I phoned Peg again and asked her to find out if the Wolffs were back in Mamaroneck, whether or not they intended to leave for Cape Horn, and where Kathryn had been all this time.
“Phillips,” she reported back a few minutes later, “grudgingly admits that his employer is once more in residence, but insists that Miss Wolff is still out of town and refuses to divulge any further details on that point. He also states that no South American trip is scheduled. I don’t think Cape Horn sounds reasonable myself.”
“That’s just why I suspect Dudley Wolff might go there,” I growled. “Keep one eye on them for me, will you? And if you see any sign of his daughter I want to know. I’ll be here. I’m going to get some sleep.”
“Sleep? At nine in the morning? And what were you up to all night, or am I being personal?”
“Chasing wild geese and counting sheep, believe it or not.”
“What’s that? A special assignment for Country Gentleman?”
“Something like that. I edit the joke page. You’ll get a rejection slip in the mail. ’By.”
I went to bed and dreamed that Dudley Wolff had left with Kay on the 8:15 rocket to the moon. I stowed away on the next flight out — the nonstop Lunar Flyer. But my additional and unsuspected weight upset the navigator’s calculations. The ship promptly curved back and headed for a watery grave in mid-Atlantic. I heard the warning bells that signaled a crash landing. Then, waking, I shut off my alarm clock, took an aspirin, showered, dressed, and went out for lunch, unhappily.
Afterward, I walked cross town toward Times Square. I had some vague idea that perhaps I might be able to circumvent the censors at the Wolff house and get a letter forwarded to Kathryn, wherever she was, by using code or maybe invisible ink. Since The Great Merlini’s Magic Shop was the local headquarters for that sort of thing, I went there. A course of “Ten Easy Lessons in Clairvoyance and Applied Crystal Gazing” might be a good buy, too.
But I purchased none of those things. I even forgot to ask for them. I should have stayed in bed and continued with the dream. A few minutes later I found myself watching a man being buried alive.
Chapter Five:
Merlini Loses an Angel
If some archeologist of the year 3000 ever digs up an Early Twentieth Century Manhattan classified telephone directory, and if one of his historian colleagues, carefully investigating its brittle pages, notices a listing that is there under M—Magical Apparatus, Magicians—I suspect that his published comments on the civilization of the Streamlined Age will contain certain belittling remarks.
If, on the other hand, a medieval sorcerer, Raymond Lully perhaps, or Nicholas Flamel, could return from the grave and walk into the shops of any of the nine concerns listed, he would sell his soul a dozen times over for many of the mysteries in stock. Even Cagliostro would be as excited as a small boy in a toy store at Christmas time. And the Spanish Inquisition, after one hasty horrified glance at the catalogues, would promptly consign them, the shops, and their proprietors to the flames.
The most famous of these stores among conjurers is Merlini’s The Magic Shop, located in an otherwise sedate office building just off Broadway. Although it is not the dusty, gloomy little shop of black candles, incense, and stuffed alligators attended by an elderly gnome in a tall pointed hat that its sales slogan, Nothing Is Impossible, might lead you to expect, it does nevertheless have a distinct air of sulphur and brimstone about it. The miracles for sale that are spread out in its neat, shining glass showcases, although intended for entertainment purposes only, are witchcraft just the same — psychological sorcery in modern dress.
The right-hand wall as you enter is covered with curiously lettered playbills describing the performances of Pinetti, Bosco, Anderson, Blitz, Alexander, Frikell, Döbler, Robert-Houdin, and the other early celebrities of conjuring. With them are the more modern, mostly autographed photographs of such men as the Herrmanns, Kellar, Maskelyne, Devant, Houdini, Thurston, Leipzig, Cardini, Tenokai.
On the opposite wall, shelves mount ceilingward bearing a bewildering assortment of conjuring paraphernalia, an odd and infinitely varied collection of commonplace objects which, in a magician’s hands, attain the peculiar property of violating all the more immutable laws of physics. There are bird cages that vanish at the count of three, rose bushes that blossom on command, inexhaustible bottles that pour forth any drink called for. There are bright-colored silk handkerchiefs, giant playing cards, billiard balls, red-and-gold Chinese boxes, eggs, alarm clocks, crystal-gazing globes, slates, swords, fish bowls, red-haired ventriloquial dummies, and, of course, a rabbit.
Peter, purely a floor sample and not for sale, is no ordinary bunny. He is a veteran trouper, an honorary member of the Lambs’ and Players’ Clubs, so much the actor that I suspect he too hopes some day to tread the boards as Hamlet. In his time he has made many a sudden and dramatic entrance before the footlights, usually from a top hat. But now, somewhat heavier about the middle and not so easily concealed, he has been retired to a Mohammedan paradise of ease and lettuce nibbling. As I entered, he peered at me from behind a talking skull marked: This Week Only—$7.50, and his pink excited nose wigwagged a friendly greeting.
Burt Fawkes, ex-contortionist, once billed on sideshow banners as Twisto, the Man Who Turns Himself Inside Out, and now Merlini’s shop assistant, leaned across the counter. He was talking to John Scarne, Luis Zingone, and Paul Rosini, a trio of exceedingly nimble-fingered gentlemen who earn their living making decks of cards sit up, roll over, and jump through impossible hoops.
“He was a little guy with an underslung chin and big spectacles,” Burt was saying. “He didn’t say much until he saw Merlini demonstrate our new rapping hand. Then his eyes pop, and before long I’m wrapping up the hand, a spirit bell, a floating light bulb, a medium-size wonder cabinet, the blueprints for walking through a brick wall, and a copy of Miracle Mind-Reading Secrets. He hurries off like he’s got a paying date that night and wants to work all those stunts into his routine before curtain time.
“But the next morning, when I open up, he’s waiting outside the door, and muttering. He eyes me the same way he would if I’d sold him a shipment of gold bricks. He has all the apparatus with him and he dumps it out on the counter nearly breaking the glass. ‘I want my money back,’ he demands flatly. ‘Every cent of it!’
“I didn’t get it. Our improved rapping hand is the best on the market, the spirit bell has a money-back guarantee, and the wonder cabinet holds a bigger load than some I’ve seen twice its size. I tell him so. But he’s stubborn and keeps insisting that none of the stuff is any good at all. He is very insistent about getting his money back. If not, he threatens to complain to the Better Business Bureau.
“‘About what?’ I ask him. ‘This merchandise does everything we claim. You saw it demonstrated yourself. The light bulb burns without visible connection and floats in midair. The brick-wall trick is the original Houdini method.’
“Then it comes out. ‘It’s all a swindle!’ he says disgustedly. ‘They’re just tricks!’
“That floored me for a minute. I edged over nearer those brass lota bowls so I could heave one at his head in case he got violent. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you want the real thing? A rapping hand with a direct spirit connection to hell, a floating light held up by mental concentration, and a recipe for walking through just any brick wall that you happen to meet. That it?’
“He nods, leans across the counter, and whispers confidentially, ‘Yes. No tricks. The real thing! It’s quite all right if you sell them to me. I’m a Third Degree Adept of the Atlantean Order of Rosicrucians. Here’s my Master’s diploma.’ And he gives me a quick look at a very fancy sample of printing and engraving from a Los Angeles correspondence school in the Higher Mysticism. It was signed, spirit writing I suppose, by Saint-Germain and a couple of Tibetan lamas.”