The Headless Lady

Chapter Two Side Show

Conventions are uninhibited, haywire affairs. I imagine that even the annual conclaves of the Society of Ancient Historians, the United Association of Embalmers, and, possibly, the left wing section of the D.A.R. have their moments. But a convention of magicians, coin kings, card manipulators, illusionists, mind readers, hypnotists, and ventriloquists is an experience. The Mad Hatter’s well-known tea party was, by comparison, as humdrum, staid, and decorous as a seminar in quantum mathematics.

The nimble-fingered delegates practiced their deceptive skill in the corridors, the elevators, and at the table. I think I saw every accepted scientific axiom of physics and logic shattered beyond all mending. The effect was rather like living in a room paneled with the curved distorting mirrors from an amusement park’s Fun House. After two days and nights of concentrated trickery I essayed a little vanishing act of my own. At 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I sneaked quietly off to the room Merlini and I shared, locked the door with the only key, and crawled into bed.

I woke less than an hour later to find the door wide open, the room full of smoke, shop talk, and magicians. Several of them sat on the edge of my bed playing a curious kind of game with a deck of cards, never dealing but passing the complete deck from hand to hand, each man as he reached for it, saying, “That reminds me— have you seen this one,” or, “Here’s another way of doing that.”

I sat up, swearing sleepily, only to have the cards spread in an expert fan beneath my nose with the command, “Here, take one, any card at all.”

Automatically I obeyed, looked at the card, and then shuffled it back into the deck as directed. The magician, a fat little man with a bland grin, took the cards, held the deck between forefinger and thumb, and gave it a smart rap with the edge of his right hand. The cards fell in a shower to the floor, all except one, which remained in his fingers. “And your card,” he said confidently, making ready to turn it face up, “was—?”

There is, I knew, one thing that makes a magician feel like going into retirement. I supplied it.

“I couldn’t say,” I replied. “You didn’t ask me to remember it.”

“Oh, it’s him!” someone else said in a tone that made me feel as if I had six legs and lived in a drain. “Here, take this and be quiet.” He handed me a highball. I couldn’t smell any bitter almond odor, so I drank it.

There were more tricks on Sunday, and a banquet. I met a blonde who was sawed in two twice a day for a living, discovered that she didn’t require more than the usual amount of care in handling, and had a pretty good time. Monday morning we caught up on sleep, and in the afternoon Merlini packed what miracles remained unsold and we took them to the Express office.

Monday night we had a session with the proofs. Merlini’s job was to check them for facts, but I had the devil’s own time trying to keep him from adding a lot of fiction. On nearly every other galley he’d say, “Of course, I know it didn’t happen just that way, but don’t you think it would have more punch if—” I managed to stop some of his “improvements”; but at that there were enough facts to be trued up so that I spent most of Tuesday madly rewriting. I finished just in time to make the post office before it closed, and sent the proofs off by registered mail. Then, finally, after giving the car a feed of gas and oil, we pulled out and headed west on Route 20—smack into trouble.

Waterboro, according to the road map, is a wide spot in the road (Pop.: 5,000 to 10,000) some 75 miles out of Albany in the middle of nowhere, and noted as far as I knew for exactly nothing at all. I’d never heard of the place until Merlini had pulled it out of his hat on Thursday night, and I’d long since given up trying to figure out how the mysterious Miss H—, her unholy desire for a headless lady, and her use of the name of a two-headed freak had suggested it.

I said as much, and insisted, with some annoyance, on an answer.

“Circus,” Merlini replied. “The Mighty Hannum Combined Shows is playing Waterboro today. And I’ll drink all the pink lemonade on the lot if we don’t find the headless illusion of mine working in their side show.”

“A particle of dried mud that I didn’t notice on Miss Christine’s left shoe, I suppose,” I said. “An unusual type of red clay that you immediately recognized as coming from nowhere else but the northeast corner of the circus lot in Waterboro, New York.”

“You don’t know my methods, Watson,” he paraphrased. “No. Hardly that. The show plays one-day stands. Last Thursday when Miss H, as I prefer to call her, made her brief appearance, the show was playing Newark, New Jersey.”

