The Illusionists

Tonight was an opportunity, even though the audience was wrong and Grady was a fool.

The opportunity must not be missed.

One act followed another. The acrobats were popular, the musicians and singers less so. The curtain came down as the hem of another costume swept across Devil’s line of vision. He glanced up, and then looked higher. Carlo towered over him, Carlo on stilts that were concealed by a long robe and an academic gown stitched with occult symbols. He wore the grey wig Devil had bought for him, the horsehair combed smoothly back from his brow. Under the stage paint his long-chinned face looked authoritative, even noble. The dwarf was pleased with his appearance.

‘Ready?’ Devil asked automatically.

Carlo’s lips twisted to indicate that he was always ready, that Devil would never find him in any other condition. In a moment of fellow feeling Devil even patted the dwarf’s shoulder but all that met his touch was the wicker frame that Carlo wore over his shoulders to increase their breadth beneath the philosopher’s gown.

A pair of stagehands lifted the cabinet between them and positioned it on the marks. Devil himself carried the precious mirrors and placed them on the angled lines he had so carefully calculated and measured. When they were aligned the cabinet appeared to stand clear of the stage on its four legs, with no other support or place of concealment visible from the body of the theatre.

The curtain rose once more.

The stage was empty apart from a soot-black basket and the cabinet itself. Paste jewels glittered under the lights. To begin with there had been some tittering and a couple of louder guffaws, but the effect was sufficiently striking to capture attention. Devil swept onstage into an expectant silence, the first real silence of the evening. As the evil philosopher he was costumed in stark black. The lights dimmed, there was a slow roll of the drum and he threw open the double doors of the cabinet. There was nothing in the velvet-lined interior, so much nothing that the emptiness seemed infinite. Devil slid his hands inside and spread his arms to prove that the audience’s eyes did not deceive them. As he withdrew there was a flash of light, and a puff smoke rose from the cabinet. Devil came forward to the footlights and bowed low.

‘Are you finished?’ some wag called down.

Towards the back of the stalls Devil spotted Jasper Button, seated with a young woman on either side of him. He was glad that after all Jasper had come to see him perform.

Devil held up one hand. ‘I have not yet begun,’ he said.

His air of authority was enough to quell the unrest. The audience shifted in their seats. There was another flash of light and smoke drifted across the stage.

He led Carlo out from the wings at the end of a short length of rope. The captive’s hands were bound at the wrists. He moved at a slow shuffle, his head hanging like a prisoner’s. Devil brought him to centre stage.

Between them, in the past days, they had worked up some lines of dialogue.

Devil was pleased with his own literary abilities and he had composed a declamatory paragraph or two to establish the proper degree of evil exhibited by himself. Carlo’s response to the first recitation of this had been to scowl, pinch his own lips between finger and thumb and then jab a forefinger at Devil.

‘Keep the jawing short. Tell ’em a bit of a story as fast as you can do it and move on to the action.’

There had been a day or two of violent disagreement followed by a period of coolness, but Carlo had won. The exchange now established simply that Good and Evil were locked in a struggle for possession of the formula for transforming base metal into gold. This was established mostly by sign language accompanied by plenty of smoke, drum and cymbal.

‘I shall never yield my secret,’ said the good philosopher. ‘Never, while breath remains in this body.’

He raised his grey-wigged head and held it high.

Behind him, with relish, Devil drew a long blade from beneath his academic gown.

The audience fell silent.

‘Then the breath shall be extinguished,’ Devil cried.

He swung the blade in a glimmering arc. There was a collective gasp. Following a loud bang, a second’s total darkness and a savage chord from the musicians, the lights flared again. Devil stood alone in a swirl of smoke. The knife dripped with gore and at his feet a huddled outline lay beneath the good philosopher’s robe.

Devil reached down to the soot-black basket and slid one gloved hand into the interior. With a flourish he pulled out the severed head and brandished it by a hank of the grey hair.

Jasper had done his work well. The noble philosopher’s features were Carlo’s smeared with blood, the eyes glazed in death. When the executioner tilted it to show the mutilated neck a woman screamed aloud in horror. Devil bared his teeth in a snarl and tossed the head back into the basket. Once the grisly thing was hidden from view and the shock of its appearance subsided, there was a tide of applause followed by a substantial rising cheer from the gallery. In the wings Jacko Grady stood watching, thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat and feet planted apart, a cloud of cigar smoke about his head.

