HOUDINI UNBOUND: FRAMING STORY

The following extract was the original "framing story" for our forthcoming novel, HOUDINI UNBOUND. It proved popular among editors, but ultimately too complex - and thus unnecessary - for our hero's fictionalized adventures. 

Harry Houdini’s secret history started to unfold the day my grandfather died. I never imagined Grandpa’s trail would intertwine with Houdini's - through Teddy Roosevelt's White House, Kaiser Wilhelm’s spy network, Nicholas and Alexandra's bedroom, the Moscow Circus, a Wild West medicine show, a terrorist bomber hideout and the deepest dungeons in Russia. For me it all began in a backroom workshop in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Even a poet could not prettify Perth Amboy. Drab, rusting, smelly -- it’s the dreariest town on earth, too far from New York to be intriguing, too small to be important, with a polluted river and a main street whose crumbling red brick buildings haven’t seen prosperity since before the Depression.

Perth Amboy in Grandpa's day.

It was a completely different place in 1913 when my grandfather first opened his jewelry store on State Street. It bore his name, “S. Saltman,” in beautiful Caslon capitals, above a show window with signs in three languages: "We repair Russian and Polish watches." He had spent the first part of his life in Russia where he was born Samuel Saltzman; his "z" was confiscated at Ellis Island. First New York City, then Perth Amboy became his home during the latter part of his life. My father was born there, he met my mother there and it was there we gathered when Grandpa passed away. After the tears were cried and the funeral was over, we all found ourselves in a seedy lawyer's office on the fourth floor of the Perth Amboy National Bank, the ugliest and most depressing building in the township. The lawyer, graying and fraying like Perth Amboy itself, had called us together for the reading of Grandpa's last will and testament.

The will was completely routine with a single, startling exception. Grandpa had left “one perfect diamond” to a man none of us had ever heard of — someone named Franz Kukol of Vienna, “or his descendants.” His leaving a diamond was not, in itself, so surprising. Being a watchmaker, he had always kept a few diamonds handy in the workroom of his shop. But who was this stranger, Kukol? And Vienna? As far as any of us knew, Grandpa had never even been to Vienna.

After a lot of bewildered discussion at the lawyer's office, then later at the store and in my grandmother's house, the family elected me to investigate, mainly owing to my two years of college German. I got on a plane to Vienna and went to work. 

Vienna in Grandpa's day

      
Beginning with the telephone directory, I sought out anyone named Kukol. After laborious inquiries in which my German rapidly improved, I managed to locate one H. H. Kukol, the son of a now-deceased Franz. I told him I had something for him, left as a bequest. He invited me to his flat on the Berggasse.

H. H. Kukol was a genial man in his fifties with a receding hairline counterbalanced by a brushy dark moustache curled slightly upward at the points. I learned, to my surprise, that the initials in his name stood for “Harry Houdini.”  That intrigued me because I myself was already an enthusiastic practitioner of magic – sleight-of-hand with cards, balls, cups, ropes, coins, cigarettes, thimbles, and slips of paper. Harry Houdini Kukol told me he had been named after the man who was, in his father’s estimation, the greatest genius on earth. And his father was in a position to know:  Franz Kukol had worked as Houdini’s principal assistant from 1900 onward, helping him rise to become the world's most famous performer.

When Mr. Kukol learned I was there to present him a diamond on behalf of the late Samuel Saltman of New York and New Jersey, he knit his brow.

“Saltman? New Jersey? A diamond?” he repeated, shaking his head in puzzlement. “My father did live in New York for some time....  I’m afraid I can’t accept your diamond ….  Unless… perhaps … if it were ‘Salzmann,’ from Russia….” He gave my grandfather’s Russian name the German pronunciation.

 “Saltzman was my grandfather’s name in Russia!” 

A smile spread over Kukol’s face. “Ah, Saltzman. From Russia. I think I’m beginning to understand. Did your grandfather escape from Siberia, perhaps?”

I was floored: this was a major piece of family folklore! Grandpa, we knew, had been condemned to Siberia for organizing resistance to the government of Tsar Nicholas after a series of bloody pogroms against Jews. He escaped, we had been told many times.  But the exact method and circumstances were always vague. I knew only that somehow, as a young man, he had made his way from Siberia to London then later to New York and New Jersey, where he met my grandmother and began a much more peaceful life. A life that closed the door on the darkness of the "old country;" a life that looked forward, not back; a life that celebrated ideas and opinions, instead of putting you to death for them.

As we sat sipping sweet dark coffee in the Viennese twilight, Kukol told me his end of the story. His father Franz had been the black sheep of a wealthy family. He showed me an old sepia-tinted photo: handsome, dapper, with a brown moustache and shining, dark, knowing eyes that looked like they had indeed, in the words of his son, "been through fire, water, copper pipes and all the roulette halls of Monte Carlo." 

Franz Kukol

At first, Franz had dutifully followed family tradition, studying classics at Heidelberg, then serving as an officer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef. “But in reality,” his son said, suppressing a smile, “my father, in those days, was devoted to three things:  music, women and the circus." In addition to being a seductive sharpshooter who could recite Homer in Greek, Franz Kukol was an accomplished juggler, pianist, gymnast, knife thrower and clown. "My father also knew some very elegant magic tricks, which he learned from a student of Hofzinser's. Are you familiar with that name?” Hofzinser, he informed me, was the most famous Viennese conjuror of the nineteenth century; Houdini thought Hofzinser was the cleverest card magician who had ever lived. “When my father met Houdini in 1900, in Dresden, he showed him his Hofzinser card illusions,” he said, grinning with pride, “and fooled him completely.”  

Harry Houdini -- impulsive, intuitive and decisive -- had offered Franz Kukol a job on the spot. Kukol became Houdini’s friend, confidante, interpreter, fixer, shill, musician, photographer, mechanic, librarian, advance man, leg man, and, in the occasional absence of Houdini’s wife, his onstage assistant. Among their many adventures together, Kukol was instrumental in Houdini’s notorious escape from the kareta, the black iron wagon used to transport Russian prisoners to Siberia. And that’s where his life intersected with my grandfather’s.


(... to be continued.)

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[Images: Houghton Library, Harvard University; HoudinisGhost.com, Google)