by Jared Shurin
I couldn’t learn the guile.
In community college I always sat in the same chair. One day I got moved to a different one. Someone had carved into the folding table: Gandalf v Thulsa Doom. Deep and smooth at the edges, filled with black gunk like it had been done back in the sixties. Even when I moved back to my usual seat, it bothered me. Gandalf I’d heard of, but who was this Thulsa Doom? The undead sorcerer in Conan the Barbarian, that’s who. James Earl Jones, that’s who. James Freakin’ Earl Jones.
And it all came back. I’d never seen a black wizard before. I don’t mean dark arts, evil magic. I mean: black. Wizards were old white guys with beards and staffs. No disrespect, Mr. McKellen, but this was a black guy who looked as mean as fuck and could turn into a giant death snake. James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom: That’s a wizard I could get behind.
I hadn’t thought about those old words gouged into the community college desk for years. But it lay there, unseen but not forgotten, until one hot, high-pressure night in Reno, it came bubbling up.
“A challenge.”
I knew Jack wasn’t getting it with the same white, Saint Paul–blinding light in which I saw it. This would be a sell.
“The challenge, my friend. You, Maltese Jack Caruana, international man of mystery, magic, and mentalism, challenge the great Remi, all-seeing wizard of the Silverado, that you will perform a trick, before a live audience, that it cannot explain. Marketing, my friend. Is. Everything.” The plan was clear and entire before me. I had a vision. “Battle of the wizards. Gandalf versus Thulsa Doom.”
“I could be wrong here…” Salazar was a less frequent visitor to the evening sessions than Inés, but he did chip in for the scotch. We were a small, tight community; four trailers drawn in around an open yard in a quiet corner of Buena Vista. We all chipped in what we could, when we could. “But that’s more Gandalf versus the all-seeing eye of Sauron.”
“The point,” I said, “the actual point is: You market it, you make it the biggest magic show in Reno – bigger even than anything in Las Vegas. The biggest show in the world. I tell you, you’ll get every magician and table-worker and illusionist and mentalist on five continents turning up to see this. It’s the classic battle – man versus machine. Like that chess master taking on Big Blue, or whatever.”
“Deep Blue,” Salazar said. Know your enemy.
“That chess master lost,” Jack said.
“Your career’s finished anyway,” Salazar said. “Like mine. Another robot kill. If you stop talking to Remi on the phone, it’ll break in on the sound system. If you shut down the sound system, it’ll just post the camera feed on YouTube. This way, you keep a percentage of the house and the licensing deal and a story for the after-dinner and convention circuit.”
“You’ve got this all thought out,” Jack said, and I knew I had him.
“Looking at ways to game the system is my job,” Salazar said. “Was.”
“Wizard Wars!” I said. “Or Wizard versus Wizard. Which sounds better?”
Then came a cry from Inés’s trailer and a sudden, flickering light. She had knocked over one of her candle stubs. Her curtains were on fire. Salazar pulled open the door, I went through like a linebacker and hauled Inés out. Her hair was singed, her hands scorched. Her sofa was ablaze. Black smoke boiled up from the burning upholstery foam. Then Maltese Jack was in with the fire extinguisher, sending tornadoes of powder to every corner of the trailer. The fire was out in moments. Powder covered every surface. The trailer leaked smoke from door, windows, every vent. It would be weeks before Inés could live there again, if ever.
“You stay with me tonight,” I said. Pernell Brolin, refuge to the lost.
We knew then we had to get out of Buena Vista.
The management didn’t go for either Wizard Wars or Wizard vs Wizard. They had their marketing department take a look at our proposal and decided to call it Magic or Machine? Like a Discovery Channel show.
Which is to say, they bought into it two hundred percent. A thousand percent. They bought it. The dudes who developed the software bought it. The papers, the syndication shows, the networks, and the digital channels: they bought it. The other casinos in Reno bought it: they wanted to see if Remi was as good as the Silverado said it was. And the public bought it.
