The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (4 page)

Grey again put his hand to his forehead for a moment, and then he spoke. “Bernice, through either choice or chance, you have picked one of my favorite passages from that great play. At the top of that page, Macduff speaks, does he not? Say the words with me, Bernice.”

They began to read together, he onstage and she in the audience.
“O, horror, horror, horror. Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Most sacrilegious murder hath broke open the Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence the life o’ the building.”

Bernice closed the book and looked up at Grey with open-mouthed awe, her eyes tearing up slightly as Grey continued to speak the verse.
“Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight with a new Gorgon: do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves. Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, and look on death itself!”

His final words echoed through the chamber. Bernice slowly sat back in her chair as the audience applauded enthusiastically. Even Pete and Clive, on either side of me, broke into spontaneous applause. I didn’t join in, but I had to admit, even though Grey was as dishonest as the day is long, he was a hell of a performer.

Chapter 3

The act continued in this manner for several minutes. Nova picked audience members and Grey read their minds as they concentrated on the books and magazines in front of them. The routine went smoothly—more smoothly than the previous exercise, that’s for sure—with only one noticeable hiccup.

Nova had approached an audience member who had received a copy of
Business Week
magazine. She spoke with him briefly.

“Grey,” she said as she turned back toward the stage, “I’m standing here with Chad. He’s looking at page sixteen of
Business Week
magazine.”

“Page sixteen of
Business Week
magazine,” Grey repeated. “Let me see.” He put a hand to his forehead and leaned forward in concentration. “I’m seeing an article about employee compensation, am I right?”

Chad nodded to Grey and then, realizing that the man was blindfolded, he leaned over to the microphone Nova was holding.

“Yes,” he said. “Employee compensation.”

“And the headline, the headline reads, ‘More Employees Willing to Walk to Get Higher Wages,’ is that correct?”

“Yes it is,” Chad confirmed, shaking his head in amazement.

“I also see,” Grey started to say and then stopped. He put a hand up to his forehead and then shook his head.

“I also see,” he repeated, this sentence getting no further than the earlier attempt. “In addition to the headline...”

His voice trailed off as he pushed his hand harder into his forehead.

I turned from the stage back to the TV monitor, which was on a tight close-up of Grey. It looked as if he was beginning to sweat.

There was a long, awkward pause, as Grey shook his head from side to side. “No,” he said in a raspy whisper. “No, absolutely not. No. No. I said no!” With a ferocious almost violent move, Grey stood up suddenly and ripped his blindfold off, throwing it down onto the stage. He looked out at the audience, his eyes squinting in reaction to the sudden exposure to light after having been covered for so long.

“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, quickly regaining his composure. “On rare occasions, while in the midst of the spiritual flow such as I was just immersed within, an unwelcome spirit will intrude upon the proceedings. A most unwelcome spirit. At times like that, it is best to simply break the connection with that particular entity. Permanently.”

He ran a hand through his hair to ensure that each strand was still properly in place, and then stepped to the edge of the stage. “I think it’s time to begin the portion of the program that most of you have come here tonight to experience. I will connect to the other side, connect with your loved ones, and answer questions that are near and dear to your hearts. Nova, are the questions prepared?”

By the sudden buzz of excitement that broke out in the room, it was clear that this was, in fact, the portion of the evening that the audience had come to experience. As effects go, it was simplicity itself. Nova presented Grey with a large punch bowl, filled with small tan envelopes. Before the show, each audience member had written a question on a slip of paper, folded it and sealed it in one of the small envelopes.

For the performance, Grey would then remove an envelope from the bowl, hold it to his forehead for a moment, then announce the question, the name of the questioner, and then provide an answer from the beyond for the hopeful participant.

“One important note before we begin,” Grey said, pulling a match from his pocket and striking it on the table. “I should warn you that when the stream to the Other Side is opened, it is not entirely uncommon for an impatient spirit to jump his or her place in line,” he said as he lit a candle on the table. He moved it to the center of the table, adjusting the position of a large silver ashtray next to it.

