“He’d get along well with my upstairs neighbor,” I said.
“Huh?”
“She rescues dogs.”
“Oh. I didn’t even know who he was until he’d tipped the dealer some huge amount and left the table. Then everyone started going crazy.” She took a bite of her egg roll. “How about you? You ever do magic for anyone big?”
I had told this story before many times. “Another Michael, actually. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Last name Jackson?”
Her eyes widened. “Get the fuck out.”
I smiled.
“I can’t believe you just beat out my Michael Phelps story. What was the occasion?”
“There wasn’t one,” I said. “Not one I knew of, anyway. This was back in ’04.” I told Ellen about how Michael had been in New York, recording. I was only seventeen—this was just a few months after my second-place finish at the WOM convention, during that astonishing year of touring. My mother drove me into the city from Jersey, then left me at the curb so I could walk into the recording studio alone. I was led to a small conference room just inside the entrance, and once I was set up a dozen or so people entered. I have no idea who they were. Studio staff or managers or whoever. I stood at the front of the room, and they sat around the conference table, turning their chairs to face me. Then Michael came in and sat front and center and I did my twenty-minute show and left.
“What was he like?”
“He didn’t say much. One of the tricks involved a signed playing card, and after the show he told me to keep it.”
“Do you still have it?”
I shook my head. “Stupid me, I lost it in a move.”
“Too bad,” she said. “It’s probably worth a lot of money.”
What I omitted from my Michael Jackson story—this time, and every time I told it—was how, afterward, he had laid a hand, ungloved, on my arm and smiled at me and said, I just know you’re going to be a big star, Natalie. And I omitted the part where, because I was seventeen, and because I had shows lined up in London and Lisbon, and because the prognostication had come from Michael Jackson himself, I believed him with every cell in my body.
“I’ve told you before,” Ellen was saying, “your friend in A.C. did a fine job nullifying the cut. He really did.”
“Not my friend,” I reminded her.
We had cleared dinner from the table. Each of us now had a deck of cards out. “My point is, that’s not gonna work here. These men aren’t rubes. Victor’s gonna cut the cards before I deal.”
I was confused. Unless: “Victor’s not in on it, is he?”
She watched my face, saw the gears churning.
“Nope,” she said.
“He’s really gonna cut the cards?” I asked. “Like a legit cut?”
“Yes.”
“And then you’ll be dealing the deck that I stacked?”
“Come on, Nat, you’re the award-winning magician. Figure it out.”
I didn’t like knowing a method existed that I couldn’t deduce right away. I considered Ellen’s bar scam. The most direct path from A to B.
“Don’t feel bad,” Ellen said. “Though I must tell you, if you were a real card cheat, you’d think this was pretty easy.”
“If it’s so easy, then why isn’t everyone doing it?”
“I meant easy to deduce. Hard to execute. That’s a big clue, by the way.”
Yes, it was. I was pretty sure I knew now, but I was still foggy on how it all fit together. “Some kind of pass,” I said, and she smiled a little. All card magicians learned the classic pass—a very elegant, though difficult, secret cut used to move a card to the top or bottom of the deck—but many opted for other, easier methods. (In my experience, the classic pass was mainly useful for magicians to judge the technical abilities of other magicians.)
“How do you know where to get the break in the deck?”
Her half smile became a whole one. “Most of the time, you don’t need one. The guy cutting the cards doesn’t complete the cut. He leaves the two halves side by side on the table, and I can do a spin pass. It makes the age-old problem of the cut simply vanish.”
None of this was intuitive for me because I performed standing up. I played to the audience, not to other people seated around a table. So the moves I used—they were different moves. But from somewhere in the back of my brain a move came to me: “The Charlie Miller table pass.”
“What the hell’s that?” Ellen asked.
I cut the deck and did a fairly poor version of the Charlie Miller, where under the guise of completing the cut and gathering the cards I reset the two halves in their original order, undoing the cut.
“That is a spin pass,” she said. It was true. In doing the move, half the deck gets quickly spun 180 degrees.
“I learned it as the Charlie Miller table pass.”
“Tomato, tomahto,” she said. “And you didn’t learn it very well.”
“It’s not something I ever use,” I said.
“Well, done right … here. Cut.” She showed me the top card and handed me her deck. I lifted half the pack and set it beside the other half. She completed the cut and gathered the cards. Showed me the top card: it was the same card.
I’d had no idea the move was worth the effort. But it was. Now in addition to the Greek deal, here was another significant lapse in my training. I clapped softly for Ellen. She held up a hand: no applause necessary.
“What if he completes the cut?” I asked.
“What if who does?”
“You said the players usually don’t complete the cut. But what if they do?”
“Just to be safe, the shuffler—you—will crimp the bottom card before handing over the deck to be cut.”
Of course. After the cut, Ellen would feel the crimped card and do a more traditional pass so the deck would revert to how it was before the cut. Like she had
