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  “Why jacks and queens?” I asked. “Why not really high cards? Aces and kings?”

  “It all has to be believable,” she said. “When the dealing and betting are over and everyone lays down the cards, it has to look like an actual poker hand. The big hands you always see in movies, royal flushes beating out four aces … it’s absurd. Real poker doesn’t come down to billion-to-one hands. We’re giving them very strong hands, the kind of hands that will get any decent player betting big and—this is important—betting early in the hand, because they’ll want to scare away the other players before those final two community cards get dealt. That’s why players go all in: it’s an aggressive move, but it’s also defense.” I wasn’t dubious, exactly, just a step or so behind. “I’ve studied these guys for a year,” she said. “It’s gonna work. Victor and Danny? Neither one would ever admit it but they can’t stand each other. They’re gonna be especially aggressive in a hand where they both think they can stick it to the other one. Trust me, this hand is gonna get them into a war. And when the hand is over, and they’ve both lost to my flush in hearts, there won’t be anything suspicious about any of it.”

  I nodded, looking over the cards some more. “Okay,” I said. “I think I get it.”

  “Good.” She smiled. “Of course, the next card will be another heart, any heart, giving me my flush, so I’ll beat them both.”

  “As long as we make sure the final card isn’t a jack or a queen,” she said, “or a pair with the turn card, I’m guaranteed to win. Do you still follow?”

  I thought I did. Still, there was a glaring problem with her plan. “You’re talking about controlling a hell of a lot of cards: three jacks, three queens, plus three additional hearts … I can’t control that many cards during a single shuffle.” I was damn good at controlling cards, but that many? In a specific order? “There’s just no way.”

  “Neither can I,” she said. “No one can. So what you’re gonna do is palm some cards off and collect the rest when the deck comes back around to your shuffle again.”

  To palm cards off the top would mean playing with less than a full deck. It would mean keeping those palmed cards on my body—pocketing them or sitting on them—until I had all of them, at which point I would have to add them back into the deck so Ellen could execute the false deal. If anything went wrong, if one of the guys were to count the cards and see the deck was short, it could mean me getting caught red-handed.

  “This doesn’t sound much better than using a cold deck,” I said.

  “Palming is a risk,” she said, “but I’m gonna help you with that. I’ve palmed cards in game situations for years and never once been caught. Do you use the gambler’s cop?”

  This was a palm where you used the edge of the table to help conceal a card. I’d always assumed it was unnecessarily risky because part of the card is exposed beneath the table. “No.”

  “Why not? My god, you magicians.” She shook her head. “It’s perfect for me because my hands are small, but even with your big hands, it’s a better move than the classic palm when you’re seated at a table. Trust me. You’re gonna be fine. And once you’ve returned the cards to the deck for dealing, the evidence disappears. That’s why it’s better than a cold deck.”

  “But what if I do get caught? What will these guys do to me?”

  “They aren’t mafiosi, Natalie. These are professional men with clients to think about and public images to uphold. They don’t even want anyone knowing they’re in the game. They can afford to lose a quarter million in a night. They’d never do anything to jeopardize their own lives. It would be illogical.”

  “Ellen.” I was old enough to know how little logic explained why people did many of the things they did. “What could they do to me?”

  “Worst case? And I mean worst case, like you sneeze and all the palmed cards go flying across the room? They kick you out the door and keep your buy-in. Which, if you’ll remember, is really my buy-in. I’d be the one out of luck, not you. But that’s not gonna happen. We’re gonna work hard. We’ll be ready. You’ll be palming cards in your sleep. You’re gonna earn your money.”

  “What if we switch jobs? You shuffle and I deal?”

  She shook her head. “If you’re a little slow palming off the cards, you can take some extra time. These guys play with two decks, and while you’re shuffling the one, I’ll be dealing the other and can slow the pace down a little. If you absolutely have to, you can wait for the deck to come around a third time to grab the rest. But if you’re the dealer, there’s only one chance to get it right.” She shrugged. “Besides. This is my gig. I set it up, and I’m staking everything on it. I deal the cards.”

  I nodded.

  “No one’s gonna be watching the shuffler anyway,” she said. “The dealer gets all the attention. And the Greek deal is a really hard move to get right. It’s taken me years to perfect.”

  “Why not just bottom deal?” I asked.

  “You saw why in Atlantic City. And here tonight. The Greek deal’s just a better move when it’s done right.”

  I had to agree. “All of this. It’s … hard. This is really hard sleight of hand we’re talking about.”

  “I know.”

  “If I hadn’t gone running after you in Atlantic City, what were you going to do? Who were you going to find?”

  She took another sip of coffee. “I don’t know. I guess we both got lucky.”

  She gave me a lesson in the finer points of the gambler’s cop. By the time she put her coat on and I walked her to the door it was past midnight. The birds were side by side on the perch with their eyes closed. Ellen and I made plans to meet up again on Tuesday when she was done teaching for the day. In the meantime, I had plenty of magic to practice. Ellen was almost out the door when I stopped her. “What about the cut?” I couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me earlier. “Whoever’s sitting between us is going to cut the cards.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “But if I arrange the deck and then someone cuts the cards, it would undo everything. That’s why cards get cut.”

