Still, he was swimming in unsafe waters. With a bottom deal that bad, someone was going to catch him. Maybe not tonight, but someday. And what then? It didn’t matter if the buy-in was four hundred or four thousand. Nobody liked to be cheated.
This storm seemed to brew nowhere else but in my mind, however, because suddenly the deal was done, and Ace set the deck down, and we each peeked at our two hole cards, and Ellen, sitting left of the big blind, made the first raise, and everything was so damn ordinary.
My cards stank, which was just as well. I folded and sat in quiet disgust. I thought about the money I had already paid Ace. I thought about the hope I’d invested in this trip and how it was all for nothing. Even if Ace won some money tonight, my cardsharp was a disaster. Which made me a disaster by association.
I decided to get very drunk.
The booze was free, and I liked booze, and so I would drink some of my losses back, and the best part was that no one would notice how inebriated I became, because no matter what I did—shout incoherently, strip naked—my drunkenness would be less obvious than Ace’s bottom deal.
I got up and poured myself a generous refill of whiskey, neat. By the time the river card was laid on the table, it was clear that Ace wasn’t going to win big. He’d missed his three-of-a-kind, and the pot of chips on the table never got very large anyway. I laughed inwardly (and perhaps a little outwardly—the whiskey was hitting me just right) at the poetic justice.
Then came more poetic justice. He lost the hand to Ellen—Ellen—who’d stayed in the betting and taken the pot with two pairs: jacks and threes.
“Wow,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by the attention. “That was … wow.”
Watching her collect the chips, I wondered if Ethan had undersold his niece’s “half bad” poker skills. I set down my drink and kept a closer eye on her. Not for any reason. I knew she was only a kindergarten teacher. Maybe I was hoping to be surprised by something, anything, now that my cheat had exposed himself as a fool at the card table.
When it was Ellen’s deal three hands later, she shuffled the cards with the stiff hands of a beginner. Her fingers were small, and they strained on the riffle shuffle, the bottom card flashing a little. She squared up the deck and set it to her right. I tapped the deck, same as everyone had been doing for at least a dozen hands now.
She picked up the cards and began to deal, and everything changed forever.
10
When did you first get interested in magic?
I’m often asked that. I was eight when Victor Flowers handed me my first magic kit, thirteen when Jack Clarion gave me my first sleight of hand lesson. Sometime between those two events I remember watching a magician turn a cobra into a duck on TV. I don’t remember who the magician was, but I clearly recall the brain-twisting feeling of seeing something that simply could not be.
That was how it was now. I was seeing what I couldn’t be seeing. Only this was so much better, so much more, because there was no TV and it happened two feet from my face.
Without the distraction of Ethan’s sourdough lecture or the benefit of large hands, Ellen quietly dealt herself the ace and seven of spades while dealing Carlo the king and five of spades, while also dealing three additional spades to the board. They both had flushes, but hers was the winning hand.
Here’s the thing. I never saw her cull the cards. The culling was so invisible, I would have thought she’d swapped in a cold deck, except if she’d used a cold deck then she wouldn’t have needed a false deal. And the false deal was what I detected, and why I suspected Ellen’s winning hand was more than big luck.
I barely detected it, though.
It was more a sense than a sighting. My position, on her immediate right, was the easiest place to catch a false deal, yet I saw nothing. Her deal was inaudible, the pacing perfect. I knew she wasn’t dealing from the bottom, because I kept snatching glimpses of the bottom card. So what was it, then?
By the time the hand was done and she had collected the chips, I realized it wasn’t the deal itself that had put me on alert. It was her face. How she wasn’t watching the cards as she dealt. That was her error. Beginners watch the cards as they deal. Or maybe it wasn’t her face. Or maybe I was imagining everything, though I didn’t think so. I began to suspect that Carlo Desoto’s financial woes weren’t a well-kept secret. And that Ellen was specifically targeting him as she played, same as Ace was—only she was doing it a thousand times better.
She won the largest pot of the night, over three hundred. And the way she smiled awkwardly through it all, seemingly embarrassed to be gathering up so many chips—it was Oscar caliber. Her outfit—that sweater, those shoes—I now saw it for what it was: a costume. Even her posture at the table, hunched over, making herself small. And the bitten-down fingernails. I had driven to Atlantic City with an amateur, but sitting at my table was a pro.
She could act, she could play poker, she could control the cards, but the deal had my brain at war with itself. A cobra turns into a duck. Impossible. But it happened. So easy, so pure. I didn’t see the move when Ellen dealt, and
