Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (22 page)

“No.”

He showed her the folded page, which had gotten crinkly and shroudish from his efforts with it.

“That thing? I thought that was a cartoon.”

“Well, it is, kind of. But you have to solve it.” The barman had approached them and Mark asked for a glass of water. “I didn’t want to tell you that before because it’s not a very high-minded game, the Jumble. That’s probably pretty stupid, huh? To lie to a stranger about something like that.”

“I don’t know that it’s stupid to lie,” she said. “It seems weirder to cop to the lie.”

Mark smiled and nodded in a touché kind of way. Then he said: “Well, will you help me solve the Jumble?”

She smiled and said sure. He sat next to her and was pleasantly aware of her proximity. He thought at first she smelled like peanuts, but then he realized that that was the little dish of peanuts on the bar. She made short work of the Jumble answer: A Hack Saw.

He didn’t like it. “What’s he supposed to do with a saw? Saw those books in half?”

“No.
Saw,
like a saying—you know, an aphorism. A hack saw would be, like, a poorly made aphorism.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Mark said petulantly, “but there’s supposed to be more of a…a linkage between the picture and the answer to the riddle thing. Like the guy should need the other kind of saw, a wood saw. Or it should have been, ‘What the lazy
carpenter
aphorist needed to finish the job.’ I think that’s unfair.”

She laughed at him and said, “Well, it’s
way
down on the list of unfairnesses, you have to admit.”

Fuck, another zinger. He liked her. See, he was not a vain idiot; he didn’t mind being made fun of. “I’m Mark,” he said, and when he asked her name, she said, “Leila, no, I mean Lola,” which was really very suspicious. She was a choreographer. Where was she traveling?

“You know, I’d rather not talk about it,” she said. “What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m a consultant,” he said. “I have a meeting with a big client today, but I don’t know whether it’s canceled or what. I’ve been here for hours. I’m just supposed to wait to find out if the meeting’s off or been rescheduled. What’s the longest you think someone’s waited in an airport lounge?”

“You can’t just go home? Have them call you when they know where you’re going?”

“Go home? No. No way. Too big a client.”

They both just sat there for a few beats. Strangers at a bar.

“Do you have any cards?” she asked him.

“Business cards?” He patted his pockets in that too-elaborate way that cheap people do to convey their wallet-lessness.

“No. Playing cards. Maybe they have cards here.”

Did he have playing cards? Usually at least two decks. Sometimes a Svengali deck or a forcing deck. He went back to his corner and dug in his valise. He pocketed a forcing deck and returned to the bar waving a legit one.

He let her choose the game. She liked a simple nine-card kind of rummy he hadn’t played in years. She said she’d played it with her dad when she was young.

He let her win a couple of hands to suss out her game play, baited some discards to see whether she favored the knock or the hoard. She was a decent player; handled her cards with little fuss and displayed no obvious tell when he threw her a card she was after.

“I hope you don’t consult on card games,” she said to him, her pretty sloe eyes twinkling. So he ordered a beer and took the next three hands.

The man asleep in the corner was listing now and harrumphing pachydermishly at regular intervals.

After Mark had beaten her soundly a third time, he noticed that Lola’s or Leila’s eyes had gone from twinkly to annoyed.

“Want to play something else?” he asked her.

“No. It’s your deal,” she said. “I’m going to use the bathroom.” She took her shoulder bag with her. Which might mean that he hadn’t cleared sociopath yet. But her little rolly suitcase was still beneath her stool.

Mark took a card from the forcing deck in his pocket, a deck composed entirely of jacks of spades; he wrote his name and his New York mobile number across the face of the jack and slipped the card, jack out, behind the little plastic window on the top of her suitcase, the place meant to frame an ID. Once she was rolling that suitcase around again, the jack would be hard to miss.

When she came back from the bathroom, he taught her Conquian, a Mexican game from which rummy games are descended.

“Okay. You actually know a lot about cards,” she said. “Were you hustling me?”

He had always liked the term
hustler,
with its confused connotations of hard work and underhandedness. “I think that would require money bets,” he said. Answer and don’t answer.

