Nevermore (15 page)

Unprepared for a situation over which he had no physical control, the magician felt powerless. Guts and grit were no help at all; concentration and willpower less than useless. The hallucinations refused to diminish. For the first time in his life, the magician confronted an unfamiliar emotion: the rigid, irrational beginnings of fear.

He told himself, over and over, the ragged wings sweeping across his body weren’t real. He denied the frenzied howls and wailing. Shutting his eyes didn’t help. Isis tormented him in all her many guises. Paralyzed by pure terror, Houdini surrendered as the wings folded about him; arms gathering him to her in a dank embrace. He confronted the glowing green stare. Her lips parted for a kiss. In place of her tongue, a writhing snake appeared. When the phone rang again, Houdini was screaming.

Vickery hung up the receiver, his joker’s face creased with worry. “Something’s wrong with the Boss,” he muttered to Collins. “He sounds frantic.”

“He in some trouble?”

Vickery shrugged. “Said everything was going fine.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“Don’t know there is a problem. It was just his voice. Rattling on a mile a minute. Seemed a bit weird, is all.”

“Maybe I should have a word with him.” Collins reached for the phone.

Vickery shook his head, adopting an officious demeanor. Over the years, he frequently appeared in the act as an insane asylum attendant or police detective or whatever dignitary the circumstances demanded, and he had come to assume an air of mock authority even offstage. “Not such a good idea,” he said, his voice as comically officious as Groucho Marx pretending to be a judge. “He didn’t ask for any help. There’s the alarm bell if he’s in trouble. My vote is leave him alone. What is it they say about letting sleeping dogs lie?”

“I don’t know, what do they say?” Ever the willing straight man, Collins screwed his face into an approximation of curiosity.

“Why, let them lie there, that’s what they say. Especially if it’s a dog.”

“And if it’s a cat …?”

“If it’s a cat, you kick it in the bloody ass, is what you do. But, never a dog. No, sir. Not on your life. Encounter a sleeping dog and you’d be well-advised to let the beast lie.”

“Is it lie, or is it lay…?”

“Depends entirely upon the disposition of the dog.”

They continued along with this aimless banter, trading sallies like Gallagher and Shean in the good old days at Hammerstein’s Victoria, and all the while, their employer raged in his tomb at the bottom of the pool. Looking at the placid surface, no one guessed what wild orgiastic nightmares transpired just a few feet below the undulant reflections.

The telephone saved Houdini from complete insanity. Every time he was poised to plunge into the final abyss, Vickery or Collins called from the real world and pulled him back. Speaking with them each quarter hour, he managed by supreme effort to keep his voice normal; all the while Isis-faced harpies involved him in previously unimagined sexual perversions. The coffin’s narrow boundaries enclosed an infinite landscape of utter damnation. A lifetime of puritanical self-control left the magician unfamiliar with the labyrinthine delights of depravity.

After his first hour underwater, Collins and Vickery telephoned their boss at five-minute intervals. He raved at them but, accustomed to his temperamental outbursts, the Jims took it all in stride, joking between calls about the old man blowing his stack. The next hour passed in this fashion, with Houdini insisting in a ferocious manner that he meant to remain submerged for eternity. His assistants took it all as an angry joke, failing to detect the dissonant note of desperation corroding his voice.

At the end of the second hour, the lifeguards brought the bronze casket to the surface in accordance with prearranged instructions. Although trial runs in the workshop had Houdini remaining sealed in a glass-topped box for nearly twice that length of time, some concern persisted regarding a build-up of excess carbon dioxide. Might it affect the magician’s ability to reason? The Jims decided to end the challenge after two hours in spite of any protests to continue.

They unfastened the hasps securing the lid. Because the caulking proved tenacious, Collins and Vickery opened the coffin only after considerable effort. It sounded to them like Houdini was singing, but as they helped him into a sitting position it became embarrassingly obvious that he babbled nonsense. He dripped with sweat and his skin had a dull, ashen pallor. The blue-gray eyes blinked in bewildered disorientation.

