Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!
Yours in magic,
Brad Corzo
Chair, Panel Selection Committee, World of Magic
The link opened a PDF grid that was hard to navigate on my phone, but I did my best. Some of the names I knew from years ago, though many were new to me—just as my name would be unfamiliar to the newer magicians attending.
I scanned the grid, scrolling, looking for my name. Finally, there it was.
Reading the event title, I felt my stomach twist.
Room: Exhibition Hall E
Event Title: Magic Safety with Cal Murrow
Event Type: Presentation/Discussion
Event Details: Working with flash paper? Knives? Firearms? Rope? Even magicians working with everyday objects can expose themselves and their audience to risk and injury. Renowned stage magician Cal Murrow, with the help of Sergeant Roy Sturgis, NYPD, and New Jersey native Natalie “Card-in-the-Eye” Webb (have no fear, folks, she’ll only be talking!), will lead this discussion aimed at reducing the chance of accidents, injuries, and lawsuits.
I stared at my phone, thinking: What a sucker I am.
Thinking: I should have fucking known.
I should have known I wouldn’t be forgiven. Not after ten years, not ever. Not as long as they could still remind me I didn’t belong. Who exactly “they” were I could only wonder. The whole selection committee? Or just its chair? My email to Corzo should have been nicer, fine, I should’ve left out the Boy Scout stuff. But damn.
Mick Shane, it occurred to me, must be getting a good laugh.
The question of exactly how the selection committee had come to learn about my playing-card incident interested me for all of about two seconds. Then I realized one of the lawyers must have tweeted it, or posted about it, or blogged about it, or mentioned it in a discussion forum … all it would have taken was for the Venn diagram of personal injury attorneys and magic enthusiasts to have an overlap of one. One lawyer to get the magic community gossiping. The only real surprise was my own foolishness in assuming that somehow word wouldn’t get out. That the story of my Newark mishap would have died quietly in the Hyatt ballroom on that icy night, or at worst been the subject of some water-cooler gossip the next day.
I screamed in my car. I wanted to hit someone and took it out on the steering wheel, which blared in the parking lot. How could I have been so naive as to think the magic fraternity, this brotherhood, would simply welcome me back?
I would think long and hard about the email I was going to send Brad Corzo.
Except: No, I wouldn’t. I was done with all that. And there were far more pressing matters.
It was late, almost midnight. So what? I made the call. When it went to voicemail I hung up and, frustrated, furious, I stomped on the accelerator and pulled onto the road way too close to another car. His horn blared. I gave him the finger in my rearview—it wasn’t his fault, but fuck him anyway—and then my phone buzzed and I took the call.
“Do you still need a partner?” I blurted out.
Ellen’s pause, only a second or two, felt endless. “What’s going on? Are you having a change of heart?”
“Yes or no. Do you still need a partner?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And you would teach me? Show me what you know?”
I sped through a yellow light.
“Natalie, if you agree to this, I’ll teach you everything. Then we’ll play one night of poker and walk away with a million dollars.”
I almost drove off the road. “Say that again.”
“Your take would be twenty percent.”
My god, what was she involved in? What the hell was this? I had been hoping for maybe a couple of thousand dollars to jump-start things—some dollars into the Lou Husk fund, or maybe I could get my car repaired. But two hundred thousand?
“I can’t do that,” I said, cursing myself. I couldn’t believe I was already reneging. But it was too much. Too criminal.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Of course you can.”
“For that kind of money…. it’s too dangerous.”
“I promise you it isn’t,” she said.
“You have to be straight with me.”
“I’m being straight,” she said. “The players are all businessmen. They’re really wealthy, but they’re respectable. I’m telling you, this isn’t some floating, high-stakes, backroom game.”
Two hundred thousand dollars. To say no would be madness. To say yes would mean committing to being … what? A cardsharp? No. That was just some fancy word. A thief. A criminal. Webbs weren’t criminals. When I told Brock that, I’d meant it.
“It’s just a high-dollar home game,” she was saying. “The guy hosting it has this mansion on the water. You even know him.”
“Huh?”
“Not know him. I mean you know who he is. He’s running for office. They have this monthly game at his home, and once a year—”
“Wait,” I said.
Businessman. Mansion by the water.
“They do this special thing where—”
“Wait. Stop. Ellen, just stop talking.” My fingers felt numb on the steering wheel. I tried to catch my breath. “Is it Victor Flowers?” Silence on the other end. I thought the call might have been disconnected. “Ellen?”
Then: “Am I allowed to talk now?”
“Yes. Talk.”
“Victor Flowers. That’s right. He’s actually a huge gambler. Nobody knows it. But yeah.”
“Your plan is to take Victor Flowers’s money,” I said.
“His and three other guys’, yeah,” Ellen said.
I wasn’t in my car any longer. I was at a mansion by the water. “Victor Flowers takes a helicopter to work,” I managed to say. It was the best I could do.
“Does he? Well, that makes sense. He’s rich as fuck. I’m telling you, Natalie, for these guys it won’t even be a big loss. We can do it. It’ll work. But there’s a lot to prepare, and not a lot of time. So Nat?”
I was still vaguely aware of hearing Ellen’s voice on the phone, but my car’s interior, the dashboard, the doors, the windshield, everything had dissolved around me, and I was smelling meat cooking on
