“When did you decide to use me?” I asked Ellen now. I’d had plenty of time to reflect on this question and was no closer to an answer.
“Hey, don’t forget—you found me. You chased me down. You came to my school. You couldn’t be told no.”
Maybe. Or maybe that had all been part of her plan. Had she recognized me in Atlantic City and done the Greek deal just badly enough for me to spot it but well enough for me to be amazed? Or had her plan started earlier? Had Ace tipped her off to our presence at that Atlantic City game? Had he and Ellen been working together to reel me in? Ethan, too? Late at night, in my cell, I entertained all possibilities—that Ace was smarter than he let on, even that Brock McKnight, my competent attorney, could have been behind the whole thing from the moment he first joined me in the elevator at that Newark reception. Had my desperation and loneliness been so apparent? Had I come across so much like a sucker? I wondered sometimes if Brock had been Ellen’s connection for selling the Revere bell once it was stolen. My speculations would eventually circle back toward the probable, but prison gives you time to weave and reweave conspiracies of infinite design. And just when my theories would start to seem unreal and far-fetched, I would remember that the bell was real, and everything would seem possible once again.
“You have to tell me how you figured it out,” she said.
“Figured what out?” I asked.
She scratched at her neck as if she had a bug bite. “Why weren’t you watching the TV along with everyone else?” That was when she’d stolen the bell from the small safe hidden behind the painting of the blue heron. While everyone else was staring at the TV screen, watching me deal the cards in slow motion, she was stealing the bell. “How could you not watch the TV?” she asked. “You, more than anyone, should have wanted to see exactly where your Greek deal fell apart.”
And here was the dilemma I’d been facing ever since granting Ellen her visit here. Some secrets are simply too good for the magician to reveal to anyone. But was I a magician any longer? Ever since that poker game in Atlantic City where I’d first laid eyes on Ellen, I felt myself becoming something else, something new, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. And now all I had to do was look around and I had my answer. I had only to remember where I was, in this temporary prison from which in just under two hundred days I would flutter away.
There was no need to keep my greatest secret from Ellen. As she herself once told me, the real suckers know they’ve been conned. So she might as well know how.
“I didn’t cheat,” I said.
“What?”
“I was still being a magician.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I told you,” I said. “It’s Magic 101. You don’t do a trick until it’s ready.” I shrugged. “I wasn’t ready.” I watched her face as she tried to make sense of what I was saying. “I thought I was ready, but when the moment came … I didn’t do it. I didn’t false deal.”
I had told myself I was ready, but once again my hands knew better and thought faster than my brain did. Or maybe not being fully satisfied with my technique was only part of it. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to be a cheat yet. Or I knew that stealing all that money from Victor Flowers and his poker buddies wasn’t going to bring my father back.
Maybe I was just afraid.
Ellen’s face, already gaunt, was now drained of color. “And then Victor accused you.”
The moment that happened, I knew I’d been set up. And the only explanation was the woman now sitting across from me. She had told Victor in advance that she was bringing a card cheat to the game. Who knew what reason she’d given? Maybe she told him I’d cheated her in the past and this was payback. Whatever the story, she had tipped him off to exactly when I would be false dealing the cards. Our weeks of preparation were nothing but a big con with me as the mark.
I was terrified, and so I had protested exactly as I’d been taught—loudly, vehemently, which helped me not at all—but I wasn’t only terrified. I was also desperate for the secret. I wanted to know what was behind this wildly elaborate deception. To know what the prize was. So I didn’t beg everyone to show their hole cards (not that it would’ve helped—even ordinary cards can become a winning hand, and a good cheat would avoid anything obvious). I didn’t try to throw Ellen under the bus as the mastermind (not that they would have believed me). I protested, like we’d planned in the event of disaster, and then I shut up.