The physician stepped in to take his pulse. Only 84 before he’d been sealed inside, it thundered now at 142. His diastolic blood pressure looked even more alarming. At the start of the experiment, it had also measured 84, but had dropped drastically to 42. Houdini looked haggard and drained of all vitality. He found it hard to focus. Those around him appeared blurred, as if seen from under water. Their voices sounded muffled and distant. The bright artificial lights seemed another hallucination. Closing his eyes, the magician prayed for sanity.

Vickery and Collins did their best to hold off the reporters while the Boss pulled himself together. In their zeal, they failed to notice a slender woman dressed in black approaching the magician from the other end of the pool.

“You were quite impressive,” Opal Crosby Fletcher said, regarding the pale middle-aged man with an appraising eye. “Death and resurrection. How very, very appropriate for you, my dear Osiris.”

“Don’t call me that!” Seated on his coffin like some medieval effigy, Houdini avoided looking at her. His voice sounded cranky and feeble; the whining of a frail old man.

“My, my… . Aren’t we snappy? What’s the matter, not getting enough sleep?”

“I get all the sleep I need. Four hours a night is plenty for me.”

“Only four hours? Seems hardly enough time to dream.”

“Some people have more important things to do with their lives than waste it in bed dreaming.”

Isis cocked her head as if considering what sort of meal he’d make. “Dreaming is never a waste,” she said. “Nothing is more important in life than the nature of one’s dreams. Been enjoying yours?”

“My dreams are none of your business!”

”You are touchy. And here I thought you the master of self-control. Maybe you’ve been having too many nightmares. Too many wild jungle cats raging in your subconscious?”

Houdini stared at her. “What do you know of my dreams?”

“More than you could ever imagine.” Isis walked over to the group of men standing by the end of the pool. “Excuse me,” she interrupted with a smile. “Has anyone got something to drink? My tongue is as dry as a snake.”

Houdini found it difficult to breathe. He felt powerful electric spasms surge through his body, leaving him gasping and all atremble. Although he didn’t make the connection, this sense of dumbfounded amazement was exactly what his ` audiences had experienced for years, viewing his mysterious and inexplicable escapes.

L
ISSEN UP, LITTLE CHILDREN
, and listen good, your kindly old uncle means to tell you a Tale of Two Chippies. One sunny a.m. last week, tug-boat skipper, Anthony “Toot-Toot” Scalisi, spots something strange floating in the harbor just south of Governor’s Island. The deck-hands place bets as to whether it is a baby whale or maybe young Johnny Weissmuller having made a wrong turn after he wins a half-mile free-style.

Turns out, once they gaff it, to be the corpse of a young doll. A bottle blond, her hair still bright as a double eagle even if there’s not enough face left to form an opinion concerning her looks. A strip torn from her chemise is tied loosely around her neck with a sailor’s knot. Her dress is ripped upward from the hem, another strip wrapped around her waist like a sash. Capt. “Toot-Toot” is of the opinion this makes her easier to carry.

At the morgue, county coroner Albert L. Portman discovers the cause of death to be a lace collar. This is put on so tight it is now buried out of sight in a fold of her flesh. It takes a couple more days, but the doll is eventually identified as one Mary Rogers, reported missing two weeks ago. Until her demise, she is employed as a cigarette girl at Barney Gallant’s gin mill on Washington Square.

Mary Rogers lived alone in the Village but is really more a Broadway doll than a bohemian. Last seen as a contestant in the recent Roseland bunion derby, she is said by those in the know to be a carefree kid without an enemy in the world. So far, this tale is not so very different from a hundred others like it happening every year in the city O. Henry called “Baghdad on the subway.”

What sets this murder apart from other recent rub-outs is the distant echo of another crime which made the headlines in Gotham eighty years ago. Here, too, we have a young doll named Mary Rogers who earns her living selling cigars. All reports indicate she is the main attraction behind the counter of John Anderson’s tobacco shop at 319 Broadway. Anderson is well known around town as a top-notch snuff manufacturer but it is Miss Mary’s considerable charms that keep a steady clientele coming through the doors of his establishment. A pretty face sells a lot of cigars.

As it happened, this Mary Rogers likewise turns up missing back in July of 1842. She leaves home one Sunday morning and isn’t seen again until the following Wednesday when her body is found floating in the Hudson off Weehawken Heights. Other eerie similarities raise a fine crop of goosebumps eight decades later: the same lace choker, the torn bits of clothing, a delay in identifying the body.

