The Confabulist

  Margery Crandon, seeming smaller than she had in her séance room, stood, feet bare, dressed in a simple cotton dress with mother-of-pearl buttons running down the front. She stepped aside but he didn’t enter the room.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, her voice low.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.” She smiled a little. “Do you think I intend to do you harm?”

  “There are a finite number of reasons a married woman would invite a married man to a hotel room in a city that she has a house in. I cannot dismiss anything at this point.”

  Her smile broadened. “We are not ordinary people, Houdini. The usual reasons do not apply to us.”

  He walked past Margery. It was a sparse room, weakly lit, with a bed on one side and a small sitting area on the other. He chose a high-backed chair that was pushed up against the wall and sat. From here no one would be able to sneak up behind him—he could see the whole room, including both the main door and the door to the bathroom.

  Margery closed the door and did not address his rudeness. She sat opposite him, hands folded in her lap. She stared at him, her eyes light brown with flecks of yellow. She seemed to Houdini to be very different from the previous evening, when she remained in control but slightly vacant, as though but a cog in a larger machine. She was playing the part of a medium. Now she was playing another role. Or she was herself. He didn’t know. She seemed apprehensive, even vulnerable.

  “Well,” he said. “Why are we here?”

  “I know your opinion of me. I heard everything you said to Malcolm Bird last night.”

  “I realize that. Do you dispute my assessment of your methods?”

  She looked away toward the window, and he wondered if she was about to signal a confederate, but she simply gazed at the empty space. After a time she looked back at him.

  “It’s more complicated than you think. I don’t think you realize who you’re dealing with, how completely they believe in what they’re doing, or what they will do to those who make themselves their enemies.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mrs. Crandon?”

  “No,” she said. “But you know as well as I do what kind of a man my husband is. And he’s not the only one. They will not hesitate to kill you. They have already begun to plan.”

  “But if I don’t expose you, they will reconsider?”

  She tilted her head. “Yes, they will.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t you?”

  He leaned back in his chair. He knew he should leave, that every moment he spent in this room with Margery Crandon risked his reputation. But there was something about this woman that he was drawn to, and it was more than simple charisma.

  “Why do you do it?” he asked. “Why do you lie to these people?”

  She scratched her forehead, a gesture that Houdini recognized as anything but casual or offhand—it was a stage gesture. This woman was a magician.

  “When I met my husband, I was a widow with two children. We had no money and I had no prospects. In the beginning things were fine with Le Roi, but soon I could feel him tiring of me. I knew what would happen if he abandoned me. But then one night, for fun, we took part in a séance with a Ouija board. In an instant I realized I knew how to manipulate it. I did it for fun, out of boredom, but Le Roi believed it, and everyone else did. That night at home he looked at me differently, like he needed me. Like I could be useful in his world.”

  Houdini thought about this. He’d heard this story from more than one debunked medium. Many had expressed relief at having been revealed. But she didn’t seem to be expressing relief.

  “He can’t believe what you’re doing is real.”

  “He knows there are tricks and gimmicks, but at its essence he believes there is truth to my abilities and all we do is enhance people’s experience of that truth.”

  “And you do not dissuade him of that?”

  She snorted, the first lapse in her performance. “What do you think would become of me if I did? He would kill you in a heartbeat if he could, and I do not doubt that eventually he will if you persist. That pales in comparison to what he would do to me. What they would do to me.”

  “Who are ‘they’ exactly?” he asked.

  She looked at him and he saw her fear. Whatever facade she had been maintaining had dropped away. “If you think I’m going to tell you that, you’re a fool. I’m not here to help you make things worse, Houdini. We have common interests.”

  “And what are our common interests?”

  “Survival.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I am beginning to doubt the considerable intelligence you have loudly and publicly credited yourself with. Do you not understand that if you successfully discredit me, then we will each of us likely end up dead?”

  “These risks,” he said, “are risks we accept. You’ve gone down this road, as have I. It’s hard to imagine turning back now.”

  “There is a way you could discredit me without destroying me.” She unbuttoned the top button of her dress. “You could give away a few things, the odd trick. The true believers would brush it off. You would maintain your credibility.” Her hands continued undoing buttons with a deftness that confirmed his belief that she was a skilled magician. She paused when she reached her waist. “Neither of us would lose our reputations.”

  “Or,” he said, “you could simply stop lying.”

  “Is it lying? I suppose it is. But there’s no force on earth or beyond it that can make a man believe in something he doesn’t want to.” She stood up, and with a subtle roll of her shoulders her dress collapsed to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. He rose from his chair. She did not seem nervous or apprehensive. She was offering herself to him in the way one might offer a houseguest a drink. She was a striking woman, with flawless skin and a combination of softness and muscle that he wanted to reach out and touch.

  “Mrs. Crandon, I’m a married man.”

  She stepped slightly closer to him. “I know that,” she said, and he could smell lavender bath soap. “And I also know that you do not take those vows very seriously.”

  He stepped away from her. “How is it that you know this?”

