The Last Illusion

by Unknown

  Twenty-eight

  So what to do next? Go to the theater and find out about Signor Scarpelli’s residence or visit the press that published The Dramatic Mirror magazine? It was not the sort of weather to go rushing around any more than necessary. The humidity today made it feel like wading through a Turkish bath. Actually I had never been in a Turkish bath since they are strictly reserved for gentlemen, but I had read about them. Every step seemed an effort. Clothing stuck to me in an unbecoming manner. I could feel the sweat trickling down the back of my neck and my hat felt like a deadweight on my head. Patchin Place was so close by. I could go home, have a cool splash of water, and a cold drink. I stood up, tempted, then turned resolutely to my task. Theater and magazine were not too far from each other—one on the Bowery, the other on Pearl Street.

  I decided on the magazine first. Theater folk are notoriously late risers and I’d probably find the place deserted until at least eleven. So I caught the trolley south down Broadway. Although it was crowded, its sides were open and it was more pleasant traveling than in the closed carriages of the El. As we neared the southern tip of Manhattan we picked up a hint of cooler breeze coming in from the ocean. As I alighted I stood, breathing in the air with a hint of sea tang and picturing myself standing on the cliffs at home, feeling that cool, salty wind in my face. How long ago that all seemed now, as if it was a distant dream.

  As I went into the office of The Dramatic Mirror a loud clatter of machinery was coming up from the basement, so that I had to shout my request to the young woman who came to greet me.

  “An article by Houdini?” she shouted back. “Yes, he often writes for us.”

  “Do you have his latest articles here for me to look at?”

  “May I ask what this is about?” she asked.

  I decided this was a time for straight talk. “You’ve heard that he has disappeared and has probably been kidnapped,” I said.

  “Yes, I read it in the papers. Shocking, isn’t it? Whatever next?”

  “I am a detective, working with Houdini’s family and the police on trying to trace him. We’d appreciate any help you can give us.” I produced my card that read, “P. Riley Detective Agency. M. Murphy Co-Owner.” I had taken the liberty of having the cards printed after Paddy Riley died and I was left holding the baby, so to speak. So I wasn’t really co-owner, just owner by default.

  She looked at the card, then at me. “Wait here please,” she said. “I’ll get Mr. Goldblum.”

  She went into a back office while the machinery downstairs clattered on. I wondered how anyone could get work done with that sort of noise nearby, but then the whole city was full of workshops and small factories. It was hard to find a quiet backwater like Patchin Place.

  Mr. Goldblum looked tired and stooped. “You’re asking about Houdini, miss?”

  “I am. I know he wrote regular articles for your magazine. I have the latest edition but I wondered if there were any articles you’ve received from him that are not yet published.”

  “We have an edition going to press, even as we speak. You can hear the noise, no doubt.” He gave a tired smile. “And, yes, he has an article that will appear in that edition.”

  My hopes rose. “May I see it?”

  “It would still be down with the typesetters, but I expect I could retrieve it. But may I ask on whose authority you are here and what you hope to achieve?”

  “I’m here with the full backing of the Houdini family and the police,” I said, although this wasn’t quite true. In fact, Daniel had said in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t my case any longer, but Chief Wilkie and the Secret Service counted as police, didn’t they? “And as to what I hope to achieve—we can leave no stone unturned to find Mr. Houdini. It’s just possible that something he saw or did in Germany has put him into this current danger. Some kind of feud with another magician, maybe.”

  “I see.” He frowned. “I remember reading the article and it seemed perfectly harmless to me. But I’ll go and see if I can retrieve it for you. Anything to help Houdini’s family—and the police, of course.”

  He was gone quite a while. Nobody offered me a seat, and indeed there didn’t seem to be an extra chair in that outer office. The girl had gone back to her filing duties and nobody else appeared. At last Mr. Goldblum came up the stairs, huffing and puffing a bit.

  “Not as young as I used to be,” he said. “Here you are. Here is Houdini’s article, literally hot off the press.”

