Escapade (2 page)

Directly ahead of us, with more clouds streaming like pennants from its towers, was the house.

It was black and it was huge, as big as a cliff. The towers, one at each side of the main building, were taller than the giant twin oak trees that flanked the entrance. The lighted windows were tiny narrow vertical slits in the craggy mass of rock.

It looked like the kind of place you couldn’t get into without an invitation, and maybe not even then. That was fine with me.

“It’s big, eh?” said the Great Man.

“Yeah,” I said.

“In the thirteenth century, it was built. The Normans. Observe the towers.”

“Hard not to.”

To the right of the building was a carriage house—slate roof, stone walls, two broad wooden doors. In front of this was a graveled area for cars, roofed over to protect them. Six cars were parked there. I wheeled the Lancia in and parked it beside an elegant Rolls-Royce tourer.

I turned off the ignition reluctantly. The big automobile had driven beautifully. A couple of times, rain or no rain, I had been tempted to hit the gas and see what the car could do. I hadn’t mentioned this to the Great Man.

We got out of the car and I put on my hat. I went around to the trunk and opened it. The Great Man joined me, rubbing his hands together. Even in the dimness I could see his smile. He was excited. He was about to make an entrance.

Impatiently, he waved a hand at the trunk. “Leave the bags, Phil,” he said. “The servants will take care of them.”

“Why should we bother the servants?”

I pulled my bag out of the trunk.

He was shorter than I was, by almost a foot. But his shoulders were as broad as mine and he could pick me up and hold me in the air for pretty much as long as he liked.

It wasn’t merely strength, although he had plenty of that. It was a refusal to recognize that, for him, anything at all was impossible.

If he decided he didn’t want to carry his bag, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Except carry the bag myself, to prove a point.

He grinned up at me and he clapped me on the shoulder. “You are a pure democrat, Phil. A true American. That is what I like about you. I am exactly the same myself.” He reached in and swung his bag out of the trunk. Black alligator leather, with gold fittings. The kind that all true Americans carried. I had stashed the bag in the trunk, so I knew that it weighed about seventy-five pounds. He handled it as if it were filled with popped corn.

I slammed the trunk shut and together we walked to the enormous wooden door at the entrance to the house.

An electric light glowed above the door. Poking through the door’s center was the head of a big brass lion who was chewing on a big brass knocker. The Great Man lifted the knocker and rapped it once, hard, against its brass plate. The lion didn’t seem to mind.

For a moment we stood listening to drip-water plop against the puddles. Then the door swung open and a butler stood there in the light. A tall man, heavyset, white haired, in his sixties. His round English face was red, the face of a man who knew where they hid the cooking sherry. He was dressed in black, elaborately. If kings wore black, they would dress the way he did.

“Gentlemen?” he said. His features were blank and expressionless.

“Harry Houdini,” said the Great Man, like Santa Claus announcing Christmas. “And Phil Beaumont,” he added. Remembering the reindeer.

The butler nodded without changing the look on his face, or adding one to it. “I am Higgens,” he said. “Please come in.”

He stood back. I moved to one side, to permit the Great Man his entrance. He stepped in grandly, sweeping off his hat with a flourish, and I followed him. We set down our bags. To the right of the butler was another servant. This one was also dressed in black, but not as magnificently. He glided smoothly forward, as though he were wearing roller skates, and he began to help the Great Man with his coat. The Great Man smiled pleasantly. He liked having people help him with his coat.

The butler said, “Lord and Lady Purleigh are in the drawing room, with their other guests. Would you like to join them now, or would you prefer to go to your rooms first?”

“Go to the rooms, I think,” said the Great Man. “Don’t you agree, Phil?”

I shrugged.

The servant glided toward me, but I had already taken off my hat and coat. If this was a disappointment, he didn’t show it. He just nodded and took them, his features as blank and expressionless as the butler’s. But he was shorter, and younger and much thinner, with black hair and a pale, pinched face.

“Very good,” said the butler. “You’ll be staying in the east wing. Briggs will take you there.”

Briggs had hung up the coats and hats. Now he lifted both our bags and said, “Please follow me, gentlemen.”

