Club Deception

by Sarah Skilton

  The head shave and piercings were new. Visible, daily reminders that she’d never again be, or even resemble, the demure, naive, and outright stupid girl she’d been in grad school.

  Landon arrived ten minutes late. She saw him first and watched him searching for her. His worried eyes darted around the restaurant, and he seemed smaller, more life-size, now that he wasn’t onstage. He also looked tired. Expending so much confidence and energy over a long, uninterrupted stretch of time must have taken a toll.

  With a deep breath and a quick reminder to herself (You need this job, you need this job), she strode over to greet him.

  “You’re here,” she said flatly.

  He held out his hand. “Hi, Kammy, thanks for your patience,” he said warmly.

  She corrected his pronunciation. “Kai-may. Like ‘My Way’ from your favorite singer. It’s a Hawaiian name.”

  “But you’re Korean, right?”

  “Korean American, third generation. We aren’t super traditional. I lived in LA till I was twelve, but my parents always wanted to move to Hawaii, so my name was their way of making sure it happened, I guess.” She hadn’t meant to say all that. The less he knew about her, the better.

  “Cool, cool. Hey listen, I’m sorry it took me so long to get out of there.”

  “I understand. You were probably being swarmed with ‘honeys,’” she said sarcastically.

  “What? Uh, no, just some guys wanting to talk about forced spreads—”

  “Jesus!”

  “It’s a card term,” he interjected quickly, and showed her the deck in his hand as if to prove it. His hands were so large that the deck fit in his palm without her noticing it. “Anyway, sorry again to keep you waiting.”

  She was thrown by his apology, and therefore irritated by it; he wasn’t allowed to behave the way he had onstage and then switch to someone decent in private.

  Why is he being nice? What’s his angle? With her makeup removed and shaved head on display, she’d purposefully “uglified” herself (in the tame, predictable view of men like Landon, at least) so there was no reason for him to be gentle with her.

  Still, she had to admit that if Landon’s pickup techniques worked—and that was a big “if”—it wasn’t because of some secret, or his ability to do magic tricks. It was because of the way he looked. Up close, he was startlingly attractive; his perfectly symmetrical face, clear brown skin, and charming smile were distracting, and unfair. Who among his prey would stand a chance?

  She motioned to the hostess that they were ready for a table.

  When they reached it, Landon pulled Kaimi’s chair out for her.

  But it felt like a slimy, premeditated gesture instead of a considerate one.

  She made a point of grabbing the chair herself.

  “What’d you think of the show?” he asked once their drinks had been ordered. Iced tea for her, water with lemon for him.

  “‘Half plus seven’?” she said. “Really? You’re incapable of enjoying the company of someone born the same decade as you? It would just be too disgusting to spend time with a girl who might actually share the same cultural references and touchstones?”

  He lowered his voice. “Hey, c’mon, between you and me, I don’t believe the half-plus-seven thing.”

  “You were selling it pretty hard.”

  “Because that’s what I do. Sell it. It’s just a persona, for the job. If I legitimize what they think they want, they’ll subscribe to my newsletter, which is where I make my real money.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I sort of figured that out the seventeenth time you mentioned the newsletter. But if you legitimize what you think they want, you make life even harder for women than it already is.” Asshole.

  He took a long sip of his water. His voice was likely shot from the show. “But it’s not real. It’s my day job. I’m sort of like a con artist, if you want to look at it that way.”

  “Don’t you mean pickup artist?”

  “No, it’s not like that, really. I can explain it to you, if you want—”

  She brushed him off with a flick of her hand. “No, forget it, I don’t care. Let’s talk about why we’re here. You need help selling some artwork?”

  “Not artwork like a painting, but…It’s a rare and unique magical item.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay…” Her specialty was the Old Masters, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Let’s see it.”

  He retrieved an acid-free manila envelope from his briefcase (at least he wasn’t clueless about storage) but hesitated to hand it over.

  She rolled her eyes. “If we’re going to work together you’ll have to trust me with the merchandise.”

  He reluctantly slid the manila envelope across the table to her. She undid the clasp and reached inside with her thumb and forefinger, expecting to pull out an eight-by-ten photo of some kind of historical artifact. Instead the item itself was inside, held together in a plastic, see-through dust cover: a sheaf of five wrinkled papers, covered with small, ink-splattered writing, diagrams, and margin notes. Oddly, the set was torn diagonally in half.

  She frowned. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “There is no rest of it. This is all I’ve got.”

  She squinted at the pages in the poor lighting of the café. “I’ll need a QDE to verify this, but I want to say 1905?”

  He nodded. “Close. It’s 1902.”

  “And these wormholes look real. Congrats, you’re the proud owner of some old paper.” She knew she shouldn’t antagonize a potential source of income, but the meeting felt hopeless. It’s not like she could look this up on Artnet for estimates or comps. And unless the potential QDE or graphologist she hired could verify, she had nothing.

  He bristled. “Trust me, these are worth a lot.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He leaned in, expecting her to follow suit. But she remained fixed, straight-backed in her chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “Never-before-published, unedited, handwritten pages by S. W. Erdnase.” He stared at her and raised his eyebrows, waiting for a reaction.

