Eleven 
After I left Daniel I went straight to the theater. I didn’t expect to find the Houdinis there, but I hoped that there might be some activity at this hour and someone could tell me where they lived. The Bowery was a regular hive of activity, with women doing their morning shopping, pushcart vendors crying out their wares, and small boys dodging between carts as they played some game. The street itself was clogged with a jam of horse-drawn drays, hansom cabs, the occasional automobile, and trolley cars. The smell of fresh manure and the slops tipped into the gutters were overpowering in the sticky heat, and I was glad when I saw the theater marquee rising above the shops and saloons. The front doors were locked but I went down the alley to the stage door and found Ted, the doorkeeper in attendance.
“You again?” he said. “You keep turning up like a bad penny—and speaking of bad pennies, I’d keep well away from Mr. Irving, the manager, if I were you. He was in some fearful bad temper last night. Not only did he have to stop the show for the second time in a week, and give some people their money back, but it turned out that someone had unloaded quite a few forged banknotes on us. My but he was hopping mad.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “So what was everyone saying about the accident last night?”
“You know theater folks—superstitious, that’s what they are. They were saying that the place is jinxed. First Lily and then Bess.”
“And what do you think?” I asked him.
“I’m not paid to have an opinion,” he said, “but if you really want to know, I think these illusionists take crazy risks and something’s bound to go wrong sometime. Give me a nice song-and-dance act any day.” He realized he was chatting with me, stopped, and frowned. “Now what did you want this time?”
“I was upset about what happened to Bess Houdini last night. I wanted to go and see her to make sure she’s all right. She quite took to me, you know. So I wondered if you could tell me where they are staying?”
He looked at me appraisingly. “I’ve been doing this job for a good while and I’ve learned a thing or two about people and there’s something about you I just can’t quite fathom out. Something that doesn’t quite add up.”
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.
“The first time you showed up, you came back here to collect your lost shawl,” he said. “A shawl that had been used to cover a dead girl. What young lady would want her shawl back after that? Any young lady that I know wouldn’t want to touch it again, even if it wasn’t covered with blood. And then the next time you show up you’re supposedly the bosom buddy of Bess Houdini. And you know what else?” His eyes narrowed as he squinted at me. “Every time you’ve been at this theater, something’s gone wrong. So I’m thinking that maybe someone has sent you here—someone who has it in for our theater.”
“You think I might be the one who caused the accidents?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Some of these criminal types, they’ve used pretty young ladies to do their dirty work before now. So perhaps someone’s paid you to settle a score with Houdini.”
I glared at him. “Settle a score with Houdini. Who might want to do that?”
He touched his nose in a confidential way. “Remember that affair with Risey on Coney Island? That left bad blood, didn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I haven’t been in this country for long. Who is Risey?”
“Risey—he’s a big noise on Coney Island. He was badmouthing Houdini and calling him a fraud, so Houdini challenged him and locked him in a trunk at Vacca’s theater. Risey panicked and they only just got him out in time.”
I nodded, digesting this. So Risey, a shady character, had been made to look a fool by Houdini.
“And Risey was heard to say that Houdini better not show his face anywhere near him again,” Ted added.
“I see,” I said. “Well, I assure you that I am not working for anybody. The first time I came to this theater was with my young man and we witnessed that horrible scene with Scarpelli. My intended went onstage immediately after the tragedy happened to see if he could help. I went with him. Bess Houdini saw all the blood and had hysterics. I took her away and calmed her down and she became instantly attached to me. She came to my house to thank me and invited me to come and watch the show. That’s the whole truth.”
Ted stared at me again, then nodded. “Maybe it is, and then again maybe it isn’t. I’ve always found that women make the best liars.”
“So you’re not going to give me the Houdinis’ address?” I asked. He was now beginning to annoy me—partly because he could see through me, I suppose. “I just thought it would be the friendly thing to do to go and check on Bess, seeing that I was there as her guest last night and I was supposed to be meeting her for lunch today, an appointment which she obviously won’t be well enough to keep.”
This last was a lie, of course, that came to me in a flash of inspiration.
“They’ve taken a house up in Harlem, from what I hear,” he said, “but as to the address, you’d have to ask Mr. Irving, and like I say, he’s in no mood to talk nice to anybody today.” He turned away, then looked back at me. “Your best bet would be to come back to the theater tonight. Houdini will be doing his act whether his wife is fit to join him or not.”
