The Floating Lady Murder

by Daniel Stashower

  “Do you see the difference?” Collins asked. “In the Maskelyne poster, there’s no focus. With Mr. Kellar’s version, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Kellar waves his hands—the lady floats. That’s the impression he means to convey, and that’s what we have to create on stage.”

  “Very dramatic,” I said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Collins said. “Here’s the description Mr. McAdow is having printed up in the program.” He handed over a sheet of paper.

  “ ‘The Levitation of Princess Karnac,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘The most daring and bewildering illusion, and by far the most difficult achievement ever attempted. Absolutely new in principle. The dream in mid-air of the dainty Princess Karnac surpasses the fabled feats of the ancient Egyptian sorcerers, and it lends a resemblance to the miraculous tales of levitation that come out of India. It is the most profound achievement of either ancient or modern magic. Its perfection represents thirty years of patient research and obtuse study, and the expenditure of many thousands of dollars. The result of these labors is a veritable masterpiece of magic, the sensational marvel of the nineteenth century, and the crowning achievement of Mr. Kellar’s long and brilliant career.’ ”

  I handed the paper back to him. “I gather that Mr. McAdow is not one for understatement.”

  “Hardly,” said Collins. “Of course, it’s left to us to make certain that it actually happens. I don’t know whether—”

  “The dome,” Harry said.

  Collins looked up from the illusion plans. “Pardon?”

  “I would be surprised if Maskelyne’s floating figure is able to rise more than four feet above the stage,” Harry said. “Not if this apparatus works in the manner that I believe it must. What’s more, a conventional winch would lift the figure straight up above the stage. But Mr. Kellar has made it clear that he will settle for nothing less than a Floating Lady who rises out over the heads of the audience until she has reached the very dome of the theater.”

  “A winch doesn’t help us,” Valletin agreed. “Neither does ‘thirty years of patient research and obtuse study,’ apparently.”

  “The dome is the key to the entire effect,” said Harry. “The dome at the Belasco must be a good seventy feet high!”

  “Seventy-two and a half.”

  “Even better!” cried Harry.

  “I can’t imagine why you’d think so, Houdini,” said Collins. “I’ve been trying to talk the old man out of it ever since he came up with the idea. I could just about see giving him a levitation roughly equal to the Maskelyne effect, but the dome is just too much. He’s got his heart set on it because of—Houdini? What are you doing?”

  My brother had wandered off into the wings and was pawing through an open crate of juggling props. “I’m just thinking,” he said. “Carry on with what you were saying.”

  “He’s got his heart set on it because of his kindly old teacher. The Wizard of Kansas, or whatever his name was.”

  “Kalliffa.”

  “Right. But every time we try to give him what he wants, we get buffaloed by—Houdini? What are you doing now?”

  Harry had climbed onto the Floating Lady banquette and was holding a red juggling ball up to the lights. “Ignore me,” he said. “Pretend you don’t see me.”

  Collins looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. “Well, as I was saying, I’ve now devised four or five perfectly acceptable methods of doing a levitation. Any other magician would be well satisfied. But unless we find a way to—unless we find a way—Houdini? That’s quite distracting. Would you mind?”

  Harry had begun bouncing the rubberized juggling ball off of the stage with such force that it bounced nearly into the curtain rigging. “Pay me no mind,” he said, darting out his hand to catch the ball as it dropped. “Just go about your business, if you would.” He hurled the ball at the stage once more, and watched as it bounced high overhead.

  “Look, Houdini,” said Collins, raising his voice a notch. “As much as I hate to interrupt, I believe Mr. Kellar would prefer that you assist us with our little problem.”

  Harry’s hand darted out to catch the ball as it returned, though he nearly lost his footing as the platform shifted beneath his weight. “Oh, that,” he said, leaping down from the platform. “I’ve solved it.”

  “Pardon?” Collins asked.

  Valletin struggled to suppress a smirk. Silent Felsden merely folded his arms and glowered.