  I read it, my disappointment growing. It was little more than a list of which performers were touring the Continent from America and where Houdini himself would be playing when he returned. “And I expect to have some new tricks up my sleeve when I return,” he concluded. “There are some kinks to be worked out but I think you’ll all be suitably surprised and impressed.”

  The amazing underwater trick, I thought. He was going to perfect it. Was it unique enough to make someone kill him to get their hands on it? I handed the paper back to Mr. Goldblum.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing there that could help me,” I said. “I’ll have to try the other magazines he wrote for. Do you happen to know where Mahatma is headquartered?”

  “Up in Boston, I believe,” he said.

  That was a long way to go just for a magazine. I thanked him and was about to leave when a young man, his face and hands smudged with ink, came up the stairs.

  “Here you are, sir,” he said, and handed some papers to Goldblum. Goldblum smiled, then handed the booklet to me. “Here’s the entire new edition, with my compliments,” he said.

  I came out into the deep shadow of Pearl Street where tall buildings blotted out the sun and made my way though to the waterfront at the South Street Pier. I put down my bag, and stood for a while, watching the commerce on the East River, listening to the sounds of a busy dockland—the toot of tugboats and sirens of bigger ships coming in from a long ocean voyage mingled with the shouts of stevedores as they unloaded sacks of coffee, crates of bananas. Above these sounds came the squeals of small boys jumping off the docks into the cool water. At which of these docks had Houdini’s trunk washed up? I wondered. I should have asked Daniel, but then he’d only have reminded me that it wasn’t my case.

  I stared at the river, at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the almost completed East River Bridge and wondered exactly where his captors had dumped him into the river. It was always so busy, even at night when ships were unloaded by the glow of lamps as ships’ companies employed their own police forces to keep the merchandise safe. Why had nobody seen or heard the splash of something heavy being thrown in? Perhaps they had, but surely the police would have pursued this line of inquiry.

  I sat on a packing case, enjoying the rich, rank smell of the river and the cry of the gulls overhead, and looked through the magazine I had been given. I knew that sometimes Houdini wrote anonymously and even placed advertisements. And to my growing excitement I saw there was an article from “Our Berlin Correspondent, Herr N. Osey.”

  After a few lines of gossip about life in Berlin, I read a passage that caught my attention. “Expect an invasion of German talent on the New York scene in the near future. German magicians plan to take America by storm—just as Houdini and his like have become the darlings of Europe. Look out and prepare to be surprised by the amazing underwater escape trick.”

  I stood there, my heart beating very fast. There. Absolute proof that Houdini had written the article. But what did it mean? Could it possibly mean what I thought it might—that Germany was planning to invade New York soon? Not our enemies yet, Mr. Wilkie had said, but the Kaiser was ambitious and sought to expand his empire. That’s rubbish, I thought. They wouldn’t dare test the might of the United States. The sound of some kind of machinery across the river set my teeth on edge—the whine of metal cutting metal. I looked across at the Brooklyn shoreline. A large ship was out of the water in a dry dock and men were working on its hull. And at the back of the ship was something similar to the flower shape that Ha
rry Houdini had drawn on his underwater device. I stood and stared, trying to understand the implication of this. The strange bullet-shaped device, the motor, the hatch, the flower-shaped addition at the rear that obviously must propel it . . . It wasn’t an illusion at all. What this had to be saying was that Germany planned to attack using a new submarine that Houdini had witnessed when he toured German factories.

  Twenty-nine

  I had to let Mr. Wilkie know immediately. I could hardly breathe with excitement as I asked for directions to the nearest telegraph office. I expect the man behind the counter wondered why I was so agitated and spending all that money to send a message that said, “Thank you for birthday present. Your niece.”

  “I take it you won’t need to wait for a reply, miss,” he said in a bored sort of voice.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Mr. Wilkie had already instructed me that he would come to me and I didn’t think he’d risk naming a meeting place or time.

  “It must have been a very nice birthday present,” the clerk said, “when someone spends two dollars just to thank him for it. A nice uncle you’ve got there.”

