The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer

  “The ancient art of coming back from the dead.”

  Zig was still staring at the cadets, who were just standing there, like they were waiting for someone.

  “I didn’t realize that was an actual field of study,” Zig said.

  “It was a passion of their boss,” Waggs explained. “An obsession, really.”

  “Who was their employer? Dr. Frankenstein?”

  “Close,” Waggs said, her voice slowing down. “Nearly one hundred years ago, Rose Mackenberg, Clifford Eddy Jr., and Amedeo Vacca all worked for a man named Harry Houdini.”

  14

  You know I hate magic.”

  “This isn’t magic, Ziggy. It’s about understanding who these people were,” Waggs said through the phone. “Rose Mackenberg. Clifford Eddy Jr. Amedeo Vac—”

  “I heard you,” Zig said, eyes still on the two soldiers at the entrance to the bowling alley. “They died fifty years ago and worked for Houdini, which means someone’s pulling a fast one here.”

  “More than you even realize. I put their names in the system. At 0800 this morning, the bodies of Mackenberg, Eddy, and Vacca were delivered to Dover. But guess what else I found? They died five years ago in a helicopter crash. And four years before that not far from Stanford University, in an accident with an Army Humvee.”

  “Fellas,” Dino called out to the two soldiers, who were still just standing there, “we’re on break for an hour. Come back later?”

  One soldier looked at the other and they nodded their goodbyes, leaving the bowling alley.

  “Wait, it gets better,” Waggs added. “All three of them also died right after 9/11, when we invaded Iraq. And then again in the early nineties, when we first went after Saddam. Every decade: seventies, eighties, nineties—they’re like one of those contemporary easy-listening stations, but with dead bodies instead of James Taylor songs. I found records of them dying in Cambodia, Lebanon, even the Falkland Islands.”

  “Waggs, I’ve worked on 2,356 bodies here—and not one of them has come back to life. So if you’re trying to sound all spooky, you need to do it with something less trendy than zombies.”

  “I’m not talking zombies. You know what this is, Ziggy. Mackenberg, Eddy, and Vacca—”

  “I get it. They’re cover names,” Zig said, referring to the fake IDs that are used to hide the real identities of national security operatives. Zig saw them all the time. “Usually, though, they go with something more low-key, like Andrew Smith.”

  “Exactly. But now you’re seeing the problem. If they’re purposefully using specific names like these, either they’ve got a good reason to use those names—or maybe the names are somehow associated with a particular undercover unit. Those happen more than you think.”

  “But to use the same names over and over? Doesn’t that just call attention to yourself?”

  “Not over and over. They did it every half decade or so. Plus, people are committed to their code names. A few years back, I had a supervisor who named all his confidential informants after characters in Stephen King books.”

  “So then, what? If Mackenberg, Eddy, and Vacca all worked for Harry Houdini, we’re looking for someone out there who’s a magic fan?”

  “Again, this is more than magic. Everyone knows Houdini was the world’s greatest escape artist, but as I was Googling him just now, y’know what the number one thing was that he wanted to escape? Death. It was his obsession. On nearly every website I found, it said that when Houdini died, he was so determined to come back to life, he gave out secret code words to those closest to him. That way, if they tried to contact him during a séance, they’d know it was really him. Houdini’s wife got a code, his brother too. And from what I can tell, so did Mackenberg, Eddy, and Vacca. They were the ones who were supposed to help him communicate from the great beyond.”

  “Sounds like a hell of a trick.”

  “Of course it’s a trick. Everything with Houdini was for show. But his obsession with death? That was real. It started when his mother passed away. It wrecked him to his core. From that day forward, he became a walking corpse, putting on the biggest and best shows for the world, but deep down, he was so wounded by the loss, he pulled away from everyone around him. It was the one thing that the man with no fear was afraid of: opening himself up and risking pain like that again. Until the day he died, he would’ve given anything—truly anything—for one more chance to tell her that he loved her. Sound like anyone else you know?”

  For a moment, Zig sat there motionless in the plastic bowling-alley seat, staring at the polished pins at the end of the lane.

