Carter Beats the Devil (69 page)

“Yes,” Carter said, “very uplifting. There’s something else to change. What is it? Ah, the bullet catching, of course. We’re cutting that.”

When he said this, he saw Ledocq frowning at him, but he also heard a single pair of hands clapping and a familiar voice crying “Hoo-ray.” Phoebe was sitting in a chair, half-hidden by curtains. “You kept your promise,” she said.

The prop man went to the table upon which were laid the loads of flowers, the silks, the bird cages, and such, and he segregated the pistols onto a shelf for the items to be cut.

“Anything else?”

“The ending,” Ledocq said.

“Ah, yes,” Carter replied. “Is my jacket ready yet?” The seamstress shook her head.

“Might I go now, boss?” Albert stretched his arms. “I feel like using up that
flash paper
.” He smiled at Ledocq.

“Albert, that is volatile flash paper,” Ledocq sighed. “I have told you this more than once. Are you juggling the torches?” Albert nodded enthusiastically. Ledocq said, “I hope I’m in your will.”

“Albert, you’re a madman, go now, enjoy, please.” Carter waved him away. He rubbed his palms together. “So . . . who do we need for this? Carlo and Scott and Willie . . . and . . . that’s all, right, Carlo and Scott and Willie?”

The script girl nodded. The three men approached for a huddle. Simultaneously, Tom and James approached, leading Phoebe between them. James had a final pat on the back in mind, and Tom wanted to complain to Carter that though he’d opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, there’d been nary a peep from King Tut himself. But all that was put on hold, because James saw that Scott was holding an odd metal sort of basket.

“I’m sorry,” James said, pointing, “but what is that?”

Scott waved it in the air, an effort that took both hands. “It’s called a brank.”

James squinted as if listening for faint music.

“Carter,” Tom started, “you didn’t give us our King Tut.”

“James?” Carter asked.

“Didn’t Dad have drawings of a brank or something on his wall?”

“Yes. Why, do you remember anything else about it?”

James said to Phoebe, “He’s always bringing up things I don’t remember.” Then, to his brother, “No, I don’t remember. What are you doing with it tonight?”

“I’m imprisoned in it just before Willie here cuts my head off.” Carter patted Willie on his ruddy cheek.

“Well, that’s nice,” James said. “Listen, the show has been marvelous so far—”

“Cutting off your head?” Phoebe looked toward Carter. “Cutting off your head,” she said again, this time drawing out the words like they described an exotic and awful delicacy.

“It’s a trifle,” explained Carter.

Carlo made a grand head-chopping motion on Carter’s throat, adding
whoomph
as a sound effect.

“Actually,” James said, flipping through the few remaining pages of the script, “I’m just not sure about that as a finale.”

“Why? Carlo, Scott, Willie, you can go, we’re all up to speed, I think.”

With the crew gone, James continued, “I’m worried about the very end of the show. People enjoy resolution.”

“My head comes off, and then I come back onstage.”

“Excuse me,” Phoebe said. “Can you please tell me why cutting off your head isn’t dangerous?”

“It’s far safer than the bullet-catching.” He considered telling her he wouldn’t be killed tonight, they’d turned away a Secret Service agent at the stage door, and it had only been Agent Griffin all along, but she looked so peeved he didn’t want to risk it. “James, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Thematically,” he said, and then acknowledged Carter’s look of surprise. “Yes, yes, for once I’m able to see a theme here. I’m quite involved in your show tonight, it’s been superior. And I just think that the way you have it blocked, it lacks some kind of magical
punch
at the end. People will be riled up when they see you die, and . . . you haven’t really thought out the coming-back part, have you? It’s blah.”

Carter took Phoebe’s hand, saying, “Let’s leave my brother to his bad feelings. I’ll explain the illusion to you.”

“Thank you.”

But James stopped them. “No. The illusion reminds me of the worse side of the things you dream up. Like Blackmail. It performs the function of an illusion, but it’s not satisfying.”

“Oh, an argument with God,” Phoebe interjected. “I’ve had those,” then “Ah! Yes!”—she gripped Carter’s arm.

“What?” He was feeling impatient.

“Say.
Did
you destroy television on purpose?”