So Victor, stealth filmmaker, led everybody over to that giant TV screen to watch the recording of my deal. And this, too, was all part of Ellen’s misdirection, a great big distraction to get everyone together, staring at that big screen as intently as jewelers in search of the flaw. Victor was told I had planned to cheat him, and so he convinced himself that I had. They all did. They watched my honest deal again and again. They watched, and rewatched, and watched in frame-by-frame slow-motion—slowly convincing themselves and one another that they were seeing me cheat—the subtle “hitch,” in Ian’s words. There was no hitch. They were searching for it, and so they found it. They worked themselves into a murderous froth, but it was all based on nothing other than Victor’s accusation, which Ellen had forced on him just the way I forced playing cards on unsuspecting volunteers show after show.
And all this watching and rewatching of my deal on the TV screen, convincing themselves they were busting a card cheat, gave Ellen ample time to steal the Revere bell. No one saw her do it, because what was happening on the screen was probably the most compelling thing they had ever seen in their lives. They dared not miss a single frame, a chance to catch, red-handed, a cheat, their new guest, this woman with the short bleached hair who had waltzed into their high-stakes game and tried to rob them all, these men of strength and savvy, these self-described winners.
“You didn’t cheat,” Ellen said, as if trying out the words in her mouth.
“No. I didn’t.”
And because I hadn’t, there’d been no reason for me to watch the TV. I knew I’d been set up, and I knew that the men were being distracted for a reason, so I watched Ellen step across the plush carpet to the fireplace and push aside the picture of the blue heron. It was a gas fireplace. There was no flue and plenty of space for the small safe that Ellen had opened in a few fast twists of her wrist.
“But you didn’t rat me out,” she said.
“No.”
“You didn’t cheat, but you”—she glanced at my hand—“you let them do that to you?”
I hadn’t seen exactly what small object she had removed from the safe, but I saw her slip it into the pocket of her pants before shutting the safe again and sliding the picture back into place. And whatever it was, I knew it had to be worth a hell of a lot more than the million dollars she and I could have won together at the card table.
“I can’t believe you dealt straight and let them do that to you. God, Natalie, you let them—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I was there.” I’d had several months already to understand the implications of my own actions on that snowy January night. She had set me up and risked my life, and I was going to either take whatever it was she had slipped into her pocket or die trying.
I decided to put it into words she would understand. “I told you I was all in.” When she didn’t reply, I added, “And don’t forget, you did the same thing in my kitchen.”
That came to me only later—how cutting her own thumb had been part of the plan. She had needed me to deal the cards with just a couple of days of preparation so that when Victor accused me of cheating, I would have reason to second-guess my own performance.
She grimaced. “That isn’t the same thing at all.”
One small disappointment: Ellen had exaggerated her own injury. In my apartment, despite my own agony and the beginnings of shock, I remember seeing her exposed thumb as she helped lay me down on the loveseat. I took no notice of it at the time, but afterward I was sure of it. Two small knots of black thread on her thumb.
Two stitches. Not four. I expected better of her. A stronger commitment.
“No, I guess it isn’t the same,” I said.
“When did you lift it from me?” she asked.
I was no expert pickpocket, but I had been bleeding everywhere and the snowstorm was gusty and Victor Flowers’s yard was dark and Ellen was practically carrying me to her car. Distractions were everywhere. Our bodies were close. I knew which pocket to pick. It wasn’t complicated.
“I lifted it from you exactly when I decided to.” A smug reply, but I believed I had earned the right.
She didn’t seem well. I wondered how much of our half-million buy-in she had borrowed, and at what interest rate. I wondered who might be after her, what sort of trouble she was in. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I had a buyer all lined up. He’s probably still interested.” Another neck scratch. “I can give you thirty percent. That’s a huge amount of money, but we have to move on this. You have to tell me where it is. I’ll take care of everything. But you’ve got to tell me where the bell is.” When I didn’t reply, she said, “All right, thirty-five percent.”
“Take a good look at my left hand,” I told her, “and say the words ‘thirty-five percent’ again.”
“Forty percent,” she said.
