The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (5 page)

Chapter 4

“Okay, we’re back,” the TV host said as the red light popped on above the main camera.

I was onstage, seated at the large wooden table, trying to look casual and relaxed and feeling neither. My unease was heightened by the placement of Grey, who was seated at the other end of the table. This was an unexpected development and the only solace I could take in the situation was that it seemed to be just as unanticipated for Grey as well.

During the break, as the host chatted casually with me while I settled into my place on stage, he suddenly turned to the floor manager and said, “Hey, why don’t we get Grey back out here as well? Might be fun to have the two of them on camera together. Is he still here? Can we do that?”

This was followed by several energetic and hushed conversations by crew members speaking frantically into their headsets. A few moments later, Grey stepped back into the room, just pulling on a black wool coat. The host saw him from the stage and pointed him out to the crowd. “Hey folks,” he boomed to the audience, “how many of you would like Grey to stick around for this next segment?”

Even if Grey had tried to decline, he would have been drowned out by the thunderous ovation the audience gave to this seemingly spontaneous suggestion. Moments later, he was re-wired with a microphone and seated at the other end of the table from me, where he still sat stiffly, refusing to look me in the eye.

“We just had a great paranormal experience with psychic, mentalist, and spiritualist Grey,” the host continued, speaking directly into the camera. Without any prompting from the floor manager, the audience began applauding wildly. Grey smiled wanly and tilted his head a fraction of an inch, acknowledging their adoration.

“And joining us now,” he continued, glancing down at his ubiquitous index cards, “is debunker and magician, Eli Marks.”

He waited a beat too long, anticipating an interruption by applause, which clearly wasn’t coming. The floor manager, standing just off-camera, frantically gave the audience the applause signal. Their response was at best lackluster, clapping with the same enthusiasm that a group of kids might display when being forced to welcome the man who was about to kill Santa Claus.

The host glanced at the index card again and then looked up at me. “So, Eli, you saw all of Grey’s performance tonight, right?”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“As a debunker of paranormal events, did it set off all of your internal alarms? All the bells and whistles?” He chuckled good-naturedly.

“Well, to begin with, I prefer the term skeptic rather than debunker,” I began, but he quickly cut me off.

“Debunker, skeptic, either way you don’t believe that what Grey did here tonight was supernatural in any way, do you?”

I looked from the host, to the crowd, to Grey, who was ignoring my very existence.

“Here’s the deal,” I said suddenly, turning back to the host as I decided to just jump in and do it. “Grey is very good at what he does. Really. He has excellent crowd control, solid routines, and is obviously skillful. I have no issue with that. What gets me…what sticks in my craw, as my uncle would say…is that he presents the tricks that he’s performing as if they were real.”

“You’re saying they’re not real?” the host asked provocatively.

“Not one second of it. Look,” I said, leaning forward and gesturing toward Grey across the table from me. “Grey has a great mentalism act. Really. He could make a handsome living in a Las Vegas showroom for years to come with that act. Not at one of the bigger hotels on The Strip,” I added, “but he could still aspire to a job downtown.” My joke, such as it was, got nothing from the audience.

“So then, if it’s all bogus, can you tell us how he does it?” the Host asked provocatively. “Let us in on all the little secrets?”

I sat back in my chair with a sigh. “Well, you see, that’s going to be a problem. Essentially what Grey did tonight was a magic show, and we magicians are not known for our willingness to let our secrets out.”

“A professional magician never reveals his methods?” the host offered.

“Something like that,” I agreed.

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, Eli,” the host said, getting ready to go in for the kill. “But you appear to want it both ways. You say it’s all fake and not real, but at the same time you won’t explain how it’s done. That’s doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?” He winked at the audience and got a smattering of applause in response. They still hated me, but now for a new reason. That was progress of a sort, I guess.

“Maybe I can meet you halfway,” I said. “What parts do you want to know about?”

He glanced down at his notes. “Let’s start at the top. How did he stop his heartbeat?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, folks, that’s a magic trick. I can duplicate it for you, if you like, but I won’t tell you how it’s done.”

“Okay, then,” he continued, scanning through his notes. “How did he identify people in the audience…he knew their names, what they were wearing, objects they were holding…and he did it all while blindfolded. Can you explain how he did that?”

“Well, for starters, just because you have a blindfold on doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re blind. But, as for his method, I suspect he and his lovely assistant—”

“Nova,” the host added, gesturing to the woman in question, who was seated just off-stage.

“Yes, the lovely Nova. I suspect that the two of them used a fairly simple verbal code to communicate the information. In fact, if you were paying close attention…or even if you weren’t, for that matter…I think you might have recognized they were having a wee bit of trouble with it tonight.” I looked over at Grey, who was glaring at Nova. She looked away and Grey huffed quietly and folded his arms in disgust.

“All right, fair enough,” the host said, looking down and flipping to a new card in his stack. “What about his second-sight ability…reading the words from books and magazines held by audience members? There clearly wasn’t any code going on there.”

I nodded in agreement. “No, I think a more sophisticated technology was used for that.” I picked up the wireless handheld microphone that Nova had left on the table. “Remember earlier when Nova got too close to one of the speakers in the audience with this microphone? How there was that loud, annoying feedback?”

