Circle View (24 page)

The crowd started up its noise again and surged against her back. She heard in their words the twin hopes that he would escape and that he would not, that he would triumph from his efforts or die from them, dangling and spinning. She thought of the worst sound she'd heard in the hospital, at night on the women's ward during typhoid season, when the delirious asked for water they could not keep down by banging on their nightstands with tin cups. Banging until they wore down and gave up.

The sun pushed shadows from the scaffolded buildings surrounding the street, the repairs to the city ongoing still, ten years after the Great Fire. Houdini shouted as his other arm wrenched loose. He pulled with his teeth at the leather straps along his fists. His arms loosed from one another and the shouts in the crowd began to rise. Reaching behind he unhasped two of the buckles along his spine, pinching them through the stiff canvas. He swung out over the crowd, nearly hitting the Fidelity Building on backswings. He twisted once inside the straightjacket, and again, then the jacket pulled down off his shoulders and he was free of it, holding it by its sleeve and waving it at the crowd. The noise of the people rose up beyond hearing, the roar like water against her eardrums. Someone threw a bouquet of flowers; cap pistols popped, making the dogs bark. Houdini extended his arms and took his bow upside down in the air.

The circle pushed back as the assistants lowered Houdini to the cobbles and the men with cigars handed money around, wetting their fingers to count it. The crowd gathered tightly, straining to see, and the Scotsman shouted for his assistants to keep everyone back. Then Houdini leapt atop the dray, resting his bare foot on the handle of the copper kettle, and he tossed the straightjacket to the reporters standing about with their notebooks and flash cameras. He wore no shirt, only the white cotton bathing suit, and in the cold his skin puckered and turned red in blotches along his legs. His chest and shoulders had bruised from his struggle with the straightjacket, some of the bruises as wide as hands. Out of breath, he invited the reporters to inspect the jacket, to come collect a thousand-dollar reward if they found anything amiss. The cheers eased away and the people applauded now as if at the theatre, the boys jumping from the fenders of cars, some of the women crying. Without meaning to, Anna found herself applauding as well. Houdini shouted for all to return in two hours, a block away at water's edge where he would “challenge the icy depths of the harbor.” Anna looked for the Scotsman, but he was gone.

The crowd shifted against one another and pressed toward Eutaw and Pratt streets, jostling her, milling about as if they did not know where to go, as if they had no homes or businesses to return to. She thought back to the cold night in February, ten years ago, when she had opened a curtain on E ward, thinking she heard ambulance bells, and had seen instead a spotted horse careening down the street dragging a milk wagon, the wagon riderless, milk jugs spilling on the pavement. In the next minute the streets filled with the noise of explosions and fire wagons, of window glass raining from the buildings downtown. All that night the flames spread, and people pressed into the streets in the freezing weather, standing behind the firelines the police had strung, the mist from the hoses freezing to ice on the power lines overhead, in the mustaches and fur collars of the watchers. The fire became a show, everyone cheering the blasting of dynamite or the extinguishing of small blazes, until from everywhere the smoke ran down in thick clouds like cable cars through the streets, and people moved to get away from it and there was no getting away. By morning of the third day the city smouldered, the skipjacks and steamers in the wharves bobbing in six inches of soot and ash as if thrown adrift in fields of dirty snow. Anna worked with the nurses and other probationers for three days straight, hearing stories the ambulance drivers told. One man, sitting at his desk in his office, had swallowed water from the fire hoses and drowned. A mother and child were found fused by the heat. In the days that followed the fire, people of the city had roamed the streets, looking over the ruin, watching the smouldering ash.

Anna walked quickly along South Street. As she found a pathway out of the milling crowd, a young man fell into step beside her and pressed his hand at the small of her back. She grabbed his arm to push him away.

“We'll need your help, miss. Over here.” She thought that someone in the movement of the crowd had been injured and now required medical attention, but he steered her away from the crowd, down a narrow alley.

She stopped and jerked away from him. “What kind of help exactly?” she said. “Who are you?” She looked into his face and recognized him as one of Houdini's assistants, the one with the ruined teeth. She guessed him to be close to her own age.

