“It was when I—”
“Shush, let me think,” she said. “It wasn’t when Dr. Eldon folded the squares and dropped them into the hat—he did that on his own. And when you dumped the messages onto the table, you were holding just the brim of the hat. Your fingers didn’t go near the table.”
“Do you want me to explain?”
“Hold on, bucko. Now, when the squares were on the table, Eldon touched them—you asked him to arrange them into a triangle—but you never did. No, the only time you touched them was when you held them to your forehead—and you couldn’t have read them like that.”
“Oh, my dear Irish rose, I’ve spent my nights at the gaming tables, and I can’t tell when you’re bluffing. I know you’ve got moves much more complex than what I’ve shown the old man.”
“Mr. Telemachus,” Maureen said in that mock-prim voice that made his skin tingle. “It’s your moves that are under inspection here. The folding business—that’s quite suspicious. Why the little squares?”
He started to answer and she held up a hand. “You do know what a rhetorical question is, don’t you? Try to be quiet for a single minute.”
They walked in silence. The people they passed were mostly students, much younger than Teddy, and most were men. He watched them steal glances at Maureen, and he thought, Yep, boys, the girl’s with me. If only she’d let him say so out loud! When in public, she wouldn’t allow him to hold her hand, or put his arm around her waist. Her mother, she claimed, would be scandalized, as if her mother had eyes everywhere in the city. Maureen had only allowed him to kiss her (and yes, a bit more) twice, and both times it was in the pitch dark of the building’s supply closet.
“The shaking of the hat,” Maureen said finally.
He laughed.
“I’m right!” she said. “That’s the only time I saw your fingers inside the hat at the same time as the papers.”
“Caught at the scene of the crime,” he admitted.
“And that’s when you nab one of the squares,” she said.
“And substitute one of my own, yes.”
“Where did yours come from? When did you fold it?”
He opened his hand. “Right here.” A folded square of paper rested in his palm. “I always keep a couple around.”
“All the time? You just walk around with paper in your pants—I mean, your pockets?”
“And a few other things. It only works if the trick’s over before the audience knows it’s started. It’s all about preparation.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“And you just, what? Improvise?” In all their time alone together—which wasn’t much, only the minutes stolen during breaks and the few more after the day’s experiments were over—she’d never once given him a hint of her technique. It was a level of secrecy that he’d previously found only in paranoid, embittered cardsharks.
“How do you know what to write on your square?” she asked, refusing to be distracted.
“There’s nothing on mine. It’s blank.”
“But why would—?”
“Wait for it. When I dump the squares onto the table, two of those are the mark’s, and one’s mine.”
“I don’t like you calling Dr. Eldon a mark.”
“Shush,” he said, in the same tone she’d used with him. “I know which billet is mine because I put a little top crease in it. Barely noticeable unless you’re looking for it.”
“That’s why you have the squares—so your little imposter can sneak in.”
“And so the mark—excuse me, the honorable victim—can’t accidentally see that one’s blank.”
“But why the triangle business?”
“Because while everybody’s looking at him push the squares around, I’ve got one hand unfolding the first billet. It takes just a glance to read it—that’s why I only have him put two words down. And now the moment that seems to be the meat of the trick, from the audience’s point of view.”
He stopped talking. He was following a piece of advice given to him by his first magic teacher: whether it’s an audience or a woman, you have to make them ask for it.
But of course that didn’t work with Maureen. “That’s the read-ahead,” she said. “You’ve got one on your forehead, but you’re just pretending to read it—you’re telling us the one you’ve already read.”
“You’ve got it,” Teddy said, only slightly disappointed that he couldn’t do the reveal himself. “Then, after they confirm I got it right, I open the paper, nod knowingly, crumple it nonchalantly, and toss it in the hat.”
“By which point you’ve just read what the next wish is.”
“Always stay one step ahead of the audience,” Teddy said.
“And the last square on the table is the blank,” she said. “That’s very clever.” She looped her arm through his, and his blood whooshed like hot water in a Kenmore. They resumed their stroll.
“What if they look at the messages afterward?” Maureen asked. He could barely hear her over the roar in his ears. “They’ll notice the blank.”
“Oh, I never throw that last one in. I throw in the first message, suitably crumpled, and palm the blank.”
“You’ve got quick hands, Mr. Telemachus.”
If there is one thing more glorious than to walk arm in arm with a beautiful woman, it is doing so with one who’s flirting with you. He thought of the professor’s three wishes: “repaired furnace,” “grant approval,” and “publication permission.” So boring! God he hoped he never lived a life as small as Dr. Eldon’s.
“Now tell me your secret, Miss McKinnon,” he said. “How’d you do the photograph?”
Just before the break, Dr. Eldon had handed them a small photograph of a man sitting on a park bench. The picture had been taken from some distance away, but his short, triangular beard and slashing dark eyebrows made him as vivid as a Dick Tracy villain.
“I’d like you to concentrate on this man,” the professor had said. He was leaning over his desk, notepad and pen at the ready.
“Who is it?” Teddy had asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Dr. Eldon said. “That’s part of the test.”
Which was unusual. The professor hadn’t given them a test of his own devising in weeks. “What I need you to do is try to picture where this man is now.”
Teddy studied the photograph for half a minute, and then passed it to Maureen.
“Hmm,” Teddy said. “I’m sensing…a large building. An apartment? Or an office building?” Whenever Teddy was forced to do a cold reading, he just kept throwing out words until the mark gave something away. This time, though, the professor seemed to not know himself. Everything Teddy said he jotted down on the notepad.
“It seems to be an eastern city,” Teddy said. “Or southeastern? I can picture the sun coming up—”
“He’s on a submarine,” Maureen said.
Dr. Eldon looked up. “Pardon?”
Maureen’s eyes were closed. “Right now. He’s on a submarine, deep underwater. Near the Arctic Circle.”
The professor glanced toward the one-way mirror, then addressed Maureen more formally. “Perhaps you’d like to concentrate a bit more. Teddy, do you sense anything else?”
Her eyes snapped open. “I told you where he is,” she said before he could answer. The doc sighed, and started scribbling in his notebook. “Small room, curving metal walls. And above him, an expanse of snow and ice, which is why I said the Arctic. Though I suppose it could be the Antarctic.”
“Fine,” Dr. Eldon said. He wrote all this down reluctantly, like a man signing a confession. “Arctic or Antarctic. Anything else?”
Maureen closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s gone now. I think I scared him.”