Nevermore (22 page)

How banal, Sir Arthur thought, aghast at the procession of organized bigotry. He contrasted this sorry spectacle with his memories of the perverse nobility depicted in D. W. Griffith’s grand motion picture
Birth of a Nation.
These klansmen resembled nothing so much as a pack of poorly costumed ghosts in some provincial amateur theatrical. Bumpkin bully-boys whose benign comic appearance camouflaged true blackshirt Fascisti menace.

Walking away across the Mall, Conan Doyle had occasion to meditate upon Benito Mussolini’s recent appearance on the spring Honor’s List. The Italian dictator was now a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. What had King George been thinking of, conferring a G.C.B. on such a brute? He remembered the KKK also called themselves knights. How sad a reflection of the chivalrous ideal.

Sir Arthur meandered past the Gothic Revival turrets of the Smithsonian Institution with no particular destination in mind. The puzzling murders in New York occupied more and more of his mental attention. He regretted slighting the demands of his mission but felt it couldn’t be helped. Not when the safety of his family remained at risk. Every afternoon recently, instead of napping as Jean recommended, he took long solitary walks, smoking pipe after pipe as he cogitated on the baffling conundrum.

Twenty minutes of aimless wandering led him to a grove of trees planted along the bank of the Tidal Basin. Philadelphia had been an excellent walking city and Washington promised to go it one better. Due back at the Madison Hotel at four to discuss the logistics of tonight’s lecture in the ballroom, he savored his solitude and introspection.

Although the morning had bloomed bright and sunny, by noontime storm clouds had gathered and the sky darkened with the threat of rain. A brisk wind corrugated the slate gray surface of the Basin, erasing reflections of the government buildings on the opposite shore. The dim penumbral light gave an unearthly feeling of twilight to the elm grove. Sir Arthur strolled between the trees, puffing on his briar pipe, troubled about what he had read of the Esp murders. Did the killer dress as a gorilla because his madness required the masquerade, or was this a deliberate stunt, some piece of macabre theater? The evidence suggested the former, yet a nagging doubt persisted.

As he pondered, the knight failed to notice a shadowy figure leaning against the pale gray bark of a slender elm. Sudden, extravagant flailing caught Conan Doyle’s attention. Arms windmilling, the stranger lurched into an open space and seemed to vanish in the dull metallic sheen reflecting off the wind-riffled water. Sir Arthur gasped. The figure reappeared, racked by spastic shudders and staggering blindly through a narrow rectangle of shadow. Poe’s ghost shimmered like gossamer.

“I say …” The knight took a tentative step forward. “Poe…?”

The specter glanced up at him, face pale as moonlit ivory. Dark hollows encircled the pain-blunted eyes. “Go away,” he said, the haunted voice a distant echo resonating from the depths of a bottomless well. “Leave me alone.”

“Do you remember me?” asked Sir Arthur.

“All too well.” Poe’s ghost groaned, wrapping its misty arms around a tree trunk. He stared up at the knight after a seizure of violent retching. “God… . What breed of monster are you, to take such pleasure in my shame?”

Conan Doyle stood dumbfounded. Although he neither saw nor smelled any illness, the apparition clearly vomited before him, contradicting everything he believed about the beyond. Ghostly nausea violated the basic tenets of his faith. The afterlife as he conceived it was not a place of illness or passion or regret. Earthbound woes remained behind forever. Or so he wished with all his heart.

On closer inspection, the knight took note of Poe’s disheveled appearance. Cravat undone and waistcoat unbuttoned, the specter lurched about in torn shirtsleeves, having somehow lost his jacket. “You still here?” he bellowed, swaying unsteadily. “Have you nothing better to do?”

The distant, hollow voice sounded slurred and Sir Arthur recognized with chilling certainty that Poe was in an advanced state of inebriation. How could a spirit be drunk? His very soul rebelled at the thought. “Are you not well?” he asked softly.

“I am … indeed, indisposed …” Poe’s ghost sagged, slumping onto a cast-iron bench overlooking the Tidal Basin. “This pestilential city… . Capital of despair.”

“Why are you here?” Conan Doyle’s brain reeled with confusion.

“What business is it of yours, Sir?”

“I … I am a friend.”

The specter laughed, a sound as dreadful and shrill as the scream of a dying animal. “There are no friends … only sycophants and damned leeches. Why, I was to see Rob Tyler today, the president’s son himself.” Poe stared at Conan Doyle with malevolence, silently challenging him to dispute his boast.

