Skillful Death

by Ike Hamill

  “Because he’s a bastard and has no sister,” the man on the right said.

  “Exactly,” the Constable said. “The final act to prove the Providential is to save his sister, and by your story the only one he saved was my daughter.”

  The two men holding Constantine tightened their grip but remained silent.

  The Constable shifted his weight to the side and began to slide from beneath his bed sheet. His wife appeared in the doorway just as his feet hit the floor.

  “Why are you getting up, husband?” she asked.

  The two men holding Constantine blushed and looked at the floor when they heard her tone.

  “We have pressing business, wife,” the old man said. The Constable turned his glare to Constantine. “Where are you from, Forestling?”

  Constantine held his tongue. He saw no benefit from trying to conjure an answer to the old man’s question.

  “Answer me, boy. Who are your people?”

  Constantine remained silent.

  “They say he’s from the Midwife,” the man on the left said.

  At the mention of the old woman, the wife wrinkled her face, turned her head, and spat on the floor.

  “I know where they say he’s from,” the Constable said. “But that’s not what I asked the boy. Little Forestling, who raised you? Who brought you into this world? Where do you lay your head?”

  “Answer him,” the man on the right said, when Constantine didn’t speak up.

  Constantine cleared his throat and then answered. “Nobody. The Midwife, I suppose. On my hands.”

  “He’s an impudent bastard,” the Constable said. He threw off his nightgown and began to clothe his large frame with his best garments, working from the ground up. Constantine was fascinated by the layers of interlocking finery. “Alexei’s son has died,” the Constable said to his wife. “I must pay my respects and you must offer to take over the house for Elena. Send word to Paley and ask if our daughter can stay with them while we take care of the Skomin house.”

  “She should come with us,” the Constable’s wife said. “She can sit with Maria.”

  “Thank you, wife,” the Constable said. “That’s good thinking.”

  “And what of this one, my Lord?” the man on the left asked.

  “What of him?”

  “Should we consider all possibilities?”

  “Haven’t you already?”

  “There’s one we haven’t discussed,” the man on the right said. “It fits all the evidence.”

  “Would you have me guess at it, or would you prefer to simply inform me?” the Constable asked.

  The two men exchanged another glance. The man on the left proffered the theory. “What if he’s a Midwife’s baby?”

  “Then he has no standing unless the father claims him. What would the evidence be? If you torture it out of the Midwife, she’ll tell you whatever you desire. Would you call that evidence?”

  “What if the father...” the man on the left began, but he swallowed hard and seemed to lose his voice.

  “Yes?” the Constable asked. He was fastening a row of buttons across his belly and had nearly finished. After adding a coat, he would be ready to leave. His impatience came out in a phlegmy roar. “YES?”

  “What if you are the father?” the man on the right asked.

  The Constable’s wife narrowed her eyes at her husband and pressed her hands to her chest.

  The Constable himself didn’t seem at all shocked or surprised by the question. “The legend of the Providential doesn’t say anything about a half-sister. In fact, if you go back through time, most of the Providential Boys have saved their twin sister. I think I’d know if my daughter had a twin brother, don’t you?”

  “Yes, my Lord, of course,” the man on the left said.

  The man on the right kept pressing. “That’s what a Midwife’s baby is. A Midwife’s baby is a stolen twin. You wouldn’t necessarily even know that he existed, but he’d be the full twin of your daughter.”

  The Constable donned his jacket, smoothed back his hair, doubled over with one final cough, and then addressed the two men for the last time before leaving, “Then by all means, throw him in the river.”

  The two men exchanged another glance as the Constable and his wife left the room.

  28 MAGIC EXPLAINED

  I HAVE THE KID in the interrogation room, but I don’t have him strapped down or anything. We haven’t identified ourselves. My team is tight-lipped when they pull someone. They don’t answer questions or give orders, they just move the target around like a puppet and expect nothing less than compliance.

  “Hi,” I say. I sit down in a chair next to the young man.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “You recognize me from the street,” I say. It’s not a question. In this type of situation, I prefer that the subject starts volunteering information, so I make simple, declarative statements and just wait for them to open up.

  “You’re not surprised that we picked you up,” I tell him. This guy is playing it pretty cool. He’s looking straight ahead, only glancing at me when I finish a statement. His hands are resting comfortably on the armrests. He’s not fidgeting or wiggling around at all. I wonder what he thinks is going on. He has me asking myself questions, which is not good for the power dynamic.

  “You’ve got a good hustle. You pull in about a thousand dollars a day, but you can only work a hundred days a year, if you’re lucky. Rain, snow, wind, cold—they all kill your business.”

  When I first saw this guy doing his card tricks, he was already well-polished, so I’m not exactly sure where he came up. Once a guy has his routine locked down, it’s really hard to spot their origin. Sometimes you find these guys who have apprenticed under old hands. Guys who’ve apprenticed are wise beyond their years, but they lack the solid foundation of a self-taught performer.

