The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer

  45

  Washington, DC

  Today

  My phone’s not on.”

  “At the Conjuring Arts, you had it on. And it’s on right now,” The Amazing Caesar said, sliding into the driver’s seat, starting the shuttle, and steering the small bus out of the driveway. “You get three lies. That’s one, Mr. Zigarowski.”

  “Zig. Friends call me Zig.”

  Caesar’s eyes slid to his right. Zig was sitting in the very first seat of the shuttle, holding the pole like an umbrella.

  “You tell me two more lies, Mr. Zigarowski, this conversation’s over.”

  Reaching into his breast pocket, Zig took out his phone. “I’ll call you back,” he whispered to Dino. “Yeah, no, don’t worry. I’m okay.” With a tap, the phone was off.

  “You lost someone in that plane crash, huh?” Caesar asked.

  Zig didn’t answer.

  “For what it’s worth, it’s the one thing I thought you weren’t bullshitting about,” Caesar added. “When it comes to real loss, it never leaves someone’s face.”

  Zig glanced upward at the bubble-shaped escape hatch in the shuttle’s roof. Bright red letters read: Emergency Exit.

  Hitting the gas, Caesar spent the next two minutes hunched in the driver’s seat, his pointer and middle fingers on the steering wheel at the five and seven o’clock positions. Old man out for a casual ride.

  “You said you felt bad those people died. What do you know about it?” Zig asked.

  Caesar just drove.

  “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?” Zig added.

  “I like parks,” Caesar said, turning the corner and pulling to the side of the road, in front of a large abandoned lot with a state-of-the-art construction trailer on it. The shuttle lurched and shuddered, Caesar not yet used to the hard clench of its brakes. “Plus, I like knowing who’s sniffing after me.”

  Zig looked out the side window of the bus. This part of the neighborhood was far less developed, a scattering of open lots with no restaurants or buildings nearby. If anyone was following, they’d be impossible to miss.

  “Pretty soon, the corporate bomb will hit, and this block’ll be covered in Starbucks and Paneras—but no matter how much money they pour in, this town still won’t be able to produce a proper slice of pizza,” Caesar said. “By the by, guess how much that valet kid wanted from me to borrow his shuttle?”

  Zig was still staring out the side window. From this distance, the sixties-era hotel, lit up at night and dotted with its TV-shaped windows, looked like a tiny concrete beehive, which brought an odd sense of calm to Zig, something safe from home right here in a spot where he felt so uniquely off-balance.

  “I’d like to know about Operation Bluebook,” Zig insisted.

  “Do me a favor first—watch the key,” The Amazing Caesar said, pulling the key from the ignition. The shuttle went dark, the only light now coming from a shattered street lamp with an exposed bulb. “Still see the key? Now I want you to hold it for me,” Caesar said, swiveling his seat toward Zig and handing it over.

  “I don’t have time for a magic trick.”

  “Mr. Zigarowski, if there was ever time for a magic trick, this is most definitely it.” His voice was deadpan, but as he started doing his act, you could see hints of the natural performer buried underneath. “Now I want you to put the key in this envelope,” he added, pulling a crisp letter-sized envelope from his jacket pocket.

  Humoring him, Zig took the key and slid it into the envelope.

  “Seal it with a lick,” Caesar said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t poison it.”

  Zig looked down at the envelope, then licked it, sealing the key inside.

  “Now what do you suppose is the big ta-da of the trick?”

  “I honestly don’t care. I don’t like magic. The only reason I’m—”

  “I know why you’re here, Mr. Zigarowski. Your commitment to repetition makes it nauseatingly obvious. I’m trying to illustrate a point. When it comes to magic, do you know how many tricks there are?”

  “I don’t know. Thousands.”

  “Don’t let sarcasm mask frustration. There are four. That’s it. Sure, there’s levitation, with all the strings and wires. And there’s escape stuff, which relies on gimmicked cuffs and other gaff. But for the rest of them, there are only four different magic tricks: You make something appear. You make something disappear. You make two things change place. Or you change one thing into something else. Everything in magic is a variation on those four.”

