by Alan Russell
On the third try I did my best Ali Baba and said, “Open sesame.” This time the owl’s eyes flashed red, and the passageway opened.
Every kid in the world wants a house with a secret passageway. Adults want them too, but they usually settle for a walk-in closet or a kitchen with an island.
“I was just testing the bird,” I said to the hostess, who was pretending to look interested.
I followed the red carpeting forward and was beckoned inside by piano music. The pianist was said to be Irma, a ghost who likes tickling the ivories. Irma has kept up with the times; her repertoire includes modern selections, but at the moment she was doing ragtime. This time I didn’t stop in Irma’s Room to call out a request or sit down for a cold one at the antique bar that formerly served a London pub, but continued walking. Posters and playbills lined the walls, showcasing magicians of the past. Judging from the old photographs, bad makeup isn’t a recent invention.
Having never visited the Houdini See Room, I looked for signs pointing out the way. That’s when I became aware of all the eyes peering at me. Owls of all shapes, sizes, and materials are perched throughout the Magic Castle. I am okay with owls, but I could have used less in the way of who, and more in the way of where to find the meeting spot.
As it turned out, the Houdini See Room was on the second floor. Since I was a few minutes early, I had time to tour the unoccupied room. The area wasn’t large, maybe five hundred square feet, which explained why it wasn’t used for everyday shows. Along the walls were exhibits that offered a look back at the life of Harry Houdini. The displays showed handcuffs, straightjackets, shackles, and pictures of Houdini’s death-defying escapes. Even Harry wasn’t perfect, though, as the room also had on display the only set of handcuffs ever said to have foiled the legendary escape artist.
“Detective Gideon?”
The voice was overloud; a stage voice. Most people aren’t able to sneak up on me. I turned around and saw a man in a black shirt and suit who wasn’t Johnny Cash. His dyed ebony hair made it difficult to gauge his age, but he was at least forty.
“Dr. Inferno, I presume? Or do you prefer Isaac?”
“Please call me Dante, or better yet, Dr. Inferno. It’s a name that pleases my mother to no end. Nowadays she goes around saying, ‘My son, the doctor.’ ”
The line, I was sure, was part of his act. He seemed to acknowledge that by saying, “If you don’t mind, I will be practicing different parts of my performance as we speak.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
If I’d been smart, I might have asked him about that performance before agreeing to be audience to it.
“I’m a bit of a Houdini buff,” he said, “so I thought this would be a good place for us to talk.”
He gestured to a green felt table, the kind where cards are dealt, and we both sat down.
“They use this room for small dinner parties where they occasionally have séances,” he said. “One of Houdini’s great passions was debunking mediums. He pursued it vigorously. Some might even say fanatically.”
“Why? Was it personal for him?”
With a nod, Dr. Inferno said, “I think it was. In Houdini’s day spiritualism was very popular, and every city had its mediums who claimed to be able to contact the dead. Some of those mediums were quite the celebrities. Houdini probably didn’t like that. He was never one to want to share the limelight. But it was the death of his mother that caused him to take a close look at spiritualists. Being a bit of a mama’s boy, Houdini hoped to be able to communicate with his mother in the great beyond, but he didn’t let his grief get in the way of his judgment. When he realized that mediums were merely preying on the vulnerable and that their supposed communication with the dead was nothing more than parlor tricks, Houdini became an avenging angel and began exposing the tricks of their trade.”
“Houdini probably would have been a good detective.”
“As they say, it takes a thief. You might even argue that Houdini had a criminal mind, as he loved tricking people. He would have made a great mastermind in one of those locked door mysteries.”
Dr. Inferno pointed to a display. “At the New York Hippodrome in 1918, Houdini made a five-ton elephant named Jennie disappear in front of thousands of people. Of course Houdini claimed it was a ten-ton elephant.”
“What are a few tons among friends?”
“Mere peanuts,” he agreed.
“Care to tell me how Harry did it?”
“Let’s ask him, shall we?”
“Are we going to hold a séance?”
“More of a channeling,” he said.
A magician’s wand suddenly appeared in Dr. Inferno’s hand. I was okay with his sleight of hand, but not with what happened next. A ball of flame shot out of his wand and went at least ten feet into the air. I jumped about that high myself and almost overturned the table.
Dr. Inferno wasn’t done with playing with fire. He was juggling a fireball from one hand to the other. Not content to keep the exhibition outside of his body, he appeared to move the ball of fire through his stomach and then out his back, and then reversed the route. With a final hard yank, he pulled the flame out of his chest. There was a loud bang and a bright flash, and the fire was extinguished.
“If you were a beautiful young woman,” the magician told me, “I would have turned the ball of fire into a rose and presented it to you with the words ‘I’m carrying a torch for you.’ ”
“I came close to presenting you with something as well, but not a rose.”
He caught my drift—so to speak—but wasn’t quite penitent about it. “Distractions are part of every illusion, Detective. They are but one of the elephants in the room.”
