The Man Who Killed

Jack and his John Buchan turn again, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Wait. How’d he know where you’re staying? You told him you were at the Occidental under Smith and here you were at the Wayside under Magee. Dammit, another illustration of Jack and his methods. The bastard said he was with the Pinkertons, the unsleeping eye. Stay ahead of him from now on. He’s using you, trying to twist you in the wind. Stay awake, boyo.

A shiver wracked me, and I collected myself. Jack’s dispatch wasn’t coded and so must be a safe summons. It was nine now by the clock on the wall. The question posed: stay or go? Jack’s play with Lilyan failed to arouse in me refusal; I was deadening somehow and animated by a deeper impulse, a low concupiscence. It was all one. At the rank I hailed a ’cab and made a reluctant return to campus. Montreal was a graveyard of memories. My mouth suddenly parched and I thirsted after warm tea with lemon to soothe it.

The taxi dropped me at the Roddick Gates, each of the four clocks telling a different time. I walked alone in the dark under elms spattering rain down my neck. Ahead blazed the hall. A sign gave details:

Medical Students’ Union

A Discourse Upon Spiritualism and the Scientific Method

— MR. H. HOUDINI —

Commencing 8 PM

Something was afoot. At the door stood an unctuous pup I recognized from the pathology lab, a shifty little informer right at home amongst diseased tissue samples and eviscerated corpses: Lubie by name. Resentments erupted as crimson boils on his ugly phiz. Lubie’d been two years below me and had puffed himself up since, gatekeeper and tattletale, all rheumy eyes and dirty suit aswarm with bacteria.

“Ticket,” he grunted at me.

“How much?”

“Union member or guest only.”

“I was a member,” I said “Current Medical Union members only,” the blackguard said.

I was a step below him. Several options presented themselves to me: a quick punch to Lubie’s tiny testicle, the Webley’s barrel shoved into his gut, a tactical retreat. I turned to see if anyone was watching, and turned back to “Here’s his ticket.”

Jack handed the bastard a stub. Lubie snorted. As I climbed by I elbowed him hard in the kidney. Lubie grunted and doubled over. I felt a mite better.

A reedy voice could be heard in the hall beyond the reception. Jack and I went into the room. It was a swelter, the seats filled with heavy men in damp coats with hats on their knees, thick womenfolk wrapped up in drab shrouds. The lamps’ iron filaments flared with an uncertain electric current on a man behind a lectern onstage. Before we sat down Jack steered me out again and into a dirty water closet. He took out his small vial and spilled cocaine on the platinum cigaret case. In a gesture of conciliation for the previous evening he offered me the salt first. One sniff of the drug and a cold finger touched my hypothalamus. When we returned to the hall Jack and I sat near the rear. Nearby a clutch of sniggering students fooled in the corner and moved like drunks.

The man onstage spoke: “Inasmuch as notions of the possibility of communication with those who have passed from the terrestrial sphere have been studied using empirical methodology the results have unequivocally tended towards the uniformly negative. This would lead one to suppose that in our present age of scientific development the means have not yet been devised to establish whether such a removed plane can be revealed by any rational process, or contrariwise, whether such a supposed realm can be considered to verifiably exist.

“Notwithstanding the concentrated combined efforts of the most stringent scientific disciplines there continue to remain charlatans without number who, contrary to all received proofs, aver an ability to communicate with the loving departed. These same predators feed not only on the naivete and credulity of those poor sufferers left behind, but do so for the basest pecuniary motives. They are wastrel wolves extracting a toll far dearer than money. These fiends tax the remaining hope and spirit of bereaved survivors. My own researches into and well-publicized exposures of fraudulent mediums and hoaxers have been legion. This chapter of my life is well-documented and I hope familiar to this learned audience.

