Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  “And this is your evidence? Righty-o?” The knight sounded incredulous.

  “We’ll know soon enough after searching his apartment,” Houdini sniffed, looking out the window in a sulk.

  Saying he wanted to avoid the traffic on Central Park West, the cabby entered the park at 110th, winding down West Drive. The magician stared silently at the lights from distant apartment buildings flickering through the bare tree limbs.

  “You propose to break the law based on nothing more than what you’ve just told me?” Conan Doyle ended the silence as they passed the Maine Memorial, exiting Central Park and angling onto Broadway at Columbus Circle.

  Houdini didn’t turn his head. “This man tried to kill me. And you. I don’t think he concerned himself with legal niceties.”

  “Someone certainly tried to kill us,” Conan Doyle said without emotion. “A person whose identity remains unknown.”

  “Not to me.” Houdini leaned his forehead against the cool window glass. “I know who did it. Without a doubt.”

  Neither man felt comfortable with further conversation and they rode in renewed silence as the cab traversed the blazing carnival brilliance of Times Square. Houdini remembered the area as Long Acre Square, when Oscar Hammerstein moved his theater uptown and Rector’s and Shanley’s and Reisenweber’s were the places to be seen. Not another word until Sir Arthur caught sight of the Hotel McAlpin on the uptown corner of Thirty-fourth Street. “By Jove,” he remarked, “I know where we are now. This is where we attended the banquet.”

  “Rammage lives just below Herald Square,” the magician muttered, still staring sullenly past his reflection in the window. “If he caught the midnight milk run out of Union Station, he’s not due into Grand Central or Penn Station for two hours.”

  In the nineties, the intersection of Broadway and Sixth Avenue had been the juicy rare prime of the Tenderloin, but the Haymarket and Jim Corbett’s place and Koster & Bail’s Music Hall were long gone. And, ever since James Gordon Bennett’s familiar two-story palazzo housing his New York Herald was torn down a year and a half ago, Houdini felt a stranger in this part of town.

  “Herald Square,” the driver called as the cab passed beneath the dripping iron girders of the El.

  Houdini and his wife had showed in many of the surrounding theaters back in the old days. Bess still came here once or twice a month to shop at Macy’s. She spoke of the area with nostalgia, but as far as the magician was concerned, each demolished building further eroded his memories of those happy times long ago.

  “Where to, mister?” An edge of impatience sharpened the driver’s query.

  Houdini had the cabby turn left at the Hotel Martinique and drive east on Thirty-second Street. Conan Doyle observed the magician carefully scrutinize the odd-numbered addresses along the uptown side. At Fifth, Houdini settled back in his seat. “Drop us at the Life Building on Thirty-first,” he ordered.

  “You got it.” The driver followed Fifth Avenue downtown for a block before turning west again on Thirty-first. He pulled to a stop in front of the offices of the famed humor magazine, a classical building with iron balconies sporting an ornate pattern of back-to-back L’s. Houdini paid the buck-fifty fare with a two-dollar bill and told the driver to keep the change.

  The cab’s departing taillight faded down the block. Houdini followed its diminishing red stare, Gladstone bag in hand. Sir Arthur paced solemnly at his side. “Look here,” the knight said as they turned the corner and headed uptown on Broadway, “what possible motive would this man Rammage have for wanting to kill you?”

  “Remember, in Atlantic City…?” The magician cocked his head, eyes glittering in the lamplight. “You asked if I had any enemies? Someone who might have it in for me?”

  “It seemed a logical avenue to pursue.”

  “Well, the avenue leads straight to Rammage.” Houdini jabbed a spieler’s forefinger at his companion. “We’ve been rivals since I first toured your country twenty years ago. I totally discredited his handcuff escape act. I’m sure he hates me.”

  “Two decades later the man decides to murder you? Highly improbable.”

  “There have been other … incidents, over the years. I never did like Rammage. Something instinctive, I suppose. Couldn’t ever pass up a chance to take him down a peg or two. I opposed his run for secretary of the Society. Why, just back in June, I torpedoed his swami act with my underwater stunt at the Biltmore Hotel.”

  A twinkle of merriment brightened Sir Arthur’s empyrean eyes. “I daresay I might have a motive for killing you myself, were I he.”