This made sense, but it was Bess I wanted to see and I had seen how protective Houdini was of her. She was now my client, as far as I was concerned. She had hired me to do a job and from what I had seen last night, that job had become all the more urgent.
“Why don’t you write her a note and I’ll make sure that one of them gets it,” Ted said, seeing my frustration.
“That’s not going to be any use for my luncheon appointment today, is it?” I said. “Still, I suppose it’s better than nothing.”
He handed me paper and a pencil and I wrote, “So sorry about what happened last night. If you’d like to talk about it, you know where I live. Yours fondly, Molly.” I suspected that Ted would snoop and read it so I left it at that.
As I came out onto the Bowery I passed the front of the theater and saw that a door to the box office was now open. I went inside. A crowd had gathered around the ticket counter and voices were raised. “But we were told we’d be able to see the show for free after it was stopped!” a woman was shouting. “Who is going to give us our money back if the show is sold out?”
I sneaked past them and tried the doors to the theater. They didn’t open but there was a passageway down the side, leading to the balcony and the boxes. I went down this, and to my delight found a door that opened into the orchestra stalls. The door closed behind me and I stood, blinking in almost complete darkness. I felt my way forward, row by row, until the orchestra pit opened up in front of me. Then I felt my way around that to the steps at the right and the pass door. It yielded to my touch and I was through to the backstage. Silence and darkness greeted me. The smell of fresh paint mingled with sawdust and stale coffee made me want to sneeze and I put up my hand to my nose to stop myself. I passed through the wings and tiptoed up the little staircase that led to the dressing rooms. There was a glimmer of light coming from somewhere on this hallway and I located the Houdinis’ dressing room by the star on the door. It wasn’t locked and I went inside. I wasn’t quite sure what I hoped to find in there. I closed the door carefully and turned on the electric light switch. Blinding light flooded the room from the bulbs around the mirror and I had to stand with my eyes squeezed shut until I dared to open them again. To be honest I still wasn’t used to the glare of electricity, having only gas at my house, which gave a softer and gentler glow.
As I looked around, I was again struck by how Spartan the dressing room was: the counter below the mirror with its jumble of grease paints, cotton wool, and patent medicines; the rack holding Houdini’s frock coat and Bess’s page-boy outfit; the couch in the corner, a couple of rickety chairs—that was about it. None of their props, I noticed. They were all locked away safely.
I tried the drawer in the dressing table. And then I went through the pockets in the jacket. All they contained was a card: the nine of spades. I smiled to myself. Then I noticed that the waste basket hadn’t been emptied. I sorted through cotton wool caked with vanishing cream and makeup, an empty tonic bottle, and then I hit pay dirt. An envelope, addressed to Mr. Harry Houdini, 178 E. 102 Street, New York.
Having had such a stroke of luck, I looked inside to see if perhaps it might have contained something useful like a threatening letter from a gangster—but it was empty. No matter. I had achieved my purpose and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I made my exit from the theater without being detected. There was still a vociferous crowd around the ticket kiosk and I pitied the person inside it.
From the Bowery I took the Third Avenue El, traveling north. It felt as if I were traveling to the ends of the earth, stuck in that hot, crowded compartment with frequent stops and plenty of jostling and shoving. On the way I had time to think about what had happened to Bess and why. I had overheard something that had sounded very much like a threat last night at the theater, when Houdini had told the young man that he was going to hand over something only to his boss. And now today Ted had told me that someone called Risey, who was a big man on Coney Island, had been humiliated by Houdini and had vowed to get even. I knew how New York gangsters bore a grudge and what kind of thing they might do to get even. So Bess had been quite right in her suspicions and had almost paid with her life. If an ax hadn’t been nearby, it would have been too late for her.
We crawled northward painfully slowly until finally I alighted at Ninety-ninth Street station. It wasn’t a part of the city with which I was familiar and I was interested to see it had the same distinctly Jewish feel to it as the streets of the Lower East Side but without the pushcarts, cacophony of sounds, and ripe smells. I heard Russian and Yiddish spoken and passed a synagogue where old bearded men in black caps stood on the steps in heated conversation with a lot of hand gestures.