About now maybe you are thinking, what’s the big deal? Mary Rogers is not some uncommon monicker. Lots of sweet innocent dolls get bumped off in this wicked city in close to a century’s time. Talk to your bookie, he’ll give you the odds on such coincidences as this and chances are they’ll go no better than three to five.

Maybe so. But you won’t be in the money unless your bet-taker knows as much about how to read a book as how to make one. Let me tip you to something on the emmus. These two cigar-selling dames are neck-and-neck on a dead track. If you don’t believe me, check it out with the noted scribbler, old pal Edgar A. Poe.

If you remember, your tipster calls your attention once before to the Poe connection in the recent rash of rub-outs plaguing Gotham. What makes E. A. Poe such a kick in the pants is a story he writes not long after the first Mary Rogers gets bumped off. The title of this tale is “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and it lays out all the details of the cigar doll’s death, except he gives her this frenchified alias and moves the local to gay Paree so as perhaps to protect the innocent.

Talk to the coppers working homicide and their official line is that Poe is strictly from hunger. But, just between you and me and the lamp-post, if someone is to offer you a tall drink of amontillado, tell him you’re on the wagon.

A
CLOWN ON STILTS
paraded down the boardwalk wearing a sandwich board advertising FELTON’S AMAZING SALT WATER TAFFY. His chalk-white face boasted a clown nose the size of a golf ball and red as his curly fright wig. A painted grin stretched from ear to ear, concealing the clown’s somber scowl. The children laughed at him and never noticed his true expression.

Two boys and a girl, sturdy, tow-headed rapscallions whose bright gales of mirth turned the heads of other, more mature, vacationers, followed after the clown, imitating his stiff-legged gait. Denis, the oldest at fourteen, marched in front, clearly the leader, although his brother, Malcolm, who wouldn’t turn thirteen until November, compensated by being the rowdiest of the three. In this, he received effusive competition from their ten-year-old tomboy sister, Jean, who insisted on being called “Billy.”

They paraded behind the clown, shouting, shoving, and giggling, from the Ambassador Hotel, where they were staying with their parents, their governess, and a tutor, all the way past the stately ornate Marlborough-Blenheim, facing the ocean like a prim, parasol-toting Victorian matron decked out in seaside layers of lace, pleated petticoats, elaborate furbelows.

Halfway to the Steel Pier, the giant glowering clown came to a lurching stop in front of Felton’s Taffy Shoppe, a one-story establishment wedged between a Planter’s peanut roasting emporium and a small penny arcade housing twin rows of cast-iron clam shell Mutoscopes. All three children felt the pangs of a false nostalgia for these turn-of-the-century flip-card film devices. Watching the brief flickering images seemed like peeking through the keyhole of time at their father’s youth, or at least how he was before they were born, which seemed an impossibly long time ago.

The clown leered down at them, his big rouged grin masking an angry grimace. He jabbed his white-gloved forefinger at the open, sweet-smelling doorway, indicating in furious mime the time had come to stop fooling around and go inside and buy some damn candy.

The children ignored his aggressive gestures, staring through the shop window at the comic gyrations of the chain-driven taffy-pulling machine. They had no shortage of funds, their pockets bulged with change, but the coinage was unfamiliar and they didn’t want to appear foolish in front of strangers. After a sudden whispered exchange, the three children darted whooping between the tent-pole legs of the looming clown and ran like mad back up the boardwalk.

Halfway to the hotel, they spotted their father approaching through the crowd. He was a huge man, towering over most others, and easy to see at a distance. “Papa!” Billy waved and shouted. Someone walked with him. A much smaller man wearing a white linen suit and a straw boater. He was clean-shaven, unlike their papa, with his thick white mustache.

“It’s the magician!” Denis recognized him and doubled his pace, pulling ahead of the others.

”Who?” Billy hated being the youngest and always the last in the know.

“Houdini, stupid,” Malcolm said, hurrying to catch up with his brother.

Sir Arthur scooped his daughter up in his massive arms, tousling her short-cropped blond hair. “Stop that,” she protested, happy laughter belying her objections.