Mrs. Houdini(40)

Charles shook his head. He took a paper bill out of his wallet and placed it on the bar, then handed her his card. “You can meet me at the press offices tomorrow, if you’d like. I’m there all day on Saturdays.”

Stella saw her and waved, making her way over to the bar. Bess intercepted her before she could reach Charles. “Hello! I was just on my way out.”

“Is that the estate man? He’s very handsome.”

“Yes, yes, he is.” Bess took her elbow. “Shall we go to dinner?”

Outside, the sun had gone down, but the boardwalk blazed with light. It reminded Bess so much of Coney Island, only livelier. She had to keep herself from searching for Harry in the crowd. The boardwalk had changed quite a bit since the first time she had been there with him. Back then, women rarely walked alone; now, there seemed to be more single women out than single men. And the names on the billboards had changed entirely; instead of Old Dutch Cleanser and Bixby’s Shu-Wite, Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike advertised on every block.

Stella said, “I heard from a lady in the hotel that we shouldn’t expect to see any celebrities while we’re here. They never come when it’s this hot. They mostly travel to Europe in the summer. All the well-dressed women are the gamblers’ mistresses, apparently, and the prostitutes.”

Bess laughed. “I don’t care very much for celebrities.”

“Funny, given you are one.”

“You know what?” She turned to Stella. “Let’s take dinner in our room tonight.”

“This, from Bess Houdini? You’ve never been home on a Friday night before midnight!” Stella teased. “Is there something the matter? You haven’t been yourself lately. Since the Arthur Ford episode.” She hesitated. “You weren’t really in love with him, were you?”

“God, no.”

“Then what is it?”

Bess couldn’t take her mind off Charles. There had to be something she was missing.

She wondered if his father had been someone they had known, or someone Harry had corresponded with—someone in the bookselling or magic field? “I’ve just had a bad reaction to what I was drinking earlier,” she said. “I think I’ll go to bed early.”

Stella took Bess’s arm. “Off to the room then, darling. I’m going to take a bath. Would you order me dinner?”

Their suite was on the second floor, on the ocean side; it had two bedrooms and a sitting room in between. The maid had left the windows open so the breeze would cool the room. Bess felt lost; her meeting with Charles had accomplished nothing. She had always been small, but over the years she felt herself growing smaller, shrinking with age, as if Harry’s death had been eating away at her, physically, every day. Draping her wrap over the sofa, she listened to the people on the pier and wished she were in Russia again, the gardens blanketed with snow, and men and women roaming about in furs and capes. Harry was there, and in the warmth of the fire they were talking about his performance that evening, during which he had asked all of the guests assembled in the ballroom to write down something impossible they would like to see performed.

“It is my job,” he explained, “to make the impossible possible again.”

The duke selected one of the papers and unfolded it. “You are being asked to ring the bells of the Kremlin,” he said and shook his head sadly. “But those bells haven’t rung in a hundred years. They are too old.”

The question, of course, was a plant; Harry went to the window that overlooked Palace Square. He removed his handkerchief from his pocket and waved it out the open window. As he did so, the bells began to ring. The duke could not speak for several minutes; one of the women fainted onto the couch. For his success, Harry had been handsomely rewarded with a purse full of money. They were certain he was some sort of mystic, or the devil himself. Bess, as his wife, received a white Pomeranian whom she named Carla.

The truth was that Harry’s assistant, waiting outside, had fired a pistol at the bells. Even though the ropes holding them had rotted away, the sound was accomplished.

Many people had known some of his secrets. Franz, who fired the pistol, knew most of his tricks. Harry’s secretary knew of his correspondence. Alfred knew the extent of his expenditures. But only Bess knew everything. Only Bess knew how his mouth twitched when he slept, and how he looked in the middle of the night when he was not Harry Houdini but Ehrich Weiss. Only she knew. There were no children, no children’s children, to know his preference for strawberry jam in the mornings; it was always just her.

Now, she felt something pulling her back to the bar where she had left Charles. The only way she would find out whether the photographs were a coincidence or a message was to come clean with him, and tell him everything. If he had any knowledge that would help her, she needed to find it out. She didn’t care if he called her a madwoman. She grabbed her purse and went into the sitting room. She could hear Stella running the bath, and she left quietly.

In the bar, everything was as it had been fifteen minutes earlier. The man pouring drinks was whistling; the piano music was going; the woman in blue was sitting on the lap of another man, smoking a cigarette. Bess looked around, but she didn’t see Charles. He had gone.

She leaned over the wooden bar and waved to the bartender. “Excuse me,” she called, slightly out of breath. “The man who was sitting here—when did he leave?”