“Take it from there,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“The Headless Lady is this season’s wow exhibit in the open-air amusement world. Miss H’s healthy tan, her too-contrasty make-up, and her athletic manner taken together, suggested outdoor show business. Circus, carnival, or exposition. There were half a dozen playing within a two-hundred-mile radius of New York City. Then, when Burt asked her name, she gave a phony. She’s too quick-witted to give out something like Mary Smith or Jane Johnson, but she found herself hesitating, and she popped out with the first other name that entered her head, Mildred Christine. Simple matter of association. We were discussing a headless lady, and she thinks of a two-headed girl. My deduction that she knew her circus history was elementary. I consulted Billboard for circus routes. There were three shows in the neighborhood. One, I knew, had the illusion; one was a dog-and-pony show that couldn’t afford it; and the other, the one nearest New York at that, was the Hannum show. It looked possible.”

“Then you added in the H monogram on her purse, I suppose?”

“Exactly. At the beginning of the season, Billboard prints lists of the personnel of the various shows as they leave winter quarters. Major Rutherford Hannum, an old-time circus man who dates from the wagon-show days, owns the show, and one of its featured performers is his daughter, Pauline. I haven’t seen the Major for years, and I failed to recognize Pauline because the last time I saw her she was in pigtails and short dresses. She’s changed.”

“She performs, you say?” I asked.

“Wire-walker,” Merlini replied. “And good, so I hear. She also doubles this season in the swinging ladders, perch, and double traps.”

“Perch and double traps?”

“Perch act. The girl who does the hand and headstands atop a pole balanced on the head of the under-stander. You’ve seen the Walkmirs with the Big Show. Double traps means double trapeze. You’ll have to learn the language.”

“So,” I said, “she didn’t really need that fire escape at all. She could have gone into a human-fly act down the side of the building. But why does their side show need a headless lady so badly and so quickly that she commits an illegal entry to get one?”

“That,” he said, “is what I’m going to find out.”

“Three-ring outfit?”

“Yes. It works out of Peru, Indiana and ordinarily sticks to the Middle West, which is why I haven’t caught it lately. It’s one of the largest truck shows, though if you’re polite when you’re on the lot, you refer to it as a motorized show. And don’t call the tents, tents; they are tops except for the one you eat in. That’s the cookhouse. A mitt camp is the fortune-teller’s booth; zebras are convicts; barkers are never called that, but talkers, openers, or grinders; show elephants are all female, but are referred to as bulls; a rubber man is not a freak — he sells balloons; the picture gallery is the tattooed man; a mush is an umbrella and a skinned mush, consequently, a cane. A grab joint is a hot-dog stand; a grease joint is a lunch wagon or stand; a juice joint, the lemonade—”

“That,” I said, breaking in on the foreign language broadcast, “is a good idea.” I pulled off the road before a white house with a neatly dignified sign that read, Ye Old-Fashioned Cookie Jar — Chicken and Waffles, Our Specialty. “This grease joint do?” I asked.

We reached Waterboro at eight o’clock and, as I braked before the town’s one traffic light, I hailed a boy on the corner. “Which way to the show grounds?”

Merlini’s voice beside me answered. “Turn right, here.”

“Oh. You know the town, then?” I asked, turning.

“No. Never set eyes on it before. Now turn left.”

“Clairvoyance?”

“Something like that,” he said. “Just give the car its head. I’ve had it so long that it turns in at circus lots automatically. Force of habit.”

I could believe that. Merlini, as I should have explained before now, was born to calliopes, elephants, spangles, and sawdust. His mother was turning somersaults on a resin-back as late as five months before he was born and within a couple of weeks after. At one time or other when you were in knee-pants or short dresses you probably saw the Riding Merlinis, an equestrian act that circus people still talk about. Merlini, himself, began his career of mystification as a side-show sorcerer, and he still has a very warm spot in his heart for the whitetops. I’m fairly certain that he’d have found himself at Waterboro that night even though the headless lady incident had never happened.

We made one more turn at his direction and came onto a street at the town’s edge lined on either side with parked cars. At its farther end there were lights and music, the gay, thumping, nostalgic sound of brasses that held all the old gala promise of excitement, color, and pageantry. As we came closer, I glimpsed the bellying, pennon-topped silhouettes of the tents rising above the brightly lighted side-show banners with their hot, garish splashes of color. We were downwind, and all at once I got the first whiff of that inimitable circus odor, the complex blended smell of elephants, cats, horses, hay, sawdust, crackerjack, hot peanuts, and candy floss.

“Is that your secret?” I asked. “Hypersensitive sense of smell?”

“The telephone poles were chalked,” he explained, sitting forward expectantly in his seat. “When the show moves, the crew on the first truck out puts arrows on the poles, marking the turns so that the following drivers can dispense with maps or having to ask questions.”

