HOUDINI'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF RUSSIA

St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow, c. 1903

From the moment Harry Houdini, his wife Bess and their friend and assistant Franz Kukol crossed the Russian border, they felt themselves in prison. They came in on the 'Courier' from Berlin, May 2, 1903:

The auburn-colored train had slowed and gradually hissed to a stop, awakening Harry and Bess, who were tangled together in their sleeping berth. Dressing quickly, they climbed down the tiny stair and peered through the windows. They could see only billows of steam. They heard the conductor passing through the corridor, calling out in German and Russian: "Alexandrovo … Alexandrovo … passports ready … this is the Russian frontier … Alexandrovo." A brigade of Russian troopers in gray greatcoats suddenly materialized through the smoke and boarded the train. Jackboots stomping, a trio of guards led by a walrus-faced officer knocked once at the door of their compartment, then immediately barged in.

"Papieren, bitte. Bumagi, pazhalusta. Papers, please."

"We have nothing to declare," Harry said in the faultless German he had learned from his parents. He handed over their passports.

Completely ignoring him, the guards thoroughly rifled all their baggage. The walrus-faced officer’s droopy gray moustaches bobbed with joy when he opened the trunk containing Bess's shoes and slippers. She had carefully wrapped them in last week's Rheinische Zeitung.

"We have seen such subterfuge before," he remarked, nodding his head, smiling and winking, as he zealously unwrapped each pair, threw the footwear on the floor and confiscated the newspapers.

Bess looked imploringly at Harry, tears forming in her large blue eyes. "They're pigs in boots!" she wailed. 

“Sherlock Holmes never did a more thorough search,” Harry concurred, stroking her golden hair. "Don't worry, sweetheart, we'll be on our way soon."

The guards suddenly began jabbering in rapid Russian: they had discovered Harry's desk-trunk. The walrus-faced inspector smiled broadly as he proclaimed to Harry, in painfully literal German, "You must to wait until a censor, whom English speaks, has summoned been and all papers within inspected and approved has." Alarmed, Harry called for Kukol, his quintessential fixer in all matters European.

"Kukol, that desk is full of secret diagrams for escapes and the plans for all my big illusions. We can't let them inspect it. What can we do?"

Kukol thought for a moment. He addressed the inspector, whose brown-toothed smile peeped through his mustache like murky streetlights through a fogbank.

"We are going to send the whole trunk back to Berlin," Kukol announced to the border official, whose pinniped face suddenly fell like a failed soufflé. Kukol peered through the window and spied a shipping office in the station. He relocked the desk-trunk and trundled it onto the platform to take care of the transport arrangements, which mainly involved exchanging great sheaves of currency for a single piece of paper with dozens of impressive-looking stamps.

While Kukol was gone, the enraged border guards found Harry’s kit of burglar tools buried deep in a suitcase. Believing they had at last found a prosecutable offense, the officials conducted a whispered conference in ecstatic Russian.

"My God, Bess, they're either going to send us to Siberia or back to Germany."

Harry called to the guards as he produced a paper from his shoulder bag. It was a permit for the tools, which he had had the foresight to obtain from the Russian Embassy in Berlin. An exquisitely filigreed document with no less than seven stamps on it, franked, signed and countersigned by three government officials with the rank of State Councillor and the title of Baron, it made the guards furious. The enraged walrus-faced gang leader took immediate revenge. He picked up a threadbare silk handkerchief that Harry had been using since his freak show days. He looked at the silk suspiciously, then at Harry. Slowly closing one eye, he said, now in English, "You plan sell this, no?” Despite Harry's denial, the guard wrote "silk" in his notebook and charged Harry an exorbitant customs duty.

"Where do I pay?" Harry asked, resigned.

"Here," the guard said, holding out his hand.

[Extract from HOUDINI UNBOUND, forthcoming in November from Hudson River Books.]