  “We know everything about you.” He wondered how it was that she was naked and he was fully clothed yet somehow she was exposing him. “Remember, we can talk to the dead.”

  She laughed at this, and he backed away. He knew the thing to do was to escape. He desired her even though he knew he was being manipulated. Every time he had been unfaithful to Bess, he knew that it was dangerous and wrong, but there was a part of him that spoke louder. Was it simple lust? There was no earthly reason he should still be here in this room with this woman who was his enemy. And there was no reason he should be stepping forward and pulling her to him, his hands on the small of her back, then her buttocks.

  Just before he kissed her, though, he stopped and pushed her away. She stumbled back, almost losing her balance, and in that moment he saw an ugliness in her, pathetic and desperate, and felt that same ugliness in himself.

  “Please, I’m begging you.” She folded her arms to cover her breasts.

  “The lies you’ve told are yours,” he said. “You’ll have to live with what they bring you.”

  “Everybody lies,” she said. “Even the great Houdini.”

  “Yes,” he said. “No doubt I will get what’s coming to me.”

  He moved past her, and she shuddered as their shoulders brushed. When he reached the door, he opened it without hesitation, not caring if someone passing in the hallway should look in and see her, or him leaving her like this. He closed the door behind him and made his way out of the hotel.

  As he passed Rose on the street, he touched the brim of his hat, a signal that instructed her to stay put and monitor the hotel. She walked on as though she hadn’t seen him, but when they met up hours later back at his hotel his suspicions were confirmed.

  “Dr. Crandon a
rrived about ten minutes after you left, to pick her up. They looked grim when they came out of the Lennox.” Rose sat in the leather armchair by the desk while Houdini stood beside the window, watching the street below.

  “So it was a setup all along.”

  “Did you ever think otherwise?”

  The image of Margery, naked before him, came into his mind. “No.”

  “So what now?” He couldn’t tell if Rose was tired or excited. His ability to read her hadn’t improved.

  He crossed the room to the desk and retrieved an envelope. “Mail this to the Times.”

  Rose took the envelope but didn’t move. “So you expose this séance. They’ll just change their methods, change their effects.”

  He said nothing. Rose was right. They were fighting a losing battle. “What would you have us do, then?”

  “Go to one of your politician friends. What they do is fraud, the same as writing bad cheques or rigging the stock market. It should be against the law.”

  “No politician will bring in a law like that.”

  She smiled. “What if they had no choice?”

  He understood her immediately. In the course of their investigations, they’d become privy to all sorts of information about various leaders of society. The sort of information those men would want to protect. He smiled back at Rose. “You’re worth every penny I’ve ever paid you.”

  “I’m worth triple what you pay me.” She held up the envelope. “What do you want me to do with this?”

  “Mail it.”

  When he told Grigoriev of his plan, the wily Russian wiped his scissors on the towel that hung over his shoulder and studied the back of Houdini’s head.

  “There are fourteen million spiritualists now,” Grigoriev said to him, “maybe more. And that’s just in America.”

  “I know,” Houdini said.

  Grigoriev snipped off a bit of hair and considered his handiwork. “You’ll find in today’s files a very interesting letter our man in London intercepted from Doyle to Le Roi Crandon.”

  “Really?”

  “It seems Doyle’s talking spirit has predicted your death.”

  Houdini snorted. “That’s no surprise.”

  Grigoriev put down the scissors. “I don’t think it’s a prediction. I think it’s an order.”

  Houdini stared at himself in the mirror. It was strange for him to see himself now, middle-aged and tired. In his core he felt like the same boy who’d rapped off handcuffs in Appleton. “You give the slowest haircuts of any barber in America.”

  “I like to do a good job.”

  He held the scissors above Houdini’s head. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “The haircut?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t answer. Whether he wanted to or not was immaterial. He was a man who finished what he started.

  A few weeks later Houdini was backstage after a show at the Hippodrome when three men came into his dressing room. They were serious men, and he could immediately tell they were carrying guns. For a second he thought that Doyle was about to make good on his threat, but as he got to his feet John Wilkie walked in. One of his men closed the door behind him and the other two stood off to the side.

  Wilkie observed him for a moment. Houdini couldn’t tell what he saw—his face betrayed nothing. He hadn’t worked for Wilkie for years, and the man had no hold over him now. There was no reason he should be afraid, and he wasn’t.

  After examining the room, Wilkie nodded to his men and sat down. The men left, closing the door behind them. It was the first time since the day they’d met that the two of them had been alone.

  “Hello, Ehrich.” He looked old. Houdini wondered if he could still palm cards like he used to.

  “Hello, John.”

  “I saw the show. It was good.” He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “I’m coming here as a courtesy, a sort of thanks for all you’ve done for your country over the years.”

  Houdini said nothing. It surprised him that Wilkie saw it this way. From his vantage point, it had seemed like Wilkie always wanted more of him, that whatever he had done was insufficient and by not doing more he had put himself in danger. Was that not the point of Findlay’s ominous appearances?

