The Withdrawal Method (18 page)

Soon Kempelen had had them all - that is, with the exception of the elusive Franciscka, who fled any room he entered, always with a flirtatious glance over her shoulder before retreating to some distant corner of the palace. During a chess match that saw the empress taking Kempelen's pieces at will, he confided to Maria Theresa that Franciscka seemed to represent the final variable in the equation of his life, and that without her he felt things sprawling infinitely, with no end in sight.

"So even your love life you reduce to science?" wondered the empress.

Kempelen frowned at her, and it was the frown of one who, hearing his own philosophy spoken aloud by another, was forced to bring it into question.

"You've always told me everything is science. Even chess, you've said, relies on logic so precise that a machine could play it."

Kempelen shrugged. "Maybe I'm in love with her."

"Oh, Wolfgang!" exclaimed the empress, shaking her head. "Be careful. There's something suspicious about that girl - always lurking around, silent, popping up in places she shouldn't be. I'd stay away from her, if I were you."

After a restless, sleepless night, Kempelen lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He pictured Franciscka's face: those big, brown eyes, that little nub of a nose, the lips thin and tightly drawn, as though hiding something forbidden within. Thoughts of her made his head swim, unable to rest on anything definite or absolute; formless images and ideas went caroming off one another, colliding and spiralling away. Kempelen closed his eyes and, one by one, methodically, he pulled the fragments in and laid them out as pieces to a puzzle. With systematic precision he went through, organizing, arranging, and as he did, something conclusive began to take shape.

Kempelen swept the bedclothes aside and, ignoring the matter of dressing, limped briskly out to the maidservants' quarters in his nightshirt, where he pounded on the door, dropped to one knee, and, when a startled Franciscka appeared, promised to renounce his licentious ways if she would agree to marry him.

Franciscka looked down at the man grovelling at her feet, eyes reflecting sky. She felt very little, other than a vague satisfaction that she had played her cards right for the past two years, not like those other tarts around the palace. After six years as a maidservant, Franciscka was fed up with being bossed around by the capricious Maria Theresa and knew that as a counsellor's wife she would be excused from her position.

Extending her hand to Kempelen, who took it and pressed it to his forehead, Franciscka thought fondly of this impending freedom. Kempelen looked up, saw her smiling, and mistook it for lover's joy. His heart raced: he finally felt something that defied his wealth of knowledge, a deep, booming sense of uncertainty that brought him to his feet. He swept his bride into his arms and hollered, "I love you!"

AT THE WEDDING, Maria Theresa appeared ambivalent, yawning openly as the vows were read. Beside her sat Francis Stephen, gloating at the magnificence of his floral arrangements, bright and glorious around the palace chapel. The benediction ended, Kempelen beamed at his bride, and then plunged at her for a nuptial kiss vigorous enough that the priest had to step in and pry him away. The place erupted with cheers - most enthusiastically from Kempelen's colleagues, relieved that the palace's most coveted bachelor was finally off the market. Maria Theresa clapped wanly, a thin smile on her lips, while her husband blew kisses to the newlyweds as they made their way under a shower of rice out of the chapel.

The marriage was consummated purposefully, with Franciscka bent over and staring out the window while Kempelen grunted and thrust from behind. When he finished with a mighty holler, she pulled away, squatted, and Wolfgang watched while his ejaculate was emptied on a stream of urine into the chamber pot beside their bed.

Franciscka's royal duties relinquished, she moved into the counsellor's villa. For the first time in his life, Kempelen felt something he could not identify in certain terms, an uneasiness that devolved into confusion. That consecratory first night haunted him, how Franciscka had indifferently flushed his seed from her body, and their day-to-day, wordless existence resonated with a similar emptiness. She turned her cheek obediently for a goodbye kiss every morning, but he could sense her gazing off into the distance over his shoulder; she yielded nightly to his advances, but in an almost conciliatory way. Any attempt at communication was greeted with a mute, blank stare.

The answer Kempelen had been looking for still seemed to elude him, and he became preoccupied and began to neglect his duties as counsellor. His first project as a married man, a mechanical system meant to raise and lower the bridge into town, collapsed under the weight of its first crossing (two chickens drowned).