I was saying this to the host, but I could see audience members nodding along with me as I spoke. “Well, that’s because you don’t want to get a live microphone too near a speaker—whether it’s a great big speaker on a stand in front of the stage,” I said, waving the microphone toward one of the distant speakers, “or a little tiny speaker hidden somewhere else.”

With that, I waved the microphone past the left side of Grey’s head, which produced a loud, shrill electronic shriek from somewhere near his left ear. He leapt up, holding his ear and moving quickly away from the table.

“Damn it,” he said, rubbing his ear furiously. Then he must have realized that not only was he still in front of a live audience, he was also on live television. Ever the professional, he regained his composure just as quickly as he had exploded. He bowed slightly to the audience, ran a hand through his hair and glared quietly at the host as he returned to his chair.

“I didn’t come on this program to be insulted,” he said, sitting heavily in his seat. “I have a gift that I have proven again and again, countless times. I don’t need the blessing of this, this…performing monkey.” Grey spit out the last words like a curse. He flinched slightly as I moved the microphone toward him again, and then I set it midway between us on the table as a gesture of truce. The host was still flipping through the cards.

“Perhaps, Mr. Marks, you could explain how he predicted each of the questions in the sealed envelopes? And, even more impressive than that, there were all the facts he seemed to know about the audience members. People he’d never met before, according to him.”

“Impressive? Perhaps,” I began. “But not really all that difficult.”

“What about when he revealed that someone in this room had a relative who died on the toilet? You don’t just pull that out of thin air, do you? And he even knew how the fellow died…a heart attack, if I remember correctly.” He nodded in agreement with several nearby audience members.

“To begin with, dying while on the toilet may be a unique event, but it’s not as rare as you might think. How many people do we have in this room?” I asked, doing a quick scan of the crowd. “About 200 people?”

“Give or take,” the host agreed.

“Well, in a group of 200 people, I would guess you have maybe a one-in-three chance of finding at least one person who knows of someone who died while on the toilet. For an act like Grey’s…for any mentalist…that’s a chance worth taking, because it’s a big payoff for very little risk.

“And, as for cause of death, there weren’t really all that many options,” I continued. “When death comes on a toilet, it’s traditionally in the form of a heart attack or stroke, not a fall from a great height or a gunshot wound. Unless you’re John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction
.” This actually produced a ripple of laughter from the crowd. It didn’t turn the tide, but finally I was feeling a little less hate coming from the group.

“Okay,” the host acknowledged. “But what about divining the questions on the cards in sealed envelopes? I think of myself as a pretty smart guy, and to me that seems to defy explanation.”

“Let me see here,” I said. “How can I explain the technique without giving too much away?” I sat quietly for a moment, not trying to build drama—although that was the unintended effect—but to actually figure out a way to explain what Grey had done without screwing up about a hundred other magic tricks that use the same method.

“There’s a technique in magic called One Ahead,” I finally said, talking first to the host and then turning and addressing the crowd. “And it’s as simple as it sounds…The magician is one ahead. That one might be a piece of information, a name, a question, or even a physical object, like a coin or a ball. The magician has it and the audience doesn’t know it, so he’s One Ahead.”

I gestured toward Grey, who was still steadfastly refusing to look in my direction. “In the case of Grey’s envelope trick, somehow he got the first question ahead of time…lots of different ways to do that, although I think I know the method he used tonight…and by being in possession of the first question, all he had to do was to pretend to read that question when he was actually opening the second question.”

I was getting an equal amount of head nodding and blank stares from the audience. The host was going to say something, but even he seemed a bit baffled. I reached into my coat pocket and took out the deck of cards I always carry.

“Let me demonstrate the same thing, but with a deck of playing cards,” I said as I spread the cards, face down, in a mess all over the table. “I’ll need some help with this,” I added, gesturing toward the host and then, in a burst of inspiration, toward Nova as well. As the audience applauded, the host bounded back up to the stage, while Nova moved at a much less enthusiastic pace.

“Let me see if I can remember the pattern for this routine,” I said as much to myself as to the crowd. It took a few seconds for me to mentally sort through my card trick files, and then I remembered the routine. “Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

I spread the cards around on the tabletop some more, to mix them even further. The host was standing over me and Nova had just crossed the stage. Grey, seated across the table from me, looked like an unhappy statue.

“Every time I try to write the word psychic,” I said, rolling into the routine. “I somehow always end up writing the word physics. Now, except for sharing most of the same letters in common, the two words may seem unrelated. But they’re actually a lot closer than you might think. You see, in quantum physics, it’s understood that the very act of observing an action invariably changes the outcome. And, it turns out, the same is true in some psychic situations.”

I moved the pile of cards around on the table, flattening it out, exposing nearly all the card backs. “Now, all of us are, to one degree or another, psychic. However, just like in physics, sometimes the very act of observing our psychic work will change the outcome. So for this effect, each one of you is going to use your psychic powers, but we’re not going to look at the results until the end. Because looking at them might actually change that outcome.”

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?”