The Last Illusion

I tried the drawer in the dressing table. And then I went through the pockets in the jacket. All they contained was a card: the nine of spades. I smiled to myself. Then I noticed that the waste basket hadn’t been emptied. I sorted through cotton wool caked with vanishing cream and makeup, an empty tonic bottle, and then I hit pay dirt. An envelope, addressed to Mr. Harry Houdini, 178 E. 102 Street, New York.

Having had such a stroke of luck, I looked inside to see if perhaps it might have contained something useful like a threatening letter from a gangster—but it was empty. No matter. I had achieved my purpose and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I made my exit from the theater without being detected. There was still a vociferous crowd around the ticket kiosk and I pitied the person inside it.

From the Bowery I took the Third Avenue El, traveling north. It felt as if I were traveling to the ends of the earth, stuck in that hot, crowded compartment with frequent stops and plenty of jostling and shoving. On the way I had time to think about what had happened to Bess and why. I had overheard something that had sounded very much like a threat last night at the theater, when Houdini had told the young man that he was going to hand over something only to his boss. And now today Ted had told me that someone called Risey, who was a big man on Coney Island, had been humiliated by Houdini and had vowed to get even. I knew how New York gangsters bore a grudge and what kind of thing they might do to get even. So Bess had been quite right in her suspicions and had almost paid with her life. If an ax hadn’t been nearby, it would have been too late for her.

We crawled northward painfully slowly until finally I alighted at Ninety-ninth Street station. It wasn’t a part of the city with which I was familiar and I was interested to see it had the same distinctly Jewish feel to it as the streets of the Lower East Side but without the pushcarts, cacophony of sounds, and ripe smells. I heard Russian and Yiddish spoken and passed a synagogue where old bearded men in black caps stood on the steps in heated conversation with a lot of hand gestures.

The house the Houdinis had rented was nothing fancy—a modest brownstone on a quiet street. Children were playing jump rope on the other side, chanting the same sort of rhymes that we had chanted back in Ireland. This made me wonder whether the Houdinis had any children or, more to the point, whether Bess’s nervous condition and collapse might be due to pregnancy. I tapped on the front door and waited.

It was opened by a gaunt-faced old woman. “Ja?” she demanded, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Is this the residence of Mr. Harry Houdini?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly. Then she said in heavily accented English. “Not here.”

“Do you know where I might find him?” I asked. “It’s Mrs. Houdini I wanted to see. I’m a friend of hers, and I was very upset when I heard what happened to her last night at the theater. I wanted to make sure she was all right.”

“Theo?” the old woman turned back and called into the passage, and then rattled off something in a language I couldn’t understand.

A young man appeared behind her. At first I thought it was Houdini, then I saw that although the resemblance was striking, this man was younger and bigger.

“Can I help you, miss?” he asked, his hand folded defiantly across a massive chest.

I repeated my request. “I know Bess would want to see me,” I added.

He frowned at me. “I never heard her mention your name,” he said. “I’m Harry’s brother’s Theo. They call me Dash, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you—seeing that you’re such a good friend of Bess’s?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. And something I had recently read in a newspaper popped into my head. “You were part of the act, weren’t you?”

It was a lucky stab in the dark but he nodded. “Yes, it used to be Harry and I who performed the Metamorphosis, but I was glad to hand it over to Bess. I didn’t fit into that trunk so good.”

“I can see that.” I smiled and so did he.

“Lucky for me, you could say,” he said, his smile fading. “That might have been me trapped in there last night and I used to fit in that trunk so tight there was no room to breathe to begin with. I’d have been a goner.”

“I was there, watching from the wings. It was frightening,” I said.

“I don’t know what could have gone wrong.” Theo frowned. “That ain’t never happened before. Harry’s always so careful to double-check the equipment. And of course it would have to be Bess who got stuck in there. She panicked, of course. That makes it worse.”

“I hope she’s fully recovered,” I said. “Is she resting or can she receive a guest?”

“She’s not here,” Theo said, staring at me, unblinking.

“Can you tell me where she is?”

Theo shook his head. “Some doc’s got her under sedation. She was in a bad way last night. Harry was real worried about her.”

“Is your brother here or is he with her?”