The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (91 page)

             
"I wouldn't think of it," Moriarty said.

-

             
And so Barnett found himself in a hansom cab, commencing an afternoon of investigation. His objective: the lower end of the Strand, with its appendage streets and lanes, and the theatrical agents and managers whose offices were clustered about the area.

             
"What, exactly, am I supposed to be looking for?" he had asked Moriarty before the professor hustled him toward the door.

             
"You are seeking truth," Moriarty explained. "You are trying to identify a murderer."

             
"In a theatrical agent's office?"

             
"There are very few possibilities," Moriarty said. "Very few facades beneath which our killer could be lurking. I have had most of them investigated already: locksmiths, burglars—"

             
"You said some time ago that it wasn't a burglar," Barnett interrupted.

             
"I said some time ago that it was not someone intent on burglary," Moriarty replied. "We are not now looking for motive, but training and ability. There are few people as knowledgeable and competent in the field of surreptitious entry as our killer has shown himself to be. This is an acquired skill, not an innate ability. Most of those who are known to have acquired such a skill have already been investigated, either by my own men or by Holmes's official minions, without turning up a possibility.
"

             
"
And so?" Barnett asked.

             
"When you have eliminated the impossible," Moriarty told him, "it is time to take a hard look about and see what's left."

             
The first offices Barnett visited were those of Simes & McNaughten, Theatrical Agents, Specialty Acts, Bookings for London and the Provinces. He spoke to Mr. Simes, a man who looked as though he could have been the model for the puppet Punch.

             
"Magicians, you say?" Simes asked. He went to a cabinet and pulled open a dusty lower drawer. "I'd say we've handled a fair number over the years. None recently. They used to be very popular as a music-hall turn. Drew top money, top billing. Kind of died out now, though. Some really big names there were, back in the sixties and seventies. Manders, the Modern Merlin, was a top draw for, maybe, twenty years. Retired to Sussex. Still around, I believe. Keeps bees."

             
"Have you handled any in the past few years?" Barnett asked.

             
"I specialize in animal acts now," Simes said, waving his arm to indicate the posters on the surrounding walls. "Seals, dogs, bears, doves. No magicians. They're too temperamental. Most of them these days are foreigners. Italians and such."

             
"Thanks for your time," Barnett said.

             
He visited three more theatrical agencies with similar results. But then he arrived at the offices of Ditmar Forbis, Theatrical Representative—All Major Cities.

             
Ditmar Forbis was a tall, thin man with deeply set, searching eyes, who was dressed immaculately and tastefully in a hand-tailored black sack suit. Barnett's impression was that the man was miscast as a theatrical agent. He was much too somber and far too elegant. Barnett decided that by appearance and inclination, Forbis should be an undertaker to royalty. "You say this is for a newspaper article, Mr. Barnett?" Forbis asked.

             
"That's correct," Barnett told him. "Probably turn into a series of pieces on music halls and vaudeville."

             
"Vaudeville, Mr. Barnett, is an American phenomenon."

             
"I write for an American news agency," Barnett told him.

             
"I see," Forbis said. "Magicians, you say. As it happens, I handle most of the magical gentlemen working London today."

             
"Well," Barnett said, relieved that he had finally come to the right place, "is that so?"

             
"Yes, it is. They are mostly foreign gentlemen, you know. Largely Italians or Frenchmen. Even when they're not Italians or Frenchmen, they tend to take French or Italian names. Signor Gespardo, the Court Card King, for example; he is really a Swede."

             
"The Court Card King?"

             
"Yes. He does tricks with playing cards, but he only uses the king, queen, or jack—the court cards.
"

             
"
Strange," Barnett commented.

             
"They are that—all of them." Forbis reached for a wooden box on his desk. "I've got cards on all the magicians who are currently active. Must be twenty or thirty of them. I don't imagine you want to see them all. How shall we sort them for you?"

             
"I'd like to concentrate on escape artists," Barnett said, taking out his notebook and flipping it open to a blank page. "People who are expert at picking locks and the like."

             
"That's not what they do, you know," Forbis said. "Or, at least, that's not what they admit they do. It's supposed to be some sort of miraculous power they have; nothing so mundane as a lockpick."

             
"What sort of things do they do?" Barnett asked. "Can you give me an example?"

             
Forbis shrugged. "Anything you can think of. And if you think of something they haven't done, why one of them will try it." He groped behind him and came up with a handful of handbills. "I'll show you a few examples of the sort of stuff they advertise. Here— here's one." He waved it across the desk.

             
The four-color illustration on the handbill portrayed a man in evening dress with his arms stretched out in front of him, hands clasped. He was shackled by every variety of handcuff and chain imaginable, but there was a confident glare in his clear blue eyes. Across the top of the print was the semicircular legend
KRIS KOLONI
THE HANDKUFF KING.

