As to the rope trick, in the course of its performance a boy dies and is later restored to life. Accordingly, it represents the most profound of these sacred reenactments.
And then the expert drily opined that the reason no one accepted Lord Northbrook’s challenge – the offer of ten thousand pounds sterling (a fortune in 1875) to anyone who could perform the rope trick – was that the “key ingredient to the trick is a set of identical twins, and such are hard to come by. The secret is of course quite simple: one of the twins is sacrificed in the course of the proceedings.”
I knew… of course I knew. I’d figured it out long ago, out in the Red Rock Canyon. Clara Gabler was killed on stage. Carla was produced, alive and whole and no doubt smiling wide to display her newly whitened teeth. And then, when the performance was over and the audience had dispersed, Carla was disposed of with one efficient shot. Ditto the Ramirez twins.
After these performances, the surviving twin became redundant, a nuisance and a danger. In the case of the Ramirez twins, Byron Boudreaux had planned it well. He’d undoubtedly helped Charley Vermillion petition his way out of Port Sulfur, and then set him up to take the fall for the murder of the Ramirez boys. I’m sure Boudreaux located the cabin near Big Sur, then provisioned it for Vermillion. After the performance in which the Ramirez boys were killed, Boudreaux provided the cyanide capsule to Charley. Who knows what he told him it was. And then he tipped off the police.
I knew, yes, but I was guessing. To read an expert opinion, written in the detached, slightly dated prose of 1952 – before I was born – just about levels me.
I sit there for a minute, my heart thudding with dread. I’ve got to find them.
I plug Mertz into the Anywho website and come up with half a dozen listings in the L.A. area. But after checking them out, it’s clear none of them is the man I’m looking for.
I call Mary McCafferty and ask for her advice. She found Emma Sandling; maybe she can locate Mertz. McCafferty’s sorry, she’s heading out for a wedding, but gives me the names and telephone numbers of two “information brokers” in L.A.
“And what do I tell them?”
“All you have is the last name? Mertz?”
“That. And that he’s a foreigner.”
“Tell them to find out if he has an unlisted telephone number. Also, they could try the court records. Maybe he owned a house or something.”
I contact the broker. He promises to get back to me in the morning. And then there seems to be nothing left to do but hit the Yellow Pages, look up “magician,” and start calling. It feels like the gerbil wheel again, but until it’s time to go to the Magic Castle, I can’t think of anything else to do.
I spend three hours on the phone. Mostly, I get answering machines. Of the few magicians I actually speak to, three remember Carrefour, all of them from seeing him perform at the Castle. None of them knew him personally, or can give me any information about where he lived, his friends, or whereabouts. They have never heard of “Byron Boudreaux” and knew him only as Carrefour, Maître Carrefour, sometimes Doctor Carrefour, a man who spoke English, but with an accent.
Time to go. I put on a clean shirt, and a tie, and head for the Castle, anxious to see DeLand and Kelly Mason, the magician who knew both Carrefour and Mertz.
The sky is full of clouds, and the Castle, a brooding structure worthy of a gothic novel, has a menacing look as I drive up the hill. But it’s a sort of faux menace. Up close, the Castle has well-tended landscaping, well-dressed guests, and valet parking. I retrieve my ticket from the box office, where I’m given a schedule of performances, then pointed in the direction of an ornate door and told what to do. Which is to speak the words “open, sesame” to the red-eyed owl perched in the center of the door. The door swings open.
The whole place is like that – hokey and charming by turns, just the thing for a slightly offbeat date or an adventurous evening with one’s mother. Contributing to the somewhat old-fashioned feel of the place is the fact that everyone’s dressed up – an anomaly in this casual town. I make my way to the crowded bar, which reminds me of a nice English pub with its etched and stained glass, and fight through toward the bartender. The crowd is dense and convivial, with constant eruptions of laughter. I find a tiny table against the back wall. True to DeLand’s promise, I see at least a half-dozen guys with cards in their hands, either doing tricks or in some cases explaining them. In the ten minutes before DeLand arrives, it becomes clear to me that at least half of the people around me are magicians.
DeLand has to speak to at least a dozen of them before he reaches me. Finally he sits down and slides a manilla envelope my way. “I don’t know that this will be much help to you. There’s an address and a telephone, some kind of tax ID number – although not a social security number. It’s all probably useless, I realize. Remember, you’re talking to a man who was persuaded the fellow was French. But I also checked on Mertz. He was an associate member of the Castle. Lived in Beverly Hills. The address is in there.”
A woman dressed in pink satin delivers a drink. “Thanks, Sally,” DeLand says, pressing a bill into her hand. “How’d you guess I wanted a drink?”
She chirps a warbly little birdsong, which no one but me seems to find remarkable, then retreats with a smile.
“Cheers,” DeLand says, raising his glass. “I can’t stay, actually. I’ll take a look round and see if there’s anyone you should especially talk to, and if so, I’ll bring him your way. You’ll want to catch Kelly’s show at nine. He’s performing in the Parlour. You can talk to him after.” He gets to his feet and drains his glass. “If you’re going to eat,” he tells me, “the beef is quite good.” He sets his glass down, and heads for the door.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s only made it halfway there. I head for a quiet area to call in the addresses and telephone numbers in the packet to the information broker. Although I somehow doubt that Carrefour left a forwarding address.
“He scared me.” I’m talking to Kelly Mason, in his tiny dressing room, after the show.
“Carrefour?”
“No. His act was a little gruesome, but he seemed a good enough guy. Luc Mertz – he’s the one who scared me. He lived in this mansion-”
“You went there?”
“Yeah. He invited me. A Spanish-style place in Beverly Hills. But – I don’t know. We had this interest in common, but…” Mason wears stage makeup and it exaggerates his expressions, so that now he seems the very picture of a man perplexed. “I couldn’t talk to him. Maybe it was the language thing. Or maybe it was the obvious income disparity. He had stuff… I couldn’t believe it. As a scholar, it was really a privilege to see some of the old posters and documents, and he was quite generous about letting me photograph them, even publish them. But the whole time I was there, I felt… uncomfortable. When he invited me back, I just bailed on it. As my hippie parents would put it, the vibes were bad.”
I’m tired by the time I get back to my hotel, and when I get through the door, I find that someone’s been there before me. The lamp and telephone are gone from the end table next to the bed, replaced by a display of Mercury dimes arranged in the shape of a cross. Above the top of the cross is something utterly unexpected – a sugary white marshmallow bird, an Easter-time confection. What do they call them?
Peeps.
A white Peep. And a cross.
I don’t get it, at first. And then I do. Diment’s ugly face flashes in front of me. He’s pointing to the postmark on the card from Point Arena. “For vaudoo people, this a most important day. Sacred to the Marassa. This is why Byron sends the card that day. August 10. You might say… vaudoo Easter.”