The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery)

by Gaspard, John

  I looked up at the host, who was anxiously scanning the cards spread across the table. “You can start,” I said. “Using your psychic powers, I want you to point out the Queen of Hearts. Don’t pick it up, just point to the card that your psychic powers tell you is the Queen of Hearts.”

  The host studied the cards for a long moment, finally pointing to a card in the center of the pile. I picked it up and glanced at the face of the card without letting any of them see it. “Good job, good job.”

  I looked up at Nova, who was standing nervously beside Grey. I caught her eye and gave her a smile, which she returned shyly. “Nova, I’d like you to use your psychic abilities to find, let’s see…why don’t you try to find the ten of Clubs?”

  Nova appeared to be taking her task very seriously. She considered the mass of cards and then, suddenly, pointed to one card on the far edge of the group. “Are you sure that’s the ten of Clubs?” I asked. She thought about it for a moment and then nodded decisively. I picked up the card and glanced at the front. “Well done.”

  I looked at the cards spread out across the table, and then looked up at Grey, who was still stubbornly refusing to look in my direction. I glanced from him to the audience as I said, “How many of you would like to see Grey pick one of the cards?”

  Without any prompting, the audience burst into an energetic round of applause. Grey smiled grimly at this outburst and then slowly turned his head and acknowledged me. His eyes were boiling over with hatred. He was seething and I think would have killed me with his bare hands if we hadn’t been on live television.

  “Great,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “Grey, why don’t you point out…point out where the two of Diamonds is.”

  Without taking his eyes off me, he pointed at a random card on the table. I reached for the card and inspected the front of it. “Perfect,” I said, trying to keep things light. “And now, I’m feeling a little psychic myself, so I’m going to see if I can find a card as well. Let’s see, I’ll find…I’ll find the Four of Hearts.”

  I picked up a card off the table, added it to the three others in my hand, and then placed each one down, face up, on the table with a flourish as I called it out. “There they are…the four of Hearts, the two of Diamonds, the ten of Clubs, and the Queen of Hearts.”

  The host gathered up the four cards and held them up for the audience, but it was an unnecessary step. The audience was already applauding wildly. The host clapped me on the back and Nova gave me a shy grin. Grey was the only one not smiling.

  “That, without giving anything away,” I explained as the applause began to subside, “uses the same technique that Grey used with the questions in the envelopes. I was One Ahead.”

  “We’ve still a couple minutes of the show left,” the host said, treating me now like I was his best friend in the world. “Is there anything else you can show us tonight?”

  “Well, let’s see,” I said as I gathered up the cards and straightened them back into a pack. I looked over at Grey, who was still fuming, and the part of my personality that often gets me into trouble suddenly spoke up. “How about a quick card trick with just Grey here?”

  The audience showed their enthusiasm for the idea by bursting into applause again. “That sounds like fun,” the host said over the ovation, and then he turned to Grey. “Are you up for it?” he asked, pretending that Grey had a choice in the matter.

  Grey could see there was no way out, so he pretended, badly as it turned out, to be a good sport. “Sure thing,” he said with all the sincerity of a used-car salesman.

  I quickly shuffled the cards and then shuffled them again. “After seeing him perform tonight, I sense that Grey is an ambitious guy. So this will be the perfect card trick for him. It’s called The Ambitious Card. Why, you ask?” I stated rhetorically, without stopping for anyone to answer. “Because, just like our friend Grey here, one particular card always finds its way to the top.”

  I fanned the cards and held them out to Grey. “Pick a card,” I said, adding a carnival barker inflection to my voice. “Pick a card, any card.” This produced more laughter from the crowd than it really warranted.

  Practically dripping with contempt, Grey reached out his hand and pulled a card out of the cluster of the deck without even bothering to look at it. I gathered the cards together and pivoted in my chair, turning my back on him. “Now go ahead and sign your name on the face of the card, just to ensure that I don’t try to switch cards later on.”

  I could hear him sigh deeply, then I heard the rustle of clothing as he pulled a pen out of his suit coat pocket. Moments later I heard the scratching of the pen on the card, then the click of the pen and the sound of rustling again. “All set?” I asked with a bit too much cheer.

  “Yes, all set,” he replied with no inflection in his voice.

  I turned back to the table and once again held the cards out to him, slowly riffling through them. “Say stop whenever you like,” I instructed.

  “Stop,” he growled.

  I stopped riffling and told him to place the card at that spot in the deck, which he did with little enthusiasm. I cut the cards and then gave the deck two quick shuffles.

  “So I’ve mixed the cards twice and cut them once. Your card is buried somewhere in the deck. But, like I said, it’s an ambitious card, and so with a little coaxing from me,” I said as I gave the bottom of the deck a hard flick of my index finger, “your card magically moves to the top of the deck.” With that, I peeled back the top card, revealing a signed card—The King of Diamonds.

  Grey stared at me with disdain, but the crowd applauded wildly. I looked at the card and then looked from the card to the diamond rings on Grey’s fingers. “King of Diamonds,” I said. “How fitting.”

