Ed Ifkovic
Escape Artist
Chapter One
I was getting ready to leave the city room when Sam Ryan mentioned Harry Houdini. Curious, I dawdled at the pinewood table that served as my desk, fiddled with the ancient Oliver typewriter, and shifted some papers.
“Last time he was in town, some years back, he performed at the Opera House.” The old man, publisher of the Appleton Crescent, leaned back in his chair.
I had no interest in showy carnival antics, too slapdash Circus Maximus for my taste, but Houdini, whose early boyhood had been spent on Appleton streets, always made for good copy. My parents often talked about the escape artist whose father at one time had been rabbi at Zion Congregation.
“The great Houdini.” That was Matthias Boon, the new city editor. “The celebrated handcuff king himself.”
Miss Ivy, Sam’s sister, looked up. “I hear he is staying for a week with David Baum.”
Matthias Boon looked surprised. “Who’s that?”
“A childhood friend.”
Boon sneered. “You know, I don’t understand this malarkey he spouts. Tied up, imprisoned, boasting about escaping. What kind of an act is that?”
Byron Beveridge, the beat reporter, broke in, a bit of awe in his voice. “He does this Metamorphosis act with his wife. She ties him up and puts him into a box, and in three seconds he changes places with her.”
Boon grunted. “Impossible. Trickery.”
Bryon shook his head. “Of course it is. So what? Barnum was right.” He beamed. “But a real showman.”
“Foolish, really, such stunts.” Miss Ivy yawned.
I kept still, just listened.
Sam skimmed the sheets before him. “You know, suddenly he’s all the rage in Europe. He can extricate himself from the most complicated set of handcuffs. He’s escaped jails in Russian Siberia, in London. He can free himself from a straitjacket…”
Miss Ivy spoke over his words. “My brother is a loyal follower.”
“He can trick innocent souls into forking over hard-earned dollars for some obvious chicanery,” Boon sneered.
“Mr. Boon, you’re new here in old Appleton. You don’t understand the appeal of a man like Houdini in this town.” Sam’s voice rose, excited. “A real home-grown hero.”
Boon frowned. “A grown man strutting around publicly in his BVDs, jumping into nailed boxes, taunting the police.”
Byron Beveridge drummed his fingers on his typewriter. “I’ve seen him perform. In his early days, starting out, when I worked in Chicago. He was with a dime museum, real shabby, with snake charmers and bearded ladies. Then he reinvented himself. Impressive, I must say.”
Boon would have none of it. “Seems to me you small-town folks are easily impressed by circus acts.”
“He’s one of our own. Small-town boy who made it big.” Sam’s spectacles slipped down his nose and he readjusted them.
“Just proves that the world is nuts,” Boon concluded. He glanced my way but looked through me. Since he arrived from Milwaukee a few months back, he’d decided that girl reporters shouldn’t exist.
Sam pointed to typed pages on his desk. “Houdini’s provided us with press sheets, including an interview he gave in London. He expects us to publish them verbatim.” He tapped the sheets with his index finger. “With his curiously ungrammatical quotes.”
“What are you saying? We can’t interview him, we small-town hicks?” Boon guffawed. “Now the question of the hour is this: How do we get an interview with the man?”
Sam grinned. “It seems we don’t. He and his brother are here socializing with old buddies, though he’s performing a one-shot benefit for the Children’s Home on Platt. The man may crave publicity, but no one’s seen him around.” He shrugged. “No interviews, I guess.”
“The obnoxious little Jew,” Boon muttered.
I sat up, iron-backed. There it was.
Sam glanced at me while Boon refused to look at me. “Maybe our little Jewess can convince him otherwise.”
“Maybe this little Jewess will respect a man’s privacy.” I glared.
“I mean no insult, Miss Ferber.” Boon spoke with obvious calculation. “I just assume you people all know each other.”
My voice was chilly. “The Weiss family-he was Ehrich Weiss here, though you probably don’t know that-left before the Ferbers came to town.” I stopped, my throat dry, my head swimming. Appleton was kind to its small Jewish population. Indeed, the popular former mayor, David Hammel, was a Jew and lived across the street from the Ferbers. I’d not felt the sting of discrimination, not since my family had fled bigoted, ugly Ottumwa, Iowa, where I’d been routinely mocked. But now, again-here it was. “His father was the first rabbi of our temple.”
The room got cold all of a sudden; glances shifted, eyes averted. “All the more reason.” Boon, the willful baiter, the bigot. Suddenly I wondered how much his undisguised dislike of me stemmed, not from my being a young girl and a reporter, but my being a Jew.
“I mean no harm.” Boon sucked in his cheeks. He was lighting his pipe and watched me, over the blazing match.
“Then you harm inadvertently.”
“Meaning?”
I turned away.
“We have a paper to get out.” Sam stood, stretched his back. “Maybe we should get busy.”
I picked up my notebook-“Always carry it with you,” Sam Ryan often reminded me- and wrapped my blue chiffon wrap around my shoulders, drawing it close around the high-neck lace collar of my dress. I slipped on my kid gloves. I dreaded climbing the five weathered cement steps that led from our subterranean city room up to the street level. After a year as a girl reporter for the Democratic afternoon daily, I’d come to gauge my level of fatigue by my approach to those five steps-from the rare exuberance of a rich, vital day of reporting to the familiar exhaustion after a day of disappointment, false starts, emptiness. Lately, I approached those steps with the reluctance of Sisyphus pushing that dreadful stone up a redundant hill.
As I moved past Matthias Boon, he leaned back in his swivel chair and boasted, “You know, I like a good challenge. I think I’ll interview the great Houdini. It’s all in the manner of approach. What stage performer lacks an ego? And his is overweening, I’ve heard. Self-love makes a man vulnerable.”
Good Lord.
Boon was still crowing. “I once convinced a reluctant Tommaso Salvini to talk about his life. ‘I have nothing to say,’ and then he couldn’t shut up. And he was a crowing sort of buffoon.”
“I don’t know…” Sam began.
“Houdini is a vain exhibitionist. He’s mine.” He started to choke on his pipe tobacco.
Up on College Avenue, I headed to the courthouse, but stopped walking. I didn’t want to do my job. I wanted to stay in motion, strolling aimlessly down the avenue, lost among the stragglers making their late-afternoon purchases. I stared in the window of Schiebler and Schwante. Hmm, Japonette handkerchiefs on sale for three cents. Yes, I’d buy myself a set from the wages of a job I’d soon be losing.
Only recently I’d lingered for hours down in the city room, dreamily staring up at the half-windows, contemplating the lower extremities of Appleton citizens wandering past. Yes, Mamie Tellis’ ample bottom, awash in a pale lavender crepe de chine go-to-tea dress under a Persian lamb coat. Mayor Linsome’s bow-legged waddle. Caroline Tippler, in her perennial crinoline smock, headed to her waitressing job at the Sherman House, her stride lively. Mildred Dunne, the high school librarian, with her shuffling baby steps. Principal Jones, lumbering past, his gait slower since his wife died last year. I knew them all and loved the panorama.
And then-then Matthias Boon arrived from Milwaukee.
The splendid human comedy out in the street now metamorphosed into a dark danse macabre, the march of the doomed. Inside my tiny space, under the large shadow of that small man, despair gripped me. I wasn’t happy.