“This child is no longer with us,” she said. “Am I right? She wants you to know that she is safe and happy where she is.”

There were murmurs through the audience. “Can she contact the spirits?” someone asked. “Can she talk to my dead husband?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t profess to be spiritualists,” Houdini said. “Bess is—well, let’s just say she has a gift in that direction. But now let’s move on to the part of the show you have all come to see. We now present for you the Metamorphosis, as performed before the great houses of Europe. The Kaiser offered me a thousand marks if I would tell him how it is done. Others have claimed that I can dematerialize my body or that I am in league with the devil. I assure you I am not in league with him.”

A trunk was pushed onto the stage. It was bound with metal straps and held with two large locks. Houdini removed his jacket and his tie. Then he removed his shirt and trousers, so that he wore nothing more than a one-piece, form-fitting costume rather like a pair of combinations that have shrunk in the wash.

“I now invite two strong men from the audience to come up onstage to examine me and this trunk,” he said.

There was a stampede to get to the stage and the first two were allowed up the steps. They were burly young men, both of them, the kind you’d expect to see hanging around some less reputable type of tavern.

“Perfect for the task,” Houdini said. “Now if you would be good enough to search me to see that I carry no tools on my person that might enable me to free myself from any lock or key.”

They duly patted his body and pronounced him clear. Then he opened the trunk. They felt around inside, tried the locks, and nodded.

“Now,” Houdini said. “Here on the table you will find an assortment of handcuffs and leg irons. I invite you gentlemen to examine them, then apply them to my arms and legs any way you see fit.”

The two men went to town, clamping the cuffs and irons on him with his arms tightly behind his back and his legs bound together.

“Thank you, you have been most helpful,” Houdini said. “Don’t go away. I have more work in store for you. Now I ask Madame Houdini to wheel onstage my special cabinet.”

I felt the curtains brush at me as a contraption was wheeled out. It was nothing more than a three-sided frame with velvet drapes, about shoulder-high.