Bluff

by Michael Kardos

  8

  A paralegal from Brock’s office returned my message late Wednesday only to tell me in a bored, lock-of-hair-twisting voice that Brock would call me by the end of the week, which he didn’t do. On Saturday night I did a bachelor party for some middle-age, second-marriage deal in Morristown. (“Would you believe the ex never even let me have a bachelor party?” the groom made a point of telling me twice.) I decided not to perform Target Practice. Otherwise, the set went unremarkably. My audience’s only regret seemed to be that I wasn’t a stripper.

  Afterward, one of the men kept invading my personal space while I packed up and I got out of there quickly. No, honestly, I’m really not hungry at all.

  I arrived home starving and walked the two blocks to a Chinese place that stayed open late.

  It was almost one a.m. when I returned to the apartment with my carton of lo mein. I let myself into the narrow landing and shut the outer door behind me, thinking of dinner and bed. That’s when I heard the low snarl.

  From the shadows at the top of the narrow wooden stairway leading to the upstairs apartment, something was suddenly charging/skidding/falling down toward me, its nails clicking like a massive raccoon’s or a wild boar’s, something driven by hunger and rage.

  The sound I made wasn’t human either.

  I dropped my carton of food, and having just shut and locked the outer door, I now slammed my body against it. The doorknob jabbed my spine, and I gasped as the animal—border collie mixed with dragon—catapulted itself from the bottom stairs. Instinct caused me to pivot to the side and crouch a millisecond before the dog sank its teeth into the calf of my pant leg.

  “No no no no!”

  The denial came from upstairs. Harley bounded down the staircase and grabbed the dog by its collar. The dog released my leg, and Harley knelt down to the brute’s level, putting her face dangerously close. “No biting!”

  The dog shook itself free, sniffed the lo mein carton, and clicked its way back upstairs and into Harley’s apartment.

  “Did he get you?” Still on her haunches, she examined my pant leg.

  I unlocked my apartment door and limped inside. Harley followed with the lo mein. I shut and locked the door behind us, switched on the light, limped over to the loveseat, and fell into it.

  My pencil pants were torn and bloody. “Why the hell would you open your door this late at night?”

  “To tell you about the dog,” she said. “In case you heard him upstairs.”

  I rolled up the pant leg. My face felt cold. Harley was headed toward the kitchen. She returned with a wet dish towel. “Hold this against your leg.” She worked at an animal hospital as a vet tech and knew how to keep animals alive and maybe people. “Did you have a show tonight?”

  “You can’t have a dog here!” My leg throbbed.

  “Mustard really isn’t a biter.”

  My pain and anger worked against any attempt to control my breathing. If I got stuck in the hospital because of that damn dog and had to miss my trip with Ace tomorrow … My vision was getting swimmy, same as when my father would come home after getting beaten up and I’d have to see his angry, swollen face. “You can’t have him,” I said.

  “You have birds,” she said.

  “The birds are in my lease.”

  “But the shelter was going to put him down.”

  “The shelter should have put him down.”

  Harley had moved in last summer, and until now I’d always thought of her as one of the saner tenants to occupy that apartment.

  “Let me see,” she said. “Move the towel.” She knelt down. “It’s a puncture wound.” She stood. “I have a good first-aid kit upstairs. I’ll get some gauze and antibacterial. You lie down and elevate the leg.”

  “Do I need stitches?”

  “For that? I don’t think so. But it’s probably going to swell. And maybe turn a weird color.”

  As she left my apartment I called after her, “Shut my door before opening yours!”

  I checked the dish towel again. Still bleeding.

  Some barking upstairs. Then Harley was back in my apartment with her first-aid kit. She set it on the coffee table, went into the kitchen, and returned with a roll of paper towels and hand soap and a bowl of water. She squatted down beside me and dipped a paper towel into the water, squeezed out some soap, and gently washed the wound. It hurt.

  “Stop moving,” she said. “You’re worse than the dogs.”