“We just need you,” he said, his eyes darting about. “Quickly.”

He directed her into the lobby of the Altamont Hotel. The silence and solitude of the hotel grew like a dream pulled out of the dissipating crowd. She hesitated then, in the lobby, and the young man touched the small of her back again and the heat rose in her face. He inclined his head toward her, speaking in a whisper.

“Very important, miss. Please.” What he had to tell her or show her seemed a burden to him, a weight across his skinny shoulders, and she thought at once that Houdini must have died from his escape, that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage or a poison in the blood. They arrived at the door of a room on the second floor.

When Anna stepped into the room, Houdini sat on a brocade couch, taking sips from a tiny cup. Next to him sat the Scotsman, trimming a cigar with his knife. Houdini wore a heavy white bathrobe belted tightly around him. He stood and smiled and bowed to her a little. His eyes were the color of pewter, his lips thick and feminine, his nose sharp and angular, like some instrument for cutting.

“Please, sit with us for a moment.” His voice came high, laced with a slight accent; she noticed now how small he was, how muscular in his neck and face. The Scotsman did not look at her.

“Mr. Houdini, I thought…”

He held up his hand, brown with callouses. “You must call me Ehrich.”

“You're not hurt?”

At this the Scotsman laughed out loud and lit his cigar with a match he struck against his boot sole. He threw the match into a green glass ashtray.

“No, I'm not hurt. But I do need your assistance.”

The three men watched her. “How?” she said.

He explained that in the next hour he would arrive at the harbor, that the local constable would strip him, search him, and shackle him. He would be placed in a bag made of sailcloth drawn by chains. The bag would be nailed shut inside a shipping crate and the crate laced with anchor chains and heavy padlocks.

“Then,” he said, “they lower me into the water.” He smiled. “You won't see me for a while.”

She shook her head. “I don't think it's clever, what you do. I think it's foolishness.”

The Scotsman spoke up. “Last night, we saw a fine turning out at the Odeon Theatre. Watermen were there with a challenge escape.” He puffed on his cigar. His words seemed directed at no one in particular.

“They bring out this sea monster, a giant octopus or a squid, I'm not sure. Bigger than a man, preserved in an ice box, a formaldehyde bath. They slit this monster open, push Houdini inside, sew the thing with piano wire. Two hours that escape. The preserving fumes nearly killed Houdini by the end.”

He turned his cigar, studying the lengthening ash. “Before that,” he said, “a zinc-lined piano box, an iron boiler, a milk can filled with water, an enormous leather football laced by experts.” He looked at her. “Defying death, missy, is no foolishness.”

She started to speak and Houdini took her hand.

“I can get out of the box, yes. But I'll need a key, for the manacles. Not even a key, really. A length of watch spring. A lockpick. Almost nothing.”

She thought of what he would put himself through, the utter darkness, the cold, brackish water rising in the box.

“But the nails on the box, the chains. Why risk your life this way?”

He smiled at her, his lips tight and shiny as the skin on a fruit. “A tiny lockpick,” he said. “Everything will be fine. No more than one of your hair pins.”

She pushed away the hair that had fallen around her face. Houdini held his hands together, like a child at prayers.

“You'll help me?” he said.

“How would I help you?”

“You must give me the key. So no one sees it, after I have been searched.”

“What's to keep anyone from seeing it?”

The Scotsman laughed, and the ash on his cigar broke off and fell across his vest. Houdini took her hand again.

“Before they lower me to the water, I'll be allowed a kiss from a pretty girl, for luck.” He looked at her. “The key will be inside your mouth.”

She yanked her hand away and stood, her face burning with the blood that pounded in her ears. She smoothed out the folds of her cape and her blue uniform, the patterns of the rugs beneath her feet blurring in her vision. She shook, hearing those words:
pretty girl
.

“I don't need to be here,” she said. She turned to leave, and the Scotsman grabbed her above the elbow, squeezing her arm.