  “Yes,” said Harry. “Quite simple, really.” He tossed the red ball to me. “Small steps, Dash,” he said. “Everything in small steps.”

  I caught the ball and examined it as though it might hold some clue to Harry’s strange behavior.

  “I believe your mistake was in knowing how to approach the problem,” Harry was saying. “You have concentrated entirely on devising a means of causing Miss Moore to float.”

  “Well, Mr. Houdini,” said Valletin, “since that is the effect that Mr. Kellar has asked us to achieve, I would say that our approach has been rather sensible.”

  “Oh, I agree that we must achieve the effect of causing the lady to float. It is simply that we will not actually cause her to float.”

  “You’ve lost me there, Houdini.” said Collins. “And I really don’t have time for more puzzles right now.”

  “Harry,” I said, trying to head off Collins’s rising temper, “if you’ve really cracked the problem, now would be the time to let us know.”

  “Feed me the ball, Dash.”

  “What?”

  “Feed me the ball.”

  “If you say so.” He was referring to the throwing, or “feeding,” of a series of balls to a juggler—one at a time—so that the performer could handle three or more at once. I drew back my arm and sailed the ball toward him in a gentle arc, so that it would reach him at waist level. Rather than catch it, Harry brought his palms together in a thunderous hand clap. The ball had completely disappeared. “Gone,” he said, holding up his empty hands. “Vanished.”

  Valletin appeared genuinely startled. “Not bad, Houdini,” he said, rubbing at his plump cheeks. “Where’d it go?”

  “Ah!” Harry walked to the forward edge of the stage and pointed a finger upward. There, wedged between two arms of an ornate chandelier, was the red ball.

  “Nice trick,” said Valletin, “but what’s that got to do with—”

  “I get it.” I walked back to the center of the stage. “Very good, Harry. Small steps.” I ran my eyes from the banquette to the chandelier. “Small steps,” I said again. “It might work.”

  “It will work,” Harry said. “It’s the only way.”

  Collins cleared his throat. “Gentlemen? Would one of you mind letting the rest of us in on the secret?”

  “I believe that even Mr. McAdow will agree that it is absolutely new in principle,” Harry said. “One might even say that it is the most profound achievement of either ancient or modern magic, and that the result of my labors is a veritable masterpiece of magic.”

  “What he means to say,” I added hastily, “is that he’s come up with an interesting variation on the problem which might satisfy Mr. Kellar’s requirements.”

  Collins fixed his eyes on the chandelier. “Time to tip the gaffe, boys.”

  “It’s really very simple,” I began. “Harry has just created the illusion of having caused that red ball to travel from the stage to the ceiling, as if it floated there. But in truth, the ball didn’t go anywhere. It’s actually a simple disappearance, followed by an equally simple reappearance. Harry made one red ball vanish from his hands, and at the same time he made another one appear in the chandelier. To the rest of us, it looked as if the red ball had traveled from one place to another instantaneously.”

  Collins stroked his chin. “He made one ball vanish and made another one appear.”

  “So the second ball was already up there in the chandelier the whole time,” said Valletin. “Even before you started the trick.”

 
; “Exactly,” said Harry. “But you had no reason to look until I pointed it out.”

  “And you’re saying that we can work it the same way with Princess Karnac, is that it?”

  Collins furrowed his brow. “It might work.” He paced back and forth, talking it out to himself. “Princess Karnac comes out and lies down on the banquette. She’s covered with a cloth. The audience doesn’t realize it, but she’s vanished underneath the cloth. Then we figure out a way to make it seem as if she’s appeared up in the dome.” His head snapped up. “Say, Houdini, how did you make that little ball appear up there, anyway? I never saw you go anywhere near the chandelier.”

  “Genius,” Harry said.

  “Foresight,” I clarified. “While we were all ignoring him— when he seemed to be playing catch with the ball, he bounced one into the chandelier.”

