‘Due ceremony, as you stipulated. All top-drawer, like the casket itself.’
Harry pats a pocket of his jacket, checking for something.
‘Very well then. It is best this way. You are able to see it through, Franz?’
‘Sure thing, boss. Just another box for me to accompany. You won’t be coming along yourself?’
The horse snorts. The plumes on the casket shudder. Harry steps back and shakes his head.
‘There’s something else I must attend to. This is all I had requested. Thank you. I … We’ll talk later, Franz.’
He turns and leaves with no further farewells, walking with his hands clasped behind his back; not towards the hotel, as Kukol would have expected, but in the other direction. Towards the river. He hasn’t been there since his jump five weeks previously, when he came by motor car. Now it is early in the morning and there is no pushing crowd of people, but he recognises it even before he sees the sign.
Queen’s Bridge.
He watches his feet, heedless of anything else around him, until he judges he is halfway across.
There is the stone parapet on which he perched. He could mount it again without difficulty, but there is no need. Instead he leans against the wall, which is no more than chest-height, and looks over. The water is as black as the undertaker’s horse. Black and oily. Difficult to discern the surface. He hears it sucking against the piles. Somewhere a door slams.
Now.
It is not enough. He did not observe shemira. He will not attend the internment. He needs to do more. And he realises as he stands there, right hand reaching into his jacket pocket, that he cannot even think of an appropriate prayer to recite. He is a poor son of a Rabbi.
So this offering will have to do.
He has tried to settle things in his own way. And now she can rest. They can both rest.
Several blocks away, the wheels of the first cable-tram screech on a turn.
If anyone were watching, though he sees nobody when he glances around, they would think nothing of it: a solitary man muffled against the cool of the morning, losing himself in private thoughts on the bridge before tossing something over the side. Perhaps a chunk of old loaf for seagulls.
The flying goggles – the ones he wore just a few days earlier, one metal frame slightly dented – spin in the air, reflecting the early light, before they hit the water with the slap of a fish jumping.
Then the blackness swallows them.
58
THE comet has arrived.
Late in April 1910, when Harry is approaching the end of his Sydney season at the Tivoli Theatre, the comet is spotted in Malta.
It is visible to the naked eye, its tail sloping upwards.
One Sydney reviewer salutes Harry as: ‘The absolute greatest and most astounding Artiste (without exception) that has ever appeared in Australia.’
At the Theatre Royal, the J.C Williamson production of Madame Butterfly, in English, is also a great success. The Sydney Morning Herald’s critic celebrates ‘wonderfully dramatic passages that spring upwards like a pyramid of fire and expire again like a flash of summer lightning’.
Notices for the comet are less enthusiastic.
In Geelong, outside Melbourne, a clergyman named McKenna tells his Sunday congregation at St Mary’s church that newspapers are making a lot of fuss about Halley’s Comet.
He had got up to see it himself, he says, and considers it to be the most miserable farcical attempt at a comet. His advice is not to waste five minutes in looking upwards, for it is without any noticeable features.
Years previously he saw a comet resembling an immense gum tree. That, he concludes, was something worth seeing.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
HARRY Houdini’s success rested in blurring the line between reality and illusion. He was a storyteller whose favourite subject was himself. Truth was an optional extra. Most people who flocked to his performances, public appearances and stunts left thinking that what they had witnessed was authentic because they lacked the insights or imagination to come up with any other explanation. Also because they wanted to be amazed. He was ahead of his time in his embrace of publicity and marketing – a trait he shared with theatre owner and promoter Harry Rickards, who brought him to Australia in 1910. Magician and actor Penn Jillette has said: ‘Houdini was really, really good at getting people to tell stories about him. He was probably the first person to use the Press in a way we recognise today.’
This is a work of fiction based on fact – at least, what is presented in books and newspapers as fact. Most of the characters in the novel did exist. Several even get to speak some of their own words. Some – Jordan, for example, and the diligent Brassac – have needed more fleshing out than others. Their names can be found in biographies or witness-statements but they are often only granted walk-on parts with few lines.
