The Linking Rings

by John Gaspard

  “The other point of interest,” he said, turning toward me, “was what they discovered while going through Borys’ effects. You know the zippered case he carried on his person, the one with his special blend of tea?”

  “I do,” I said, remembering how Angus Bishop had chided him about it and Borys’ explanation that he needed to safeguard his tea because other magicians keep pinching from his stash while he was on stage. “I saw him take a teabag out of it the night he died. He offered me one as well.”

  “And a good thing you didn’t accept the offer,” McHugh said with a grim smile. “Yes, well as it turns out, he had eleven teabags in the pouch when his body was found. The lab ran tests, and five of those teabags tested positive for poison.”

  I considered the implications of this. “So, it wasn’t the water that was poisoned, it was the teabag.”

  “Apparently.”

  “And whoever put the poisoned teabags into his pouch could have made the switch at any time. It wasn’t necessarily someone at Laurence Baxter’s house that night.”

  “Just so,” McHugh said. “It was a time-released murder, a trap set to go off at some undetermined but deadly point. So I’m hoping this new development will help to take some of the—I believe the word is heat—off of our Harry.”

  “That would be nice,” I agreed. “Regardless, though, don’t you think the deaths of two magicians in just three days of each other is sort of an odd coincidence?”

  McHugh shrugged. “I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who called coincidences ‘spiritual puns.’ That sounds suitably intellectual, although if pressed, I would have to confess I don’t entirely understand what he meant. Of course, he also said ‘The reason angels can fly is they take themselves lightly,’ which may be one of my favorite quotes of all time.”

  Since he appeared to be in a relatively chatty mood, I put a question to him I had been pondering since tracking him down the previous Sunday night as he led his popular Jack the Ripper walk.

  “How was it you and Harry met?” I said. “I mean, you’ve been friends for certainly as long as I can remember.”

  “Nearly as long as I can remember as well,” he said, setting his newspaper on the empty chair beside him. “It was years ago, of course. I was on the force and had just been promoted to Detective Inspector in the homicide division, a proud moment indeed. And one of the first cases I was assigned to was the death of Harry’s friend, Archie Banks.”

  “I thought it was a suicide,” I said, not understanding why this would involve the police, let alone someone from homicide.

  “Anything outside of natural causes triggers a police investigation,” McHugh explained. “Strictly routine in this case, as there was a detailed suicide note and no evidence of any possible cause of death but suicide. And since the note went into some detail about Mr. Banks’s dissatisfaction with his fellow magicians, Harry was one of the chaps I had to speak to.”

  “So you interviewed all these guys when they were younger?” I found the idea fascinating, trying to picture this venerable group as young up-and-comers.

  “I did indeed,” McHugh said with a smile. “Characters one and all, Harry being one of the most remarkable. Our thirty-minute interview turned into dinner and then an evening-long chat.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, he was fascinated with true crime at the time,” McHugh said.

  “He still is,” I said, thinking of the hours Harry had spent in deep conversation with my ex-wife, an assistant district attorney, about her current and past cases. He was so ardent in his fascination, she often chided me for not being as interested in her day-to-day work as my uncle. I was never sure if she was kidding or not, which was an ongoing issue, on many levels, in our short but combustible union.

  “And I’ve harbored a life-long fascination with magic and magicians,” McHugh continued. “Just loved it, always have, dating back to listening to The Piddingtons on BBC.” He looked to me, and my quick head shake told him I was in the dark on that one.

  “They were a married couple who performed a mentalism act on the radio,” he explained. “Big stuff at the time, quite sensational. An amazing couple—the things they got away with. Stunning. It’s amazing the tricks you can pull as a double act. Anyway, I found what Harry did to be enthralling, and he felt the same way about police work, and we quickly became fast friends.”

  “And where does Jack the Ripper come into all this?”

  McHugh laughed. “As with most significant occurrences in one’s life: unplanned and from out of nowhere. The short version is I was asked to speak on police procedures at a Jack the Ripper conference. I read some books before the presentation, just to have a basic understanding of the case. And then, before I realized it, I found myself digging through files at Scotland Yard and working out my own perspective on all the clues, real and imagined. There is some fine work being done in that field by exceptionally bright people. But there is also considerable chaff mixed in with the high-end wheat. So I eventually wrote my own book to set the record straight, as it were. And I’ve traveled around the world with it ever since. Of course, I did more of that after Cora died, as she didn’t care for traveling. More of a homebody Cora was.”

  He grew silent for a moment, and I successfully resisted the urge to fill the silence. He then sighed and looked over at me with a sad smile.

  “That was when I started the walking tour, which I did much more frequently back then, sometimes five nights a week. I guess it’s safe to say I found immersing myself into the world of Victorian London more comfortable than my present-day reality.”

  I nodded slowly. “And now, with these murders, we have our own Jack the Ripper to deal with.”

  McHugh shook his head and held up a hand. “No, I don’t think so. I believe all of Jack’s victims were truly random—crimes of opportunity, with the poor unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He glanced down the hall, and I followed his gaze. Harry and Wexler-Smith were slowly making their way toward us.

