The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 42

I drive to my hotel, a one-star joint down Santa Monica toward Venice. I check in, throw my stuff down, and take a look in the phone book under the heading Magic. I find two listings for bookstores specializing in books about magic and the occult.

The closest one is on Hollywood Boulevard, and it turns out to be the kind of place you have to ring a bell to enter. It’s small, and crammed floor to ceiling with old books. That old-book smell, an amalgam of disintegrating paper and surface mold, pervades the air. The man who buzzed me in sits at a desk in the back, talking on the phone. He raises his hand to acknowledge my presence.

A central table holds bins of artwork and pamphlets, each poster or booklet protected by a plastic sleeve. I leaf through the pamphlets, most of them vintage booklets describing how to perform different illusions, while I wait for the man to finish his call.

A minute later, he joins me. He’s young, with long dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a gold hoop in one earlobe. “Help you with something?”

“I’m looking for a book about the rope trick.”

“Are you a collector?”

“No, I just need something that describes it, talks a little about its history.”

“Okay, I think I can find something.” I follow him down a narrow aisle and watch him ascend a library ladder. He comes down with a battered paperback encased in a plastic sleeve. “This is a compilation of famous effects in the history of magic. The book itself is not in great shape, but it has a nice little chapter on the rope trick.” He cocks his head, smiles. “Anything else?”

“One more thing. I’m looking for a guy. Used to live in L.A. Worked at the Magic Castle?”

“Okay.”

“His stage name was Carrefour. Maître Carrefour.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Or a guy named Mertz? European guy, maybe French. Collects books about the rope trick.”

“Sorry.” (Is it my imagination, or does he answer too quickly?) “But I’m just the hired help. It’s my uncle’s shop.”

I know I’m being way too blunt. Normally I don’t go head on like this. Normally I’d schmooze this guy, get him to like me, seduce him a little. That’s how you get people to tell you things they shouldn’t. I tell myself this, I give myself a little pep talk – but I can’t summon the will to charm this guy. Maybe I’m all played out on the charm front.

“Could I get your uncle’s telephone number? It’s important… Since this guy Mertz was a collector, and he lived here in L.A., this is exactly the kind of place he-”

“No,” the kid says. He looks down at his hands, and once again I detect a slight hesitation before he answers me. “I’m sorry, but Uncle Frank’s in Croatia.” A pause. “Traveling. He doesn’t have a phone.”

“Hunh,” I say. “When will he be back?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“I guess just the book then,” I tell him, sure from his body language that the kid is lying. He’s heard of Mertz. I’ve done so many interviews I know the signs.

I follow him to the cash register, and he rings up the book ($9.25), then slides it into a paper bag. “Receipt in the bag?” he asks.

“That’s fine. Let me ask you – you know of any other bookstores or magic stores I might try? I really need to find this guy Carrefour.”

This seems to relax him, the chance to pass the baton. “Sure – there’s Magic Magic, over on Sunset. You might try there.”

But Magic Magic turns out to be closed. The sign posts the weekday hours as ten until two. I’ll have to return tomorrow.

I sit on the bed in my hotel room and read about the rope trick. The chapter is long and begins by describing how very old the trick is. The trick is mentioned in an offhanded way in the Upanishads. A bit later, chronologically, sacred Buddhist texts mention the rope trick as one of the entertainments performed in a (failed) attempt to raise a smile from the young prince who later became the Buddha – a boy who had never smiled in his entire life. The trick became so famous during the time of the British Raj that the wonder of it, and other such tricks, was considered a recruiting tool for enlistment in the British army. Indian officers were offered a year’s pay as reward for finding a practitioner of the trick. In 1875, a magician’s society in London offered a huge award to anyone who could perform the trick before an audience.

There’s a long sequence about the trick’s parallels with Hindu cosmogony, and also to the English folktale Jack and the Beanstalk and other stairway-to-heaven myths. There’s even a Freudian take on the trick, focusing on the rope’s unexpected rigidity.

And finally, I come to an excerpt from the 1898 edition of The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette:

The conjuror took a large ball of rope, and after having attached one of the ends of the rope to his sack, which was lying on the ground, hurled the ball into the air with all his might. (In many versions, the ball repeatedly thumps back down to the ground before the conjuror succeeds.) Instead of falling back to the ground, the ball continued slowly to ascend, unrolling all the while until it disappeared high into the clouds. There was no house (or other structure)… where it might have fallen… A large portion of its length remained rigid.

The magician [then] ordered his son, who was his assistant, to climb the rope. Seizing the rope in his hands, the little boy climbed… with the agility of a monkey. He grew smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the clouds as the ball had done. The conjuror then ceased to occupy himself with the rope and did several minor tricks. After a little while he told the audience that he required the services of his son and called up to him to climb down. The voice of the little boy replied from above that he did not want to come down. After having tried persuasion, the magician became angry and ordered his son to descend under penalty of death. Having again received a negative answer, the man, furious, took a large knife in his teeth and climbed up the rope and disappeared… in the clouds.

