by Brad Barkley
The crowd shifted against one another and pressed toward Eutaw and Pratt streets, jostling her, milling about as if they did not know where to go, as if they had no homes or businesses to return to. She thought back to the cold night in February, ten years ago, when she had opened a curtain on E ward, thinking she heard ambulance bells, and had seen instead a spotted horse careening down the street dragging a milk wagon, the wagon riderless, milk jugs spilling on the pavement. In the next minute the streets filled with the noise of explosions and fire wagons, of window glass raining from the buildings downtown. All that night the flames spread, and people pressed into the streets in the freezing weather, standing behind the firelines the police had strung, the mist from the hoses freezing to ice on the power lines overhead, in the mustaches and fur collars of the watchers. The fire became a show, everyone cheering the blasting of dynamite or the extinguishing of small blazes, until from everywhere the smoke ran down in thick clouds like cable cars through the streets, and people moved to get away from it and there was no getting away. By morning of the third day the city smouldered, the skipjacks and steamers in the wharves bobbing in six inches of soot and ash as if thrown adrift in fields of dirty snow. Anna worked with the nurses and other probationers for three days straight, hearing stories the ambulance drivers told. One man, sitting at his desk in his office, had swallowed water from the fire hoses and drowned. A mother and child were found fused by the heat. In the days that followed the fire, people of the city had roamed the streets, looking over the ruin, watching the smouldering ash.
Anna walked quickly along South Street. As she found a pathway out of the milling crowd, a young man fell into step beside her and pressed his hand at the small of her back. She grabbed his arm to push him away.
“We’ll need your help, miss. Over here.” She thought that someone in the movement of the crowd had been injured and now required medical attention, but he steered her away from the crowd, down a narrow alley.
She stopped and jerked away from him. “What kind of help exactly?” she said. “Who are you?” She looked into his face and recognized him as one of Houdini’s assistants, the one with the ruined teeth. She guessed him to be close to her own age.
“We just need you,” he said, his eyes darting about. “Quickly.”
He directed her into the lobby of the Altamont Hotel. The silence and solitude of the hotel grew like a dream pulled out of the dissipating crowd. She hesitated then, in the lobby, and the young man touched the small of her back again and the heat rose in her face. He inclined his head toward her, speaking in a whisper.
“Very important, miss. Please.” What he had to tell her or show her seemed a burden to him, a weight across his skinny shoulders, and she thought at once that Houdini must have died from his escape, that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage or a poison in the blood. They arrived at the door of a room on the second floor.
When Anna stepped into the room, Houdini sat on a brocade couch, taking sips from a tiny cup. Next to him sat the Scotsman, trimming a cigar with his knife. Houdini wore a heavy white bathrobe belted tightly around him. He stood and smiled and bowed to her a little. His eyes were the color of pewter, his lips thick and feminine, his nose sharp and angular, like some instrument for cutting.
“Please, sit with us for a moment.” His voice came high, laced with a slight accent; she noticed now how small he was, how muscular in his neck and face. The Scotsman did not look at her.
“Mr. Houdini, I thought…”
He held up his hand, brown with callouses. “You must call me Ehrich.”
“You’re not hurt?”
At this the Scotsman laughed out loud and lit his cigar with a match he struck against his boot sole. He threw the match into a green glass ashtray.
“No, I’m not hurt. But I do need your assistance.”
The three men watched her. “How?” she said.
He explained that in the next hour he would arrive at the harbor, that the local constable would strip him, search him, and shackle him. He would be placed in a bag made of sailcloth drawn by chains. The bag would be nailed shut inside a shipping crate and the crate laced with anchor chains and heavy padlocks.
“Then,” he said, “they lower me into the water.” He smiled. “You won’t see me for a while.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s clever, what you do. I think it’s foolishness.”
The Scotsman spoke up. “Last night, we saw a fine turning out at the Odeon Theatre. Watermen were there with a challenge escape.” He puffed on his cigar. His words seemed directed at no one in particular.