“Do you know any tricks?”

“I do not like the term,” he said archly.

She smiled at that. “Come on. Show me what you got.”

What should he give her? The Dunbury Delusion? The Chicago Opener? Or something showier, like a cascade control? The real trick he had already accomplished. That’s how it always is.

He started his patter. “I mean, the thing with cards is, they all have these incredible stories behind them, you know? The numbers, the characters. Like the seven of clubs. You wouldn’t want to be alone with a seven of clubs.”

She gave him a
yeah, right
face, but he widened his eyes and rocked his chin slightly. “I’m serious, Lola,” he said. “You don’t wanna fuck with a seven of clubs. Excuse my language.”

“Excused.”

He riffed and riffled and shuffled and shenaniganned. He was still using the legit deck, so he let her hold and handle the cards. She was obviously confirming that these were the same cards she had just played with.

“Nines and sevens have a certain thing going on, a kind of charge,” he said. “If I were a mathematician, I maybe could say why. I’m not, so I can’t. But it’s definitely there.” He flipped a seven of diamonds and then a nine of spades rapidly out of a spread deck; not an illusion at all, just a demonstration of digital finesse. “Strangely, when suited, they seem not to like each other.” He drew a nine of diamonds and held it near the seven on the bar, then popped it so it jumped from his hand. As it tried to sail off the bar, he snatched it out of the air with his other hand. Her mouth actually opened a bit; a tiny misalignment of her two front teeth caught his eye.

“How about you?” he asked her. “You have any relationship with a particular card?”

“You serious?”

He
mm-hmm
ed.

“No. I’m not really into numerology. I think that sort of thing’s rather vicious, actually.”

“You mean superstitions do harm and should not be indulged?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Fair enough. Well, how about the shape of a suit? Its color? You must have some response to those.”

She considered this. “Spades,” she said. “If I have to choose.”

Most people chose spades. “Was it only rummy that you played when you were little?” Mark asked. “Any other games?”

“Stupid ones. War. Spit. Go Fish. My dad once tried to teach us a Persian game, but it had funny cards, and we were bored.”

Of course: she was Persian. He was pretty sure that meant Iranian. “Go Fish is an honorable game, I think. Where did you play?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, was it around a coffee table?”

“Yes. It was.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is this one of those sneaky fake-mystic tricks? Like, everyone remembers a coffee table?”

He
narrowed
his
eyes at
her
and appeared to consider. Then he said, “Most remember a coffee table. Some a carpet. But that doesn’t make it a sneaky fake trick.” He sounded a little hurt. “We’re just talking here.” Saying
We’re just talking here
makes your interlocutor feel aggressive.

“Yeah. It was this wagon-wheel thing. With a glass top.”

He swapped the legit deck for the forcing deck. He did this quickly, beneath the cover of one of his large hands. It would have looked odd had he not spent the past ten minutes doing even slicker manipulations. “Okay,” he said, “I want you to choose a card. Then look at it and do not show me. But it’s important that you really think hard about the card once you’ve chosen it, once you’ve looked at it. I mean, I suppose you could try to think of a different one to mess me up, but then I might not be able to accomplish this. And what fun would that be?”

“Way to lower expectations,” she said.

He fanned the deck on the bar before her.

“Turn around,” she said.

If she looked at more than one card, he was cooked: there were fifty-one jacks of spades before her. But he turned his back without hesitation. At least that way he could easily prep for reswapping the decks.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ve chosen a card.”

“You thought hard about it? You put it back?” he asked, still turned away from her.

“Yep.”

He swiveled around, scooped up the fan in his left hand, and then appeared to pass it to his right. In fact, the forcing deck stayed tucked in the meat of his wide left palm and then dropped soundlessly into his lap. He concentrated intently on the legit deck, now returned to the stage. So did she. He held it as delicately as a baby bird.

“Are you going to shuffle those?” she asked.

“You want me to?”

She considered. “Yeah.”

