Saving Houdini (9 page)

“You ask a lotta questions.”

“Just tell me. Maybe all this stuff is happening for a reason.”

“
What
reason? You’re just a kid. You don’t know that things happen for
no
reason, not yet. You wanna know about Gluckman? He was my best friend. I knew him from the old country. Went to school with him. We killed chickens together fa goodness sake. So, who else are you going to trust with your life? He owns the Pantages, best stage in the city, so why wouldn’t I make him my manager?”

Dash had started at the name of the theatre, but Blumenthal
didn’t notice. The owner of the Pantages, the man with the flashlight. Figures.
Why not make this even harder, Universe?

“So I paid him twenty percent of my take,” Blumenthal continued, “and in the spring, he goes to Farnham for five percent more. Farnham the Farter or whatever he’s calling himself these days. A crummy magician is what he is. And don’t think Charlie Gluckman is above sending a boy to spy. To take my methods.”

“I’m not a spy.”

Blumenthal shook his head. “You think you know your friends,” he muttered. “Believe me, you don’t know your friends.”

Dash let him grumble. He looked around the apartment. It was not a very homey place. There were two different chairs in the kitchen and neither of them went with the rickety table. He couldn’t be doing very well. Maybe Houdini could really help him. Dash’s eye fell on the sugar-coated bun again. “What is that?”

“What?” said Blumenthal, turning his head. “The
rogeleh
? It’s a
rogeleh.
”

“
What
is it?”

“It’s the last one is what it is.” His glance went back and forth between the boy and the pastry, and with a grunt of resignation, he grabbed the plate and held it out to Dash.

“All right, so. This
trick
,” he said, “this magnificent
trick.
What happens in it?”

Dash chewed quickly. The
rogeleh
was even better than the cherry purse. He explained about the vanish and Blumenthal listened with an unimpressed look on his face.

“Easy,” said the magician, when he’d finished talking. “Trap door.”

“No trap door,” said Dash. “The stage was solid underneath me. And I didn’t fall through anything. I was still on the stage. And there was
no one in the theatre.
”

Now Blumenthal screwed up his mouth in an odd smile. “I’ll give you this, you keep a straight face. Did you hear anything unusual during the trick?”

“No.”

“Did you
go
somewhere?”

“Here.”

“I mean, when you were still onstage.”

Dash shrugged. He couldn’t say. He’d been in the dark.

“I could do it if I had some smoke and a trap door.”

“No smoke, no trap door,” Dash said between bites.

“Look, kid, I gotta walk my squirrel. Whaddaya want from me? You want money?”

“I want to go to Montreal.”

“You think I got
that
kind of money?”

“You could come with us.”

“
Look.
The
rogeleh
is on the house, and here …” He stood up from the table and dug in his pocket. “I got a buck forty-six. But now you should go.” He put a handful of coins into Dash’s hand. “G’wan. Before I call for a constable and let him decide what happens to ya.”

“I think you’re my only chance to get home, Mr. Blumenthal! And I think
I
might be your only chance to be great.”

But Herman Blumenthal remained unmoved. He held the door open and waited. He wasn’t going to change his mind. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” he said, sweeping Dash out of his apartment.

There was no point in rushing now. There wasn’t going to be a train to miss. Dash, his shoulders slumped, turned south on Yonge Street. He was pretty sure Walt was going to be as upset about this turn of events as he was. He passed Richmond, Adelaide, and King streets. The clock on the corner of Yonge and King told him the Montreal train was leaving in twenty minutes.

He turned on Front and there was Union Station. He crossed and went inside. The main floor was exactly as he remembered: a high ornamental ceiling arched over the marble floors of the concourse far below. Walt was inside, waiting near a fruit stand. He had two little rucksacks at his feet.

“Where’s Herman Blumenthal?”

“He wouldn’t come. I don’t think he believes me.”

“Sure,” said Walt. “I guess you spend all your time trying to trick people, you think everyone’s trying to trick you.”

“I don’t think he likes people very much.”

“Great. So now what?”

“I don’t know.” Over the loudspeakers they were already announcing the train to Montreal.

“Let’s see if we can get on it anyway.”

“I don’t know, Walt. Won’t we get caught?”

“Well, we’ll have to be careful. They’ve got rail bulls here.”

“Rail bulls?”

“Police. Train police. They hit people who jump on trains with big sticks.”

“Oh, well, no big deal, then—”

“You have proof that
we went
to Montreal, Dash. We should at least try to get there.”

Dash was scared, but he saw that Walt was right. “Okay. So let’s just go straight to the Montreal train and get on it. We’ll say, uh …”

“We’re catching up with our parents. They already showed our tickets.”

“Yeah. Good,” said Dash, and they started off for the ramp that led into the bowels of the station.

It was dimly lit down here. To get to the platforms, they had to walk under the tracks and they could hear the huge cars rumbling over their heads. They tried to blend into the river of bodies narrowing toward the stairs that led to the Montreal platform.

