“No idea at all. My hunch was maybe he had run afoul of somebody—some gang maybe, and that the episode in the trunk the other night had been a warning, but I don’t see how a gang would have the expertise to pull off a trick like tonight’s. And I don’t see what that young man would have to do with it. I’ve seen gang members. They don’t dress like that.”

Daniel nodded. “After tomorrow,” he said. “Somebody knew that something was going to be settled tomorrow so they had to act swiftly. But if they wanted to stop Houdini from doing something, why kill somebody else?”

“Houdini’s missing,” I said. “It’s possible he’s also dead. Or kidnapped.”

“Or he has just committed a murder and fled the scene. That is the obvious conclusion, isn’t it? It was his act, his trunk. He was inside it and somehow switched places with a dead man. I was watching. Nobody else came onstage.”

“I know,” I said.

“And that trunk was not big enough to hold two men, was it?”

“I saw it before they put Houdini inside. It was empty. And I helped carry it onto the stage, remember?”

“Damn these illusionists,” he said. “They can make you believe anything they want to. It has to be one of their fraternity, doesn’t it? Those other men on the bill, if you’ve been guarding Houdini, what do you know about them?”

“Marvo and Robinson didn’t seem to pose any threat to me. They seemed like pleasant enough men and Marvo had gone home tonight before Harry started his act. Abdullah the sword swallower comes from Coney Island. I thought he might have been sent to settle an old score for a man called Risey.”

“Risey? That’s right. Houdini made a fool of him—but that was years ago and Risey no longer holds the power he once did.”

“I went to Coney Island today and talked to Abdullah—whose real name is Mike, by the way and he’s Irish like us. I didn’t sense that he had anything to hide. In fact the only indication I got was that he was interested in me. He wanted to take me to supper after the show—don’t scowl, Daniel.”

“It all comes down to what the motive was behind this,” Daniel said.

“Until now I was wondering whether it was to discredit famous illusionists and wreck their acts. First Scarpelli’s act goes horribly wrong, then Bess is trapped in a trunk and has to be rescued. So I would have said at that time that we might be looking for a disgruntled magician who felt he had been denied the limelight.”