Devil passed in front of the ornate cabinet. He caressed the gilded pinnacles and touched the paste gems with the tip of his finger. He uttered some words in an unintelligible language and flung open the doors.

Another gasp rose from the auditorium. The good philosopher’s head floated in black space within. It turned from side to side and its ashen lips parted.

Devil demanded, ‘Tell me the formula now. You are my prisoner for eternity.’

‘I curse you to eternity and beyond,’ Carlo’s voice answered.

Devil threw back his head and laughed. He stretched out one foot and kicked over the basket. It rolled, empty, towards the footlights. He picked up the sword once more and drove the point into the lower part of the cabinet where the living body attached to the head must surely be concealed. He stabbed the emptiness over and over again.

‘My secret is mine,’ the head mocked him.

‘Die, then.’

‘You cannot kill me. I will always be here. In sleep, in waking, in daylight and darkness. Wherever you travel, I will be at your shoulder. I shall be always watching you’.

His words echoed in the air. Across Devil’s face in rapid succession passed realisation, understanding of what he had done, and then the dawning of a terrible fear. It was a moment to behold, and the audience edged further forwards in their seats.

Carlo Morris had agreed to throw in his lot with Devil just as deliberately as his partner had chosen him. He had done so because he recognised from the outset that Devil Wix was a useful melodramatic actor. All he needed was proper restraint.

Jacko Grady pulled on his cigar.

Out on the stage Devil had closed the doors and taken a step backwards from his magic cabinet. He snapped the blade of the sword. He fell on his knees beside the black basket and dropped into it the fragments of metal and the twisted hilt.

‘Forgive me!’ he cried.

There was a deafening drum roll and every pair of eyes in the house fastened on Devil as he prostrated himself. The lights flashed off and then burned cold blue and silver.

With his forehead pressed to the boards and dust in his nostrils making him want to sneeze, Devil wordlessly prayed that the sequence would go smoothly. This was the trickiest part of the entire illusion.

Across the stage to his right the tumbled heap of clothes belonging to the good philosopher stirred and grew as it took on human shape. The gown’s hood fell back, and the audience saw that the noble grey head rested on broad shoulders again. Standing tall, Carlo held up his arms. The sleeves dropped to expose his bare wrists, freed from the rope.

When Carlo leaned over him Devil shielded his head with his hands, but his rival did not strike him. Instead he picked up the black basket and held it high in the air. More smoke coiled from the interior.

Carlo tipped the basket. There was no broken sword. Instead, a stream of golden coins cascaded over the evil philosopher’s body.

‘Here is your black heart’s desire,’ the good philosopher called. ‘You shall have no happiness from it.’

The curtain fell as clapping and whistling surged through the Palmyra.

Devil scrambled to his feet and embraced the sweating Carlo. His blood jigged in the euphoria of a successful performance.

‘You did well, my friend.’

Carlo swung an extended leg. ‘I did better than that. I am a hero. Let me see you fastening on stilts and then climbing a ladder into your costume, all in the space of two seconds.’

‘Yes, that was excellent. And I performed the sleights to the same standard.’

‘You were adequate.’

The curtain swept up, they took their bow and it fell again.

The stagehands ran on to collect the props. Devil and Carlo shook hands, although even this much appreciation was awkward. They hurried offstage together. Jacko Grady picked a shred of tobacco off his thick tongue and cleared his throat.

‘Too long,’ he growled. ‘They were restless out there. Make it faster tomorrow.’

‘How many seats sold?’ Devil pleasantly enquired.

‘One hundred and seven paid for.’

The capacity of the theatre was two hundred and fifty.

‘You should give us more stage time, not less. Word travels fast, Mr Grady. Tomorrow everyone will be talking about Boldoni and Wix.’

Figures relating to percentages danced between them. They stood on opposite sides of this barrier of numbers until Grady waved Devil and Carlo aside. The Swiss engineer Heinrich Bayer moved out on to the stage with the beautiful Lucie on his arm. The violinist began to play and the couple danced, Lucie’s shining hair curling over her white shoulders and Bayer bending his head as if to breathe in her perfume. Their timing was mechanically perfect, but Lucie’s smile was fixed and sadness drifted from her creator like mist rising from water.