  She patted my leg dry with another paper towel, taped a bandage on, and rolled down my pant leg.

  She looked around the place. She’d never been in here before. We’d only ever spoken on the landing or on the street. She was a couple of years out of college, and I knew I didn’t need to impress her. Still, I didn’t like seeing my place through someone else’s eyes. “How long have you lived here?” she asked.

  “A year or so.” It’d been eight years. “I’m gonna decorate soon.”

  “You have a lot of books.” There were two faux-wood bookshelves along one wall. “Are they all magic books?”

  “Most of them.”

  “I thought magicians are supposed to keep their secrets.”

  “Books are okay,” I said. “Like a loophole?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Damn, my leg hurts.”

  “Let me get you some ice.” She went into my kitchen again. The freezer opened and closed. Then a couple of cabinets. “You have any liquor?” Through my ceiling I heard the click click click of the dog pacing. Probably plotting.

  “Under the sink,” I told her.

  She opened and closed a cabinet. The sound of pouring.

  She returned with the ice in another dish towel and two glasses. I took one: straight-up vodka. And I didn’t buy the good stuff.

  Harley took a sip and asked, “Who’s that guy?”

  She meant the guy hanging up across the room. Except for my calendar of bookings, the black-and-white poster was the only thing on the wall. I knew she was only asking about it because I had revealed myself to be squeamish and cowardly, and people probably blacked out less if they were in the middle of a conversation.

  In the photo, the magician was about fifty. Tuxedo, top hat, cape. An old-time look, but then again he was old-time. Also: white gloves. Gloves.

  “Richard Valentine Pitchford,” I said, and groaned a little. “He went by Cardini.”

  “So card tricks?”

  “He revolutionized card magic. And he wore gloves. You wouldn’t believe how hard that is.”

  “Probably like doing surgery on a dog while wearing gloves. That’s what the vets do.”

  She had it wrong, though. Card magic was one hundred percent touch. A doctor’s form-fitting latex gloves were nothing compared with white dress gloves. But I wasn’t going to argue with the person patching me up. On the day Harley moved in, I’d seen her lugging boxes from a U-Haul and didn’t go outside to help. I couldn’t bear the thought of helping her and then being forgotten forever.

  “I should’ve helped you move in,” I told her now.

  “Huh?”

  “When you moved in. I was at home. I should’ve helped.”

  She looked surprised for an instant. Then a shrug. “You didn’t know me.” She nodded toward the carton of lo mein. “Do you want that? I can get you a fork.”

  I shook my head and held the cold dish towel against my leg. Harley’s pajamas had stars and moons on them, and the cuffs of the pajama pants were orange. She looked like a rocket ship.

  She frowned. “Are you going to rat me out to Tony?” Our landlord.

  I glanced down at my pants: the bleeding seemed to be slowing. “Just keep your dog away from me.”

  “He isn’t mine,” she said. “He needs a home.” She took a drink. “Did you know him?”

  “Know who?”

  “Cardini.”

  I shook my head. “He died before I was born.” Still, I’d spent more than a few hours over the years imagining such a meeting. He watches me do a fe
w card flourishes, a trick or two, and he strokes his pointy white beard and flashes his winning smile and says something beautiful.

  “He was a perfect magician,” I said. “Absolutely pure in his movements. He developed his magic in the trenches during the First World War. That’s why he wore the gloves.”

  “For real?”

  “It was cold in the trenches.”

  She took another sip, squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again. “Hey, are you gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah. Do I need like a tetanus shot or something?”

  “You should probably do that tomorrow.”

  “Because I really don’t like needles.”

  “No, you really don’t like tetanus.” She finished her drink. “David Blaine—do you know him?”

  Always with the David Blaine. “You mean personally?”

  “Yeah.”

  I told her I didn’t. “I don’t really know anyone anymore except for Jack Clarion.”

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” I said, and took another drink.

  9

  “You call that distracting?” Ace said.

  “Pardon me?”

