Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  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.”

  “Do it again, Harry, and buy me a drink,” W. C. Fields quipped.

  “You see, Mr. Runyon, all it takes is a little sleight-of-hand and the true believers start forming in line.” Houdini spoke with a glib smile. More than anything, he wanted to believe in the truth of his own uneasy convictions.

  19

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  A HEAT WAVE GRIPPED the East Coast. In Washington, D.C., President Harding’s staff announced the chief executive’s departure for cooler climes. The presidential tour of the territory of Alaska began after a four-day Shriners’ Convention when twenty thousand fez-wearing delegates visited the White House, the largest number of guests ever to call in a single day in all the Republic’s history. The president shook over ten thousand hands, hoping to make an undeclared statement by receiving the Shriners so soon after refusing to meet with members of the Ku Klux Klan.

  In a sweltering Federal courthouse in New York, the government rested its mail fraud case against Marcus Garvey, Provisional President of Africa, Commander of the Order of the Nile, and Distinguished Son of Ethiopia. Garvey, his black nationalist movement already in ruins, planned to argue in his own defense following a weekend recess.

  These events dominated the headlines. Making final preparations for the summer’s short tour through New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Houdini had no time for newspapers. Last spring, box office receipts had gone down considerably from the previous year and now the magician gave more and more thought to his plans for a full-evening show. He saw nothing from the press but the clippings Ernst sent at the end of each week. He read Damon Runyon’s version of his remarks at the Friars Club on a tear-sheet. Seen through the eyes of the cynical Coloradan, he came across as harsh and cruel.

  Runyon’s column also brought Sir Arthur’s reply. It came tucked in a manila envelope among a batch of clippings from small-town papers along the route of the upcoming tour:

  “I hate sparring with a friend in public, but what can I do when he says things which are not correct, and which I have to contradict or else they go by default. Our relations are certainly curious and are likely to become more so, for so long as he attacks what I know from experience to be true, I have no alternative but to attack him in return. How long a private friendship can survive such an ordeal I do not know, but at least I did not create the situation.”

  Houdini wrote a brief note of apology to Sir Arthur and received no reply. Caught up in the final preparations for the tour, a task greatly complicated by Jim Vickery’s continued disappearance, he gave no further thought to it. Collins traveled in advance to Trenton, setting up a challenge, the first such promotion in almost ten years.

  Houdini undertook a task normally Jim Vickery’s, the final equipment inventory. Not trusting anyone else to do the job, the magician spent his last free Sunday wandering the shelved aisles of his storeroom, clipboard in hand. In the summer heat, the atmosphere inside the windowless chamber was stifling. The drone of unseen flies provided an unwelcome annoyance. A putrid, sickly-sweet odor hung in the air. Something had died. A rat caught between the wall studs, Houdini reasoned. That explained the smell.

  Houdini’s master list cataloged every illusion, enumerating the backup hardware each required. The magician checked off the main gags, including such related items as “20 loose pin hinges,” “2 dozen cleats,” and “5
extra angle irons.”

  The telephone rang in the shop. Houdini made a beeline for the rolltop desk. He dropped into a swivel-chair, grabbing the phone attached to a scissor-hinged X-Tendo wall-mount.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Morningside seven seven nine four?” chirped central.

  “Speaking.”

  “Go ahead, Regency.” The operator made the connection.

  “My lord, Osiris …” The silken voice purred in the receiver.

  Houdini’s throat clenched. “How did you get this number?”

  “Why haven’t you called? Why haven’t I seen you?”

  What could he say to her? That he felt ashamed and afraid? “It’s impossible,” he said.

  “Nothing is impossible for the courageous.”

  Anger surged through the magician. “What’re you talking about? Courage has nothing to do with any of this. I love my wife. Respect her feelings. I don’t want to see her get hurt.”

  “And what about me? What about my feelings?” Her voice sounded without emotion.

  “You’re a big girl. You knew what you were getting into.” His words cut like an Arctic wind.

  “You, I think, have gotten into something you know nothing about.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Some kind of threat?”

