Holding a fireman’s axe, its blade buffed to catch the lights, Kukol positions himself in front of the curtains. He must listen for any knocking or sounds of distress from the man inside the can. After two and a half minutes – one hundred and fifty seconds, Harry tells the audience in his final speech – Kukol is instructed to use his axe on the container, destroy it if necessary, to allow him to breathe.
Though it may be too late.
Harry has wondered if the effect would be greater, the suspense heightened, if the container was left in full view on the stage. But there are practical difficulties with that. He also thinks the curtains add an element of mystery. Kukol, too, has pointed to a critical factor.
‘The clock, boss. People watch the clock, not the can.’
He is right. After making his escape, with the water streaming off him and forming pools around his bare feet, Harry has often peeked around the curtains from the wings. Audience members, some standing, some with hands over their faces as if the tension is too much, study the second hand of the clock rather than Kukol, who listens intently for any sounds, consults his own watch as if he cannot believe the evidence of the timepiece nearby, then raises his axe and wrenches at the curtains … even as they part and Harry wanders to the front of the stage, wet but unharmed.
And there is his upright coffin, its top apparently still secured, its padlocks in place. Anyone can come up to confirm this.
Harry is immensely proud of the procedure. He has patented the design of the can, with its curved handles modelled on a Grecian vase. The routine has never failed to earn him astonished acclamation. But in his dressing-room on this Thursday evening he doubts he can wrestle with water again so soon after his leap off the bridge. The leap that left him trapped on the river bottom. Although he has scrubbed his hands with fragrant yellow soap, he senses that he can still smell a rank odour upon them and feel something scummy on his nails. The taste of vomit remains at the back of his mouth. He shudders as he recalls his desperate struggle on the river bottom and wonders if the body – surely not everyone would have seen it – will distract attention from his own feat in any reports. There is a dull throbbing pain behind his eyes.
He must try to get more sleep.
Kukol does not query Harry’s decision to suspend the milk-can escape. Nor does he ask when it will return to the program. Rickards may ask about it, he guesses, but only if house numbers fall. This is unlikely, as all notices for Rickards’ star attraction – ‘Absolutely the Greatest and Most Sensational Act that has Ever Been Engaged by Any Manager’ – have been enthusiastic. Kukol does not say anything, just as he had asked few questions after the leap. He nods and presses his lips together, nothing more. But this is enough. Harry observes his trusted assistant’s expression. It lingers with him on stage even as he runs through his repertoire of handcuff escapes, slipping in and out of steel bracelets like a lady trying on various pairs of leather gloves in a department store.
Harry, now almost two weeks into a six-week season, broods upon Kukol’s mute response and determines that he will perform the milk-can routine after all. He announces this on stage in an especially loud voice so that Kukol can hear him and make the necessary preparations. He will allow himself to be immersed in water again. He must. To do anything else means surrendering to uncertainty. He cannot permit this, for his chief accomplishment has been conquering fear.
When enclosed in a cabinet or coffin or milk-can, he must work with delicacy and speed. Should he panic, he is lost. All his faculties must be clear. Fear causes confusion. He had not allowed terror to take over even when snagged on the river bottom. If he cannot confront the darkness again, fear will plant doubts in his mind just as a fly leaves maggots in a carcass.
So Harry presents his famous routine. And only the very few in the theatre who have seen it before, none more often than Kukol himself, appreciate that they witness an abbreviated version of the trick. Harry stays within the container for fifty-three seconds, much less than his time in the river that afternoon, then reappears on stage before Kukol has cause to advance towards the curtains with his axe to rescue him.
Harry knows he has not squeezed every skerrick of tension from the procedure, yet still people in the audience stand and call for more. And as he acknowledges their applause, bowing as water drips from him, Harry believes he has scored an important victory over self-doubt.
Yet those fifty-three seconds were among the most taxing of his professional life. His heartbeat started racing as soon as the container’s top was secured and he was in darkness again. His shackled hands felt like bony fingertips grasping at his ankles. The chill water had a metallic tang. The shape of the container made him think of an urn used for the internment of ashes after cremation – a process that appals Harry. He would never condemn a departed loved one to flames, disposing of them as if they were trash. Immersed in water, he thought of fire. He imagined himself burned to dust and shards of bone, but suppressed these phantoms in his mind so as to ensure his escape. He could not rush or panic, but after less than one minute he was out, leaning on the top of the container with its removable bolts like a drunk clinging to a bollard on a pier.
