Play dead

PHILADELPHIA 1938

The Kensington section of Philadelphia was a near northeast working-class part of the city, bordering the neighborhoods of Fishtown, Port Richmond, Juniata, and Frankford.

In November 1938 Karl Swann came to live with his distant cousins Nicholas and Vera Ehrlinger. They lived in a narrow row house on Emerald Street. Both of his cousins worked at Craftex Mills. Karl attended Saint Joan of Arc School.

In the late 1930s Philadelphia was a rich and vibrant community for magic and magicians. There were chapters of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Society of American Magicians, The Yogi Club, the Houdini Club-an enclave dedicated to preserving the memory of Harry Houdini.

A week after his tenth birthday Karl took the streetcar to Center City with his cousin Nicholas. They were on a mission to locate a tablecloth for Thanksgiving dinner. Karl marveled at the Christmas decorations and displays near Rittenhouse Square. When they reached Thirteenth and Walnut, Nicholas kept walking, but Karl stopped, captivated by the one-sheet poster in the window of Kanter's Magic. Kan- ter's was the premier magic emporium in Philadelphia, its clientele an amalgam of amateur and professional magicians.

The poster in the window-a bright and bizarre display of doves and grinning harpies-was for a show due to arrive in two weeks, a show the likes of which Karl had never imagined. The star of the show was a man named Harry Blackstone.

For the next ten days Karl took on every odd job he could. He delivered newspapers, shined shoes, washed automobiles. He finally saved enough money. Three days before the show he went to the theater, and bought his ticket. He spent the next two nights in bed, looking at the voucher in the moonlight.

At last the day arrived.

From his seat in the balcony Karl watched the incredible spectacle unfold. He watched a stunning illusion called the Sepoy Mutiny, a piece of magical theater in which Blackstone was captured by Arabs, strapped to the mouth of a cannon and blown to bits. At more than one performance of this fantastic illusion women had been known to faint, or run screaming from the theater. The fainthearted who fled never got to see that, moments after the cannon fire, the executioner would pull off his turban and beard, only to reveal that it was Blackstone himself!

In another illusion Blackstone passed lighted lightbulbs right through a woman, each pass eliciting shocked gasps from the transfixed audience.

But nothing surpassed Blackstone's version of sawing a woman in half. In Blackstone's rendering, called the Lumbersaw, a woman was strapped facedown on a table, and a large buzz saw ran right through her middle. When Karl saw the illusion it brought tears to his eyes. Not for the woman-of course, she was just fine-but for the power of the ruse. In Blackstone's gifted hands it was a level beyond enchantment, beyond even theater. For Karl Swann, it had reached the level of true magic. Blackstone had done the impossible.

In the summer of his fourteenth year, Karl Swann spent every Saturday afternoon at Kanter's, pestering the owner, Mike Kanter, demanding to see every trick beneath the glass. One day Karl wandered behind the store, into what looked and sounded like a machine shop. It was a brass works. He saw a man at a workbench. The man noticed him.

"You should not be here," the man said.

"You are the man who makes the Nickels to Dimes?" The Nickels to Dimes illusion was one where the magician places a stack of nickels on the table, all the while pattering about inflation and the costs of things these days. He passes his hand over the stack, and they turn into dimes.

The man spun on his stool, crossed his arms. "I am."

"I saw the trick today," Karl said.

The man stroked his chin. "And you want to know how it is done."

"No."

The man raised a single eyebrow. "And why is that? All boys want to know how magic is done. Why not you?"

"Because I know how it is done. It is not that clever."

The man laughed.

"I will work for you," Karl said. "I can sweep. I can run errands."

The man considered Karl for a few moments. "Where are you from?"

"Kensington," Karl said. "From Emerald Street."

"No, I mean where were you born?"

Karl did not know if he should say, the war being the war, still so alive in everyone's mind. He trusted the man, though. He was clearly of German extraction. "Hanau."

The man nodded. "What is your name?"

Karl squared his shoulders, set his feet, just as his father had taught him. He extended his hand. "My name is Karl Swann," he said. "And yours?"

The man took Karl's hand. "I'm Bill Brema."

For the next two years, Karl apprenticed with Bill Brema, working in the brass works, helping to produce some of the finest brass apparatuses in the world.

But the real benefit to working there was the people Karl encountered. Everyone came to Kanter's, and Karl met them all; acquiring moves, pieces of patter, a well-used silk, a battered wand. His magic box grew. His understanding of misdirection flourished.

At twenty, it was time to perform professionally for the first time in the United States. He called himself the Great Cygne.

For the next ten years the Great Cygne toured the country, performing in towns large and small. Although not a strikingly handsome man, at six-two he was a commanding presence, and his courtly manner and piercing eyes drew women to him in every venue.

In Reading, Pennsylvania, he met a German girl named Greta Huebner. Weary of finding love on the road, Karl proposed to her within one month. Two months later they were married.

Back in Philadelphia, when his father's estate was finally settled, more than fourteen years after the end of the war, Karl received a check for nearly one million dollars. With it he bought a house in North Philadelphia, a sprawling twenty-two-room Victorian mansion called Faerwood. He surrounded it with trees.

For most of the next decade the Great Cygne continued to ply his trade. Childless, the couple had all but given up on a family. Then, at the age of thirty-eight, Greta Swann became pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, and on the morning of October 31,1969, Greta died from complications of childbirth. At 7:00 AM, a weeping midwife handed Karl the swaddled baby.

Karl Swann held his infant son for the first time, and it was in this moment, when the child first opened his eyes, that Karl saw something that chilled him to the bottom of his soul. For a moment, his son's eyes were a blinding silver, eyes that held the very cast of Hell.

It may have been an illusion, he thought a few moments later, a trick of light coming through the high windows at Faerwood, for soon the vision was gone. The baby's eyes were an azure blue, like his father's.

Karl Swann named his son Joseph.