We had been standing before a hall big enough to land an airplane. An electric chandelier hung from the center of the beamed ceiling, but the ceiling was so high and the walls so far apart that the room’s upper corners were cobwebbed with darkness. Below the chandelier a long wooden table ran for twenty-five or thirty feet. The walls of the room were made of pale brown stone and they were draped with murky oil paintings of dead people wearing old costumes. Embroidered curtains hung at the sides of the narrow mullioned windows. The pale gray marble floor was covered with broad dark Oriental carpets, seven or eight of them.

Ahead of us, Briggs glided across the marble floor toward another wide, open doorway. I noticed that the far wall of the hall, off to my left, held no paintings. It held weapons: lances, pikes, broadswords, cutlasses, rapiers, wheel-lock muskets, flintlock rifles, an enormous blunderbuss, some shotguns, a Sharps buffalo gun, a scoped Winchester Model 1873, a selection of handguns. Most of the handguns, like most of the long arms, were black powder antiques. But there was a Peacemaker Colt, a long-barreled artillery officer’s Luger Parabellum, a Colt Army 1911 automatic, and what looked like a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver. If the Apaches attacked tonight, we would be ready.

I don’t know what the Great Man noticed. Maybe everything. He was glancing around, calmly appraising, like someone who was mulling over the idea of adding all this to his private collection.

We followed Briggs up some stone stairs and through a wide doorway, then down a wide hallway with parquet wooden floors. More dead people hung from the walls. We climbed up a wide, worn, wooden stairway and we went down some more hallways. The place was a maze.

Carpets flowed along the wooden floors. Cabinets and chests and tables clung to the stone walls. Perched on these were vases and bowls and lacquer boxes, statuettes of porcelain and ivory and alabaster. I’ve been in museums that owned less bric-a-brac. Maybe most museums did.

We came to another corridor. On our way down it, we passed ornate wooden doors, left and right. Each door had a small card thumbtacked to it. On the cards, names had been written in a flowing cursive script.
Mrs Vanessa Corneille
, said one.
Sir David Merridale
, said another.
Mrs Marjorie Allardyce and Miss Jane Turner
, said the card on the door opposite.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
, said the card on the last door to the left. On the door opposite, the card said,
Mr Harry Houdini and Mr Phil Beaumont
.

The corridor ended up ahead, about thirty feet. In the stone wall was another door, unmarked. Probably it led to a stairway.

Briggs set down the Great Man’s bag, opened the door, and gestured for us to enter. As usual, I followed the Great Man. Briggs picked up the Great Man’s bag and followed me.

It WAS A BIG ROOM, tall stone walls and a beamed ceiling. The wooden floors were spread with carpets. To the left was another door, opened, and beside this, a small writing desk and a chair. Directly ahead, against the wall, was an antique cupboard and an antique dresser that held a ceramic basin and a ceramic pitcher. To the right was a huge four-poster bed covered with white satin. White satin curtains were drawn back to each of the posts. Large night tables stood on either side of the bed.

Briggs set the Great Man’s bag down on the nearest of these. “The bathroom is through here, gentlemen.” Carrying my battered bag, he moved through the open door. Inside, he opened a door on the left, to show us the bathroom. A sink, a towel rack hung with heavy white towels, a huge tub squatting on big brass lion’s paws. Paws from the same lion, probably, whose head was trapped in the front door.

Briggs opened a door on the right to show us the toilet. It was a fine toilet.

The second room was beyond, and smaller than the first. But it was as comfortable as the other, with a second writing desk and chair, a second cupboard and a second four-poster bed. The bedspread here was also white satin.

“Your room, Mr. Beaumont,” said Briggs. He placed my bag on the nightstand. “Will there be anything else, gentlemen?” “No,” said the Great Man. “Thank you, Briggs.”

Briggs nodded, his face still expressionless. “When you’re ready, please ring the bellpull beside the bed. Someone will come for you.”

The Great Man nodded. “Yes, certainly, thank you.”

Briggs glided off.

The Great Man looked around, smiling. “Not bad, eh, Phil? This is a very pleasant room, don’t you think?”

“Well, Harry,” I said, “I’m glad you like it. Because this is the room you’ll be taking.”

He frowned.

“I’ll take the outer room,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then he said, “But Phil! Surely you don’t believe that anything will happen here? With people present, with all those servants?”

“Something happened at the Ardmore. With all those house dicks and all those cops.”

“But that was a
hotel
! And the newspapers had
announced
that I was there. No one knows that I am staying at Maplewhite.”