  “I prefer my explanation,” said Harry.

  “Is there some means of causing Miss Moore to appear in the dome of the theater?” I asked. “The disappearance should be fairly straightforward, but I don’t know how we’ll manage the reappearance.”

  “I don’t see too much difficulty about it,” Collins said. “There’s a catwalk running around the interior of the dome. We could lay a beam across the middle and have Miss Moore hidden beneath a black cloth. She’s a trapeze artist, after all. She’ll have no problem getting out onto the beam, so long as we have her attached to a safety harness. Once the house lights go down no one would ever be able to pick her out, even if they did happen to look up, which isn’t terribly likely. All we’d have to do is attach some wires to the black cloth so that we can whip it away at the critical moment. It will seem as if she has appeared in mid-air!”

  “That’s fine for the Belasco,” Valletin said, “but what about on tour?”

  “I guess we’ll have to bridge those domes when we get there. I think this is our best option. Houdini, let me be the first to—”

  “Wait a moment,” Valletin interrupted. “Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves? Houdini’s plan is very clever, I’ll admit, but does it actually accomplish what Mr. Kellar wants? The way you’ve blocked it out, Princess Karnac will disappear from the stage and appear in the dome. It’s a good effect, but will we ever actually see her floating in mid-air? It seems to me that unless we actually see the princess travel from the stage to the dome, then we haven’t created a Floating Lady illusion.”

  I fished another red juggling ball out of the prop chest and tossed it to Harry. “Graveyard Ghouls?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  “You’ve lost me, gentlemen,” said Collins.

  “It’s an idea we had a couple of years ago,” I said. “We were travelling with the Marco Company, working as acrobats.”

  “You were an acrobat,” Harry corrected. “I was an escape artist extraordinaire.”

  “Fine, Harry. In any case, sometimes the crowds would be a little thin, and Mr. Marco would lay on an added attraction for the late night shows. He’d do a ghost and goblin routine called ‘The Graveyard Ghouls.’ Harry and I would dress up in black costumes so that no one could see us against the black backdrop. Then we’d wave a lot of skeletons and tambourines in the air so that it looked as if they were floating around by themselves.”

  “Black art,” said Collins. “We used to do a bit of that with the Herrmann show. But I don’t really see how that helps us.”

  “It doesn’t, but this part does. Mr. Marco began making a lot of money on the ghost show, so he added a special improvement mid-way through the tour. Marco had been a bit of an explorer in his younger days, and he always carried a lantern projector with him on tour, because whenever the opportunity arose he liked to earn a little extra by giving a ‘mind-improving lecture’ about his visit to Egypt with the Berrier expedition. He had a set of twelve slides painted onto glass—the pyramids, the sphinx, a couple of camels—and he spaced them out over forty minutes while he droned on about the ancient grandeur of Egypt. People sat through the lecture in order to marvel over the images, which were projected onto a large white wall. It was an amazing spectacle.”

  “I saw a lecture like that once,” said Valletin. “Ancient Greece. The man had a lantern slide of the Parthenon. You’d have sworn it was right there. You could just about touch it.”

  I nodded. “The projector gives a remarkably lifelike effect. So when the ghost show caught on, Mr. Marco decided to use lantern slides to spice it up a little. He took three glass slides and painted them with images of ghosts, goblins and grinning skulls.”

  “Pepper’s ghost,” said Collins. “What you’re describing is just a version of the old Pepper’s Ghost illusion. You take a lantern projector and show slides of ghosts on a sheet of glass. The glass is angled so the audience never sees it, but the ghosts look very lifelike. If you get fancy, it doesn’t even have to be slides. If you work it with a mirror, you can even dress someone up like a ghost and have them move around. Is that what you’re getting at? We should project an image of a Floating Lady onto glass?”