We turned right, up over the curb and onto the lot, pulling in and parking near several trailers behind the side-show top. Merlini was out almost before she stopped rolling.

He didn’t bother to circumnavigate the tent, but went directly to the side wall. His tall figure, silhouetted against the lighted canvas, stooped as if to lift its lower edge, then stopped. I hurried toward him as he picked something from the grass at his feet.

“Well!” he said in a faintly, surprised voice. “A grift show.”

He fanned the three purses and then flipped them open one at a time, looking at the identification cards behind the celluloids. As he glanced at the second, his voice showed real surprise.

“That,” he said, “is definitely a bloomer. I wonder—”

“Now what?” I asked. “Not clues already?”

He stuffed the billfolds into his pocket, bent quickly, lifted the side wall, and said, “Come on.”

He held the canvas up as I ducked in behind him. We emerged between two of the dozen or more low platforms that were set at even intervals around the interior. A tall square-shouldered man in an ankle-length, gaudy, somewhat soiled red and yellow robe, was arranging on the table before him a glittering assortment of long knives and swords. He turned, hearing us, and scowled ill-naturedly. His forehead had a Neanderthal slant, and his bony underjaw projected belligerently.

“Where the hell duh ya think you’re going, Mac?” he growled.

“Nowhere,” Merlini said calmly. “We’re here. We’re with it.”

The reception committee was skeptical. “Oh, yeah? Since when?”

“Since now.” With his customary deftness, Merlini produced a cigarette from thin air, reached again, and got a paper of matches. “Magician,” he explained somewhat unnecessarily. “Where’s the mitt camp? I’m looking for Gus and Stella Milbauer.”

The sword-swallower’s suspicion melted slightly. “Over there,” he said, jerking his head to the left. We stepped out from between the platforms and saw a small tented structure of awning-striped canvas down the line. Above its entrance hung a large drawing of Cheiro’s chart of the hand. Merlini started toward it.

There were twenty or thirty customers within the side-show tent, mostly gathered in a group at the far end listening to a five-piece Negro band that was playing with more fervor than harmony, and watching a buxom, coffee-colored, undulant wench who shouted a faintly off-color lyric to one of Mr. Handy’s Blues. She wore a skin-tight scarlet evening gown, and her hips operated on the principle of the universal joint.

Just beyond the band there was a platform surmounted by a square boxlike enclosure formed of dark red drapes, the front curtains tightly drawn.

Merlini pointed. “Success,” he said. “That’s it.”

The singer stopped just then, and the band music faded. From outside on the midway came the leathery exhorting voice of the opener shouting, “… and the weirdest sight of all, my friends, the sci-un-tific mahvel of ouah time — Mademwahselle Christine, the lady without a head! Positively living and buh-reathing! While the big show is going on you see it all for the one price — fifteen cents! Step right up … ”

Gus, standing by the mitt camp, greeted Merlini with pleased surprise. He was a skinny little man with a scrawny neck, thinning gray hair, a black-rimmed pince-nez, a rather hammy dignity, and a warm smile.

“Stella,” he exclaimed, turning. “Look who’s here!”

A middle-aged, completely ordinary-looking woman sat on a camp chair before the tent. She wore a black evening gown, too much eye shadow, and an abstracted air. She looked at Merlini with faded blue eyes and nodded politely but with little enthusiasm.

Gus and Merlini, however, burst into a rapid-fire exchange of reminiscences. “Haven’t seen you since Coney-Island in ’33 … played the Orpheum circuit together … remember the Curtises? … They’re on the Russell show this season …”

I looked interestedly around the tent at the silent gaping crowd and at the blasé matter-of-fact freaks, and performers who were awaiting their turns. Hoodoo, the Headhunter from the Amazon, an inky-black, fuzz-topped colored man with war paint on his face, sat on a campstool before his collection of war clubs and shrunken human heads, cleaning his fingernails with a jack-knife. One of the grass-skirted cooch dancers was knitting busily at a small pink sweater.

My attention shifted suddenly back to Merlini and Gus, as I heard the former ask, “When did the Headless Lady join up?”

“Friday, I think,” Gus replied. “Wasn’t it, Stella?”

Stella, the woman who, according to the inscription on the chart behind her, knows all, sees all, and tells all, answered, “I guess so.”

“Who is she?” Merlini continued off-handedly. “Anyone I know?”