 “Maybe that’s true,” I said. “Maybe it’s not.”

“But Phil—”

“Harry. You remember when you made me take that oath? About not giving away your secrets? You promised me something too, remember? And you promised Bess.”

He stared at me. Finally he nodded. He drew himself fully upright. This usually meant that an announcement was coming. “Houdini always keeps his promises,” he announced.

“I know that,” I said. “So we’ll switch rooms.”

He nodded and he compressed his lips. He had made a promise and he would keep it, but no one had said he couldn’t sulk.

He looked around the room with a sour expression on his face. I took my suitcase into the main room, exchanged it for the Great Man’s bag, carried his bag back into the other room. The Great Man was sitting on the bed with his shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. He didn’t say anything when I put the suitcase down.

“Harry,” I said.

He looked up.

“It’s for your own good,” I told him.

He nodded glumly.

“Let me know when you’re finished washing up,” I said. “We shouldn’t waste too much time. They’re all waiting for you.”

He frowned for a moment, considering this. Then he smiled. “Yes. Yes, of course. You are right, Phil.”

IT WAS Briggs who came to get us. The Great Man was feeling better by then. The idea of hobnobbing with lords and ladies always cheered him up.

Briggs led us down the corridor again, and up and down some more stairways until we came to another doorway. We followed him through it.

This room was smaller than the hall. Not enough space to land an airplane, but enough to park it. More Oriental carpets were spread along the floor and the walls were swathed with tapestries. Running across the tapestries were some plump naked people chasing other plump naked people through a forest. The plump people were naked in a refined way—their vital parts were all hidden by rushing arms or pumping legs or by a leafy bush that happened to spring up in exactly the right place. The forest looked damp to me, but everybody up there seemed to be having a pretty good time.

Against the far wall stood a long trestle table. Atop the table were liquor bottles and champagne buckets and stacks and pyramids of glasses, silver teapots and china cups and saucers, silver platters and china plates. There was also a gramophone. It was playing Dixieland jazz, the horns and the piano sounding thin and tinny this far from home. Behind the table was another servant who wore a black uniform and a blank expressionless face.

Throughout the room, in cozy glowing pockets created by the electric lamps, there were small clusters of people sitting.

Briggs led us off to the right, to a cluster of two women and one man. The man sat in a stout padded leather chair, the women in a small upholstered sofa behind a coffee table of dark polished wood. The three of them looked up.

Briggs said to the man, “Excuse me, milord. Mr. Harry Houdini and Mr. Phil Beaumont.”

“Ah, thank you, Briggs,” said the man, and stood up.

Briggs disappeared. His employer offered a hand to the Great Man. He was short and burly in his gray tweeds, and his hair and his mustache were thick and white. So were his eyebrows, which were big and bristly and looked like a pair of albino beetles. He had blue eyes, a large beaked nose, pink cheeks, and a wide fleshy mouth. “Houdini,” he said, grinning. “Great treat for us, your coming. Glad you could make it.”

Smiling happily, the Great Man shook hands. “It is a great pleasure to be here, Lord Purleigh.”

“Now, now. None of that nonsense here. It’s Bob. Always has been, always will be. And this is Beaumont, is it?”

“Phil Beaumont,” said Houdini. “My secretary.”

Bob—Lord Bob?—glanced at the Great Man as his beetle eyebrows rose. “Secretary, eh? Getting up in the world, are we? Exploiting the poor workers now, eh? Well, pleasure to meet you, Beaumont.” He shook my hand. “First time in England?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Dreadful place, isn’t it? Rain and fog and mist. Attractive women, though, eh? A couple of ’em right here. Mrs. Allardyce. Cousin of my wife’s. And Miss Turner, her companion. Marjorie, Miss Turner, let me introduce Mr. Harry Houdini. And his secretary, Mr. Phil Beaumont.”

Calling them attractive had been gallant, or optimistic, or maybe nearsighted. In her sixties, Mrs. Allardyce was built like a blacksmith, but without the daintiness. Her shoulders and her arms were thick and meaty. Her round breasts and round stomach were taut against the pink floral pattern of her black dress. Her gray hair had been carefully chiseled from granite. Someone had stenciled circular patches of rouge on her round cheeks. Her gray eyes were small and shiny and avid, glistening birdshot trapped in a pale puffy muffin.