Harry, his white shirt miraculously undirtied, proceeded to unwind the rope from around the trunk and open the latch. Inside, emerging somehow from the cloth sack, also unrumpled, was Dash.
The audience cheered. “Bravo!” Doll called, getting to her feet. From the stage, Dash noticed them and smiled. Bess was impressed and curious. It had been a matter of only a few minutes since Harry himself had been tied up in that sack. How could he have managed to get himself out, and Dash in, so quickly?
Then, from the back of the theater, a voice broke out. “Youse a bunch of fakers!” someone cried. The crowd parted to reveal a scowling, gray-haired man with his fists in the air. “I know fakers when I sees them, and youse two are some fakers!”
Onstage, Dash and Harry looked at each other. “I beg to differ with you, sir,” Harry said, and the audience laughed.
“What you have here is a fake box, and I’m gonna show this thing up,” the man cried.
“Do it!” someone else called. “Go up there and do it!”
Bess felt sorry for the Houdinis. She wished she could save them. She saw Dash wince, and she looked at Doll. “Those poor boys. He’s ruining their act.” But neither brother seemed the least bit flustered.
The man made his way up to the stage, cheered by the audience, and when he arrived he stood face-to-face with Harry and Dash, his cheeks flaming red.
“I can get myself outta that cheap box,” he announced. “I been doin’ acts for thirty years, and you’re dirtyin’ the stage with your fake tricks.”
“Please,” Harry said, motioning toward the trunk still sitting in the middle of the stage. The audience laughed again, nervously this time.
The man climbed inside the sack and pulled it up to his shoulders and then over his head, still muttering to himself. When he was completely enclosed, Harry tied the sack and helped him kneel down inside the trunk. Dash closed the latch and locked it, then pulled the curtain around the trunk, and Harry and Dash sat down on the edge of the stage to wait, their legs dangling just above the floor.
For the first few minutes everyone was quiet; Bess was not quite sure whether they were rooting for the old man or for the Houdinis; it would make for an unexpected show either way. By the start of the third minute, the crowd began to murmur.
Doll looked at Bess and beamed. “Dash promised a riot, didn’t he? I’ll tell you what, this is wonderful fun. I wonder how long he’ll stay in there.”
Bess wasn’t so sure. By the fifth minute it was becoming apparent that something was wrong. The crowd was restless, and some people were beginning to boo. Harry stood up from his seat at the corner of the stage and held up his hand.
As the voices died down, the muffled cries behind the curtain became louder. Someone on the other side was calling for help. Dash jumped to his feet, and he and Harry yanked the curtain aside to reveal the trunk, still roped shut. Dash sliced the ropes, and together the brothers helped pull the man, still inside the sack, from the confinement of the trunk. He was writhing inside the cloth, and when they untied it and the fabric fell to his feet, he stood for a moment in the middle of the stage, his body damp with perspiration, and then collapsed on the floor.
The crowd cheered.
The brothers had promised to meet them at the stage door a half hour after the show. Doll begged Bess to go back to their room so she could change. “I hate this skirt.” She tugged at the coarse blue fabric. “I should have worn the red.”
“Won’t Anna be mad when she sees you brought me instead of her?”
“Nah.” Doll shrugged. “She’s got a beau of her own tonight anyway.”
Bess smiled, but she knew why Doll had asked her instead of Anna. Of the three of them, Bess was the plainest; she had the smallest bust and the cruelest shape. Anna, on the other hand, with her corn-blond hair and pillowed cheeks, was the principal among them, and always took the middle spot when they sang.
They lived, with most of the other performers, in West Brighton, in a neighborhood nicknamed the Gut. The rough half a dozen blocks were crammed with shanties, beer halls, and cabarets. The three of them lived in a cheap hotel alongside chorus girls who danced in the bars and hustled customers by slipping hydrate of chloral into their drinks and stealing their wallets. It was Bess’s dream to one day earn enough to stay in the Brighton Beach Hotel, with its white veranda and geranium-lined walkways.