Bluff Read online

  The lobby bar was bright and close to the elevators, not crowded but moderately bustling, people coming and going. But across the large lobby, in a dimly lit corner, was a much smaller spillover bar, just long enough to accommodate four bar stools. The area was closed, roped off. It was as good a place as any to hide and wait.

  So that’s where we sat, folded table and bag of gear beside me, while the ice continued to fall over Newark.

  “I just want to say,” he began, “that what you do with those cards …” He whistled. “Not the throwing. The other stuff. Like where the queens all ended up together? It’s truly amazing.”

  “I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” I said.

  “What? You’re a hell of a magician, Natalie. That’s all I’m saying. It’s a compliment.”

  “I just blinded a man!”

  “Maybe you blinded a man. It was a playing card, not a knife.”

  “I can pierce the rind of a watermelon with a playing card.”

  He winced. “Well, then, all the more important you and I are talking.” He offered me a meaty hand with black hairs sprouting out from the tops of his fingers. “Brock McKnight.” I was relieved when his handshake didn’t crush my bones.

  We were by a window, and I could see across the road to another hotel where outside, beneath the overhang, a doorman stood alone and hugged himself for warmth. I shivered. “I feel sick,” I said. It was true. Long ago I had decided that nothing was worse, nothing less forgivable, than to be the cause of someone else’s physical harm. In all the years since, I had subscribed to very few creeds, but always that. “I didn’t really mean to hurt him.”

  I was relieved that the words tasted mostly true.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Brock said. “Why would you want to sabotage your career?”

  Yes, exactly, I thought. An eye is very small. My aim was good, but was it that good? I didn’t remember taking aim. I had been irate and embarrassed, true, but the throw had felt automatic. Like with classical pianists, how the fingers do the thinking, not the brain. Otherwise, they could never do those lightning-fast runs up and down the keys.

  But even if my hand had gone rogue, doing what my mind wouldn’t have allowed it to do, did that make it any better? My hand was still part of me, wasn’t it? That snapping wrist, those quick fingers, were mine.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “It depends,” Brock said. “Do you carry liability insurance?” When I didn’t answer right away, he sighed and began to relate highlights from The Legend of Lou Husk. The man with a plan. And that plan was evidently to make his adversaries wish they had never heard the name Lou Husk.

  “If he goes to the police,” Brock said, “it’s conceivable the prosecutor could charge you with aggravated assault. But maybe not in Newark, where actual crimes are being committed and taking up police time. You’d probably be looking at misdemeanor endangerment.”

  “Which means?”

  “The fine caps at a thousand dollars and a year in prison.”

  That word, “prison,” echoed like profanity in a language I could barely identify. “For a playing card?”

  “You said yourself it cuts watermelons.”

  “I guess a thousand dollars could be worse,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t worry—it will be, since he’ll almost certainly file a civil lawsuit, too. That’s where the real money is. But that’s a ways down the road.” My eyes welling up didn’t seem to faze Brock at all. He didn’t bother to look out the window or pick imaginary fuzz off his suit in order to give me a moment to collect myself. He must have been used to people hitting rock bottom in his presence. “I’d like to be your lawyer, Natalie,” he said.

  “I can’t afford one,” I said, wiping my eyes with shaky hands.

  “And now I’m supposed to say, ‘There’s no way you can’t afford one.’ And it’s true. If he ends up blind in one eye …” He didn’t need to finish. “Instead, I’ll tell you I’m really good, and I work on a sliding scale.”

  But just how far would it slide? I dropped my head into my hands. “Why the hell would I let him get to me like that?” I muttered.

  Over the years I’d faced some nasty characters, been in actual threatening situations. Yet I’d always kept my composure.

  “Yeah, but lawyers,” Brock said. “We’re professional assholes. We have it all down to a science.” He didn’t totally mask his pride in saying so. “Look, I can tell you need a drink. What’s your poison?”

  If I knew my poison I’d be able to avoid it. And anyway, the bar where we were sitting was closed. I looked out the window again. It was only November. God knew what December would bring. “I can’t believe I have to drive home in this.”

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Too far away for a cab,” I said.

  “And you’re telling me there’s no hotel rider in your contract?”

  “I have birds,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Doves. To feed. They need food and fresh water.”

  “She has birds.” The lawyer shook his head and pried himself off the bar stool. “Come on, what’s your drink? I’ll get it from the other bar.”

  Outside, the ice was falling harder. “Just get me something I can’t afford.”

  “That’s just what I’ll do”—he held a finger in the air as if testing the wind—“the moment I’m done taking a leak.”

  Alone with nothing but a promise. My stomach growled, and I saw my refrigerator at home—plenty of condiments, little to put them on—and wondered who exactly I had been spiting earlier by refusing to invite myself to the buffet. Maybe a stomach full of peel-and-eat shrimp would have made me more patient with my volunteer.

  I checked my phone. No missed calls. I’d been hoping to hear from my mother today. As I was returning the phone to the side pocket of the duffel bag, Brock came back empty-handed. “I didn’t feel like waiting,” he said. But rather than sit down again, he went behind our private, closed-down bar and knelt down until only the top of his head was bobbing around.