“What are some of the others?”
“Illusionists utilize a variety of techniques. To achieve their goals, they use optical, mechanical, and psychological means. Magicians exploit deficits in our vision and brain. Our everyday perception employs all sorts of shortcuts, and the performer knows how to produce a temporary blindness, if you will. Cognitive illusion can be induced by misdirection, distraction, and sleight of hand. A flash of light—my favorite technique—is a perfect way to distract. My comedy is also a distraction. A laughing audience is inattentive to many things. And you can never forget about the man in the audience.”
“What man?”
“The stooge, the shill, the plant,” he said. “The person in plain sight, or in the wings, whom no one recognizes for what he is; the man sitting in the audience who might be gathering information for the performer, or who makes you look one way when you should be looking another.”
“There are lots of things to look for.”
“Too many,” said Dr. Inferno. “That’s what the illusionist counts on.”
“Speaking of the Wizard of Oz,” I said, “what can you tell me about Drew Corde?”
“That’s not his only nickname. In the defense industry some also call him the Prince of Darkness.”
“Do you know Corde?”
The doctor shook his head and said, “Not personally, but I know those who have worked with him and dealt with him.”
“What’s the scuttlebutt?”
“He’s brilliant. He’s arrogant. He’s a genius. He’s an evil genius. He’s ruthless. He plays to win. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and he might be right in that. The defense industry is the perfect business for him because he believes that business is war and you should take no prisoners.”
“You wouldn’t be surprised if he used unethical means to procure governmental contracts?”
“I would be surprised if he didn’t.”
“Do you think illegally monitoring conversations and conducting surveillances would be among his bag of tricks?”
“OZ has both a public product line, and a not-so-public one. Those who are in the spycraft business do not e
xactly advertise their trade.”
“I know their public product line features two different UAVs,” I said, “the Dumbledore and the WWW, the Wasp Warhead Weapon.”
“The rumor is that the WWW was originally called the Wicked Witch of the West, but sales came up with the acceptable acronym of the Wasp Warhead Weapon.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t call it the Flying Monkey.”
“OZ marketed the WWW as a cheaper alternative to the Predator and the Hellfire Missiles it fires. At a cost of only thirty thousand dollars apiece, the Wasp Missiles are half the price of a Hellfire.”
“What a bargain,” I said. “You mentioned the not-so-public offerings of OZ. What else do they make?”
“For years there’s been talk about a drone mostly referred to as the Specter.”
“What’s special about it?”
“The word on the street is that it has stealth capabilities; it’s a UAV undetectable to radar.”
“It sounds like the perfect tool for spies and voyeurs,” I said. “Maybe that’s what was used on me.”
I told him about the recording made of Lisbet and me; the doctor wasn’t convinced it was the smoking gun that I made it out to be.
“The Specter might be a good tracking instrument, as are so many drones, but making that kind of recording would be problematic. Drones aren’t designed for close-up monitoring. Their optical systems allow for great camera surveillance, but they make too much noise to provide good audio.”
I wondered if the Specter had found a way to muffle its sounds. The recording of Lisbet and me might not have been acoustically perfect, but no one was going to mistake what was going on.
“You can be your own Q these days,” said Dr. Inferno, referencing the eccentric scientist in the 007 films. “Just go to any hobby store. There are plenty of UAVs you can buy off the shelf. Add a Smartphone as a camera, and control your flight patterns with a notebook or tablet, and you can be Bond, James Bond.”
Dr. Inferno began to shuffle cards. From the way he manipulated the deck, I knew I wouldn’t want to play poker with him. “I’ve always been what they call a comic magician. My act is interspersed with one-liners. Around five years ago I started playing with fire.”
“Didn’t your mother warn you not to play with matches?”
“I guess I had a burning ambition to perform.”
On cue, a card flared up. I tried not to react like the Scarecrow. Dr. Inferno displayed the flaming card, and then made it disappear.
“It’s my job to amaze the audiences, and make them laugh.”
“That’s the same thing I try and do.”
“Detective,” he said, “you’re so boring you can’t even entertain a doubt.”
It was a line he probably used on hecklers. I tried to think up a rejoinder, but the doctor was already on a roll. “Detective, you’re nobody’s fool, but don’t give up hope. Perhaps someone will adopt you.”
I did the best rim shot possible with my fingers and then tried to steer him away from his act.
“I am working a case where there was a witness to some unusual goings-on,” I said. “My witness noticed moving lights in the sky and speculated there was some kind of triangulation going on involving the tracking of an object. While observing this, my witness said there was this huge burst of light that caused all the hair on his body to stand up.”
“A hair-raising experience,” said the doctor.
“Got anything besides a bad pun?”
“If his hair really did stand up, that suggests some kind of electrical weapon was brought into play.”
“Are you talking about a directed energy weapon?”