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  Landon plucked a green book from his briefcase and plopped it down in front of her.

  She read the title aloud. “The Expert at the Card Table. Who’s S. W. Erdnase?”

  “Good question. No one knows.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no one knows’?”

  “The book’s a classic. You can find it on the shelves of every magician and card cheat in the world, but no one knows who Erdnase was. Some people think his real name was E. S. Andrews—you know, S. W. Erdnase spelled backward—and others believe it combines the names of two people who were too scared to reveal their identities and lose social standing back in the day, since the book was written for card cheats.”

  “Okay. Well, there’s always hope in the art world that a master’s lost work will resurface, but does anyone reference these elsewhere? Are people looking for them?”

  “No, but wouldn’t that make it even more valuable? New Erdnase material that’s never been circulated or even hinted at…any magician would lose his mind to get his hands on it.”

  “Do you have other samples of his handwriting? How do you know it’s authentic?”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  She leaned back and folded her arms. “I’ll have to hire a graphologist and QDE—qualified document examiner—and that’ll cost extra.”

  She was sort of hoping he’d call the whole thing off, but it didn’t seem to faze him.

  “Do whatever you need to.”

  “You said in your email that your father bequeathed them to you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They didn’t belong to him, though, did they?” It was a stab in the dark, but his reaction told her she was right.

  “Well…” He smiled. “That’s sort of the tricky part.”

  “Uh-huh. Why are they torn? Was there some
kind of struggle?”

  “Look, I don’t know how he acquired them. But I didn’t steal them, okay? They simply came into my possession, and now I want to unload them. For the right price.”

  “Is it a shakedown?” she demanded. “You sell the first half, then raise the price for the second half?”

  “No, I’m telling you, there is no second half. If there was, he’d have left it to me. But I can’t exactly sell them to a historical society. They’re going to want to know the origin and chain of sale and all that.”

  “Yeah, how dare they?” she asked sarcastically.

  “Is this going to be a problem for you? Because I figured with your arrest, you’d be cool with it—”

  She stood up, furious. “How do you know about that?”

  Landon laughed, which made it ten times worse. “Relax, Kaimi.”

  On second thought, that’s what made it ten times worse.

  “Wow.” She fanned herself with her napkin and made an exaggerated swooning motion. “Nothing turns me on more than being told to relax by a guy I just met.”

  “Okay, okay, I apologize.”

  “It’s not a problem for me ethically,” she explained. “But it does limit the number of people we can sell to.”

  “All it means is that when you ask around, you tread carefully.”

  “Meaning…what? Is there some kind of magician black market? Because you’d be better at that than I am. Why do you even need me?”

  “Because you’re a woman.”

  She pulled at the skin next to her eyebrows. “I’m scared to ask why that’s relevant.”

  “I can’t approach any of these guys directly. It’s too risky. I need a go-between, I need you to get to them through their wives.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Club Deception has a monthly brunch for the wives and girlfriends of magician members. I’ll get you the password and you can buddy up to them, feel the place out. You’ll have to pose as my girlfriend.”

  Oh, the joy my life is, she thought. “Can I take a sample page with me?”

  He snatched the envelope from her and placed it back inside his briefcase. “The pages stay with me,” he said seriously. “They don’t leave my sight until they’re sold.”

  “At least send me a jpeg in case I need to prove their existence.”

  He nodded. “Okay. A quarter of a page. I don’t want any digital copies floating around or no one will be motivated to buy.”

  I can do this, she realized. Pose as his girlfriend, befriend some of the so-called magician wives, and laugh all the way to the bank.

  Because if she found a willing buyer, and the papers were worth as much as Landon seemed to think they were, Kaimi didn’t need Landon at all.

  She would steal the papers from him and sell them herself.

  Plus, it would be pure pleasure to rip him off.

  “Smile,” Kaimi said, and leapt into frame to take a selfie with Landon.

  Reflexively, he grinned for her camera phone. Click.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “Maintaining the illusion.”

  She pocketed her phone, got up from the table, and left him to pay the check.

  Felix

  From the outside, Merlin’s Wonderporium on Ventura Boulevard appeared to be a year-round Halloween store. The costumes in the window were top-notch, designed to lure in tourists seeking Guardians of the Galaxy masks or Avengers shields, but the bait and switch only lasted a few feet. Once you moved beyond the dress-up area, Merlin’s Wonderporium became another store entirely, mired in the past.

  Dusty straitjackets, handcuffs, and vintage coins filled the padlocked display cases in the center of the room. Old issues of Mahatma, Sphinx, Genii, and Linking Ring, encased in plastic, pressed against one another in three-foot-long collectors’ boxes, color-coded by month and year, all the way back to 1953.

  The employees, all men, were skilled at sleight of hand and happy to show off any products for sale.

  Felix Vicario, however, had recently been forbidden from demonstrating tricks. He sat behind the cash register, mournfully surfing porn on the owner’s slow-ass 2010 desktop computer. Normally he spent his downtime perfecting his overhand shuffles or coin rolls, but any of those movements might draw an audience, which was currently numero uno on the Forbidden List.

