THE CLOUDS CLEAR. The waxing moon, a golden coin, gleams against the velvet backing of the sky. He sees none of this. Face down on a deck slick with rain, algae, and oil, he lies breathing shallowly, wrists skinned and manacled, fingers swollen, feet torn from climbing the barnacled hull. His head aches as if the wound there were burning. He touches it, and without a wince pulls himself to standing. But the boat rocks on a swell and he slips again, and would go crashing into the water if not for physical genius and the memory of reflex. He catches the rusted balustrade, swings out over the Hudson and back, landing on his feet.
His gut spasms. He coughs, grabs the railing, and retches.
On the riverbank, a train chugs past, the top of its steam cloud a single black shape with the elms of the nighttime park, and the low mansions of Riverside Drive. Houdini tastes the bile in his mouth and tries to gauge his position. He is blocks downtown, past the garbage heaps and scows of 79th Street—how could he have missed them in the river and the storm?—and well offshore from the park. He can glimpse the silhouetted turrets of the Schwab mansion. Houdini knows nothing of boats, but catches the smell of coal and of alcohol. He sees the stubby smokestack and figures he is on some tramp steamer that found quick harbor against the storm. His fingers feel weak and fudgy. There’s a ringing in his ears. His stomach swells and heaves.
A needle-thin lockpick rests in the callus of his left heel. He lifts his wrists to examine the handcuffs. And even though he is feverish and weak, the task brings his mind to focus. All that remains in the lock are some coarse grains of sand, no longer the cement that he had worked against in the water. His adversary used some kind of semi-soluble paste. Very clever, for had he drowned it would have dissolved, and on his recovered corpse the manacles would show no sign of tampering. But now he can flick the last grit out easily, even as he struggles against the urge to vomit. Poisoned by the river water but working steadily, Houdini feels the rusted guardrail for an uncorroded point. A jerk, a smack, metal against metal, a deliberate flexing of the muscles, and he is free.
But the work makes him woozy. His bowels heave. He barely has time to pull down his shorts, when the shit leaves his guts as if propelled through a spigot. His stomach clenches. He doubles over, forehead pressed against the cold, slimy deck.
Death to the doubter. The words echo in his head.
He will destroy whoever did this to him. Sabatier, Margery, the weird sailor, whoever they are, whatever their motive. He thinks of Bess. The humiliation galls him. That she should think him defeated and drowned, that his wife should mourn Houdini, that the world should think he failed. He replays the scene as though he were the camera that filmed it, and from this godly perspective of perfect memory, he comprehends the entire act, in which his corporeal self, whom he sees strutting foolishly on the deck and performing, plays the fool and is played upon by a villain. He understands now the misdirection that he missed on account of his anxiety about the storm: how Sabatier maneuvered Molly Goodman through glances and smiles and the cock of his head, how he made her select that sailor. And was the sailor’s name Stevenson or Johnson or did he give both? Useless aliases. Miss Goodman was not part of the plot, she had to have been played, and when, like idiots, he and Jim Collins had their eyes on Sabatier, who was inspecting the chains, Stevenson-Johnson had fixed the handcuffs. Houdini thinks of the strange dangling ectoplasmic thing that hung from Margery’s ear at the séance, the kitchen-counter chemistry involved in Spiritualist tricks. They could have used anything, a teaspoon of fine sand, some viscous adhesive, a dab on each thumb, and the handcuffs would be inoperable. He pulls up his trunks, mouth gone dry, but no sooner is he staggering to his feet than he feels it coming on again. He tries to aim the diarrhea into the Hudson but it spits wildly, hot against his ankles. Houdini squats, clinging exhausted to the rusty post of the guardrail, letting it all run out of him. A breeze against his nakedness and he shudders. His teeth chatter. He feels his fever rise. His arms want to tremble, but Houdini makes them stop.
When the lightning struck the river, it knocked him senseless. He began to sink, but the taste of the Hudson woke him. Panic struck underwater. Houdini tried to breathe, felt the water coming in, and his body worked like a miracle machine, breathed out when he was breathless, kicked his furious legs, shot upward, broke the surface, coughed, spat, and gulped air. The rain hit hard, but he kept on swimming. Dark of night, he remembered the boat. Hands in cuffs, head bleeding, skin on fire with pain, he went against the current, and before he knew who or where or why he was, he had scrambled up the side, vomiting, chest heaving, hands and feet chafed raw, skin electric. Now he walks stiffly across the deck toward the boat’s little cabin, where he thinks he might find some shelter against the wind, if not the cold. His teeth chatter, his head pulses, his hearing is strange and dull.