  “And … bingo.” He stood up again. “I’m very surprised they have this.” He came back around carrying a bottle and two rocks glasses. “This is like two hundred a bottle.” He poured us each a generous drink. “No way should they be letting us do this.” He shook his head. “It’s a shame what America’s become.” Then he said, “To my newest client,” and we drank, and the Scotch felt nourishing going down my throat.

  Brock laid a reassuring or maybe possessive hand on my arm. “I think it’s vitally important,” he said, “that I pour us refills. This Scotch sat alone in a barrel for twenty years just so you and I could drink it and cement our new relationship.”

  It was the most sense anyone had made all night. He poured, and we drank.

  “So now that I’m your lawyer,” he said, “I would like to give you a piece of advice. May I do that?”

  The Scotch had steadied me a little. I was now a woman with a lawyer who gave her advice. “Sure,” I said.

  “You should be working with larger objects,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean cards? Coins? Who can see any of that from across a conference room?”

  The ubiquitous criticism of the close-up magician. Brock McKnight might have been unique among the lawyers—he alone had followed me, the perpetrator, into the elevator. Still, he was a typical layperson, and despite myself I felt my hackles rise. “It’s called sleight of hand,” I said. “It’s what I do.”

  “Still …” He finished his drink. “You do bigger stuff, it might go over better.”

  The ice storm was keeping me here. My lawyer’s critique of my show was repelling me to the car. The Scotch was keeping me here. Two against one. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’m a professional performer.”

  When he laughed, I assumed it was because I had hardly demonstrated my professionalism tonight. But that wasn’t it. “Darling,” he s
aid, “everybody in that ballroom is a professional performer. We’re litigators!” He shifted in his bar stool and got his wallet from his pants pocket. The business card he offered me was curved to the shape of his ass, like a little canoe on the river You’re Fucked.

  “Come by my office tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “By then I’ll have something on our pal Lou and we’ll get the paperwork squared away.” He saw me looking at the card. “Sliding scale,” he said, “I promise,” and I took it. Then, almost as if it were an afterthought: “By the way, that trick with the queens? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of card tricks in my day, but with you it’s like another thing entirely. So come on—how’d you do it?”

  The Four Queens is very straightforward to watch. I show the queens and lay them on the table, facedown, in a square. Then I lay three additional cards on top of each of the queens, so there are four stacks of four cards. One by one, the queens migrate to a single stack.

  How did I do it? I did it by studying with a magician named Jack Clarion. I did it by learning the palms and passes and false shuffles in dozens of books on card manipulation, slowly, over many years and thousands of hours. I did it by developing my own routines with original patter to counterpoint the physical technique, until the moves were so undetectable you’d be fooled from a foot away, and until the routine was so well rehearsed that you could smash a lamp over my head and it wouldn’t affect my timing.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It would violate the magician’s oath.”

  Brock burst out laughing. “Are you for real?” He made himself stop laughing. “It’s not like you’re giving up the launch codes.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He reached into his wallet again and removed a bill. A hundred dollars. “I assume the physical therapists are withholding payment?”

  “I’m not gonna take your money,” I said.

  “What, you don’t take tips?”

  I was immediately ready with my crude response, the result of too many bachelor parties—

  Honey, I take the whole thing.

  —but it was late, and I was exhausted and worried and had no taste for posturing.

  “Yeah, I take tips,” I said.

  “Well then?” He waited until my fingertips were touching the bill. “By the way, how’d you do that trick with the four queens?”

  I let go of the bill.

  “A hundred isn’t enough?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “The oath?” he asked, eyebrow cocked.

  “The oath.”

  It wasn’t the oath. In truth, I didn’t especially care anymore about a couple of sentences uttered a million years ago in front of a handful of middle-aged men. But I did care about the shred of dignity I might still have at the end of the night. Then again, wasn’t paying my heating bill dignified?

  As if reading my mind, Brock set the bill on the bar. “Take it,” he said.

  I was about to stuff the hundred dollars into my pants pocket when instead I held it up in front of him. Slowly, I tore the bill in half, then in half again. I crushed the four pieces into a small wad, tighter and tighter, until there was nothing at all left between my fingertips. I showed the lawyer my empty hands, front and back.

  My hands were still shaking a little, something that would persist for the next eleven days (until in a cold, windswept parking lot they would suddenly become still again). I took a drink as a bit of misdirection.

  “You know, it’s a shame,” Brock said, “a woman with your talents stuck performing for people like us.”

  “It’s an honest living,” I said lamely.

  “Maybe that’s your problem,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “I know a guy. Another magician of a sort. He does very well playing poker against people like me. I’m talking world-class.”

  “If he told you he’s a card cheat, then he isn’t world-class.”

  “I said guys like me. I’m his lawyer. There’s confidentiality between us.”

  “You obviously consider it a sacred trust.”

  “Natalie, I’m trying to help you,” he said. “You could earn real money if you’re even half as good as my guy.”

