Byrne’s green eyes were ebony in the moonlight.

“I gave it to her.”

FIFTEEN

JOSEPH SWANN WATCHED the evening news. They had found a body in a shallow grave in Fairmount Park. A helicopter hovered.

Although it had been more than two months ago, Swann recalled the night he buried her as if it were yesterday. He recalled the cerulean sky that evening, the way the moon searched for him. Now, as then, he was a cipher, a man beyond even the reach of the heavens.

He had stood on the west side of Belmont Plateau that night, deep in the bushes and trees, lost in the shadows. He patted the dirt, dumped the bagful of leaves and debris on top of the bare earth. The scene looked undisturbed. The perfect illusion.

He recalled how he took off the gloves, slipped them into a plastic trash bag, how he later burned everything, including the thick plastic sheets that lined the trunk of the car, along with his clothing. It had been a shame to part with his bespoke suit, but it was a small price to pay. He had not been diligent about his visitors all this time to make a simple mistake. In fact, only one had ever gotten away. Sweet Cassandra.

He thought about how he had discovered the woman on the Faerwood grounds that night. She had looked strong, but she also looked manic. She had fired her weapon at him while he was standing in the gazebo, the pergola long ago fitted with the counterweight elevator.

As the police engaged their new mystery, Joseph Swann sipped his tea. He knew it was time to bear down.

The Seven Wonders, he thought.

The game is on.

Minutes later, as he climbed the stairs, he reached into his shirt pocket. He had kept a memento of the dead woman, a small souvenir of their brief time together. A business card. Such a personal thing, he thought, yet something so aloof, something one gives away like a handshake, or a compliment:

DETECTIVE GENEVIEVE GALVEZ

SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT

OFFICE OF THE PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY

PART II

THE SINGING BOY

The past walks here,

noiseless, unasked, alone.

—VIRGINIA WOODWARD CLOUD

SIXTEEN

IN THE YEARS before darkness became his mistress, and time became an abstract précis, Karl Swann was a student of the masters.

His art was magic.

Born in 1928 to an upper-middle-class family in Hanau, twenty-five kilometers east of Frankfurt, Germany, Karl began his exploration of the dark arts at an early age. His father Martin, a retired army captain from Glasgow, Scotland, had parlayed a small military retirement into a thriving metals business after settling in the area following World War I. Martin married a local girl named Hannah Scholling.

In 1936, when Karl was eight, his father took him to a performance at the Shuman Theater in Frankfurt, a show featuring a well-known magician named Alois Kassner. During this performance Kassner vanished an elephant.

For three nights young Karl could not sleep thinking about the illusion. More than the trick, Karl considered the illusionist himself. He trembled at the thought of the mysterious, dark-haired man.

Over the next year, Karl collected books on magic, as well as biographies of the great American, European, and Asian conjurers. To the dismay of his parents, and the detriment of his studies, this pursuit seemed to consume the boy.

At the age of nine, he began to perform magic tricks at parties for his friends—cups and balls, vanishing silks, linking rings. Although his technique was not dazzling, his hands moved with competence and grace. Within a year he improved substantially, moving his act from the table to the parlor.

As the rumblings of war in Europe began, Martin Swann, over the hysterical objections of his wife, decided to send their only son to live with distant relatives in America. At least until the clouds of conflict blew over.

On October 4, 1938, Karl Swann boarded the USS Washington in Le Havre, France. His mother and father stood on the dock, waving good-bye. His mother cried, a white lace handkerchief in her hand, her rich burgundy cashmere coat in stark relief to the gray dawn. Martin Swann stood, shoulders square, eyes dry. It was how he had taught his son to face emotion, and he would not betray that lesson now.

As the ship set to sea, the two silhouettes painted a frozen montage in Karl’s mind; his fragile, beautiful mother, his stoic father. It would be how he always remembered them, for he never saw them alive again.

PHILADELPHIA 1938

THE KENSINGTON section of Philadelphia was a near northeast working class part of the city, bordering the neighborhoods of Fishtown, Port Richmond, Juniata, and Frankford.

In November 1938 Karl Swann came to live with his distant cousins Nicholas and Vera Ehrlinger. They lived in a narrow row house on Emerald Street. Both of his cousins worked at Craftex Mills. Karl attended Saint Joan of Arc School.

In the late 1930s Philadelphia was a rich and vibrant community for magic and magicians. There were chapters of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Society of American Magicians, The Yogi Club, the Houdini Club—an enclave dedicated to preserving the memory of Harry Houdini.

A week after his tenth birthday Karl took the streetcar to Center City with his cousin Nicholas. They were on a mission to locate a tablecloth for Thanksgiving dinner. Karl marveled at the Christmas decorations and displays near Rittenhouse Square. When they reached Thirteenth and Walnut, Nicholas kept walking, but Karl stopped, captivated by the one-sheet poster in the window of Kanter’s Magic. Kanter’s was the premier magic emporium in Philadelphia, its clientele an amalgam of amateur and professional magicians.

The poster in the window—a bright and bizarre display of doves and grinning harpies—was for a show due to arrive in two weeks, a show the likes of which Karl had never imagined. The star of the show was a man named Harry Blackstone.

FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS Karl took on every odd job he could. He delivered newspapers, shined shoes, washed automobiles. He finally saved enough money. Three days before the show he went to the theater, and bought his ticket. He spent the next two nights in bed, looking at the voucher in the moonlight.

At last the day arrived.

From his seat in the balcony Karl watched the incredible spectacle unfold. He watched a stunning illusion called the Sepoy Mutiny, a piece of magical theater in which Blackstone was captured by Arabs, strapped to the mouth of a cannon and blown to bits. At more than one performance of this fantastic illusion women had been known to faint, or run screaming from the theater. The fainthearted who fled never got to see that, moments after the cannon fire, the executioner would pull off his turban and beard, only to reveal that it was Blackstone himself!

In another illusion Blackstone passed lighted lightbulbs right through a woman, each pass eliciting shocked gasps from the transfixed audience.

But nothing surpassed Blackstone’s version of sawing a woman in half. In Blackstone’s rendering, called the Lumbersaw, a woman was strapped facedown on a table, and a large buzz saw ran right through her middle. When Karl saw the illusion it brought tears to his eyes. Not for the woman—of course, she was just fine—but for the power of the ruse. In Blackstone’s gifted hands it was a level beyond enchantment, beyond even theater. For Karl Swann, it had reached the level of true magic. Blackstone had done the impossible.