The world took a long time coming back together again. Joyce lay back and smoked a cigarette. I curled up beside her warmth and took the pins from her hair. She smiled like a cat while I took down her hair and spread it out over the pillow. Fresh chestnuts on new snow.
“How did you start, Bill?”
“You started. You called me up and—”
“No. How did you start cheating at cards?”
I hadn’t told the story in a long time. When you live your life according to a certain pattern and when you fit part and parcel into a certain world, it’s hard to remember another living pattern and the other world you used to inhabit. When one world is law-abiding and the other is the gray world of the card mechanic, the two spheres are especially far apart. I remembered the first world, of course, but I seldom thought much about it.
Well, I hadn’t told the story in a long time, and Joyce had asked, so I felt talkative. I told her the story of a young guy named Maynard the Magnificent who had done magic tricks. Sleight-of-hand with cards and matchboxes and silk scarves. A batch of pretty decent bits tied together with some easy patter and a certain amount of stage presence. Add some mentalist routines, toss in the white tie and the tails and a supposedly debonair moustache, and you had Maynard.
I had never been big. For one thing, I hadn’t been that good. For another, there aren’t a hell of a lot of big magicians around. Can you name four magicians offhand? And don’t name Thurston or Houdini or Blackstone, because they were all a long time ago. They played vaudeville houses then and they were big draws. A magician isn’t a big draw nowadays. He’s something to fill up the card at a burlesque house, something only slightly more amusing than the shop-worn blackout bits. He’s an added unattraction in Miami Beach hotels and borscht belt resorts. He’s something they pay twenty-five bucks to for entertaining a batch of snotty kids at a ten-year-old’s birthday party.
Maynard the Magnificent. I had had to fight like hell to snag lousy billings, and it was a nothing road to nowhere. From time to time I thought of junking magic and finding a job in a widget factory. This never happened. For one thing, I didn’t know or care very much about widgets. For another, I was still a young guy who pulled a kick out of magic tricks. I didn’t need the big money or the comfy security.
Then there had been a girl named Carole—the woman I sawed in half, the girl who brought out the wagon of props and enchanted the audience with her mammary development. She was fifth in the series of my assistants. They come and they go. This one stayed awhile; she was prettier than the others and warmer than the others and I was twenty-eight instead of twenty-two. I taught her special tricks at night and we made special magic in dark rooms, and we wound up standing in front of a justice of the peace to make it all legal.
There had been a big change. Two can’t live as cheaply as one. Two can’t live as cheaply as one plus one, either. The whole is monetarily greater than the sum of its parts. Two can’t go too far on apple pie and coffee in roadside diners and one-night stands in sleazy resorts.
But it had been good at first. It became a little less than good, then worse, until there was that night at a waterfront motel in Miami when a dark-eyed man approached me after I’d finished entertaining my captive audience.
“Wizard,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”
I told him to go ahead.
“Someplace private. I got a car outside, Wizard.”
So I told Carole to wait for me, and I accompanied the dark-eyed man to his car. It was that year’s Caddy, long and black. He sat behind the wheel and I sat next to him. He gunned the car north on Collins Avenue, made small talk while we passed through Golden Beach where the millionaires live in oceanfront mansions. He gave me a cigarette, took one for himself, and started talking through smoke.
“Wizard,” he said, “how much money do you make?”
“Not much.”
“You got a valuable talent,” he said. “You need training, but you got a valuable talent.”
“If you’re trying to sell me correspondence courses—”
He laughed. “Wizard,” he said, “you ever play any cards?”
Thurston once said he never played cards—if he won they would accuse him of cheating, if he lost they would say he was a lousy magician. I had never played much. The dark-eyed man talked about cards, and about what you could do if your fingers were clever. Then he talked about money. I told him I would have to think things over. He drove me back to the motel—Carole and I had a room there during the engagement and he gave me a card. His name, his phone number.
Nothing else.
The next day I called my agent. The motel gig was due to end on Saturday and he didn’t have us booked for anything until the following Thursday. I put the phone on the hook and asked Carole if she felt like going for a swim. She whined something to the effect that she couldn’t wear the same damn bathing suit day in and day out. I told her to buy a new one. She said a decent bathing suit cost twenty bucks minimum and we couldn’t afford it.
That night I called the dark-eyed man. A girl answered. He took the phone from her and asked who I was.
“Bill Maynard,” I said. “Maynard the Magnificent.”
“What do you say, Wizard?”
I said, “I’ll play.”
We played ten hours a day for the next two weeks. We played in a suite at a hotel. There was the dark-eyed man, a heavy type named Guiterno who was bankrolling the operation, a long-fingered Cuban and a nervous little blond girl. They taught me how to play straight and crooked, showed me the moves for false-dealing and palming, taught me to hold the deck in the mechanic’s grip with the index finger in front and the other three fingers around the side of the deck, thumb poised to do little tricks. They taught me gin rummy and poker and blackjack and pinochle and by the time they were finished I was good enough to roll.
The start was in a solarium on top of a big strip hotel. There was a character from New York, a paunchy bastard who came down to the beach twice a year for three weeks to sit in the sun, and screw call girls and play gin rummy. We played for two dollars a point. In three days I had eight thousand dollars of his money. Sixty-five hundred went to my trainer and I was fifteen hundred to the good.
That had been just the start.
Carole hadn’t known about it at first. Somewhere along the line she found out, and somewhere further along the line she left. Whatever it was we’d had, it didn’t work in the new world I’d managed to find for myself. Somewhere along the line the mob split. I found a partner and played ocean-liner bridge on the Queen Mary. We sailed to Le Havre and back and let the opposition pay for the trip. Somewhere along the line I soloed. And somewhere along the line, in Chicago, I hung myself up on a bottle-blonde and looked to pick the wrong kind of people. They caught me and broke my teeth and dislocated my thumb and told me to get the hell out of town…
4
Outside, something was heading north on Main Street with its siren open. It was either a police cruiser or an ambulance, I couldn’t tell which, but it was making a hell of a lot of noise. I crossed to the window and stood there straightening my tie and trying to see what it was. But it had passed out of view by then.
I turned to Joyce. She was dressed now, and she was trying to manage that chestnut hair back into its French roll. I walked up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. She spun around and put her hands against my chest.
“I suppose only a dentist like Seymour Daniels would look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”