Maltese Jack’s agent negotiated him a percentage of house and rights. It was a sweet deal. The Silverado added a rider; every trick that Remi guessed, Jack would never perform again. We both read the score: a Las Vegas magician on the glide-path of his career, who couldn’t even fill the smallest bar in the resort. It was the mother of all resignation letters.
So, you’ve had the meet-cute. Now the montage.
We had a date: Halloween. Of course. We had a venue, the Gold Room: the Silverado’s four-thousand-seater prime ballroom. Full light, sound, and projection. Willie Nelson filled it ten years back, ten nights in a row. Jack Caruana had one night, and he could have filled it ten times over.
Maltese Jack’s problem: there are only ten magic effects. Vanish, produce, transform, restore. Transpose, transport, escape. Levitation, penetration, prediction. Everything else is panache. Remi knew all ten.
Maltese Jack’s problem: part two. The kind of magic he performed was small scale, close up, unshowy. Making it fill the Gold Room was an issue. Big flashy displays, glam assistants in fishnets and smiles, would make the audience suspicious and kill it dead. Possible solution…
Add celebrities. The guest list for the golden circle was so full the Silverado had to start star-rating the celebs. Fellow magicians – only if they’d had a network series, a residency of more than six months, or seven million YouTube hits. Movie stars – only if promoting something that would be premiering at the time of the show. Sports stars. Supermodels. Millionaires, no chance, billionaires: step right up. Bloggers, vloggers. Influencers. Musicians? We could have filled the Gold Room with needy pop stars and had them spilling onto the gaming floor. Celebrities had the panache. Pick a star, pull them up onstage, and stick a camera in the face to see the OMG! expression all over the screens. Who needed flash and fishnets?
The publicity grind. The media training, the interviews, the photo shoots and profiles. The Silverado moved Jack out of Buena Vista to a penthouse suite. Inés took over his trailer. Management still hadn’t got round to fixing the fire damage. When our shifts allowed, Jack invited us up to abuse the bar.
“Look at the size of the bathroom,” Salazar said. “You could fight a war in here.”
“Egyptian cotton,” Inés said, stroking the sheets. Her hands had healed after the fire but the pain had set into the nerves and would likely never leave again. “What’s the thread count?”
“You can see all the mountains,” I said. I was out on the balcony. Cooler now, a different season.
“Planes coming in,” Salazar said, joining me.
“Where are our trailers?” Inés asked. From the penthouse level we could see Buena Vista at the centre of a ring of casinos.
“It’s like a walled garden,” Salazar said.
“Some fuckin’ garden,” I said.
“Way to the right,” Jack said. “You can’t see them. The trees get in the way.”
It was pleasant on the penthouse balcony, with hundred-dollar bourbon and a cooling breeze from Tahoe, and it all said, Halloween is coming, and Maltese Jack Caruana: Are you ready? Do you have the effect that will fool an artificial intelligence that knows every trick and cheat and slick move a human can pull? Because if he did, he sure wasn’t telling me.
On the night, he called it right. The Silverado wanted tux minimum; silver lamé preferred. Maltese Jack walked on in the same slightly tight, cheap grey suit he wore for all his shows. At least a hat, the dresser said.
“Hats are for Sinatra,” Jack said.
So on he came, a small man in his early sixties in a bad suit. Onto the biggest stage of his life. He was on his mark before the follow-spot found him; it was another twenty seconds before the audience realise
d who he was. We started the applause. He had reserved us a table. Not the best, not in the golden circle, too close to the bar and we had to share it with a team from Boing Boing. He waited for the applause to die down.
“Good evening. I’m Jack Caruana. And I’d now like to introduce my partner and worst enemy, the machine that will decide in front of this specially invited audience and all these cameras if there really is such a thing as magic. Remi, the house AI.”
Remi’s voice boomed from the sound system. “Good evening, Jack. Good evening, guests and everyone watching on television,” and oh my days, the Gold Room went apeshit. Jack went down to a table in the golden circle and an actress I kind of recognized from those car-stunt movies gave him a big black book.
“My book of tricks,” Jack said. He put it on an honest-to-God church lectern. “My grimoire.”
