Now he listened to the singing voices again. None of the Golden Gate Assembly of the Society of American Magicians could sing that well. “Dante, you bastard,” he muttered, for Dante was the only magician he knew who could sing, and magicians were fond of ambushing each other.
But he’d been chloroformed, or ethered, he didn’t know which, and no magician would do that. Faintly, he remembered crouching among four young men who wore their matching dark wool suits like uniforms. A high gloss to their boots, all of them exactly the same style. A familiar style. When had he last seen—the night the President had attended his show.
The Secret Service.
Way-hey up she rises
Way-hey up she rises
Way-hey up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning
They dissolved into laughter at the same time as Carter became aware of something inflating the sailcloth against his cheek. He pushed against it; it gave way, then filled up again. Water. He turned slightly, and the whole sack went with him, sickeningly, throwing his equilibrium off. The report of hammers, hammering shut . . . a crate?
More singing. They were having fun with him. Some magicians welcomed impromptu escape challenges, but Carter, who had never made peace with Mr. Jenks for trapping him in the bilboes and the brank, was not among them. He hated escapes. It went beyond fear or the urge for self-preservation. The few times he’d had audience members bring their restraints onstage, he’d had to fight back a growing black, dumb anger. It obliterated his better judgment and, sometimes, his abilities.
Still, he’d studied cuffs and crates in an academic kind of way, the way he looked at diagrams of automata he didn’t love enough to own. In
addition to the regular picks, which he kept in his pockets—kept them there so they’d be found—he traveled with a concealed tool kit, as per the instructions of Ottawa Keyes. Wires, hooks, passkeys, magnets, odd objects that he’d made himself that had functions but no names, all cunningly hidden such that no one would ever find them. He turned his left wrist upward to reach his right sleeve and found only skin.
The tool kit, all of its lovely various parts, was sewn into the fine coat he’d draped around Phoebe Kyle’s shoulders.
“Fuck!”
Shouting an obscenity in a small canvas sack drifting somewhere in the bay suddenly made him feel quite small. He added, “Fudge,” as if that would make things better. The sailcloth now pressed insistently against his cheek. He realized that he was sinking.
“My mouth is dry, my pulse is eighty-five, my feet are asleep, I’m cramped and can’t see, but I’m fine.
Fine
.” Actually, there was a strange, shooting pain in his right calf, but since he was cuffed, he couldn’t touch it to see what it was.
The handcuffs around his wrists felt like Bean-pattern plug 8s, the kind issued to law enforcement, the easiest kind to open. All he needed to do was strike them once, firmly, against a concrete floor or a metal plate, best kept under the trousers, on the shins, and they would spring open. It was devastatingly simple, he remembered a young man from an annual Society of American Magicians picnic saying, what did he call himself, Lotharini, a man of no experience, talking around a sausage dismissively, “If someone can’t escape from plug 8’s, he’s a dunderhead,” and looking around to see if he’d made points. Since Carter was cuffed hand-to-foot, there was no way to get leverage. That devastatingly simple method did him no good.
There was another way. He’d heard it worked. His fingers were quite literally pressed against his boots. The shoes he normally wore—the ones now standing on his living room rug—had false heels in which he had a few useful items. The ones on his feet, however, were simple, Sears-issued lace-ups. He reached out, left hand to left boot, right hand to right boot, and started undoing both laces, which were standard-issue black bootlaces, cotton weave wrapped around narrow cotton core that made the knots stand up to a fashionable height. He had to work the laces under the leg cuffs without tearing the woven cloth, which required him to be nimble.
His hands felt stiff and half-asleep, but almost thirty years of practice allowed him to make movements so subtle they seemed impossible. Out came the left lace. Carter tied a simple slipknot in it and worked the loop,
by touch, into the keyhole of the first pair of cuffs. He breathed shallowly, through his nose, counting out his heartbeat, and gingerly twisting counterclockwise. Regardless of how careful he was being, he still felt the fabric support give way.
That is completely unfair
, he thought. He continued putting fine, continuous pressure on the lace until he heard a click, which relieved him more than he had expected.