“They bring out this sea monster, a giant octopus or a squid, I’m not sure. Bigger than a man, preserved in an ice box, a formaldehyde bath. They slit this monster open, push Houdini inside, sew the thing with piano wire. Two hours that escape. The preserving fumes nearly killed Houdini by the end.”
He turned his cigar, studying the lengthening ash. “Before that,” he said, “a zinc-lined piano box, an iron boiler, a milk can filled with water, an enormous leather football laced by experts.” He looked at her. “Defying death, missy, is no foolishness.”
She started to speak and Houdini took her hand.
“I can get out of the box, yes. But I’ll need a key, for the manacles. Not even a key, really. A length of watch spring. A lockpick. Almost nothing.”
She thought of what he would put himself through, the utter darkness, the cold, brackish water rising in the box.
“But the nails on the box, the chains. Why risk your life this way?”
He smiled at her, his lips tight and shiny as the skin on a fruit. “A tiny lockpick,” he said. “Everything will be fine. No more than one of your hair pins.”
She pushed away the hair that had fallen around her face. Houdini held his hands together, like a child at prayers.
“You’ll help me?” he said.
“How would I help you?”
“You must give me the key. So no one sees it, after I have been searched.”
“What’s to keep anyone from seeing it?”
The Scotsman laughed, and the ash on his cigar broke off and fell across his vest. Houdini took her hand again.
“Before they lower me to the water, I’ll be allowed a kiss from a pretty girl, for luck.” He looked at her. “The key will be inside your mouth.”
She yanked her hand away and stood, her face burning with the blood that pounded in her ears. She smoothed out the folds of her cape and her blue uniform, the patterns of the rugs beneath her feet blurring in her vision. She shook, hearing those words: pretty girl.
“I don’t need to be here,” she said. She turned to leave, and the Scotsman grabbed her above the elbow, squeezing her arm.
“For chrissakes, girl, we need one kiss from you. It’s not as if we’re asking you to—”
“Let her go.” Houdini raised his voice and stood. The Scotsman chewed his cigar and walked across the room, his smoke drifting behind him.
“Let me explain further,” Houdini said.
Anna looked at the part in his wiry hair, the creases around his mouth and neck. His carotid artery fluttered in a fold of skin, beneath a patch of whiskers he had missed shaving. Anna’s eyes watered as heat spread across the back of her neck.
He reached out his hand. “Nothing more than this,” he said. On his palm was an inch-long length of flattened clock spring, filed to a tear-drop shape. In her hand it felt cool, the metal shiny and bluish with tempering. She shook her head. Houdini reached as if to take her arms, then drew back. She saw him glance at the Scotsman.
“I have a reputation,” Houdini said. “If you don’t do this, if they find the lockpick on me, I’ll be nailed in the box without the key. I will go in the water.”
His gray eyes looked steady on her. They were eyes she’d seen before, eyes she knew as if from a dream. She started to speak, to hand back to him the length of spring. She remembered his eyes, the man touching his face as if to wipe away the rain
, remembered imagining how they would look. They were these pewter eyes, Houdini’s, as if he had stolen them to descend into the cold water and to see with them the blackness of the void, to bury their seeing forever in that box, to give them up to reputation, to the absence of a tiny key.
He showed her where to place the lockpick in her mouth, holding her chin and tipping her face toward the mirror. She let him, feeling him reach in like a dentist to touch her teeth and her gumline, the roof of her mouth. When the key was positioned, he told her to close her lips and smile. He examined her face.
“Relax the muscles here,” he said, tapping her jaw. She thought of the doctors in the operating room, guiding her hands to clamp a cut blood vessel. When she had made herself relax, Houdini bent and pressed his mouth against hers, and his tongue lifted the key from her. His lips, cold and dry, tasted of metal.
“Everything just as I showed you,” he said. “Don’t change anything.”
In the last hours of light Anna walked through the streets near the wharves, practicing again and again the placement of the lockpick in her mouth, believing she had forgotten everything he had shown her. From the top of Camden Street she watched as the crowds came out, drawing together on the wharves where market boats and paddle steamers sat docked, awaiting passengers and freight. Anna made her way through the crowds, the lockpick held tight in her mouth. Around the watermarks of the boats floated straw and rough boards and fish with their eyes whited and half eaten away by the gulls. The smell of the fish mixed with that of oil drifted shiny along the surface of the harbor. The gulls screamed and hovered on the wind.