The house the Houdinis had rented was nothing fancy—a modest brownstone on a quiet street. Children were playing jump rope on the other side, chanting the same sort of rhymes that we had chanted back in Ireland. This made me wonder whether the Houdinis had any children or, more to the point, whether Bess’s nervous condition and collapse might be due to pregnancy. I tapped on the front door and waited.
It was opened by a gaunt-faced old woman. “Ja?” she demanded, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Is this the residence of Mr. Harry Houdini?” I asked.
She stared at me blankly. Then she said in heavily accented English. “Not here.”
“Do you know where I might find him?” I asked. “It’s Mrs. Houdini I wanted to see. I’m a friend of hers, and I was very upset when I heard what happened to her last night at the theater. I wanted to make sure she was all right.”
“Theo?” the old woman turned back and called into the passage, and then rattled off something in a language I couldn’t understand.
A young man appeared behind her. At first I thought it was Houdini, then I saw that although the resemblance was striking, this man was younger and bigger.
“Can I help you, miss?” he asked, his hand folded defiantly across a massive chest.
I repeated my request. “I know Bess would want to see me,” I added.
He frowned at me. “I never heard her mention your name,” he said. “I’m Harry’s brother’s Theo. They call me Dash, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you—seeing that you’re such a good friend of Bess’s?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. And something I had recently read in a newspaper popped into my head. “You were part of the act, weren’t you?”
It was a lucky stab in the dark but he nodded. “Yes, it used to be Harry and I who performed the Metamorphosis, but I was glad to hand it over to Bess. I didn’t fit into that trunk so good.”
“I can see that.” I smiled and so did he.
“Lucky for me, you could say,” he said, his smile fading. “That might have been me trapped in there last night and I used to fit in that trunk so tight there was no room to breathe to begin with. I’d have been a goner.”
“I was there, watching from the wings. It was frightening,” I said.
“I don’t know what could have gone wrong.” Theo frowned. “That ain’t never happened before. Harry’s always so careful to double-check the equipment. And of course it would have to be Bess who got stuck in there. She panicked, of course. That makes it worse.”
“I hope she’s fully recovered,” I said. “Is she resting or can she receive a guest?”
“She’s not here,” Theo said, staring at me, unblinking.
“Can you tell me where she is?”
Theo shook his head. “Some doc’s got her under sedation. She was in a bad way last night. Harry was real worried about her.”
“Is your brother here or is he with her?”
“He’s with her,” Theo said, “if he’s not at the theater, checking on the props and making sure nothing else goes wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t want me to join him in the act tonight. There’s no way Bess is going to be fit to go onstage.”
That, of course, would ruin everything. It seemed I had to see Bess today somehow or I’d be out of a job again.
“Would you tell Bess I called?” I said, biting back my frustration. “My name’s Molly. Molly Murphy.”
“I’ll tell her if I see her,” he said. “They might keep her there for a while.”
He shrugged. “Some doc’s place. That’s all I know.”
It appeared that all I could do was to go home and wait until Bess Houdini contacted me. And if she was sedated and under a doctor’s care, she was hardly likely to be in a mental state to think about her dear friend Molly whom she had hired to protect her husband.
It was now way past midday and my stomach reminded me that I’d had nothing to eat. I told myself that I should probably save the money and try to hold out until I got home, but when I passed a corner delicatessen I gave in and bought myself a pastrami sandwich. Pastrami was another new food for me. I ordered it after asking for ham and getting a funny look from the man behind the counter and the patrons. It wasn’t half bad either, served with sour pickles!
The journey back to Greenwich Village seemed to take an eternity. It was stiflingly hot in carriage and the atmosphere grew worse as more and more people crowded in. If I’d been the kind of young lady who swooned, I’d have definitely done so. As it was I sat in my corner and tried to make enough space to fan myself with the empty envelope.
My muslin was a crumpled mess and soaked with sweat by the time I reached my front door. I let myself in and stood in the hallway, relishing the cool darkness. A long drink of water and then a cold wash were in order. Then I noticed that something was stuck in my letter box.
Inside was a note written in a shaky hand.
Molly, I must speak with you immediately. I am at a private clinic at 95th Street and Park Avenue. Could you come right away?
It was signed “Bess.”