  “She’s not very subtle, is she?” Dino asked from the vending machine, pretending to straighten a row of cookies but still clearly eavesdropping.

  “Tell Dino I’m being honest,” Waggs shot back. “Pay attention, Zig. Whatever’s going on here, those other bodies—Mackenberg, Eddy, and Vacca… they weren’t sightseeing on a teen tour. This was a plane full of secrets.”

  “I don’t care about secrets. What I care about is Nola, which is why top priority right now is seeing who comes to claim her body.”

  “You mean came.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m looking at the big board right now. According to this, they just moved Nola’s body—or whoever’s body it is. She got picked up three minutes ago.”

  15

  They called this area Departures. Like it was an airport lounge and everyone was sitting around, scrolling through their cell phones, waiting to take off to some exotic locale.

  Really, though, it was a warehouse, clean as a hospital, and long and wide enough to hold an eighteen-wheeler. On good days, it was mostly empty, except for a few caskets on display—metal or wood, the government made you choose—and a large yellow sign with red letters:

  Casketed Remains Must Be

  Flag Draped Beyond This Point

  Sure enough, as Zig burst into the room, there was a lone coffin wrapped in a freshly pressed American flag. From the lower handle, a newly minted dog tag read:

  Brown

  Nola

  “Don’t you muss my flag,” a woman in her mid-fifties warned in a flat Indiana accent.

  “Who dressed her?” Zig challenged.

  “Zig, I’m serious—don’t muss it!” said Louisa “Lou” Falwell—thinning brown hair, stocky round build, mesmerizing sky-blue eyes—from her desk in the corner.

  Too late. With a yank, Zig tugged the flag from the shiny and freshly-rubbed-with-Pledge wooden coffin. The flag whipped into the air. Zig made sure it didn’t touch the floor. Normal flags were eight by five. Coffin flags were bigger, more unwieldy, which made it drape like a cape over Zig’s shoulder. Around the base of the coffin, the polyester elastic braid that held the flag in place still hugged tight.

  “Master Guns warned me you were getting emotional, but has your brain officially disappeared?” Louisa asked, pointing a stubby finger at Zig but still not moving from her desk. As the head of Departures—the final stop before each body got shipped back to its family—Louisa was well accustomed to dealing with people at their worst. As Dover’s only female mortician—the one who played Funeral with her Barbies—she also had a PhD in stubborn men.

  “I want to know who dressed her,” Zig insisted.

  Before Louisa could answer, Zig flipped the latches at the head and foot of the casket. He knew which side was which—the stars of the flag always covered the soldier’s heart.

  Tunk. Tunk.

  “Is she a relative?” Louisa asked.

  “Not a relative. Family friend,” Zig replied as he lifted the lid of the casket.

  Inside, the woman ID’d as Nola—the woman from the painting, the woman Zig had worked on so painstakingly last night—was flat on her back, in perfect prayer pose, her face tranquil. A clear plastic sheet protected her blue Class-A dress uniform—with white gloves and dark socks—from any stray makeup that might rub off during the transfer to the funeral home.

  “Robby
did a good job,” Louisa said, though she knew, when it came to the final dressing of the dead, nothing was good enough for Zig.

  Reaching into the casket, Zig pulled aside the plastic, scanning Nola’s uniform and each of her badges and cords.

  “You think we didn’t do the full checklist?” Louisa asked.

  At Dover, there was a twenty-six-item inspection list just for each casket. That didn’t include the body, or the checklist Zig himself had written. He focused on Nola’s face, knowing how vital it was to get it right. Every parent, including Zig, needs to see the face to believe it’s real. Now, her makeup was holding up nice. Her hair too. Last night, Zig had washed it himself, then washed it again. As one of his predecessors put it: The mother of the deceased is the first to wash a soldier’s hair; you get to be the last one to wash it.