Once they got there, people jostled to find their cars. The train was packed. A man had asked them for their tickets right away, but they each gestured confidently at the train and told him they’d just gone for candies and their parents were already
aboard. He smiled them through, reminding them for next time that there was a restaurant on the train that sold plenty of candy. He wanted to know which car they were in. Three, Dash told him, making it up, and the man pointed them toward it.

“Good news about the restaurant car,” Dash said. “Blumenthal gave me a buck forty-six.”

“Gimme my quarter!” Walt laughed, but Dash kept the money in his pocket.

Car three was first-class. They straightened their rucksacks on their backs and stood tall. A steward in a very black suit was standing by that door looking at the ticket of a woman in a fur coat.

“Let’s go to steerage,” said Walter. “Might be easier.”

They went back a few cars, but when they tried to convince the steward that their parents were inside car six, he brushed them off. He’d seen train-jumpers before.

So had the stewards at cars eight and eleven.

At the bottom of the stairs, back beneath the tracks, the man who’d let them onto the platform glared at them.

“This sucks,” Dash groused. “And before you ask, if something sucks, it’s really bad.”

“Well, then, I agree that this sucks.”

They sagged together on a bench back in the concourse like a pair of sad, old men. The final boarding announcement sounded over their heads.

“Well. At least we have money for a malt,” Walt said.

“What’s a malt?”

“What’s a malt! Come on. An ice cream malt?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Walt stood and put his hands on his hips and leaned back. “You’ll see. A malt will help us think.”

He drew Dash toward a wall of little shops. At the end was Creighton’s Soda Shop. A countertop wound a lazy blue S through the middle of it.

Walt took a seat at the counter, dropping the rucksacks beside him. “Two malts,” he said to a man in a uniform the same blue as everything else in the shop. He wore a peaked paper hat on his head. Dash watched him crack an egg into each of the big fluted glasses. “Raw eggs?”

“Put hair on your chest,” the man called over his shoulder. “Chocolate?”

“Yessir,” said Walt. “Now, listen, maybe we should go back out front and try to catch a ride with someone. There could be a bigwig at the Royal York Hotel who wouldn’t mind driving two kids to Montreal.”

“I don’t know about that. My mum and dad always tell me not to get into cars with strangers.”

“What stranger? It’d just be a guy with a car.”

“I don’t think we should.”

The drinks arrived. Six cents in total. In each glass, there was a large round ball of chocolate ice cream floating in a mass of fizzing foam. Dash watched Walt navigate his straw around the ice-cream orb and into the creamy, cold liquid below. It was so cold the glasses were sweating.

Walt said, “We could hire a taxi!”

He took a slurp and Dash copied him, sucking in a big mouthful.

“It would cost more than a train,” said Dash, “and between the two of us we still only have—” He stopped talking.

“Um, are you okay?”

“What did you say this was again?”

“A malt?”

“It’s
incredible
!”

“You really don’t have them in 2011?”

“We have milkshakes. Not malts. I don’t
think.
Give me a minute.” Dash drank slow and deep. It was like drinking a feather pillow, only cold. How, in the advanced, super-connected future, could no one still be making malts?

The station was filling with people again. There was something called the Toronto Railway Line; it seemed to bring people in from smaller towns around the city. A voice boomed out from white hornlike speakers announcing the arrivals and departures:

They went back under the station and took an unmanned set of stairs up to the platforms again. The freight trains were on tracks beyond the passenger platforms. A couple had open cars piled with wood from front to back, but there were others—squat, windowless cars and silver cars with slits for air. Many of the freight doors were open to the platform, exposing their cargo—crates and bales, machinery and barrels. As they approached one of them, they smelled a warm, earthy scent, and hear the sound of many mouths breathing softly. Cattle and swine.

They tried to walk casually, like they were just curious about the train, and then Walt grabbed a vertical bar at one end of a car and swung himself onto a steel step.

“Come on,” he called out to Dash, and he reached for his hand. “There’s an opening in this car. Let’s see what direction the train heads. We can just jump down if it goes west.”

Dash reached out and Walt pulled him up onto the narrow step. “Are you sure about this?”

“You got a better idea?”

They were in a car with special shelving on which were stacked boxes wrapped in butcher paper. It didn’t look very comfortable. They walked through it quietly, hunching down
past the open doors in the middle of the car. They had to open another door at the end and step out onto the big metal coupling that joined the trains. Even with the cars at a standstill, it felt like a dangerous thing to do.

They crossed gingerly and entered the next car. This one was open to the tracks through a wide central door. It had crates full of apples and pears lined up against the walls, bins as big as washing machines. They crouched against the bins and reached up to grab some of the fruit. Suddenly, one of the pears went flying out of Dash’s hand and sailed out the opening: the train had started moving. The two locked eyes.

“East?” asked Dash.

“I’m pretty sure.”