“You’re getting closer,” I said. “But first I want to know how it all started. How did you know what to steal? How did you know about the safe?”
“Come on,” she said, “you think a man like Victor Flowers is going to keep that bell a secret from everyone? The greatest thing he ever owned?”
“How’d you know it would be in the safe?”
“Because the bell came first. The safe came second. The safe only existed because of the bell.” She shook her head. “He showed it to the guy who installed the safe. Who happens to be a guy I work with from time to time.”
She knew the safe guy. Of course she did. I’d forgotten what should have been ingrained: the secret was rarely as elegant as the trick.
And why would Victor Flowers agree to let his home be used as a place to catch a card cheat? That was the other thing I couldn’t figure out. “Why would Victor invite this kind of trouble into his home?” I asked. “What was in it for him?”
She didn’t answer right away. She surveyed the visiting area, fingers twitching, and I wondered if maybe she really had become an addict. Finally, she faced me again and said, “A 1695 Stradivarius.”
“A violin?”
“A violin played at the premiere performance of the New York Philharmonic in 1842.” She spoke flatly, as if reciting a memorized set of facts. “I promised a meeting with the current owner, who wanted to sell the instrument but didn’t want to pay a big commission to an auction house. With my connection, Victor could have gotten a great deal on it.”
“But the story was made up, I assume.”
She was watching the trees, the yard. “A little creative thinking, a little Wikipedia.” She scratched her neck. “But none of that matters. The bell. That’s what matters. That’s everything. And you need a buyer. Otherwise, it isn’t worth anything. You know that, right? Forty-five percent. What do you say? Huh? I’ll even pay the safe guy his points out of my share, but we have to do it now. People are following me. I don’t know if it’s Victor’s people or the guy I borrowed the buy-in money from. I abandoned my apartment. I don’t go to work anymore. We’re both at risk until we sell the bell, get the money, and disappear. That’s the only way to do it. I can get it done, but it’s got to be now, Natalie. Please.”
I listened to the mourning dove’s familiar call.
“Fifty percent,” she said. “Okay? Partners in the truest sense of the word. I’m so, so sorry about your fingers. Jesus, Natalie, I swear I never in a million years thought they would do something like that. If I’d thought for a minute they’d—I mean, they’re just guys, you know? Guys with money. I’m so sorry, but let’s do this, huh? Fifty percent. Partners.”
I let her talk until the words trickled to a stop. Quietly, I said, “Fifty-one percent.”
“Huh?”
“I want fifty-one percent.”
“Are you being serious?”
“Fifty-one.”
She sat, fuming and flummoxed, the player at the table with the losing hand and everyone knows it. Finally, she said, “And then you’ll do it? We’ll have a deal?”
“I don’t know why you’re making this so complicated,” I said. “Fifty-one.”
I clasped my hands together and set them on the tabletop, our old signal for the con to begin, only in reverse and minus two fingers. She looked away, then up at my eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “You want fifty-one percent. You want that, then fifty-one it is. All right? That’s over. Now where’s the bell?”
I met her gaze, saw the hunger in it. I almost felt bad for her when I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what bell you’re talking about.” I stood up and waved the guard over. “Good-bye, Ellen.”
“Wait—no, no, no—we just agreed—”
“Ma’am?” Simon was coming our way.
“We’re done,” I told him.
“No!”
“Ma’am, all right, let’s go.” Gently, he took her arm. She stiffened but knew better than to resist. I watched her go and listened to the birds.
I wished Ellen had come at two o’clock instead of three-thirty. Now there was very little time before dinner. In the white-walled dayroom I joined my regular poker game, already in progress. Today they were playing for small bags of Fritos and mini Snickers bars.
At North Ridge, the poker chips were a remarkably durable composite of toilet paper and soap. The game was Texas Hold’em with a couple of crazy house rules and strict limits on raising. Over the weeks, I was steadily improving my play. Yesterday we’d played for stamped envelopes, and I made sure to win one. I needed to write that letter to Bruce Steadman to apologize for never coming through with the Men’s Quarterly article. It turns out I couldn’t find a good enough cheat, I would explain.