  From his pocket, Zig pulled out the small six-inch ruler he carried with him every day on the job. He measured from the seam of her shoulder down to the tip of the chevron stripes that marked her years of service. Five inches. Perfect. Then the ribbon rack on her chest. No more than an eighth of an inch between each ribbon. Perfect. He even lifted her jacket, making sure the side of her belt buckle lined up with the zipper of her pants and the flap of her shirt. A perfect gig line.

  “How do you really know her, Ziggy?”

  “I told you, family friend. Like that Marine a few years back who went to your church in your hometown. You wouldn’t let anyone work on that body. Cleaning, embalming, dressing…you did it all,” Zig said, pulling a stray thread from the shoulder of the uniform, then another a few inches down. Then another, and another. Fourteen loose threads in total. Would anyone have noticed? That wasn’t the point. Even when someone requested cremation, Zig made sure every detail was perfect.

  “This was my job, Lou. Not Robby’s. Not yours,” Zig said. “Besides, we’ve barely had her twenty-four hours. Since when do we rush people out so fast?”

  “Hsu said she wanted to make room for the six new fallen who came in today.”

  It made sense. Yet as Zig turned back to Louisa, he noticed she was still at her desk, like she was glued there. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Of course. Why?”

  Zig headed toward her, scanning her desk. “Who gave you the bag?”

  “The what?”

  “The bag,” Zig said, pointing to the plastic baggie on her desk, tucked under her arm. “Those dog tags?”

  “These? Yeah, they just came in,” Louisa said, holding them up like she’d forgotten they were there. Sure enough, in the baggie were two beat-up dog tags, both labeled:

  Brown

  Nola

  Just like the ones missing from the Personal Effects room—including the one that was cut from “Nola’s” bootlaces.

  “Where’d you get those?” Zig asked.

  “Colonel Hsu brought them in a little bit ago. Said they arrived on this morning’s flight with the six other fallen. Apparently, someone found them at the crash scene. She wanted me to make sure the family got them.”

  Zig stared at Louisa, who’d still barely moved in her seat. He’d worked with her for over a decade. He knew she was tough—from that case where a young female soldier was murdered by an officer in Iraq, and it was Louisa, as she put the woman’s organs back into her body and sewed her up, who figured out the woman was pregnant. Even the male morticians couldn’t handle that one.

  Zig also knew how twisted and funny she was, remembering the story Louisa always told about how she got into this line of work: Her friend was dating a mortician who insisted that being an undertaker was a man’s field, which made Louisa think that’s where the money was. It certainly was—and still is—a man’s field. But it wasn’t until Louisa enrolled in mortuary school in Oklahoma that she realized how crap the pay was.

  Heart or no heart? Louisa had heart. Always. Didn’t she?

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Louisa said, finally getting up from her seat. She was still holding the baggie with the dog tags. “You think I don’t know why Hsu is suddenly showing interest? All she wants is another excuse to brief the White House and maybe get a thank-you from the President. I wanted to barf on her when I saw her out on the flight line this morning.”

  At a nearby table, Louisa slid the dog tags into a larger plastic pouch that held other personal effects, including the burned boots with the sliced laces.

  “Can you help me get her ready? We need to close her up,” Louisa said, motioning to the casket.

  Before Zig could answer, there was a loud buzz, the doorbell from the outdoor loading dock. Louisa pushed a button on the wall, and the roll-top door at the far end of the room began to rise, revealing a shiny black hearse—Cadillac, brand-new—that was here for the casket. Zig knew where it was headed: Longwood Funeral Home. The only question was, who’d be waiting at Longwood for it?

  “All available personnel, report to the front for a send-off,” a voice announced through the PA system.

  Peering into the casket, Zig took one last look at this dead woman’s face, at the thick makeup that made her so bronzed and beautiful. Still, as he did with every send-off, he couldn’t help but imagine the pale gray skin that was lying just underneath. And now, for the first time in years, he was thinking of his last moments with—

  “Zig, little help here?” Louisa said, fighting to spread the protective plastic sheet back over the body.

  As Zig grabbed a corner of the sheet and tucked it over the dead woman’s uniform, he noticed the brand-new name tag on her chest, black with white letters. Brown.