  McHugh turned to me and finished his thought. “These murders, if they are the work of a single person, are just as calculated and brutal, but they are also far more focused and, I think, actually quite personal.”

  With that, he got up and moved toward Harry and the solicitor. I considered what he had said about the personal nature of the murders and wondered if that might be the key clue to crack open the whole affair. Then I got up and followed him, anxious to hear how the police interview had gone.

  “Well, that was a complete waste of my time, and theirs,” Harry said, not for the first time in the past few minutes. We had said our goodbyes to McHugh at the police station and, with Harry acting as navigator, we were deep within the London subway system on our way back to Laurence Baxter’s house in Hampstead Heath.

  “So you said,” I responded. “McHugh said it was strictly routine.”

  “Strictly nonsensical, if you ask me,” he said with a shake of his head. “The same five questions as the last interview, just reworded and in a different order. This is us,” he added as he got up and headed toward the doors of the subway car.

  The train was just pulling into Charing Cross station, where—if I was understanding the quick itinerary Harry had spouted as we walked into the tube station—we would switch to the Northern Line. I couldn’t quite get the geography right in my head, but Harry did it with ease. He moved smoothly from line to line and always knew which train we were looking for and which one not to step into. He had already kept me from walking into two different express trains in the few days we had been here. Since then, he’d kept a close eye on me as we bustled our way through the busy stations.

  “Charing Cross,” he said suddenly, as if surprised by where the train had landed us. “We’re so close it would be silly not to take a quick detour and drop in on Davenport’s.”

  Davenport’s was a famed Londo
n magic store, much older than our own magic store in Minneapolis, which was a relatively new kid on the block in comparison. Although I didn’t know the particulars, my understanding was Davenport’s had been around since the Victorian era. As with everything else in London, Harry seemed to know exactly where it was, and so I did my best to keep up with him as he zigged and zagged his way through the underground maze that was Charing Cross station.

  “Word on the street is they have a set of the linking rings used by Ching Ling Foo in the early 1900s. I’ve always wanted to take a peek at them.” Talking about the magic props clearly excited Harry because the more he talked, the faster he walked.

  “Is it wrong of me to say I’ve always found the Linking Rings, I don’t know…” I said, looking for the right word. “Sort of boring?”

  This comment produced a raised eyebrow from Harry but did nothing to break his stride.

  “Wrong to say it?” he repeated as we turned another corner. Charing Cross station seemed to be structured like an octopus, with arms heading out in several directions. “No, not wrong. You just have never seen it done right, apparently. When we get home, I’ll show you a video of Jay Marshall, simply a classic version. Tina Lenert has a lovely new take on the illusion. And Mike Caveny turned the whole routine on its head by using clothes hangers.” He looked over at me and smiled, happy to be back in mentor mode. “Eli, like a lot of supposedly ‘boring’ magic tricks, if you can get it into the hands of the right people, it becomes new and amazing and a thing of beauty.”

  We turned one more corner, and Harry let out a small yelp of victory.

  “There it is, just where I left it,” Harry said with a laugh. We passed several other small establishments in this bizarre, nearly deserted underground shopping mall and then pushed open the glass door to Davenport’s magic store.

  As we stepped inside I realized that although I had spent the better part of my life in a magic store, I had actually been in remarkably few other magic stores. Consequently, the feeling as I entered Davenport’s was an odd sense of déjà vu, where everything felt simultaneously familiar and completely foreign. It was like we had been transported into an alternate universe in which all the elements of our store had been shaken up and reassembled by a stranger. The store was smaller than our shop, but they had many of the same tricks, props, and posters we did. However, enough of the elements were different to make the overall effect a bit mind-boggling.

  Harry, of course, felt none of this and had immediately approached a clerk behind the counter.

  “I understand you have a set of linking rings used by Ching Ling Foo,” Harry said. “Since we were in the neighborhood, I thought I would stop by and see if it was possible to take a look at them.”

  This seemed to be news to the clerk, who was obscured from my view by Harry. After rephrasing his original question several times, it finally became clear the answer would be found with a higher authority, and so the manager was summoned. While this transpired, I busied myself looking at the products in the glass cases, more curious about how the merchandise had been laid out for presentation rather than what they were selling.

  For years, Harry and I had been waging a silent war in our shop. The skirmishes all involved the proper method for displaying magic tricks. Harry preferred, in my opinion, to jam the cases so full of products it became a jumbled mess. My preference was a more spare presentational style, which I felt helped to feature each illusion and make it stand out. In Harry’s mind, this made it look like we didn’t have any products to sell, and so he would quickly restock the display as soon as my back was turned. It was an ongoing and ultimately unwinnable battle, with both sides convinced they were fighting on the side of the angels.

  Soon the manager arrived, recognized Harry immediately, and quickly ushered him into the back room for a special viewing of the century-old metal ring set. As I moved my inspection from one display case to the next, I glanced up and realized I knew the clerk behind the counter. He saw me at the same time, and we both studied each other, briefly puzzled as to how we knew one another.

