I rolled
the penny across my knuckles, then quickly palmed it, making it disappear from
view. Palming a penny was easy, rolling it across knuckles was not. But Eva,
unimpressed with my coin work, rolled her eyes at me.
I picked up
the deck of cards, instead, rapidly shuffling and manipulating the cards. Our
first meeting had been at a poker game where she had dealt. I had managed to
keep up with a good bit of her card work. She also knew when I held back cards,
but now we were reversing roles.
The deck
had been subtly cut. Reversing certain cards made it easy to keep track of them
throughout the deck, and manipulate their location. And while this was pretty
standard for card tricks, I also had a more subtle trick up my sleeve.
“I met him,
you know.”
“Who?” Eva kept
her eyes on my hands as I shuffled.
“Harry.
Houdini. He came to Frisco in ’23. Of course he was doing only escapes, then,
but I did ask him about his card tricks.”
“You won’t
distract me that easy. Houdini was impressive, sure, but my eyes aren’t
budging.”
“Wouldn’t
dream of it. He gave me a couple of pointers when it came to the cards, though.”
I rapidly
flourished the deck, spread them along the table in a neat arc before scooping
them back up. But then I slowed it all down, making my movements clumsy, at
least seeming to be clumsy. A missed bridge after a riffle resulted in a small
spray of cards that I had to put on the bottom of the deck. I then moved into a
new riffle. I cut the deck several times sometimes using a slip cut, but also messing
them up by dropping cards after each cut. I went back into a series of riffles
and bridges, also working in a few zarrows and some false cuts, all the while
working those cards I accidentally dropped up.
I dealt the
hands, then.
“Really, Slater? A pair of jacks? I expected better from you.”
I shrugged,
laying down my king high hand of nothing.
“Guess I
messed up somewhere along the way. Houdini did say it was a pretty hard trick.
Maybe I should have gone for another cut?”
I dealt out
a second hand.
“You may
have fast hands for pick pocketing, but your technique is really sloppy for
shuffling.”
“You know,
that’s what Houdini said.”
“Well,
maybe you should have—” She looked up from her cards, glaring at me. She put
her cards down, displaying the aces and eights, the classic bad luck hand
popularized by Westerns. I laid down four kings.
“Sloppy
isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to cards, so long as it masks the
real work,” I grinned.
“Shut up
and show me again. And I can still pick a lock better than you can.”