FOR MAX AND MITCH
And rays of truth you cannot see
Are flashing through Eternity—
a Bostonian 1827
1. Hocus pocus
2. Monkey business
3. A varray parfit gentil knyght
4. Isis in search
5. Meow!
6. The writing on the wall
7. Heegan of homicide
8. The game is afoot
9. Tripping the light fantastic
10. Metamorphosis
11. Perchance to dream
12. Says damon runyon à
13. By the sea, by the sea
14. Making whoopee
15. Ask me no questions
16. And if i die
17. The million things she gave me
18. Ghost of a chance
19. Finders keepers
20. Gifts
21. The pleasure of your company
22. In the good old summertime
23. Games
24. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack
25. Trick or treat
26. Under the knife
27. Barnstorming
28. Elementary
29. A wow finish
30. Legerdemain
31. Abracadabra
Author’s Note
THE MAGICIAN STOOD ALONE in the shadows backstage. Short, stocky, and middle-aged, he parted his dark shock of wiry gray-flecked hair straight down the middle. A surprising number of men still sported this Gay Nineties barbershop quartet look at the start of the Jazz Age, the brave new tommy gun decade when flappers and bathtub gin became as American as apple pie and the G.A.R.
Despite impeccable tailoring, the magician’s evening clothes looked perpetually rumpled. He had never been known as a fashion plate. When just a teenager first starting out, he wore suits several sizes too large, like a kid in hand-me-downs. Perhaps this was deliberate, a misdirection worthy of a master in the arts of deception. Watching him, one never suspected the starched dickey and wrinkled soup and fish concealed an athlete’s body honed by years of diligent exercise.
It was not his nature ever to be idle. Waiting in the wings before his turn, listening to the house orchestra play an Irving Berlin medley, he kept his hands busy with a pair of lucky silver half-dollars. He rolled them from knuckle to knuckle across the backs of his hands, a flourish as difficult as any known in magic. The coins moved with delusive ease, round and round, propelled by an imperceptible flexing of his tendons. His eyes slid shut. His head slumped forward. He looked like a man in a trance, the rotating coins part of the deepest meditation.
The magician was the headliner, the most famous name on the big-time vaudeville circuit, topping the bill at the Palace, one thousand, eight-hundred simoleons a week for two shows a day. He listened to the applause surging and crashing beyond the footlights like storm-driven surf. The orchestra’s string section trembled on the last notes of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” as if overwhelmed by the frenzied clapping. “Conrad and Speers,” the ballroom dancing team, were getting an enthusiastic hand. The magician had never seen their act, but the reaction to their finish gave him great pleasure. A warmed-up audience meant his own reception would be enormous.
“Dapper Dave” Conrad and Violette Speers traipsed off hand in hand, pausing behind the stage right tormentor. Draped in shadows, the magician watched them exchange hissed insults, their faces sudden savage masks of hate. In a moment, it was time to waltz back on for a final bow, and the frozen smiles snapped into place like instant makeup.
Conrad and Speers were an act in one. They performed on the apron between the footlights and a painted drop, making entrances and exits without a curtain, timing their calls precisely. Smiling, ever-smiling, they swirled into the wings in each other’s arms as the applause died and the majestic house curtain descended.
A stagehand hauling the show drop aloft whispered: “You two were a panic. Knocked ’em dead.” Conrad and Speers stalked past him without a word, heading for their dressing room dour as prisoners walking the last mile. The magician watched, not comprehending how they endured such hell on earth. The years he and his wife had worked as a double were the happiest in his long career. A momentary smile eased his stern expression.
The interlude, a lively jazz tune, segued into the familiar strains of his act intro, jogging the magician out of his dime-museum memories. He made one last check backstage, his fierce, slate-blue eyes taking it all in. His equipment stood in place between a sequence of drop curtains. Everything had functioned smoothly when he and his assistants tested the props earlier that day. He saw Collins and Vickery in position and the rest of the team waiting on their marks. Ever the perfectionist, the magician scanned the stage; his hawk’s gaze detected that the new girl had forgotten her plumed turban. Mary, her name was. Mary something. No time to mention it now. He made a mental note to dock a five-spot from her pay.
The act drop rose and the lights came up. Iris, the showgirl longest in his troop, stood center stage, waiting for the applause to die down. The magician slipped a silk packet smaller than half a stick of gum into his mouth, concealing it between his cheek and lower jaw. Years ago, he made these himself, staying up late into the night, winding silk in the flickering gaslight of a hundred nameless cheap hotels.
They were manufactured for him now in lots of a dozen by Martinka and Co. As a boy, he’d often wandered into the famous magical supply house, unable to afford even the cheapest five-cent trick; in 1919 he bought the entire business lock, stock, and barrel. The tiny custom-made packet nesting inside his mouth seemed a talisman, his entire career wound within its minute coils.
When the applause crested, Iris began her lilting spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, direct from a triumphant tour of the British Isles and star of the recent smash hit motion picture The Man from Beyond, the Palace Theater proudly presents the world famous escapologist, that magnificent master of mystery … the Great Houdini!”