  The two men paused on the downtown corner of Broadway and Thirty-second Street. The Hotel Martinique, an opulent French Renaissance confection with multileveled mansard roofs, stood on the opposite corner. There was an entrance on Thirty-second. Farther along rose the Alcazar, another midprice hotel, although sporting a less extravagant facade. Number forty-five West Thirty-second Street, sandwiched improbably between them, had once been part of an elegant row of brownstones stretching all the way to Fifth, but now, it alone remained, a quaint knickknack from the past. “That’s it,” Houdini whispered, though there was no one else close enough to hear. “At best, we’ve got two hours.”

  They crossed the street and Sir Arthur stood fidgeting outside on the stoop landing while the magician picked the front door lock. Larceny accomplished in an instant, Houdini bowed from the waist, beckoning his friend inside.

  Conan Doyle crossed the threshold with a culpable look over his shoulder. “Swift,” he remarked, concealing his guilt under a smoke screen of sarcasm.

  “Piece of cake. You can open junk like that with a hat pin.”

  The two men climbed the dusty carpeted steps. Once a single-family home, the building had been divided into eight small apartments. Sidney Rammage lived in 4-B. The lock was a standard Yale triple-ward. Twenty seconds with the pick and Houdini was inside.

  Sir Arthur stood by quietly while the magician closed the door behind them and took a small flashlight from the bag, flicking the beam around the room, making certain the drapes were drawn before he switched on the ceiling fixture. The old gas lamps had been converted to electricity around the turn of the century and the cramped apartment, with its somber quarter-sawn oak wainscoting and ornate picture moldings, retained a fussy Victorian gloom.

  The entire layout consisted of two tiny rooms, plus a kitchenette and bath. Ancient music hall posters advertising “the Wizard of the Rif’” and framed photos of Rammage costumed as Ali ben Haroun hung everywhere. Clumsy installment-plan furniture crowded the threadbare carpet. Curiously, a rusted suit of armor slumped in one corner and an exquisite fourteenth-century diptych altarpiece stood on the cluttered desktop, improbable as a perfect rose growing out of a litter pile.

  Houdini went in to search the bedroom, leaving Sir Arthur to deal with the messy desk, a task complicated by the diptych’s minutely detailed beauty. The right-hand panel portrayed the peaceable kingdom of Eden; the left, Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden. The knight studied the pair’s guilty, hangdog expressions and felt he knew exactly what they were thinking. How like a lapsed Catholic to be so troubled by conscience, he thought, sorting through a stranger’s correspondence scattered across the desktop.

  Most of the mail was business-related—unpaid bills, letters concerning booking inquiries, notes from other magicians. A surprising number were from spirit mediums. Apparently, Sidney Rammage was a believer. Sir Arthur recognized many names, including some of the most illustrious. Their tone was chatty, occasionally philosophic, and almost every letter contained scurrilous references to Houdini. “… Another diatribe from H.H. I concur with your opinion, Sidney, the man is truly a menace …” “Houdini up to his usual dirty tricks again. Went in disguise to a séance in Brooklyn and disrupted it utterly. How much longer must we tolerate such outrage? …” “Saddened to learn the archfiend, Houdini, has once again attempted to besmirch the integrity of our sacred beliefs. Something must be done t
o stop him …”

  “Look at this, Sir Arthur!” The magician rushed out of the bedroom, waving his arms furiously. “Just look at this!”

  Conan Doyle glanced up from his reading. “Hmmm…?”

  “I found these searching through a chest of drawers.” Houdini held several fragments of cut leather. “Bet my bottom dollar they’re the pieces for another mask.”

  “Perhaps. We’ll have to come up with something much more substantial if we wish to make a case.”

  “I’m just getting started,” Houdini snorted, hurrying back into the bedroom.

  Conan Doyle next turned his attentions to the contents of the desk drawers. Other than the usual clutter (cheap fountain pens, pencil stubs, a jar of hardened library paste, scattered thumbtacks, postage stamps, rubber bands, several packs of playing cards), he found nothing unusual until he came across a battered volume of Poe resting atop a metal cash box in the bottom drawer.

