Saving Houdini Page 8

  There were lots of people here, as there had been Tuesday night, but most of them now were coming back from lunch, not going home. He dodged them, one way and the other, and pushed on. Bay Street, Queen’s Park. A flag flapped in the light breeze, as it always did there, except it wasn’t the Canadian flag. It was a red flag with the British flag in the corner.

  Weird.

  He arrived in Kensington Market. It was even dirtier and smellier than he remembered, and there were chickens clucking in wire cages stacked on the sidewalk and stray dogs sniffing in the gutters. He smelled coffee roasting and meat being broiled, and to one side of him was an open stall selling spices out of paper bags, to the other, a store with sausages hanging in links in the window. His stomach called out to them. The signs in all the windows were Hebrew.

  Seventy-eight Augusta was a small bookshop and beside it a set of stairs led to a basement. Apartment B. He went down and knocked on the door.

  Nothing.

  He knocked again. No answer. Did anyone ever answer their doors in this town?

  “MR. BLUMENTHAL! ARE YOU HOME?”

  “Ohfer!” came Blumenthal’s voice. The door flew open. His red eyes tracked down. “What the—? You? What are you doing here?” He slivered his eyes. “How’d you find me anyway? You following me? Gluckman tell you to follow me?”

  “No!” said Dash. “I don’t know any Gluckman! I just want to talk to you. It’s really very important. I found you in the phone book, er, register.”

  Blumenthal narrowed his eyes. He was wearing a pair of soiled brown pants and an undershirt. “What is your name?”

  “Dashiel.”

  He looked at the boy in his doorway and seemed to weigh his options. Then he stood aside and let Dash in. The apartment was a single room, small, and it smelled of cigar smoke. There was a couch with a discoloured white cloth over its back, and a table with three chairs. A pot of water was simmering on the nearby stove.

  “Sit down,” he said to Dash. “Give me that Phillie.” Blumenthal was pointing at a standing ashtray to his right. There was a cigar in it. Dash passed it to him and Blumenthal held a match to it. Instantly the room filled with a fresh cloud of noxious, light-blue smoke. “Ahh, good,” he said.

  He went to his fridge and opened the door. Dash saw a little block of ice in the bottom, and a fur of frost around the opening. Blumenthal took out a wet package wrapped in waxed paper. He reached into a paper bag on his counter and took out a bagel, which he pried apart with his dirty thumbs and laid flat on his countertop. There was a small plate with some kind of bun coated in big square crystals of sugar. The sight of it made Dash’s mouth water. Blumenthal plastered a thin layer of what came out of the wax package on each half of the bagel and handed one to him. He tried not to eat it too quickly, although from the way Blumenthal ate, Dash didn’t think he’d mind if he shoved the whole thing into his mouth at once. The stuff in the package was cream cheese, but it was both dense and fluffy, and tasted more like cream cheese than cream cheese had ever tasted before.

  “So, whaddisit already?” said Blumenthal. He tore a massive hunk out of the bagel with his front teeth and spoke through it. “For what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Can I show you something?”

  “Gonna vanish a quarta’ for me?”

  “No,” said Dash. “This—”

  He held out the newspaper clipping. The man glanced at him with suspicion before taking it and unfolding it.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a newspaper that won’t be printed until … tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks,” he said, handing it back. “But I don’t read so good.”

  “Look,” said Dash, pointing at the picture. “That’s Walt. Who you met last night. And that’s me. Standing beside him. Someone gave me this newspaper eighty-five years from now, and it has a picture in it of me and a kid I just met yesterday.”

  “Why do I care?” He looked up at the ceiling. “This is a question I find myself asking on a daily basis …”

  “You should care because the reason we’re in this picture is that him and me are in Montreal asking Houdini for his help.”

  “What help?”

  “With the trick. The trick you’re supposed to invent.”

  Blumenthal took a long drag on his Phillie, sucking the smoke in through the mess of bagel and cheese in his mouth. Involuntarily, Dash grimaced.