A fresh tumult of applause greeted the magician. He strode onto the stage, framed by a bright pair of follow spots, his slightly bowlegged walk in no way detracting from his inherent dignity. His grave demeanor suggested ancient ritual: a priest at the altar; yet his words had the easy confidence of a man utterly at home in the limelight.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen … “ A brief nodding bow acknowledged the ovation even as his hands went up to silence it. “A great pleasure to be back in my hometown, entertaining the finest and most discerning audience on the face of the earth.” The faint hint of a smile and a lifted hand stifled ripplings of renewed applause. “I got my start more than a quarter of a century ago, playing engagements on the Bowery at Coney Island and in Tony Pastor’s great theater, which some of you must remember, down on Fourteenth Street in the old Tammany Building …”
As he spoke, a lithe showgirl named Wilma wheeled forward a cloth-draped table with a round glass fishbowl as a centerpiece. He asked a member of the audience to loan him a handkerchief and a dozen eager hands fluttered with silk and cotton in abject surrender. He was charming them now, a sudden smile erasing the years, the handsome face a boy’s mug once again. “And just to show I have nothing up my sleeves … “ With a quick tug, his celluloid cuffs pulled away, along with the sleeves of his tux, both fastened with snaps above the elbow.
The first trick was all deft patter and mechanicals. He showed them the clear glass fishbowl, rapping and tapping to prove its solidity. Wilma pulled the paisley drape aside, displaying the table’s bare legs. Houdini placed the borrowed handkerchief in the bowl. It vanished in a flash of igniting magnesium paper, deftly palmed from Iris when she’d handed him the hankie.
Rewarded with renewed applause, Houdini’s dazzling smile grew several degrees brighter and he milked the hand, pulling yard after endless yard of rainbow-hued silks from out of a seemingly empty bowl. Wilma gathered up the excess, winding it around her slender waist with a ballerina’s twirl. The impossible multicolored flow continued uninterrupted, accompanied by a crescendo of clapping, until at last the borrowed handkerchief appeared, knotted in the middle of this silken harlequinade, and it brought down the house.
Houdini had the audience in his hip pocket. There was nothing to the trick. They loved it because they watched a legend, a wizard who walked through brick walls and leaped manacled into icy rivers. Prisons on three continents had failed to contain him. In 1906, with much ballyhoo, stripped naked and searched by the authorities, he had escaped from the condemned cell that had held Charles Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield.
Over the years, he had accepted every challenge. Padlocked into water-filled milk cans, nailed in crates and piano packing cases, sealed inside giant paper envelopes and iron boilers welded shut on stage, he escaped from them all. He was once chained within the carcass of a huge squid found on a Cape Cod beach. It stank with formaldehyde and he nearly suffocated, but in five minutes he was free.
For more than a quarter century, each escape had appeared more impossible than the last. A thousand times he’d stepped sweating and disheveled into the spotlight, a testament to unimagined heroic exertions. More baffling still, when the volunteer committee removed the cloth screen, the confining challenge would be standing intact on stage, ropes and chains in place, padlocks still fastened.
His mystery and daring captured the imagination of an entire generation. At almost fifty, the magician retained energy equal to that of a man half his age. The week before, to publicize his Palace opening, he’d eagerly hung upside down, trussed by his heels, five stories above a vast crowd on Times Square, wriggling out of a strait jacket in under three minutes.
“Five years ago, ladies and gentlemen, I made an elephant disappear several blocks from here on the stage of the Hippodrome, the world’s largest theater.” Houdini said this without the shadow of a smile, invoking a cathedral hush within the gilded auditorium. “Tonight, I’m going to perform the world’s smallest wonder …” Scattered applause indicated old-time fans recognizing the introduction to “The Needles,” a trick Houdini had performed with success since before the turn of the century.
A request was made for a volunteer from the audience and Iris ushered a portly gentleman with a golden Shriner’s crescent dangling from his watch chain onto the stage. Houdini bantered with the man, breaking the ice by asking his name and where he lived, making him feel at ease. He showed Mr. Elmer Conklin, of 809 Lexington Avenue, a paper of sewing needles and a small spool of thread. “Are these anything other than common everyday items which might readily be purchased at the five-and-dime?”
“They are not, sir.” Mr. Conklin nervously handed them back, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his blue serge vest.
“Observe carefully. Houdini swallows them.”
Mr. Conklin watched, amazement overcoming his stage fright, as the magician mouthed the needles and thread. Back in the summer of ‘95, when Houdini and his wife had toured with the Welsh Brothers Circus, an old Japanese acrobat had taught him to regurgitate at will. So blasé he often fell asleep while performing as the bottom man of a balance-pole act, Sam Kitchi was a swallower, ingesting ivory balls, coins, watches, and once, to the amazement of the young magician, a live mouse. Houdini practiced for weeks with a peeled potato tied to a string, strengthening his throat muscles, perfecting the art of retroperistaIsis.
The magician focused his raptor’s stare on a bewildered Elmer Conklin, swallowing in quick succession the needles and thread, followed by the packet from Martinka’s. Gripping them halfway down his esophagus, Houdini invited the volunteer to examine his mouth with a flashlight provided by Iris.
“Glad I’m not a dentist,” the stout man stammered, unwittingly getting a good laugh as he peered at the magician’s molars. “Folks, there’s not a thing in there I can see…. Talking about under his tongue and everything. I’m satisfied his mouth is empty.”
