Free Nevermore by William Hjortsberg

serious?”
    “Go on… . Give it your best shot.”
    Sir Arthur placed his hands behind his back. “I used to be quite keen about boxing. Grand sport. Wouldn’t want to sully it with this sort of foolishness.”
    “Okay …” Houdini relaxed his stance. “It was just meant as a demonstration. Wanted to show you what the physical body was capable of. Watch this. Learned it as a kid in the carny.”
    Arching backwards, limber as a dancer, Houdini bent all the way to the floor and picked the threaded needle off the carpet with his teeth. Snake-supple, he returned upright. “Worked as an acrobat, tumbler, contortionist… . Watched an Indian fakir do this.” The magician thrust the needle through his cheek.
    “Dear fellow …” Nonplussed by this extraordinary behavior, Sir Arthur sputtered in Colonel Blimpish protest, even as his keen medical eye observed the needle’s passage to be completely bloodless. “No more, I beg you.”
    “Harry, dear …” Beatrice Houdini stood in the doorway of her husband’s office. “We don’t want our dinner to get cold.”
    “Coming, Mrs. Houdini.” The magician picked up his shoes. “Just showing Sir Arthur some of the tricks of the trade.”
    The other dinner guests were the magician’s attorney, Bernard Ernst, and his brooding, overweight wife. They engaged in immediate shoptalk. Conan Doyle deduced very quickly that Theo “Dash” Weiss also performed as a magician, using the stage name “Hardeen.” He toured on the rival Pantages Circuit with an act so similar it incorporated Houdini’s famous milk-can escape, which his brother no longer performed. The Weiss boys joked about cornering the market in the escape business. Hardeen’s success discouraged any serious rivals. Strictly a family enterprise.
    “When we bought this house twenty years ago, there were almost no Negroes living in Harlem,” Bess Houdini told Lady Jean. “This was a nice German neighborhood back then. Still is, really. The colored live mainly above 125 th Street. Of course, there’s an Irish section up here, too. And Italians on the East Side.”
    “The bottom dropped out of the upper Harlem real estate market in ‘ought-five,” Houdini interjected. “Speculators built too many new apartments, especially around 135th Street. Wanted to recoup their losses, natch. Fill up those vacancies. So, they started renting to Negroes. Cheap crooks’re getting one twenty-five a month for places that used to go for forty bucks.”
    “It wasn’t something you really noticed until after the war,” sighed Bessie. “That was when you really started to see the change. Used to be such a quiet residential place.”
    The conversation turned to the subject of the movies, something they all had in common. A film version of Sir Arthur’s novel The Lost World had recently been produced in Chicago with spectacular special effects footage depicting ancient dinosaurs. Houdini, veteran of a serial made in Yonkers and two Hollywood films, had started his own motion picture company in New York a couple years before. Another family enterprise. Dash took time out from his career and pitched in. Houdini was president as well as writer, producer, director, and star. Two new films were released. Both did poorly at the box office.
    “I quite enjoyed The Man from Beyond ” commented Sir Arthur. “The escape from the brink of Niagara Falls was spot on.”
    “Maybe so,” Dash fixed his brother with a cocky smile, “but Haldane was strictly from hunger.”
    Houdini ignored any implied challenge. “I shoulda done the Egyptian picture instead … Mistero di Osiris —” Suddenly brought up short, the magician cocked his head as if hearing a faraway sound, drifting away into thought. Everyone waited for him to finish speaking and the conversation dwindled, inhibited by his distraction.
    Conan Doyle cast about for a way out of the embarrassing silence. A framed photograph of an early flying machine hung on the opposite