  “So what’s that have to do with Operation Bluebook?”

  Swiveling back toward the steering wheel, Caesar stared out the front window, pursing his lips, like he was trying to touch his top lip to his nose. “You military, Mr. Zigarowski?”

  “Never enlisted, but I work with our troops. Mortician. Dover Air Force Base.”

  “Mortician? No wonder you hate magic.”

  “You were saying something about Bluebook.”

  “Just that— You were right before. My store. It’s a shop-and-drop. People come in, and we do a little challenge and password. I say the prearranged phrase; if they reply with the right password, well, sometimes I make something appear, sometimes I make it disappear.”

  “And people pay you for that?”

  “No, no, no, no, no.” He shook his head, still staring out the front window. “I don’t do this for profit. I do this for—” He stopped. “I’ve got one client. My dear old Uncle Sammy.”

  “So you do work for the government?”

  Again, he tried to touch his top lip to his nose. “How old are you, Mr. Zigarowski? Late forties?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Mhmm. You got lucky with that head of hair. Lady Time picks her lovers with care.”

  “You were saying about the government…”

  “When I enlisted, I was seventeen. World War II was long done, but even then, to see how our troops were treated… Someone gave my older brother a car—a used 1938 Ford Prefect! And that got him a wife, so…I gave Uncle Sammy a fake age, I wanted in so bad. The Marines said no, but the Navy put me in a wet suit and let me be a frogman, long before there were SEALs. When they saw I could read, they sent me to officers’ school. But in military life, y’know, you turn forty—if you’re lucky, you turn fifty—and then…”

  “No one gets old in the military,” Zig said.

  “No, you can get old. You just get less useful,” The Amazing Caesar said, staring out the front windshield like he was looking at something he couldn’t quite bring into focus. “It’s the hardest part of aging—you don’t even notice it at first, but boy does that phone stop ringing. So when a colonel called me up one day and asked me if I could take a shipment for him in the magic shop? Mr. Zigarowski, it was like being at the prom and having the prettiest girl ask you to dance and then whisper in your ear that she wants to—”

  “I think I got it.”

  “I’m not sure you do. My job at the Conjuring Arts… I take pride in my shop. I built the wooden bookshelves, built the awning out front, I built it all with my own hands. And I was happy with it. But when that colonel called up and asked for help—the shock of adrenaline—the electricity shooting through me—that’s the real magic of life. That’s what feeds us—that need to be needed. You say you’re fifty-two, Mr. Zigarowski? You’re telling me you never got a charge from a need like that?”

  For a moment, Zig stared out his window, focusing on the beehive-shaped hotel, his tongue tapping against his sharp incisor. “Not really.”

  Caesar made a noise, part laugh and part humpf. “You say you’re a mortician? You should know better than anyone. Just because you’re not dead doesn’t mean you’re alive.”

  “I appreciate the advice—but I know that’s not the reason you brought me out here in the middle of—”

  “I brought you out here because people were killed,” Caesar snapped, his voice showing its first hint of…not just anger. Guilt. “Seven people, ye
s? I need to make that right.”

  “I appreciate that, sir. So if we can get back to the colonel… What kinda shipments was he asking you to take?”

  “You’re assuming I’m a bad person, Mr. Zigarowski. This isn’t some crooked underground operation. It’s a necessity of military life. In the old days, when our SEALs needed a dozen clean laptops, they went through Acquisitions. Today, with WikiLeaks dumping every battle plan on the Internet, if there’s an above–top secret mission in Yemen that no one can ever find out about, well, Acquisitions can’t be trusted—and you certainly can’t head over to the Best Buy with a shipping address that says The Pentagon. So all across the country, there are places like mine, shops run by nostalgic old vets who miss their old lives so much, they’re happy to take delivery on whatever Uncle Sammy needs to keep quiet. And y’know how we do it? The same way as those four magic tricks.”

