I wrestled with smoothing my own wayward hair into a sleek chignon then stuck a dozen hairpins in savagely. I couldn’t think how I was going to get any more information out of him and it annoyed me to know he had only agreed to my presence to pacify a hysterical wife. But if he knew who was out to harm him, why wasn’t he doing anything about it?

“You really can trust me, you know,” I said.

“Maybe I can, but as I said, I think tomorrow will put all this behind us. And I am still not convinced that I am actually in any danger.”

“I don’t believe that. Bess has been really worried about you. She says you’ve been unusually tense and worried, getting up in the middle of the night to scribble things down on paper.”

“Bess reads too much into things,” he said. “An illusionist’s head is always full of the ultimate illusion, the one that can’t be done.”

“And have you come up with that?”

“Maybe.”

“And would anybody kill to steal it from you?”

He paused in his pacing. “The problem is that the adversary may have many faces,” he said. I thought it was an odd thing to say.

Makeup was completed. We went over signals once more in the dressing room while the other illusionists performed, then the callboy summoned us down to the stage. Houdini squatted in the shadows backstage and examined the trunk, checking and double-checking the locks. He flexed his fingers, he went through his deck of cards, he rotated his shoulders in a sickening display of double-jointedness, as the announcer began to present us.

The band struck up our music. I stepped out onstage, conscious that critical eyes would be watching me from the stage box. I tried not to look in that direction. I thought I heard a gasp. Maybe Bess wasn’t expecting my costume to be so alluring. Houdini was announced and swept out onto the stage. He went through the same patter as the night before about the Irish and their sixth sense and how lucky he was to have me filling in for Bess. Then he acknowledged her in the box and she stood to a nice round of applause. The card tricks went well, but maybe that Irish sixth sense was working—I was so tense I could hardly breathe. And it was not just stage fright either. Then two men were selected from the audience and the hood was placed over my head. I identified a comb, a train ticket, and a locket with a lock of hair inside it. I was feeling rather pleased with myself.

“I’m holding up an object belonging to a good-looking young man,” Houdini said. “At least it belongs to him at this moment. So quickly, Molly. Can you picture it?”

“It’s round,” I said, picking up his signals. “Is it a ring?”