I made sure not to win all the time. Then no one would want me in the game. But I won pretty much whenever I wanted to, because here was what I was learning: the ultimate misdirection? It was me. Whenever it became my turn to deal, everyone looked away from my hands. Even convicts had that much decorum.
I won’t lie. I still woke up in a cold sweat. Still found myself reliving that excruciating night, especially those critical few seconds of Russell’s smack to my face followed by the cleaver’s invisible chop. In my waking hours I tried not to think about any of it and instead focused on getting the feeling and dexterity back in my hand. Some days the task felt monumental, but I couldn’t imagine better physical therapy than card handling. My Greek deal was becoming smooth and silent. Friction is the enemy of the card handler, and all those two fingers ever did, I was discovering, was provide too much of it.
Not anymore. My false deal was becoming something to behold because there was nothing to behold. My hands were steadier than ever. My mind was sharper than it had been in a long time.
For the next six and a half months I planned to play a lot of poker. And I needed to continue to woodshed. In my cell were two decks of cards and a dozen poker books. As Ellen used to do—or as she’d claimed to do (futile as it was to separate the truths from the half-truths from the lies)—I would get to fantasizing about my own cabin by the water, days of snorkeling and nights of separating rich tourists from their money. But those were only passing thoughts. In the real world, my plans remained stateside. Upon release I would move to Reno, city of gamblers, city of my mother. She had somehow come up with the bail, ten percent of the $50,000 the judge had set, driving herself even further into debt.
I would have refused her bail bond, but I’d needed to be out of custody at least long enough to investigate the Revere bell’s worth. And to rent a small safe-deposit box at my bank. No way would I be able to sell the bell anytime soon. Selling it seemed awfully complicated, and I would nee
d help—but there was plenty of time to figure all that out, even if it took years. There was no rush. And I had to be sure to do it safely.
But I had the bell. That was the important part.
I hoped never to need the money, anyway. I was pretty sure I could earn a living as a poker cheat, enough for me and some extra for my mother. I knew I’d make more than I ever did as a magician. (Yes, Brock, so you were right all along.) And I knew what the upstanding citizens whose home games I planned to frequent would do when it was my turn to deal the cards. They would check their phones. Refill the chip bowl. They would look anywhere and everywhere other than at my hands.
When I was on the outside again, my two missing fingers would be my greatest asset. They would be my superpower.
Sasha, one of the game’s regulars, dealt me in. “Where’ve you been?” she asked.
“I had a visitor,” I said, and several of the women went, “Oooh,” as if I’d just returned from a hot date.
The women checked their hole cards. I checked mine. There was less than half an hour until dinnertime. Today, I decided, would be a winning day.
To false deal in prison, I knew, was to flirt with suicide. These were not people who forgave. Yet I’ll say this: never have I felt so alive as in those moments when the freshly cut deck was squared up and in my hand, and the playing cards began their soft skate across the metal dayroom table.
And so I played this game the best I could.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to Jody Kahn at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents for her wisdom and kindness. I’m very grateful to Otto Penzler for his remarkable editorial insight and generosity, as well as to Deb Seager, Kaitlin Astrella, Allison Malecha, Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Gretchen Mergenthaler, and everyone at Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic. For their willingness to help me with the details, lexicon, and milieu of poker at various levels, I would like to thank Paul Fabel, Jaclynn Moskow, Michael Blinder, Craig Gibian, and Owen Laukkanen. Thanks to Andrew Rabinowitz for guiding me on the legal details. And I’m very lucky to have the astonishing Joshua Jay as my magic guru and friend. I’m grateful to Christopher Coake, Becky Hagenston, Michelle Herman, Julie Kardos, Stephen Kardos, Michael Piafsky, and Catherine Pierce for their valuable comments on the manuscript at various stages.
Bluff Page 23