Iris took back the flashlight. Wilma handed Houdini a brimming glass of water. “Hot work always makes me thirsty,” the magician quipped, drinking down the liquid without apparent difficulty. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you and Mr. Conklin have just seen me swallow a needle-book and a spool of thread. I return them to you … thusly … ”
Houdini regurgitated the gag from Martinka’s. The needles and thread remained clenched in his throat. He plucked at the end of his tongue, pulling a single thread from his mouth. Threaded needles dangled every inch or so, a lethal silver fringe glittering in the spotlight. Houdini’s arm extended full length, prompting wild applause from the astonished audience.
Iris took hold of the thread and backed away from the magician, suspended needles unspooling continuously from his mouth as she gracefully crossed the stage. Houdini basked in the ovation. The cheers surged through him, more powerful than the transports of love. Iris held her slender arm high in the air, pinching the end of a fifty-foot catenary curving back to the magician’s open mouth. All along its length, hundreds and hundreds of needles winked and gleamed, flashing reflected light like fangs in the savage, ghostly smile of an invisible monster.
A QUIET NIGHT AT THE Twenty-ninth Precinct, unusually quiet for a Friday, although business most often picked up after the theaters let out. Manning the desk, Sergeant Heegan remembered the grand old days before Prohibition when the Tenderloin was the beat of a rookie’s dreams. Not that the payoff from the speaks wasn’t every bit as choice as back when torpedoes like Gyp the Blood and Monk Eastman brawled, bribed, and bought the house a round. Just a bit too genteel and refined nowadays to suit Heegan’s tastes. He preferred his sin out in the open.
Graft, on the other hand, needed to stay under the table, and when roly-poly Leon Fishkin waddled in off the street, bold as brass in his ritzy cashmere topcoat, offering up a thick envelope adorned with the embossed logo of the Zebra Club, the desk sergeant tossed it back in his bloated face, telling him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Much offended, the portly bootlegger stormed out of the station house, sputtering like an overheated Tin Lizzy.
“The nerve of that fat louse, waltzin’ in here and wavin’ his dough around like a come-on man at the two-dollar window, when any dumb jerk knows how the pickup is made.” Sergeant Heegan addressed his remarks to a lone cop typewriting in the bull pen behind the booking desk. Busy hunt-and-pecking his way through a robbery report, with his tie and collar removed, the sandy-haired detective didn’t glance away from the noisy Remington Standard No. 10 or offer as much as a grunt in reply.
Never satisfied with an inattentive audience, the desk sergeant shrugged and turned back to the New York American, folding the newspaper to the sports section, his lips silently forming Damon Runyon’s account of a sparring match between former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentine contender. Heegan whistled between his teeth in grudging admiration. Seemed the old dinge completely bamboozled the “Wild Bull of the Pampas.”
It was only an exhibition workout but, round after round, not a glove landed on the Negro. Johnson was forty-four, two years younger than Heegan. The middle-aged Irish cop considered himself one tough customer in spite of the silver frosting his thin red hair, yet deep in his heart he knew for damn sure no money on earth could induce him to step into any prize ring with some dago bone-crusher like Firpo.
The telephone rang, shrill as his old lady on a nagging fit. “Damnation!” Heegan set the paper aside and reached for the candlestick instrument. “Twenty-ninth Precinct,” he barked into the mouthpiece, “Heegan speaking.” The operator connected him with a near-hysterical woman. Her frantic voice echoed like the insistent buzzing of a hornet trapped in a bottle. The desk sergeant held the black, bell-shaped receiver several inches from his ear. Although often accused of being a touch deaf, Heegan had no trouble making out every word.
“I saw it with my own two eyes,” the woman screeched. “My apartment faces the street on Thirty-eighth. It came right along as big as you please and turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue.”
“A gorilla, you say,” Heegan inquired with more than a trace of a smile.
“A great big hairy ape!” The woman’s descriptive powers were doubtless enhanced by all the hoopla for last year’s Eugene O’Neill hit on Broadway.
“You sure it’s not just some drugstore cowboy in a raccoon coat?”
“Officer! Will you please listen to what I’m telling you? This was some kind of monkey. It had a young woman in its arms.”
“Carrying a woman…?”
“I saw her long blond hair trailing down over the shaggy black arm. Horrible …”
“Madam, sounds to me like you’ve observed a frolicsome couple on their way to a costume party.”
“This is not Halloween!”
“A simple masquerade, ma’am. Don’t go troubling yourself with thoughts of any gorillas.”
“Shouldn’t you alert the Zoological Society and all menageries and circuses?”
“I’ll be doing just that, ma’am. Have a pleasant evening.” Sergeant Heegan hung the receiver on the hook and laughed out loud. “Get a load of this,” he hooted, spinning around in his oak swivel chair. “Some dumb Dora thinks she’s seen a gorilla on Ninth Avenue …”
The bull pen was empty. Rows of deserted desks and shrouded typewriters stood mute as mausoleums. Heegan was alone. He spun back to his sports section, untroubled by solitude. After a year spent perched like a lighthouse keeper atop the ornate traffic tower at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, he never again felt lonely. The tower went up in 1920, the first of several similar structures bedecked with spread-winged bronze eagles and cornucopia-framed clock faces, standing in the middle of the avenue at intersections ten blocks apart. These were the earliest electric traffic lights in the city.