A voice called from the back of the gallery.

‘What else does the lady do?’

Laughter broke out, interspersed with catcalls and coarse observations. Heinrich gave no sign of having heard them and Lucie continued to smile and rotate her head. The waltz ended and the band began to play a polka. Lucie danced the polka with just the same degree of elegant detachment.

The show concluded with a sentimental soprano. The audience had thinned out, the rump of it was growing ever more unruly, and when the final curtain came down it was to nobody’s particular regret. In his narrow cubbyhole of an office Jacko Grady took his seat behind a card table with a cash box set on it. Devil and Carlo waited at the midpoint of the queue of performers, having been engrossed in a card game with the comedy tenor and the male half of the acrobat duo. Carlo had won a shilling. The acrobat’s partner looked through her eyelashes at Devil as the press of performers nudged them together.

Miss Eliza Dunlop was also waiting. Her married sister Faith Shaw and Jasper Button were talking together, in the manner of people who did not know each other very well but who are concerned to be pleasant. At the end of the show Jasper had asked her, ‘Would you care to meet the good and evil philosophers in person, Eliza? You enjoyed their performance, I think.’

‘It was very gory,’ Faith shuddered.

‘It was the best act in the programme,’ Eliza said in her composed way.

‘It was, but that is not to say a very great deal,’ Jasper laughed.

‘And I am sure you know perfectly well that your wax head was the best thing about the best act,’ Eliza told him.

In fact, she had been astonished by the brio of the little playlet. The confident speed of it, and the smoke and flashing lights and drum rolls had been thrilling, and somehow affecting. It had also been macabre and not a little vulgar, of course, but still the illusion – however it had been achieved – was impressive.

‘Thank you,’ Jasper said, with evident pleasure.

Eliza liked Jasper reasonably well.

Faith’s husband Matthew Shaw was the manager at the Baker Street waxworks gallery, and one afternoon when the sisters had called on him there he had introduced the talented modeller to his wife’s younger sister. A little time later Eliza had been happy enough to accept Jasper’s invitation to accompany him to the opening of the new theatre of varieties, and Mrs Shaw made up the party while Matty stayed at home with their two small boys.

‘I am in no need of chaperoning, Faith,’ Eliza had protested. ‘I am a modern woman.’

‘You are indeed,’ Faith agreed, but she had come along just the same.

This threesome lingered for a few moments in the Palmyra’s foyer as a mob of overheated young men surged in the entrance, shouting to each other about where and how to continue their evening’s pleasures. Two of them took sudden offence and they squared up, swaying and jabbing until the theatre’s doorman bundled them out into the street. He was seeking to secure the premises, so along with the rougher elements of the audience Jasper’s party found themselves outside in the noise and glare of the Strand.

‘I think we shall make our way to the stage door and wait there for my friends,’ Jasper said quickly. He shepherded the two women a few steps to the alleyway that ran down the side of the theatre.

Eliza was not afraid of a pair of brawling inebriates, but she allowed Jasper to guide her. As soon as they turned the corner they were buffeted by a sharp wind that funnelled up from the river, carrying with it the stink of mud and horse manure and wet straw. The cobbles were greasy with the damp of a November evening, and they reflected the glimmer of a single torch burning in a holder next to the unmarked stage entrance. Jasper was about to knock when the door was suddenly flung open. A line of people emerged, but before she could distinguish them she became aware of more footsteps skidding down the slippery cobbles. Someone fell and loudly cursed, and another voice jeered, ‘Get up, Makins. See here, it’s the philosopher. Looking to cut off another couple of heads, are you?’

‘Whoa, and the dancer with the pretty doll. Where is she? In the box? Care to loan her, would you? I’ll teach her a different dance.’

‘Ha ha.’

Eliza saw a man in a threadbare coat throw himself across a trunk on a porter’s wooden cart. Two toughs wrenched his arms behind his back and tried to haul the trunk from underneath him.

More figures scuffled down the alley to reinforce the assailants and seconds later a proper fight erupted.

