Bluff Read online

  When I had closed the gap between us to maybe ten yards, I called out, “Ellen?”

  Not only had her hair lightened a few shades since last night; it had grown longer, past her shoulders. Eyeliner, mascara, blush, lipstick, all were applied expertly. Her green eyes were large and inquisitive and wide awake. Quite possibly, the circles under them last night had themselves been the product of makeup, not the absence of it. She looked as out of place now in the primary school parking lot as she had last night, the fatigued mom-slash-teacher at the poker table.

  “Natalie?” She squinted and looked around as if perhaps she, and not I, were in the wrong place. “What are you …”

  “The Last Call Tavern?” I said. “Where you asked me to meet you? It must have shut down since the last time you were there.” I glanced around. “I can’t believe you’re really a kindergarten teacher.”

  She unlocked her door.

  “Is that the wig?” I asked. “Or did you wear the wig last night?”

  She faced me full-on. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Is your name really Ellen?”

  “Is yours really Natalie?”

  “My last name’s Webb,” I said. “I’m a professional close-up magician.” We were alone in the parking lot. Still, I lowered my voice. “I promise I’m not here to cause you any trouble. I don’t care if you cheat at poker. Or I do care, but not in a bad way. Listen, can’t we just please go and sit someplace that actually exists?” She kept watching me impassively. “Come on. I’ve driven a long way, and I could really use a beer.”

  “If you want a beer, no one’s stopping you. If there’s something you want from me, then tell me what it is. I’m very busy.”

  Aware that I might have only this one shot, I launched into my fastest explanation of the Men’s Quarterly article, and why I’d been with Ace the previous night in Atlantic City, what I’d hoped to learn from him, and how he’d been a disaster, but how excited I had been to witness her, Ellen, at the card table.

  “A magazine article,” she said when I stopped talking. I waited while she looked out at the brown fields, the empty playground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She clicked her key and the car door unlocked. “It was nice seeing you again.”

  “Wait!” I said, louder than I meant to. Her door was open. “Please, just … forget the article for a minute, will you?” I had so many questions, but the one forced itself to my lips. “Was it a center deal? It wasn’t, was it?”

  When she didn’t answer right away, I knew she was deliberating: keep playing dumb, or drop the act. But I wasn’t being fooled by the act, and I was her only audience. She must have come to the same conclusion, because she said, “My god, why are all magicians so obsessed with the Kennedy deal? It isn’t even useful.”

  “I just want to know—”

  “So you can write your article. Yes, you’ve explained all this already.”

  “I said forget the article. I want to be able to do it.”

  “In your little magic show, you mean.”

  I let it slide. “You might not call yourself a magician,” I said, “but I saw you perform last night. No way did you pick up everything on your own. You had teachers. People showed you what they do because you needed to know. Please. Ellen. I need to know.”

  A cold breeze whipped across the schoolyard. Ellen unzipped her shoulder bag, felt around, and withdrew a pack of playing cards. “Here.” She tossed me the pack. “Show me something. Show me if you’re any good.”

  2

  The raw air of the school parking lot was lousy for card manipulation, but I’d performed in worse settings: poolside with a wet deck; frat parties in rooms too dark to see and for audiences too drunk to care; hotel suites where the air was choked with smoke and sweaty bodies.

  After a few cuts and flourishes to warm my hands and give Ellen a glimpse of my card handling, I did an abridged version of a card change/disappearance/reappearance I’d been doing for years. I kept the patter to a minimum, because my patter mattered to her as much as my shoe size. It was my hands she was interested in, a fast showcase of what they could do. And they could do a lot, and they did it well, and they didn’t shake at all despite the cold. My hands, my fingers, they were mine again. When I returned the deck to her, she said nothing but walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for me.

  While we drove, I gave her the silence she seemed to want while she decided the parameters of our conversation. After a short journey she stopped in front of a place called Sixty-Two, which was the street number.

  Whatever setting I might have imagined for the clandestine shoptalk between magician and cardsharp, this wasn’t it. The venue was either a café that sold beer or a bar that sold coffee drinks, ice cream, and, inexplicably, glass vases. The floor was cement, the ceiling drop panel, the walls brick. The music was ’80s pop, the kind no one ever seeks out but everyone knows. This time in the afternoon, a lone bartender/barista stood behind the counter looking at his phone. Two guys in their twenties were shooting pool near the back.

  I paid for a bottle of beer. Ellen ordered some triple espresso, high-octane drink that would have kept me awake for a month. To the guy behind the bar she said, “Sorry, I keep forgetting your name.”

  “David.”

  “Right. David. Got it.” She paid for her drink, stuffed a dollar into the tip jar, and led me to a high-backed booth near the rest-rooms. We sat opposite each other. “I want you to understand something,” she said. “I don’t do this—explain myself. It’s no one’s business what I do.” Her voice had a lower, richer tone to it than the night before. At the poker game she had a thin, nasally voice. “You’re a magician and a woman,” she was saying, “and maybe you think that means I can trust you—”

  “You can trust me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I can. Or maybe you only need to know I’m a kindergarten teacher.”