  “You’re Eli Marks, I met you the other night at The Magic Circle,” he finally said before I came to the exact same, albeit tardy, conclusion.

  “That’s right. And you are...Lee,” I said, taking a stab in the dark. I mentally acknowledged the irony of this phrase, as he had been the stagehand who had moved the deadly chair to center stage. But my first memory of him had been his dazzling display with cards.

  “Liam,” he corrected. “Liam Sutherland.”

  “Yes, you were doing the...the thing with the cards,” I finally said, not sure how to describe the acrobatics he had put the deck through.

  “Cardistry,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cardistry,” he repeated. “I’m a cardist.”

  “A cardist?”

  “I specialize in card flourishes,” he explained. He picked up a deck of cards from the counter and quickly demonstrated a series of fans and one-handed cuts, essentially juggling the cards in the air in front of me. “You’ve seen this sort of thing before, right?”

  “I have, I just didn’t know it had a name beyond calling it card flourishing,” I said, getting a little hypnotized as the cards danced in front of my eyes.

  “Oh, it’s the next big thing, mate,” he said as he concluded what I had to assume was a presentation which had taken him months, or maybe even years, to master.

  “Is there a lot of call for that here?” I asked, looking around the shop at all the traditional magic illusions on display.

  “Sadly, not so much,” he admitted as he slid the deck of cards back into its box. “I spend my days demonstrating Svengali decks and self-working Three Card Monte routines to the tourist trade and geeky kids.”

  “You don’t get to demonstrate anything other than cards?” I asked, looking at all the fun options around the room. He shook his head, rolling his eyes at the other effects.

  “I’m a card man,” he said with finality that seemed premature, as he probably wasn’t yet even eighteen. “I don’t bother with that other twaddle.”

  “Okay, card man,” I said, glancing at the door to the backroom and realizing it was likely Harry would not return for a while yet. Since I was in a rare competitive situation, I figured I should use the time constructively and pick up whatever selling tips I could. “What’s your favorite card trick to demonstrate?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, reaching into the display case for a deck of cards. “Hands down, this is my favorite. It’s a killer, a mind-blower.”

  “Will it fool me badly?” I added, using a favorite phrase among magicians, who are never merely fooled but only “fooled badly.” He nodded in rabid agreement as he pulled the deck from its pack.

  “Let me ask you this, mate,” he said, and I recognized the practiced tone and cadence of the opening phrases of well-worn patter. “I’ve always believed there is a real connection between cards and dogs.

  “For example,” he continued, looking up at me and clearly not recognizing the growing look of dismay on my face, “Dogs travel in packs and so do cards. Dogs do tricks and so do cards. And there are those who say dogs pick their owners, and I believe the same is true of cards. So, go ahead, pick a card, whichever card you’d like.”

  He had spread the deck, face up, toward me, gesturing that I could pick from any of the visible cards for my selection. I gamely reached out and pulled a card from the spread.

  Liam then proceeded to perform my Ambitious Dog routine, virtually word-for-word the way I had done it for years—long before I demonstrated it to Jake North at our fifteenth high-school reunion. He showed me how I had picked the only blue card in a red-backed deck and then walked me through the sequence where the magician helps the spectator attempt to get the card to change back to its original color. When that didn’t work, he revealed that—because my ca
rd was the leader of the pack—the entire deck had instead changed color.

  From there, he took me through each of the other phases in my routine, finally concluding with the card doing its final trick—like a dog, this card could roll over—revealing it was now the only reversed card in the deck. He looked up at me, waiting for the enthusiastic response he was sure was coming.

  “That’s...that’s, um, great,” I said as I tried to come up with the right words. “Did you see that on TV the other night?” I continued, trying to take all the stress out of my voice. I don’t think I succeeded. “I mean, you saw it on TV, right?”

  Liam shook his head, puzzled either by my stammering questions or my complete lack of amazement at what was clearly a stunning card trick.

  “No, never saw it on the telly,” he said, trying to read my expression—which I guessed was an odd mix of rapidly changing emotions. “Bloke taught it at a magic lecture a couple weeks back. Brilliant trick, dead simple to do, been getting great reactions here in the store.”

  “I see, I see,” I said, trying for casual nonchalance in my efforts to extract information out of the kid. “So someone taught it at a lecture. Who did he attribute the trick to, if you remember?” I tried to make this last question sound off-hand, but I don’t think Liam was paying particularly close attention to my tone.

  “He didn’t credit anyone. The impression I got was it was his own trick. Really a nice piece of work. Let me see, I have his lecture notes here somewhere,” Liam said as he turned and opened one of the drawers in the large cabinet behind him. “He demonstrated it and sold it and the gimmick at the end of the lecture. You know how they do.”

  I nodded, because I did know that. I knew lecturing magicians often sold the tricks they demonstrated, along with the gaffs and gimmicks that made the tricks work.