“Why do they come?”
“They come to be deceived, to be fooled, to be amazed. That’s where the pleasure is – not in finding out that something astounding was enabled by a secret latch or a mirror or an accomplice in the audience. The pleasure comes in being deceived – except that you can’t figure out how it happened.”
“Okay…”
“Now, someone like Houdini, a real showman, he used to press the point. Before one of his escapes, he’d insist on being examined naked – usually by the police – to prove he literally had nothing up his sleeve. They’d inspect his gym shorts, or whatever he was going to wear for the performance, before they escorted him onto the stage. Fortunately, this was in the days before the cavity search.”
“You mean-”
“Yup. Something up his keister. That’s the suspicion – although this is not to disparage Houdini. He was an astonishing athlete and he trained as hard as Lance Armstrong.”
“Nobody trains that hard.”
“Maybe I’m exaggerating, but he trained like hell. For instance, he had this one effect where he was cuffed and wrapped in padlocked chains and then lowered into cold water – icy water, mind you. Now, sure – he had to have some kind of file or pick to get those locks open. But still – he’s upside down in thirty-five-degree water with his hands and feet cuffed, and wrapped in heavy padlocked chains. So he had a pick – he still has to spring all those locks. Years before, he’d practiced holding his breath until he could do it for three and a half minutes. Amazing. And to get ready for these cold-water escapes, he trained by sitting in a tubful of ice cubes every night for weeks until his body could tolerate the shock, until he could still function” – Kavanaugh wiggled his fingers – “in the freezing water. That kid David Blaine recently did something of the sort. Encased himself in ice for several days – actually an endurance feat more than anything else. That kind of thing also has a long and honored tradition in magic. Being buried alive. In fact, all kinds of physical feats used to be part of the magic shows. Water spouting. Stone eating. Walking on coals. Interesting to see Blaine revive that aspect.”
“Blaine?”
“You don’t know him? You should check him out – he had a few TV shows. Street Magic was the first, I think. Anyway, very impressive.”
“But… you said it yourself. Magic doesn’t play on the screen.”
“Blaine did something really innovative: He concentrated on the audience. He shows himself doing the effects for small groups – one, three, four people, that’s all. And watching their response is fascinating. They go nuts, absolutely crazy, they are transported. They literally can’t believe their eyes. It’s wonderful stuff. Some of them actually cover their eyes, as if they can’t trust themselves to look at the world anymore.”
I add this to my notes: David Blaine.
Kavanaugh sighs. “I could go on all day. So maybe you should tell me what you really want to know.”
“I’m not sure what I want to know.” I tell him I’m investigating the murders of the Gabler twins, and that I think the murderer may have been a magician.
He steeples his hands and rests his chin on the point. “I remember the case. Dreadful. But what makes you think a magician was responsible?”
When I tell him what I’ve learned, he leans back. I hear a sharp little intake of breath, and his expression is serious, even grave. “Oh, my Lord,” he says. “The lady sawn in half. Sweet Jesus – it’s like an in-joke.”
I show him the Wanted poster with the sketches of The Piper. His face contorts. “I don’t know. Maybe. You mind if I keep this?”
“No problem.”
He folds the poster precisely in half, then runs a nail along the crease, then folds it again, and slips it into his pocket. “I’m not sure I agree with you – that a magician committed the crime. I hope not. Maybe just somebody with a repulsive sense of humor. If it is a magician – you’ll find there are certain characteristics many of us share. Would that kind of thing be helpful to you?”
“Please.”
“Well, most magicians take up the art as children. And there are a couple of reasons for that. It takes a long time to develop the dexterity a magician needs, for one thing. And many tricks take a really serious amount of practice. It’s like… oh” – he looks at the ceiling – “skateboarding. Even a simple skateboarding skill – and I know this, because my grandson is a devotee – takes hours and hours and hours to master. Same thing with magic. An adult would be daunted by the amount of time it would take to master – well, let’s say a faro shuffle.”
“What’s that?”
“If you cut the deck in half and shuffle, cut and shuffle eight times, interleaving each card, at the end you’ve restored the deck to its original configuration.”
“And people can do this?”
“Oh, sure. I could do it by the time I was ten years old. And I can still do it. But it took a lot of practice. So much practice that an adult would just give up. But kids – they’ll put in that time.”
“Hunh.”
“So if you have more than one suspect, you might want to find out if one of them did magic tricks as a kid.”
“Let me ask you something – are there any tricks that use kids as their… subjects?”
“Well, at kids’ birthday parties, sure. You get volunteers from the audience. But if you mean the magician’s assistant – the assistant is almost invariably a young woman, the better to inject a little sex appeal into a show. And scantily dressed women do work quite well for the purposes of misdirection – I can tell you that from personal experience. People will look at them. In the past, children were very commonly used as assistants. And they would perform all the roles that women do today – I mean they’d be levitated, locked in cabinets, or put into urns or baskets, then transported to distant spots or transformed into animals and back again.”
I force myself. “Sawn in half?”
Kavanaugh frowns. “Maybe. I can’t give you a date, but I believe that illusion is relatively recent. I’ve only ever seen or read about it being performed with women assistants.”
“Hunh. Anything else about magicians I should know?”
“Well, actually, I’ve been thinking about your fellow. If he is a magician, I’d say he’s a student of the art, someone aware of the history.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well… just what he did, with those girls, you know. I mean dismemberment and restoration have been part of the magician’s stock-in-trade for centuries, but nowadays you only see antiseptic tricks. You might see paper – or money, or rope, or fabric – torn or cut into pieces. Or maybe the magician has someone in the audience write something on a piece of paper – which is then torn to shreds before eventually being restored to wholeness. A twenty-dollar bill, somebody’s tie – that’s enough for today’s audiences. Even the standard sawing-the-lady-in-half is bloodless. She’s smiling the whole time. No one believes she’s being injured – or even in danger of being injured. Someone, I read – can’t remember who – thought the trick was actually a thinly disguised display of sexual sadism.” A shrug. “I don’t know about that. It’s still very popular. But certainly, it’s bloodless. My point is that tastes change. Audiences used to love gore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Audiences still love violence, don’t get me wrong. Danger – someone else’s danger – makes us feel more alive. But in terms of magic, audiences don’t enjoy blood and gore the way they used to. We’ve all become squeamish. Plenty of people who love their steaks and burgers find hunting, for instance, barbaric. You wonder what they’d think of a slaughterhouse.”