James clapped his hands to his mouth. “You dear woman! Maybe he did!”

Carter’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding me.”

“Aha, yes.” James picked up the thread. “If movies hurt the magic business, maybe you worry that television would do the same, or worse.”

“As if I would behave that way. “Carter hissed, “That’s absurd.”

“Yes it is,” Phoebe answered. She said to James, “I don’t think it’s conscious on his part,” and James nodded quickly, replying to her, “Yes, I told him to make it a Viking funeral tonight, only I didn’t know how truly I spoke, you know,” which caused Phoebe to say, “He has self-destructive notions and he can be very sad, have you noticed how sad he can be?”

As Phoebe and James continued to discuss him, Carter said, “Why
is it everyone I know sounds exactly like my mother? My every motive is utterly transparent and I do
not
stand a chance. Might I just kill myself now?”

James came up to Carter and poked him in the chest. “Don’t let this be a peculiar punishment-suicide trick. Peculiar isn’t good.”

“It’s not a trick, it’s an illusion.” Carter took Phoebe’s hand. “Phoebe, I’m going to show you the illusion, and I’m going to walk you though everything that happens, and I’m going to show you the safety mechanism, just so you know how safe I’m going to be.”

Phoebe hesitated. “All right,” she said.

Carter and Phoebe walked away from James and, on the catwalk, a figure stepped along on the balls of his feet, following from above, as Phoebe wasn’t the only person interested in seeing how the safety mechanisms worked.

CHAPTER 8

Meanwhile, on stage, Albert and Esperanza were finishing their routine. As he was too excited to pace himself, Albert had used most of the flash paper in the first thirty seconds. The finale, therefore, though fiery, was flash paper–free: an inspired bit in which they threw back and forth six knives and a burning torch. Each time Esperanza received the torch, she used it to light a candle downstage, and each time Albert caught it, he attempted without success to light a cigar he gripped in his mouth. He kept bringing the flames up to his face, which elicited quick shrieks from the fainthearted, and when it ignited, there were cheers.

The couple shared a quick tango by the light of all the candles, and then bowed. When they straightened, Albert said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we bring you the end of Carter the Great’s show, his finale.”

Esperanza said, “To preserve the mystery for future audiences, management asks that you please not reveal any details of the act that follows.”

The lights fell and at the same time, the curtains were drawn fully open. The stage was bare. Carter ambled out from stage right, hands in pockets, lingering. He had a smile on his face, and the smile truly came from his soul, for he had the profound sense,
inexplicably
given how much financial trouble he was in, that he was in exactly the right place, doing, God knew why, exactly the right thing.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said softly, “it has been wonderful. But now it’s time to say good night.” He teared up, just slightly. There was silence out there, as the audience knew this couldn’t be it, not yet, Carter wouldn’t cheat them that way, and he realized what sort of pact he had with them: he would treat them fairly in ways that life itself would not. “We have had our fun, and I have proven myself the greatest magician of any age. I am prepared to send you all back home unless a greater wizard than I should appear.”

There was a brilliant flash, far more brilliant than last season, it made Carter wince in fact, and then a great roiling sulphurous cloud; the Devil himself joined him onstage.

So it began: the ending of the Carter the Great Paragon Show of Mystery, the all-new, all-different spectacular, the show with fifteen carloads of scenic effects and tons of ponderous impedimenta. In the wings and under the stage, prop men waited with newspapers and ducks and eggs, and Cleo tucked her long hair under a blonde flapper wig so she could be put into the Gone! chair, and Esperanza, too, put on a wig to be her double. And men rode the Fairbanks up and down silently and Scott and Willie suited up to be bearded Hindu yoga men, and the cannons were rolled into position, loads of flowers at the ready. From the flies to the crawl spaces, every square inch out of the audience line of sight was packed: here was the cage for the doves, there were the screen and projector and slides for Carter’s hand shadows, here was a cage lined with straw, goats and pigs and sheep within, ready to be released when the hand shadows came to life. And, listening carefully to every sound was Phoebe Kyle.

The music was fiery, and brash, with cymbals clashing and the lead violinist showing off Paganini-like hemi-demi-semiquavers. Carter was handed his rod and reel so he could materialize fish from just over his audience’s heads, and at the same time down from the flies came the instruments the Devil used for
Night on Bald Mountain.