The block and tackle had been rigged from one of the bollards at the end of the pier. The crate, thick and knotty, sat open, the hoisting cable and anchor chains curled on the dock planks behind it. A mule stood with its head hanging, the cable that would hoist the crate fastened to its saddle. Police erected barricades at the water’s edge, so that no one would be pushed in by the force of the crowd.
Anna drew her cape around her, her hands bunched inside the folds of cloth. Twice the Scotsman came around and told her and the others standing near her to step back, not looking at her. The lockpick pressed into her cheek. It tasted of copper pennies, of sewing pins held in her mouth. She thought of her mother, watching for her through the curtains. She tried to think about the boy, tried remembering him, and saw his cracked lips, the rise of his ribcage, but not him, not his face. He might have had a tooth missing, but she couldn’t remember.
The kiss would be short, as Houdini had shown her, so as not to raise any suspicion. He had told her she must not let the lockpick move, she must keep it secure inside her cheek. He would kiss her and that would be their only chance. It would not last and could not be repeated. He would enter the box. The water would take him. Wind lifted the edges of her hair and drew a chill down her spine. She dared not swallow. Her mouth filled with saliva like the beginnings of nausea. She clamped down on the wire with the muscles of her face and tasted her own blood.
A fringed carriage drew through the crowd, opening a space in front of it that pulled in closed behind it. The carriage stopped and Houdini stepped out and waved to the crowd. A cheer went up and he nodded slowly without smiling. He wore a gray suit with a vest and a necktie, a stiff new collar.
A police sergeant stepped from the carriage behind Houdini, the brass buttons on his uniform tracing the curve of his stomach. He withdrew from the carriage a worn leather satchel, opened it, and lifted out with both hands a tangle of steel chains, handcuffs, leg irons, and padlocks. He shook them in the air, shouting to attest that he had inspected the manacles and found them to be unaltered in any way. The manacles clanked in his fist.
Anna touched her face where the lockpick lay hidden. The muscles of her cheeks and jaws quivered, and had numbed so that she could no longer feel the lockpick there. As she reached with her tongue to touch it, the pick slid atop her tongue. The taste of metal bloomed in her throat, gagging her. She nearly spat the wire out on the ground.
A committee of volunteers stepped forward to reinspect the shackles and to strip Houdini of his clothes. He removed his shoes and socks, his necktie and collar, his shirt and undervest. The men searched the spaces between his fingers, ran their hands through his hair, held matches near his ears and nostrils. They lifted his arms to search his armpits. One of the men put his fingers inside Houdini’s mouth.
Anna used her tongue to push the wire back into the side of her cheek. For a moment she thought she had turned it, the point of it now directed at the back of her throat, but then she was unsure. She wanted to reach into her mouth to reposition it with her fingers, but of course she could not. Don’t direct any attention to yourself, the Scotsman had told her.
The committee instructed Houdini to remove his trousers. Beneath them he wore only a tight breechcloth of thin white cotton. He stood hairless and pale, his muscles carving shadow in his skin. She saw through the thin fabric of the breechcloth his outline, distinct and full. She remembered the naked men in the emergency area after the paint factory explosion, remembered blushing as she moved among them, a girl of seventeen. She thought of the parents of the dead children, how they accepted their grief as if embarrassed by it, how they never touched. Throughout the crowd women turned away as Houdini stripped. The wire bit into the side of her mouth.
Several of the men held up a section of canvas as a screen, and a doctor was brought forth to complete the inspection. The men drew away the canvas and began to shackle Houdini. They locked his elbows with cuffs connected by a steel bar running across the middle of his back. Three sets of iron bands linked his wrists, joined by padlocks and chains to similar bands clamped around his ankles. Houdini raised his head as a heavy iron collar was hinged around his throat and padlocked at the back of his neck, the chains on the lock connected to those at his wrists. All of these were woven through with more chains, secured with padlocks.