The sergeant leaned back in his chair, drifting away into memory. Switching the red, yellow, and green beacons had always made him feel important. High above the passing swarm, snug from bad weather, he pitied those poor bastards standing all over town directing traffic with white-gloved hand signals, their apple cheeks puffing, a cacophony of whistles steaming in the chill air.
On most days, the exhaust haze had hung so thick Heegan could barely see the towers nearest him, north and south along the avenue. When he had started on the force, automobiles were an exotic rarity and high winds often whirled tons of dried horse manure, powdered by passing carriage and wagon wheels, into poisonous shit storms so dense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, let alone take a decent breath. Some things about the old days were not quite as grand as the desk sergeant might have wished.
“Goddamn that dumb kike!” Heegan bellowed, his face redder than his hair.
“Not so dumb as to be without friends in City Hall.” Captain Boyle looked more like a bishop than a policeman, his immaculate hair white as an altar cloth; the lean greyhound face shrewd and intelligent. He spoke in a whisky-mellowed whisper. “How many of your friends are pals with the mayor?”
Subdued by the quiet, patient voice, Sergeant Heegan adopted a more conciliatory posture, like a choirboy caught throwing spitballs. “I know I was way out of line, Captain, but the sight of him there, waving that money around like he was rubbing our noses in it, well, it just got my blood up …”
“You’ve too much heart, Jimmy, that’s your trouble.” The captain remained genuinely fond of Heegan, was in fact godfather to his oldest son. Both men knew he would never rank higher than sergeant and, although neither ever mentioned it, the bright gold badge gleaming on Francis Xavier Boyle’s breast provided a constant rebuke. “Heart’s a grand thing, but when you’re dealing with the public you’ve got to use a little more of what’s up here.” The captain tapped a manicured forefinger against his temple, chuckling inwardly at the image of the sergeant’s head thumping hollow as a melon at the same touch. “You know I’ll have to take you off the desk…?”
“That sheeny bastard!”
“Relax. He was after your stripes.” The captain handed Heegan an envelope. “Report down to homicide at headquarters.”
“Headquarters? What the hell’m I gonna do down there?” “I’m sure you’ll find some way to make yourself useful.”
Sergeant Heegan heard the captain’s words echoing in his mind all through the afternoon. Every time he refilled the detectives’ coffee mugs from the big graniteware pot kept percolating on a hot plate in the squad room lavatory, he thought about making himself useful. No one at homicide knew what to do with him. Several other uniforms served as drivers and in menial backup capacities. None ranked above corporal. So, Heegan brewed the coffee and hung around trading lies with the plainclothes dicks when they weren’t out on call or busy interrogating suspects and typing endless reports. He had no complaints. In another year, he’d have his pension.
Just after dark, a call came in ordering every available man over to an address in Hell’s Kitchen, cutting short Heegan’s rambling blarney once again. On his way out the door, a detective caught the sergeant’s doleful glance. “You waiting for some engraved invitation?” he asked. Heegan made a pistol of his index finger and aimed it at his heart: Who, me?
“No law says you have to sit on your ass all day long.”
Sergeant Heegan followed the detectives down the long, narrow stairs. There was nothing for him to do, but it had to be an improvement on watching the coffee boil. He rode up front beside a uniformed driver in an open five-passenger 1918 Ford with a canvas top. They set out in a black caravan of four automobiles.
Just for the hell of it, Heegan cranked the siren and they wove through traffic with a great wail, other vehicles pulling out of the way. An unnecessary noise, in the absence of any emergency: the dead meat didn’t care if the cops arrived on time. Technically, it was against regulations, but nobody told Heegan to knock it off. The siren’s scream made the jaded detectives feel important.
When they pulled up at an address on Thirty-ninth Street, just east of Tenth Avenue, a small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Three patrolmen stood by the entrance. The detectives sauntered inside, leaving Heegan in charge of the uniforms, who now, with the addition of the drivers, numbered seven. The sergeant paced off a thirty-foot perimeter in front of the tenement, telling his men, “Don’t take no naps and keep the rubberneckers back of this here line.” Task accomplished, he made straight for the action, bustling through the building with a hefty swagger.
The body sprawled in the courtyard out back, a dirt lot adrift in trash and almost as crowded as the street, with detectives milling everywhere. A camera on a tripod tilted down into the roped-off trapezoid enclosing the corpse. In the bright magnesium flare of flash powder, Heegan saw a gray-haired woman, shirtwaist stiff with dried blood, her splayed limbs contorted like those of a broken doll flung from some great height.
Heegan made himself inconspicuous on the fringes of the activity, picking up what he could from overheard conversation. Two elderly tenants talked with detectives about the victim. Her name was Mrs. Esp. She was a widow; spoke with some kind of accent. Lived with her daughter on the fourth floor. Other than that, the two wheezing geezers, a man and his wife from the look of it, didn’t know beans. Widow Esp was something of a recluse. They never saw that much of her. The daughter, on the other hand, came and went every day. Had a secretarial job downtown. Lovely young thing, with long golden hair. Not bobbed the way some of them are wearing it.
Heegan edged away from their babble, wanting a closer look at the corpse. The photographer had done with the late Mrs. Esp: having shot her from a dozen different angles, he folded his equipment into a black suitcase. Another man coiled the barrier rope. Several bored detectives leaned over the body, gazing down at her with no seeming interest.