Working quickly, Carter freed himself from the first three pairs of handcuffs, feeling clever for using a shoelace to defeat iron. Take that, Lotharini. The last pair, on his ankles, resisted this method. They felt different, nonregulation cuffs, and he couldn’t be bothered with them anyway, as water was filling up the crate. He was protected from it for now by the waterproof mail sack, but once he escaped it—if he escaped—he would have to figure a way out of the packing crate, and he needed to examine it while there was air left.
Blue skies
, he thought,
wide open spaces
, and sweat dripped into his eyes as he maneuvered into a sitting position, knees to his chest. Escaping a mail sack required skill, and a patience he was rapidly losing. He tapped along the canvas until he felt something hard that swung back against his fingertips. The padlock. If he had a knife, he would simply cut his way though the cloth, but he didn’t (there was one in his blessed jacket), so he tested the canvas’s flexibility. It was as supple as flannel; he could hold the lock steady with one hand. All he needed was the key to the sack and opening it would be simple. It was getting stuffier; he was running out of air.
. . .
The rain came down pleasantly on the dock, and the men there went through “Blow the Man Down” and “Sugar in the Hold.” Hollis asked if anyone else knew one he’d heard, “The Dead Horse Shanty,” but when no one else joined in, they sang “Good-Bye Fare Thee Well.” On the Alameda side of the channel, a fishing boat was returning from its morning by the Farallons, and Stutz was the first to speculate that its wake would pass over the crate.
. . .
Carter’s leg still hurt. Irritated, he touched the sore spot and found, to his surprise, a needle stuck an inch deep into his calf. He was instantly aware of several other sore spots, and as he touched them, sticky with blood, he knew that someone had jabbed him while he was unconscious. Coldly, he bent the needle. He was picturing the lock, what kind of tumblers the standard U.S. Postal issue had, while in a deep, primitive place, he recalled hanging upside down in the bilboes, and how his fake rose had jabbed him in the leg, ultimately freeing him.
Suddenly, crazily, the packing crate dropped a foot, bobbed up two feet, wobbled onto its side, and Carter tumbled against the pile of discarded handcuffs, water percolating around him, as some watercraft passed him.
Just riding its wake
, he told himself.
He’d dropped the needle.
It was no use trying to find it in the pitch black; it was somewhere at the bottom of the bag. Frustration tightened the muscles in his neck, even in the blackness he began to see red. He needed a perfect coil shape.
His watch. When he touched it, he realized the crystal was already broken. “Fine,” he murmured, as it was that much easier to pull out the mainspring.
He punctured the sailcloth with the sharper end of the spring, and with a corkscrew motion he worked most of it through, leaving a sliver for him to grip. The padlock he held steady with his left hand. With his right hand holding the tiny spring between thumb and forefinger, he worked blindly, imagining the scene from outside the bag: here was the padlock, and poking out of the cloth, a coiled lockpick, drawing closer. Gently, he turned his hands inward; the supple cloth just allowed the lock to face the pick directly, and there was something slightly wrong about the resistance he felt, something too slow. It was water. The lock and pick were now working underwater, he realized, which meant the crate was nearly empty of air. He twisted the coil, trying not to breathe, feeling it bump against the metal surface of the lock. Probing left, right, up, down, he still couldn’t find the lock hole. He saw, for a moment, a roomful of blind women threading multicolored beads on a string, making complex patterns and never making a mistake.
The coil found the lock. Carter squinted, trying to feel for the tumbling mechanism, imagining vibrations traveling up the watch spring. Though the heat made his face perspire, his palms were dry.
The packing crate lifted a little. Carter could feel a swell beginning. The drone of another ship engine. No, not another wake, not now! He held on to the lock and spring for dear life as he was tossed up, then down, all violence, head banging against the crate, then flat calm. His hands were empty. No lock, no spring, and frantically he searched for them, hands stroking the sailcloth in total darkness. But it was no good. He felt along the canvas and could tell where he’d been holding it by the impression of his nail marks, and the lock was no longer there. He tapped. Nothing. Which didn’t make sense, unless . . . With dim hope, he pushed at the mouth of the mail sack, and it opened wide. The last twist of the spring had popped the lock off, he’d succeeded, complete
success!—which he could hardly celebrate as a flood of muddy water poured down on him, in a second filling up his bag, backwashing into his eyes and mouth, all widgeon grass and silt choking him so he bilked it up again.
