The Last Illusion

“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 Harry 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.”