She was a mess. Thick clumps of hair had been yanked free by the handful, laying bare a raw, abraded scalp. Her blotched and bruised face twisted disagreeably, the backwards stare making her look all the more like a twisted doll. Heegan marveled at how deeply her throat had been slashed. The cut ran from ear to ear.
Alone among all the others, a slim, dapper man in a battered “Open-Road” Stetson and double-breasted topcoat stared, not at the body, but straight up at a shattered fourth-floor window. “Long drop, Mr. Runyon,” quipped a detective at his side.
Heegan took a good look at him. So, this was William Randolph Hearst’s blue-ribbon sportswriter. He knew the word along Broadway was Damon Runyon liked to hang out with shady characters. Gamblers. Torpedoes. Small-time grifters. Cops. For all of that, the sergeant had never laid eyes on him before.
“It’s the sudden stop that kills you, Charlie,” Damon Runyon said. He was a small man, with a thin, unsmiling shark-slit mouth. His round glasses gave him an owlish look, the glint of the lenses masking the ironic twinkle in his eyes. The detective chortled appreciatively.
“Turn her over.” Lieutenant Bremmer gave the orders. “Let’s see the rest of the damage.” Heegan glimpsed him earlier in the day, rushing in and out of his office. The lieutenant was built like an energetic fireplug, one of those small men who made up in authority what he lacked in stature. Two detectives immediately took hold of the body and everybody watched as they gently lifted it.
Mrs. Esp’s battered head tore loose from her shoulders, falling with a soft thud into the shadows. Even the most hardened cop gasped in horror. “Eight to five she was already dead when she hit the ground,” smirked Damon Runyon.
About this time, the wagon arrived from the morgue. Bremmer had the team bundle the stiff on a stretcher but told them not to load her until he and the boys had a look upstairs. Heegan went along with the pack, trooping up four flights. They found the door to the Esp apartment locked tight. “Give us a hand here, Sergeant,” barked “Bulldog” Bremmer. Grateful for something to do at last, Heegan reared back his beefy leg and splintered the door open with a single kick.
The front room was a kitchen. An oak icebox dripped in one corner. A coal scuttle stood between the blackened range and a bathtub covered by a worktable. This was an Old Law tenement with a single toilet in the hall serving all four apartments on the floor. The men pushed inside, finding the place a shambles, broken furniture strewn like pieces of kindling. An overturned flour bin powdered most of the floor but the detectives failed to find a single white footprint.
The back room was in even greater disorder. Twenty-dollar gold pieces lay scattered about, along with a bundle of silver spoons tied with silk ribbon and several broken bits of costume jewelry. A cotton mattress torn from the bed was bunched against the wall. Mother-of-pearl grips smeared with gore, a gleaming straight razor lay on the only unbroken chair, pointing to the blood splattering the cheap patterned wallpaper. The shattered window frame gaped with night. A gusting breeze sent several torn clumps of gray hair drifting across the bare floorboards like tiny spectral creatures.
Lieutenant Bremmer turned the central gas jet higher. At first glance the room looked unoccupied, a fireplace on the side wall seemingly unused, as no ash collected on the grate. Oddly enough, considerable quantities of soot had fallen onto the hearth. Bremmer bent over for a look. A long strand of blond hair hung out of the flue.
“Christ almighty,” he muttered, reaching up to tug a slender arm down from the chimney. The head and shoulders of a young woman followed, badly scratched and mauled. Discolored bruises banded her pale throat. Hanging upside down, her staring blue eyes and wide-open mouth spoke of a final uncomprehending horror.
Damon Runyon leaned forward among the detectives. “I’ll be damned,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Rue Morgue …”
“What’s that?” asked Heegan, standing at his elbow. He thought he’d heard him say “rumor.”
“Just like the Poe story.”
Sergeant Heegan didn’t know what the newspaperman was talking about. He had never heard of Edgar Allan Poe.
THE KNIGHT AND HIS lady stood arm in arm at the stern rail of the Mauretania, watching the long white line of wake describe their course across a blank and nearly motionless sea. It was very cold. Bundled in heavy overcoats, she with her ermine stole wrapped tightly around her neck, they remained the only couple on deck under a moonless, cloud-free sky. The clarity of the air magnified the myriad stars and rendered the horizon sharp and straight as a razor’s edge, the obsidian sea abruptly divided from the silver diadem of sky.
He drew her close and whispered into the fur-muffled ear. “It was on just such a night as this that the Titanic went down. And not so very far from here, I should reckon.” His voice rumbled gently with a laconic Scots burr.
“Is it only a decade ago?” she said. “It seems absolute centuries.”
His heart surged with emotion, not because of what she implied: a whole world swept away; each of them losing a beloved brother to that devastating war; his son, Kingsley, gone as well. They had been through so much together, yet he felt neither sadness nor loss. He no longer believed in the finality of death. If there was such a thing as eternity, he knew in some mysterious way it was connected to the profound love he shared with this fair, stalwart woman who had remained by his side through it all.
He was sixty-three years old, his wife fourteen years younger, although she looked to be still in her late thirties. Theirs had been a love at first sight during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee more than a quarter century before, and the fire of it burned more fiercely now than on that first damp spring morning so long ago.