“That certainly … is a great honor,” Sir Arthur stammered, unsure of what to say.

“It is utter humbug!” The ghost staggered to his feet. Unsettling to see so ethereal a creature move with such total lack of grace. “The man was not at home to me, Sir… . He, who had pledged to secure me an appointment … at the Philadelphia Custom House… . He … refused to see me …”

Poe wandered off, strangling a sob.

The knight started after him. “Don’t you remember me from Philadelphia?”

“I don’t want to remember.” The ghost’s doleful eyes brimmed with despair. “I want to forget. I crave oblivion!”

The spectral melancholy proved contagious. Sir Arthur felt the first pangs of ineffable sadness enter his spirit like an infection. “Is there not sufficient oblivion after dying?” he asked, his voice weary and dull.

“Presumably… . I’ll let you know when I’m dead.”

“Damn it, man. You are dead!”

The ghost laughed, shrill as breaking glass. “How true … How pathetic and true. I can picture my epitaph, carved on a cold marble slab: ‘Here lies Eddie Poe, / Wearing yet a new disguise. / He lived a life so full of woe, / Thus welcomed death as no surprise …’ “

Mind near blank with morbid despair, Sir Arthur silently watched the phantom drift off between the trees, dissolving like fog in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the ragged storm clouds.

The Friars Club in Manhattan, founded in 1904 by a group of Broadway press agents who wanted a place to conduct business while letting off a little steam, became a favored watering hole of actors and journalists looking to grab some midnight supper or find a friendly gin rummy game. Harry Houdini was not a member, but frequently dined late at the Monastery with friends who were longtime Friars. Tonight, he planned to join his lawyer and the songwriter Billy Rose, whose most recent Tin Pan Alley hit was a catchy little ditty about Barney Google, the comic-strip con man.

Houdini entered the Tudor-Gothic building at 110 West Forty-eighth Street whistling the Billy Rose tune more than slightly off-key. He was notoriously tone deaf. Heading for the grill room, he spotted Sidney Rammage waving a newspaper at him from across the wood-paneled lobby. “Harry! What an unexpected coincidence.” The slight, bald-headed man hurried to his side. “Just reading about you.”

Houdini beamed. “Never hurts to get your name in the paper.”

“Depends what they say, I suppose.”

“As long as it sells tickets, they can say anything they like.”

“Righty-o …” Rammage indicated his seriousness of purpose with a deliberate frown. “I gather then you haven’t seen this morning’s
American?”

“I’m taking my show on the road end of next week. Think I’ve got time to sit around all morning reading the papers?” Houdini said this with a certain malicious pleasure, knowing full well his underwater stunt at the Biltmore had closed down Rammage’s buried alive act.

“Just thought you might be interested because of your friendship with Conan Doyle.” The little Englishman’s smile revealed more than a trace of smugness.

Houdini took the bait. “Sir Arthur had something nice to say about me?”

Rammage shrugged. “It’s about your mother, really. Some séance he claims put you in touch with her spirit. Says you deny the truth only to further your own vendetta against mediums.”

“Gimme that!” The magician grabbed the newspaper out of his rival’s hands. His brow wrinkled in furious concentration as he devoured the brief article. “That bastard,” he muttered. “Dirty limey rat!”

“I take it you’re not pleased?” Rammage suppressed a grin.

“Damn him. I’m gonna tell my side of this.”

“Thought you already did?”

Houdini ignored the jibe. “He wants to tell the truth? I’ll give him the truth!”

“Well, you won’t have to wait long for that.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Sidney Rammage positively gloated. “Damon Runyon’s sitting in the bar right now, even as we speak. It’s his byline.”

The magician’s intense eyes gleamed. “Runyon, eh? Never met him. What’s he look like?”

“A little man.” Rammage caught Houdini’s raised eyebrow. “Well, he’s taller than I,” he conceded. “Wears cheaters. Round lenses. Nicely dressed; gray sharkskin suit. Say, you know Bill Fields?”

“The juggler? Of course. Worked the three-a-day with him years ago.”

“Righty-o. Then you’ll spot Runyon straight away. He’s sitting with Fields and another guy with a uke who I—”

Houdini made a beeline for the bar before Rammage could finish what he had to say. He stood in the doorway a moment, looking over the crowd, and found his party right away. W. C. Fields he knew by sight, and there sat the little man strumming a ukulele. Houdini made out the lively strains of “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” The third man with the eyeglasses and narrow smile must be Runyon.

