David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Nines and sevens have a certain thing going on, a kind of charge,” he said. “If I were a mathematician, I maybe could say why. I’m not, so I can’t. But it’s definitely there.” He flipped a seven of diamonds and then a nine of spades rapidly out of a spread deck; not an illusion at all, just a demonstration of digital finesse. “Strangely, when suited, they seem not to like each other.” He drew a nine of diamonds and held it near the seven on the bar, then popped it so it jumped from his hand. As it tried to sail off the bar, he snatched it out of the air with his other hand. Her mouth actually opened a bit; a tiny misalignment of her two front teeth caught his eye.

“How about you?” he asked her. “You have any relationship with a particular card?”

“You serious?”

He mm-hmm ed.

“No. I’m not really into numerology. I think that sort of thing’s rather vicious, actually.”

“You mean superstitions do harm and should not be indulged?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Fair enough. Well, how about the shape of a suit? Its color? You must have some response to those.”

She considered this. “Spades,” she said. “If I have to choose.”

Most people chose spades. “Was it only rummy that you played when you were little?” Mark asked. “Any other games?”

“Stupid ones. War. Spit. Go Fish. My dad once tried to teach us a Persian game, but it had funny cards, and we were bored.”

Of course: she was Persian. He was pretty sure that meant Iranian. “Go Fish is an honorable game, I think. Where did you play?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, was it around a coffee table?”

“Yes. It was.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is this one of those sneaky fake-mystic tricks? Like, everyone remembers a coffee table?”

He narrowed his eyes at her and appeared to consider. Then he said, “Most remember a coffee table. Some a carpet. But that doesn’t make it a sneaky fake trick.” He sounded a little hurt. “We’re just talking here.” Saying We’re just talking here makes your interlocutor feel aggressive.

“Yeah. It was this wagon-wheel thing. With a glass top.”

He swapped the legit deck for the forcing deck. He did this quickly, beneath the cover of one of his large hands. It would have looked odd had he not spent the past ten minutes doing even slicker manipulations. “Okay,” he said, “I want you to choose a card. Then look at it and do not show me. But it’s important that you really think hard about the card once you’ve chosen it, once you’ve looked at it. I mean, I suppose you could try to think of a different one to mess me up, but then I might not be able to accomplish this. And what fun would that be?”

“Way to lower expectations,” she said.

He fanned the deck on the bar before her.

“Turn around,” she said.

If she looked at more than one card, he was cooked: there were fifty-one jacks of spades before her. But he turned his back without hesitation. At least that way he could easily prep for reswapping the decks.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ve chosen a card.”

“You thought hard about it? You put it back?” he asked, still turned away from her.

“Yep.”

He swiveled around, scooped up the fan in his left hand, and then appeared to pass it to his right. In fact, the forcing deck stayed tucked in the meat of his wide left palm and then dropped soundlessly into his lap. He concentrated intently on the legit deck, now returned to the stage. So did she. He held it as delicately as a baby bird.

“Are you going to shuffle those?” she asked.

“You want me to?”

She considered. “Yeah.”

He looked concerned. Then he shuffled the hell out of that deck. His riffles were as quick as machinery but as smooth as wavelets meeting on the sand. Crak-crak went the deck halves as he rapped their sides on each other before knitting them together like a zipper; a tiny whir rose from their arched congress. He stopped. “Here, I think,” he said, then he held the deck delicately again. “The card you chose is on top. Go ahead and look.”

She reached out to take it.

“Wait!” He said that so loud that the barman jumped a little and a man with horse-head cuff links lowered his Financial Times . She snatched her hand back and then looked sheepish and then annoyed. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I screwed up.” He shuffled the deck for another thirty seconds and then re-offered it to her.

“You sure?” she asked, all scolding.

“I’m sure.”

She plucked the top card from the deck and brought it to her vision.

This is actually the hardest part: enduring the disappointment in the eyes of the mark when the wrong card is drawn. He could see in her dark eyes the hope change to something like hurt. She twirled the card between two fingers for him to see — a seven of diamonds.

“That wasn’t it?” he asked lamely. She shook her head. He looked genuinely embarrassed. Once, the mark had by chance drawn the same card as he had forced, and Mark had had to act all pleased with himself when in fact he was wondering how he was going to get the force card from the woman’s hatband. You could, of course, remove the force card from the legit deck before this stage in the routine, but that was one more maneuver that could be spotted. More than two or three close-up techniques was too many for a routine. The illusion lay elsewhere.

“Fucking sevens,” he said under his breath.

“Try it again,” she said to him quickly, as if he had just fallen off his bike.

“It’s not really like that,” he said grumpily. Then he brightened a bit. “Maybe it’s the next one.”

She was game and drew the next card. Nope. Even the air around them seemed to wilt.

“Okay, I’m going to have to actually draw the card to the top. This is kind of an advanced maneuver.” He cupped the deck in front of himself at eye level, stared daggers at it.

“Okay, now draw the top card. It’s yours.”

She regarded him suspiciously. She drew the top card. This time, she could not even meet his gaze. She flopped the card down before him.

“I take it the king of diamonds was not your card?”

She shook her head.

“Was your card a king at least?”

She shook her head again. “You want to know what my card was?”

It is when they ask this that you can stop.

“No,” he said, convincingly deflated.

“You want another drink?” she asked.

“Might as well.”

She ordered a glass of wine for him and one for herself. She raised her glass to him, but he was already gulping his, so they were both embarrassed. She returned to her notebook.

“You have a stage name?” she asked him a minute later. “Maybe you need a stage name.”

“A stage name? You think that’s the problem?” he asked. “How about Deveraux the Baffled?”

“That’s pretty good. Is Deveraux your real name? What kind of a name is that?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he said.

“Oh, sorry.”

“I’m kidding. Yeah. It’s my name. It’s Acadian.”

“Acadian? You mean, like, Cajun?”

“Well, that makes me feel rather like a chicken dish, but yeah.”

The SineCo rep approached from behind.

“Mr. Deveraux? Sorry to keep you waiting. It seems that the location of your meeting has changed. I have passage for you to Hong Kong. Will that be all right?”

Hong Kong. He’d never been. Odd, because Mark could have sworn that Straw said that Sine Wave had been up in the fjords last week. “Oh, that’s fine. Thank you for seeing to that.” So reasonable. He tried to note whether Lola had gotten any of this: Hong Kong, location changed, his unperturbedness.