On jelly legs he works the cabin door, breathing deep before moving, but the entrance fools him. Houdini misses a step, stumbles, and pitches into darkness. Falling, he reaches to his right, grabs a shelf, but this time his strength and reflexes play against him. The shelf he grabs pulls free. It whacks his back as he falls. A thought at the speed of blinking: bootleggers walloping him. But the blow to his gut is a stool, and with a crack a paint can nails him at the point where his neck meets his skull. He lies where he falls and his unconscious bowels let loose.
Dawn finds him hallucinating, his body tiny, his head overlarge, his injuries glowing. He has a third arm, but has somehow misplaced it. Where did he put that arm? He lies in his shit, surrounded by the rum-runner’s ragtag equipment. A filthy wool blanket, a hammer, a wrench, a coil of rope, pitch, paint, and grease, the shelf itself, a clasp knife, an old shirt, a raincoat, some empty bottles, and old magazines. He opens his eyes and feels the cold shit on his thighs. He spots the blanket and bundles himself in it, never mind the smell. The cabin has a small cracked window, its bottom pane gone. Houdini chatters and sweats. His tongue probes his mouth, a chipped tooth, a loose tooth. His hands shake and he wills them still. Someone wants to kill Houdini, he reasons, therefore Houdini will triumph.
He wipes himself with an old rag. He rinses his trunks in a slimy bucket. The old raincoat itches. The blanket is stiff. He spots the clasp knife on the floor and drops it in the pocket of the coat. Again, he needs to shit.
The man who emerges from the cabin is unrecognizable as the great magician. The grubby clothes, the slight stoop, the shuffling, his hair matted with shit and blood, his face disfigured, black and blue, feverish, sweating, off-kilter, but strong. Dawn spreads behind the buildings of Manhattan, a jagged line of mansions and apartment houses and steeples. Their shadows lie across the gray water. The weather has turned cool, as though the storm swept out summer and introduced the autumn chill. Beyond the garbage scows he can make out the marina, and on its docks the armature of lights that had been rigged overnight to help divers search for his body. A few bustling uniformed figures haunt the piers. Houdini moves to the far side of the cabin so no detective with binoculars will spot him. He leaves the blanket on deck, drops the handcuffs in the raincoat’s pocket along with his knife. Then, bundle in hand and wearing his filthy, soaking swim trunks, Houdini makes a perfect dive into the Hudson. Sick, beaten, feverish, and exhausted, he retains the lung capacity of a small whale.
Over the greasy rocks he climbs, dry-mouthed, thirsty, barefoot, his head throbbing. Momentum overrules the urge to collapse, and he passes into the brambles and ailanthus trees, filthy with bottles, rusted cans, and mossy women’s underwear. Houdini shakes out the raincoat and pulls it on, his shoulder muscles jerking with the cold. A commuter train passes, heading south to the city. Houdini watches through the rusty fence. Bankers, ad men, and insurance agents drift by. In the wasteland between the river and the wall of Olmstead’s park live a hundred drunks and drifters. The ground is soft, riddled with sinkholes. Houdini follows the track north, sticking close to coal bins, bushes, and piles of trash, anything that might indicate solid footing. Something rustles in the underbrush, the dash of a tail, and there are two of them, rats up on their haunches. Uphill, he sees a crate on its side, a makeshift hovel. Everywhere, the smell of urine. Grunts and groans come from a stand of weedy trees across the tracks. Houdini glimpses a man shitting or masturbating, and he looks away.
He keeps by the riverbank. The shantytown lies on the other side of the tracks and the raw wire fencing: little huts of discarded wood, sometimes with a sheet-metal roof. Hoboes huddle for warmth, old men curled like pairs of nestling boys. Fever makes Houdini sweat. His jacket itches as though it crawls with tiny bugs. His vision focuses and blurs. Before long he comes to the mountains of trash at 79th Street. Seagulls whirl and caw above the heaping rubbish, enormous rats prowl the periphery. The big scows are huddled close to the shore against yesterday’s storms, and the hauling machines are parked by a bridge that runs over the railroad tracks. Houdini looks over it all, the impassable brown green pile of food and clothing and glass and metal. The reek is unbearable. He gathers himself, climbs the slack fence, crosses the southbound tracks, then the north, and again, nimble and deft, makes the next rusty barrier and lands on his feet. He flexes his raw, sore hands. There’s a narrow space between the New York Central’s fence and the eastern wall of the garbagemen’s bridge. Houdini makes it through, bent and barely breathing, stepping carefully between the sleeping bodies packed close in the dark. He emerges from the fetid air into shadow that feels like sunlight. Houdini stands on a rock and watches the policemen work near the yacht club. He does not have to worry about being spotted, his broken body is an impenetrable disguise.