He shrugged. “It’s possible. Or it could have been something else entirely. What kind of flash of light are we talking about?”
“He described it as a detonation. It was of a magnitude that he was blinded for a minute or two. When his eyesight returned, he saw what he thought was an angel bleeding out light on an alleyway below where he was.”
Dr. Inferno stared at me. His finger scratched at the table, signaling me as if I were a blackjack dealer: Hit me.
“Three surveillance cameras were aimed at the alley where he said he saw the angel. During the time in question, all of the footage on those cameras was somehow disabled. Someone suggested a dazzler might have been used to accomplish this.”
The doctor shook his head. “It’s more likely the surveillance optics of the cameras were overloaded by mechanical and electronic jamming.”
“You have a scientific explanation for the angel as well?”
He shrugged. “It’s possible your witness was looking at a bogey.”
“I assume you’re not talking golf.”
“Fighter pilots refer to unidentified aircraft or objects as bogeys. Our angel might have been a specialized image being tracked down by UAVs.”
“You’re saying the angel could have been a projection?”
“Think of it in these terms: your witness might have seen the end result of a military-sized version of laser tag. The projection, or hologram, might have been equipped with an electronic kill target.”
“Have you heard of such a thing?”
“Not specifically,” he said, “but there is a long history of drones being sent off to dispatch specific targets. Various versions of the Chukar, which was named after a partridge, have been around for a long time. The Chukar was designed as an aerial target and is used in missile training exercises. When a drone brings down a Chukar, the pilots like to say they’ve bagged their bird.”
“You think the angel was part of a very elaborate video game?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case. The military hasn’t had an easy time retaining drone pilots. Their quit rate is three times that of manned pilots. Would you rather be a fighter jock experiencing the thrill of ten g’s, or a drone pilot staring at a computer screen and moving around a joystick on a twelve-hour surveillance mission? Drone work, for the most part, is dull. But if you can attract gamers and make drone piloting feel more like a game, you might be able to retain those pilots.”
“And you think this angel might have been part of their gaming?”
“It’s possible.”
“Why wouldn’t Corde have said anything about that?”
“Companies like to keep their secrets. Maybe OZ is planning on putting out a UAV simulation. Or maybe that’s the kind of program that’s not politically correct, and they’d be worried about a corporate black eye.”
“Are there any rumors about OZ drones being designed to perform assassinations?”
“I haven’t heard that kind of talk,” he said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that were the case.”
“Brave new world,” I said.
“You can’t imagine how happy I was going from the war business to show business,” he said.
Dr. Inferno stretched forward slightly, opened his hands, and showed me a cigarette and a box of matches. “Do you mind?”
“They’re your lungs.”
“I don’t smoke, except in my act.”
He did imaginary scales with his cigarette hand, and the cancer stick vanished from sight. Then he lit a match, and it disappeared in front of my eyes.
“Up your sleeves,” I said.
He took up his black jacket, rolled up his dark sleeves, and lit another match, which also vanished.
“It’s in your hand somewhere.”
He extended his hand my way and let me see that nothing was there, then stretched that hand behind my ear and came away with both flaming matches. I tried to mask my discomfort as Dr. Inferno continued playing with fire. He inhaled the matches, which seemed to extinguish them, but then he exhaled a stream of fire and they were alight again.
With a voice I hoped didn’t reveal how I was feeling, I said,
“I’m afraid I didn’t bring marshmallows.”
“What a shame.”
I didn’t clap, afraid that it might encourage him. I didn’t clap, afraid that he might see my trembling hands.
And then someone started talking, but it wasn’t either Dr. Inferno or me. It took both of us a moment to realize what we were hearing. One of the attractions in the room was a facsimile of Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder recording device that had captured Houdini’s voice. It was Houdini who was talking.
“Interesting,” said Dr. Inferno. “I think our séance worked. Houdini told his wife that he would try to contact her after his death, but that was one feat with which he apparently didn’t meet with success.”
“It would have been a hell of an encore.”
“Whenever I perform at the Magic Castle, I usually walk over and visit Houdini’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“Houdini did several films.”
“The special effects must have been great.”
“Surprisingly not,” he said. “Houdini believed in doing his own stunts. In those old, silent films, Houdini really performed his own wing walking on a flying airplane, as well as other death-defying acts. The public wasn’t very impressed. They preferred the fantasy and drama of special effects as opposed to the sweat and blood of the real thing.”
“I wish I was surprised by that.”
I thanked Dr. Inferno for his help and reached out to shake his hand. I suppose I should have expected to find something palmed in his hand. The object was transferred over to me. The box of matches displayed a picture of Dr. Inferno tossing a fireball; on the back of the box were his telephone number, his Facebook page, and his website.
“I perform at just about every kind of occasion.”
“You do funerals?”
“I’m especially good at cremations.”
I decided to leave before the good doctor got it in his mind to give me a hotfoot.
“You’ve been a great audience,” he said.
