Some of the women in the room like that and smile or snicker.
I’m not sure where he’s going with all this, but I get the sense that things are not moving in the direction I would like them to move in.
“What is it you want?” I ask him.
“One magic trick.”
Apart from close-up work with cards, I prefer the word effect, but I’m not about to correct him. “One trick?”
“Yes. That I haven’t seen before, and that I can’t figure out. You give me that, and I’ll give you Tomás.”
“Why?”
“Why would I give you Tomás?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure he told me the truth,” he says pointedly. “Maybe he did. Maybe you did. Can you do it?”
“Okay.” I pull out my deck of cards. “I’ll do it.”
Charlene looks at me somewhat uneasily.
Solomon steeples his fingers. “I used to do a little sleight of hand myself. Close-up effects, back when I was growing up. It’s like that for most magicians, I suppose, huh? They start with the walk-around and street magic tricks, but to ever make it big you need to do the stage stunts. That’s why Blaine doesn’t have a show here in Vegas, right?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
He gives me a head tilt and a faint smile. “I’ve lived in Vegas my whole life. I’ve seen a lot of tricks.”
“You haven’t seen this one.” I riffle through the deck but keep the cards in order. I do an overhand shuffle, a strip and a weave, cut the deck one-handed, and then pause. The secret to card tricks, to so many things, is not in what cards you’re dealt but in what you do with the ones in your hand.
He can tell I’m just getting set up for the effect. “Do you need a table?”
“That would be best. Yes.”
He gestures to one of the women, and she crawls forward and positions herself in front of him. He pats her back, but I’m not going to demean her like that.
“The floor will be fine.”
He catches my drift. “I understand.” He pats her butt and she scrambles out of the way.
I hand Solomon the deck so he can inspect it.
When working with control cards, you need to be able to know exactly where they are in the deck and be able to shuffle off any card that you want to, when you want to. Some people are able to shuffle off the second card or the bottom card, but the best sleight of hand magicians in the world can do any card they choose.
I can do any card I choose.
But first you have to memorize the deck to know where the cards are that you’re working with. That’s the hard part.
I’m not nearly as good as Lennart Green, but I can memorize a deck as I shuffle through them, noting the cards, the order, the orientation. He can do it in mere seconds, but it takes me about fifteen to twenty, which might be too many in this case.
I hand Solomon the cards. “Shuffle the deck as much as you’d like.”
Playing cards are always packaged in the same order so whenever you open a deck, you already know where every card in the deck will be. If you’re careful enough and practice shuffling enough, you’ll know where each card is, even after you cut or reshuffle them. If I ask you to cut the cards, it doesn’t change the order of the cards, it doesn’t shuffle them, it just simply changes which cards are on the top of the deck.
One magician in the thirties knew half a dozen ways to do the same card trick. He invited people to try to guess how he did it, but he would shake his head. “No.” And then he’d prove it by doing the effect again, but this time he would change his technique. He cycled through things that way, always staying one step ahead of them, and no one ever pinned him down or figured out what he was doing until he explained it all in a book he wrote late in his life.
I kneel while Charlene waits nearby. “I’ll deal five poker hands. Tell me one card you’d like in each of the hands and which hand you’d like to be dealt if you were in the game.”
It’s close to an effect Green does, but as far as I know he’s never done it quite like this, and I have the sense that this way will be harder because I’m allowing Solomon to choose one of the cards in each of the hands and not a single control card.
And I’m going to allow him to shuffle the cards himself before I deal them.
While I’m not looking.
Holding the cards facedown, he passes his way through the deck. “They’re still in order, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
He checks them, flipping through the cards faceup. “Alright. Let’s go with the five of diamonds, the nine of hearts, the three of spades, the king of clubs, and the queen of hearts.”
“And which hand would you like to be yours, if we were playing poker?”
“The second hand you deal out. The one with the nine of hearts.”
I think of Emilio and how much is at stake here. It takes me a second to calculate what each of the hands is going to have to be, then I close my eyes. “Shuffle the cards.”
He seems to guess what I’m going to do. “You’re kidding.”
“Shuffle them and I’ll show you the trick.”
After a few moments he tells me that I can open my eyes, and he hands me the deck.
Tonight I’m going to have to do this nearly as fast as Green does, and I’ve never even attempted that before. I turn over the deck so I can see the cards, then finger my way through the deck, noting the location of the cards Solomon chose, memorizing their position and the position of all the other cards I’ll need in order to deal the hands I’m planning on dealing.
I give myself eight or ten seconds — it’s hard to say since I’m not really paying attention to the passage of time, just committing the deck to memory.
Then I turn the cards over, riffle through them twice, and glance at Solomon. He’s watching me attentively.
Man, this would be a lot easier if I had another deck and I could just switch them without him seeing.
I focus on the cards.
Okay, if I’m right, I know the location of each of the twenty-five cards. Now, I just need to shuffle them out of the deck in the right order into the five poker hands.
As I do it, I banter slightly to keep from focusing too much on what I’m doing and let instinct take over instead. “You met with Agcaoili today, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
I finish with the first card in each hand and start going around again. “Did you hire him to kill my friend?”
“No, I did not.”
“But you know who did?”
I finish with the second, move to the third card in each hand, then the fourth.
“I don’t know his name. He calls himself ‘the hero avenges.’”
That brings me up short. Distracts me. And that is not good. I think of the man we stumbled onto last fall, the assassin the FBI still hasn’t been able to locate. “Akinsanya?”
“So you’ve heard of him. That surprises me.”
Studying Solomon’s eyes, I see no deceit there, and I can tell that everything he’s been sharing with me is true.
Akinsanya is involved? How? And why? Because of the RixoTray connection?
I do my best to return my attention to the deck, but I still have one more card to deal into each hand and I’ve lost my place.
Bad, bad, bad.
I take a small breath.
The five steps Arno Ilgner outlines in his book on mental training for rock climbers to deal with the fear of death, The Rock Warrior’s Way, come to mind. They’re the same five steps I use to deal with fear in my escapes: observe, accept, focus, intend, commit.
Quickly, I go through them, observing what I’ve done, accepting where I am, focusing on what’s happening, intending to succeed, and committing myself fully to what I’m doing.