Grimoire: that’s a good, mouth-filling word. Thulsa Doom would sure as shit have a grimoire.
He led with an old one, an easy one; a gussied-up variation on that same force that Remi had spotted and called us on Jack’s cell to discuss. Even I could see how it was done. Brian Hoyer from the Patriots, who’d come up waving and smiling to pick the card, was stunned. The room went silent as a morgue, waiting to see what Remi made of it.
“I am disappointed, Jack,” Remi said. “Very disappointed. Really, the bottom card force? That was the very first trick I learned.” Whoever was on the sound desk managed to make him sound even more irritating and petulant than he was on the phone. Remi spent five minutes taking Jack’s effect apart to the last finger-flick and thumb-hold. The entire Gold Room was spellbound. Jack Caruana stood smiling.
“That your last word Remi?”
“It is, Jack.”
“Well, Remi, our deal is, if you can see how the trick is done, the trick is gone. You saw it. That trick is gone. Dead. Buried.” And Jack strode over to the grimoire, tore out a page, and held it up for all to see. A flick of the fingers, a flash of blue fire, and the page was floating ash. Oohs. Flash-paper; always a nice piece of theater.
Next Jack brought one of those new country and western singers onstage. A decent prediction effect, a bit of number magic. Applause. Camera close-ups of amazed faces at the celeb tables. The pause – the AI equivalent of clearing your throat. Then Remi explained how he had done it in such detail, the whole Gold Room could have gone home and performed it.
Jack went to the grimoire; another spell from his book of tricks went up in a blue flash.
The French Drop. The Blackstone Cardless Card Trick. The Talkative Clipboard. Twisting the Aces. Classic effects, all of them. And Remi destroyed all of them in that patient, geeky, reasonable voice. Each dead trick, a page went up in blue fire from the book of magic. At first the audience had laughed and applauded when Remi told them how the effect was done. Then I noticed them sit back and sigh and murmur, and those murmurs become rumbles of displeasure. Because Jack was losing to Remi, but Remi was losing the audience. Remi didn’t know, didn’t care. Remi didn’t see the panache. Remi only saw the guile. And that was its mistake.
Hummer Card, Mexican Turnover, Scotch and Soda, the Reluctant Telepath. Dead, dead, dead. Dead. I felt the Gold Room turn, I felt the anger and silent resentment, from every pit-watcher who lost his job to an AI to the singer who’d been auto-tuned until every atom of individuality had been polished out of her voice, every musician who’d had an AI take her song, drop it around beats and boops and turn it into some shiny, soulless global megahit. Every ball-player and tennis star and golfer who’d had their game taken apart and analysed and drilled by a machine coach again and again and again to do it right do it right do it right. And I saw that the real loser was Remi.
Jack went to the grimoire, opened it to let the final page hang down.
“All gone,” he said. “Every trick in the book. Except one.”
Every magician keeps the big effect for the finale. Leave them astounded. The Gold Room went quiet. Even the bar fell silent. Not a camera-whir, not a notification alert. Jack went down into the golden circle and led Taylor Swift up onto the stage.
Everyone in the Gold Room was on the edge of their seat.
Jack delivered some quick-fire patter, let Taylor promote the new album, then said, “I’m going to show you a deck of cards.” He took a deck out of his right pocket.
I whispered, No, Jack, don’t do that. You can’t do that. Not for the last effect.
He did the force and the switch, right pocket–left pocket. The worst, the best, the most bare-faced trick in the world. Queen of Hearts. They’re all Queens of Hearts. A silence in the Gold Room. Was that it? Was that the trick that Remi couldn’t solve? Applause started – not by me – broke into a ripple, into a cautious wave. Obviously something very, very clever had happened here. Something Muggles couldn’t see, something not even Remi could see.
“Jack.” The Gold Room held its collective breath. Cameras went in close on Jack Caruana’s face. “Jack. You took the first deck from your right pocket. You took the second from your left pocket.”