  He had just gotten into my car and was checking me out. “I thought I told you to wear …” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  I had on a black cardigan over a simple black top. Jeans and black knee-high boots. Sorry, Ace: no skin. He’d have to create his own distraction.

  I remained irked for a few miles, but by the time we were south of the Driscoll Bridge I was feeling the stirrings of an actual adventure, an American road trip where anything could happen, and even if it didn’t all go our way I’d have the story afterward—and it was a story I was getting paid to write.

  In the past 365 days our planet had raced completely around a medium-sized star, yet I hadn’t traveled more than a hundred miles from my apartment. I’d performed some shows, doing the same routines by rote and coming home again to frozen dinners and the gut-gnawing awareness that eventually the word “rut” loses its meaning. I was like some former high school jock who had once thrown a few winning passes and now had only the memory of those long-ago games to keep him warm at night. But this trip with my cheat had my heart pumping a little harder. I felt—dare I say it?—energized.

  “If ever there was a shithead who needed to be separated from his money,” Ace was telling me while fidgeting with my radio dial, “it’s Carlo Desoto.” Desoto was a middle manager at Atlantic Insurance. “He’s the swell guy who denies your grandmother’s cancer treatment.” Ace settled on a Rolling Stones song and began drumming on his knees. “That’s why we’re driving all this way. Because he’s in it for real money. The other guys are run-of-the-mill suckers who think they’re better than they are, but for them it’s a pastime. They have money to lose.”

  “What kind of money? A bakery owner?”

  “His wife is an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah, ah. Listen, I do my homework. This is their golf. Their whatever. It’s something they enjoy doing. All except for this guy Desoto. He’s in deep. I met him at the Tropicana couple of months ago, watched him win and then give it all back. He had on this terrific Gucci suit, and it was so obvious that his wife thought he was working late at the office, or maybe having an affair. Such a beautiful thing to see. Desperation has a glimmer to it, like diamonds. Took me all of ten minutes to talk my way into one of his regular home games. I’ve seen it before. These guys, these family men, they get to losing more than they ever imagined they could lose. And when it gets bad enough, it’s like a switch gets flipped, and they realize they’re in so deep they’ll never get out except for a miracle, and then that becomes the goal: the miracle. But they know miracles don’t happen, so then it’s almost like losing becomes the goal. Losing big. Losing so big you can’t even believe it.”

  But of course I could believe it.

  Red or black?

  I could hear my father’s voice as clearly now as when I was twelve.

  “Because when you’re desperate enough,” Ace was saying, “the feeling of losing big isn’t so different from the feeling of winning big. And someone who can’t tell the difference anymore? Who’s in so deep he needs that feeling at whatever the cost? That’s who you want at your table.” He slapped his leg. “That’s Carlo Desoto.”

  The others at the table would be typical of the men into whose card games Ace found his way: utterly forgettable, and with just enough success to believe they were smart and clever.

  “So can we talk about your tactics a little?” I asked. I wanted to understand the details of Ace’s technique, his mechanics, his grip, but he kept insisting I see—or, more precisely, fail to see—all that in action. But I also wanted to know how he worked as a solo player. How often did he false deal? What kind of deal was it? And what about the cut? Someone else would be cutting the cards, which makes it useless to stack the deck beforehand. An accomplice could false-cut for him, or cut the deck at exactly the right place … but Ace worked alone.

  “First you watch,” he answered. “Then on the drive home, we talk. I don’t want to bias your eyes.”

  I drove on, letting prime interviewing time go to waste but unsure what to do about it. At least my car was cooperating, deciding to wait a while longer before coughing out its last breath.

  When we got close to Atlantic City, my phone navigated us to the bakery, and I parked across the street. We were several blocks in from the ocean, on an inadequately lit street lined with darkened storefronts. The air was gustier than it was up north, and I wrapped my arms around myself as Ace and I crossed the road. You couldn’t see inside the bakery because of the shelves of bread blocking the windows. The sign on the door said CLOSED, but the door was unlocked.

