Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  “Get ahold of yourself,” she said, laughing. “You keep yelling like that you’re going to get us all arrested!”

  Then she let go of him and he fell back against the lawn, giggling. He was back inside his big, blobby body. But that was okay. He’d found another way out of it.

  7

  Teddy

  Love makes a man desperate. After he’d exhausted his scant resources—two phone books; a suspicious operator; a useless, fruitless, but cinematically romantic drive around Oak Brook—he was forced, at long last, to ask for help from Destin Smalls.

  The previous time they’d talked it was the agent who’d called, pestering Teddy about the psychic activity among his descendants. Teddy may have implied that Smalls was a nosy, paranoid drama queen. Now it was Teddy calling, and the foot was in the other mouth.

  “You’ve gone off your rocker,” Smalls told him.

  “It’s a small favor,” Teddy said to him. “Hardly anything for a man with your connections.”

  “What in the world do you want it for?” Smalls asked.

  “Can you get it or not?” And within hours, Smalls arrived at his front door—but with company.

  “Jesus Christ,” Teddy said. “You brought him?”

  G. Randall Archibald—tinier, balder, and more mustachioed than ever—held out his hand. “A pleasure to see you again, Teddy.”

  “The Annoying Archibald. My God, you look like the guy on the Pringles can, but with less hair.”

  “And you still dress like an extra in an Al Capone movie.”

  “Says the cue ball with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustache.” To Smalls he said, “Did you bring it?”

  The agent held up a slip of paper. “I want to talk first.”

  “Of course you do,” Teddy said with a sigh. He led them to the back patio. The men settled awkwardly into their folding chairs. Archibald eyed the hole in the yard and said, “Burying a body?”

  Teddy ignored him and nodded at the paper still in Smalls’s hands. “So?”

  “Tell me what you want with it, first,” Smalls said.

  “You scared the lady away before we could finish our conversation.”

  “Then why don’t you just call her? I can give you her phone number.”

  “I’ll take that, too. But I’d prefer to mail her a card. It’s more gentlemanly.” Teddy reached into the ceramic flowerpot that sat under the window, and came out with the plastic baggie that held his secret stash: a box of Marlboros and a Bic lighter.

  “She’s married, Teddy.”

  “I’m aware of that.” He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully. “You want one?”

  Smalls didn’t pretend the offer was sincere.

  “Archibald?”

  “No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago.”

  “What kind?”

  “Prostate.”

  “I’m not asking you to smoke it in your ass.”

  “There’s quite enough emanating from yours,” Archibald said.

  “Can we please stay on topic?” Smalls said. “This woman’s husband is on trial for murder.”

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” Teddy said. “I just want to help her out.”

  Smalls leaned forward, the piece of paper in his hand like bait. “Two conditions. One, I never gave this to you.”

  “And?”

  “I want you to be straight with me.”

  “You want to know about the kids.”

  “No, I—has something happened?”

  “I told you twice now, none of the grandkids are doing anything. Zip, nil, null.”

  “What about the boy?” Archibald asked.

  “Matty?” Fortunately, the kid was out of the house, working with Frankie. “Not a chance. His daddy was a no-talent Polack. It would take a lot to overcome those genes.”

  “Not like your sturdy Greek genes,” Smalls said.

  “What the hell, Smalls.” Teddy glanced at the door, making sure Buddy wasn’t standing there.

  The agent raised his eyebrows. “They still don’t know?”

  “Jesus Christ. It’s none of your business.”

  “All right, let’s set aside the children for now,” Smalls said. “I have a different question.”

  “You know, we could have had this entire conversation on the phone, and you wouldn’t have had to drive all the way over here with this pint-size William Howard Taft.”

  “This is important,” Smalls said. “I want you to—”

  “And how’d you get here so fast?” Teddy asked. “You two bunking at the Hinsdale Oasis or something?”

  “Would you stop interrupting for one gosh darn second?”

  “There’s no call for language,” Teddy said. Archibald chuckled.

  Smalls took a breath. Then, in a quieter voice, he said, “I told you Star Gate was closing down.”

  “And I bet Archibald’s wallet is still in mourning.”

  “There’s only a couple agents left,” Smalls said. “You remember Clifford Turner? He’s detected an enormous spike of psychic energy in this area.”

  Teddy laughed. “Cliff? He’s sweet, but he couldn’t detect an armchair if he was sitting on it.”

  “Teddy, this is important. We’re trying to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Your children, at least. What if the Russians picked up that spike? What if, at this very moment, they’re homing in on this area?”

  “Looking for my children?”

  “No,” the agent said. “The next Maureen.”

  Teddy laughed.

  “Just because the Cold War’s over doesn’t mean the world’s any safer,” Smalls said. “In fact, with all this instability, threats can come from—”

  “Destin. Please.”

  “What?”

  “Has it crossed your mind that you’re inventing all this spy drama because you’re terrified of retirement?”

  “Inventing it?”