             
"He does challenge escapes," Forbes said. "You name it and he'll get out of it. Last year he escaped from a patented strait-waistcoat used at the Beaverstream Lunacy Asylum."

             
"That's the sort of chap I'm interested in," Barnett said enthusiastically, writing the name on the top line of his notebook. "Can I get in touch with him?"

             
"I'm afraid he is in Paris at the moment. In jail, as it happens."

             
"Jail?" Barnett was now definitely interested. "For how long and for what crime, do you know?"

             
"For the past four or five months, I believe. Refuses to pay alimony to his ex-wife."

             
"Ah," Barnett said, drawing a line through the name. "I assume you're reasonably sure of your facts—that is, that the fellow is still in jail?"

             
"I received a letter from him just last week," Forbis said. "Pleading for money, as it happens. Performers are just like children—totally incapable of handling their own affairs, most
of them. Here's another chap." Forbis pulled a handbill free of the pile. "Moritz the Wonderful Wizard, he calls himself. His specialty is escaping from locked steamer trunks. Actually a very boring act. For twenty minutes the audience has nothing to look at save this trunk in the center of the stage. Then all at once Moritz pops out, waving his arms about as though he's done something clever. You understand that if you were a theater manager from the Midlands, that isn't how I would describe the turn. But just between us, that's the effect."

             
"Doesn't sound precisely like what I had in mind," Barnett said.

             
"Don't blame you," Forbis said. "Let's see, what else have I?" He riffled through the card box. "There's Professor Chardino—the Invisible Man. That's the way he bills himself. Works with his daughter; has a very interesting stage presentation. It's a sort of challenge to the audience. Gets them involved. He escapes from things people bring with them to the theater. Trunks, boxes, canvas bags, leg irons, handcuffs, animal cages, anything you can think of. It may sound superficially like Moritz the Wonderful's act, but I can assure you that the effect is entirely different. The man has a wonderful grasp of stage presence and stage personality. He makes the audience
care
what happens to him."

             
"How so?" Barnett asked.

             
Forbis frowned in concentration, his right hand grasping the air for the right word. "Let me describe it," he said. "Chardino is locked into the restraint—whatever it happens to be—usually by a committee of spectators. Through his conversation with the committee and the audience he has established the difficulty of what he is about to attempt and won the sympathy of his audience. Then his daughter covers him, and whatever he may be locked into, with a large drop cloth. There is now a period of waiting. The daughter, after standing expectantly for a minute, commences to pace nervously, obviously worried. There is a muted conversation about 'air supply' or some-thing else possibly relevant. The audience are on the edge of their seats. Then it happens! Sometimes he appears from under the cloth; sometimes she whisks the cloth aside and he has disappeared completely. Sometimes she raises the cloth up to cover herself also, and then it drops and Chardino has taken his daughter's place, and it is she now locked inside the restraint. Once a society of undertakers in some provincial town brought along a coffin, and they took him to a local plot of land and buried him in it. After a while, when nothing happened, they dug the coffin up and opened it to find him gone. He beat them back to the theater."

             
"Why does he call himself the Invisible Man?" Barnett asked.

             
"Chardino specializes in getting in and out of impossible places— often without being seen."

             
Barnett made another entry in his notebook. "What sort of places?"

             
"Well, let me see." Forbis referred to his card. "He was locked in the tower room of Waldbeck Castle and escaped while two companies of guardsmen were surrounding the building. They saw nothing. Another time he was locked in the vault of Bombeck Fréres, in Paris, and was
found to be gone the next morning when the time lock permitted the manager to open the door. The man is a great showman."

             
Barnett nodded slowly. "I would very much like to meet Professor Chardino," he said. "He sounds like just the sort of person I have been looking for."

             
"Fascinating to talk to," Forbis agreed. He flipped over a few more cards. "Then there's the Amazing Doctor Prist—the World's Leading Escapist. It sort of rhymes, you see."

             
"He escapes from places also?"

             
"Oh, yes. Not as good as Chardino perhaps, but very showy, with a great many flourishes. He's been trying to arrange an escape from the Tower of London for the past five years, but the authorities won't let him. Naturally he plays that for all it's worth. By now he's gotten almost as much publicity out of the fact that the authorities refuse to allow the escape as he would have from successfully accomplishing it."

             
Barnett wrote the name Prist down in his notebook. "Any others?" he asked.

             
"Well, if it's escapes you're particularly interested in, there's Walla and Bisby," Forbis said, pulling out another card. "You can see them at the Orion right now, as it happens. Their specialty is
walking through a brick wall, which is constructed right on stage in full view of the audience."