He looked concerned. Then he shuffled the hell out of that deck. His riffles were as quick as machinery but as smooth as wavelets meeting on the sand.
Crak-crak
went the deck halves as he rapped their sides on each other before knitting them together like a zipper; a tiny
whir
rose from their arched congress. He stopped. “Here, I think,” he said, then he held the deck delicately again. “The card you chose is on top. Go ahead and look.”

She reached out to take it.

“Wait!” He said that so loud that the barman jumped a little and a man with horse-head cuff links lowered his
Financial Times
. She snatched her hand back and then looked sheepish and then annoyed. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I screwed up.” He shuffled the deck for another thirty seconds and then re-offered it to her.

“You sure?” she asked, all scolding.

“I’m sure.”

She plucked the top card from the deck and brought it to her vision.

This is actually the hardest part: enduring the disappointment in the eyes of the mark when the wrong card is drawn. He could see in her dark eyes the hope change to something like hurt. She twirled the card between two fingers for him to see—a seven of diamonds.

“That wasn’t it?” he asked lamely. She shook her head. He looked genuinely embarrassed. Once, the mark had by chance drawn the same card as he had forced, and Mark had had to act all pleased with himself when in fact he was wondering how he was going to get the force card from the woman’s hatband. You could, of course, remove the force card from the legit deck before this stage in the routine, but that was one more maneuver that could be spotted. More than two or three close-up techniques was too many for a routine. The illusion lay elsewhere.

“Fucking sevens,” he said under his breath.

“Try it again,” she said to him quickly, as if he had just fallen off his bike.

“It’s not really like that,” he said grumpily. Then he brightened a bit. “Maybe it’s the next one.”

She was game and drew the next card. Nope. Even the air around them seemed to wilt.

“Okay, I’m going to have to actually draw the card to the top. This is kind of an advanced maneuver.” He cupped the deck in front of himself at eye level, stared daggers at it.

“Okay, now draw the top card. It’s yours.”

She regarded him suspiciously. She drew the top card. This time, she could not even meet his gaze. She flopped the card down before him.

“I take it the king of diamonds was not your card?”

She shook her head.

“Was your card a king at least?”

She shook her head again. “You want to know what my card was?”

It is when they ask this that you can stop.

“No,” he said, convincingly deflated.

“You want another drink?” she asked.

“Might as well.”

She ordered a glass of wine for him and one for herself. She raised her glass to him, but he was already gulping his, so they were both embarrassed. She returned to her notebook.

“You have a stage name?” she asked him a minute later. “Maybe you need a stage name.”

“A stage name? You think that’s the problem?” he asked. “How about Deveraux the Baffled?”

“That’s pretty good. Is Deveraux your real name? What kind of a name is that?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he said.

“Oh, sorry.”

“I’m kidding. Yeah. It’s my name. It’s Acadian.”

“Acadian? You mean, like, Cajun?”

“Well, that makes me feel rather like a chicken dish, but yeah.”

The SineCo rep approached from behind.

“Mr. Deveraux? Sorry to keep you waiting. It seems that the location of your meeting has changed. I have passage for you to Hong Kong. Will that be all right?”

Hong Kong. He’d never been. Odd, because Mark could have sworn that Straw said that
Sine Wave
had been up in the fjords last week. “Oh, that’s fine. Thank you for seeing to that.” So reasonable. He tried to note whether Lola had gotten any of this: Hong Kong, location changed, his unperturbedness.

Seldom is an illusionist offered an exit like this. The reveal would come in a third act. The SineCo rep hovered behind him.

“Well, look, Lola,” he said to her. “Good luck, okay?”

“Oh, yeah, thank you. Mark, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, Mark.” Off the high stool and back on terra shiny, Mark found his equilibrium. He wasn’t as drunk as he had feared, could do a convincing imitation of a weary-for-good-reason business traveler. The fact that the SineCo rep had said
passage
and not
ticket
gave Mark reason to hope that he was going to Hong Kong on one of the Sine aircraft; the excitement of this prospect momentarily overpowered the torpor of six hours’ drinking. “So maybe I’ll see you again in one of these places?”

“Unlikely,” she said. “Good luck with your meeting.” And then, sly-like, “You’ll want to work on that trick.”