  “You don’t have to be stuck at the end of a Tuesday night vaudeville show!” he said urgently. “You’re good! You should be doing your own act on a real stage!”

  “HEY!” Blumenthal said, and now he sounded angry. “I don’t need you and I don’t need anyone to tell me howta do what I do! You think I take advice from a kid?”

  “No.”

  “So shaddap.”

  Dash looked away from the man’s red, angry face. “Who’s Gluckman?”

  “Gluckman,” Blumenthal spat. “My thieving, lying former friend.”

  “Why former?”

  “You ask a lotta questions.”

  “Just tell me. Maybe all this stuff is happening for a reason.”

  “What reason? You’re just a kid. You don’t know that things happen for no reason, not yet. You wanna know about Gluckman? He was my best friend. I knew him from the old country. Went to school with him. We killed chickens together fa goodness sake. So, who else are you going to trust with your life? He owns the Pantages, best stage in the city, so why wouldn’t I make him my manager?”

  Dash had started at the name of the theatre, but Blumenthal didn’t notice. The owner of the Pantages, the man with the flashlight. Figures. Why not make this even harder, Universe?

  “So I paid him twenty percent of my take,” Blumenthal continued, “and in the spring, he goes to Farnham for five percent more. Farnham the Farter or whatever he’s calling himself these days. A crummy magician is what he is. And don’t think Charlie Gluckman is above sending a boy to spy. To take my methods.”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  Blumenthal shook his head. “You think you know your friends,” he muttered. “Believe me, you don’t know your friends.”

  Dash let him grumble. He looked around the apartment. It was not a very homey place. There were two different chairs in the kitchen and neither of them went with the rickety table. He couldn’t be doing very well. Maybe Houdini could really help him. Dash’s eye fell on the sugar-coated bun again. “What is that?”

  “What?” said Blumenthal, turning his head. “The rogeleh? It’s a rogeleh.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the last one is what it is.” His glance went back and forth between the boy and the pastry, and with a grunt of resignation, he grabbed the plate and held it out to Dash.

  “All right, so. This trick,” he said, “this magnificent trick. What happens in it?”

  Dash chewed quickly. The rogeleh was even better than the cherry purse. He explained about the vanish and Blumenthal listened with an unimpressed look on his face.

  “Easy,” said the magician, when he’d finished talking. “Trap door.”

  “No trap door,” said Dash. “The stage was solid underneath me. And I didn’t fall through anything. I was still on the stage. And there was no one in the theatre.”

  Now Blumenthal screwed up his mouth in an odd smile. “I’ll give you this, you keep a straight face. Did you hear anything unusual during the trick?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go somewhere?”

  “Here.”

  “I mean, when you were still onstage.”

  Dash shrugged. He couldn’t say. He’d been in the dark.

  “I could do it if I had some smoke and a trap door.”

  “No smoke, no trap door,” Dash said between bites.

  “Look, kid, I gotta walk my squirrel. Whaddaya want from me? You want money?”

  “I want to go to Montreal.”

  “You think I got that kind of money?”

  “You could
come with us.”

  “Look. The rogeleh is on the house, and here …” He stood up from the table and dug in his pocket. “I got a buck forty-six. But now you should go.” He put a handful of coins into Dash’s hand. “G’wan. Before I call for a constable and let him decide what happens to ya.”

  “I think you’re my only chance to get home, Mr. Blumenthal! And I think I might be your only chance to be great.”

  But Herman Blumenthal remained unmoved. He held the door open and waited. He wasn’t going to change his mind. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” he said, sweeping Dash out of his apartment.

  11

  There was no point in rushing now. There wasn’t going to be a train to miss. Dash, his shoulders slumped, turned south on Yonge Street. He was pretty sure Walt was going to be as upset about this turn of events as he was. He passed Richmond, Adelaide, and King streets. The clock on the corner of Yonge and King told him the Montreal train was leaving in twenty minutes.

