The way Victor avoided the casinos, she told me, was to host his own game. High-stakes Texas Hold’em. They met monthly, though once a year they played tournament-style for even higher stakes: $250,000 buy-in.
“One winner,” Ellen explained. “No second or third place. Whoever wins gets the entire million and a half.”
“Rich people are insane,” I concluded.
She smiled. “These guys are very sane and predictable. That’s why we can go in and take their money. It’s why on January first you’re gonna make two hundred thousand dollars.”
I had a habit of always converting money into how much my father lost at the roulette wheel all those years ago. The busted car I drove had cost me two thousand dollars: just under two percent of my father’s loss. Last year, I made twenty-six thousand dollars doing magic: about a quarter of my father’s loss at the roulette wheel.
My take for one night of poker would be almost twice what my father had lost.
“I’m sure you have everything planned out,” I said to Ellen.
“I do.”
“But what if we get caught?”
She shook her head. “Can’t happen.”
“It can always happen.”
“Not the way I’m planning it.”
We were still seated at my bistro table, plates in front of us, in my lousy apartment. This talk of stealing a fortune felt very abstract, and I needed it to feel real.
“Show me the false deal,” I said.
“I told you I would.”
“Please. Show me now.” I stood up to put my plate and silverware into the sink. I returned with a pack of cards and handed it to her.
“Natalie, the deal … it’s a good move, but that’s all it is. Don’t lose the forest for the trees. What we have to do—it’s a lot more than a single move.”
Undoubtedly true. But all of this would only become real to me when she revealed her secret. I replied: “Show. The. Move.”
She sighed, pushed her plate aside, and slid the cards out of the pack. “Have a seat,” she said as she began to shuffle the cards. Her fingernails were still ragged, her hands were dry, but in her card handling she was nothing like the hesitant amateur I’d seen in Atlantic City. She made a few cuts, and then: she did it. She made everything real.
“Second from the bottom,” she said. “I learned it as the Greek deal. Done right it’s invisible, and you can flash the bottom card so the other players think they’re gaining an advantage.”
I remembered, during the game in Atlantic City, how she’d occasionally given us all an “accidental” peek at the bottom card before dealing from the top of the deck. Or so it had looked. In actuality, she was sliding the bottom card out of the way and false dealing from the card just above it.
“Learn the Greek deal,” she said, “and you’ll never need to bottom deal again.”
“Do it,” I said, and watched as Ellen—how did she handle the cards so well with such small hands?—fanned the deck to locate the four aces, which she set at the bottom of the deck. She placed another card underneath. Then she dealt out four hands of four cards each. She turned over her own pile to reveal the four aces.
I was glad not to have misremembered the level of her talent. Or maybe I had, because her deal tonight was better than it had been in Atlantic City. This time I was watching for it—no distractions, no misdirection—and yet I caught not a whiff of the false deal.
“In magicians’ terminology,” I said, “that is called fucking amazing. Teach it to me.”
She was gathering up the cards. “We have a lot to do tonight.”
“I know we do. But I gave up magic last night. So how about throwing me a bone?”
She squared up the stack of cards in front of her. “Get a second deck,” she said.
By the time I had attained a halting, awkward grasp of the Greek deal the bottle of wine was long gone. The table was cleared and we had dug into a package of cookies I’d bought for the occasion. Julius and Ethel had both started cooing. Their concerts were unpredictable.
“You use the doves in your act, I assume,” Ellen said.
“Actually, they’re just pets.”
“Yeah, birds freak me out. They’re like rats with wings.”
“Some people have rats for pets, too,” I said.
“Yuck.” She made a face. “No offense. By the way, Victor and his friends think my name is Emily Ross, wealthy descendant of Horace Smith.”
“Who?”
“Of the Smith and Wesson company.”
“Lucky for you.”
“You said it. Victor ate up my own little piece of Americana, just like I knew he would. My great-great-great-granddad Horace started out inventing a new method for killing whales: an exploding bullet.”
“How very disgusting.”
“Victor was extremely interested in my entrepreneurial ancestry, which I happened to mention at a reception for Notes for Kids last winter. We had a lovely conversation. He was intrigued by my pro-gun-control stance even though it hurt my personal fortune.” She smiled. “I left him knowing two things about me: I had money to donate, and I was a serious poker player who, like him, hated the public nature of casinos. Next day, I got the call.”
While she spoke, I was dealing second-from-the-bottom cards over and over. “How’d you know he played poker?”
“Not everyone’s as good at keeping secrets as we are.”
Fair enough. “So you played in Victor Flowers’s home game for a year. When did you first start thinking about a big take?”
“I figured just getting invited to their regular game was a major score. But the moment they started talking about their annual tournament, I knew. It’s perfect, Natalie. There’s no second buy-in. That makes planning easier. But there are other things, too, like Victor not hiring a dealer. He likes it to be a game among friends. I guess he thinks a hired