Researching this story took me to places as diverse as a meeting of gramophone enthusiasts, the aviation museum at Moorabbin Airport, Melbourne’s Performing Arts Museum, and the State Library of Victoria seeking works on everything from magic to music and old copies of the journal of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain. Also, of course, to Diggers Rest – where there is a Houdini Drive and a couple of plaques, one close to a toilet block, acknowledging his flying feats. It is difficult to get a sense of the past largely because, ironically, the international airport is nearby and jets fly overhead.
It is easy to get lost in the forest of books, commentaries, and documentaries about Houdini’s life and work. The biographies I relied on most – for insights into the stoic Beatrice as well as Harry himself – were Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss, by Kenneth Silverman (Harper Perennial, 1997); The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, by Ruth Brandon (Kodansha International, 1995); The Secret Life of Houdini, The Making of America’s First Superhero, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman (Atria Books, 2006); also Secrets of Houdini, by JC Cannell (Hutchinson London, 1931).
For information on entertainment in Melbourne in 1910 I am indebted to The Australian Stage: a Documentary History, edited by Harold Love (New South Wales University Press, 1984). Also Magical Nights at the Theatre, by Charles Waller (G. Taylor, 1980) – for descriptions of shows by the likes of WC Fields, Grossi the Mind Reader, and Houdini himself.
Photographs from the period are intriguing. I’m not sure I’ve found one in which Brassac is not wearing a hat. I found myself gazing at pictures of Bess, almost always with her husband, wondering: what was she thinking? Newspapers and magazines from the time were particularly useful, especially for Rickards’ extravagant spruiking of his attractions. They also provide a contemporary perspective. Houdini was certainly well-known, but his name did not have the resonance it does now. He was another performer in town; his show competing with the likes of Count Hannibal at the Theatre Royal, Julius Caesar at the Town Hall, and The Prince and the Beggar Maid at the King’s Theatre.
Newspapers and magazines provided updates on Halley’s Comet, enticing offers relating to Champion Phonographs, and reports on early attempts at flight in Australia. Witness accounts, including the signatories, are as they first appeared in print. The inscription on the inelegant trophy presented to Houdini, celebrating his successful flight, is as it appeared on the original – including the intriguingly incorrect date.
Houdini believed that his achievements in his Voisin biplane, which he sold after some exhibition flights in Sydney (and then never flew again), would outlive his feats on stage. He was wrong. His name is synonymous with escapes, not flight. There is still debate about the legitimacy of his claim to the Australian record, although his adroit use of reporters, photographers and cameramen strengthened his case. Early in 1910, the august British journal Aeronautics gave the honour of being first to fly to Colin Defries in Sydney in December 1909, although his ‘flight’ lasted only a few seconds. Custance also has his champions. I am grateful for assistance from members of the Aviation Historical Society of Australia. Books that were useful included Australian Aviators – An Illustrated History, by Brian Carroll (Cassell Australia, 1980); By the Seats of their Pants, by Terry Gwynn-Jones (UQP, Queensland1992); the chapter ‘Up Over Down Under’ in Milbourne Christopher’s Houdini The Untold Story (Crowell, New York, 1969); also Milbourne Christopher’s Houdini: A Pictorial Life (Crowell, New York, 1976).
The recordings that entertain Brassac and Banks in Plumpton’s Paddock did exist. It is true that Caruso and Melba recorded just one duet, in the USA in March 1907: ‘O soave fanciulla’ from Puccini’s La Boheme. Principal reference works on the sad-eyed composer were Peter Southwell-Sander’s Puccini (Omnibus Press, London, 1996); and especially – for his language and beliefs – Letters of Giacomo Puccini, edited by Giuseppe Adami, translated by Ena Makin (Vienna House, New York, 1973). There is no evidence of Puccini ever visiting Melbourne. But the Australian premiere of Madame Butterfly did indeed occur in Sydney in March 1910. And the document certifying Houdini’s longest flight at Diggers Rest was witnessed – in addition to several sailors, an Argus reporter, and Jordan – by someone signing himself A. Bindo Serani, Consul for the Italian Touring Club in Melbourne. If nothing else, it is a great name for a character in a Puccini opera. Brassac was right. It could be another Houdini mystery.