  He turned on Front and there was Union Station. He crossed and went inside. The main floor was exactly as he remembered: a high ornamental ceiling arched over the marble floors of the concourse far below. Walt was inside, waiting near a fruit stand. He had two little rucksacks at his feet.

  “Where’s Herman Blumenthal?”

  “He wouldn’t come. I don’t think he believes me.”

  “Sure,” said Walt. “I guess you spend all your time trying to trick people, you think everyone’s trying to trick you.”

  “I don’t think he likes people very much.”

  “Great. So now what?”

  “I don’t know.” Over the loudspeakers they were already announcing the train to Montreal.

  “Let’s see if we can get on it anyway.”

  “I don’t know, Walt. Won’t we get caught?”

  “Well, we’ll have to be careful. They’ve got rail bulls here.”

  “Rail bulls?”

  “Police. Train police. They hit people who jump on trains with big sticks.”

  “Oh, well, no big deal, then—”

  “You have proof that we went to Montreal, Dash. We should at least try to get there.”

  Dash was scared, but he saw that Walt was right. “Okay. So let’s just go straight to the Montreal train and get on it. We’ll say, uh …”

  “We’re catching up with our parents. They already showed our tickets.”

  “Yeah. Good,” said Dash, and they started off for the ramp that led into the bowels of the station.

  It was dimly lit down here. To get to the platforms, they had to walk under the tracks and they could hear the huge cars rumbling over their heads. They tried to blend into the river of bodies narrowing toward the stairs that led to the Montreal platform.

  Once they got there, people jostled to find their cars. The train was packed. A man had asked them for their tickets right away, but they each gestured confidently at the train and told him they’d just gone for candies and their parents were already aboard. He smiled them through, reminding them for next time that there was a restaurant on the train that sold plenty of candy. He wanted to know which car they were in. Three, Dash told him, making it up, and the man pointed them toward it.

  “Good news about the restaurant car,” Dash said. “Blumenthal gave me a buck forty-six.”

  “Gimme my quarter!” Walt laughed, but Dash kept the money in his pocket.

  Car three was first-class. They straightened their rucksacks on their backs and stood tall. A steward in a very black suit was standing by that door looking at the ticket of a woman in a fur coat.

  “Let’s go to steerage,” said Walter. “Might be easier.”

  They went back a few cars, but when they tried to convince the steward that their parents were inside car six, he brushed them off. He’d seen train-jumpers before.

  So had the stewards at cars eight and eleven.

  At the bottom of the stairs, back beneath the tracks, the man who’d let them onto the platform glared at them.

  “This sucks,” Dash groused. “And before you ask, if something sucks, it’s really bad.”

  “Well, then, I agree that this sucks.”

  They sagged together on a bench back in the concourse like a pair of sad, old men. The final boarding announcement sounded over their heads.

  “Well. At least we have money for a malt,” Walt said.

  “What’s a malt?”

  “What’s a malt! Come on. An ice cream malt?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Walt stood and put his hands on his hips and leaned back. “You’ll see. A malt will help us think.”

  He drew Dash toward a wall of little shops. At the end was Creighton’s Soda Shop. A countertop wound a lazy blue S through the middle of it.

  Walt took a seat at the counter, dropping the rucksacks beside him. “Two malts,” he said to a man in a uniform the same blue as everything else in the shop. He wore a peaked paper hat on his head. Dash watched him crack an egg into each of the big fluted glasses. “Raw eggs?”

  “Put hair on your chest,” the man called over his shoulder. “Chocolate?”

  “Yessir,” said Walt. “Now, listen, maybe we should go back out front and try to catch a ride with someone. There could be a bigwig at the Royal York Hotel who wouldn’t mind driving two kids to Montreal.”

  “I don’t know about that. My mum and dad always tell me not to get into cars with strangers.”