  Ace gently touched my arm. “If you win a hand, don’t lay your cards down extra slow to rub it in. It’s bad etiquette.”

  “Slow rolling. I know.”

  “And protect your cards. Not everyone’s as honest as you and me.”

  I smiled.

  “Let’s go get ’em, tiger,” he said, and we went in.

  I was hit by a blast of warm air and a smell that was yeasty and sweet. Shelves behind the counter were partially stocked with what I supposed were the day’s leftovers. In the center of the room was a cheap metal poker table, the fold-up kind, and on a long table near it was a spread of bread, cheeses, and olives. Beside the food were several bottles of wine and liquor.

  Three other people were in the room. A skinny, older man came right over, all smiles. “Welcome, welcome.” He reached out to shake Ace’s hand. He was maybe early sixties, with a long, kind face and a day’s gray stubble. Bakers woke up early. His day must have already been sixteen, seventeen hours old.

  “This is my friend Natalie,” Ace said. We saw no reason for me to use a fake first name. “Natalie, meet Ethan Garret.”

  “It smells wonderful in here,” I told Ethan, who beamed and pumped my hand.

  “Thanks for coming all this way. You’ll make five.”

  “Five?” Ace frowned.

  A younger man came over. Well built. Black cashmere sweater, brown corduroys, polished black shoes. His hair was as dark as his sweater, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. I’d have singled him out at a casino, too, but not for his betting style.

  “Good to see you again, Ace,” he said.

  “Likewise.”

  “I’m Natalie,” I said.

  I felt myself being assessed. His smile seemed real, if guarded. “Carlo Desoto.” We shook hands.

  “And this is my niece, Ellen,” Ethan said.

  I felt embarrassed, having assumed that the woman standing by the food table was an employee, here to serve drinks or pick up after us. Had she been a man, I would have assumed she was a last-minute player substitution. Shame on me.

  “Hi.” Ellen gave the room a smile but saved a special finger wave for me that seemed to say, We’re both female!
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br />   She wore a loose sweater—gold, with white stars—blue jeans, and canvas Keds. She had on very little makeup, if any, and her brown hair was cut short and might have looked stylish on another woman’s face. Ace had fooled me back at the park on Wednesday with his How many kids do I have? nonsense, but this time I was certain I was dealing with the parent of small children.

  Still annoyed at myself for dismissing her so quickly, I went over and made a point of shaking her hand firmly, saying, “Nice to meet you, Ellen. I’m Natalie.” She smiled politely.

  “You said there’d be six,” Ace said to Carlo. I knew what annoyed him. Fewer players meant smaller pots, and we had come a long way. “What about Hank and Roy?”

  “Roy’s sick,” Ethan said. “And Hank forgot about some event at his kid’s school.”

  Ace bit his lip. “Still, I would think …” But that was all we would learn about what he thought, because he went over to the drink table and unscrewed the cap from a bottle of tonic.

  “What do you do, Ellen?” I asked.

  “I teach kindergarten in Flemington.”

  “I guess you like kids.” I always felt uncomfortable talking to mothers, who seemed to belong to a tribe with laws I wasn’t privy to and grievances I didn’t understand.

  “Actually, they’re pretty gross a lot of the time.” She smiled. “But they’re sweet. They keep me young.”

  The opposite seemed true. Her eyes looked tired and her mouth had permanent frown lines. I’d have guessed she was only a few years older than me, but children had aged her face and wreaked havoc on her fashion sense.

  “Flemington’s what? A couple of hours away?” Ace asked, the vodka tonic in his cup fizzing.

  “Thereabouts,” she said. “But I hadn’t seen Ethan and Margie in a while, and I like driving.” Her smile came and went in a single second. “I’m going to visit the ladies’ room, if you don’t mind.” She headed toward the rear of the shop.

  Once she was out of earshot, Ethan said, “She’s in the middle of an ugly divorce.”

  “I don’t like people watching the game,” Ace said.

  I glanced over at the restroom. “Ugly how?”