Inside the federal prison in the district of Washington, Bess awaited the outcome of Harry’s latest stunt. The warden’s tiny office was crammed with a dozen deputies, police officials, and reporters.
Warden Harris had been skeptical of Bess’s presence. “This prison is no place for a lady,” he had explained to Harry, and it had taken some convincing to allow her inside.
It amused Bess that in the course of only a year she had become “a lady.” It had not been very long ago that they had happily slept in hotel rooms crawling with bedbugs and washed in basins stained red with rust. But Harry’s notoriety in Europe and Russia had found its way back to America, and after fifteen months overseas, far longer than they had anticipated, he was invited to open in New York’s Colonial Theatre. Bess assisted him during his act, which began with a new stunt he had perfected, in which he swallowed a packet of needles followed by a few yards of string, then proceeded to remove the items from his mouth, with the needles threaded onto the string. It was a trick he had come across, like many, in an old book of magic in a Paris antiques store.
She dressed like a lady now, too. She shopped the fur and fine dress floors at Macy’s and had the boxes delivered directly to their new home on West 113th Street. She purchased haute couture from Paris and wore it to the racetrack in Saratoga, where American designers often hired models to show off their latest designs. In their new home, Harry installed a massive eight-foot mirror in his bathroom, where he practiced his sleight-of-hand tricks, and an even larger tub to practice his underwater breathing techniques.
The United States Jail in Washington was an enormous stone fortress. Getting inside the gates alone had taken twenty minutes. Now Bess, Harry, and ten reporters filed down the hallway and stood with the warden before Cell No. 2 on Murderers’ Row. There were seventeen cells in the wing, all of them occupied, and the cheers and shouts of the inmates were deafening.
“This is the cell that held Charles Guiteau after he assassinated President Garfield,” the warden explained. He gestured toward a heavily reinforced square room with brick walls and a thick combination lock securing the iron door. “The door has been dug three feet into the earth to fortify it.”
“But—it’s occupied!” Bess said. Shaking in the corner of the cell was a large black man with his knees drawn to his chest. He looked terrified.
“Mr. Houdini will be safe, won’t he?” Harry’s press agent, Whitman Osgood, asked the warden. Per the agreement, Harry would be left alone, except for the prisoners, to attempt his escape. Harry laughed. “Whit, I’m the one who asked to do this trick.”
“In an empty cell,” his agent argued.
“We never specified that.”
“Harry, it was assumed.”
Every prisoner housed in this wing was surely a murderer, but Bess felt a wave of compassion for the man in the cell. Everyone was staring at him. “It’s all right,” she told him. “It’s just Harry Houdini. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”
“Houdini!” a man called from down the row. “Let us out!”
“We’ll have to search you, of course,” the warden told Harry. “If you choose to go forward, that is?”
“I would expect no less,” Harry replied. He began taking off his shoes and socks. “And yes, I’m going to go on as planned.”
The warden cleared his throat and looked at Harry’s press agent. “Mr. Osgood. I believe it would be prudent for Mrs. Houdini to retreat to the office at this time?”
Bess burst out laughing. “Trust me, Mr. Harris. I’ve seen my husband naked many times before.”
Harry smiled, embarrassed. “Of course you have, dear, but it’s probably best to wait for me there. Or should they handcuff you and lead you off?”
“It’s all right, I’ll go willingly,” she said. She felt the color rush to her cheeks. She was proud of Harry, certainly, but since their trip to Europe it had become clear that he would have more success performing on his own, for exactly such a reason. Many of his escapes required him to expose himself completely to assert the authenticity of the trick. A fully dressed lady beside him, concealing whatever tools a dress might hide, would only discredit her husband.
Bess was escorted to the office and took a seat by the window, where she sipped her tea and listened to the skeptical chatter of the prison guards.
“Do you really think he’ll pull it off today?” one of them asked her.
“Of course.”
The guard shook his head. He was a heavyset man with a thick head of hair. “I’ve been working here for fifteen years. It’s impossible. I’m telling you—”
“But he did escape from Scotland Yard,” one of them interrupted.
“Those good-for-nothin’ Brits.” The heavy guard shook his head. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Guiteau was hanged here, wasn’t he?” Bess asked. “Do things like that ever make you think the place is haunted?”
“I’ve seen all kinds of strange things here,” the guard said. “Things you wouldn’t believe.”