But Gus didn’t get to answer just then. A lean, lantern-jawed gentleman with a pair of innocent brown eyes and his hat brim turned up all the way around, stepped from the crowd and touched Merlini’s arm.

“Pardon me, brother, but can you tell me how soon the big show starts?” His voice was that of the country yokel, but there was a knowing grin on his face.

“Holy jumping camelopards!” Merlini ejaculated. “Farmer Jack!” They shook hands energetically. “Ross, step over here. I want you to meet the dean of the broad tossers, the best three-card-monte man in the business. If he offers you a little bet on a sure thing, run for the nearest exit! Tell me something, Farmer. Last I heard this was a Sunday School show. When did the grift come back?”

Farmer grinned. “It’s coming back on a lot of shows. Last season was a bloomer for one thing, and the grift’s a sort of insurance. And then, too, when the fixer walks into Johnny Tin Plate’s office and says, ‘No grift at all this year, Chief,’ for an answer he gets, ‘Oh. That’s nice. But how the hell do I get mine?’ And the fix has to be paid off anyway. So why not frame a store or two?”

“I can’t think of a real good answer for that one, Farmer. You’re on the payroll then?”

“Yeah. I think so. But maybe I’m wrong. Orders came through to lay off a few days. But if I don’t get the office soon, I’m blowing. Seems like every time I take a vacation the chumps walk right up asking for it.”

“Why the layoff? Too much heat in these parts?”

“No. There aren’t many beefs the way I dust ’em off. Don’t know what it is. Something goin’ on around this outfit that I’m not hep to.”

“It’s the advance crew for one thing,” Gus put in disgustedly. “Kelley and Edwards. They’ve gone nuts. Here, look at this route card.”

Gus continued, “Seventy-, eighty-mile jumps every day, and a lot of wrong towns. Waterboro’s a grass town. Show this size hadn’t oughta be here. We won’t come close to making the nut. Norwalk tomorrow, and that’s worse. I don’t get it. We even played Bridgeport less’n two weeks after the Big Show.”

“And,” Farmer added, “we just got out of mine-strike territory in Pennsy, and we’re heading smack into a milk strike upstate. But it’s not the advance crew, Gus. They don’t know no more about it than we do. Couple of them back on the lot Sunday and crabbin’ about it. It’s orders from the old man.”

“Salaries paid up?” Merlini asked.

“Yes,” Gus said, “but that’s funny, too. We were six weeks behind up until Saturday. Lots of folks were all set to blow. Three or four big top acts did leave. Then we got the whole thing up to date, all at once. Like that.”

“The Major land an angel?” Merlini asked.

“Looks like it,” Farmer answered. “High-class sucker, too. I’d like to have his phone number. But say, hasn’t anybody told you—”

The lecturer’s voice cut in above Farmer’s. “Over here, ladies and gentlemen — the strangest, most startling scientific exhibition ever shown, Mademoiselle Christine, the Headless Lady.”

Merlini gave me a glance. “Christine,” he said. “Perhaps we’d better watch this.” He started toward the crowd that stood before the speaker.

“Two years ago,” the lecturer stated in a brisk clinical tone, “a terrible railway accident occurred near Paris, France. Many of you doubtless read about it. Mademoiselle Christine, who you are about to see, was in that accident. They found her among the dead and dying in the twisted wreckage with the bony structure of her skull horribly crushed. But she still lived! By a fortunate chance, the accident happened close to the private villa and research laboratories of the great surgeon, Dr. Josef Veronoff, world famous, as you all know, for his wonderful experiments in keeping human and animal tissue alive in chemical solutions. He saw at once that Mademoiselle Christine’s head injuries could never be repaired by any surgical means. He kept her alive for three days with adrenalin and serum injections, while his technical assistants hastily constructed the marvelous apparatus you are about to see. Then Dr. Veronoff completely amputated the young lady’s head! And substituted his astounding machine!”

The lecturer pulled a cord; the curtains drew apart. “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce Mademoiselle Christine, the Lady Without a Head! The eighth wonder of the world of science!”

The display was obviously the lecturer’s favorite. He really went to town and put oomph into his buildup. He did it well; the spectators, up to this point, had expected to see something falling as far short of the painting on the banner outside as did some of the other exhibits. But they were fooled. The side-show banner artist had, for once, found it impossible to gild the lily. The Headless Lady was exactly that.

