Burt’s audience was grinning. “Did you give him his money back?” Zingone asked.
“I did. Quick too. He’d have probably put the evil eye on me and then gone to the Better Business Bureau, the Mayor’s office, and the FBI.”
“You missed a bet mere, Burt,” I cut in. “You should have sold him a strait-jacket escape. He may be needing it.”
Burt looked around. “Oh, hello, Ross. He wouldn’t have liked that either unless the directions told him how to dematerialize into ectoplasm, ooze through the eyelets, and reassemble himself on the outside. Where have you been? The boss was trying to get you yesterday.”
“Out of town.” I glanced toward the door behind the counter that led to the sanctum sanctorum, if that term is applicable to a workshop where such diabolic contrivances as those Merlini designs are put together. “Is he in?”
“No.” Burt left his audience and moved down the counter toward me. The magicians resumed their discussion of the merits of the Erdnase one-hand shift, which is not the article of wearing apparel you might imagine, but a gambler’s sleight with cards. “He’s over at the Drury Lane. He wants you to stop in. Some script changes, I think, in those sketches you wrote for the show.”
“Rehearsals under way?”
“They were this morning.” Burt frowned. “But I don’t know how long they’ll last. Merlini is shy an angel.”
“Oh, oh. That sounds serious.”
“It is, and somebody has got to be cast for the part quick before we lose our shirts.”
I started for the door. “Don’t look at me,” I said. “At the moment, I couldn’t finance a one-ring flea circus. See you later.”
I headed for the Drury Lane. The Great Merlini, it appeared, in spite of being a magician, was up to his neck in trouble too.
His farewell tour in ’29 was proving to be about as final as any actor’s. This was to be expected in a man who was born on a circus train en route and into a family whose name had been famous in sawdust annals for five generations. Twenty-six years of entertaining audiences under canvas and in what seemed to me, when I once heard him list some of them, nearly every theater on the habitable globe, was a record that makes retirement difficult. Merlini, I had always known, would never be able to resist the call of grease paint and footlights as long as his lean and agile fingers were still nimble enough to make a half dollar vanish into thin air.
He was, at the moment, head over heels in a project he had long dreamed of, one more ambitious than any he had yet attempted — a full-dress magical-musical revue complete with chorus, singers, dancers, a cast that included half a dozen top-flight magicians, and a libretto shot through with streamlined mystification. Big-illusion magic, since the deaths of vaudeville and of Howard Thurston, is rarely seen on today’s stages. The best current conjuring is the more intimate close-up sleight of hand that a group of polished performers present in night-club floor shows and around hotel supper-club tables. It was Merlini’s idea that the larger magical feats were still good box office, provided they were presented in a novel up-to-the-minute manner and in a sophisticated setting of girls and music. He was playing this hunch with his currently projected Hocus-Pocus Revue.
I entered the Drury Lane on 45th Street by the stage door, climbed a short flight of iron steps and found myself suddenly swept on-stage by a rush of girls in ballet slippers and practice costumes. Piano music issued from the orchestra pit, and, from somewhere in the outer dark of the auditorium, Merlini’s voice rose. “Ross, this is an underwater ballet sequence. And we aren’t casting any flounders. Swim down out of it.”
I put an arm around each of the two nearest dancers. “I’m an octopus,” I said. “I’ll need six more of these, one for each arm.”
The piano music stopped. “We’ve got a comedian,” Merlini answered. “A good one.” He spoke to a man in shirt sleeves who sat on the piano top. “Let the girls go, Larry. They’ve been at it long enough. Besides, Don’s all set and he’ll have to be getting back for the next Music Hall show shortly. Bring in the tank and let’s run through that. And I want the lights — spots, foots, and the underwater circuit. Ross, you sit down here and try to act like a tired businessman. I want your reaction.”
I crossed the footlights, descended the rundown, and took a seat in the third row beside the magician whose tall, spare, and sometimes dignified frame extended for an alarming distance out into the aisle. Although he is one of those fortunate persons who can get along comfortably on much less sleep than the average mortal, I got the impression, for once, that he was tired. Why I thought that I don’t know. His black eyes still sparkled with their customary alertness, and the good-humored crinkles at the corners of his mouth bracketed his characteristic impish smile. His magician’s air of self-confidence was there too; his precisely modulated voice still captured and then smoothly misdirected the attention with all its old, expert, hypnotic power.
The delicately co-ordinated movements of his body and highly trained hands, the forcefully cut, though asymmetric, planes of his face, and his attentive interest in practically everything made him appear, as always, at least fifteen years younger than the sixty his Who’s Who biography admits.
His off-stage informality of dress, his lack of the traditional mustache and flowing hair are deceptively unmagicianlike. But, the moment he begins to work at being a conjurer, the practiced ease with which he seems to accomplish the utterly impossible imparts such an air of genuineness to his trickery that a century or two earlier he would have been taken out posthaste and burned at the stake.
“Where,” I asked as I sat down, “did you acquire an underwater ballet, of all things? It’ll give the customers an eyeful of the Grade A, fancy assorted, female anatomy you seem to have hired, but I don’t see how it fits in.”
“You will,” he grinned. “It’s a build-up for the newest Merlini Mystery. Accept no substitutes and keep your eyes peeled. If you can explain it, we’ll toss it out.”
“Always the guinea pig,” I said. “Okay, baffle me.”
As I spoke, the long, white, conical beams of twin spots streamed out above our heads from the balcony and centered in mid-stage on the great, square, glass-walled tank that half a dozen stagehands were pushing out into place. Water swirled and foamed within it, gushing from the nozzles of fire hoses that curled up over the tank’s edge and led away, twisting snakelike across the stage floor to the wings.
Then a raised platform slightly higher than the tank and extending partly over it was shoved into position. A young athletic man with a dark handsome face rose from the seat behind Merlini.
“Well, here goes,” he said, and moved forward toward the stage. He slipped off the dressing-gown he wore, dropped it across a first-row aisle seat, and then, clothed only in the briefest of scarlet swimming trunks, vaulted lightly over the footlight trough up onto the stage. His bronzed body was something that any matinee idol could have been proud of, and he used it with all the sure, graceful ease of a skilled athlete — which, among other things, was what he was.
“A little something,” I said, “for the tired businesswoman to look at too, I see.”
The performer on stage ran lightly up a flight of steps to the raised platform, turned, and bowed in our direction. He stood beside the dark sinister shape of an upended open coffin. Two stage assistants followed him, carrying a formidable collection of heavy handcuffs and leg irons. They quickly adjusted the handcuffs on his extended wrists, pulled the ratchets tight, and locked them. Then they affixed the massive shackles on his legs.