She interrupted his musing: “Will there be any danger of ice?”
“I should think not.” The knight wrapped a bearlike arm around his fair lady. “They steer a somewhat more southerly course these days. Still, it’s all fate, isn’t it, really?”
“At least we should be together.” She nestled tenderly against him and he knew she was thinking of Mrs. Isidor Strauss, who had refused to enter a lifeboat, saying she had spent forty years with her husband and would not part from him.
“I wonder how poor old Stead spent his last moments…?” He referred to W. T. Stead, once editor of the “Review of Reviews,” his Boer-sympathizing adversary back in the days of the South African War, later a friend and companion on the spiritual path, lost along with more than fifteen hundred other souls in the Titanic disaster. “Perhaps at tonight’s meeting we might make contact.”
She smiled up at him. “I know if we don’t, it shan’t be from want of trying.”
Never noticing their burnished reflections in the gleaming cherry-wood paneling, so intensely did they stare into each other’s eyes, the dignified couple made their way along the first-class passageway. Steam heat transformed the interior of the great ship into a balmy summer evening, and they removed their topcoats, he gallantly carrying both over his arm.
The knight was a tall man, well over six feet, with the burly build of a heavyweight boxer. In spite of his years, he moved with an athlete’s innate grace. Carefully trimmed now, his thick, white walrus mustache had swept to dark, dashing cavalier points when first they met. She thought him then the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes upon and nothing in all the years spent together had ever altered her original opinion.
Their stateroom was on the port side of A Deck. It was spacious, yet dainty in its “posh” appointments. Although not bound for the Indian Ocean, they had shared a quiet laugh about “port out, starboard home” upon embarking. He hung up their coats. She sat at the vanity, brushing and rearranging her dark gold hair. She caught his reflection over her shoulder and smiled.
Her husband was one of the most famous men on the planet, his beloved books translated into dozens of languages; his plays, the toast of the West End. He received his knighthood not for these literary accomplishments but for service to Crown and country during the Boer War, something altogether more noble. Far from being a bookish chap, he was an avid sportsman, an expert amateur boxer, and a champion cricketer. She admired him enormously.
The smiling knight rested his powerful hand on his lady’s pale shoulder. She pressed her cheek against it, kissing his fingers. Neither her pride in the man nor her admiration for his varied abilities compared to the enormity of her love. When they met she was a girl of twenty-four with a passion for singing and fast horses. She still craved a spirited mount and galloped fearlessly through the woods surrounding their Sussex estate. And her fine mezzo-soprano voice, trained at Dresden and Florence, continued to give her husband great pleasure.
She sang for him on that first rainy afternoon so long ago and she remembered the joy in his bright blue eyes. He was in his prime then, a jovial bull of a man, bursting with energy and ideas. Already celebrated, he wore his fame lightly, taking more joy in scoring a century on the cricket field than in all the kudos of the literary establishment. He was also married, “Touie,” his wife, an invalid. She loved him anyway: utterly, completely.
If he had been a different sort of man, one to whom honor mattered little, he might have divorced his ailing wife, or baser still, taken his new love for his mistress, and she surely would have followed his lead. But, he did neither, compelled by a code he’d honored all his life. He would not abandon his wife; neither did he deny his love. Although wiser heads counseled her never to see him again, no romantic heart ever argued with her choice. For the next decade, their relationship remained platonic. They saw each other often, chastely, and with discretion. And whenever he stormed at the unfairness of it all, she smiled and said she didn’t mind as long as they were together.
Nine years went by with dignity and decorum, and when Touie succumbed peacefully to the tuberculosis that doomed her long before, he mourned for another twelve months. He was now a knight of the realm. This meant little to him. The happiest day of his life was when at last his lady became his bride. And although the “Flaming Youth” of a more cynical postwar generation might smirk at the thought, she took pride after such a long and secret courtship in being still a virgin when she stood beside him at the altar.
A passenger liner at sea provided a succinct microcosm of the society left behind on land. Down in the depths of the stokehole the black gang toiled in sweat and misery, shoveling coal round the clock into furnaces under the great boilers that drove the ship. Over them, the steerage passengers dwelt in dormitories little better than prisons. The spare, efficient quarters on the next level housed the crew. No frills or fancy ornament here. Servants were not expected to aspire beyond their station.
High above the throbbing engines and catacombed human hive, the stately corridors of wealth and privilege surpassed a humble immigrant’s most extravagant dreams. The steamship companies provided fantasies as grand as any concocted in the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Shielded by riveted iron plates, surrounded by teakwood decks, magnificently arrayed beneath the four looming red stacks, the Mauretania’s hand-some public rooms included cafes modeled on the Orangery at Hampton Court, tiled Turkish baths with marble columns, a gentle-men’s smoking chamber in the manner of Renaissance Italy, grand ballrooms and dining rooms spanning every French style from François I to Louis XVI.
Launched five years before the Titanic, sister ship to the Lusitania, the Mauretania first won the Blue Riband for speed in 1907. The prized ensign remained affixed to her foremast fifteen years later. Still the swiftest craft afloat, she was a stately survivor from a grander and less gaudy age. The same might well be said of the knight and his lady ascending the main staircase, so completely did they embody the virtues of a lost time. The year before, he had been made an Earl and Knight of the Garter. They were known, at least by sight, by all the passengers. Everyone on the stairs nodded an amicable greeting.