He shucked the bag like dead skin, half-stepped, half-floated out of it, gagging on the acrid taste of salt. There was less than a foot of air left. The packing crate was just tall enough to crouch in, but he couldn’t stand up. He touched its rough surfaces and knew, heart sinking, that it was in no way gimmicked or prepared. A couple of splinters lodged under his fingernails, which made him angry all over again.
There were wonderful devices, collapsible jacks and such, and clever devices like sliding panels that made packing crate escapes quite easy. Carter had a jack on his desk at the Washington Street house. But unlike handcuffs and mail sacks, there was no way to escape from an unprepared packing crate.
. . .
Soon, Samuelson’s knowledge of shanties, from the short-haul shanties to the capstans, was exhausted. To his surprise, Hollis knew more and was singing them alone as all four men watched the slowly sinking crate, which had drifted between the arms of one of the larger berths. It rocked gently, but was no longer in danger of drifting into the bay at large.
“He
is
going to get out of there, right?” O’Brien asked.
Samuelson shrugged. “That’s his problem.”
“If he doesn’t get out, we’ll have to get him.” Stutz looked at the crate nervously. “Right?”
They stood on a dock about ten feet above the water, which roiled in patches below their shoes, as the planks had eight-inch gaps every several feet. This was supposed to (but never did) discourage drunks from fishing here at night. The crate was in the slip between docks.
A moment later, Hollis said, “Maybe I should go to the truck, and bring the crowbars back.”
Samuelson looked at the crate, and then at the horizon. A boat of some sort was pointing at them, prow forward. It was fairly close, but the odds of it trying to dock at the one berth in which the crate floated were quite slender indeed.
“If you want.”
. . .
Carter pushed the sack to the back of the crate, its mouth on the floor and its end floating on the water like an onion. He was on his hands and
knees, soaked to the skin, his trousers ballooning around him, his ankles still shackled together and he supposed he had less than two minutes of air left. He went into a crouch, feet braced against the floor, his shoulders and neck pressed to the top planks, and he pushed, reasoning that brute force was his only option. He strained for several seconds, visualizing nails popping from the boards. No. Nothing.
He was breathing faster. Less efficiently. Getting dizzy. Though the water hadn’t yet reached the top of the crate, the air left was filling with his own exhalation—little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide. He took another breath and pushed harder than before, feeling stronger than the boards, feeling only triumph, anger, and then, a creeping despondency, weakness, floaters in his eyes.
Houdini, who never revealed a specific method unless he was done with it, never shut up about the general philosophy of escape. “Were I ever in trouble,” he assured Carter, as if Carter had been asking him about this very topic, “I would think of my loved ones and feel their strength filling me.” Houdini had never actually been in trouble, to Carter’s knowledge, but he had pretty thoughts about the situation, and seemed to fantasize about it often. “For instance, if I were in the milk can, and I became stuck, with my dying breath, I would think of my mother. And Bess, of course. Or if I were buried alive,” continuing, eyes wide like describing paradise.
Now, his head feeling uncomfortably light, nothing left to lose, Carter thought of his loved ones. His dead wife. He felt guilt. He felt like a failure. He thought of his animals, whom he loved, and yet having Baby and Tug in his mind simply made him realize how he would miss them. He imagined his mother and father and James standing on the dockside, waving to him broadly, loving him from a distance, the way you love an odd pet, and he choked. His knees gave way. He brought his hands against his face, water pouring all around him, a mess, and lonely.
Hello, folks, hello, James
. Which, after a heartbeat, became
Good-bye
. The human heart was a terrible thing. His family would mourn him, and then they would survive. The essential resilience of human nature made his throat contract. Here, in his horrible crate, he admitted something he hadn’t before: he no longer mourned Sarah. But he just couldn’t bear to be one of the ones who forgot.