“When that happens,” he continued, “I will have no clue that a new spirit has stepped in and taken the place of the spirit I was communicating with. Consequently, the information I’m receiving may no longer be relevant to the person I’m talking to. I will need your help…all of you,” he said, spreading his hands wide to encompass the whole room.

“If the information I’m providing to you is correct, please acknowledge it by saying ‘yes,’ loudly and clearly. And if you’re seated across the room and suddenly you feel that what I’m saying is applying to you, please let me know right away. Is that clear?” Like obedient students, the audience nodded at Grey as one.

“Good. Let us begin,” he said as he pulled out the chair next to the table and sat. Lighting in the room shifted to increase the already moody ambiance and eerie organ music again began to echo throughout the cavern. He closed his eyes and reached into the bowl, taking out a single envelope and holding it up near his temple for a long moment.

“Rene T.,” Grey said finally. “Rene, are you here?” A blonde woman in her late twenties stood in the crowd and meekly held her hand up. Grey turned his head in her direction as Nova moved through the crowd to her with the handheld microphone.

“You are curious about a relationship, are you not?”

Rene nodded, wringing her hands together nervously. Remembering Grey’s earlier instruction, she quickly added, “Yes. Yes.”

Grey closed his eyes. “This is a relationship of long duration, am I right?”

“Yes. A year and a half,” she said.

“Rene, a year and a half is merely a blink in the eye of the universe. I’m seeing that this relationship has existed in this life and many previous incarnations. And that the two of you are working out issues now that have existed between you for millennia. You are arguing more now than usual, am I right?”

Rene nodded again. “Yes, it feels like it.”

“One of the reasons you’ve been brought together in this life is to continue to work on these differences. But make no mistake…this person is your soul mate and you will indeed make progress that will help not only in this life, but in future lives as well.”

“Thank you,” Rene said as she sighed in relief and began to sit down again.

Grey raised his right hand and closed his eyes for a moment. “Rene, I’m also getting that you have a work relationship that is beginning to come to a boiling point, does that make sense?”

Rene cocked her head to one side, considering this. “I believe so, yes,” she said, beginning to nod in agreement.

“Watch that closely for the next three weeks. Some changes are in order,” he instructed as he picked up his letter opener and ripped open the envelope he had been holding the entire time. He pulled out the slip of paper and read it aloud: “Can you tell me if I should stay with my boyfriend, signed Rene T.” He smiled at her as the audience applauded. He held the slip of paper over the candle and it began to smoke and then burned down to an ash. He held on to it for a long time, the flames flickering at his fingertips, before dropping it onto a large ashtray on the table.

He reached into the bowl and withdrew another envelope, as the audience appeared to lean forward as one in anticipation.

And so it went for over thirty minutes. Grey took envelope after envelope out of the bowl, identifying the owner and their question—and offering a detailed answer as well as other facts about the person and their life—before opening the envelope and reading their actual question aloud. Then he’d burn the question and move onto the next envelope.

“How the devil is he doing this?” Clive asked in a raspy whisper. “It’s extraordinary.”

I shrugged. “He’s good, but it’s all pretty simple stuff, really. He’s one ahead, that’s for sure. The rest is just a mix of cold reading, deductive reasoning and a solid understanding of human nature.”

“One ahead? One ahead of what?” Pete asked, not taking his eyes off Grey, who was in the midst of giving a fellow a message from the man’s recently deceased father. The guy was nearly in tears, his head bobbing up and down along with everything Grey was saying.

“Somehow he got a hold of the first question ahead of time,” I explained quietly. “Probably a switch of some kind—the Al Baker or the Moldavian—and so every time he appears to be opening an envelope to read the question he just answered, he’s actually reading the next question.”

“One ahead,” Pete repeated.