  “Take it to mean anything you like. And remember this: I am not some cheap showgirl you can dally with and then discard.”

  Houdini resisted an impulse to hang up. “Look,” he said, “what happened was a mistake. One I deeply regret. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any unhappiness. You must realize that what occurred between us was an accident. This can’t be allowed to go any further.”

  A long silence followed. He heard the chill hiss of her breathing. When she spoke again, her words came slowly, deliberately. “For once in your life, you are involved in something over which you have no control. Larger forces are at work, sweeping us along with them. To resist is to invite destruction. I have looked into your coffin. I see you lying there. Who will throw the first handful of earth into your grave?” She hung up abruptly.

  Houdini stared at the telephone with distaste, as if he held some loathsome creature. He replaced the receiver. The X-Tendo contracted, scissoring back against the wall, the movement reminding him of a coiling snake. An involuntary shudder prickled up his spine.

  Houdini cursed the day he first laid eyes on Isis. No serpent seemed more lethal. He sensed her venom spreading through his entire life. Hadn’t she threatened him twice with odd remarks about his coffin?

  The magician headed back into the storeroom, anxious to finish the inventory and get on with more pressing demands. Tolerable before, the smell of rot now struck him as foul and cloying. Some impulse, perhaps occasioned by his conversation with Isis, impelled him to walk behind the storage shelves for a look at the expensive bronze coffin. Above his head, flies buzzed in the shadows like angry demons.

  Houdini saw straight away the casket had fallen from its sawhorse supports. It lay on its side in the dim light. The magician approached to investigate. What were the men thinking of? How dare they treat his equipment in so cavalier a fashion? His rage simmered, calling to mind last week’s police search. Undoubtedly, this piece of clumsiness was their work. He’d have a word with Lieutenant Bremmer.

  The casket weighed too much for one man to handle alone. Houdini did not attempt to lift it. He knew the limits of his considerable strength. The overwhelming smell of decay surrounded the magician like a poison cloud. A thrill of dread apprehension trembled through his fingers as he unfastened the clasps securing the coffin.

  The lid fell open. Houdini recoiled from a noxious blast of putrescence strong enough to turn his stomach. Jim Vickery’s blackened hands curled into rigid claws. Arrested in a final scream, the teeth in his open mouth looked impossibly white against the bloated, purple lips. Flies had already been at their obscene work and masses of squirming maggots writhed in the hollow eye sockets. The whole of the rigid body hummed with the macabre music of their intense corruption.

  Houdini screamed. His terror echoed around him in the windowless room.

  20

  GIFTS

  LT. FRED BREMMER SURVEYED the crowd gathered in the lobby of the Essex Market Court. He leaned against a balustrade checking out the hard cases mingling with the merely curious below. He’d seen a majority of their mugs in lineups over the years. The young torpedoes in their flashy suits worried him most. Never trust a hot-head, especially one who went heeled.

  Bremmer had been assigned to the courthouse at the last minute, part of a special police detachment numbering nearly one hundred men. Fifty uniformed patrolmen stood positioned at strategic points on the stairs and out on the street. Almost as many plainclothes detectives roamed the halls. All this force just to cover the ass of a mobster named Nathan Kaplan, alias Kid Dropper, who until today everyone in the department thought was headed up the river.

  A raid two weeks ago on a bookie joint in the Putnam Building on Times Square, across Forty-fourth Street from the staid Astor Hotel, yielded Kid Dropper, “King of the East Side racketeers,” among a dozen others. In the end, the only charge to hold him on was carrying a concealed weapon and this morning he beat even that rap; case dismissed due to lack of evidence.

  The biggest problem for the police involved keeping Kid Dropper alive until they released him from custody. A longstanding feud raged between the Dropper’s gang and a rival outfit headed by Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, who wore on his cheek a curving five-inch scar—Kid Dropper’s trademark, he being a handy guy with a can opener. Jack “Legs” Diamond, former strong-arm man for gambler Arnold Rothstein, worked as Orgen’s bodyguard and sometime partner in the labor rackets. When Legs and several members of Little Augie’s gang were spotted loitering about the courthouse before Dropper’s trial, the commissioner decided to take no chances and ordered in a big detachment of police.

