The Confabulist (33 page)

“Take it.” He held the letter out, insistent. I took it from him, then crossed the room and threw it in the fire. I didn’t want to read it again.

“You can deny it all you want,” Houdini said. “That won’t bring her back.”

“I know that.”

“The dead are gone. My mother’s not coming back. Grigoriev’s not coming back. Clara is not coming back.”

I stepped back. He knew about Clara. How did this man know so much about my life? How did he seemingly know every terrible
thing I’d ever done, everybody I loved? He had read the letter, obviously. He knew that it was from her, telling me she was sick, asking me to come and see her. And he knew that I had gone, had rushed to the hospital, but she was gone.

“Clara isn’t dead.” I swallowed, hoping that this was true.

“Isn’t she? I think you know better than that.” He said this with such condescension that I wanted to pull the pistol’s trigger and shoot him.

“Bess isn’t dead either,” I said. “Except to you.”

At the mention of Bess’s name Houdini wilted. I kept at him.

“I went and saw her. She was returning love letters to the women who wrote them. She knows what kind of man you were.”

Houdini remained silent.

“Why did you drag me into this?”

Houdini turned to look at me, his eyes watering from the smoke. “To buy me time.”

“Time for what?”

“To protect her. You were always a decoy.”

I took the book out of my pocket. “And this?”

“I slipped it into your pocket the night you punched me. They were supposed to take it from you weeks ago. It was supposed to be the last piece of the puzzle for them, the thing that would finally convince them they were done with Houdini. Do you really think I’d have put anything important in a keyword code? A child could crack one of those. But you got the better of our friend here.”

Houdini returned to the fire. He fuelled it with another box and retrieved a jerry can from beside the fireplace, unscrewed the lid, and poured what appeared to be gasoline onto the fire. A ball of
flame momentarily threatened to escape the limits of the fireplace but subsided.

The man in the chair stirred. A moan escaped his lips, catching Houdini’s attention. He put down the canister.

“You see this?” he said, gesturing to the fire. “It’s over. I’m burning everything.”

When he got no response, only a glassy stare, Houdini sprinted across the room. “That’s how you want it to be, Findlay? You’ve spent a quarter of a century chasing me around, a lurking spectre.” He hit Findlay hard across the face with the back of his hand. Findlay’s eyes rolled back and a trickle of blood ran down his chin, but he stayed conscious.

“I hand you and Wilkie a rube to uncover and you can’t even do that,” Houdini said.

“Grigoriev stopped me from going to the Crandons,” I said.

Houdini turned and glared at me. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

Houdini returned to the fireplace and fed it more files. He picked up the gasoline again but didn’t put any on the fire. Sweat poured down his face and his shirt was blackened and stained, but he didn’t seem to notice the heat. He put the gasoline down and stepped away from the fireplace, moving toward the pile of remaining boxes.

“I’m sorry, Martin. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

I believed him. It seems odd to me now that I did, but he seemed sincere. How much does that matter? I wondered. Does being genuinely sorry for something make a difference?

Then I saw his right hand. He raised Findlay’s gun at me and pointed it at my chest.

“What are you doing?”

He swung his arm away from me and pulled the trigger. The gun
recoiled and filled the room with thunder. Findlay’s chair fell backward and to the side. He aimed the gun back at me.

“I’m sorry, Martin. I don’t want to do this. But you know everything. You’re my last link to the past. Neither Houdini nor Ehrich Weiss can die as long as you’re alive.”

“Please don’t.”

He shook his head and sobbed, but he didn’t lower the gun. I thought of Clara, and how I would never see her again. What would our life had been like if I had done something else in the next moment, anything else? Would we have married, raised kids, grown old? She would have come to depend on me to have answers, as someone who knew how to feel about what was happening. My children would have deserved a father who was capable of properly loving them. Standing there with a gun pointed at me by the most famous man no one knew was alive, I wished that I could have been that person. But I knew I wasn’t. Punching Houdini hadn’t ruined anything for me that I wasn’t going to ruin on my own.

What happened next is a blur. It felt like we stood there for hours with him working up the nerve to pull the trigger and me trying to think of some way out. Then there was an explosion and the can of gasoline spewed forth an arcing column of fire. I still held the gun I’d used to knock Findlay out, and without thinking I raised it and shot Houdini in the heart.

He staggered back, blood seeping from his chest, and collapsed in a heap behind the boxes. A line of fire raced across the floor. If I didn’t move quickly it would beat me to the door. Smoke was beginning to fill the room, making it difficult to breathe and see. I covered my mouth and nose with my arm and ducked low.

“Strauss!” Findlay called out. I should have ignored him and left
but I didn’t. I had only a second to react and instead of fleeing I made my way over to him. He was shot in the arm and one eye was swollen shut.

“Please don’t leave me,” he said.

I’d done a lot in my life that I wasn’t proud of, but I couldn’t leave him. I knelt down and tried to undo the ropes binding him to the chair, but Houdini’s knots were too difficult for me. The fire had spread and was nearly at the door.

With a strength that surprised me I was able to pull Findlay upright, still tied to the chair. I tipped the chair back on two legs and dragged him across the floor. The fire had burned its way up the wall, and the boxes of files that Houdini hadn’t burned in the fireplace were engulfed in flame. The smoke was so thick that I couldn’t see the spot where Houdini had fallen. There was no question of stopping the fire now.