In the Louis Seize library, where the bookcases were so like those in the Trianon, they paused to chat briefly with the Duchess of Marlborough, whom they’d met at a séance in Kent. Knowing that her friends, the Burlieghs, were among their guests, they invited her to join their party, and she accompanied them into the adjoining writing room.
The rest of the group had already assembled. “Here’s Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle just now,” barked bluff Brig. Gen. Sir Nevil Soames. After genial greetings, the knight introduced the duchess to those she didn’t know: a couple from the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Randell; and the spirit medium, V. T. Podmord, a noted clairvoyant. The steward brought drinks and refilled coffee cups. Lady Jean chatted with the duchess and the Randells, who owned a chain of “drug stores” in some improbable place called the Midwest.
Sir Arthur joined General Soames, Lord and Lady Burliegh, and the ethereal Mr. Podmord, a thin young man so pallid as to be nearly translucent. “Dreaming true is the only psychic power I possess, outside of healing,” Sir Arthur said, replying to a question from Lady Burliegh. “Thank God for that.”
“What? No desire to have ectoplasm oozing from every pore?” The brigadier fixed young Podmord with a dubious eye. “Tell him what he’s missing, tell him of the rapture and the joy.”
The clairvoyant’s cheeks flushed. “Perhaps Sir Arthur possesses powers of which he is unaware …” His reedy voice piped in suppressed indignation. “Or wishes to deny.”
“Of whatever small talents I lay claim to, Mr. Podmord, I can certainly assure you that there are none which escape my attention.” Sir Arthur’s cerulean eyes danced, lively with imagination. “It’s the responsibility I couldn’t bear. To be so close to the spirit realm, to hear all those pleading voices, greet so many distant shades… It would quite consume my life, I’m afraid.”
“It already has,” Soames remarked. “Lecture tours in Australia. America, again. And book after book on spiritualism. Give us more of The White Company and Micah Clarke.”
Sir Arthur felt secretly pleased. The brigadier had praised the historical fictions, his own two favorites among his work. Unlike most enthusiasts, Soames did not urge him to produce more bombast about the odious Sherlock Holmes.
“Might not one be insensitive to his psychic gifts and, at the same time, unconsciously make use of them?” Lord Burliegh wondered.
“Rubbish!” snorted General Soames.
“I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn.” Sir Arthur smoothed his mustache. “First, hear the evidence. In a long life touching every side of humanity, far and away the most intriguing character I have ever encountered is Houdini.”
“The music hall magician?” chirped Lady Burliegh, anxious to demonstrate her familiarity with popular culture, although unsure of the reference.
“The same. I have never met his equal in courage. All the world knows of his daring. Why, he has performed feats the average man trembles to contemplate. Moreover, it is impossible to think of his many miraculous escapes without imagining some form of dematerialization has taken place.”
“Is not this same trickster leading a campaign against spiritualism?” pouted V. T. Podmord. “Is he not the greatest medium-baiter of the age?”
“He has lately embarked on a very public vendetta, attacking every medium, whether false or true, with equal fervor.” Sir Arthur sighed. “I believe this serves Houdini a two-fold purpose. First, he has never been adverse to publicity, however lurid. But, more importantly, there is no better smoke screen than just such an antispiritualist posture, not if you are trying to conceal being the greatest physical medium of all time.”
Brigadier General Soames swirled his brandy and shook his head. “Why should an entertainer wish to conceal his greatest selling point? Especially one who so courts the press?”
“Houdini is a great student of the history and literature of magic. He, more than anyone, is aware of the fate suffered by those conjurors whose tricks were found to be accomplished through supernatural means. The stake awaits the warlock.”
After the steward cleared the table, they all gathered around. “I’ve had sittings with Hartlepool, the trumpet medium,” Sir Arthur said to Lord Burliegh as the ladies took their seats and the steward closed the drapes. “And with Gladys Piper, the flower medium, not to mention the Bangs Sisters of Chicago. All with remarkable results.”
“We’ve used the Bangs,” Mrs. Randell commented. “Very inspirational … “
The steward retired, shouldering a tray piled with cups and glasses. He turned off the lights and closed the double doors on his way out. It was pitch dark. Shadows masked the gray sycamore paneling and gilded furniture. Sir Arthur had arranged for the disbeliever, Brigadier General Soames, to be seated as far from the medium as possible. It was essential at these times to give the sensitive psychic support and he made sure Lady Jean was placed on Podmord’s right. His wife had the gift of “inspired writing.” Her faith was a beacon.
Following a short prayer, Sir Arthur spoke of the Titanic, mentioning they presently passed through water where more than a thousand bodies had drifted for days, if not weeks. He quoted Thomas Hardy’s poem on the calamity, telling them that his friend, the journalist W. T. Stead, who perished in the accident, had also known the poet. “If his spirit is at large, perhaps he will reveal himself to us here tonight.”
Although Stead had not been personally acquainted with anyone else present, both General Soames and the Burlieghs had friends among the passengers lost on the Titanic. V. T. Podmord expressed his opinion that this would “most exquisitely facilitate contact.” All the psychic signs were auspicious and they sat together holding hands in the dark as the great ship steamed on its course through the icy sea. Other than occasional small talk, nothing of interest occurred.