  I looked him in the eye and said, “Webbs aren’t criminals.”

  I had meant it, but my words sounded even to me like Scotch-influenced melodrama. And then there was the matter of the playing card I’d thrown, and how the question of whether or not I was a criminal was very much up in the air.

  “Duly noted,” Brock said, and slid off his bar stool again. “Come by tomorrow. Two o’clock?”

  “All right,” I said.

  He shook my hand again. “You be careful getting home to those birds. I’m going upstairs to see if the zoo animals left me any petit fours. I’m a big fan of those.”

  He returned to his brethren, leaving me alone at the closed-down bar by the window. Outside, a steady rain had begun to fall, washing away the ice. I chose to attribute this to my attorney’s vast influence.

  3

  I braved the slow, white-knuckle drive south on Route 9, a cavalcade of trucks and SUVs whipping past me in the left lane, splashing a blinding slurry of ice and mud onto my windshield. I was intensely aware of statistics: how on this road, this night, someone was ending up in the back of an ambulance.

  The terrifying conditions kept me focused on the road, yet halfway home I remembered that Lou Husk’s wristwatch was still in my pocket. At the end of the trick, once the card had been transformed into the three of diamonds and the audience had finished applauding, I was supposed to say, “I have a prize for you, for being such a good volunteer.” I would then give him back his watch, which I had stolen from his wrist while shaking hands at the beginning of the trick. If my volunteer happened to be wearing a watch, and it was a kind I could pinch—Lou’s had been easy, the band made of spring segments—then producing it at the end of the trick made for a fine, surprising coda.

  I rolled down my window and tossed out the watch.

  By the time I parked along the road in front of my apartment, the rain had softened to a light drizzle, lifting a curtain on the raw night. There were a few bars within walking distance, and I probably would’ve been able to wangle free drinks because earlier, while sitting at the bar with Brock McKnight, I had become twenty-seven.

  But at this hour the bars would be closing in on last call and turning on their rude, despairing lights. I removed my gear from the trunk and lugged it all up the three steps to the landing.

  The apartment was only a small house with an upstairs and downstairs unit and a common entrance. Half a dozen of these houses stood in a line on my side of the street, bookended by a tattoo parlor and a mini-mart. I’d forgotten to leave the outside light on, and I fumbled for the keyhole while trying to prevent the table from unfolding or falling over. On the landing I tried to be quiet for Harley, the upstairs tenant, though I could already hear my birds cooing steadily.

  I finally got the door open and stowed my gear under the bed. Back in the living room, I tossed my coat onto the loveseat, removed my new shoes, and checked on the birds. Their water bowl was mostly full but the food bowl was empty, so I took care of that. Unless you’re a stage illusionist who’s married to your assistant, coming home after a gig is the world’s loneliest experience. I was glad to have the birds.

  While they pecked at their food, I went in search of mine. The leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator had absorbed all the sauce and looked alarmingly wormlike, so I settled on a glass of adequate cabernet. I heard somewhere that drinking alone was only sad if the booze was too cheap or too expensive. I sat down on the loveseat and pulled an afghan over my legs.

  I opened my laptop and touched a key to wake it up. Did some fast Google searches: aggravated assault, misdemeanor endangerment. Google’s unblemished record of only fueling my anxieties remained intact.

  I was about to shut the computer again when I found myself opening my email to reread the message that had come in that afterno
on. I couldn’t help myself, like picking at a scab.

  Subject: WOM Application

  Dear Natalie Webb,

  I’m writing to let you know that the selection committee has decided to stand by its original decision. Unfortunately, you were not selected to perform at this year’s World of Magic convention in New York City. Due to the number of magicians who applied to perform (we set an all-time record this year!) competition was especially stiff. As mentioned in my original email, the selection committee had a very difficult job, but they did it with the utmost care. To revisit those decisions now is simply not practicable.

  Thank you for your understanding.

  Yours in magic,

  Brad Corzo

  Chair, Panel Selection Committee, World of Magic

  After reading the first rejection two weeks earlier, I had gone to Brad Corzo’s website. I’d never heard of him, and, as I’d suspected, he didn’t look like much of a magician—one of those people whose administrative credits overshadowed his professional ones. Did he not know that I had once been a Spotlight Guest, one of only four such magicians that year? That I’d performed on the main stage to a packed room?

  I hadn’t attended a World of Magic convention since I was eighteen, since my lightning-fast transformation from Big Deal to Embarrassing Spectacle. But the self-imposed exile felt long enough, and I thought this would be the year to get back into the game. Ten years after my first WOM convention. The symmetry felt right. So I’d emailed back, asking if the committee might reconsider my application in light of my past professional accomplishments.

  That email had been highly respectful and diplomatic and not at all pushy. But tonight had me feeling panicky and impulsive. I clicked the reply key.

  Dear Brad,

  Please review my bio one more time.

  Sincerely,

  Natalie Webb

  Grand Prize Winner, WOM international close-up competition

  Then I couldn’t help myself.

  P.S. I saw on your website that you performed for three different Boy Scout troops last year. Well done.