  “Very generous,” I said frostily, because I could tell what he was hinting—that he was not my uncle but a very different sort of relation who had been showering me with gifts. Since I didn’t look like the kind of girl who had rich admirers, he was probably bemused by this. “The wire will be sent immediately, I take it?” I asked.

  “It has to wait its turn. If the line’s in use it may take a few minutes. It’s not that urgent, is it?”

  “Very urgent,” I said. “It has to reach my uncle before he sails to South America.”

  “Don’t you worry, miss. We’ll get it out to him,” he said in a patronizing way now. Maybe I was just overwrought but I had a desire to slap him. Instead I gave him a curt nod and stepped back out into the street. Why were men so insufferable when dealing with women?

  I found a church clock and checked the hour. Eleven thirty. That meant that even if Mr. Wilkie received my message instantly, he could not be in New York before five o’clock at the earliest. So I had some time to follow up on my other plan for the day, namely to find out what might have happened to the elusive Mr. Scarpelli and if he had really met a bad end, as the police believed. I wasn’t too keen about lugging that bag of books around for the rest of the day, but I didn’t have much choice. It was lucky that I’d grown up used to carrying sacks of potatoes and peat from the fields, wasn’t it?

  As I stood outside Miner’s Theatre I found that my stomach was clenched in fear. There was danger inside those doors. People had died there. I hesitated on the sidewalk while the stream of pedestrians flowed around me, and it occurred to me that someone connected to the theater had to be involved. Of course it would have taken an illusionist to pull off the switching trunks trick so smoothly, but someone had to know exactly where the trapdoor was on the stage. Someone had to be able to help move a body without being noticed. And a thought crossed my mind. Mr. Irving the theater manager. He was there all the time, standing on the stage right in front of that little door behind the curtains that led to the area below the stage. And the passage that led to his office was on that side of the stage as well. Wilkie’s man could have been lured into the office, stabbed, and then taken down below in a trunk.

  So did I really want to go back in there? I certainly wasn’t going to face Old Ted at the stage door again. He already thought I had ulterior motives and was up to no good. And to be honest, I didn’t want to find myself in the dark passages of backstage.

  “Come on. Don’t be such a ninny,” I said to myself. They only knew of me as Bess’s friend and Houdini’s fill-in assistant. What did I have to fear?

  I shook my head and stepped into the cool shade of the theater foyer. The box office was doing a lively trade for the matinee. People were pressing around the kiosk and I could hear excited whispers: “They’re not sold out already, are they?” “Do you think anything terrible’s going to happen this week?” “Did you hear there was a curse on this theater? Some are saying there’s a monster lurking in the basement.”

  I wondered if the new illusionist was as famous as Houdini, or if the reason all these people were here was merely that morbid human fascination with death. Did they want to see another girl sliced in half or another dead body roll from a trunk? Apparently they did. I hesitated, not sure whether to push past the throng and into the theater or not. As I waited I studied this week’s playbill. The new illusionist was called Stevie Summer and he too sported an impressive handlebar mustache. Was this a requirement of illusionists, I wondered? In which case why was Houdini clean shaven? I stared at the face again. There was something about the deep-set eyes that caught my attention. It was as if the face was set in a perpetual worried frown.

  “Wait a minute,” I muttered, and stepped into the far corner of the foyer where there was a gilt-and-velvet bench. I sat down and brought out the scrapbooks. I had seen those eyes, that worried scowl, I was sure of it. I thumbed hastily through the pages and, yes, there he was. It was a group photo taken onstage in Berlin. Houdini was standing front and center, looking rather pleased with himself, but right behind him, much taller and thinner, his face half obscured in shadow, was a man who looked remarkably like this Mr. Summer, only he was clean shaven. The article below was in German, of course, but I scanned through the words, hoping to find something familiar, and came across the word “Fommer.” Was that character an “F,” as I had previously decided, or an “S” in the German script? In which case was “Sommer” the German equivalent of “Summer”?

