The Magician and the Cardsharp by Karl Johnson

Author:Karl Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

8

DICE MAN

“Charlie,” Vernon commanded his new protégé, “don’t … open … your … mouth … whatever you do.” The two magicians were entering Kansas City, a mysterious, overwhelming world that was now the stage setting for their own improbable play. “I know how to talk to these people,” Vernon said with authority. “I’ve practiced this. I’m not a racketeer myself but I know the talk and what goes with it.”

Vernon had shared the Mexican gambler Villasenor’s sketchy leads with Miller and agreed to take him along to Kansas City because the kid from El Paso had shown himself to be a magician after his own heart. Miller had demonstrated, from the moment he first spun Vernon’s own tricks for him, an undeniable touch of genius. Beyond that, Miller understood the potential for this impossible sleight that Vernon was now so intent on finding. Miller seemed to grasp instinctively the complex currency of secrets.

But as their uncertain mission got under way, Vernon also realized that he was taking a big, soft, unshaped child into a hard adult world. Kansas City, Missouri, was a far different place than El Paso or Wichita, or New York for that matter. As he happily bounced in his letters to Ross from one topic to the next, Miller occasionally bragged, without much detail, about his social exploits. He once blithely mentioned a “girl in Los Angeles.” But that was all bluff. Vernon, and even Ross, two smooth-talking, handsome men in their thirties, were experienced with women, with society, with the wider world. No matter how good he may have been at card tricks, Miller was still really a wet-nosed pup, a prudish mama’s boy.

Magicians had to know about acting, of course, at least a little. It was a crucial part of how they presented themselves and put their effects over. One of Vernon’s ultimate heroes, the nineteenth-century French conjurer Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, who modernized the presentation of magic, left a much-quoted dictum to the effect that a good magician was really an actor playing the part of a magician. Just as he had done with most of the classic card tricks, Vernon now took Robert-Houdin’s principle and gave it a new twist. For this foray into Kansas City, he was a magician playing the part of a cardsharp.

Vernon decided that the best chance he had of concealing that he was an out-of-towner asking a lot of prying questions was to pass himself off as an out-of-towner with legitimate standing to ask a lot of prying questions. Thus he chose to present himself as what the cheaters called a “boat rider” or “deep-sea gambler,” a high-rolling sharp from back east who specialized in working the transatlantic liners. Heartland gamblers didn’t see one of those every day. On the ships, which cheaters considered giant floating game rooms, the suckers were fat, happy, and lulled into submission by food, drink, and rolling waves. It was a lucrative grift indeed, and to the polished, urbane gamblers who worked them the boats might just as well have been ballasted with cash.

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