I pulled Findlay out the door and down the stairs, the legs of the chair landing with a thud on each tread. Findlay was quiet—either he had nothing to say or he’d passed out. I focused on escape and survival. When I pushed open the front door, the building gulped in fresh air from the outside and glass showered the street as the upstairs windows blew out.

When we were safely across the street I was overcome by a fit of coughing and fell to my knees. It took me a moment to recover, then I turned my attention to Findlay. He was awake but breathing heavily.

“Thank you,” he said.

I suppressed the urge to cough again. “What now?”

“It’s over.”

“I just killed Harry Houdini.”

“Didn’t you do that already?”

“You saw me shoot him.”

“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead.”

He was right. I left him tied to a chair under the elevated train and walked away just as a fire crew arrived. It was possible they might be able to save the building. At the very least it seemed like they’d be able to prevent the fire from spreading. From the outside it didn’t seem that bad—a little smoke was wafting out the second-floor windows, but otherwise the building appeared to be intact.

As I walked down Third Avenue toward Grand Central Terminal I looked back and saw a man try to untie Houdini’s knots, then give up and cut the rope with his pocketknife. I never heard from Findlay again.

MARTIN STRAUSS

Present Day

T
HAT
’
S IT.
I’
VE TOLD
A
LICE EVERYTHING
.

She’s listened without interrupting, her hands folded in her lap. There is sorrow in her posture but her face is calm, almost serene. I don’t know what to make of this.

“I couldn’t tell you before,” I say. “I didn’t want you to know what kind of man he was.”

“I don’t care about Houdini.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I don’t care that you’re sorry. Why did you leave her?” She’s not serene, she’s angry.

“Clara?”

“Yes,” she says, “you know, the woman you loved one moment and abandoned the next.”

My head begins to ring again. “I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing happened right. I was overwhelmed and dealt with it in exactly the
wrong way. I tried to make amends, later, but her father told me never to come back.”

“And you listened to him?”

“Yes.” I shouldn’t have listened to him. I should have gone back.

“Why?”

“Because it was what I wanted to hear. That I wasn’t welcome, that the world had gone on without me.”

“Did you love her?”

I pause. “Yes.”

“Do you regret it?”

It doesn’t matter whether I regret it. Life doesn’t work that way. Once you’ve done something, it can’t be undone. That only works in magic tricks. The rope cut into pieces made somehow whole again, the object that’s disappeared reappearing. It’s magic because we know that this doesn’t really happen.

“Regret isn’t a big enough word.”

“No,” Alice says, “I guess it’s not.”

I can feel her rage. Did I expect she wouldn’t be angry? Why else would I have delayed telling her the truth all these years. It’s possible that at any moment she’s going to get up and walk away without looking back and I’ll never see her again.

“My mother raised me by herself, Martin. She was lonely and she was betrayed. But she never became bitter. She was confused, if anything. Never understanding why she’d been abandoned by my father. It was as though there was something basic about human nature that she couldn’t fathom. It eluded her, I believe, because it doesn’t exist. There’s no good reason she was left alone. It took me years to realize that I would never find it. But my mother …”

She’s crying, tears running down her face. I reach my hand into
my pocket and remove my coin. I show it to her, and she wipes her eyes and smiles a little. I transfer the coin from one hand to the other, throw it up in the air, catch it, and show it to her. I transfer the coin and throw it again. We watch it rise up, and for a moment I wonder if it will escape us both, somehow keep going upward away from here and into the unknown above us. Maybe Alice is wondering the same thing. But its ascent slows and then reverses, and the coin falls back to my waiting hand, tied to the earth by the same immutable forces that govern us all. I do the false transfer and mimic a throw with my left hand.

Alice places her hand on my right hand. She’s stopped crying, but her face is blotchy and stained.

“She’s dead, Martin.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So you keep saying.”

But I am sorry. A grief envelops me, one that goes far beyond the bounds of normal empathy, even for someone I care for as much as I do Alice. I grieve for parents, and for parenthood. Being a parent is a monumental thing. You shape reality for another person. You cannot be an illusion. You cannot be paralyzed by the fear that you are an illusion. If you have done a bad job, or no job at all, what remains of you is proof that the world is an unfeeling place. If you have done a good job, what remains is the part of you that was magical.

A man walks by us, talking loudly on his cell phone. What do you say to a person who’s lost her mother? It’s a horrible thing to lose your mother. I know this as well as anyone. Now, in my old age, I can barely remember my mother. I have flashes of her, and I have an impression, but all that is left now is her faint reflection.

A memory isn’t a finished product, it’s a work in progress. We
think that our minds are like a library—the right book is there somewhere if you can find it. A whole story will then unfold with you as the narrator. But our memory changes, evolves, erases. Moments disappear and are replaced and combined. What’s left of a person after they’re gone is a spirit of who and what they were.

This is where our pain comes from. Because we know this is going to happen. We feel it and it underwrites our mourning.

For all of us the future is an unmade promise. For the living there is the present and the past. The past is always moving, always changing, as the people we lose are transformed in us. The past is no place to live. But it’s the only place the dead lived.