  I hurried to rejoin the throng around the ticket booth. I had to come to the matinee this afternoon and see this Mr. Summer for myself. As I was jostled forward toward the booth I wondered why I was so excited to find that Mr. Summer might also be Herr Sommer from the Berlin newspaper. Even if he was the same person, he hadn’t been at this theater last week. I supposed I could dare to pay a visit to the suspicious stage doorkeeper and ask if Mr. Summer had shown up in advance, but that would probably mean admitting that I was working for the Houdini family and that message could be passed along to unfriendly ears.

  The important thing, as far as I was concerned, was that I now had one tangible link between Houdini and Germany. The two men had stood close together on a stage not three months ago. And his name, in the German newspaper, was not Summer, but Sommer, which might suggest that he was of German origin. I calculated that I would have time to attend the matinee before Mr. Wilkie could possibly arrive in New York and make his way up to Houdini’s residence to find me. I reached the ticket booth only to hear the young man inside it saying to the person ahead of me. “All sold out now, I’m afraid. I can sell you a ticket for tomorrow, if you’d like.”

  “Forget it,” the woman snapped, and pushed past me angrily.

  I stepped up to the ticket booth. “So there is nothing at all left for this afternoon?” I asked.

  “Only a stage box with partially obscured vision,” he said, then translated in case I was particularly dense. “That means you might not see everything that’s going on all the time. Especially the acrobats.”

  “But it’s close to the stage, right?”

  “Almost on top of the orchestra,” he said. “You have to lean out a bit.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “It will cost you a dollar.”

  “A dollar? For a seat I have to lean out of to see anything?”

  “It’s a box, isn’t it? And box seats go for more.”

  I had no alternative. I paid the dollar, wondering as I did so whether I’d ever see any money from the Houdini family. But I did have the advance from Mr. Wilkie. And promise of more.

  “By the way,” I said. “That illusionist who was at the theater last week—Signor Scarpelli. Any idea where he was staying before he vanished? I need to get in touch with him.”

  The man laughed. “Doesn’t everybody? It seems he owes half of New York money. But
if the police can’t find him, then you’re not likely to either.”

  “So who would know his address?”

  “The manager, I suppose.”

  “So this manager—is he likely to be in his office at the moment?”

  The clerk shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you, miss. I just sit out front here and do my job. And a right busy job it’s been these last couple of weeks too. Sold out every performance since that first accident happened with Scarpelli.”

  “I’ll go and see if I can find the manager in his office then,” I said, sounding a lot braver than I felt. I pushed open the frosted glass swing doors and stood in the darkness and silence of the theater. Every step forward I took, I felt more reluctant. Did I really need to know where Scarpelli had taken rooms in New York? Was it at all relevant to Houdini’s disappearance? And surely the police must have searched his rooms most thoroughly. So was I putting myself in danger for nothing?

  I had to come up with a good, convincing lie. Why would I need Scarpelli’s address? Think, I commanded myself. Use your brain. But my brain refused to work. I went along the side aisle, up the steps, and pushed open the pass door. The backstage area was eerily quiet and shrouded props loomed like ghosts ahead of me. Mercifully, there was a small light on in the narrow hallway leading to the manager’s office and light shone from a half-open door. I tapped on the door nervously, then pushed it farther open and went in. The office was empty. I couldn’t believe my luck. Now all I had to do was to find some kind of file or card system that he kept on the performers. Of course it was possible that there was nothing of the kind in this little back office and that the circuit that owned this theater took care of all the booking arrangements, but surely a theater manager must be able to get in touch with his performers?

  The desktop was messy in the extreme, but seemed to be all random papers, plus a couple of ashtrays that needed emptying. I went to the filing cabinet on the wall and pulled out the top drawer. It contained financial statements and I didn’t feel comfortable going through them. I closed it again and tried the drawers below. The bottom drawer contained contracts. I found one for Scarpelli (alias Alfred Rosen), and noted that the address stated, “represented by Morgan Highfield management, 294 Broadway.”