Suddenly a cry rang out and to the horror of the spectators, drops of blood began to fall from the place where the magician had disappeared into the sky. Then the little boy fell to earth, cut into pieces: first his legs, then his body, then his head. As soon as the boy’s head touched the ground, the magician slid down the rope with his knife stuck in his belt. (In many accounts the magician is, at this point, inconsolably sad. “Oh what have I done,” etc.)

Without undue haste [the magician then] picked up the parts of the child’s body and put them under a piece of cloth [atop a basket]… He gathered together his magician’s paraphernalia (often performing a ritual or muttering magic incantations), drew aside the cloth [from the basket] and (mirabile dictu!) the little boy [emerged]… perfectly intact.

A subsequent essay explains how the trick was thought to have been accomplished. It was always performed in rugged terrain, with a braided catgut cord or cable strung between two promontories. Platforms were thought to be erected on either side from which unseen assistants could pull on the cross support and thus hold the rope rigid. An acrobat or rope walker would wait above, in the mist and out of sight. When the rope was thrown, its weighted end would loop it around the cable. The assistant would walk out, and secure it. Then with the help of an assistant on the opposing platform, the rope would be pulled tight. The trick was always performed at dusk or dawn and in a location where fog was common, so as to obscure the area where the rope, and then the child, and later the magician, disappeared. If the nature didn’t cooperate by producing fog or mist, smudge pots or braziers were employed.

As to the rest of it, opinions varied. Some thought the audience was subjected to mass hypnosis or that hashish and opium were aerosolized in the fires common at such performances – the hallucinatory air pushed out toward the audience by the vigorous salaaming of the magician. Some thought the performance venues were meticulously chosen so that at a particular point in the performance, the sunlight would blind the audience. Some thought the bloody parts of the child were actually pieces of a dismembered monkey, shaved of fur, the face smeared with blood and obscured by a turban. Some thought the pieces thrown down were parts of a wax effigy, ingeniously identical to the child assistant. In these cases, the child was thought to descend the rope hidden in the magician’s loose robes.

One historian held forth on the origins of magic, in “the tabernacles of ancient religions.” These were faiths in which sacrifice, even human sacrifice, were commonplace, part of the liturgy. “And what is sacrifice but a ritual in which the forces of destruction, those that cause death, are transformed into the forces of life and creation?”

According to this historian, the “magic” that we see on stage is a reenactment of these ancient religious rites. The defiance of natural laws embodied in the most famous effects (levitation, dematerialization, etc.) are restagings of ancient religious miracles – and so remain mysterious and powerful even after they have been rendered safe.

Gods, he went on to say, have supernormal abilities – it’s one of the things that define them. The Buddha, while not exactly a god, often demonstrated his perfection by floating yards above the earth. The god of Abraham commanded nature. Not only was he capable of producing a voice in a whirlwind, or the spontaneous combustion of a bush, he could part the waters of a sea. Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated his power by multiplying loaves, by walking on water, by healing the sick and raising the dead.

As to the rope trick, in the course of its performance a boy dies and is later restored to life. Accordingly, it represents the most profound of these sacred reenactments.

And then the expert drily opined that the reason no one accepted Lord Northbrook’s challenge – the offer of ten thousand pounds sterling (a fortune in 1875) to anyone who could perform the rope trick – was that the “key ingredient to the trick is a set of identical twins, and such are hard to come by. The secret is of course quite simple: one of the twins is sacrificed in the course of the proceedings.”

I knew… of course I knew. I’d figured it out long ago, out in the Red Rock Canyon. Clara Gabler was killed on stage. Carla was produced, alive and whole and no doubt smiling wide to display her newly whitened teeth. And then, when the performance was over and the audience had dispersed, Carla was disposed of with one efficient shot. Ditto the Ramirez twins.

After these performances, the surviving twin became redundant, a nuisance and a danger. In the case of the Ramirez twins, Byron Boudreaux had planned it well. He’d undoubtedly helped Charley Vermillion petition his way out of Port Sulfur, and then set him up to take the fall for the murder of the Ramirez boys. I’m sure Boudreaux located the cabin near Big Sur, then provisioned it for Vermillion. After the performance in which the Ramirez boys were killed, Boudreaux provided the cyanide capsule to Charley. Who knows what he told him it was. And then he tipped off the police.

I knew, yes, but I was guessing. To read an expert opinion, written in the detached, slightly dated prose of 1952 – before I was born – just about levels me.

I sit there for a minute, my heart thudding with dread. I’ve got to find them.

I plug Mertz into the Anywho website and come up with half a dozen listings in the L.A. area. But after checking them out, it’s clear none of them is the man I’m looking for.

I call Mary McCafferty and ask for her advice. She found Emma Sandling; maybe she can locate Mertz. McCafferty’s sorry, she’s heading out for a wedding, but gives me the names and telephone numbers of two “information brokers” in L.A.

“And what do I tell them?”

“All you have is the last name? Mertz?”

“That. And that he’s a foreigner.”

“Tell them to find out if he has an unlisted telephone number. Also, they could try the court records. Maybe he owned a house or something.”