They directed him to the crate, a man on either side of him. He walked with tiny steps, slightly bent like an old man, the chains dragging on the wood planks behind him. Anna shifted her weight and the wetness in her mouth ran to the back of her throat and she swallowed. For a minute she could not feel the wire and imagined she had swallowed it as well. Her mouth was numb. When she took a breath through her lips, the wire cooled at the back of her mouth. Houdini was lifted into the crate, the canvas bag pulled up to his neck and held there. The Scotsman poured brandy into a snifter and held it to Houdini’s lips, shouting out words she only half heard. The life of a man. The hand of God. The watery depths. He had an actor’s voice, loud and stagy. He would not look in her direction. She pushed the wire against the roof of her mouth to reposition it, and felt her heart beating in her temples, in her stomach. She wanted to let herself cry, to leave and forget all of this. The wire turned again and she pushed it forward, unable to remember where it had been when he had placed it in her mouth back at the hotel room.
“Some young lass,” the Scotsman shouted. He extended his arms to the crowd. “One kiss, for fortune’s smile.” Her face burned and she stepped forward out of the crowd. The movement of the boats docked at the pier made her feel as if the world were in motion beneath her. Her legs quivered. Houdini stood with his gaze fixed out over the heads of the crowd. She knew that already he was at work, twisting his hands inside the canvas bag, positioning them. The Scotsman lightly held her fingers and brought her to the front of the crate as if leading her through a waltz.
The key was now only a coppery sourness in her mouth. Houdini looked at her, no flicker of recognition in his face. She leaned toward him, not knowing what to do with her hands. She wanted to touch him, to steady herself against him, to keep herself from falling. His face came up to hers and she smelled on him the sweetness of the brandy. Then his lips touched hers and she felt the sting of his whiskers, the dryness of her lips, the push of his jaw downward and her own pushed with it. His tongue ran between her lips, moving across her teeth. She parted her
teeth slightly, then opened her mouth, and somewhere behind her the shouts of the crowd mixed with those of the Scotsman saying “maybe his last, maybe his last,” and with her eyes closed her hands moved in the empty air, reaching toward him, and her fingertips brushed the canvas bag, the muscles of his face worked against hers and then his tongue slid fully into her mouth. A shuddering passed through her. Already too much time had passed, must have passed. They would know, she thought, and she angled her face slightly upward, tilting her throat, and inside her mouth she felt his tongue thicken and flatten, his saliva warmer than hers at the back of her throat. The key floated somewhere between them, the taste of it rising into her sinuses. She opened her eyes briefly and saw his gray eyes open and stilled in concentration. She closed her eyes again, and then the wind blew cool at the edges of her mouth, Houdini was shouting to the crowd that he would be allowed only twenty minutes, that the oxygen inside the crate would be depleted in three.
The Scotsman drew her back to the edge of the crowd. She watched Houdini wave to the crowd and smile at her, but it was a smile for the crowd; it told her nothing. The canvas bag was lifted up over him and his face disappeared from sight, his outline shifting and bobbing under the canvas. She imagined him in the bag, reaching with his fingers to withdraw the key, working already at the locks as the men chained shut the bag and folded it—him—into the crate. The box lid fell down and then the hammers sounded in the moist air, six of them pounding a strange, short song, like a children’s song. The chains drew up the crate, the mule strained, and the box lifted and spun in the air. The men pushed it over the side of the pier and the crowd pressed forward to watch. It hit the water and bobbed, tilting slightly before it began to sink. The Scotsman withdrew his watch and began to count in quarter minutes, shouting, holding his watch up to the crowd. The crate fell fully out of sight in the black water, tiny waves splitting white around the cable. Anna leaned out to see, the press of thousands at her back. Still in her mouth were the sweetness of the brandy, the sourness of the key. She closed her eyes to imagine his frantic work in the blackness, in the failing air, the crate buried in cold, the warmth at its center, his warmth, his beating heart. The Scotsman sounded the minutes. She swallowed, tasting him. Don’t die, she whispered.