  Capt. Peter Tighe commanded the entire operation. A veteran of the Bowery gang wars of the 1890s, when the Daybreak Boys from Five Points and the Pug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits shot it out at night under the Second Avenue El tracks, Tighe knew firsthand the homicidal inclinations of the underworld.

  The gangs weren’t gone. The Gophers still ran the West Side docks. Pint-sized limey killer Owney Madden, walked out of Sing Sing a couple months back with the state’s complimentary double-sawbuck in his pocket. A week later, he strutted around town in hundred-dollar suits, flashing a bankroll provided by shady Larry Fay, the man who gave Texas Guinan her stake at the El Fey Club. Just another Gopher eight years ago, banty-rooster Madden had gone to the big house for bumping off Little Patsy Doyle of the rival Hudson Dusters and had emerged a Prohibition entrepreneur. Tighe now wore gold captain’s bars. Under the fancy veneer, neither had changed.

  Captain of detectives Cornelius Willemse, another old-timer, had personal charge of Kid Dropper. Lieutenant Bremmer was assigned as his backup. A taxicab had been ordered for the strutting gangster, and two uniforms brought word of its arrival. Captain Tighe made a withering remark about apple-polishers on the beat. Kid Dropper got a big laugh out of that one. Tighe ignored him and okayed the start of the procession from the courthouse.

  Wearing a blue serge suit and straw skimmer, Captain Willemse led the way down the wide staircase. Kid Dropper followed, his wife, Irene Kaplan, clinging to his arm. Cocky George Katz, a criminal associate also recently acquitted on the gun charge, strode along on the Kid’s left, a triumphant sneer mocking the assembled forces of law and order. Bulldog Bremmer brought up the rear.

  All along the way, Kid Dropper nodded and smiled like a visiting head of state. The small party passed through the parted crowd in the lobby, between twin ranks of uniformed policemen. Out on Essex Street, a Yellow cab waited at the curb. Several curious onlookers stood about rubbernecking. The gangsters gripped their hands above their heads in the victorious gesture of triumphant prizefighters. A couple of bystanders even app
lauded.

  Captain Willemse held open the cab’s rear door, beckoning the mobsters inside. “In you go, boys,” he said. “Only sorry we didn’t hang the rap on yez.”

  Katz climbed in, sliding across the backseat. Kid Dropper grinned at the policeman. “Ain’t none a you bulls gonna make me take a fall.” He followed his compatriot into the cab. The captain made no reply, slipping in next to his charges. Bremmer glanced up and down the street, eyes flicking like an eager watchdog. He took Mrs. Kaplan’s arm to guide her inside.

  Distracted by the rudiments of gallantry, the lieutenant missed seeing a pasty-faced runt in a drab six-dollar suit dart out of the crowd and run to the back of the cab. Before anyone could shout a warning, the little guy was up on the running board, a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. He fired three shots in quick succession through the open rear window.

  Whatever, if anything, the shooter called out was lost in a general outcry from the surrounding crowd. Wild-eyed, Irene Kaplan screamed and threw herself at the diminutive gunman, seizing him by the lapels in a maniacal frenzy. She shrieked and shrieked, waltzing the tiny killer around in circles.

  Bremmer pulled his roscoe from under his armpit, holding the .38 Smith & Wesson out of sight along his side, not wanting to alarm the gunman when the woman stood in his line of fire.

  Wailing like the noonday whistle, Mrs. Kaplan suddenly let go of the baby-faced torpedo. He dodged around her, dropping his cannon in a sprint across the street.

  Captain Willemse had his head out the cab window, shouting at Bremmer, “You get the man, I’ll grab the heater!”

  The lieutenant took off after the suspect like the “Flying Finn.” The little guy ran with the street smarts of someone who’d grown up snitching fruit from pushcarts and had lots of practice ducking away through crowds. This time, more was at stake than stolen apples. Most onlookers, intimidated by the feral savagery gleaming in his wild wide eyes, stepped aside as he wove between them.