IN THE SUMMER of his fourteenth year, Karl Swann spent every Saturday afternoon at Kanter’s, pestering the owner, Mike Kanter, demanding to see every trick beneath the glass. One day Karl wandered behind the store, into what looked and sounded like a machine shop. It was a brass works. He saw a man at a workbench. The man noticed him.
“You should not be here,” the man said.
“You are the man who makes the Nickels to Dimes?” The Nickels to Dimes illusion was one where the magician places a stack of nickels on the table, all the while pattering about inflation and the costs of things these days. He passes his hand over the stack, and they turn into dimes.
The man spun on his stool, crossed his arms. “I am.”
“I saw the trick today,” Karl said.
The man stroked his chin. “And you want to know how it is done.”
“No.”
The man raised a single eyebrow. “And why is that? All boys want to know how magic is done. Why not you?”
“Because I know how it is done. It is not that clever.”
The man laughed.
“I will work for you,” Karl said. “I can sweep. I can run errands.”
The man considered Karl for a few moments. “Where are you from?”
“Kensington,” Karl said. “From Emerald Street.”
“No, I mean where were you born?”
Karl did not know if he should say, the war being the war, still so alive in everyone’s mind. He trusted the man, though. He was clearly of German extraction. “Hanau.”
The man nodded. “What is your name?”
Karl squared his shoulders, set his feet, just as his father had taught him. He extended his hand. “My name is Karl Swann,” he said. “And yours?”
The man took Karl’s hand. “I’m Bill Brema.”
For the next two years, Karl apprenticed with Bill Brema, working in the brass works, helping to produce some of the finest brass apparatuses in the world.
But the real benefit to working there was the people Karl encountered. Everyone came to Kanter’s, and Karl met them all; acquiring moves, pieces of patter, a well-used silk, a battered wand. His magic box grew. His understanding of misdirection flourished.
At twenty, it was time to perform professionally for the first time in the United States. He called himself the Great Cygne.
FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS the Great Cygne toured the country, performing in towns large and small. Although not a strikingly handsome man, at six-two he was a commanding presence, and his courtly manner and piercing eyes drew women to him in every venue.
In Reading, Pennsylvania, he met a German girl named Greta Huebner. Weary of finding love on the road, Karl proposed to her within one month. Two months later they were married.
Back in Philadelphia, when his father’s estate was finally settled, more than fourteen years after the end of the war, Karl received a check for nearly one million dollars. With it he bought a house in North Philadelphia, a sprawling twenty-two-room Victorian mansion called Faerwood. He surrounded it with trees.
For most of the next decade the Great Cygne continued to ply his trade. Childless, the couple had all but given up on a family. Then, at the age of thirty-eight, Greta Swann became pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, and on the morning of October 31, 1969, Greta died from complications of childbirth. At 7:00 AM, a weeping midwife handed Karl the swaddled baby.
Karl Swann held his infant son for the first time, and it was in this moment, when the child first opened his eyes, that Karl saw something that chilled him to the bottom of his soul. For a moment, his son’s eyes were a blinding silver, eyes that held the very cast of Hell.
It may have been an illusion, he thought a few moments later, a trick of light coming through the high windows at Faerwood, for soon the vision was gone. The baby’s eyes were an azure blue, like his father’s.
Karl Swann named his son Joseph.
1973
AT FAERWOOD, Joseph’s World was a labyrinth of small, dark rooms and hissing whispers, a place where specters coiled behind the wood lath, and shadows darted and gamboled in the halls. Joseph played his child’s games by himself, but he was never alone.
Without a mother, the only woman in young Joseph’s life was his father’s stage assistant, Odette. Odette cooked for him, bathed him, helped him with his lessons. In the end, it was Odette who knew his talents.
As a young boy Joseph Swann proved to be far more dexterous than other children his age, far more nimble with his hands than even his father had been as a child. At three he was able to perform all the fundamentals of coin magic—palms, switches, vanishes—simply from observation, being particularly adept at Le Tourniquet, the classic French drop. At four he mastered the Okito, the small brass box it had taken his father the better part of a decade to perfect. Given a bridge deck—to accommodate his small hands—he could fluidly perform any number of card basics: false shuffles, Hindu shuffles, double lifts, false counts.
In these early years, as Karl Swann struggled to remain relevant in a changing world of magic, as madness began to seed his mind, instead of pride he developed a profound resentment toward his son, a bitterness that at first manifested in abuse, but soon matured into something else.
Something closer to fear.
1975
ONE NIGHT, WHILE on a brief tour of small towns in southern Ohio, Karl Swann locked his five-year-old son in back of the battered step van they used for traveling, leaving the boy to amuse himself with a 250-piece jigsaw, a rather difficult puzzle depicting a pair of eagles high in the clouds. When Karl returned to the van to retrieve a forgotten device, eight minutes later, the puzzle was complete. Joseph stared out the window.
1976
WITH THE SUCCESS of The Magic Show—a magic-themed Broadway musical featuring an overly grand, aging alcoholic, a character not all that different from the Great Cygne—the world of parlor and stage magic all but changed forever. It was now the large scale Las Vegas show that the public demanded. For the Great Cygne, the venues got smaller, the road longer.
At the age of seven, it was evident that Joseph, despite his almost preternatural skills, and his integral part in the stage act, had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps. His true interest was puzzles—word puzzles, jigsaws, cryptograms, riddles, anagrams, rebuses. If there was a maze, Joseph found its entry, its egress. Deduction, truth, deception, paradox—these were his sacraments.
But if Joseph’s mastery of things enigmatic was evident, so had become the darkness which had taken hold of his father. Many nights Karl went down to Faerwood’s basement in the middle of the night, constructing partitions, building and erecting walls, making rooms that mirrored the growing divisions in his mind. He once spent six weeks manufacturing a magic apparatus only to set it afire in the middle of the road in front of the house.
Every night, before Joseph went to bed, Karl played an old French film called The Magic Bricks. The silent three-minute film, made in 1908, showed a pair of conjurers making people appear and disappear, using boxes, bricks, and other props, mostly with rather crude special effects.
By his tenth birthday Joseph knew every illusion in the film, every trick of the lens, every hand-colored frame. He saw it nearly one thousand times.
1979
KARL SWANN GLANCED at his image in the gold-veined cheval mirror. They were in a shabby hotel, in a small town in Bell County, Texas.
“Watch,” Karl commanded.
He turned with a great flourish of his cape, extended his right hand, and in an instant produced a seemingly endless number of cards, dropping them into a silk hat on a nearby table.