Audience members do not know this. All they see is a sodden performer, apparently unharmed, and the container with its locks still firmly fastened. They do not notice Kukol’s quizzical expression as he observes his employer breathing heavily. They cannot know that Harry is congratulating himself. It has been a close-run thing, but he has faced down the fiend again. He has confronted fire and water. And as if to compensate for this one slightly truncated stunt, he concludes his show with a routine that has a desperate edge to it. Trying to expunge all memories of the river, Harry puts extra effort into the straightjacket escape after changing out of his wet costume. He writhes out of the restraint’s tight leather straps, flexing and wriggling his wrists to get them free, arching his legs so that his hands can work on buckles secured behind his buttocks, then flipping his way free like a snake shedding its stiff canvas skin. Only when he is done does he even seem to notice the sorry state of his white dress shirt.
‘Rather knocked about, but a good one still,’ he tells the crowd.
People cheer. Harry smiles, raises both hands and bows.
There he stands. The Arch Mystifier triumphant once again.
But as well as Kukol knows him, he cannot tell what Harry is thinking while he is wriggling and straining, catching a glimpse of his wife sitting impassively in her customary seat near the front even as he struggles to free himself from the buckles and straps and chafing fabric designed to subdue violent lunatics.
It is as if he is somewhere else. Harry’s body, muscular and bruised, is on stage but he has willed his mind far from this hot and unfinished city with its murky brown river. To escape the water he has left the earth.
The performer with premature grey in his hair is now a boy again, barely nine, the son of Rabbi Weiss and his wife Cecilia, newly arrived in Milwaukee, USA, from Budapest, Hungary.
He is a tiny trapeze artist wearing bright red stockings in a penny circus contrived by his friend Oskar Zimbalist. Clutching a knotted rope secured to the trunk of an apple tree, he looks down upon the spectators, gathered in the yard of the Rabbi’s plain wooden house with the iron gates that groan in Wisconsin winds. His beloved mother is there, smiling and encouraging, proud of her adventurous third-born son. His father is absent, officiating at a circumcision.
But Harry can see all his brothers and sisters below him: Nathan and William – older and more worldly, yet still impressed by his act; Theodore and Leopold, cross-legged, mouths open; baby sister Carrie swathed in blankets on his mother’s lap, too young to appreciate what he is doing.
Never before and seldom since has he experienced such an exhilarating sense of freedom and release. One hand is holding the rope, the other is waving to the people gazing up at him before his red-stockinged feet leap from the bough again and he is flying, flying, flying …
He calls himself Ehrich, Prince of the Air.
6
THE comet is coming, its tail like the train of a luminous bridal gown.
As it hurtles closer to the earth its velocity steadily increases to around thirty miles per second. But the comet is still invisible to observers on the southern continent, where things happen especially slowly. Magistrates deem drivers of motor vehicles to be reckless if they exceed thirty miles per hour.
More than six years have passed since Americans Wilbur and Orville Wright used funds from their bicycle business in North Carolina to finance the world’s first powered flights. Nobody has yet emulated the feat in Australia, though several unsuccessful attempts have been made. A writer in a Sydney newspaper wonders whether the antipodean air is simply too hot or more rarefied than in Europe, making flight especially problematic.
But now, early on a Friday afternoon, the man who aspires to be the first to fly in Australia is in the dining-room of the Hotel Metropole, having lunch with his wife.
HARRY and Bess are seated opposite each other at their usual table in a corner. They look alike; could pass for brother and sister. The wedges in Harry’s shoes are no good to him when he is seated, so he tries to keep his spine straight. He leans forward attentively, responding to his wife.
‘Music? What kind of music did you hear?’
‘It was some distance away. Yet seemed familiar.’
‘This was a popular tune – a folk song?’
Bess meets his gaze, her eyes dark in her pale face.
‘Nothing like that. People singing, as if in an opera.’
‘Intriguing …’
This is not his well-projected stage voice, with a stress on almost every syllable. When performing, it sounds as if he is cutting words out of the air with scissors. Because Harry maintains that nothing is more contagious than a performer’s exuberant enthusiasm, he has trained his voice and lungs. He has made speeches to nobody at deserted racetracks and beaches to enable him to address the most distant gallery of a theatre as well as people in the first row. In his voice there is a melange of accents: New York Jewish via Hungary and the American mid-west. Now Harry strives for a tone of infinite receptivity as he strokes the back of Bess’s right hand.
‘I never cease to marvel at you, sweetness. Here we are on the other side of the globe to Milan, let’s say, yet it seems you can enjoy operatic entertainment. If only I could incorporate such a feat in my act …’