  “It would be a bad thing for you if you testified against the spiritualists at the congressional hearings next month.”

  “It would put them all out of business. How is that a bad thing?”

  Wilkie seemed bemused.

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of them. Have you been talking to the dead? What did our old friend Melville have to say?”

  Wilkie sat back. “I’m surprised at you. I thought you were a much smarter man. I’m not a spiritualist, Ehrich. But if you’ve learned as much as I think you have, you know how far up this goes.”

  He was fishing for information. “The truth is as it is,” Houdini said. “A man of principle can’t ignore it or pretend it to be otherwise.”

  “You don’t understand these people. It’s a religion to them. They base their lives on what the medium tells them. They listen to the dead. That’s a powerful thing, and you and I both know that power is never relinquished voluntarily.”

  “I have no illusions that they will do so. I intend to take their power from them.”

  “You don’t want to go in front of Congress.”

  Houdini stood up. “You’ve intimidated me plenty, John. I remember all those times your man Findlay hovered around, worse than any ghost, and still I’m here. I appreciate the warning, if that’s what this really is, but you and I have no further business to discuss.”

  “Do you ever wonder,” Wilkie said, his voice low and commanding, “how it is you came to be where you are? Do you remember yourself, before there was a Houdini, a magician, a crusader? There was a person there, once, I suspect. And to survive, as we all must, you invented a persona, a shell to show the world. But at some point that shell took over. I don’t think you know which parts of you are real and what parts are made up, and I think this frightens you.”

  Houdini felt the blood rush to his face. Wilkie had rattled him, and he couldn’t hide it.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Is it different for any of us? Can you honestly say you’re not the same?”

  Wilkie shook his head. “I may be just as caught up in my own illusions as you. But I am not an invention. And whatever I am, it does not frighten me.”

  “You’re not going to change my mind.”

  Wilkie rose, and Houdini thought he looked genuinely disappointed. “I’m sorry we’re here,” he said. “I’d hoped it would be different.”

  Wilkie held out his hand and he shook it. When he released Wilkie’s hand, a quarter was in Houdini’s palm.

  Houdini stood in the basement. There were only two boxes left in the pile he’d set out for removal, but the rest of the space was cluttered with hundreds more boxes, all of them full of the files he’d amassed on the followers of spiritualism. Every time his agents visited a séance they took meticulous notes.

  Rose returned and placed her hand on his shoulder. “We should get going.”

  “Is all this worth it?”

  She removed her hand. “Of course it is. You know that too.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, you do. The truth is the most important thing of all.”

  Rose was right. But the truth wasn’t easily identifiable. You could spot a lie, but the opposite of a lie wasn’t always the truth. He was against the liars, and those who capitalized on the pain of loss, but was what he was pursuing the truth?

  “Is it possible that the truth is what you believe?” he said, startling himself.

  “No,” Rose said.

  But still he wondered. If something was not known to be true, was it therefore untrue? Was truth the absence of a lie? And what was it exactly that people had been getting from him all these years? The magic, the escapes, the challenges. He’d been careful ever since Harold Osbourne to
make it clear that what he did was amazing and marvellous but not occult. But had people listened to him? Had they believed him? Maybe they had decided to believe that there was such a thing as magic in the world. He had made them believe in magic because they had wanted to. He knew it wasn’t real, but they didn’t. For them, none of it was a lie.

  He had refused Bess’s request to adopt a child. They argued, they fought, and he kept refusing. She hadn’t forgotten about it. And she was right. There was no reason not to adopt. But he’d lost the ability to tell which parts of him were real and which were tricks. If there was a centre to him, he didn’t know what it was. All he knew how to be was Houdini.

  “If Houdini isn’t real,” Bess had said, “it’s because you made him that way. You are hiding from yourself inside a fiction.”

  “Why do we need a child?”

  “Why would we not? It is a part of life, a part of being a human. We can’t have our own, but why should that matter?”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “No, it isn’t. The issue is you are unwilling to be anything other than the focus of attention. You must maintain your illusion at all costs, because without it you fade away.”

  She was right. How could he be a father to a child, then? How could he teach anyone anything about how the world worked, about how to be a person, about what could be trusted and what could not, if he was nothing more than an artifice?

  Rose reached for one of the two remaining boxes. “We have to go,” she said. “It’s late, and we have only a few hours before the train leaves.”

  He bent down and picked up the last box of files. It felt heavier than the others, and as he carried it out of the basement its weight increased. When he heaved it into the car his arms ached and a drop of sweat rolled down his brow and off the tip of his nose. He couldn’t remember ever having been so tired.

  The day of the congressional hearings Houdini woke up before the sun, having barely slept. He dressed in silence and left the hotel early, careful not to wake Bess. He walked the streets of Washington, deserted except for those few whose work necessitated forsaking their beds. He walked past the White House, where he knew President Coolidge held regular séances. He walked past the homes of members of Congress, where he knew matters of state were being regularly discussed with false mediums. He had irrefutable proof.