The four-star Sovetskaya Hotel on Moscow’s Leningradsky Prospekt remains home to the famous Yar restaurant, which for many years after it opened in 1826 was considered the best in Russia. If you search for the restaurant online there are several sub-English, self-replicating travel guides that list the place as “Establishment: Yar”. I’m guessing that biographer Kellock somehow misunderstood the name of the eatery and rendered it as “Establishment Yard”; Ruth Brandon dutifully copied the error.

Houdini was booked at the Yar from May 4 to July 4, 1903, having lied to the authorities that he was a Catholic, since Jews weren’t allowed to work in the city. While performing at the ritzy restaurant, he burnished his international reputation further with a dramatic escape from a “Siberian Transport Cell”, described as a paddy wagon, like a safe on wheels, and better known as a carette. Once he was strip-searched and placed inside, near naked, he was told that the only key was indeed in Siberia, many days’ drive away.

The following year when he returned to the States for a visit, Edna Ferber asked him about his toughest stunt so far. “I think my escape from the Siberian Transport was my most difficult performance,” he said. “I was placed in the great vault usually assigned to political prisoners, and when the great door was shut, I had the hardest time of my life, perhaps, in releasing myself. But nevertheless, it took me 18 minutes to walk out, and face the dazed officials.”

Other sources say it was either 28 or 45 minutes, and when he got out, the police reneged on their promise to issue him a certificate of proof of his escape, but word spread anyway, and Houdini remained in Russia until September 1903, having convinced the tsarina, and many others, that his magic was real. Maybe she would have kept him around the palace as a second Rasputin, but he headed back to England, and a public waiting as eagerly as ever.

In “The Secret Life of Houdini”, William Kalush and Larry Sloman (more here) speculate that Houdini, in the pay of the British secret service, was on the lookout for anarchist activity in Russia, and was sending back intelligence reports. Anarchist conspirators were widely feared at the time — only two years before, Leon Czolgosz had assassinated President William McKinley.

Chronic overachiever Orson Welles, who used to flaunt his own magic tricks at the drop of a top hat, once committed to paper the strange story of Houdini’s trip to Moscow, and “the night he rang the bells in the Kremlin”.

“I’m proud to say,” Welles wrote, “he was my teacher in magic when I was young. As a favour to my father he did give me my first lessons in the art of conjuring … I’d sit in his dressing room backstage at the Hippodrome, or wherever it happened to be, and he’d make me go over and over a new trick.”

In a private performance for the tsar and his family, he says, “with Rasputin in the background, gnashing his teeth with jealous rage”, Houdini asked everyone to write down “impossible things”. One of them wrote “ring the bells in the Kremlin”. They’d been silent for a century and had no ropes attached. Houdini went to the window, raised his arm and the bells rang out.

“Now ordinarily, I don’t explain how tricks are done,” Orson wrote, “but in this particular case I think I can tell you, since it’s unlikely that anyone will be doing this particular trick again.” Bess was standing at the window of a hotel across the square awaiting his signal, and with an air rifle, shot the bells!

This story is apparently true, though there’s some debate over whether Bess could have handled a rifle so well. More likely it was one of Harry’s stage assistants. Houdini had prepared the whole thing in advance, of course, and would have almost certainly manipulated an audience member into coming up with a request for which he was perfectly ready. This was how Robert-Houdin effected his most famous illusion, making items that audience members had marked vanish and “fly to” far-flung places around Paris, where they were discovered by a specially dispatched committee.