  “Why a kindergarten teacher?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw what you can do. Why are you a kindergarten teacher?”

  “Because I’m certified to be one.”

  “But what’s the angle?”

  “Angle? The angle is I like being a productive member of society,” she said, and sipped her drink. “Also, there’s this thing called the IRS, and it has a real bias against citizens who are able to live in homes and pay bills with no reported income.”

  “Still, how do you work it with your poker schedule? What if you have to travel to a game?”

  Ellen chewed her lip. I felt her reading me as if there were cards in my hand. “You said forget the article. I’m holding you to that. I don’t tell you a damn thing if it’s for an article.”

  Why had I gone and said that? But I knew I couldn’t take those words back now. She’d be out of here in two seconds.

  “You have my word,” I told her, my need to know eclipsing my good sense.

  “I’m a substitute teacher,” she said. “They call me, I tell them if I can work that day or not. Sometimes, like now, when my schedule is relatively clear, I take a long-term sub position. A little stability.” My face must have made me look like a layperson who’s just been given the unimpressive secret to an impressive magic trick. “What do you want me to say? People are more than one thing. I’m a teacher, too, and I’m good at it, and it gives me pleasure as well as a W-2 each year to make Uncle Sam happy.”

  “It’s just weird.”

  “I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve played cards. Weird for you? Maybe. Not for me.”

  “And the part about your being a mom?” I thought back to the previous evening. “Your son’s love of dung beetles? Your daughter’s … whatever it was?”

  “Yeah, that was all fiction.”

  “You had pictures on your phone.” Hearing my own words made me feel like such a sucker.

  She smiled. “Come on, you’re a smart woman. Stressed-out mom? It’s a winning persona at the card table,
even if I were playing honest poker. People lower their guard.”

  “You were convincing.”

  “Wasn’t hard,” she said. “A little frazzled, a little naive. God, I love bringing up euchre. Euchre’s a great touch. I do that and people don’t believe I can play a hand of poker, let alone cheat at it. They don’t believe it even after I’ve taken all their money.”

  “What about Ethan?” I asked. “Was he in on it?”

  She shook her head. “He knew my parents ages ago, when I was a kid living in A.C. I only got back in touch lately. Far as he knows, I am a stressed-out mother and wife.”

  “Well, like I said. You were convincing.”

  “You just have to commit to the role,” she said with a shrug. “It helps a lot that I’m a woman.”

  “Be glad you aren’t a magician,” I said.

  “I’m glad every day of my life,” she said.

  One of the guys in the back must have made a shot or won a game, because he started whoop-whooping as if he had just felled a gazelle with his bare hands.

  “I know you won’t agree,” I said, “but you really would be an ideal subject for the article.”

  “Breathe one more word about a magazine article,” she said, “and I’m gone. I’m being straight with you. One professional to another. It isn’t gonna happen.”

  “You want the next game?” someone called out. The pool player with the ball cap had come halfway across the bar.

  “No,” Ellen said.

  “Wasn’t asking you,” he said.

  I stared at him. Held his gaze long enough for him to say, “What?” Then he turned away. Then he turned back again. “What? Hello?”

  When he finally realized that was all I was going to give him, he shook his head and muttered, “Freak,” before going back to his friend. He said something under his breath and the two of them giggled.

  “I won’t mention the article again,” I said to Ellen. “But what about the false deal? Can’t you share it with me? One professional to another?”

  She watched me a moment. “You were right before,” she said. “I did have teachers. So I’m sensitive to what you said. I am. But there are some secrets you don’t reveal to anyone. Even to another magician. You know that.”

  If no magicians ever passed along their methods, much of the art form would be lost in a generation. I shared my secrets regularly in the Magician’s Forum. Still, innovative secrets, the real breakthroughs, were hard-won assets, and every great or good magician had a trick that was too valuable to risk depreciation.

  “Unless,” Ellen said, shuffling in her seat, “we could maybe …” She bit her lip. “Maybe make some kind of a deal?”

  “How’s that?”

  “I show you the move and, in exchange, you help me do a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  “What?” she asked. “Too vague?” I smiled.

  “It’s a little vague.”

  She squinted at me. The lighting in here was needlessly, fluorescently bright. “What are you doing on January first? At night?”

  “Why?”

  “That’s when the thing is.”

  “Do you mean a card game?”

  “No, my classroom. I’m looking for a new teacher’s aide. Yes, a card game.”

  “I’m not a cheat, Ellen.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Of course you are.”

  “Doing magic shows isn’t the same thing.”

  “I’m not talking about magic shows.”

  “Then what? You mean Atlantic City? I was observing Ace for the article. That’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all?” She finished her drink and set the mug down. “You knew Ace was trying to cheat us out of our money, and yet you sat there and let it happen. And you went along with not cutting the deck because you thought it would help him to cheat the rest of us. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but what you did is called cheating at cards. And someone who cheats at cards is called a card cheat. So I’m asking, as respectfully as possible, that you please drop the black-or-white, holier-than-thou bullshit.” She let her words sink in. “And by the way, I don’t believe for a minute you’re here because of any magazine article, even if you think you are. It’s not why you were in A.C., and it’s not why you’re here now.”

