HOUDINI UNBOUND: FRAMING STORY, CONT'D

Art by Fidel Sclavo

[This is the continuation of the original "framing story" of our new novel, HOUDINI UNBOUND, now available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and fine bookstores worldwide. The preceding section can be found here. This segment opens in Vienna, where we are visiting Harry Houdini Kukol, son of Franz Kukol, Houdini's friend and assistant.]

“Wait an eyeblink,” Harry Houdini Kukol said to me. “I have some things here you’ll find interesting.” He went into another room and rummaged around, returning with a large cardboard box. Inside were a sheaf of aging documents and a set of old, cloth-bound notebooks. 

“I believe a good part of the story is in here,” he said, opening one of the notebooks. The year “1903” was written in brownish-blue ink on the flyleaf. My fingers tingled with anticipation as I scanned the ruled pages, yellowing with age. It appeared to be some kind of journal, with dates and place names throughout. Passages written in German and English were mixed in with large blocks of numbers. Both words and numbers were in two sets of handwriting: one an elegant German script; the other, a somewhat rougher hand, in both German and English.

“These sections all in German script were written by my father,” Mr. Kukol said. “The rest was written by Houdini. I have no idea what the numbers mean, but they’re obviously a code. Houdini and my father knew the code, but unfortunately I do not. I know that Houdini and my father used several codes in presentations of mentalism.” 

The other notebooks seemed to be more of the same, from different years. The loose documents consisted of letters, memoranda, programs, show routines and travel itineraries. There were also detailed sketches of magical apparatus, with cryptic notes in Houdini's handwriting on the arcana of building illusions: “Make special bottom on Comet so I can open it myself from the back, after I turn it around towards audience.”  “Measure cone inside, to show audience it is just as long inside as outside; to do this turn cone sideways so that top and bottom are away from audience.”

Thrilling though all this was, what thrilled me the most were notes made on a few pieces of brown butcher paper - sketches, drawings and notations in a third handwriting that I recognized immediately as my grandfather’s. Written in Houdini’s hand at the top of each of these sheets was a single word: “Saltzman.”

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Diagrams for the escape from the prison van. My Father said it was their greatest escape ever, and it made Houdini the most famous man in Russia.”

“Prison van?”

“Used to transport prisoners to Siberia. Houdini was the first person ever to escape from it - helped by my father and, it appears, your grandfather! There’s a whole vignette about it in here!”

After more discussions and exchanging of receipts, I gave Kukol the diamond and he gave me the notebooks and documents. I returned the Franz Kukol material after making copies.

           

Back in the States in the months that followed, with the help of dictionaries and my college German professor, I was able to translate the uncoded material. 

Reading this, I trembled with excitement. I was actually reading about my own grandfather as a young revolutionary, helping Houdini! Parts written by Houdini himself! 

It seemed that Houdini, Kukol and Grandpa had shared adventures with repercussions that went far beyond my own family history. Determined to get the whole story, I became obsessed with the documents and resolved to break Houdini’s code.  

The enciphered numbers were quite perplexing. I had to consult experts. The best code-breaker I knew happened to be my other grandfather, my mother’s father, still vigorous in his late eighties and living in Brooklyn. He had been a professional soldier for much of his life, serving as an intelligence officer with the British Army in Egypt during World War One. A master linguist and chess player, he had specialized in cryptography. I showed the notebooks to him. After looking them over he disappointed me for the only time in his life.

“This code is unbreakable,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a book code. Unless you know which book is its key, no one can crack it.”

Undaunted, I started research on Houdini and his books.  He had been a voracious reader, an avid book collector and had written a number of books himself.   He had the world’s finest and largest collection of books related to magic, mysticism and the occult – his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had commented on its excellence, lamenting only that he didn’t seem to have too many books that were “positive” about spiritualism. Franz Kukol had helped catalog those books, as well as manuscripts, playbills and other material, all of which eventually ended up at Houdini’s four-story brownstone, which still stands at 278 West 113^th Street in New York City, near Morningside Park.

Seeking out anyone who could shed light on Houdini and his books, I wangled an introduction to Milbourne Christopher, magician and author of Houdini: The Untold Story. A major collector of Houdini pictures, posters and apparatus, in the course of an interview he gave me an important clue.

“The book that really changed Houdini’s life was the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin,” Christopher told me when we met at his apartment full of magic artifacts on Central Park West in New York City. “That’s where he got his name.”

I looked all over for an early edition of this classic book, the autobiography of the great French magician who had once stopped a war in Algeria by performing magic for tribal chieftains in the desert. I found several copies and delighted, as Houdini had, in tales of secret mechanisms to control automata which, at the touch of the wand, wrote messages, drew pictures, or fetched pastry and wine from miniature shops. I learned of ingenious devices to make orange trees flower and bear fruit on command. I studied invisible rods and hidden shelves for levitating beautiful women. But no matter which edition of the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjurer, Written by Himself I used, I still couldn’t get the coded numbers to make sense. 

I learned that Houdini had been a good linguist, with more than a working knowledge of French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Yiddish and, of course, English. So I toyed with the original French edition of the Memoirs, to no avail.

Over many months, I accumulated information bit by bit. I learned that Houdini wrote one of his first books, his great “exposé” of Robert-Houdin, in angry reaction to a snub from the French magician’s family. Harry had called on Robert-Houdin’s daughter-in-law, seeking to pay homage to his hero. But she had refused to see him, and it stung. This book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, written partly for scholarship and partly in revenge, accused his namesake of taking credit for the work of others. I finally found a tattered first edition in the cobwebbed back room of Jack Flosso’s old magic shop in Times Square, which Houdini, in an earlier era, had once owned himself. 

I again delved into the notebooks and compared the book pages with the coded numbers. Following Grandpa’s guidance on book codes, I hypothesized that the first numbers in each group were page numbers, the next set line numbers, the third set locating the word. As I began to assemble words, they still made no sense.

I nearly gave up at this point, especially after I realized that this book had not been published until 1908. How could he have used it to encode something in 1903?

I discussed these arcane matters with various Houdini collectors, biographers and specialists. From them, I learned one interesting fact: the Unmasking was indeed first published in 1908, but Houdini had begun it as early as 1901, before the Robert-Houdin snub, as a comprehensive history of magic and an authentic retelling of magicians' life stories. Only after the snub did he decide to make it exclusively an expose´ of Robert-Houdin. I began to hunt not for books, but for manuscripts. After a long, tedious search, I finally had my "Eureka" moment. In a collection of uncatalogued Houdini material at the Library of Congress, I found the 1902 typescript of his unpublished History of Magic. When I correlated the manuscript with the coded notebooks, the assembled words started to make sense. 

Houdini’s secret notebooks told a big story with world-shaking implications, and smaller stories within that story. The story that hit me the hardest - at first - was a detailed account of how my grandfather escaped from Siberia. But I soon realized this was not the biggest story in the notes, not by a long shot. The papers documented political, military and magical adventures connecting Houdini, Kukol and my grandfather to the most powerful men and women in the world: President Theodore Roosevelt; Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany; Nicholas and Alexandra, the Tsar and Tsaritsa – Emperor and Empress -- of Russia.  At first I could hardly credit it all, even though the facts came directly from the magician himself:  during his tour of Russia in 1903, Harry Houdini was such a huge success that Nicholas and Alexandra, the Emperor and Empress, really believed he had magical powers. They asked him to stay at court and become their spiritual adviser.  When President Theodore Roosevelt learned about this, he … well, read the book!