They stayed as still as they could. Walt pointed up at one of the huge bins of fruit, but Dash shook his head hard.

“No,” he whispered. “We’ll be drowned in applesauce by the time we get there. Just stay still.”

They sat with their legs crossed and pulled in to keep them from view. The train moved slowly at first. A couple more pieces of fruit they’d moved too close to the bin’s edges tipped out and bounced around a little before shooting out the door and backwards. The train was picking up speed.

Dash put an apple to his mouth, but before he could get his teeth in it, Walt was on his feet again with a terrified look on his face.

At the end of the car, standing in the open doorway, was a man in a blue uniform and a cap. He was already reaching for his truncheon.

“Don’t move a muscle, you little beggars, if you don’t want to feel Billy’s sting!”

“Run!” cried Walt. He was already wrenching open the door at the end of the car by the time Dash registered that the rail bull was stalking down the thin space between the crates.

“Wrong decision, lads!” he shouted, and Dash leapt up and ran.

The car ahead, as he saw it through the door, caught the sun redly and seemed to move independently of the car he was still on. That’s because it
was
independent. Each car in a train moves over the track freely, the couplings like steel elastic bands, letting the cars shift around. Dash stood at the end of the car looking down at the tracks blurring past. Walt was already on the other side, holding his hand out to him. He felt the sharp sting of the bull’s truncheon on his calf and he cried out. A hand clamped onto his shoulder like a vise and the bull spun him around.

“See what happens to train-hoppers, eh?” the man cried, but at that very moment, an apple exploded into green fragments against his forehead. His hands flew to his face and he stumbled backwards, howling.

Clocked by a Granny Smith!

“GIMME YOUR HAND!” Walt cried, and Dash reached out and grabbed it, almost oblivious to the roar behind him, but still very aware of the steel couplers shimmying madly like they were having a thumb war in steel. His teeth felt like they were going to leap out of his head. “Jump!” shouted Walt. “He’s getting up!”

Dash leapt with both feet without even touching the couplings and Walt pulled him through the air into the next car. Then both boys were up and running again.

Walt threw open the door at the end of that car and spread his legs between the space to open the next. The bull was through and running toward them. He wasn’t speaking anymore, just hollering, and Walt got the door open and pushed across. He didn’t have long legs but he was determined not to land in the bull’s hands. Dash’s calf throbbed, but he followed close behind.

They ran through two more cars, one full of what looked like cabinets, but which Walt said were iceboxes, and then another with canvas bags hanging from big hooks lining the walls.

There was now a car between them and their pursuer.

“This guy’s gonna kill us,” said Walt. “We have to hide.”

“We have to jump.”

“Are you kidding? We’ll break our necks!”

The sound of hollering came to them from one car away. They went over into the next one and closed the door behind them.

They weren’t alone. This was a car with slits along the sides. Inside were kennels. Full of pigs.

“Keep going!” shouted Walt, but Dash was standing in the middle of the car, looking around.

“No,” he said. “Get in! Get in a cage!”

“Are you craz—?” Walt began, but already they could hear the door in the car behind opening.

“Look,” said Dash. He got an apple out of his pocket and held it in front of one of the cages. A pig snuffled the skin through the bars and tried to scrape at it with its teeth. Dash opened the door and tossed the apple in. “Do it, Walt! Get in!” He ducked down and scuttled quickly behind the pig. The animal moved out of the way. It was more concerned with the apple.

“I’m going to kill you, Dash.”

“Kill me later! Here he comes!”

Walt wrenched open the door to the kennel beside Dash’s and held out a pear. The animal accepted the fruit with the same porcine eagerness that Dash’s had. Walt steeled himself and pushed into the cage behind it, just as the door at the end of the car flew open.

The bull came storming down the middle. He was saying something like
“Argagonnakrackenen!”
and he went all the way down to the end of the car and threw that door open.

A moment later, it slammed shut.

“Ohhh …” Walt exhaled in relief. “That was close.”

Dash was feeding his pig another apple. “We better stay here.”

“In cages with pigs? I’m not going to be lunch!”

“They eat apples, not stringbeans.”

“Ha,” said Walter, without inflection. Then he began looking around suspiciously. “We’ll have to get off at some point. They’ll figure out we didn’t jump and they’ll come back looking.”

“You want to try to make a break for it next time the train stops and try to outrun one of these guys on land?”

“I guess not,” Walt said.

“How many more apples and pears you got?”

“A few.”

“Get busy making friends, then.”

The train was picking up speed. A few minutes later, the bull came back through, muttering to himself. He didn’t bother checking in the cages, but if he had, all he would have seen was pigs.

A full-grown pig is a like a naked two-hundred-pound baby with thick, bristly hair all over it. In order to hide behind one, or so some people have discovered, it is important to position your body so that at no time will the pig sit on you. This involves soft, cajoling words and a number of apples or pears to establish that you would like to sit
with
the pig and not
under
it.