When Houdini approached their table, he overheard Fields improvising bawdy lyrics to the old Victor Herbert tune. The comedian had come directly from the Apollo Theater on Forty-second Street, straight from a dress rehearsal for “Poppy.” Traces of his stage makeup showed on his neck and forehead.

“Hello, Bill,” the magician said. “Still three-sheeting, I see.”

Fields interrupted the song and touched his neck, smudging a dab of pancake onto his fingertip for investigation. “Harry, Harry, Harry,” he rasped in his Eustace McGargle voice. “Never hurts to advertise… . Been getting out of any tight spots lately?”

“Every chance I get.” Houdini looked at the man sitting opposite Fields. Unlike the other two, he drank coffee. “Say, aren’t you Damon Runyon?”

The fixed, mirthless expression remained unchanged. “Last time I looked I was.”

“Boys, boys … excuse my execrable manners.” W. C. Fields waved his arm like a snake-oil salesman. “Allow me to introduce the illustrious escapologist, Mr. Harry Houdini. Runyon you’ve correctly identified. Our croaking troubadour here is another scribbler, Mr. Hype Igoe, sportswriter for the
World.”

“I also break in Runyon’s shoes.” Hype Igoe displayed a dainty foot, shod in an expensive bench-made calfskin wing tip.

“It’s hard to find another guy who wears a size 5 l/2 B,” Damon Runyon smirked. “When I do, I make him a friend for life.”

“Best part of the deal is I get to wear a new pair of custom clodhoppers every couple months and it never costs me a red hot cent.” The sportswriter accompanied his remarks with ascending ukulele chords.

W. C. Fields patted the seat of an empty chair. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Harry. Join us for a libation. Needn’t be ashamed of your abstinence, Runyon’s a teetotaler, too.”

“Hate to spoil the party, fellas. I’m meeting some friends in the grill.” Houdini leaned against the back of the chair. “Just wanted the opportunity to give Mr. Runyon my side of the séance story now that Conan Doyle’s put in his two-cents’-worth.”

Damon Runyon’s smile widened to show his teeth but still revealed no trace of mirth. He slid his snakeskin notebook from his inside jacket pocket as easily as a killer might draw his weapon. “Shoot,” he said. “I’m all ears.”

“Okay. Here’s the skinny.” Houdini’s voice softened to a conspiratorial hush. “We’re down in Atlantic City about a month ago. My wife, Bessie, and me. Visiting Sir Arthur and Lady Jean. He sets up a séance for us one afternoon, an automatic writing session. There was no hocus-pocus or the usual spook show flim-flam. Lady Jean closed her eyes and just started writing. She maybe trembled a little bit but that was all. No external evidence of any possession.”

“What about this writing? Supposed to have been a letter from your dead mother.”

“That’s all applesauce! First of all, it was Mama’s birthday. I made no mention of it to anyone at the time, and naturally there was not one word about it in the so-called letter. If the deal was legit, don’t you think Mama would have said something?

“Stands to reason.” The reporter never paused in his note-taking.

“You bet it does. And another thing, the letter was in English, a language Mama couldn’t write and barely spoke. Then Conan Doyle goes and makes some crack about Hebrew. That’s all horsefeathers, too. Kind of remark only a Jew-baiter would make. Mama was Hungarian, but we spoke German at home. Only that, never Hebrew or Yiddish.”

“You think Conan Doyle was pulling a con?”

“Say, you wanna sell patent medicine, you better put on a good show. He’s here promoting spiritualism, ain’t he? What better sales pitch could he want than to get an endorsement from me? Ain’t I known as the greatest debunker of fake mediums the world has ever known?” In his excitement, Houdini lapsed back into the gutter slang of his youth.

Damon Runyon pointed a fountain pen at the magician. “Have you never encountered a medium you believed was honest?”

“Never.”

“Not once?”

“Nope.”

“Let me put it another way. In all your long career—what is it now, twenty, thirty years?”

“Close to thirty.”

“Okay. In all that time, didn’t you ever meet up with some sort of supernatural phenomena that you couldn’t explain? Some wizard or shaman with genuine power?”

An almost imperceptible sweat beaded the magician’s brow. “No such thing,” he said. “You can go all the way back to Merlin. Nothing but tricks and mumbo-jumbo.” He snapped his fingers and a half-dollar appeared between them. “Hey, presto. Just like that.”