  The knight rifled the pages. Key passages in the stories relating to the murders were carefully underlined in red pencil. “A ground plan for homicide,” he muttered to himself, sweeping aside the accumulated correspondence and placing the book on the desk blotter. A quick perusal of the notated tales evoked a lethal imagination. The ghastly underscored details fairly leapt off the page: “a razor, besmeared with blood”; “decayed and clotted with gore”; “completely buried in the flesh”; “a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn… .” Sir Arthur closed the book, feeling himself in the heartless presence of a murderer.

  “Just look at this!” Houdini cried, charging in again from the bedroom. “Here’s your proof hanging in his wardrobe.” Draped dramatically in a blood-red cloak, the magician held up the rubber skull mask as if it were a severed head.

  “By Jove, that’s it!” In his excitement, Sir Arthur overlooked his annoyance at the magician’s endless histrionic posturing.

  Houdini showed him the label: Brooks Theatrical Costumers. “They’re a top-notch outfit. One of the biggest. Cater mainly to the profession.”

  “Odd …” Conan Doyle examined the coarse woolen cloak. “The costumes Jean and I wore that night were hired from the same establishment.”

  “Like I said, they’re tops.”

  Turning to the desk, Sir Arthur shuffled through the scattered letters. He quickly found a sealed statement bearing the Brooks letterhead and sliced it open with the penknife on his watch chain.

  Medieval Death (w/mask)

  One wk. @ $3.50 per … … . $3.50

  PAYMENT DUE UPON RECEIPT

  Sir Arthur handed the statement to Houdini and stooped to examine a stack of paid bills impaled upon the desk spindle. Halfway down, he found another receipt from Brooks Costumers. It was dated March 25: one gorilla suit, black, w/mask. The rate was four dollars per week.

  “Now are you convinced?” Houdini exulted, reading over Conan Doyle’s shoulder.

  “Quite.” The knight retrieved the first statement, folding the two together. “How on earth could the police have neglected to consult the records of recent costumes for hire?”

  “Probably never thought to check the professional accounts, only one-time customers. What does it matter? We’ve got the goods on him now. I say we call the cops.”

  Conan Doyle shook his head. “The Red Death is no good.

  I never reported the assault in the Plaza. In essence, it’s a crime which didn’t occur. And the presence of a second receipt only dilutes the import of the first. We need more proof.”

  “I’ll get busy.” The magician paused in the bedroom doorway. “Are you armed?”

  Sir Arthur patted the slight sag in his jacket pocket. “Revolver. Why…?”

  “The trains might be running early.” Houdini glanced at his wristwatch. “Rammage could show up anytime. Keep an eye on the door.”

  Conan Doyle wanted to say he had more important things to do than guard the door, but held his tongue, turning his attention back to matters at hand once the magician left the room. The cash box was locked and heavy. Shaking it revealed no hint of the contents. Sir Arthur placed the box on the blotter for a closer look, but something else caught his eye—something on the blotter itself.

  All down the side, etched into the soft green blotter-board, the ghostly imprint of past writing formed a repetitive pattern. The same signature, over and over. Conan Doyle took a number two pencil from the top drawer and carefully rubbed the lead across the blotter, creating a shaded area out of which the signature slowly emerged like a figure approaching through the fog: Opal … Crosby … Fletcher …

  “Houdini!” the knight called, continuing to shade the blotter. Multiple variations of the signature came to light; sortie showing the stilted formality of a copyist, others more fluid and natural. Between them, snatches of the alphabet and stray words appeared in the same forged hand. “Houdini! Come here at once!”

  The magician was on his hands and knees, peering under the brass bed. Surrounded by mouse-sized dust clumps, a dented green metal footlocker scraped the springs. He pulled it out into the light and opened the lid. It was filled with scrapbooks and leather-bound photograph albums. “This is most important!” he heard Sir Arthur call from the other room. “You must have a look.”

  Houdini bounded to his feet and poked his head through the door. “Turn something up?”

  “Have a look.” Conan Doyle pointed to the desk blotter.

  Houdini gasped when he read the name delineated by the graphite mist. “Isis…?” The magician traced his finger over the multiple signatures like a blind man reading Braille.

  “Rammage has taken great pains learning to forge Mrs. Fletcher’s hand.”