  He wasn’t allowed to showcase products to customers (even the “Hyuks” items—whoopee cushions and yo-yos—were off-limits). Without that ability, his only shot at earning commission was to match prospective customers with the right book for their skill level and interest. While Felix was stuck behind the counter ringing up orders, his asshole colleague, “Free Range” Spencer, got the advantage of moving about the floor and picking people off as they walked in.

  Sometimes Felix killed time on Tragic Magic, a Tumblr account dedicated to the most humiliating/hilarious clips of magician failures throughout the world.

  But mostly he looked at porn.

  * * *

  The incident that got him banned from demonstrating tricks had occurred a week earlier.

  His nemesis was a product called Foiled (retailing for $57.95) in which a magician wears a piece of foil covering his face, but, because of his psychic powers, proceeds to do anything he could do without a piece of foil covering his eyes, such as walk around a magic store. True, Felix hadn’t finished watching the instructional video or bothered to take Foiled for a test drive, but he was certain he’d guessed the method and he really wanted to impress the Georgetown girl and her parents visiting from DC.

  He must’ve missed a step, because the trick blew up in his face.

  With the foil wrapped tightly over his eyes, nose, and mouth, he tripped and fell headfirst into what should’ve been the counter. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, and while attempting to regain his balance, he pawed the father’s groin; the father yelled and pushed Felix backward, directly into the footstool he’d used earlier to remove a cape from the wall. The footstool banged his Achilles tendon and re-routed him into a stand-alone Hyuks display of gross-out toys, the containers of which toppled over onto the floor and split open. That, in turn, sent him crashing into the very counter that should’ve broken his fall in the first place. He knocked himself unconscious and landed with a thud facedown on the thin red carpet, surrounded by fake vomit and poop, which was how the paramedics found him after Georgetown Girl called 911.

  Besides playing the security camera footage for the other employees to laugh at, Felix’s boss, Roy, was deducting the cost of the damaged merchandise from Felix’s paychecks. It would be another week or two until his debt was clear, which was the only reason he still had a job.

  From the moment he returned from the ER, concussed and bruised, the pranks and mockery hadn’t stopped.

  Earlier today, Free Range Spencer had left out a Zorro mask on the counter, claiming Roy had offered to raise Felix’s pay by a dollar per hour if he wore it on the job.

  Racists, he thought. He was born and raised thirty miles north in Castaic, and had only been to Mexico twice. But dinero was dinero, and the quicker he replaced the Hyuks items, the cracked countertop, and the ruined Foiled, the quicker he’d have cash on hand to shore up his own collection of illusions.

  Besides, what was the big deal? He’d seen dudes dressed as the Statue of Liberty during tax season, spinning signs up and down Ventura. At least a Zorro mask was manly, and at least he was inside, where it was air-conditioned.

  Three hours later, Roy arrived for an inventory check.

  “What on God’s green earth possessed you to put on that mask?” he hollered. “Have you been ringing up customers that way?”

  “Spence said you…aw, man, fuck you guys.” Felix tore off the mask (retailing for $34.57, now added to his debt) and threw it at Spencer, who was practically crying with laughter. Spencer picked up a magic wand and made a slashing Z-mark in the air.

  “You’re having crap luck with masks,” Spencer taunted. “First Foile
d, now this. Have you considered another line of work?”

  “You know, I was reading somewhere there’s a shortage of clowns,” Roy added. “Supply and demand’s in your favor.”

  Felix and Spencer simultaneously gasped.

  The c-word was the worst insult one could sling in their line of work. A tense silence filled the shop.

  Then Spencer doubled down. “Try this on for size.” He chucked a handful of multiplying sponge balls (unnervingly similar to clown noses) at Felix, who batted them away.

  A year ago, when he played catcher for the 66ers, he’d had respect, a sports agent, and a shot at the majors. Now he used his muscular arms to fend off sponge balls.

  “Laugh it up,” he growled, “but just answer me this: Which one of us gets mad pussy, and which one of us has to take a class to learn how? Huh?”

  “Landon’s system works,” Spencer gritted out.

  Felix dug a hand into his pocket and retrieved the old school phone numbers he’d gotten that week, tossing the scraps of paper like confetti. “Runyon Canyon. All fit, all fine.”

  “Get out of here before I fire you,” Roy said mildly, though he took a moment to pick up one of the numbers and slide it in his wallet.

  “Can’t be late for your internship,” Spencer scoffed.

  Three times a week, Felix interned with Jonathan Fredericksson, Club Deception’s president. He was surprised that one of the biggest names in magic had hired him sight unseen after a brief phone interview, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the butt or whatever.

  His roommates thought he was insane for taking a nonpaying position, but what they didn’t understand was that it got him a free, all-access pass to the club, whose annual fees were unreal. Of course, Jonathan hadn’t taken him yet, and he hadn’t provided any one-on-one lessons, either (both advertised as a “trade-off” for his work), but maybe Felix had to prove himself worthy first.