He managed to end every appearance with the words "There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free."
And around then-to the vocal dismay of press and clergy-a club owner decided he was a "freak" act ("They'll hate him but they'll come") and Crane was able to work as a magician again. The crowd overflowed into the street and many were turned away. Cagliostro introduced a new escape, from a lead box that had been welded closed in view of the audience. "There is no restraint that cannot be escaped," he told them in an intense tone. "We are all absolutely free."
A pudgy Broadway columnist named Benny Benedict, who was just starting to get a following, interviewed him the next day. "How the hell did you manage that welded-box escape?" Benedict asked bluntly.
"I used real magic," the Great Cagliostro pronounced.
"Come off it," Benedict said. But Cagliostro merely grinned at him impudently.
THE ORDEAL OF RHODA CHIEF
When Rhoda Chief became the country's top Rock singer at the age of seventeen in 1958, her education was virtually nil. She knew very few facts and several dozen factoids: the long side of the triangle is called the hypotenuse and is equal to both of the other sides, or one side multiplied by the other, or something like that; what she had in her panties could make a lot of money if she was smart, or a lot of trouble if she was dumb; if you spit on an eraser, it will erase ink; Columbus did his trip in 1492, and they either started the revolution or finished it in 1776; Lincoln freed the slaves; if you yell loud enough nobody can tell if you're on key or off; we're all gonna get blown to hell by the bomb sooner or later; yellows make all your troubles go away, but the reds are the ones to take before a concert or a recording session.
After her abortion she learned enough about birth control to teach a course at the YWCA. After being screwed blued and tattooed by two record companies in a row, she also learned enough about contract law to teach that at Harvard.
Her real education began when she became the mistress of Cagliostro the Great.
The first one to see the whip marks on Rhoda's back was an old friend from Arkham High School, Doris Horus.
"Why don't you leave him?" Doris asked.
"It's voluntary," Rhoda said stonily. "It's my True Will."
The scandal eventually became an official rumor-"A nightclub Nostradamus, previously involved in other sex and drug offenses, is treating his ballad-belting sweetheart in a very sick way. Readers of a certain French marquis will know what I mean," was its first printed form, in the nation's most widely read gossip column. "You've got quite a reputation as a sadist," Epicene Wildeblood, the literary critic, said to Crane the very day that appeared.
"Afraid to be identified with me publicly?" Crane asked. They were in Wildeblood's jet-set pad, on Sutton Place.
"Oh, not at all, darling," Eppy purred. "How funny that I should know what you really are. Don't I, babe?" He lifted Crane's chin with the toe of his shoe.
"Yes, master," Crane mumbled.
"Oh, that sounded a little sullen. I think you're just a bit rebellious today, babe. That must be punished."
"Yes, master," Crane said, going to the closet for the ropes. After he was stripped, and lying face down on the bed, Eppy carefully tied his four limbs to the four bedposts.
"You are my slave and you can't escape," he said.
"I am your slave and I can't escape," Crane repeated, as Wildeblood mounted him, both of them perfectly aware that he could slip the knots at any time.
Crane took Rhoda to the Rainbow Room that night and made a point of loudly and brutally humiliating her throughout the meal. She accepted it all (her hundred most intimate friends and enemies in the room noticed with disapproval), as if he had hypnotized her.
Rhoda actually took nearly a year to discover what was happening to her. It had started with a routine roll in the hay, but in the middle of it he lifted her to an unusual position. "What the hell is this?" she asked.
"Tibetan, angel," he said softly. "Relax and you'll enjoy it."
She relaxed, and it was the most extraordinary sexual experience of her life. After that, for two months, she followed all of his instructions, with growing delight and a firm belief that she was approaching that Ultimate Orgasm the Mailer fellow was always writing about. Then, one night, he brought out the ropes.
"Now, wait a minute," she said, "that's English. That's kink. Go to London if you want that."
"I love you," he murmured, his mouth moving south across her belly toward her bush; in a little while, she agreed to the restraints. He tied them very firmly-and then, to her relief, no weapon was produced. He didn't even produce his own weapon; it was entirely oral. After five orgasms, she found him sitting up and lighting a joint. In a minute, he held it to her own lips. "For the big one," he said. She toked hungrily while he kissed and caressed her and muttered endearments-but she could still feel the ropes. When the joint was finished he finally mounted her and galloped into some dimension of spasm she had never known before.
"God," she said, coming back to herself, "that was the big one." But he was reversed again, his mouth on her snatch, and her head spun.
The mild discipline began a few weeks later. "It builds up the charge," he said, and she found that it did. Soon she agreed that stronger discipline built an ever-greater charge. When the sadism switched to a psychological level, she was too far gone to stop, living in a dark and pulsating cave of ecstasy and pain millions of light-years from com-mon earth. She accepted degradation, humiliation, and the growing vampirism which seemed calculated to slowly destroy her last remnants of ego.
Once or twice, she remembered later, she had feebly protested, "Enough, too much. Please."
"No!" he shouted. "We're at the edge. We've got to go all the way over."
("Yes, master," he would be saying to Epicene Wildeblood a few hours later, "whatever you wish, master.")
"You could have lots of bookings, instead of just working in public terlets," his agent told him. "I could get you in top-money rooms. People would forget those drug charges, and those teenaged girls, if you didn't keep reminding them by being even worse. The way you and Rhoda carry on in public, everyone thinks you're a kink. And you and that faggot, Wildeblood-everyone thinks you're a touch lavender yourself, buddy. Why don't you straighten out, for Christ's sake? You're going to end up a beggar."
(Remembering: possibly a previous incarnation: Hesse at the station in Zurich: "The mescaline, ja, the mescaline is the great teacher": and Crowley in Berlin: "The question is, who is it that seeks the True Self?" All so long ago, so far away, and Richard Jung saying, "I am an accountant, I don't buy any of this mysticism," begging on the street near the Old Granary where Paul Revere and the original Five lie buried, Rancid the Butler, Mama Sutra, weeping among the corpses at Chateau Thierry. "Please Jesus don't let me die, don't let me die…")
The boy, who was to become Cagliostro the Great, heard "You're going to end up a beggar" and looked back and saw the tramp falling to the ground, very slowly, like the tree he had seen fall slowly after being chopped by the caretaker at the upstate Crane country home. And, just like the tree, when he finally reached the sidewalk, the tramp didn't move at all, not one bit; he even seemed to get stiff like the tree did, only faster.
"On your knees," Cagliostro said sternly, and Rhoda obediently crossed the floor on her knees. "Ask for it," he said.
"I beg you, master," she said, "to stick your cock inside my cunt and fuck me and make me come again and again and again. Oh, please, master."
He lit a cigar, pretending to deliberate, and then blew smoke in her face. "No," he said. "I want you to suck me off. Nothing at all for you tonight."