  With that I launched into the trick with fervor. I shuffled the deck—the King of Diamonds returned to the top. The host shuffled the deck. The King of Diamonds returned to the top. I shuffled the deck and let Nova cut it three times in a row. The card returned to the top of the deck.

  “It’s a persistent little bugger, isn’t it?” I said to Grey, who seemed to have only one facial expression—utter revulsion. Perhaps he was one of those rare people who didn’t like card tricks.

  “There may be only one solution,” I continued, putting the card back with the others and shuffling them vigorously. “We may have to take lethal steps.” I shuffled the cards one last time, and then spread all the cards face down across the table in front of me. “Grey, could I bother you to lend me your blindfold? And your letter opener—that wickedly sharp one you used earlier?”

  I thought for a second that I had finally pushed him too far and that he was going to explode and come across the table at me. But, to his credit, he kept his cool.

  Slowly, oh so slowly, he reached into his coat and withdrew the long strip of black fabric and the letter opener, setting both on the table just outside of my reach. Before I could lean forward to take the objects, Nova moved in and picked up both of them.

  She moved into assistant mode, stepping behind me and placing the letter opener on the table, near my right hand. And then she took the blindfold and covered my eyes, skillfully tying a snug knot against the back of my head. I could feel her breath on my neck and her perfume wafted past my nose. Her hands danced lightly on my shoulders, straightening my shirt and adjusting my collar. And then I could feel her stepping back to her original position to watch the finale of the trick.

  “The conclusion of this illusion,” I said poetically, “comes courtesy of the great magician, Max Malini, who invented and perfected this move over his long and illustrious career.” I felt across the top of the table, sliding the cards around with both hands to mix them up even more. I moved my right hand until I could feel the sharp point of the letter opener, carefully sliding my hand down the blade until I was able to grasp the handle.

  “I would ask that if any of you have your hands, or any other body part, on the table, please remove them immediately, as
I’m flying blind on this one.” I could sense the host and Nova take a step back, but felt no movement from Grey’s side of the table. I gave a few of the cards one final push with my left hand, as I raised the blade in my right.

  “Let’s just see if we can trap that ambitious card,” I said, and then with a sudden movement, buried the tip of the blade into the tabletop. There was a surprised gasp from the crowd, which grew in volume and intensity as I pulled off the blindfold with my left hand, keeping my right firmly on the handle of the letter opener. I rocked the blade back and forth, carefully removing it from where it had jabbed the table. Several cards fell away as I lifted the letter opener, revealing that only one card had been actually stabbed. I tilted the letter opener forward, holding the face of the card up to the crowd—and, I’ll admit—to the television camera.

  It was the King of Diamonds, with the point of the blade cutting cleanly through his one eye. I removed the card from the tip of the blade and, reaching across the table, I slid it into the front breast pocket on Grey’s suit, giving it a final pat as I did.

  The host was wrapping up the show, the audience was applauding, somewhere the show’s theme music was playing as the credits rolled. All that was lost on me, though, as my attention was directed completely at Grey. He was staring at me from across the table, seething with fury, anger, and even more hatred than before.

  I was sorry to be the cause of all that and part of me considered, just for a moment, that I may have pushed him too far. And for a split second I felt bad about it, but only for a second. To be fair, though, I don’t think it would have improved his mood any if he had known that, in less than four hours, he would no longer be angry. He would instead be dead.

  Chapter 5

  The beauty of living in Minnesota is that, upon awakening on the first day of November, you are just as likely to spend the rest of the day shoveling eight inches of snow as you are discovering that it’s too hot and sunny to rake leaves. In other words, November in Minnesota is like one of those brown-paper grab bags they sell at charity auctions, where you never know what you’re going to get, but odds are that it will at least be interesting.

  Although the weatherman had been predicting snow for days, that particular November first dawned like a quintessential Indian Summer day, with a bright blue sky and a breeze that felt warmer than it had any right to feel.

  I left my apartment on the third floor and made my way down the way-too-steep staircase to Harry’s apartment. My divorce had come at around the same time as Aunt Alice’s death and that had seemed like the perfect opportunity to come back to the apartment on Chicago Avenue and once again make it my home. Since returning, I’d made it a habit to share breakfast with Harry as often as I could. Although he never once commented on this new tradition, I suspected that he really appreciated it.

  I really can’t fathom the level of loss he experienced at her death. In addition to being his wife for over fifty years, Alice had also been his on-stage assistant for nearly as long. As many of his contemporaries had confided in me, Harry and Alice’s act wasn’t just a magic show—it was an on-stage love affair. Whether he was sawing her in half or she was helping him produce a cascade of doves, audiences sensed the chemistry they had together, which made their performance all the more special.

  “Morning, Buster,” Harry said without looking up from his in-depth perusal of the daily paper. I get all my news, and the comics to boot, online, but Harry is a diehard in many ways. One of those included the addictive need to feel newsprint between his fingertips at least once a day. I poured myself a cup of coffee and picked up the sports page to be convivial.