Through the scrub grass and brambles he goes, stepping once on a sharp long needle of glass which drives deep into the sole of his foot. He curses, draws out most of the green broken bottle, and trudges forward, heading for home. At 96th Street there’s another huge pile of waste, also a pipe that pumps sewage into the river. The passable land narrows and Houdini trudges close by a passenger train heading south. Soot and dust attack his eyes, but he habituates himself to that also, and marches stoically past the long line of clanking cars. Puddles and mud and more sinkholes. He crosses the tracks at a hole in the fence and follows them until another train convinces him to walk by the riverbank, on the rocks exposed by the lowering tide, his muddy, bloody feet slipping on the moss and green algae.
“Mother,” Houdini groans.
Then he lifts his head to see a shorebird, not ten yards away, staring at him. Not a gull, something magnificent, white and long-legged, an egret. The bird is thin as paper, then turns again into long profile and regards him steadily. Houdini studies its beautiful neck.
“Mother?”
The bird keeps its eye on him.
“Help.”
And it takes off, upriver. He watches the way its big wings work. Ponderously at first, but then magically they render the creature weightless, and it soars.
Somewhere around 100th Street, he sees a pair of ragpickers eating breakfast by a stream of runoff that’s a couple of yards wide and brown as mud. Houdini runs his hand across his mouth and then crosses the stream carefully, making his plans with his approach. Up the rise from the men sits their cart; hanging from one handle is a pair of leather shoes. The water of the stream rises higher than he had expected, over his knees, and when at one point his foot drops in the mud, his swim trunks are wetted all over again. But he makes it to the other side feeling only once for the clasp knife, whose weight in the pocket of his raincoat he finds comforting.
“Hello,” he calls. “Good morning.”
The men regard him with the indifference all city dwellers affect on the approach of potential danger. They pretend not to have heard him, and the shorter of the two—a dumpling of a middle-aged man—grunts at the taller, who laughs even as he chews his morning bread. They have lit a small fire. Houdini can smell their breakfast.
“Good morning,” he says again.
The little dumpling waves his hand as though shooing away a dog.
“Friends—” Houdini says, but his throat is dry and his voice cracks. “I only wish you good morning.”
“And we wish you to get lost, eh?” The dumpling has a cauliflowered ear, short, matted dark gray hair, and an accent that might be Russian or Greek.
Houdini laughs. “I want to trade with you.”
“Do we do trading?” the dumpling asks his taller, thinner companion. They sit on their haunches, neither facing Houdini. “I don’t think so. Not with the stumblebums.”
At this point the thin man stands. He is even taller and lankier than he seemed while squatting, and unfolds upright like a stork. His beard is so pale as to be nearly translucent and hangs like plant growth down his skinny neck.
“I want those shoes,” says Houdini, pointing toward the cart. “I have a knife.” And it appears in his left hand. “And I will trade it for those shoes over there.”
“A knife?” The short man stands, hiking his pants. “I never trade shoes for lousy knife,” he says. “But,” he continues with a sigh, “you should let me see.”
Houdini flicks open the blade, spins the handle in his clever hands. The dumpling backs away. The knife vanishes.
“I only want the shoes,” says Houdini.
“I have take good look at knife. Maybe I give pants for it.” The dumpling extends a filthy palm. “You want deal, I have to see knife.”
Shorter and wider than Houdini, with a grubby cap on his head, he turns the weapon over in his hands and then points its blade at Houdini.
“Now you scat, hey,” he threatens. “I got knife and you scat.” He pokes the air with his blade.
Houdini looks beyond the men. “I want those shoes,” he says.
“Funny.” But the dumpling does not smile. “I kill you, funny guy, okay?”
Houdini squats, heels in the mud by the stream of runoff, eyes still on the cart. Despite the battered face and matted hair, his eyes retain their hypnotic power. The tall, bearded crane steps forward, ready for a fight. Houdini picks up a handful of pebbles.
“Buddy, funny buddy. I kill you, hey. Go home.”
“No trade,” says the crane. “We already got knife.”
“Bye-bye, funny buddy.”
Houdini tosses the pebbles in the air: one, two, three, four, five. They rise in a line, and seem to hang in the sky, then in formation they drop into his open hand. He closes his fist, opens it, and the pebbles vanish.
“No funny business, buddy,” says the dumpling, but he and his partner back off when Houdini claps.
He holds a black rock the size of a baseball. He claps his hands again and it’s gone.
The dumpling stares. The stupid crane smiles. Houdini puts his hand to his mouth and spits out pebbles: one, two, three, four, five, and then, miraculously, opens his jaws wider than they would have thought possible to produce the round black rock.
“Ach,” says the dumpling.
Houdini approaches. He shows his stone to one ragman, then to the other. Then he tosses it in the air. They lift their chins to watch. It arcs into the sky, the puffy clouds moving in the path of the northbound storm. The black rock pauses at the peak of its rise—high as an apartment building—then, with a thump, it lands between the dumpling’s feet. No magic there, except that Houdini now holds the clasp knife and its point is at the fat man’s belly.
“The shoes,” he says. “The ones you’re wearing. And a hat and a shirt and a decent pair of pants.”