  “Sleight of hand.”

  “Sleight of hand is the end result, but when it comes to selling a sleight, do you know the trick to the trick itself?” Caesar paused, ever the showman, then pumped his overgrown eyebrows and cupped his hands together. “The big motion covers the small motion. Like this…” Shaking his still-cupped hands, he did a quick three-count, then lifted one hand away, revealing a familiar gold Seiko.

  “Is that my watch?” Zig asked.

  “That’s what you get for looking so hard at that envelope with the key,” Caesar said, dangling the watch off his crooked finger and handing it back. “You asked about Houdini before—he used to do the same. He’d have you check his mouth for lockpicks and other files, but while you were doing that, no one would notice that good ole Harry had six fingers—he’d wear a fake hollow pinkie, where he’d store metal picks and a thin bendable Gigli saw that could slice through anything. Or he’d hook a lockpick on the back of your shirt while you examined him, then pull it off when you were done.” He pantomimed his left hand moving high in the air—“The big motion…”—then closed the fist of his right hand, like he had something in it—“covers the small motion.”

  “So in this metaphor, the Conjuring Arts—?”

  “These days, every country in the world, every enemy we have, has a team of computer nerds on staff. They watch the Pentagon—what we order, our supply lines. They watch the big moves. And while they’re watching those big moves…”

  “…they don’t see the small ones being funneled through your little magic shop.” Zig nodded. That part made sense. “But what’s that have to do with Operation Bluebook? You said you needed to make something right.”

  Caesar cupped his hands again. One, two, three. Then revealed: A shiny silver dollar. He cupped his hands again. One, two, three. Clink. Another silver dollar. Then, clink, another. Slowly, though, his expression changed, and—one, two, three—as a new silver dollar clinked against the others, his features fell, looking despondent.

  “Caesar, if you know something—”

  “I’m a good person. A good American,” Caesar insisted as—clink—he lifted his hand and another silver dollar appeared. “I served our country my entire adult life. And when they needed me to do a little more by helping with these shipments, I served again. In the beginning, it wasn’t much. A new delivery would show up every six months or so. After 9/11, of course, more shipments started coming in—during the heyday, I signed for so many laptops, printers, flip phones, and chargers, I swear to Moses, our government was single-handedly keeping the CDW computer catalogue in business. But again, that’s the job, right? At least I’m in the game. I’m alive. Back from the dead! The Amazing Caesar feels amazing again—so amazing that I didn’t even realize they were about to play me for a sucker. It started a few months ago, when I got the kind of delivery you never want to sign for. No packaging. Just a briefcase. Military issue. Bombproof. They told me not to look inside.”

  Zig sat there, silent.

  “What was I supposed to do? I’m a breathing human, and they were stupid enough to leave it with someone who’s a master at picking locks. I had to take a peek.”

  “And inside…?”

  “There it was—the deadliest weapon of all. Neat stacks of cash. Two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “You never moved cash before?”

  “This is Uncle Sammy. Half the time, I assumed I was moving cash. For this one, though, they said my contact would be someone named Houdini, which I thought was just their way of making fun of my store, like ha-ha, you eighty-year-old fool, you’re spending your retirement in a magic shop. Then they told me the code name. Operation Bluebook.”

  46

  You’re looking at me like I’m supposed to know what that means,” Zig said.

  “Even I don’t know what their current operation is—but I know the history,” The Amazing Caesar said. “You never heard the stories? Houdini and his Blue Book?”

  “I looked online. Said it was some sort of codebook.”

  “Not just a book. It was part of Houdini’s act. At the peak of his fame, his shows had three parts: First, there was the magic…” In the palm of Caesar’s hand, he squeezed the silver dollars. He opened his hand; now they were gone. “Second, he’d do his escapes—from handcuffs, straitjackets, and of course the Chinese water torture one. But during the final years of his life, the best part of every show was when he’d expose the fraud of local mediums.”

  “Y’mean like fortune-tellers?”