I contact the broker. He promises to get back to me in the morning. And then there seems to be nothing left to do but hit the Yellow Pages, look up “magician,” and start calling. It feels like the gerbil wheel again, but until it’s time to go to the Magic Castle, I can’t think of anything else to do.

I spend three hours on the phone. Mostly, I get answering machines. Of the few magicians I actually speak to, three remember Carrefour, all of them from seeing him perform at the Castle. None of them knew him personally, or can give me any information about where he lived, his friends, or whereabouts. They have never heard of “Byron Boudreaux” and knew him only as Carrefour, Maître Carrefour, sometimes Doctor Carrefour, a man who spoke English, but with an accent.

Time to go. I put on a clean shirt, and a tie, and head for the Castle, anxious to see DeLand and Kelly Mason, the magician who knew both Carrefour and Mertz.

The sky is full of clouds, and the Castle, a brooding structure worthy of a gothic novel, has a menacing look as I drive up the hill. But it’s a sort of faux menace. Up close, the Castle has well-tended landscaping, well-dressed guests, and valet parking. I retrieve my ticket from the box office, where I’m given a schedule of performances, then pointed in the direction of an ornate door and told what to do. Which is to speak the words “open, sesame” to the red-eyed owl perched in the center of the door. The door swings open.

The whole place is like that – hokey and charming by turns, just the thing for a slightly offbeat date or an adventurous evening with one’s mother. Contributing to the somewhat old-fashioned feel of the place is the fact that everyone’s dressed up – an anomaly in this casual town. I make my way to the crowded bar, which reminds me of a nice English pub with its etched and stained glass, and fight through toward the bartender. The crowd is dense and convivial, with constant eruptions of laughter. I find a tiny table against the back wall. True to DeLand’s promise, I see at least a half-dozen guys with cards in their hands, either doing tricks or in some cases explaining them. In the ten minutes before DeLand arrives, it becomes clear to me that at least half of the people around me are magicians.

DeLand has to speak to at least a dozen of them before he reaches me. Finally he sits down and slides a manilla envelope my way. “I don’t know that this will be much help to you. There’s an address and a telephone, some kind of tax ID number – although not a social security number. It’s all probably useless, I realize. Remember, you’re talking to a man who was persuaded the fellow was French. But I also checked on Mertz. He was an associate member of the Castle. Lived in Beverly Hills. The address is in there.”

A woman dressed in pink satin delivers a drink. “Thanks, Sally,” DeLand says, pressing a bill into her hand. “How’d you guess I wanted a drink?”

She chirps a warbly little birdsong, which no one but me seems to find remarkable, then retreats with a smile.

“Cheers,” DeLand says, raising his glass. “I can’t stay, actually. I’ll take a look round and see if there’s anyone you should especially talk to, and if so, I’ll bring him your way. You’ll want to catch Kelly’s show at nine. He’s performing in the Parlour. You can talk to him after.” He gets to his feet and drains his glass. “If you’re going to eat,” he tells me, “the beef is quite good.” He sets his glass down, and heads for the door.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s only made it halfway there. I head for a quiet area to call in the addresses and telephone numbers in the packet to the information broker. Although I somehow doubt that Carrefour left a forwarding address.

“He scared me.” I’m talking to Kelly Mason, in his tiny dressing room, after the show.

“Carrefour?”

“No. His act was a little gruesome, but he seemed a good enough guy. Luc Mertz – he’s the one who scared me. He lived in this mansion-”

“You went there?”

“Yeah. He invited me. A Spanish-style place in Beverly Hills. But – I don’t know. We had this interest in common, but…” Mason wears stage makeup and it exaggerates his expressions, so that now he seems the very picture of a man perplexed. “I couldn’t talk to him. Maybe it was the language thing. Or maybe it was the obvious income disparity. He had stuff… I couldn’t believe it. As a scholar, it was really a privilege to see some of the old posters and documents, and he was quite generous about letting me photograph them, even publish them. But the whole time I was there, I felt… uncomfortable. When he invited me back, I just bailed on it. As my hippie parents would put it, the vibes were bad.”

I’m tired by the time I get back to my hotel, and when I get through the door, I find that someone’s been there before me. The lamp and telephone are gone from the end table next to the bed, replaced by a display of Mercury dimes arranged in the shape of a cross. Above the top of the cross is something utterly unexpected – a sugary white marshmallow bird, an Easter-time confection. What do they call them?

Peeps.

A white Peep. And a cross.

I don’t get it, at first. And then I do. Diment’s ugly face flashes in front of me. He’s pointing to the postmark on the card from Point Arena. “For vaudoo people, this a most important day. Sacred to the Marassa. This is why Byron sends the card that day. August 10. You might say… vaudoo Easter.”

So now I know: who, what, when, why, and how. Byron Boudreaux is Who, and what he’s going to do, what he wants to do, is to kill the boys – my boys, one with a knife, the other with a gun. It will happen four days from now in a performance of “real magic” that amounts to a kind of religious ceremony. I know all about it now. Who, what, when, why, and how.

I just don’t know where.