  When I started to protest, she shook her head.

  “Come on, you’re no journalist,” she said. “You’re a conjurer, and from what little I’ve observed, you might be at the top of that game, but you’re nowhere near the top of mine, and you know it, and it’s driving you fucking crazy.” She stopped talking, and for several seconds it was all Duran Duran and the barista, David, laughing into his phone. Then one of the guys in the back must have made a shot, because he shouted, “Yeah, bitch!”

  When Ellen spoke again, it was softer than before. “I’ll show you what I did at the Atlantic City game, and you’ll agree to sit at the table with me for one measly night. We’re talking three, four hours, tops.”

  She had my heart beating faster, I’ll give her that.

  “Come on,” she said. “There’s a lot of money involved, and I’d rather work with another woman.”

  “What’s the buy-in?” I asked. Information gathering. Knowledge. That’s all it was.

  “It’s steep,” she said, “but we’d go home with everything, guaranteed. It’s not a typical cash game. It’s no-limit Hold’em run as a freeze-out tournament.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means you can’t buy in again when you’re out of chips. One buy-in, and the winner takes all. We would take it all. Your share would be twenty percent.”

  Twenty percent of what? she wanted me to ask. Not that it mattered. I could have used twenty percent of anything. But Webbs weren’t criminals, and Jack Clarion’s old student knew the difference between a magician and a cardsharp. Didn’t hurt, either, to have the World of Magic gig in front of me, reminding me who I was and who I wasn’t.

  “I’m not a cheat,” I said.

  “I thought we just established that you are.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Then what you are is a cheat with no guts.”

  “I’m a magician,” I said.

  “Right. I just said that.”

  I smiled and sipped my drink. “It was a center deal, though, wasn’t it? I’m almost sure. It had to be, if it wasn’t a second deal, and it wasn’t a bottom deal. You flashed the bottom card on purpose, and then you dealt from the center. Am I right? Just tell me I’m right.”

  She stared at me, waited until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “Incorrect.”

  “For real?”

  She stood up. “I’m sorry you drove all this way for nothing.”

  It was actually less than nothing, because now I knew about her. I knew she had the knowledge I wanted, but I was being denied access.

  She glanced toward the back of the bar. “Would you at least like something for your trouble?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Those guys playing pool—would you like some of their money?”

  My first thought was: you’re a pool hustler, too? Then I realized, no, that’s not where this was going, and any number of classic bar cons and proposition bets started cycling through my mind. Barbill scam? No, this place was too rinky-dink, the drinks too cheap. I knew she had the deck of cards in her bag. With the cards she could take their money any number of ways. But which way? How?

  “Follow me,” she said. The guy in the baseball cap was lining up to take a shot when Ellen approached them. He stood up straight again and said, “Hey.”

  Both men wore T-shirts and blue jeans. Closer up, I saw that they were older than I’d first thought, at least five or ten years older than me, with fleshy faces and expanding guts, the lankness and grace of youth having fully given way to reveal the men they were stuck being from here on out.

  Ellen said, “My friend and I were hoping you could settle a bet for us.”

  “What kind of be
t?” he said.

  “Do you guys have four twenty-dollar bills?”

  The baseball cap guy frowned and got his wallet out. “I have two.”

  “I have a twenty and a ten,” said his friend.

  “No,” Ellen said, “the ten’s no good.”

  The ten was perfectly good, I assumed. Saying it wasn’t? Misdirection.

  “So three twenties?” Ellen said, and tilted her head, as if deliberating. “Okay,” she said. “Let me have them a second.”

  The guys looked at each other.

  “Just for a second. I want to show you … well, you’ll see.”

  They handed her the twenties, and the baseball cap guy said to his friend, “You wouldn’t give me twenty bucks if I asked,” and the second guy said to the first guy, “That’s because you’re an ugly fuck and your tits are too big.”

  When the twenties were in Ellen’s hand, she smoothed them out and said, “Nat, come with me a sec.”

  I followed her over to the bar, still clueless as to what the con was.

  “David, we’ll be back in two seconds,” Ellen said loudly enough for the two pool players to hear. She kept going toward the exit. I kept following her.

  Suddenly, we were outside in the cold late-afternoon gloom, standing in front of Ellen’s car.

  “Get in,” she said.

  We drove away.

  “What was that?” I said, trying to see behind us through the side-view mirror.

  “Here.” Ellen handed me the bills. “Sixty dollars for your trouble.”

  “Did we just rob those guys?”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t do anything.”

  “Why not?”

  Ellen kept driving. “Because they’re men. Imagine them telling a cop, We gave sixty dollars to a couple of women because they asked us to, and then they walked out of the bar. Take a guess what any cop would tell them?” She shook her head. “People who say the best cons leave the victim ignorant of the con? That’s nonsense. People watch too many movies. The truth is, the real suckers almost always know they’ve been conned, only they can’t do anything about it because they’re born to be suckers. What?”