “Are you threatening me, boy?”

“No, of course not. I'm just saying that if I'm making a profit for you, then I deserve to be paid.”

“And if I don't pay you?”

I didn't reply.

“And if I
don't
pay you?” he demanded.

As I've said, I'd experienced enough pain not to fear being knocked about a bit. But we all fear the unknown, and I couldn't help thinking of how, when the Turk's previous operators had crossed Maelzel, they had mysteriously disappeared. I couldn't imagine that he'd do me in just to avoid paying me, but I couldn't dismiss the possibility, either. It took some courage to say what I said next: “Then— then I don't work, I suppose.”

To my surprise, he didn't strike me, or even shout. Though his expression was grim, he simply nodded and said, “Very well.” But I sensed that there was more to come. Sure enough, he bent down and poked a blunt finger in my chest. “However, I should tell you that if you do not work, you do not eat.” He unlocked the door to the workroom and pushed me roughly inside. “Jacques, you are not to bring this ungrateful whelp any more food until further notice. V
erstehst du
?
”

Jacques stared at him for a moment. “What about water?”

“Yes, yes, water is all right. We do not want to kill him, only to let him go hungry for a while, until he feels more cooperative.”