A day later, the empress sat him down at the chessboard and asked what was wrong.

"Something must have been amiss with my calculations," he offered.

"Oh, it's not just that, Wolfgang. What's the matter?"

Despondent, Kempelen dropped his pieces back into their box. "I can't play today," he said, then struggled to his feet and left the room. His limp seemed more pronounced than it had ever been; Maria Theresa watched him hobble away and realized something needed to be done. The empire depended on it.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Kempelen came home to discover Franciscka collapsed under the kitchen table, a half-drunk cup of cider puddling beneath her on the floor. Kempelen rushed to her side, knelt, and rolled his wife over - her lips were colourless, her body rigid, her brown eyes stared blankly heavenward.

The court coroner reported that Franciscka's heart had just stopped, like a watch smacked with a hammer. Kempelen's demands to perform a private autopsy were denied. Frustrated more than heartbroken, the counsellor sank into a deep depression, refusing to emerge from his home. After nearly a month of this self-imposed exile, Maria Theresa herself made the trip along the path through the woods to Kempelen's villa.

Skirts hitched, she banged on the door. "Wolfgang!"

No answer.

"Wolfgang, please, it's me. You've got to come out. The empire needs you."

Maria Theresa pressed her ear against the door. A cough. Then, muffled: "Send me away."

"Sorry?"

"Send me away from here. I don't care where. A place where I can make sense of things. A place where things make sense."

The empress paused. Something rose in her throat. Swallowing hard, Maria Theresa willed it away and spoke to the door. "As you wish, Wolfgang."

For the next dozen years Kempelen found himself shuttled all over the empire, arriving in locales where his brains were needed for problems agricultural, scientific - even judicial. In Transylvania, he concocted an ingenious pneumatic system for draining the region's flooded salt mines; in Banat, he undertook the role of detective and produced evidence to free a man wrongly convicted of murder.

During this time, Kempelen established a base back in his hometown of Pressburg. He found himself missing life in the capital but could decipher no concrete reason to return - after all, his services were in great demand elsewhere around the empire. He kept to himself, and loneliness haunted him. Without a worthy opponent, he began to build simple automated chess pieces with the gears and wheels of old watches: when prompted, they would walk across the chessboard to the appropriate square. It was an attempt, he knew, to make life of his own, to create something engaging beyond simple machinery.

Still, that life seemed hollow. Although the clockwork figures paraded around like little men, they were no real company, they provided no joy. At work, he performed his tasks methodically, without emotion, while everyone else celebrated his genius. Above all, when he thought about Franciscka's death he felt only curiosity - never sadness, and that seemed deeply wrong. It was clear, now, that he had never loved her - he had never loved anyone. He didn't know how to; he was a man trapped irrevocably in a realm of logic, distant from the enigmas of human emotion. Playing nightly chess games against himself, watching his automata march from one square to the next, the empire's prized counsellor felt the answers to life's greatest questions receding beyond his grasp.

IN 1769, KEMPELEN received word that the empress wanted him back in Vienna. "Come quickly," read the message, "this is a very urgent matter."

Fearing the collapse of the empire was at hand, Kempelen abandoned his work and made the trip back to the palace. Empress and counsellor met at their old spot in the gardens; she took Kempelen's hands in hers, seeming excited and flushed. It struck him, suddenly, that she might be in love with him, and that this rendezvous was designed to profess her adoration. That old sense of pride, long absent, swelled within him as he awaited her amorous confession.

"Wolfgang!" she exclaimed. "There is a French conjuror coming to Vienna. He was here last year, and the year before, and his tricks are baffling. The entire court was in an uproar. No one can figure out how he does it - rabbits from hats, scarves appearing from up shirtsleeves, people sawn in half. And then we thought of you!"

"That's why you ordered me here?"

"Yes! He's performing tonight. So you must come and watch and then let us know how everything's done. Typical Frenchman, the bastard thinks he's got us fooled - but he has no idea that we'll have the cleverest man in all of Europe there tonight."

Kempelen gazed at the empress: a wild, expectant look filled her eyes. He bowed, defeated, and when he spoke, his voice was a thin, reedy whisper. "Pleased to be of service."