  Like so much in this case, it was, of course, a lie.

  Somewhere right now, Nola was out there. And somewhere right now, there’s a family who has no idea their daughter is never coming home again.

  “Wanna talk about it?” Louisa asked.

  Zig stayed silent.

  “I heard she’s from your hometown. That she knew your daughter,” Louisa added. “That must be—”

  “I appreciate it, Lou. I really do,” Zig said, taking one last scan of the casket and noticing… There.

  With his pointer finger and thumb, he tweezed a single stray hair from the white satin coffin liner.

  “I think there’s actually a molecule out of place if you look close enough,” Louisa teased.

  “Shh, I’m checking the protons and neutrons first,” Zig teased back, though he was still studying the stray hair. Short and frizzy. An Afro. The mortuary wasn’t a big place. Only one man around here had hair like that. Master Guns.

  It made no sense. Master Guns did investigations; he didn’t get involved with prepping and shipping bodies.

  “If it helps, Sergeant Brown’s lucky she had you working on her,” Louisa said, shutting the casket. It took a few more minutes to re-drape the flag. In most cases, when a casket went out of state, it was put in an “air tray”—a massive container that would keep it protected on a plane. But Nola’s—and Zig’s—Pennsylvania hometown was only a short drive away.

  Unlocking the wheels of the metal casket cart, they pushed the flag-covered coffin toward the waiting hearse.

  “Here for a pickup. Sergeant Nola Brown,” the driver called out. He was a kid. Late twenties, military buzz cut and build, same as half the people here. “I’ll take good care of her,” he promised, helping them navigate the coffin into the back, where it slid easily across the car’s rolling rack.

  Buzz Cut slammed the back door shut.

  “Meet you around front?” Louisa said to the driver, who nodded as the hearse took off.

  “Zig, you coming?” Louisa added, heading back inside. Right now, on the front side of the building, a young cadet assigned to serve as a military escort was waiting to join the hearse. Fellow Dover employees were also lining up along the circular driveway for a final goodbye—and the final salute—that they gave every departing body. No one left the mortuary without a proper show of respect.

  “Be right there,” Zig said, still standing in the threshold of
the open warehouse.

  He waited for the hearse to disappear—and for Louisa to leave—then he pulled out his phone and started to—

  “Here for a pickup!” a voice called out.

  On Zig’s right, a new hearse pulled up—a silver Buick with a black top—driven by a man with a bumpy nose and a mustache to offset it. The words Longwood Funeral Home were written in script on the driver’s door.

  Zig felt a pressure on his chest; his arms went numb. “Don’t tell me you’re here for—”

  “Sergeant Nola Brown,” Mustache said. He looked over Zig’s shoulder, at the now-empty warehouse. “Everything okay, sir? I don’t see Sergeant Brown’s coffin.”

  16

  We’re gonna go to hell for this, aren’t we?” Dino whispered.

  “You’re already in hell. You work in a bowling alley,” Zig whispered as they approached the back of the hearse.

  “Yeah, says the guy who works in the morgue. By choice. Also, do I even want to know whose coffin this is?”

  Zig shot him a look, gripping the corner of the shiny wooden casket, which smelled like lemon-fresh Pledge. Someone already came and took Nola’s casket; Dover had plenty of extras. No one would miss this one. Or realize what Zig was up to.

  “Okay, on three,” the driver with the mustache called out. He was crouched down on his knees inside the back of the hearse. “One…two…”

  With a single heave, Zig and Dino shoved the flag-covered casket into the car. The driver tugged from inside, then used the nearby straps to lock it in place.

  “That was lighter than I thought it’d be,” Dino whispered.

  Zig shot him another look. Wooden caskets weighed more than metal ones. But not when they’re empty.

  It wasn’t hard to pull off. With a phone call, Dino came running. He was the perfect distraction for the driver. From there, Zig reprinted Nola’s paperwork, grabbed a new casket, and carefully affixed a freshly pressed American flag. He even added metal ID tags to the handles at the head and foot of the casket. Each one read: