The buzzing sound is louder in his ears.
His fingers work their way down the chain until they come to the object that has trapped him. It gives a little to his touch. He wrenches again.
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight …
On the surface, Kukol will be studying his watch. He always has Harry’s towel and robe ready after forty-five seconds. As instructed, policemen in a boat – engaged for dramatic effect rather than necessity – will be reaching for their grappling-hooks, scanning the river’s oily surface for any signs of a struggle. Reporters from local newspapers, also forewarned, will be scribbling in their little books, noting anxious faces all around as murmurs of concern ripple through the crowd.
Harry can picture all this even as he readies himself for one last effort. He has worked his right foot over so it is up against the object, though he finds it hard to get any purchase. The surface is like soap. Yet this must work. He kicks his leg as hard as he can.
The object moves. Harry senses a shift in the tension under his left shoulder. The chain is free. Bubbles break on his face like rat’s breath.
Sixty-eight, sixty-nine …
Even in Aberdeen it did not take him so long to remove his chains. He is working them clear as he kicks once, twice, and rises. The pressure behind his eyes is intense, the buzzing louder, but he knows he is safe now. The darkness turns grey, then yellow-brown, as he lets out the last of his breath. He can taste blood and something metallic. Yet still he remembers to hold his left arm above his head for all those people on the bridge. After waiting and watching and spying nothing they will see, thrusting out of the water, a hand holding aloft an unlocked manacle, the symbol of his amazing escape.
Seventy-six, seventy-seven …
His lungs are burning. He must be almost there. He senses something in the murk beside him, rising just like himself. He must have pulled it free of the sludge on the bottom.
His hand claws at the air and he is gasping, holding the handcuffs aloft but keeping his head down as he sucks in air so that no-one notices his distress. The buzzing sound persists. This must explain why he cannot hear the cheering as spectators toss hats above their heads. Women wave their parasols and fans. Then there is silence.
It must be shock that has caused this unprecedented cessation of applause. Shock and admiration. The steadily mounting suspense has silenced everyone. Or perhaps they are waiting to hear from him. Yet even as he opens his mouth to shout a triumphant greeting to these citizens of Melbourne, a woman on the bridge screams. Then another.
Harry sees figures above him, leaning out from the bridge. But it seems that few are looking at him. The stunt has never ended like this before.
People are looking ten yards to his right, where something is floating on the surface. Something that has appeared from out of the depths as suddenly as Harry himself.
He hears a single voice cutting through the screams.
‘Christ – it’s a corpse!’
A body is dipping lazily on the ripples of the river like a child’s toy in a bath. Its surface is the colour of clay. Something – a wave, the breeze, the release of noxious gases – causes it to roll over. Its face turns up to the sky, though there are only holes where eyes should be.
As Harry treads water and tries to slow his breathing, he can see the arms of this ghastly object bent out in front as if it had been embracing something. He is shaking now with gasping shudders as people point and stare. There is splashing: the oars of the police dinghy. An officer is standing at the bow, holding a gaff with a long wooden handle. His attention is on the body, not the escape artist.
‘Here,’ Harry croaks. The cuffs dangle like tawdry jewellery.
The policeman has the gaff lowered, his eyes on the body. But when he feels Harry snatching at the handle he gives a brusque command to his colleague to stop rowing and looks down. He has a thick moustache. The strap of his helmet has cleft his chin.
‘In you get.’
Harry clutches at the sides of the dinghy, which dips low as the policeman grabs his arms to haul him up. He flops inside. From above he hears a voice – Kukol reminding people why they are there:
‘Let’s hear it for the great Houdini!’
There is scattered clapping but no cheers. He has been upstaged by a corpse.
Still, he must acknowledge these people who have come to see him. He starts to raise himself up so he can wave at the spectators, perhaps shout out some words of thanks and remind them of the times of his shows: evenings at eight; also matinees Wednesday and Saturday.
But his gut spasms and the policeman is saying ‘Mind my bloody boots!’ and now he is glad of the distraction nearby, for he is retching river water and something foul and bitter on to the bottom of the boat.
3
MUCH of it is true: the bridge; the crowd; the jump; the wait; the triumphant reappearance of Houdini with chains and handcuffs hanging from one hand. Newspaper reporters were present. On some things they agree: the date (17 February 1910, a Thursday); the time of the stunt (1.30pm); the weight of the restraints (about twenty-five pounds).
But they do not mention a corpse bobbing up beside him – a startling event that even the dimmest scribe would have included in their account.
Yet before long the body in the river in Melbourne becomes part of the Houdini legend, just like the stories told about a similar jump from the Belle Isle Bridge in Detroit four years earlier.
In Detroit there is no corpse. There is ice. The river is frozen over, leading the local promoter to conclude that Houdini’s advertised leap-in-chains must be cancelled. But the performer insists that a hole be sawed in the ice. In he goes. Three minutes pass. Four. More. Nothing.
In desperation, a rope is lowered through the hole. Reporters dispatch messengers with news of a shocking calamity. Through the open window of her hotel room, where she is confined, an ailing Mrs Houdini hears newsboys calling out that her husband is dead. He isn’t, of course. After eight minutes – eight – he reappears, chilled but unharmed. He says he had become disoriented when surfacing, unable to find the hole in the ice.
Showing remarkable composure, he claims to have breathed in a shallow airpocket he located between water and ice before pulling off his escape when the dangling rope revealed a way out.
Extraordinary.
Does it really matter that on the date of the jump – Tuesday 27 November, 1906 – the Detroit River was not frozen?
Houdini is a master of illusion. Fact and fiction are hopelessly blurred in his own life and work. He does not present himself as a magician or a practitioner of hocus-pocus. His methods are perfectly natural. ‘I do not dematerialise or materialise anything,’ he says. ‘I simply control and manipulate material things.’ Above all else, he is a showman. He is nothing without an audience. So a stunt is advertised well in advance. A crowd gathers. Into the water he goes. Up he comes. And if, in time, there is talk of entombment under ice or of a body bobbing up, well, it only makes the event more memorable for those who were present. It becomes a tale for them to tell. Yes, I was there that day on the bridge, looking down. And you wouldn’t believe what I saw.
It is February 1910. This much is true.
Houdini, making his first trip to Australia, has been leaping into rivers or estuaries in chains since he first tried it in Dresden, Germany, in 1900. It is a trick in need of a twist – and what better than a body? Spectators cannot see everything. All they can do is watch and wait, hoping to be witnesses to something remarkable. Only Harry himself knows what happens when he is out of sight. He is the storyteller. In time, he will also suggest there was a shark in the river in Melbourne. And perhaps even believe this to be a fact.
So, because the planets are aligned appropriately in this year of the comet, he has a submerged corpse in Melbourne.
