He stroked her hair and smiled down at her. “I’d do anything for you, babykins, but what good is some dame going to be onstage with me? No offense, ma’am, but if someone has rigged my equipment how the hell are you going to know that?”

“Language, Harry,” Bess said.

“I expressed the same concerns to your wife, Mr. Houdini,” I said.

“Where I think I can help you is more likely to be offstage, keeping my eyes open and asking the right questions. But I needed a valid reason to be with you all the time.”

He nodded. “Can’t do no harm, I suppose, unless you look so bad up there that you turn my act into a comedy.”

“I’ll try not to,” I said.

“So you’ll do it, won’t you, Harry?” Bess insisted. “If he’s tried something once, he could try again.”

Harry shrugged. “If you want a detective onstage with me, watching out for me, then okay, you got it.”

Bess gave me a triumphant smile as she hugged him. Harry turned to look up at me. “I could tell right away you’d never been a performer in your life,” he said.

Fifteen

There was silence in the bedroom while we all recovered from the excess of emotion. Then Bess lay back among her pillows, looking quite at ease again. “So hadn’t you better start teaching her the signals if you want her to go on with you tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow?” I said as this reality dawned on me. “You think I could be ready to go on by tomorrow?”

“For the mind-reading act,” Houdini said. “We have a system of signals. You saw when I went down into the audience and I had someone pick a card? There’s no mind reading involved. I told Bess what card it was by the things I did and the movements I made. It’s a system as old as the hills and it’s really simple. For example, supposing the person in the audience selected the ace of clubs. I would just happen to touch that person’s shoulder. That would signify to Bess that it was an ace. And if I was standing with the right foot in front of the left—that means clubs. If I touch my hair it means the next word matters. Nothing to it except for learning the signals and watching carefully. It has to be done ever so casually—the merest brush of a hand. The sort of gesture that people don’t even notice.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “But part of the time she had a hood over her head. Can she really see through that blind?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We have members of the audience test that hood. It has to be the real thing.”

“Then how does she know what objects you’re holding?”