Mrs. Houdini(43)
Bess sat down beside him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “How do you know they’re expecting you?”
“Beck said so.”
“What’ll you do if they’ve never heard of you?”
Harry shrugged.
She turned his head toward hers and kissed him. “Don’t go just yet. We’ve only just gotten here. You’ve only just recovered.”
“We’re out of money.” Harry pulled away. “I’ve got to go to work.”
She knew he was right. “I want to go with you,” she said.
Harry looked at her sadly. “My sweet, sweet girl. You know you can’t.”
“I am your assistant, you know.”
Harry thought about it. “I think I have to go in on my own here. Or else they’ll think you’re helping me somehow. That you sneaked in some kind of lock pick.”
Bess surveyed his appearance. “At least change your clothes. You’ve been wearing those same pants for three days.”
Harry looked down. “Have I? I can’t remember when I put them on.”
After he had gone, in a clean shirt and pressed pants, she fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed of a man who’d grabbed her hand outside her school when she was twelve, a vagabond with swift eyes and tiny crystals of perspiration on his face, and the nun who’d come out of the school lobby and saved her, and the cool glass of water she’d given Bess in her office afterward, and her soft voice saying, “No one will ever hurt you.” Except when she looked up the nun wasn’t there anymore, and it was Harry standing over her, with his hand on her shoulder.
She had forgotten where she was. She looked out the window and saw clothes flapping from lines in the alley, and two children kicking dust clouds out of the dirt, the shafts of light between the buildings like two wide-open eyes.
“Here’s how we fasten the Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” Superintendent William Melville told Harry at the police headquarters. He wrapped Harry’s arms around a pillar in the middle of the station and handcuffed him. “Stage handcuffs, they’re one thing, but these are real.” Melville smiled. “Beck said you’d give me a real laugh. I might just leave you here to teach you a lesson.”
Harry smiled back at him, and Melville checked his watch and turned to the door. It was lunchtime.
“Wait,” Harry said. “I’ll go with you.”
When Melville turned around, he saw that Harry had freed himself and was leaning against the pillar, the cuffs dangling from his pinkie finger.
“Here’s the way Yankees open handcuffs,” he said. Melville looked at him in astonishment, then burst into laughter.
Harry recounted the story to Bess afterward, pacing the room with excitement. “And I convinced him,” he went on, “that I’m the real thing, and he put me in touch with an agent here, who booked me for two weeks at fifty dollars a week. He wants me to do the handcuff trick and the Metamorphosis trick.”
“Us,” Bess corrected. “He wants us to do the tricks.”
Harry nodded. “That’s what I meant.” He took her elbows in his hands. “You and me.”
“I think you did it, Harry,” she said. “I think we’re gonna be something.”
“This act isn’t going to separate us,” Harry said. “It’s going to bring us together.”
Bess grinned. “Let’s go have some tea. Isn’t that what people do when they’re in London?”
Harry’s two-week engagement at the Hippodrome turned into two months. He had thoroughly entertained Superintendent Melville with both his brazenness and his skill, and even though he would not reveal how his tricks were done, Melville had done him a favor and brought in the papers. A London Times reporter was present when Harry broke out of a concrete cell in Scotland Yard in under fifteen minutes, and the paper published the story as an advertisement for his nightly acts. People flooded the theater, bringing with them a dozen handcuffs and restraints, all of which Harry was able to extract himself from. Bess wore her usual white dress and black tights and retrieved the cuffs from the audience members, then brought them to Harry onstage. In the afternoons, while Harry was readying his new tricks to show her, she walked through the London streets, looking in shop windows. She purchased a fancy crimson-covered sketchbook in a department store, and then spent the hours on park benches, drawing. She wanted to remember these days, the small moments you see only when sitting still for a long time—the women in gossamer dresses floating like spirits over the grass, and the lonely carriage drivers who brushed their horses’ manes with the tenderness of parents. When she came home, Harry would be fast asleep on the bed. Only half awakening at the sound of the door opening, he would reach out his arms and pull her down with him, and they would nap together until it was time to get up and dress.
A week before they were scheduled to perform in Budapest, Bess convinced Harry to walk with her after lunch. He was too pale, she said. It wasn’t healthy. It was cool out, and the sky was glass blue, and she simply had to leave the dark little room in the actors’ boardinghouse they had been sharing for weeks. They walked across the park and onto Regent Street, which had some of the most fashionable shopping. The windows were dressed with rope portieres and displayed everything from silver hatpins and porcelain jars of cold cream to glass table lamps.