  “How was the show last night?” he asked casually, although I knew he was deeply interested in any opportunity to expose mediums, psychics, and other frauds.

  “About what you’d expect,” I said. “Some mind reading. Some One-Ahead stuff. The Armpit Tourniquet.”

  “Ah, that old chestnut,” Harry said. “And who was the alleged spiritualist?”

  “Grey,” I answered, as I added some cream to buffer the bitter coffee that Harry favored.

  Harry shuddered. “That one gives me the creeps. Always has.” He turned the page and scanned the fresh columns of print. “Did you give him a run for his money?”

  “Well,” I shrugged, “so much of his act is traditional magic that I really wasn’t in a position to expose his methods. Not without exposing the methods of just about every working magician.”

  Harry grunted in understanding without looking up from his reading.

  “So I just did some comparable stuff,” I continued, absently paging through the paper. “Which, at the very least, took some of the shimmer off of his act.”

  “You pulled the rug out from under him?” he asked.

  “I think I honored the family tradition,” I said.

  “And the audience hated you for it?”

  “For a while,” I said. “Although I think they warmed to me as things progressed. Then, just for fun, for my finale I did an ambitious card routine, which I ended with a nicely-executed Malini card stab, if I do say so myself.”

  This got his attention. His eyes peered at me over the top of the newspaper. One eyebrow slowly rose, like it was being pulled upward on a wire.

  “Did you now?” he said, giving a low whistle. He set the newspaper down. “The Malini card stab was always one of my favorites. Did I ever tell you about the time I did that as the wrap-up of my act on the Sullivan show?”

  He had told me that story on a number of occasions, but I shook my head and he launched into a blow-by-blow account of how Ed Sullivan himself had watched the act during rehearsal and made the decision—right there, on the spot—to move Harry’s position in the show, in order to feature him more prominently. “It was a glorious evening,” he said, stroking his thick white beard and smiling warmly.

  “We should break out the video of that some night and look at it again,” I suggested.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, we should do that. Some night.”

  I knew that he had been avoiding watching any of the old videos, as Alice would appear alongside him in every one of them, and he wasn’t really ready for that. Not yet.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if she had entirely disappeared from his surroundings. Her smiling face, like a silent screen star, peered out at us from all the photos, posters and playbills on the walls up here—they lined the walls down in the store as well. Her clothes still hung in their closet. Her toothbrush and comb lay on the counter in the bathroom. Her needlepoint sat unfinished on the small table next to her chair in the living room, as if she had just stepped out to the kitchen for some tea and would return in a few moments to pick up where she left off. She was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

  I could tell that he was sinking into a similar reverie, so I got up and brought my cup to the counter. “It’s November first,” I said with a little too much forced cheer. “If you want, I can walk the rent down to the landlord.”

  “What?” he asked, as he snapped back to the present. I noticed that his eyes had begun to water, just a bit. “No, that’s fine,” he said finally, shaking his head. “I can walk it down. The stroll will do me good.” With this mission ahead of him, he stood up, folding the newspaper carefully as he did.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, taking his cup to the sink and adding it to my own.

  He stopped folding the paper. “We both don’t need to go,” he said. “That would be overkill.”

  “I want to go,” I said as casually as I could. “Besides, it’s a nice day out.”

  He gave me a long, penetrating look. He had spent a few years in the early part of his career touring with a mind-reading act, but it didn’t take those unique skills to deduce my ulterior motive for this mission. “You just want to gape like a lovesick schoolboy at the new landlady.” He put a mischievous little spin on the word lady. “Don’t think I can’t see that. It’s so obvious, you could see it from space.”

&n
bsp; “Guilty as charged,” I admitted. “I’m going with you.”

  And that was that.

  Presenting the monthly check to the landlord in person has been a Marks’ family tradition for as long as I can remember. As a child I had enjoyed the privileged assignment of taking the check, sealed tightly in a plain white envelope, over to Mrs. Reinhardt, who lived in one of the brick apartment buildings on the other side of the movie theater. She always made a big fuss about my arrival and would encourage me to perform, for her and her cranky husband, whatever magic trick I was currently attempting to master. He matched her level of enthusiasm with his own dour nature and in his own, grumpy way he taught me a lot about dealing with a tough audience.

  Now the tradition had moved from grandmother to granddaughter.

  It was a short walk from our door to hers. In addition to owning the strip of retail shops that took up half the block, and the old brick apartment buildings that took up the other half, Megan had laid a personal claim to the shop on the corner. For years it had served as our local drugstore, under the name Shenandoah Drug, an odd choice given how far away we are from the state of Virginia and the eponymous river. Over the years that corner shop had taken on other identities since the Targets and Walmarts of the world had driven nearly every corner drugstore out of business. Now it was owned and operated by Megan, with a new name that amused me every time I saw it—Chi & Things.

  The inside of the store was about what you would expect for a store with a name like that. It was packed from wall to wall with New Age books, incense, crystals, natural oils and a large selection of teas; in short, just the sort of mishmash of items that would appeal to a wide spectrum of credit card-wielding spiritually-minded seekers.