“Why don’t you give Milo Dunning a ring.”
Magic Milo? “Milo’s the worst,” I said.
“Nah, he’s all right.” That was Jack’s code for: he spends a lot of money in my shop. “And this is for retirees? Milo’s your man.”
Jack gave me Milo’s number, and then we brainstormed a couple of other magicians in case Milo wasn’t available.
“Drink at least three Gatorades a day,” Jack said. “The big size. Otherwise, you aren’t staying hydrated enough.”
“Sure, Jack.”
“You don’t want to mess with the flu. You want to stay hydrated.”
“All right.”
“Your urine should be clear, not yellow.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
Magic Milo was also an endodontist. He was one of those guys who must’ve owned dozens of magic convention T-shirts, an enthusiastic amateur for whom the money from the occasional gig didn’t matter because he made plenty doing root canals.
He was available. And as he thanked me again and again, I was thinking about my other December events—bachelor party in Hoboken, private holiday party in Far Hills, corporate event in New Brunswick. I was becoming nauseated thinking about having to paste on a smile and go through with all those shows.
“Hey, Milo,” I said, cutting short his anecdote about having visited Hartford several years before, and touring Mark Twain’s house, and how it really was worth seeing next time I went there.
“That Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court …” He laughed, high-pitched and honking.
“Hey, Milo …” I cringed a little, knowing the bachelor party would not go well. But he would do all right with the other shows. “What does the rest of your December look like?”
Ellen arrived after school let out on Tuesday carrying a plastic bag, whose contents she dumped onto my bistro table. Eighteen sealed decks of playing cards.
“Victor always starts the night with two sealed decks. So you need to be practicing with fresh cards. Tomorrow, throw the first pack away and open a new one. Every day, a new pack, understand?”
“All right,” I told her.
“You say that, but you have a trash bag for a car window,” she said. “A fortune is riding on this game, and I’ve made it easy for you: eighteen days, eighteen decks. Don’t be stingy with the cards.” She turned to face the birds, which had started cooing—first one, then the other.
“They do that a lot,” she said.
“I barely notice anymore,” I told her.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You’re a magician with doves but you don’t use them in your act? What’s up with that?”
I told her about buying them when I was in high school, and how I hadn’t given much thought to the tricks beforehand. “Once I learned how the tricks were done, I felt bad stuffing them into tiny pouches and into tight harnesses made of fishing line. And to make a bird stay quiet and still? You have to flip it over onto its back superfast. Basically, you’re giving it lots of g-force to make it pass out.”
“No kidding,” she said.
“Yeah. It all seemed cruel.” I vividly remembered all those years back, trying the move on Ethel, flipping the bird upside down but not fast enough, then doing it again, harder, and the frightened bird was suddenly, eerily motionless, her soft body warm in my hands, her living heart beating against my fingers.
“Huh. I never knew that.” She smiled. “You’re a good egg, Natalie Webb.”
She asked me for paper and a pen and drew a map of Victor’s poker room, which was also a movie screening room and billiard room and wet bar. I could have lived happily in that one room.
She added the poker table to her sketch and reminded me that we had to get Victor sitting between the two of us. “You’ll only have a few minutes after we arrive to befriend him,” she said. “To intrigue him so he’ll want to sit next to you.”
“You want me to flirt with him?”
“I don’t even know if he likes women. But he likes being a good host. So you’re going to be interested in everything he has to say, and stick close to him, and then you’ll ask him to sit next to you.”
We got Chinese takeout from the place down the street, and while we ate she told me more about the other players who’d be at the game: Ian McDonald, Jason Panella, and Danny Squire. “Danny’s gonna seem intimidating,” Ellen said, “but don’t let him bother you. He’s just brash and an aggressive bettor.”
Ian McDonald, I learned, was a hedge fund manager, which was a familiar phrase that meant nothing to me.
“It means,” Ellen said, “that he invests a lot of nothing and bets against the economy to make rich people richer.”
“He sounds like a lovely man,” I said.
Ellen smiled. “It’s a better con than either of us will ever pull off.”
And then there was Jason Panella, who made no secret about having inherited his money from his grandfather, who had started a pharmaceutical company that grew to a billion-dollar enterprise before he sold it to Johnson & Johnson.
“He sits on some boards,” Ellen said, “though his main jobs seem to be skiing and scuba diving, depending on the season.”
“How did they react to having a woman in their game?” I asked.
“I think they like it. They can show off a little, and I know how to play the part of a girl who’s just one of the guys. The first time I went, I told them about the time I played against Michael Phelps and took his money. That sold them.”
“Is it true?”
“About five years ago, in Atlantic City.”
“I didn’t think you liked A.C.”
“I don’t, but every so often I’ll play in a casino to keep my poker chops up and do some intel—try to get new leads on home games. I was already at the table when he took the empty seat next to me. I thought he was reasonably attractive so I said something like, ‘How’s it going?’ and he said, ‘I just