“For chrissakes, girl, we need one kiss from you. It's not as if we're asking you to—”

“Let her go.” Houdini raised his voice and stood. The Scotsman chewed his cigar and walked across the room, his smoke drifting behind him.

“Let me explain further,” Houdini said.

Anna looked at the part in his wiry hair, the creases around his mouth and neck. His carotid artery fluttered in a fold of skin, beneath a patch of whiskers he had missed shaving. Anna's eyes watered as heat spread across the back of her neck.

He reached out his hand. “Nothing more than this,” he said. On his palm was an inch-long length of flattened clock spring, filed to a tear-drop shape. In her hand it felt cool, the metal shiny and bluish with tempering. She shook her head. Houdini reached as if to take her arms, then drew back. She saw him glance at the Scotsman.

“I have a reputation,” Houdini said. “If you don't do this, if they find the lockpick on me, I'll be nailed in the box without the key. I
will
go in the water.”

His gray eyes looked steady on her. They were eyes she'd seen before, eyes she knew as if from a dream. She started to speak, to hand back to him the length of spring. She remembered his eyes, the man touching his face as if to wipe away the rain, remembered imagining how they would look. They were these pewter eyes, Houdini's, as if he had stolen them to descend into the cold water and to see with them the blackness of the void, to bury their seeing forever in that box, to give them up to reputation, to the absence of a tiny key.

He showed her where to place the lockpick in her mouth, holding her chin and tipping her face toward the mirror. She let him, feeling him reach in like a dentist to touch her teeth and her gumline, the roof of her mouth. When the key was positioned, he told her to close her lips and smile. He examined her face.

“Relax the muscles here,” he said, tapping her jaw. She thought of the doctors in the operating room, guiding her hands to clamp a cut blood vessel. When she had made herself relax, Houdini bent and pressed his mouth against hers, and his tongue lifted the key from her. His lips, cold and dry, tasted of metal.

“Everything just as I showed you,” he said. “Don't change anything.”

In the last hours of light Anna walked through the streets near the wharves, practicing again and again the placement of the lockpick in her mouth, believing she had forgotten everything he had shown her. From the top of Camden Street she watched as the crowds came out, drawing together on the wharves where market boats and paddle steamers sat docked, awaiting passengers and freight. Anna made her way through the crowds, the lockpick held tight in her mouth. Around the watermarks of the boats floated straw and rough boards and fish with their eyes whited and half eaten away by the gulls. The smell of the fish mixed with that of oil drifted shiny along the surface of the harbor. The gulls screamed and hovered on the wind.

The block and tackle had been rigged from one of the bollards at the end of the pier. The crate, thick and knotty, sat open, the hoisting cable and anchor chains curled on the dock planks behind it. A mule stood with its head hanging, the cable that would hoist the crate fastened to its saddle. Police erected barricades at the water's edge, so that no one would be pushed in by the force of the crowd.

Anna drew her cape around her, her hands bunched inside the folds of cloth. Twice the Scotsman came around and told her and the others standing near her to step back, not looking at her. The lockpick pressed into her cheek. It tasted of copper pennies, of sewing pins held in her mouth. She thought of her mother, watching for her through the curtains. She tried to think about the boy, tried remembering him, and saw his cracked lips, the rise of his ribcage, but not him, not his face. He might have had a tooth missing, but she couldn't remember.

The kiss would be short, as Houdini had shown her, so as not to raise any suspicion. He had told her she must not let the lockpick move, she must keep it secure inside her cheek. He would kiss her and that would be their only chance. It would not last and could not be repeated. He would enter the box. The water would take him. Wind lifted the edges of her hair and drew a chill down her spine. She dared not swallow. Her mouth filled with saliva like the beginnings of nausea. She clamped down on the wire with the muscles of her face and tasted her own blood.

A fringed carriage drew through the crowd, opening a space in front of it that pulled in closed behind it. The carriage stopped and Houdini stepped out and waved to the crowd. A cheer went up and he nodded slowly without smiling. He wore a gray suit with a vest and a necktie, a stiff new collar.