HER HAIR GLEAMED MIDNIGHT black. When she was a farm girl in New Hampshire, it had hung past her waist, but now, fashionably bobbed, it curved like a raven’s wing along the ivory line of her jaw. Blessed with striking features (high sculpted cheekbones, large wide-spaced wave-green eyes, a prominent nose with nostrils delicate as seashells, lips full and red, parted by a slight overbite, giving her smile a perpetually mocking air), she ignored her detractors, who joked about a predatory look, calling her “fox-faced” behind her back. Most people, men especially, found Opal Crosby Fletcher impossibly beautiful.
Born in the final year of the old century, she seemed to belong more to that vanished time. Her rural upbringing kept her distant from the stunning changes bedazzling a new era. Like many imaginative youngsters, Opal had played with an imaginary friend, sharing secret confidences with him. Other children played with invisible fairies and nonexistent talking rabbits. She insisted her phantom playmate was the spirit of a priest of Ra from Old Kingdom Heliopolis, that the secrets he whispered inside her mind were prophetic.
At first, Opal’s casual remarks regarding next week’s weather or the sex of unborn calves seemed nothing more than playtime babble, but the accuracy of her predictions soon made it impossible to deny her gift. Word of her prescience spread. Neighbors dropped by the Crosby farm in North Conway daily, seeking advice from the little girl. Stories appeared in the state’s newspapers and strangers by the drove crowded onto the white frame farmhouse’s elm-shaded front porch.
Inevitably, this led to offers from a legion of one-ring circuses and fly-by-night carnivals. The elder Crosbys were seriously tempted. Their dairy business remained marginal at best, and any extra income seemed a blessing. Young Opal rejected all such commercial considerations, believing divine gifts were not to be sold for profit. A wealthy investor arrived from Boston, waving a big check in exchange for advice on future stock market developments. Opal refused to help. Her inner voice remained obstinately mute.
The onset of puberty brought about changes beyond the merely biological. At fifteen, Opal announced she was the reincarnation of Isis, ancient Egyptian fertility goddess, and conducted her first séance in the town meeting hall. Looking more innocent schoolgirl than pagan goddess, her dark beribboned braids tumbling across a home-sewn gingham dress, Opal was bound and chained within a sealed wooden cabinet.
After volunteers extinguished the kerosene lamps, manifestations began almost immediately. Bells rang, trumpets blared, tambourines and chairs levitated. Many present in the old colonial building claimed they saw luminous spirits hovering among the hand-hewn rafters. The story ran in the Manchester Union and was picked up by several big-city newspapers. The myth of “Isis reborn” began to spread.
This time, more substantial offers arrived. Telegrams from Edward F. Albee, head of the Keith Circuit, and Martin Beck of the Orpheum Circuit proposed national vaudeville tours. Broadway beckoned when both Flo Ziegfeld and Charles Dillingham sent personal representatives to New Hampshire, contracts in hand. To poor farmers like the Crosbys, the suggested salaries seemed astronomical. Opal would earn more in a month than the dairy farm took in during an entire year.
It didn’t turn out that way. Lacking their daughter’s clairvoyance, the Crosbys imagined a glorious future in the “Follies” or the Hippodrome’s “Big Show.” Isis made other plans. Barely sixteen, the fertility goddess eloped with a sixty-three-year-old textile tycoon.
Walter Clarke Fletcher descended from an old New England family, a long line of merchants and ministers; doctors, lawyers; Yale men, Episcopalians; one a colonel in the Continental Army. His grandfather had built a small woolen mill on the Housatonic. At the start of the Civil War, his father owned three more and finagled a government contract for military blankets. By the time the ink dried at Appomattox, Gordon Prouty Fletcher was a millionaire many times over. Educated abroad, young Walter broke the family’s Old Blue tradition. On the continent, he developed a taste for vintage wine, baccarat, and women who were decidedly not Episcopalian.
On his return to the United States in 1894, Walter left the Fletcher estate in Hartford and commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design an imposing chateau for him in New York, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. To this home overlooking Central Park he brought a succession of wives, who raised half a dozen children, none of whom interested him any more than did the textile business. They all survived his indifference and, by some miracle, so did his ever-expanding woolen mill empire. Not even persistent bad luck at the gaming tables made any appreciable dent in his enormous fortune.
The children were all grown by the time Walter Fletcher carried his new teenage bride over the threshold into the vast, echoing marble pile on Millionaire’s Row. As his life was already something of a scandal, none of his blue-blooded neighbors did more than cluck and gossip at this latest development. Other than the usual polite society page squib, scant mention was made of the event in the city’s newspapers. The Daily News, first of the sensationalist tabloids, remained three years in the future and, although no less cynical and hard-boiled, journalists in those days exercised a certain sense of decorum.
Whatever the prurient might have imagined regarding an aging roué ravishing an innocent farm girl, the truth evaded their wildest dreams. Opal was no timid victim. On their wedding night, she stalked Walter Fletcher across his opulent bedchamber like a tigress. Her kisses tore at his lips. Her knowing touch and erotic crooning murmurs suggested much experience, and he thought himself in the arms of a prostitute until he found he had forced a virgin and came away matted with her blood.