‘Get inside the door,’ Jasper called hoarsely to the two women. Faith did as she was told but Eliza stood her ground. She saw how Jasper pitched straight in alongside the man she recognised as the evil philosopher, as if they had both done this sort of work before. They made a useful pair of combatants. The ringleader staggered backwards from a punch delivered by the philosopher, and Jasper followed up with a series of jabs which obliged two others to abandon their attempt to wrestle open the trunk. Seemingly oblivious to the fighting, the man in the overcoat knelt to secure the catches, his pale hands shaking.

Eliza became aware that a considerable force was operating at a secondary level. She looked down and saw a miniature man, hardly more than three feet tall. He launched himself between the legs of the attackers, pummelling and kicking until one of them stopped short. This man swiped his coat-sleeve across his moustache, gasping in derision.

‘Hulloa, who is this? Is the midget your familiar, Mr Conjuror?’

Carlo’s reply was a savage punch at the tender spot behind the man’s knee. He yelled with pain, at which his nearest accomplice responded with a kick that connected with Carlo’s jaw. The little man collapsed like a punctured bladder. Eliza cried out in dismay and ran the few steps to his side. She sank to the cobbles and held his head in her lap as bright blood ran from his mouth.

A whistle sounded at the top of the alley. Instantly the fight broke up and the assailants ran off in the direction of the river. The man in the overcoat took up a protective position in front of his trunk. Jasper and the philosopher dusted themselves down and tried to look inconspicuous as the bobby marched towards them. None of them had the slightest wish to attract the attention of the Metropolitan Police. Carlo opened his eyes and saw Eliza.

He sighed and thickly muttered, ‘Don’th revive me. I am quithe comfothable.’

The police officer loomed over them.

‘Is this person badly hurt?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ Eliza said. ‘There were some drunken creatures who ran that way …’

Jasper came to her aid. He explained that they had been to the theatre and had been set upon as they made their way to meet friends at the stage door. He didn’t think the attackers were thieves, but they had been threatening enough. ‘There are ladies here,’ he added.

‘What is this?’ the bobby demanded, pointing his stick at the pale man’s locked trunk.

‘Theatrical properties,’ he answered in a Swiss-German accent. The policeman frowned.

‘Open up.’

Eliza gave her handkerchief to the dwarf. Sitting up he spat some blood and reached a clean-enough finger into his mouth to explore the damage. The flesh over his jaw was darkly swelling.

‘Rest for a moment, then we’ll take you to find water and a dressing. You will be quite all right,’ she reassured him.

The bobby was staring at the trunk’s contents. A woman’s body, folded in half, was nested into a cocoon of padded velvet. Disbelieving, he ran his hands over the rubber limbs and shone his lamp into the cold glass eyes.

‘I am an engineer of automata,’ Heinrich Bayer said.

The policeman straightened up.

‘Are you, indeed? It takes all sorts. Go home now, the lot of you. I’ll see if I can catch up with your friends.’

Carlo muttered a thick phrase and Eliza patted his arm in gentle restraint.

As soon as the bobby had moved off a small knot of performers emerged from the stage door with Faith in their midst. Jasper groaned.

‘Faith, are you all right? And you, Eliza? How in the world am I going to explain to Matty that I brought you to an innocuous evening at the variety and we ended up in a pretty bout of fisticuffs?’

‘You could avoid any mention of it. That would be the easiest course,’ Eliza advised.

In the presence of the policeman the evil philosopher had made himself next to invisible. Now he seemed to regain his full stature, even to be somehow bigger and made of more solid matter than the rest of them. He became the inevitable pivot of their strange group.

‘Jasper, you have lost none of your abilities. Won’t you introduce me to your friends?’

Jasper muttered, ‘Mr Hector, ah, Mr Devil Wix. Mrs Shaw, Miss Eliza Dunlop.’

Devil bowed to Faith, but Eliza was still crouching on the cobbles with one arm supporting Carlo. The dwarf was sitting up, dabbing at his smashed mouth with her handkerchief. Devil folded himself to their level just as Jacko Grady’s barrel body and surprisingly diminutive shoes emerged from the stage door.

‘What’s this?’ the manager demanded.

‘Mr Boldoni was attacked by some pleasant individuals from your choice audience.’