The Gold Room exhaled. They hadn’t seen it. They truly had not seen it, the most blatant, most stupid, most obvious trick in the grimoire. In that instant, they hated Remi. He had shown them something obvious, right in front of their eyes, that they hadn’t noticed. Any kid could do that trick. It had fooled four thousand people, live in front of cameras. Remi had just told every celeb and sports star and the guys from Boing Boing that they were blind and stupid.
Jack ripped the final page from the grimoire and held it up. A click of the fingers and it was consumed in blue fire.
“Ladies and gentleman, the machine has won. It was a privilege to perform for you the night the magic died.”
Then he walked down from the stage and up between the tables toward the ballroom’s main doors. The Gold Room rose around him. Roaring, cheering. Whistling and yelling and whooping. Because no one wants the magic to die. No one wants to know how the trick is done. We want wonder in the world, things we can’t explain. We want to be fooled, even though we know there is no such thing as magic. It’s always a trick. It’s the quality of the trick – the guile – that matters.
Jack Caruana walked through those tables and out the double golden doors, clean out of the Silverado, and never once looked back. A beaten man, triumphant.
And that’s the panache.
We waited until the celebs and the movie stars and vloggers had all gone, until the TV crews were coiling their cables and de-rigging their microphones. Salazar and Inés and me, we went to the elite pickup zone and waited on the red carpet between the golden ropes. Perfectly on cue, the executive van with the blacked-out windows pulled in.
Jack already had the champagne open.
“Airport, sir?” the driver said. Adnan had booked the executive van two months before.
“How much time have we got?” Jack asked.
“Time for whatever you want,” Adnan said.
“Take us the tourist route,” Jack said. We went round Buena Vista, all the way, three times, drinking the champagne as we wove between the shuttle buses. Then Adnan drove us downtown through the neon and we drank the second bottle of champagne in the blue-green flickering light.
“I thought I was going to shit myself when you did that dumb-ass two-pocket force,” I said.
“Run the risk of a new trick that just might work?” Jack said. “The pocket switch was a sure bet.”
There is a proverb in magic: Make the audience walk as far as possible from the trick to the effect. In the best effects, the guile happens even before the magician has told you what the trick is about. If the vigorish gets you in the end, the wise bet is on the house. We played Remi to lose. If Jack had beaten the AI he would have been locked up in the Silverado forever, performing that one trick again and again and again. Hey! Give us the trick that beat the computer! Again and again and again. With every eye in the Gold Room watching his every flick of a finger to spot the guile that the computer mis
sed.
We made it out clean and there was a plane on approach high over the desert, coming to take us down to Florida.
Fly away Peter, fly away Paul. Fly away Inés and Salazar and Pernell and Jack.
But the best tricks – the very best tricks – have the twist in the end. The kind of trick where you borrow someone’s tie and cut it into pieces, then forget about while you do the real trick and then at the very end, when tie-guy is the only one remembers what you did, you bring it back whole again.
“How much did you take them for?” Jack asked as Adnan brought bags round to the curb.
“Personally, about a grand,” Adnan said.
Remi boasted that it did not see as humans saw, that it could not be misdirected. But a magician will tell you: they don’t deal in misdirection. They deal in direction.
Staff can’t gamble at their own casino. But their friends, relatives, workmates at other place of employment: They can. Remi studied us, but it never occurred to it that we might study it. Learn its tricks and guiles. While Remi was watching Maltese Jack Caruana up there in the spotlight, a hundred gamblers hit the Silverado’s two floors. The casino was packed that night, players watching the Wizard Wars as they fed the machines. Our foot soldiers worked the tables, made money, moved on. Made money, moved on. Made money, cashed up, and rolled on out. The bank of Buena Vista. Remi never saw, because Remi was watching Jack.
And that’s the guile.
And that’s the story of how Maltese Jack Caruana beat the machine.
What ya mean, you didn’t see it? Where were you? Mongolia? Jail? It was all over the networks. It’s up on YouTube. Just Google it. Wizard Wars, Wizard versus Wizard. Even Magic or Machine, God help us. Any of those will get you there.