That evening the entire court gathered in the main ballroom. A thin, mincing man with an even thinner moustache performed some simple illusions, addressing the bewildered spectators in a Parisian accent rife with disdain. Kempelen, ire rising with each trick, muttered the fellow's secrets into Maria Theresa's ear while Francis Stephen whooped and applauded one seat over. After a finale that caused Kempelen to slap his own forehead in incredulity, the Frenchman bowed to a rousing ovation from all in attendance - excepting, naturally, the empress and her prize counsellor. When the applause receded, Kempelen stood and angrily addressed the crowd.

"This fellow is a fraud," he announced, his tone furious. "You people sicken me, how readily you allow yourselves to be fooled."

The magician spluttered and flapped his arms, his face reddening. Kempelen held up a finger. "Not only will I happily reveal how each of these illusions works to anyone who asks, but I am going to dedicate the next few months to creating something that doesn't need to dupe its audience with sleight of hand - something greater than human beings, something more clever, more cunning."

The Frenchman fled the room. A hush fell upon the crowd as they waited, terrified, for whatever might come next. Kempelen looked down at Maria Theresa seated beside him. In his eyes was something she had never seen before: fire, passion. It frightened her. "Give me six months," he told the empress, and then limped out of the hall.

HAVANA,1838

UPON ARRIVING IN Havana, Johann Maelzel had told the rest of the crew that he and his assistant, Schlumberger, had official business to attend to in Regla. After overseeing the unloading of the Turk and its automated brethren, the two men stole off into the night to a quiet bodega across the river recommended as "friendly" by an ageing queen back in New Orleans. With a single candle burning between them on the table and a cloud of mosquitoes whining through the air, they sat watching one another nurse their glasses of rum before Maelzel finally spoke.

"Christ, I never thought we'd get a moment alone."

Schlumberger glanced shyly at Maelzel before his gaze retreated to the floor. "Finally."

A local appeared at their table selling beaded necklaces. He stood there, a shirtless mulatto with a patchy beard, wares in hand, waiting patiently while Maelzel frowned and patted the pockets of his waistcoat. Schlumberger slapped at a mosquito on the nape of his neck. "Please, I'll get it, Johann."

The man pocketed the coins and wreathed Schlumberger. "~Otras cosas?" asked the Cuban, winking at Maelzel, who shook his head, slumped in his chair, and waved the fellow away.

Schlumberger regarded Maelzel across the table and felt a pang of melancholy at what confronted him. Where was the charisma, the life, the energy of the great showman who had entranced crowds across Europe? Since coming to America, Schlumberger had struggled to avoid noticing his companion's steady decline in vivacity, but here it was: eyes sunken, hair dishevelled - the grey, dejected visage of a man beaten and broke. The thirty years that separated them were obvious.

"Don't worry," said Schlumberger, swatting at another mosquito, "you'll get back on top once this exhibition gets going. They loved you when we were here last."

"Oh, it's hardly just me, is it?" sighed Maelzel, pulling his hands sharply away as Schlumberger tried to take them in his. "I'm just who they see, parading around like some circus buffoon. You're the true genius behind our operation."

Schlumberger blushed. "I am only a pawn in the great Maelzel spectacle."

"Bah," said Maelzel, and disappeared behind his drink.

Schlumberger had found that lately he and his companion had taken to repeating conversations, and this one was familiar. He already knew what was coming next.

"You know old Kempelen never intended for a man to be inside, don't you?" Maelzel nodded at his own words, twisting his glass of rum absently round a ring of moisture on the table. "Imagine a machine that could play better than any man, Schlumberger! Imagine if he'd been able to do it. It must have eaten Kempelen alive. He was never able to make peace with himself because of it and died a lonely, sad old man." Maelzel drank, then continued. "And to think, seventy years later, his failure is my biggest success."

Maelzel disappeared once more behind his glass of rum. There were things Schlumberger wanted to say, but they would have to wait until this whole tour was over and he and Maelzel were back on American soil. Then Maelzel would be finally able to pay off his many debts, and they could pack the Turk up and get on with their lives.