  She smiled. “All taken care of.”

  “How?”

  “It’s late,” she said. “You’ve had a big day. Sleep on it and tell me what you come up with.” I was shutting the door when she turned around and said, “By the way, your name’s Nora.”

  “Nora?”

  “Nora Thompson. And don’t just practice the Greek deal because I said it was hard. Work on controlling the cards. That’s your job.” She waved. “See you on Tuesday.”

  9

  The next morning, my eyes opened at the first light and I was fully awake. The air felt crisper, electric. In the bathroom, the blue tiles on the walls seemed brighter, as did the silver faucets. Everything seemed more. I knew things, amazing things, that I did not know yesterday, and I anticipated the busy hours and days ahead, when I would work to reduce and ultimately eliminate the friction between what I knew and what my hands could do.

  There were a few shows on my December calendar. The money for those gigs, I knew, would help pay for Lou Husk’s settlement, but if they took away from the time I would otherwise be practicing for the game with Victor Flowers, then they weren’t worth keeping. Also, I couldn’t bring myself to care one iota about coins or linking rings or silks or ropes or clever reveals inside citrus fruits. I didn’t care about witty patter or making a crowd laugh or gasp or admire me for all my years of dedication to the art of close-up prestidigitation. All I cared about was January 1. Being ready. Being perfect.

  My next show was on Saturday night in Hartford, Connecticut, the private holiday party of a retired Aetna executive. This was a referral from another retired Hartford exec, whose party I’d done a year ago. It was an easy gig, but at a home gig like that I couldn’t just leave right after the show. I’d be expected to schmooze and laugh at all the right moments, as if their motive in inviting me was so that I could be their audience and bear witness to their success
and energy and wit, to the ease with which they inhabited their white-haired years.

  I was meeting with Ellen again in just a few days. I kept thinking about all that time driving up to Hartford and back, the obligatory traffic jam on the Cross Bronx Expressway, all those wasted hours. So I called Jack at the store and asked him to help me find a replacement.

  “For this Saturday?” he asked. “December’s a busy time. What’s the matter? You don’t sound so good.”

  “I think it’s the flu,” I said, making my voice rasp without overdoing it. “Or something like it.”

  “You have enough food at home?” he asked. “You have Gatorade? You have to drink Gatorade if it’s the flu.”

  “Yeah, I have whatever I need. I just need a replacement.”

  “Why don’t you give Milo Dunning a ring.”

  Magic Milo? “Milo’s the worst,” I said.

  “Nah, he’s all right.” That was Jack’s code for: he spends a lot of money in my shop. “And this is for retirees? Milo’s your man.”

  Jack gave me Milo’s number, and then we brainstormed a couple of other magicians in case Milo wasn’t available.

  “Drink at least three Gatorades a day,” Jack said. “The big size. Otherwise, you aren’t staying hydrated enough.”

  “Sure, Jack.”

  “You don’t want to mess with the flu. You want to stay hydrated.”

  “All right.”

  “Your urine should be clear, not yellow.”

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  Magic Milo was also an endodontist. He was one of those guys who must’ve owned dozens of magic convention T-shirts, an enthusiastic amateur for whom the money from the occasional gig didn’t matter because he made plenty doing root canals.

  He was available. And as he thanked me again and again, I was thinking about my other December events—bachelor party in Hoboken, private holiday party in Far Hills, corporate event in New Brunswick. I was becoming nauseated thinking about having to paste on a smile and go through with all those shows.

  “Hey, Milo,” I said, cutting short his anecdote about having visited Hartford several years before, and touring Mark Twain’s house, and how it really was worth seeing next time I went there.

  “That Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court …” He laughed, high-pitched and honking.

  “Hey, Milo …” I cringed a little, knowing the bachelor party would not go well. But he would do all right with the other shows. “What does the rest of your December look like?”

  Ellen arrived after school let out on Tuesday carrying a plastic bag, whose contents she dumped onto my bistro table. Eighteen sealed decks of playing cards.

  “Victor always starts the night with two sealed decks. So you need to be practicing with fresh cards. Tomorrow, throw the first pack away and open a new one. Every day, a new pack, understand?”

  “All right,” I told her.

  “You say that, but you have a trash bag for a car window,” she said. “A fortune is riding on this game, and I’ve made it easy for you: eighteen days, eighteen decks. Don’t be stingy with the cards.” She turned to face the birds, which had started cooing—first one, then the other.

  “They do that a lot,” she said.

  “I barely notice anymore,” I told her.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “You’re a magician with doves but you don’t use them in your act? What’s up with that?”

  I told her about buying them when I was in high school, and how I hadn’t given much thought to the tricks beforehand. “Once I learned how the tricks were done, I felt bad stuffing them into tiny pouches and into tight harnesses made of fishing line. And to make a bird stay quiet and still? You have to flip it over onto its back superfast. Basically, you’re giving it lots of g-force to make it pass out.”

  “No kidding,” she said.

