“I’m afraid there’s nothing there that could help me,” I said. “I’ll have to try the other magazines he wrote for. Do you happen to know where Mahatma is headquartered?”

“Up in Boston, I believe,” he said.

That was a long way to go just for a magazine. I thanked him and was about to leave when a young man, his face and hands smudged with ink, came up the stairs.

“Here you are, sir,” he said, and handed some papers to Goldblum. Goldblum smiled, then handed the booklet to me. “Here’s the entire new edition, with my compliments,” he said.

I came out into the deep shadow of Pearl Street where tall buildings blotted out the sun and made my way though to the waterfront at the South Street Pier. I put down my bag, and stood for a while, watching the commerce on the East River, listening to the sounds of a busy dockland—the toot of tugboats and sirens of bigger ships coming in from a long ocean voyage mingled with the shouts of stevedores as they unloaded sacks of coffee, crates of bananas. Above these sounds came the squeals of small boys jumping off the docks into the cool water. At which of these docks had Houdini’s trunk washed up? I wondered. I should have asked Daniel, but then he’d only have reminded me that it wasn’t my case.

I stared at the river, at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the almost completed East River Bridge and wondered exactly where his captors had dumped him into the river. It was always so busy, even at night when ships were unloaded by the glow of lamps as ships’ companies employed their own police forces to keep the merchandise safe. Why had nobody seen or heard the splash of something heavy being thrown in? Perhaps they had, but surely the police would have pursued this line of inquiry.

I sat on a packing case, enjoying the rich, rank smell of the river and the cry of the gulls overhead, and looked through the magazine I had been given. I knew that sometimes Houdini wrote anonymously and even placed advertisements. And to my growing excitement I saw there was an article from “Our Berlin Correspondent, Herr N. Osey.”

After a few lines of gossip about life in Berlin, I read a passage that caught my attention. “Expect an invasion of German talent on the New York scene in the near future. German magicians plan to take America by storm—just as Houdini and his like have become the darlings of Europe. Look out and prepare to be surprised by the amazing underwater escape trick.”