Her body, dressed in brief shorts and brassière, sat on a high hospital stool made of metal tubing. Her figure was Grade A plus in all respects — except that it simply stopped short at the base of her neck. A cup-shaped rubber attachment was fixed between her shoulders, and six slender glass tubes rose upward from it, curved in a half-circle, and terminated in six descending tubes of rubber. Three of these were attached, on the left, to a radiolike apparatus, the front panel of which was covered with rheostat dials and electrical switches. The other three tubes led off to a chemico-electrical apparatus on the right, fitted with pressure gauges of strange design, an electric motor with visibly moving eccentric parts, and a complex hookup of chemical glassware — beakers, retorts, and flasks in which a red fluid bubbled. The same liquid could also be seen circulating through the glass tubes that led into the body at the base of the neck. A green light pulsated at a respiratory rate.

Above the girl’s shoulders there was simply nothing but the curved glass tubes and empty space!

“This apparatus,” the lecturer went on, “substitutes for all the physical activities of the missing brain. It supplies nervous stimulation to the body, and feeds it with a carefully regulated chemical diet and a steady flow of blood.

“The machine on your right is Dr. Veronoff’s elaboration of the diagram you see here.” With a perfectly straight face, the lecturer exhibited a framed, glass-covered Sunday Supplement double-spread. The article was headed: Carrel Keeps Tissues Alive in Serum; and the diagram he indicated was a schematic drawing of the Lindbergh heart.

The lecturer continued, “Many people, when they see Miss Christine, are skeptical. They have said that her body is merely a cleverly constructed dummy. I’ll let you decide that for yourselves.” He lifted a limp arm and pressed his thumb for a moment against its flesh. He removed his thumb, and we saw that its pressure had left a white spot on the arm which gradually faded away as the blood returned.

“I will now,” he said dramatically, “turn on the nerve exciter.” He threw a switch and moved several of the dials on the electrical equipment. A four-inch spark suddenly spit and leaped with a bright flash between two copper electrode terminals.

The body moved for the first time. The fingers of the hands twitched. Slowly the lecturer turned a rheostat, and slowly the sputtering, intermittent crackle of the spark grew faster. The girl’s arms moved upward from their position on her thighs; her fingers jerked spasmodically in a clawing, galvanic movement that accelerated with the spark’s increasing frequency. This continued for half a minute; then the crackling subsided; the finger jerks slowed; the arms settled again into their former position, and finally came to rest. The spark ceased abruptly.

“Her arms always return to their former position,” the lecturer explained, “because, having been in this condition now for nearly two years, Mademoiselle Christine’s muscles have become set to a certain extent. If any of you have any questions to ask I will be happy to try to answer them for you.” He stepped forward and drew the curtain to behind him.

“Do you have any questions?” I asked Merlini.

“Yes,” he said, “I do; but I doubt if the lecturer is the man to ask. I still want to know who the girl is. I’ve a feeling in my bones that this Millie Christine is not the one we had the pleasure of meeting. Did you like the illusion?”

“If I didn’t know it as an illusion, and if I failed to realize, as many of this audience seem to, that no bona-fide scientific marvel of this caliber would ever be on tour in a side show, it would give me the creeps, the fantods, and the willies. Look at that woman over there. She’s a kind, sympathetic soul; and it’s obvious that she is feeling sorry as hell for poor Miss Christine. It’s a bit thick, isn’t it?”

“I know,” Merlini said. “He played it straight from start to finish. The illusion is so perfect that it would still be a socko draw if it were announced as an illusion instead of as the real thing. But the lecturer is a circus man and a showman. The townspeople, to him, are chumps, linguistically and literally. It hasn’t occurred to him that he’s doing his bit toward making science our modern superstition. If it did, he’d say, ‘What the hell! My job is to pack ’em in.’ He has, of course, a notable precedent in Phineas Taylor Barnum. I think, however, that I will tell the Major that the Carrel-Lindbergh patter is not only a little too far over the edge, but quite unnecessary as well.”

Gus, who stood beside us, said, “Then I was right. You haven’t heard. Farmer started to tell you a few minutes ago that you won’t be seeing Major Hannum this trip — or any other.”

Merlini turned on his heel, sharply. “Why not?” His words were definitely apprehensive.

Gus said, “They shipped his body back to Indiana this afternoon. He was killed last night. He—”

The lecturer led the crowd in our direction. He spoke to Gus. “Let’s go. You’re next.”

“Right,” Gus said, and to us, “Sorry. See you later.”

“The woman who sees all, knows all, and tells all,” Merlini commented thoughtfully. “I do wish that wasn’t just another snare and delusion.”