“Go!” said the script girl, and Scott and Willie went onstage, where they were drilled through to great applause and astonishment, and then it was time for them to be loaded into the cannons, and they raced to backstage to change for their next bits. The partitioned dressing room was so small only one of them at a time could go in; since Scott had to get back onstage first, he changed first. He came out in black, and said to Willie, “Well, do I look like the Devil’s thug?”

Willie nodded. He pulled the curtains carefully shut. He faced a rack of hanging costumes, most of them black, all in a row, all packed so
closely together that getting one out was a struggle. He reached out for his executioner’s cloak and mask, and it seemed to resist him. He checked for snags, then pulled it out easily, utterly unprepared for the blackjack that came hurling out with it.

. . .

Onstage, things were building toward the new climax. First was Gone!, wherein Carter put Cleo into a chair, which began to rise, and when he fired a pistol, she disappeared. The Devil put a finger up in the air, indicating he had but one trick left, and he nodded smugly, confident it was so good Carter could in no way approach his presentation. Carter chuckled, as Albert was so expressive in pantomime that he seemed to make the fixed mask of the Devil smile, glare, glower, simply by his posture.

“So,” Carter said, part of the script now, “one last trick, and I have to beat it?”

A nod.

“Or else . . .”

A more significant nod, which caused nervous laughter.

“Very well.”

The Devil removed a silk handkerchief from his pocket. He turned it front and back to show it was an ordinary white handkerchief. Carefully, he extended his index finger and draped the handkerchief over it, and looked at Carter.

Carter shrugged. “So far, I believe I can beat you flat.”

The Devil’s finger described circles in the air, greater and greater circles, the handkerchief spinning at the tip, and as it spun, amazingly, it began to grow. It took several seconds for the audience to realize what was happening, but when they did, there was a great, mass intake of breath. He spun and spun the handkerchief until it was the size of a napkin, then a towel, then a bedsheet, and finally Carter had to stand back, as the silk expanded to the size of a small tent, which fell down over the Devil himself and continued spinning. The edges dragged on the stage, but slowly, slowly now, the material began to rise, and rise, and rise—revealing a street carousel. The silk had become a ribbed tent over the carousel, which had four seats, two of them in the shape of zebras, and two in the shape of bears, and in each seat there rode a beautiful woman in a sequined dress. The women held glasses of champagne and laughed, ran their hands through their bobbed hair, and pouted their lips in a display of vampish chorine sex appeal.

The carousel ground to a halt. The girls got off and joined the
Devil, standing two on each side of him, all of them linking arms. The carousel was wheeled away, and the stage from the front of the apron to its deepest recesses was pitch black and empty, save for the troupe of players.

The Devil gestured magnanimously with his palm. He’d done his trick. Now it was Carter’s turn.

“So all I have to do is something more extravagant than producing a carousel with two zebras, two bears, and four beautiful girls serving champagne?”

The Devil rocked on his heels, rubbing his hands together.

Carter snapped his fingers. It wasn’t a dramatic sort of snap, and it wasn’t even accompanied by fanfare or flashes of light. Nonetheless, one quarter of a second later, there was an elephant onstage.

The effect was so startling, there were cries from several members of the orchestra and even the players were stunned. It certainly hadn’t looked that good in rehearsal. One moment, the stage was empty, the next, an elephant!

In the back of the house, Ledocq stood, arms tightly around his waist, and holding his breath. When the crowd burst into cheers, he exhaled.

People whistled, they stomped their feet, they laughed out loud. Many an elephant had vanished onstage—but
appearing
like that? Carter asked the audience, “How many people preferred the carousel business?” and the applause continued unabated, and he asked, “How many liked my friend Tug the elephant?” and the crowd whistled mightily, doubling and redoubling their applause.

The showgirls left the Devil, and all draped themselves on the elephant.

Carter said to the Devil, “Thank you. The elephant wins. Good night,” and he escorted the women and Tug offstage.

Left alone, the Devil began to fume, and the orchestra struck up a passage from
Don Juan in Hell
to accompany him.