  My boss says that to become truly tough, you have to first be stripped down to absolutely nothing. Pretend you’re a boxer, and you grew up as a boxer’s son, spending hour after hour in gyms, working out, and learning your fundamentals. You can develop into the perfect boxing specimen—no flaws, all strength. You’ll do well in the lower ranks, but once you get into the upper echelon of competitors, you’ll lose every fight. What’s worse is that to build that boxer’s son into a good boxer, it actually takes longer to break him down before you can make him great. He has to be torn apart, piece by perfect piece, until he’s back to zero, before you can build him into a true fighter. It would be easier to start with a street kid who has no skill at all. You could start with a kid who doesn’t even know how to throw a proper punch and turn him into a champion faster than that son of a boxer.

  So who is this young man? Who is this magician with a trick so good that I can’t even fathom how he pulled it off? Was he educated by an old hand, or did he fight his way up from nothing? I’ll only find out if he starts offering me information.

  “Your hands move like silk,” I say. “I bet you’ve got fifty-thousand hours in those hands. I knew a guy like you who had a perfect hustle. One day he got a simple paper cut from a dollar bill. Infection took his finger, and he never worked again. Couldn’t re-train himself for nine fingers after all those years practicing with ten. You guys don’t tend to have very good health insurance. That’s a bad combination. You rely completely on dexterity, but you don’t have the health care to maintain it.”

  He can’t keep quiet much longer. This guy works with his hands, but easily fifty-percent of his business is chatting up the customer.

  “What’s funny about me, is that my bottom deal is terrible,” I say. “I can hear one a mile away though. I was playing at a semi-pro tourney a few years back and I heard a bottom deal two tables behind me. Yours is good, not great.”

  I’m trying to bait him. He doesn’t bottom deal. When done well, with about ten years practice, a bottom deal will fool one-hundred percent of amateurs, but zero percent of pros. There might be one guy in the world who w
ould try it on a pro. This kid’s not using a bottom deal for his trick. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for his street act, but since he’s not using it, it’s an easy guess that he thinks it’s a hack move. I’m on the right track with this approach. He wiggles a little bit in his seat when I compliment the move he’s not using.

  “Your Zarrow is clean, but if you doubled it and used a thumb break, you wouldn’t need to lead with a slip cut,” I say. I’m struggling to keep the smile from my face as the young man folds his hands in his lap. I’m taunting him by calling out these terrible moves. These are techniques that he would have abandoned years ago, and he’s not old enough to appreciate the wisdom behind these duffer moves.

  “Maybe a thousand people in the world could pull off all the false shuffles you’ve got,” I say. I watched him for over twenty minutes and I didn’t see a single false shuffle, so it has to be a point of pride for him. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Dickie Bauman,” I say. This is the name of a local hack who spends most of his time in jail or being chased down by people he’s attempted to cheat. “You’ve got him beat on at least half of your false shuffles.”

  That’s all it took to get him to talk. I bet I could have questioned him for hours and not gotten a word, but all it took was praising him for things he didn’t do.

  “I’ve never false shuffled in my life,” he says.

  “Pardon?” I ask, as if I didn’t hear him. For the record, this is my first question.

  “I don’t false shuffle. I don’t need to false shuffle.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You knew what card was on top.”

  “Yes, of course I did. I always do. That’s the point. Why am I here? Am I under arrest or something?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t understand why you think you always know what card is on top. Random is random.”

  “It’s a simple matter of precision and memory,” he says.

  “Precision and memory don’t tell you that the top card is going to match value or that the next card is going to match suit,” I say.

  “But I shuffled until they did. Do you understand?”

  “Nope,” I say, sitting back and crossing my arms. We’re both looking off across the room. His hands go to his pocket. One of my guys, leaning against the wall, moves his own hand to his belt. My guys are ready for anything, but this magician is only going for his deck of cards.

  “This isn’t the deck I used earlier,” he says. Sure enough, this deck is green. “Here’s the naked version of the trick. Take a card.”

  He fans out the deck for me and I take one from the middle. His hands don’t move as I draw the card from the deck. I haven’t flipped it, so we’re both blind to what card it is.

  “You took the thirty-third card, do you see that?” he asks.

  I shake my head, not quite sure what he means. The cards don’t appear to be marked.

  “Count from the top,” he says. “Can you see that you took the thirty-third card?”

  My eyes scan the fan of cards and I count the ridges, moving my eyes carefully every fifth card. It’s difficult to count such a tight group of edges, but not impossible. I see that he’s right. The gap in the fan is after thirty-two cards.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Well the thirty-third card is the jack of diamonds,” he says.

  I flip it and reveal that he’s correct. The trick dawns on me all at once. It was hard to figure out because it’s not actually a trick. He described how he was doing it right in his patter. He actually tracks the position of each card in the deck.

  “So now I just need to cut and shuffle until the top card is another jack and the second card is a diamond. The jack of spades is at twenty-four, so I can split there and riffle shuffle with that one on top. Then I’ll have the nine of diamonds at twenty-seven, so I can shuffle that one to the second position. Easy. Two shuffles and I’m done.”

  “Assuming you can cut exactly to twenty-four and twenty-seven, and execute a perfect alternate shuffle every time,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “That takes practice, but even Dickie Beauman can do a perfect alternate shuffle most of the time, and anyone can get a sense for what twenty-four cards feels like.”