  “It’ll never work,” said Valletin. “The last time we had a Pepper’s Ghost at the Egyptian Hall, the glass sheet weighed upwards of five hundred pounds. It took over a week to install. There’s no possible way that you could tour with it. What if it fell?”

  “We found a way to do it without glass,” I said.

  “No glass?” Collins took a look upward at the ceiling. “How?”

  “The ghost show always had a lot of smudge pots going, to create a spooky atmosphere,” I said. “The smoke also helped to hide what was going on behind the scenes. Harry and I discovered that if we added some extra potter’s ash to the pots, they gave off a particularly thick column of white-colored smoke. If we then projected a lantern slide onto the smoke, it looked as if there were ghosts darting in and out.”

  Collins closed his eyes for a moment. “Is it possible? Could that actually work?”

  “I’m telling you, the ghosts were very convincing. If we keep the lights low, and just show them a couple of glimpses—”

  “I don’t get it,” Valletin said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  Collins walked to the center of the stage. “We’re talking about doing the trick in three stages,” he explained.

  “Small steps,” added Harry.

  “First, Princess Karnac disappears from the banquette, right here at the center of the stage.” He stepped forward and waved his hands over the orchestra pit. “Then the audience catches a glimpse of her floating in mid-air, right about here, on a column of smoke. We get ourselves a lantern slide of the Princess looking hypnotized, stretched out like she’s on some kind of magic carpet.” Collins trotted down the stage steps and moved halfway up the center aisle. “Then we see her again about there,” he said, pointing over his head, “only she’s farther away this time, as though she’s actually moving upward.”

  “Exactly,” Harry said. “And we use spotlights to control where the audience is looking at each phase.”

  “Until finally—” Collins moved further up the aisle. “She’s all the way up in the dome. Hell, she could even look down and wave at us.”

  “Right,” I said, “because it won’t be a lantern slide by the time she appears in the dome. She’ll have had time to get up there from the stage while the audience is busy looking at the projections. It’ll really be her up there, suddenly popping into view.”

  Collins rubbed his jaw, reviewing each stage of the plan. “There’s got to be a flaw,” he said. “I can’t believe that’ll work.”

  “It’ll work,” Harry insisted.

  “How can you be so certain?”

  Harry took the red juggling ball, threw it hard against the stage floor, and watched as it arced upward into the branches of the chandelier. “Because,” he said, “it’s the only idea I have.”

  7

  MR. KELLAR’S FINEST HOUR

  “I ASSURE YOU, MR. LYMAN,” HARRY WAS SAYING, “I AM NOT A h
umbug.”

  “You’re sure?” Lyman asked genially. “I’ve heard you talking about all those things you can do. The handcuff escapes. Leaping from bridges while tied up in chains. Getting out of ropes. It all sounds like a lot of humbug to me.”

  “Dash,” Harry caught my eye in the dressing room mirror, “what does he mean by that word?”

  “Phoney,” I said. “A fraud.”

  “Ah. A shmegegge.” Harry turned back to Lyman. “Mr. Lyman, the Great Houdini is not a humbug. Of that you may be assured.”

  Harry and I were backstage donning our costumes for Kellar’s return to the Belasco, back in New York City. The performance would feature the debut of the Levitation of Princess Karnac, and the last-minute preparations had left us pressed for time. My brother had barely found time to slip into his “Brakko the Strongman” costume as the five-minute bell rang, and I was busy hunting around for the floppy cap that I wore with my juggler’s motley.

  We had been working without pause for two days. Having secured Mr. Kellar’s approval to develop the illusion along the lines Harry and I had devised, we spent an afternoon of frantic activity in Albany securing the necessary materials and props. Mr. Kellar himself supervised the staging and mechanical rehearsals, which continued until the very moment that it was time to strike the set and load the show back onto the train. Now, having installed the illusion at the Belasco, Harry and I had only a few moments to get into make-up before the curtain went up. For some reason, Mr. Lyman had chosen this moment to park himself in the dressing area and unleash a barrage of strange questions.