“Yeah, it’s used all the time in magic. In cards, coins. Hell, even Cups and Balls is a one-ahead. It’s all about having a piece of information the audience doesn’t know you have…You can work tons of variations on it and the audience is none the wiser.” I was going to explain further, but something Grey was saying snuck into my consciousness and grabbed my attention. In fact, for a brief moment, it sounded like he was talking about me.

Here’s a little secret about how mentalism works—the audience plays the primary role in its success, much more than the performer. That’s because the human brain, in all its evolutionary glory, insists on filling in any gaps. If you give the brain A and then follow it up with C, it’s going to do its darnedest to connect the two with some form of B.

Consequently, all the mentalist really has to do is toss out random words that your brain can grab onto and try to make sense of. If he says, “I’m getting a very powerful feeling about apples,” then the average brain immediately searches for any connection it can make to apples, and pretty soon you’re thinking, “Hey, I just had an apple last Thursday. This guy is pretty good.”

The trouble is, even when you understand the principle, it’s difficult to keep your brain from getting caught up in it. Which is exactly what happened to my brain when it heard Grey say, “Who here had something taken from them by someone named Ed? Or someone that sounds like Ed, maybe Ted?”

That immediately struck a nerve in my brain, because I did in fact have something taken from me by a guy named Fred, which my advanced brain immediately recognized as rhyming with Ed. Fred took my wife and he was the reason I was now living in a third-floor apartment above my uncle’s magic shop.

Of course, on a purely intellectual level, I knew that wasn’t the case. Fred hadn’t actually taken anything from me. My now ex-wife, Deirdre, had left our marriage and married someone else. I might be angry about the manner in which she had done it, allowing the two relationships to overlap inconveniently, but nothing had been stolen. One husband had simply been exchanged for another. Not unlike taking one automobile and trading it for a new one. The only irregularity, of course, was that D
eirdre had still been driving the first car while she test-drove the second.

But who could blame them, really? They had worked closely for a number of years, she as a fast-rising Assistant District Attorney, he as a hotshot cop on his way to becoming a hotshot homicide detective. Deirdre really had far more in common with Fred than she did with me, a guy whose greatest skill, it appeared, was the ability to make a gallon of milk disappear into a rolled-up newspaper.

All this flashed through my brain in a nanosecond and I mentally returned to the performance in time to hear Grey talking to a woman who had lost her virginity to a guy named Ned. Like I said, the brain will find the connection, regardless of how tenuous.

Grey finished his short reading of the woman and the audience applauded, as they had done each time, regardless of his level of accuracy. He held up one hand to quiet them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I can feel my connection to the spirit world growing weaker, the braided strands to the other side unraveling by the moment. Could I impose upon my first helper to return to the stage to assist my journey back across that bridge?”

Sharon, the over-dressed, matronly woman quickly made her way back to the stage, moving toward Grey, who was still seated stiffly in the high-backed chair. She placed two fingers on his wrist, moving them once and then again and then once more. She shook her head. “There’s no pulse,” she said, a note of dread in her voice.

“No, not just yet,” Grey agreed. “I’m still on the precipice.” He closed his eyes and went through his deep breathing routine again.

As he did, Sharon adjusted her grip on his wrist. After several moments, she started nodding, a little at first and then more confidently. “There it is,” she said. “I can feel the pulse. I can feel it.”

Grey opened his eyes. “Yes. Yes,” he said, smiling like a Cheshire Cat. “I have returned. Thank you, Sharon.”

He stood and ushered her off the stage, and then turned to the applauding crowd. “And thanks to all of you. I will leave you tonight with the words of a great man, The Amazing Dunninger, who so wisely said, ‘For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.’ Good night.”

He bowed deeply, took a step back, and then bowed again. The pipe organ music began blasting through the room as the audience stood, en masse, applauding wildly. Some had tears running down their faces, some were hugging each other, and the rest were clapping their hands vigorously as Grey took yet another overly-dramatic bow.

“You’re up next,” a voice next to me yelled over the applause. The floor manager had appeared by my side, looking from me to the crowd. “Boy, that’s going to be one hell of a tough act to follow.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s just what I needed to hear.”