Summer looked at Lily and laughed. “He’s guaranteed packed houses for the rest of his career, isn’t he? The illusionist who accidentally sliced a woman in half. They’ll all want to see if it’s going to happen again.”

“Enough of Scarpelli,” Lily snapped. “You found out that Smith was working with us, didn’t you?”

“No, I—”

“Why else would you have tried to escape from the carriage?”

“I—didn’t think that Mr. Wilkie would have sent someone to pick me up,” I said cautiously. “I was uneasy.”

I thought Lily was going to press me on that one but Smith cut me off. “More to the point, what exactly did Houdini tell you?”

“Houdini told me nothing,” I said firmly. Lily raised her hand again, and I put up my arm to shield myself. “I swear I’m telling the truth. He told me nothing.”

“So you’re bringing Wilkie up here just to tell him that Smith is working for both sides?”

“Isn’t that rather important?” I asked. “I’d like to know which of my staff I could trust.”

There was a pause.

“See, I told you she was a waste of time,” Lily said. “You should have dispatched her while you could, in the carriage. Now we’ll have the bother of getting rid of the body.”

“Nonsense. Plenty of places to leave a body down here,” Smith said, “and your little helpmate Ernest can put her in a sack and get rid of her like the other one.”

“Hello?” A voice echoed through the theater above us. An electric light must have been turned on because I could see chinks of brightness shining through the cracks in the floorboards above us. “Hello down there,” the voice repeated. “Can you help me? I’m looking for something.”

Then a door opened above us and someone started coming down the steps from the side of the stage. I stared at him in wonder—the last person I expected to see here. He was dressed, as I had seen him this morning, in an immaculate frock coat with a neatly trimmed beard and round wire-framed eyeglasses.

“Who the hell are you?” Summer asked, getting to his feet.

“I am Dr. Leopold Weiss,” he said. “I am the brother of the man you call Houdini. I have been sent by his family to retrieve his possessions. I understand he left his props and other personal items at the theater. The family would not wish them to fall into unfriendly hands, so I have been sent to collect them. If one of you would be good enough to show me where they can be found—”

“We’re busy at the moment,” Summer said. “You’ll have to come back at another time.”