“My own career should provide proof enough of Spiritualism’s falsity. As part of my showman’s training very early on I myself learned the secrets of their pernicious practice; I have never claimed to possess powers verging on the supernatural, as many wicked practitioners regularly do. The study of conjuring, stage-magic, and legerdemain has allowed me to reveal to the public every method employed at so-called seances by erstwhile mediums, or media, to be pedantic. These mediums ply their trade with the sole purpose of defrauding the poor, the grief-stricken, the sick-at-heart. I do not consider it a violation of the magician’s oath to unmask these parasites. A true magician seeks only to enlighten, amaze, amuse, and entertain, whilst mediums, seers, psychics, and prophets are mere confidence artists in pursuit of monetary gain based upon the exploitation of sorrow. Therefore, in addition to my speech, tonight I shall conduct a small experiment with random members of the audience gathered here and thusly demonstrate how easily trust and hope may be abused by the skilled mountebank. This portion of the discourse, I must add, is currently part of my performance at the Princess Theatre, tickets there starting at the very reasonable price of fifty cents, ladies and gentlemen.”

Houdini smiled. The audience tittered and applauded politely. Houdini cleared his throat and shuffled the papers at his lectern. He took a sip of water and grimaced. I’d never seen him before in the flesh, only depicted in newspapers and on hoarding posters. He’d suspended himself upside-down from the cupola of the World Building on Pender Street in Vancouver and escaped from a straitjacket but I’d missed that, down with the chicken pox. Houdini wasn’t overly tall and was surprisingly thick. He had an enormous flattish head with greying hair parted strictly down the middle.

The cocaine was providing me what I was pleased to pretend were insights into Houdini’s personality based upon his physiognomy. The man’s entire career was perhaps what they termed a compensation for his diminutive size, his physical bulk the result of the highly developed musculature necessary for the tremendous exertions demanded by his trade as escape artist. In Houdini’s movements were the grace of the practised showman and performer, even in the gentle manner with which he set down the water glass. From the man’s face, however, I thought to glean the most about his psychology. His features were marked with the striving of an absolute will. A commanding visage, well-nigh imperious and trained to be such in order to overawe and cow recalcitrant audiences into submission and credulity. Houdini could hint at intimate knowledge of the arcana mundi, show wonders, make an elephant disappear before our eyes.

The massive brow denoted a large cerebrum. The magician would be a phrenologist’s delight. It couldn’t be doubted that he was intelligent, his fame resident on escape from impossible scenarios. Therefore: cunning, craft, a genius for self-promotion. If not for their total difference I could be describing Jack beside me.

Houdini began to speak again in his high-pitched voice, the sole incongruity in an otherwise distinguished make-up. My interest started to sparrow around the room. On the far wall a gigantic oil of Lord Dorchester peered down on the audience nearsightedly.

“What’re we doing here?” I whispered.

“Came to see Smiler, for one.”

Jack tapped the breast pocket of his coat meaningfully, the place he’d hidden the vial of cocaine. That little bastard Smiler. Here I was expelled from the school and Union for suspected narcotic theft and in my absence the rotten piker’d horned onto my racket as a going concern. I shifted uneasily in my seat, conscious that former dons might be amongst the crowd and recognize me. Looking for Smiler I found his smug face just offstage right, seated on a cane chair as part of the group that’d enticed Houdini to give his lecture. Smiler pulled at a chain to palm a ’watch from his waistcoat pocket and another bolt of envious fury shot through me.

Houdini raised his hands and suddenly there twinkled something silver between his sinister thumb and forefinger, a needle. His oration continued: “Many if not most Spiritualist practices originate from the Indian subcontinent, where the ignorant and gullible are legion, prey to shamans, fakirs, and other so-called holy men. Some of their claims are preposterous enough to be seen for what they are and rejected outright. Others may be easily demonstrated and thus discounted. Numbered amongst these latter are claims of complete mastery over pain and bodily discomfort through supernatural succour. We see it in such explicable activities as walking over hot coals unshod or the piercing of the flesh with skewers or needles, like so.”