  “Why?”

  Sir Arthur gave Houdini the strongbox. “Open this. It was in the bottom drawer together with an edition of Poe.”

  The magician surveyed the simple lock with a frown of disdain. A half-turn with his pick and the catch released. Houdini swung back the hinged lid, centering the open money box on the desk. Inside, a pint-sized medicinal bottle with a ground-glass stopper rested atop a pair of books. Conan Doyle picked it up and took a cautious sniff.

  “Chloroform?” Houdini asked.

  Sir Arthur nodded in agreement.

  Houdini seized the uppermost volume, a five-and-dime school notebook with marbled cardboard covers. Flipping it open, the magician immediately encountered an extensive entry in what he knew to be Sidney Rammage’s handwriting. Carefully outlined in a neat accountant’s script, Opal Fletcher’s telephone numbers and addresses in both Paris and London, as well as New York, filled an entire page. The names and addresses of her servants followed ground plans of her home on Eighty-fifth Street, precisely sketched and including various illicit access routes via the cellar and a second-floor balcony.

  “Curious … ,” Sir Arthur murmured, looking on as Houdini turned the pages. Similar entries detailed the movements and habits of Ingrid Esp, Violette Speers, Mary Rogers, Jim Vickery… . “By Jove! He’s got my tour schedule down exactly,” the knight exclaimed, observing the extensive Conan Doyle section. “The man is certainly methodical.”

  “Dirty bastard.” Houdini seethed, reading the scrupulous notes Rammage had compiled on him and Bess. Phone numbers. Itineraries. Floor plans of his house. Finally, sketches of many of his illusions; the Metamorphosis, the Milk Can, Chinese Water Torture, each with an explanatory paragraph.

  “Stealing your thunder…?” Sir Arthur queried.

  “Most of this I’ve published myself. But, only the Jims knew the secret of the Upside Down.” The magician closed the notebook, a ghastly pallor aging him by a decade. “My God… . He tortured poor Vickery …”

  “Dangerous adversary, this Rammage chap.”

  “Is that what this is all about? A few cheap tricks…?”

  Conan Doyle lifted the second book out of the money box, a small gilt-edged, hand-sewn, red-leather-bound journal with the initials O.C.F. discreetly embossed near the lower left corner. �
�I believe we’ll find his motives a touch more convoluted,” he said.

  The entries were written in purple ink, the cursive Palmer-method script unmistakably the schoolgirl hand of Opal Crosby Fletcher. “Remarkable forgery …” Sir Arthur held the volume so Houdini could read along with him. “Rammage has a deft touch.”

  1/1/23

  A new year. Clean white pages. The blood-red cover strikes me as entirely appropriate. This is to be a diary of doom, an honest chronicle of the death sentence pronounced on Harry Houdini. He must be punished for his blasphemy. The world must know of the pain he has caused innocent believers.

  “He’s setting her up,” Houdini muttered. “Precisely …”

  2/17/23

  Ingrid Esp is a most obligingly punctual young woman. She puts the Swiss to shame. Every morning, out of the building six-thirty on the dot, brisk march to the subway …

  4/2/23

  The chloroform works like magic. She was out in an instant. I drove to 38th Street and changed into the ape suit. She looked like a sleeper, slumped on the front seat. I strangled her, and ran and ran and ran, her weight barely noticed, limp in my shaggy arms …

  4/3/23

  … so easy when they’re unconscious. The razor a difficult tool, cutting flesh easily enough, but had to saw and hack through cartilage and windpipe …

  4/29/23

  … brought me from the edge of my trance. Incredible! It was Houdini. He fairly leapt upon the stage. So unwary. So fond of himself. Easy prey. Even now, the noose tightens. When they find Mrs. Speers someone will remember Poe. I want H.H. to be terrified when I come for him …

  “He must have quite enjoyed this,” Conan Doyle said, momentarily half-closing the book.

  “I’m going to enjoy it plenty if I ever get my hands on him.”

  “Easy, old man.” Sir Arthur gave the magician’s shoulder a paternal pat. “Best to let the law follow its own course.”

  “Let me have a look at that thing.” Houdini grabbed the forged diary from his friend’s grasp and thumbed quickly through, reading bits and snatches at random.