Burt led us to the inner room and pointed a finger at the window on the fire escape. Merlini, I remembered, had closed and locked it before we left. But it was open now, and there was a jagged hole in the pane above the window catch.
Merlini sent a swift glance around the room. “Miss Christine,” he said then, “is undoubtedly one of the most determined young ladies I’ve ever encountered.” Three hundred-dollar bills lay beneath a paper weight on the desk. The cases that contained the Headless Lady apparatus were gone.
Chapter Two
Side Show
“… This great combined outside show and international congress of weird people, the most amazing, Gargantuan, awe-inspiring, cataclysmic collection of strange oddities, living freaks, and curious wonders ever assembled under one canvas! The show starts right away! No waits. No delays. No extra charge on the inside. Step right up to the ticket boxes on either side! Fifteen cents to all … ”
Conventions are uninhibited, haywire affairs. I imagine that even the annual conclaves of the Society of Ancient Historians, the United Association of Embalmers, and, possibly, the left wing section of the D.A.R. have their moments. But a convention of magicians, coin kings, card manipulators, illusionists, mind readers, hypnotists, and ventriloquists is an experience. The Mad Hatter’s well-known tea party was, by comparison, as humdrum, staid, and decorous as a seminar in quantum mathematics.
The nimble-fingered delegates practiced their deceptive skill in the corridors, the elevators, and at the table. I think I saw every accepted scientific axiom of physics and logic shattered beyond all mending. The effect was rather like living in a room paneled with the curved distorting mirrors from an amusement park’s Fun House. After two days and nights of concentrated trickery I essayed a little vanishing act of my own. At 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I sneaked quietly off to the room Merlini and I shared, locked the door with the only key, and crawled into bed.
I woke less than an hour later to find the door wide open, the room full of smoke, shop talk, and magicians. Several of them sat on the edge of my bed playing a curious kind of game with a deck of cards, never dealing but passing the complete deck from hand to hand, each man as he reached for it, saying, “That reminds me— have you seen this one,” or, “Here’s another way of doing that.”
I sat up, swearing sleepily, only to have the cards spread in an expert fan beneath my nose with the command, “Here, take one, any card at all.”
Automatically I obeyed, looked at the card, and then shuffled it back into the deck as directed. The magician, a fat little man with a bland grin, took the cards, held the deck between forefinger and thumb, and gave it a smart rap with the edge of his right hand. The cards fell in a shower to the floor, all except one, which remained in his fingers. “And your card,” he said confidently, making ready to turn it face up, “was—?”
There is, I knew, one thing that makes a magician feel like going into retirement. I supplied it.
“I couldn’t say,” I replied. “You didn’t ask me to remember it.”
“Oh, it’s him!” someone else said in a tone that made me feel as if I had six legs and lived in a drain. “Here, take this and be quiet.” He handed me a highball. I couldn’t smell any bitter almond odor, so I drank it.
There were more tricks on Sunday, and a banquet. I met a blonde who was sawed in two twice a day for a living, discovered that she didn’t require more than the usual amount of care in handling, and had a pretty good time. Monday morning we caught up on sleep, and in the afternoon Merlini packed what miracles remained unsold and we took them to the Express office.
Monday night we had a session with the proofs. Merlini’s job was to check them for facts, but I had the devil’s own time trying to keep him from adding a lot of fiction. On nearly every other galley he’d say, “Of course, I know it didn’t happen just that way, but don’t you think it would have more punch if—” I managed to stop some of his “improvements”; but at that there were enough facts to be trued up so that I spent most of Tuesday madly rewriting. I finished just in time to make the post office before it closed, and sent the proofs off by registered mail. Then, finally, after giving the car a feed of gas and oil, we pulled out and headed west on Route 20—smack into trouble.
Waterboro, according to the road map, is a wide spot in the road (Pop.: 5,000 to 10,000) some 75 miles out of Albany in the middle of nowhere, and noted as far as I knew for exactly nothing at all. I’d never heard of the place until Merlini had pulled it out of his hat on Thursday night, and I’d long since given up trying to figure out how the mysterious Miss H—, her unholy desire for a headless lady, and her use of the name of a two-headed freak had suggested it.
I said as much, and insisted, with some annoyance, on an answer.
“Circus,” Merlini replied. “The Mighty Hannum Combined Shows is playing Waterboro today. And I’ll drink all the pink lemonade on the lot if we don’t find the headless illusion of mine working in their side show.”
“A particle of dried mud that I didn’t notice on Miss Christine’s left shoe, I suppose,” I said. “An unusual type of red clay that you immediately recognized as coming from nowhere else but the northeast corner of the circus lot in Waterboro, New York.”
“You don’t know my methods, Watson,” he paraphrased. “No. Hardly that. The show plays one-day stands. Last Thursday when Miss H, as I prefer to call her, made her brief appearance, the show was playing Newark, New Jersey.”
“Take it from there,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“The Headless Lady is this season’s wow exhibit in the open-air amusement world. Miss H’s healthy tan, her too-contrasty make-up, and her athletic manner taken together, suggested outdoor show business. Circus, carnival, or exposition. There were half a dozen playing within a two-hundred-mile radius of New York City. Then, when Burt asked her name, she gave a phony. She’s too quick-witted to give out something like Mary Smith or Jane Johnson, but she found herself hesitating, and she popped out with the first other name that entered her head, Mildred Christine. Simple matter of association. We were discussing a headless lady, and she thinks of a two-headed girl. My deduction that she knew her circus history was elementary. I consulted Billboard for circus routes. There were three shows in the neighborhood. One, I knew, had the illusion; one was a dog-and-pony show that couldn’t afford it; and the other, the one nearest New York at that, was the Hannum show. It looked possible.”
“Then you added in the H monogram on her purse, I suppose?”
“Exactly. At the beginning of the season, Billboard prints lists of the personnel of the various shows as they leave winter quarters. Major Rutherford Hannum, an old-time circus man who dates from the wagon-show days, owns the show, and one of its featured performers is his daughter, Pauline. I haven’t seen the Major for years, and I failed to recognize Pauline because the last time I saw her she was in pigtails and short dresses. She’s changed.”
“She performs, you say?” I asked.
“Wire-walker,” Merlini replied. “And good, so I hear. She also doubles this season in the swinging ladders, perch, and double traps.”
“Perch and double traps?”
“Perch act. The girl who does the hand and headstands atop a pole balanced on the head of the under-stander. You’ve seen the Walkmirs with the Big Show. Double traps means double trapeze. You’ll have to learn the language.”
“So,” I said, “she didn’t really need that fire escape at all. She could have gone into a human-fly act down the side of the building. But why does their side show need a headless lady so badly and so quickly that she commits an illegal entry to get one?”