Sabine opened the pack. The cards were soft from a hundred games of gin rummy, from all of Dot's late-night solitaire played on a cookie sheet in bed. Once the cellophane was off a deck, and the seal broken, the cards were worth nothing to a magician. Everyone thought you were cheating, and even though you were, every minute, you didn't use marked cards. Parsifal ordered his cards by the case. He threw them away after a few tricks, even if it was only in practice. He had to work with new cards. Once a card was broken in he didn't know how to make it move anymore. But Sabine saved those decks. She practiced with cards until she tore them in half. She glued them together, painted them, and cut them into walls for office complexes. She gave the leftover packs to her mother, who sent them to Hillel House and the Jewish Home and, on one occasion, sent twenty decks to an orphanage in Israel.
She handed them to How. "Ordinary deck of cards?"
How took the deck suspiciously. He knew it. It was the deck he and Guy used to play spit-in-the-ocean on the days they were stuck inside, days it got so cold the wind could burst your eardrums. They played until one of them believed the other to be cheating, at which point they threw the cards down and began to beat each other senseless. Dot always made them count the deck in front of her once they were finished with it. Otherwise cards got lost beneath the couch. How fanned them out and did a cursory inspection, identified all four suits, did not notice an unusual number of aces. The blue-and-white deck had the softness of a well-worn baseball glove. He handed them back to her. "Okay," he said, but with no real commitment.
Sabine started the show. She did it because she felt that Kitty was asking her for help with her family. She did it because a deck of cards always made her feel closer to Parsifal. She started slow, a simple collapsing bridge. She divided the deck into packets of cards and tripped them over in her fingers. These people were card rubes. They had never had the opportunity to be impressed before. She could make them cry out in pleasure just by cutting the deck. "It was your Uncle Parsifal who taught this to me originally."
"God," Bertie said, leaning over the table. "I have to call Haas. He has to see this." She did not straighten up or go to the phone. She stayed fixed to her place by the flash of blue-and-white paper. "Do you think you could come to my class sometime? The kids would love this."
"Wouldn't that be something," Dot whispered.
How's hands stayed on the table, his chapped lips parted so that he could breathe easily through his mouth. Even Guy was quiet. Kitty was standing at the back of Sabine's chair. They were all rocked by the cards, soothed by the rhythmic motion. She could make these people bark if she wanted to. She could make them walk on their hands and knees and bark like dogs if she told them that was the next part of the trick. It wasn't even a trick, it was shuffling. She had paralyzed them by shuffling cards, which said more about Alliance than it did about her talents.
She rolled the deck so fast they would never have caught her doing anything at all. Red cards face-in, black cards face-out, a few more showy cuts where nothing really moved. "One trick," she said. "An easy one, but I'll need a volunteer."
It was a beautiful word, volunteer, the promise of partnership, inclusion. To volunteer was your chance to step into the light and see the people who were seated down where you used to be. The Fetters and the Plates looked up at her, hopeful, expectant. Each one was sure he or she would be chosen and so did not feel the need to ask.
"You, sir," Sabine said, smiling like a Vegas girl to the man at the door.
The table turned and looked at Howard Plate, who had kept his distance, staying on the far side of the kitchen. "You don't mean me."
"I do." She patted the table, a sign to come.
"Ah, hell," Howard Plate said.
"Be a good sport," Kitty said to her husband.
"I don't know anything about this stuff."
Guy moved over to the empty chair beside him, offering his place to his father. "Come on, Dad."
Howard Plate sighed at the tremendous burden that had been put on him. He walked his coffee cup over to the sink, rinsed it out, set it facedown on the counter, and came back to the table in no hurry at all. "I never liked games," he said, taking his place.
"It's not a game," Sabine said, turning the deck in her hands, making them think the shuffling continued long after it was over. "This is a test."
"I like those even less."
The table was nervous. Maybe Sabine had made a bad pick. Their backs were all preternaturally straight, their breathing shallow, as if they were at an especially convincing séance. "This is for ESP, extrasensory perception. Very easy. It is a proven scientific fact that people can sense things they cannot see-"
"Always tell them it's science," Parsifal had said. "People are suckers for science. If car salesmen wore white coats, they'd make a fortune."
"-so all I'm going to do is test your abilities. If you think a card is red, I'll put it to the left. If you think it's black, I'll put it to the right. That easy. Don't think about it too much, just go on impulse, left and right."
"I don't know what color a card is if I can't see it."
"Maybe you do, maybe you don't." There was no way out. You don't give them one. Ever. "That's what we're going to find out."
Howard Plate lifted his baseball cap high enough for him to comb back his hair with his hand and then set it back in place. He was looking at the spaces on the table in front of him, the right side and then the left. He was thinking it through. "All right."
Sabine held out a card, facedown.
"Left."
They started into the deck, four lefts in a row and then a right; another left, but then he changed his mind and put it to the right. Howard Plate stared hard at the back of every card as if the deck were marked and he had found a way to read the code. He grew quicker, more confident. "Right, left, right, right."
When Sabine had counted to twenty-six she stopped him. "Okay. It's good to switch the piles now. It helps to keep your thinking fresh. So now red is going to the right. Got it?"
"Got it."
Sabine and Howard Plate made their way to the end of the deck. When it was over the table relaxed. Bertie and Kitty both sat down. Dot stretched out her short legs in front of her. Guy slapped his brother lightly on the arm for no reason at all. "I think I did okay," Howard Plate said.
"I have a feeling you did very well," Sabine said. She picked up the stack to the right and began going through the cards like an answer sheet. "Red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red." She flipped them down slowly at first, so that there could be the moment when people were startled not by her, but by the notion that Howard Plate was, in fact, in possession of perfect ESP. In the second it dawned on them that it was all a trick, she started going faster. She picked up the second stack and fanned it out, all black.
"Jesus," Howard Plate said. He reached his hands out to touch the cards on the table. He was careful, as if suspicious of heat. "Would you look at that?"
It was not uncommon. The last person to catch on was the one who stood to benefit, the one who was quickly calculating a life of previously unexplored talents.
How laughed and broke the spell.
Sabine had picked the wrong member of the audience. She knew it the second the last card was turned, but once it was done there was no way to undo a trick. She had meant it to include him, to bring him over to the table, and yet she had mocked him. Magic was always mocking in a way. It was the process of fooling people, making them think they saw something they couldn't have seen. Every now and then fooling people made them fools.