Having had such a stroke of luck, I looked inside to see if perhaps it might have contained something useful like a threatening letter from a gangster—but it was empty. No matter. I had achieved my purpose and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I made my exit from the theater without being detected. There was still a vociferous crowd around the ticket kiosk and I pitied the person inside it.

From the Bowery I took the Third Avenue El, traveling north. It felt as if I were traveling to the ends of the earth, stuck in that hot, crowded compartment with frequent stops and plenty of jostling and shoving. On the way I had time to think about what had happened to Bess and why. I had overheard something that had sounded very much like a threat last night at the theater, when Houdini had told the young man that he was going to hand over something only to his boss. And now today Ted had told me that someone called Risey, who was a big man on Coney Island, had been humiliated by Houdini and had vowed to get even. I knew how New York gangsters bore a grudge and what kind of thing they might do to get even. So Bess had been quite right in her suspicions and had almost paid with her life. If an ax hadn’t been nearby, it would have been too late for her.

We crawled northward painfully slowly until finally I alighted at Ninety-ninth Street station. It wasn’t a part of the city with which I was familiar and I was interested to see it had the same distinctly Jewish feel to it as the streets of the Lower East Side but without the pushcarts, cacophony of sounds, and ripe smells. I heard Russian and Yiddish spoken and passed a synagogue where old bearded men in black caps stood on the steps in heated conversation with a lot of hand gestures.

The house the Houdinis had rented was nothing fancy—a modest brownstone on a quiet street. Children were playing jump rope on the other side, chanting the same sort of rhymes that we had chanted back in Ireland. This made me wonder whether the Houdinis had any children or, more to the point, whether Bess’s nervous condition and collapse might be due to pregnancy. I tapped on the front door and waited.

It was opened by a gaunt-faced old woman. “Ja?” she demanded, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Is this the residence of Mr. Harry Houdini?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly. Then she said in heavily accented English. “Not here.”

“Do you know where I might find him?” I asked. “It’s Mrs. Houdini I wanted to see. I’m a friend of hers, and I was very upset when I heard what happened to her last night at the theater. I wanted to make sure she was all right.”