  “Yeah. It all seemed cruel.” I vividly remembered all those years back, trying the move on Ethel, flipping the bird upside down but not fast enough, then doing it again, harder, and the frightened bird was suddenly, eerily motionless, her soft body warm in my hands, her living heart beating against my fingers.

  “Huh. I never knew that.” She smiled. “You’re a good egg, Natalie Webb.”

  She asked me for paper and a pen and drew a map of Victor’s poker room, which was also a movie screening room and billiard room and wet bar. I could have lived happily in that one room.

  She added the poker table to her sketch and reminded me that we had to get Victor sitting between the two of us. “You’ll only have a few minutes after we arrive to befriend him,” she said. “To intrigue him so he’ll want to sit next to you.”

  “You want me to flirt with him?”

  “I don’t even know if he likes women. But he likes being a good host. So you’re going to be interested in everything he has to say, and stick close to him, and then you’ll ask him to sit next to you.”

  We got Chinese takeout from the place down the street, and while we ate she told me more about the other players who’d be at the game: Ian McDonald, Jason Panella, and Danny Squire. “Danny’s gonna seem intimidating,” Ellen said, “but don’t let him bother you. He’s just brash and an aggressive bettor.”

  Ian McDonald, I learned, was a hedge fund manager, which was a familiar phrase that meant nothing to me.

  “It means,” Ellen said, “that he invests a lot of nothing and bets against the economy to make rich people richer.”

  “He sounds like a lovely man,” I said.

  Ellen smiled. “It’s a better con than either of us will ever pull off.”

  And then there was Jason Panella, who made no secret about having inherited his money from his grandfather, who had started a pharmaceutical company that grew to a billion-dollar enterprise before he sold it to Johnson & Johnson.

  “He sits on some boards,” Ellen said, “though his main jobs seem to be skiing and scuba diving, depending on the season.”

  “How did they react to having a woman in their game?” I asked.

  “I think they like it. They can show off a little, and I know how to play the part of a girl who’s just one of the guys. The first time I went, I told them about the time I played against Michael Phelps and took his money. That sold them.”

  “Is it true?”

  “About five years ago, in Atlantic City.”

  “I didn’t think you liked A.C.”

  “I don’t, but every so often I’ll play in a casino to keep my poker chops up and do some intel—try to get new leads on home games. I was already at the table when he took the empty seat next to me. I thought he was reasonably attractive so I said something like, ‘How’s it going?’ and he said, ‘I just rescued the greatest dog.’ It was cute.”

  “He’d get along well with my upstairs neighbor,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “She rescues dogs.”

  “Oh. I didn’t even know who he was until he’d tipped the dealer some huge amount and left the table. Then everyone started going crazy.” She took a bite of her egg roll. “How about you? You ever do magic for anyone big?”

  I had told this story before many times. “Another Michael, actually. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Last name Jackson?”

  Her eyes widened. “Get the fuck out.”

  I smiled.

  “I can’t believe you just beat out my Michael Phelps story. What was the occasion?”

  “There wasn’t one,” I said. “Not one I knew of, anyway. This was back in ’04.” I told Ellen about how Michael had been in New York, recording. I was only seventeen—this was just a few months after my second-place finish at the WOM convention, during that astonishing year of touring. My mother drove me into the city from Jersey, then left me at the curb so I could walk into the recording studio alone. I was led to a small conference room just inside the entrance, and once I was set up a dozen or so people entered. I have no idea who they were. Studio staff or managers or whoever. I stood at the front of the room, and they
sat around the conference table, turning their chairs to face me. Then Michael came in and sat front and center and I did my twenty-minute show and left.

  “What was he like?”

  “He didn’t say much. One of the tricks involved a signed playing card, and after the show he told me to keep it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  I shook my head. “Stupid me, I lost it in a move.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “It’s probably worth a lot of money.”

  What I omitted from my Michael Jackson story—this time, and every time I told it—was how, afterward, he had laid a hand, ungloved, on my arm and smiled at me and said, I just know you’re going to be a big star, Natalie. And I omitted the part where, because I was seventeen, and because I had shows lined up in London and Lisbon, and because the prognostication had come from Michael Jackson himself, I believed him with every cell in my body.

  “I’ve told you before,” Ellen was saying, “your friend in A.C. did a fine job nullifying the cut. He really did.”

  “Not my friend,” I reminded her.

  We had cleared dinner from the table. Each of us now had a deck of cards out. “My point is, that’s not gonna work here. These men aren’t rubes. Victor’s gonna cut the cards before I deal.”

  I was confused. Unless: “Victor’s not in on it, is he?”

  She watched my face, saw the gears churning.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “He’s really gonna cut the cards?” I asked. “Like a legit cut?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you’ll be dealing the deck that I stacked?”

  “Come on, Nat, you’re the award-winning magician. Figure it out.”

  I didn’t like knowing a method existed that I couldn’t deduce right away. I considered Ellen’s bar scam. The most direct path from A to B.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Ellen said. “Though I must tell you, if you were a real card cheat, you’d think this was pretty easy.”