  “Archibald’s in it for the money. But you, you need this for different reasons. You’ve been put out to pasteurize, you’ve lost the love of your life, your dreams have died—”

  “You’re talking about me now?”

  “So your life didn’t turn out the way you thought. So you didn’t change the world. So what? It was a pretty good run. And now you’ve got only one choice.”

  Smalls raised an eyebrow.

  “Embrace mediocrity,” Teddy said. “That’s my advice to you, my friend. Lower the bar. Accept the C-minus. Give up on the rib eye and order the hamburger.”

  Smalls stared at him for a long moment, annoyed now but putting a lid on it. God damn, it was fun to wind the ol’ G-man up. Just like the old days. Having Archibald as an audience was the bonus.

  Finally Smalls said, “I wish I was making all this up, Teddy. The world’s getting more dangerous by the day. Our enemies aren’t in submarines and bomber jets anymore. It’s not about missile silos, though God help me, the idea of a fragmented Soviet Union keeps me awake at night. No, our enemies are fanatics with fertilizer bombs. How can we protect ourselves against another Oklahoma City? How can ordinary intelligence suss out two men in a truck?”

  Oh, speeches. Square-jawed Smalls was hell on speeches.

  “Are you going to give me that address or not?” Teddy asked.

  Smalls handed him the folded slip of paper. Teddy studied it without opening it. He thought Archibald would appreciate the move.

  “So she does live in Oak Brook,” Teddy said.

  Smalls seemed surprised.

  “Educated guess,” Archibald said.

  Smalls stood up. “I’m serious, Teddy,” Smalls said. “The stakes are high.”

  Archibald said, “Another Maureen could make all the difference.”

  “There is no other Maureen,” Teddy said, tucking the paper away. “And no next Maureen, just like there was no one before her. She was one of a kind. The Ace of Roses.”

  He’d never seen a smoother operator, and the topper was the pho
tograph gag Maureen pulled on that last day in Dr. Eldon’s lab. This was the third or fourth week in October 1962. The campus trees were ablaze, and the air had taken on that amber shimmer of a fall afternoon. Or perhaps it was only the stage lighting of faulty memory. It could have been gray and overcast, and his mind would have cast a golden haze over that last episode of unbridled play before Dr. Eldon’s program was yanked out from under him and everything got serious.

  And it was play. A few months into the experiments, the subject pool was down to just Clifford, Teddy, and Maureen, and protocol had broken down completely. They still performed in a “controlled environment,” an observation room with a one-way mirror, behind which an assistant filmed them. But within the observation room it was anything but controlled. Teddy had nudged Dr. Eldon into abandoning his original test plans in favor of an “improvisational approach.” Cliff still did solo sessions, but Maureen and Teddy would come into the room together (another protocol breakdown that Teddy had encouraged, noting that psychic activity seemed to be stronger when they were in the same room), and do whatever popped into their heads. “What do you feel like doing today?” Dr. Eldon would ask them, and then Teddy (most often it was Teddy) would propose some new experiment, which of course he’d prepared for.

  In short, the inmates had taken over the asylum.

  A newcomer to the scam biz might suppose that scientists were the hardest to fool, but the opposite was true. Each letter after a name imparted a dose of misapplied confidence. PhDs believed that expertise in one field—say, neuroscience—made them generally smarter in all fields. Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers. And if the suckers wanted the results you were giving ’em—if they were already imagining the publications and fame that would come from proving psychic abilities were true? Everything would have been different if Eldon’s career depended on debunking Teddy and Maureen instead of confirming them. Hell, all the man had to do was hire a stage magician to watch them work and the psychics would be sunk.

  Well, Teddy would be. Maureen he wasn’t so sure. What amazed him was how she could outperform him, even when he set up the scams. He’d practice pencil reading all week, come in with prepared envelopes, his pockets crammed with blanks and dummy cards—and Maureen would toss off some feat of casual clairvoyance that would knock his socks off.

  “You’re killing me,” he told her. “Absolutely killing me.”

  She laughed. Oh, he liked that laugh. They were strolling around that improbably sunny courtyard, on break after spending a couple of hours fascinating Dr. Eldon and the invisible assistant.

  “You’re the one who’s killing them,” Maureen said. “You saw Dr. Eldon’s face when you guessed all three wishes.”

  This morning it had been mostly Teddy’s show. He’d started with some matchstick divination, followed up with his go-to shtick with the hat and paper. The doc had been suitably impressed.

  “Oh, that?” he said. “That’s just billet reading.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “One of the first tricks I learned. There was a kid in my neighborhood who did nothing but read magic books all day and get beat up on the weekends. Tiny little guy. I kept him from getting his noggin caved in, and he showed me the ropes.”

  “So how’s it done?” she asked. “The billet reading?”

  “The hardest part is palming the first slip. The rest of it’s just reading ahead.”

  “I didn’t see you palm anything,” she said. “You never even touched the papers except when you held them to your forehead. Unless…”

  “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.