It was the most sense anyone had made all night. He poured, and we drank.
“So now that I’m your lawyer,” he said, “I would like to give you a piece of advice. May I do that?”
The Scotch had steadied me a little. I was now a woman with a lawyer who gave her advice. “Sure,” I said.
“You should be working with larger objects,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I mean cards? Coins? Who can see any of that from across a conference room?”
The ubiquitous criticism of the close-up magician. Brock McKnight might have been unique among the lawyers—he alone had followed me, the perpetrator, into the elevator. Still, he was a typical layperson, and despite myself I felt my hackles rise. “It’s called sleight of hand,” I said. “It’s what I do.”
“Still …” He finished his drink. “You do bigger stuff, it might go over better.”
The ice storm was keeping me here. My lawyer’s critique of my show was repelling me to the car. The Scotch was keeping me here. Two against one. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’m a professional performer.”
When he laughed, I assumed it was because I had hardly demonstrated my professionalism tonight. But that wasn’t it. “Darling,” he said, “everybody in that ballroom is a professional performer. We’re litigators!” He shifted in his bar stool and got his wallet from his pants pocket. The business card he offered me was curved to the shape of his ass, like a little canoe on the river You’re Fucked.
“Come by my office tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “By then I’ll have something on our pal Lou and we’ll get the paperwork squared away.” He saw me looking at the card. “Sliding scale,” he said, “I promise,” and I took it. Then, almost as if it were an afterthought: “By the way, that trick with the queens? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of card tricks in my day, but with you it’s like another thing entirely. So come on—how’d you do it?”
The Four Queens is very straightforward to watch. I show the queens and lay them on the table, facedown, in a square. Then I lay three additional cards on top of each of the queens, so there are four stacks of four cards. One by one, the queens migrate to a single stack.
How did I do it? I did it by studying with a magician named Jack Clarion. I did it by learning the palms and passes and false shuffles in dozens of books on card manipulation, slowly, over many years and thousands of hours. I did it by developing my own routines with original patter to counterpoint the physical technique, until the moves were so undetectable you’d be fooled from a foot away, and until the routine was so well rehearsed that you could smash a lamp over my head and it wouldn’t affect my timing.
“Sorry,” I said. “It would violate the magician’s oath.”
Brock burst out laughing. “Are you for real?” He made himself stop laughing. “It’s not like you’re giving up the launch codes.”
“Sorry,” I said.
He reached into his wallet again and removed a bill. A hundred dollars. “I assume the physical therapists are withholding payment?”
“I’m not gonna take your money,” I said.
“What, you don’t take tips?”
I was immediately ready with my crude response, the result of too many bachelor parties—
Honey, I take the whole thing.
—but it was late, and I was exhausted and worried and had no taste for posturing.
“Yeah, I take tips,” I said.
“Well then?” He waited until my fingertips were touching the bill. “By the way, how’d you do that trick with the four queens?”
I let go of the bill.
“A hundred isn’t enough?”
“It’s not that.”
“The oath?” he asked, eyebrow cocked.
“The oath.”
It wasn’t the oath. In truth, I didn’t especially care anymore about a couple of sentences uttered a million years ago in front of a handful of middle-aged men. But I did care about the shred of dignity I might still have at the end of the night. Then again, wasn’t paying my heating bill dignified?
As if reading my mind, Brock set the bill on the bar. “Take it,” he said.
I was about to stuff the hundred dollars into my pants pocket when instead I held it up in front of him. Slowly, I tore the bill in half, then in half again. I crushed the four pieces into a small wad, tighter and tighter, until there was nothing at all left between my fingertips. I showed the lawyer my empty hands, front and back.
My hands were still shaking a little, something that would persist for the next eleven days (until in a cold, windswept parking lot they would suddenly become still again). I took a drink as a bit of misdirection.
“You know, it’s a shame,” Brock said, “a woman with your talents stuck performing for people like us.”
“It’s an honest living,” I said lamely.
“Maybe that’s your problem,” he said.
“What is?”
“I know a guy. Another magician of a sort. He does very well playing poker against people like me. I’m talking world-class.”
“If he told you he’s a card cheat, then he isn’t world-class.”
“I said guys like me. I’m his lawyer. There’s confidentiality between us.”
“You obviously consider it a sacred trust.”
“Natalie, I’m trying to help you,” he said. “You could earn real money if you’re even half as good as my guy.”
I looked him in the eye and said, “Webbs aren’t criminals.”
I had meant it, but my words sounded even to me like Scotch-influenced melodrama. And then there was the matter of the playing card I’d thrown, and how the question of whether or not I was a criminal was very much up in the air.
“Duly noted,” Brock said, and slid off his bar stool again. “Come by tomorrow. Two o’clock?”
“All right,” I said.
He shook my hand again. “You be careful getting home to those birds. I’m going upstairs to see