  “Back then they were called spiritualists. They even had their own religion—Spiritualism—based on the idea that you could talk to the dead. Today, of course, it makes you think of palm readers and crystal balls, but in those days, this so-called religion was big business.”

  “And people believed it?”

  “It was right after World War I. Families who lost their sons in battle got preyed upon by hucksters offering séances. To Houdini, whose heart was broken by the death of—”

  “His mom,” Zig said, remembering what Waggs said, which he’d confirmed online.

  “Exactly. Houdini felt that pain personally from the loss of his mother. From there, he made it his mission to go after spiritualists. He saw it as the most hurtful crime of all—ripping open old wounds and taking advantage of someone’s lost family member, or lost child. I mean, can you imagine?”

  Zig could. He’d been imagining it since the moment he thought it was Nola in the morgue, since the moment she returned to his life. The worst of it was last night, when she manipulated him into going to her office just to see who would follow. Zig could live with the maneuverings; indeed, he had to respect her for a smart play like that. No, for Zig, the real pain came from what it showed him about himself.

  A decade since the funeral, he wasn’t a novice mourner. Zig knew where his scars were; he was used to living with them on a daily basis. Plus, he worked in death, spending years using it to inoculate himself against the shattered feeling that came with the loss of Maggie. To be around so many young fallen took away the greatest weapon in death’s arsenal—just being with other mourners, Zig no longer felt alone.

  And then, Nola appeared—this girl who saved his daughter—and in an eyeblink, all that protective work was unraveled, tearing his skin off in sheets and reminding him of the one thing he’d worked so hard to overcome: The deepest wounds—the ones that pierce you to your core—they heal, but they never disappear.

  “Can you please tell me what this has to do with the Blu—”

  “I already did. It was the secret of Houdini’s trick—the secret behind all his tricks. Big motion covers the small motion, right?” Caesar asked. “Erik Weisz, aka Harry Houdini, was the big motion, the star of the show. But while everyone was focused on him, the real work was being done by Houdini’s secret service.”

  “His what?”

  “That’s what he called them. They were his closest confidants: his wife, his brother, an assistant named Amedeo—”

  “Vacca,” Zig blurted.

  “You know him?”

  Zig shook his head, not
icing a dim light outside. In the distance, up the block, a car came to a stop, its headlights glowing. It was parallel with the shuttle, still debating whether to turn. “Vacca’s name was listed as one of the passengers on board the plane that crashed in Alaska. Same with Rose Mackenberg and Clifford Eddy Jr.”

  “Both were also members of Houdini’s secret service,” Caesar said. “So someone’s using old Houdini names?”

  “That’s our theory.”

  Caesar took a long look at Zig, who was still studying the headlights outside. Even from here, there was no mistaking the siren on the roof. Police car. “Mr. Zigarowski, those three names you just mentioned…they weren’t the only people on the plane, were they? Please help me make this right. Was someone you care about on there too?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m eighty-seven. I’ve got time.”

  “I’m not sure we do, though,” Zig said, motioning to the police car in the distance.

  “I see ’em. Rental cops. We hire them for the neighborhood. They’ve passed us twice now,” Caesar said as the car started moving, disappearing to their left. “Anyhoo, you were saying—?”

  “No. You were saying. About Houdini’s secret service.”

  “Right. Before Harry got to a town—Vacca, Mackenberg, Eddy, and the others—they would come a few days early and do the recon work, figuring out everything from what brand of handcuffs the local police used—so Houdini would have a key when he challenged them to lock him up—to what kind of locks were on the jail cells. But their number one mission was to help Houdini prepare for the big finale of the act.”

  “Exposing mediums and fake fortune-tellers.”

  “It was Houdini at his sneakiest. Back then, whenever a medium would travel to a new town, they’d establish themselves by approaching someone in a prominent family and saying, I have a message for you from your dead brother—or dead mother, or whoever it was. Then they’d ID the person, by name, like: Someone named Maggie is in great pain.”