  “You’re not talking about doing a perfect alternate shuffle most of the time,” I say. “You’re talking about doing it every time, or else you’d have no idea where the cards would be.”

  “I also have to be able to see how deep other people cut. For some of the tricks, I ask the audience to cut.”

  Now I understand his selection of tricks. He’s spent all of his time learning how to shuffle and cut precisely, so that he can track every exchange of positions. No matter how many times he mixes the cards, his brain is keeping perfect track of every card’s position. I’ve seen good memories before, but his ability to adjust and track reordering is insanely good. With all that attention to shuffling and tracking, he hasn’t spent any time learning all the dexterity-based tricks that the other guys fumble through. No wonder he took such offense to my opening statements.

  This interview is over. I have the answers I need. His mind must be fascinating. What a waste to spend all that capability on street magic.

  “So you can tell me the position of every card in that deck?” I ask.

  “Deuce of clubs, seven of hearts, seven of clubs, queen of spades,” he says as he turns over the first four cards. Then he cuts, seemingly to a random depth, and names the first four cards of that section. He cuts and shuffles four times. He flips the top four cards which are now the four aces.

  “Can you give me back that card?” he asks. I’m still holding the jack of diamonds. “It drives me nuts when I’m not holding all fifty-two.”

  “So that deck you dropped when these guys picked you up?”

  “I’ll be thinking about them for a week.”

  I put the jack back on top and he sets his hands to shuffling and cutting. Once again, his hands are like silk, the cards like water, as they shuffle, over and over.

  “What are you doing now?”

  He finishes his shuffle and flips the deck. With a quick fan, he shows me that he’s shuffled the deck back into order—aces through kings. Clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades. He puts the deck back into his pocket.

  “Why are you wasting your time on card tricks? With your brain and your hands, there must be better opportunities out there.”

  “I like cards. Besides, like what? I’m only good at tracking a single deck at a time. I’m no good at probability and percentages, or reading people, so I’m no good at gambling at all. Card tricks don’t play well for large audiences. Aside from being arrested, or questioned by people like you, I really enjoy what I do.”

  “What do you mean, people like me?” I ask.

  He has looked annoyed, frustrated, bored, and open, but this is the first time I think I’ve seen him nervous.

  “You know, cops,” he says.

  “No, I don’t know,” I say. “You said being arrested, or questioned by people like me. You didn’t say being arrested and questioned by the cops, you clearly separated people like me from the cops. Who else has questioned you?”

  “Just the cops,” he says. He is lying. I love this part of an interview, where the subject has been talking so much that they don’t seem to remember that their best answer would be to stop talking.

  “Nope, not the cops. You were not talking about cops,” I say. I give my guy near the door a look and he knows what to do. On his signal, several of the bigger guys take the tiniest step forward. “Who questioned you?”

  He’s getting really nervous now. He’s probably thinking about how many hours he has invested in his hands, and how easy it would be for one of the big guys to render them useless.

  “I don’t know who they were,” he says. “They just wanted to know how I did my tricks. Same as you, I guess. Not cops, just people who wanted to know.”

  “And what trick were they interested in?” I ask. The guy is nervous now, and he s
hould be. My prime directive is to explain the inexplicable, and disprove the paranormal. My second directive is to keep track of anyone else on that same path. If this guy has run into someone else barking up the same tree, I need to know who it is.

  “It was nothing, a meta trick,” he says. “A dealer’s trick.”

  I know the kind he means. Some of the best wow-factor tricks are the kind where the magician is supposedly explaining how he’s doing the trick as he does it. Most people have probably seen one or two if they’ve ever seen a close-up magician. He’ll put four of a kind on the bottom of the deck and deal out seven hands, as if seven people are sitting down to play poker. An audience member will tell him which hand should get the four of a kind. At the end of the trick, he’s managed to deal the four queens to the third hand, or whatever, but the surprise ending is that he’s given himself four aces. That’s why they call it a meta trick, since it has two endings. It’s a trick about a trick.

  Knowing this guy’s secret, this kind of trick would be terribly easy for him.

  “They brought you in to explain a dealer’s trick?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. “Three guys on that block could do that trick, but they hauled me to a tiny, windowless room somewhere to explain how I do it.”

  “But you do the trick differently than everyone else,” I say.

  “Yeah, but they wouldn’t have known that,” he says. “As far as they knew, it was just sleight of hand.”

  “Until you explained it,” I say.

  “I never got the chance to. They had me demonstrate, and asked me to explain. Before I could, they turned me loose.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say.

  “Neither did I,” he replies.

  “You just walked out the door,” I prompt.

  “No, not quite,” he says. “They told me to explain the trick, and I started to tell them that it wasn’t a trick at all, that I just arranged the cards with shuffles until I got them in the order I wanted. But I never got any of that out. All I said was, ‘Actually,’ and an old bald guy came in from the other room and whispered something to the guy who was questioning me. He left, and the lead guy gave me some money, apologized, put a bag over my head, and walked me out. After a short ride in a van, they pushed me out onto the street.”