‘Don’t let him lie here in front of my theatre. Is he hurt? Wix, you’d better make sure he’s fit to perform tomorrow.’

Grady secured the big padlock with much jangling of a large bunch of keys. The performance was calculated to display ownership and Devil hated him for it. Grady picked his way past them and headed towards the Strand. Turning his head, Devil saw Eliza Dunlop stick out her tongue at the man’s receding back.

‘Of course he’s hurt,’ she retorted. To Devil she said, ‘We need warm salt water to rinse out his mouth. And some light to inspect the damage.’

Carlo moaned as the pain in his jaw intensified.

‘Shhh,’ she told him, and stroked his hair.

Devil noticed that her gloves were blotched with blood and Carlo’s spittle. This detail touched him more directly than the prettiest smile or the most fashionable dress ever could have done.

Who is this? he asked himself and his eyes slid at once to Jasper’s neat boots, standing only a yard away beside Mrs Shaw.

Ah, is that it? Fair enough, he thought.

To one side of their little group Heinrich Bayer looked as if he had been violated. His face was colourless and he was trembling, his hands still on the clasps of Lucie’s box.

Devil put his hands under the dwarf’s arms. He scrambled to his feet, staggering a little under Carlo’s unexpected weight, but he found that he was able to carry him.

‘Follow me. It’s only two hundred yards,’ he called over his shoulder to the others.

The private room was on the first floor of a public house well known to Devil. The landlord admitted them and put some coals on the fire. Eliza Dunlop took off her cloak and bonnet (she had thick, glossy dark hair) and once Devil had deposited Carlo on a high stool the two women inspected his mouth. Devil gave orders and a tray clinking with glasses and a bottle soon arrived, followed by the pot boy carrying a basin and ewer and a kettle of hot water. Devil mixed a hot toddy and put it into Bayer’s hands.

‘Drink that up, man. You look as green as a lettuce. Don’t faint on me, please. Jas, you will refuse the offer of strong drink, but here is one for me. You shall have a tot, Carlo, when your medical review is completed. Good health, gentlemen. We may or may not have something to celebrate tonight. Unfortunately most of the power to determine such matters lies with Jacko Grady.’

Eliza looked over her shoulder. ‘The fat man?’

‘The same. He is the owner and manager of the Palmyra theatre. For the present,’ Devil added and tipped back his toddy.

‘He is an extremely unpleasant person,’ she said.

Devil glanced again at her discarded gloves, the emblems of the evening’s events. Carlo swilled out his mouth with hot salt water and spat a brownish stream into the bowl Faith Shaw held out for him. Eliza patted his shoulder and gave him a strip of her sister’s clean handkerchief, snipped with a pair of nail scissors taken from her reticule, to put inside his mouth.

‘Well done. You will heal up in a few days. I don’t believe your jaw is broken.’

Carlo couldn’t smile, or even speak clearly with his mouth stuffed with linen but his appreciation was plain.

‘Are you thuh they ith no boken bone?’

Eliza ran her fingers over his jaw then cupped his large chin in her hands. Carlo gazed up at her with as much admiring awe as if she had stepped out of a vision of heaven.

‘I’m not a nurse, but I know a little anatomy. It’s badly bruised where that ruffian’s toe connected, and there are tooth cuts to your tongue and the insides of your cheeks. You should gargle with salt water to keep your mouth clean, but I am confident that there is nothing more serious.’

‘We muth go on tomohoh. Thuh will be nowt to pleathe an audience if I am not thuh.’

Carlo waved his empty hand to Devil who passed him his tot in eloquent silence. The dwarf removed his dressing, drank, and winced extravagantly as the alcohol stung his open cuts. Mrs Shaw and her sister had declined Devil’s offer of a small glass of wine, but they agreed to a cup of tea and the pot boy now reappeared with a second tray.

They disposed themselves around the fire. Faith Shaw presided over the teapot and Heinrich Bayer released Lucie from her velvet casing, bringing forward a chair so she could join them. He placed her hands in her lap, arranged her skirts and straightened her necklace. He was more comfortable now that he could see her and be assured that she was not threatened, and his face regained its more normal degree of pallor. Eliza watched all this with her bright eyes, but when he felt her attention on him Herr Bayer stared at the floor.