  “What stranger? It’d just be a guy with a car.”

  “I don’t think we should.”

  The drinks arrived. Six cents in total. In each glass, there was a large round ball of chocolate ice cream floating in a mass of fizzing foam. Dash watched Walt navigate his straw around the ice-cream orb and into the creamy, cold liquid below. It was so cold the glasses were sweating.

  Walt said, “We could hire a taxi!”

  He took a slurp and Dash copied him, sucking in a big mouthful.

  “It would cost more than a train,” said Dash, “and between the two of us we still only have—” He stopped talking.

  “Um, are you okay?”

  “What did you say this was again?”

  “A malt?”

  “It’s incredible!”

  “You really don’t have them in 2011?”

  “We have milkshakes. Not malts. I don’t think. Give me a minute.” Dash drank slow and deep. It was like drinking a feather pillow, only cold. How, in the advanced, super-connected future, could no one still be making malts?

  The station was filling with people again. There was something called the Toronto Railway Line; it seemed to bring people in from smaller towns around the city. A voice boomed out from white hornlike speakers announcing the arrivals and departures:

  Streetsville 8:55 arriving on platform two!

  Mimico 8:57 arriving on platform six!

  Dash sighed, resigned. “What are we going to do, Walt?”

  Gravenhurst arriving on platform four!

  Crew to loading! Freight track three!

  “Hold on!” said Walt, cocking his ear.

  Freight track three! Crew to loading!

  “We’ll get on a train we don’t need a ticket for!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They don’t ticket freight, Dash. Didn’t you hear? There’s one loading right now. What if it’s going east?”

  “Oh …!”

  “See?” said Walt. “Malts are good for your brain.”

  They went back under the station and took an unmanned set of stairs up to the platforms again. The freight trains were on tracks beyond the passenger platforms. A couple had open cars piled with wood from front to back, but there were others—squat, windowless cars and silver cars with slits for air. Many of the freight doors were open to the platform, exposing their cargo—crates and bales, machinery and barrels. As they approached one of them, they smelled a warm, earthy scent, and hear the sound of many mouths breathing softly. Cattle and swine.


  They tried to walk casually, like they were just curious about the train, and then Walt grabbed a vertical bar at one end of a car and swung himself onto a steel step.

  “Come on,” he called out to Dash, and he reached for his hand. “There’s an opening in this car. Let’s see what direction the train heads. We can just jump down if it goes west.”

  Dash reached out and Walt pulled him up onto the narrow step. “Are you sure about this?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  They were in a car with special shelving on which were stacked boxes wrapped in butcher paper. It didn’t look very comfortable. They walked through it quietly, hunching down past the open doors in the middle of the car. They had to open another door at the end and step out onto the big metal coupling that joined the trains. Even with the cars at a standstill, it felt like a dangerous thing to do.

  They crossed gingerly and entered the next car. This one was open to the tracks through a wide central door. It had crates full of apples and pears lined up against the walls, bins as big as washing machines. They crouched against the bins and reached up to grab some of the fruit. Suddenly, one of the pears went flying out of Dash’s hand and sailed out the opening: the train had started moving. The two locked eyes.

  “East?” asked Dash.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  They stayed as still as they could. Walt pointed up at one of the huge bins of fruit, but Dash shook his head hard.

  “No,” he whispered. “We’ll be drowned in applesauce by the time we get there. Just stay still.”

  They sat with their legs crossed and pulled in to keep them from view. The train moved slowly at first. A couple more pieces of fruit they’d moved too close to the bin’s edges tipped out and bounced around a little before shooting out the door and backwards. The train was picking up speed.

  Dash put an apple to his mouth, but before he could get his teeth in it, Walt was on his feet again with a terrified look on his face.

  At the end of the car, standing in the open doorway, was a man in a blue uniform and a cap. He was already reaching for his truncheon.

  “Don’t move a muscle, you little beggars, if you don’t want to feel Billy’s sting!”