“Fascinating,” I said. “And do you think he could have substituted a dead body in the same way?” I saw her frown and corrected myself. “Do you think that someone could have substituted a body that way?”

She frowned. “Where would the body have come from? The trunk’s in the middle of the stage, isn’t it? And you were there yourself.”

“True enough,” I said.

“It’s one thing for a person like me to crawl into the trunk. I’m small and I’m agile and I’ve practiced for it. But it would take a lot of effort and time to get a deadweight into that bag.”

I nodded. “And I heard or saw nothing.”

“Then I don’t know how it was done.”

All the time we were talking I was busily examining anything that could have hidden a threatening letter. There were the piles of magazines, all to do with magic, so it seemed. Then there were several scrapbooks. I leafed through them. There were playbills and newspaper cuttings, some of them in a foreign type that I didn’t understand—presumably German. But I noted some headings: “Houdini Exposes Rival as Fraud,” and “Battle of the Handcuff Kings Ends in Disgrace for Cunning.” So it would be worth taking a closer look at them later. These were the men publicly humiliated by Houdini. Men with the expertise to pull off such a stunt and bearing a grudge against him. And it was interesting to note that he had carefully mounted all his victories in a nice leather-bound scrapbook. I put the scrapbooks on a chair and continued my search. But I came across nothing incriminating. No threats or demands for money. Only a couple of letters from friends asking how long he’d be in New York, some admirers asking for autographs, some scribbled notes for an article he was apparently writing for a magazine, and then, in the drawer beside the bed, his passport.

“At least he hasn’t fled the country,” I said, holding it up. I glanced at it, then stared more intently. “I thought you said he was born in Hungary,” I said.

“He was.”

“But this is an American passport and it says he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on April sixth, 1873.”

“That’s not right,” Bess said, sitting up now. “He was born in Budapest. And his birthday is March twenty-fourth. Why would he have given false information for his passport?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said.

Bess took the paper from me and examined it, still shaking her head. “And he applied for this in 1900. He already had a passport long before that. I don’t understand. Unless—”

“Unless?”

“Unless it might have been difficult for a person who was a Hungarian Jew to get into Russia and to some parts of Germany,” she said, “so he decided to claim to be American born.”