The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

Trina asked for gin and received a glass of Bombay Sapphire. I noticed that she stroked my magician’s fingers as he passed her the glass.

I asked for whiskey, but got a glass with the nine of clubs.

“Is that your card?” Toby asked.

“How does he do it?” Sandra demanded as I fished the card from my drink.

Toby put down the enchanted bottle and walked out of the theater. The audience stood up to follow. The girls in the back row now had front-row seats for the rest of the show. I hesitated for a minute until Sandra tugged my arm. “This is the good part,” she said, dragging me along.

Toby walked through the slots. Cigarettes appeared at his fingertips. They appeared in the mouths of the slot players. Rows of flaming 7’s appeared across the pay bars of the slot machines. As he passed, a woman discovered that her nearly empty coin bucket had filled with nickels. A cocktail waitress with an empty tray found herself carrying six old-fashioneds. The audience, following several paces behind the magician, gasped and laughed. At the tables, a gambler put down his drink, and a full one appeared in its place. The man on his left found two cigarettes tucked behind his ears. Toby made dice hover in the air before they fell. He made the ball on the roulette wheel disappear. He conjured a pentagram on the bingo board.

But with the women, with the hardened Vegas broads, the gamblers’ wives, and the newcomers, he was especially slick. He pulled fistfuls of chips from a woman’s plunging neckline. He lit another woman’s cigarette from ten feet away. He transformed the cards of an elderly woman who was losing at poker into aces. Bouquets of flowers materialized in empty arms. Swing music flowed from cigarette lighters. Lipstick shades turned from pink to red.

Toby moved about the casino with the silence of an Indian tracker. The audience was unable to keep up with him. First he was causing an olive to appear in the martini of a woman playing blackjack; then he was making pink smoke rise from the drink of a lady by the bar.

For his finale, Toby chose a blackjack table, pulled out a chair, and placed a bet. The cards began to gallop across the felt. Chips followed suit. A cigarette appeared in the magician’s lips. He dropped it in an ashtray. When he looked up, a fresh one was hanging jauntily from his mouth. He deposited the new cigarette in the ashtray and discovered that another had found its way between his lips. Soon a delighted cry rippled across the table. All the players revealed their cards—six identical hands of twenty-one—all made up of the king of hearts and the ace of hearts. The dealer placed his cards on the table. They were identical to those of the other players. “Tie goes to the house,” he cried. Toby stood up, took a small bow, and the surrounding tables and spectators burst into applause.

“That was different,” I said, maneuvering around a woman in a sequined suit who had cornered my magician. Toby was having difficulty extracting himself from her grasp.

“Did you like it?” Toby asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied, although I did miss the natural elements—the sand, water, and flowers—that I had come to expect from Toby’s magic.

“Lemme buy you a drink,” the sequined woman pleaded.

“No thank you,” Toby said, unwrapping her hand from his wrist.

“Why don’t you buy me one, then?” she wheedled. “My husband’s over on the craps. Blind as a bat.”

“Sorry. I don’t socialize when I’m on duty,” Toby lied.

“So when do you get off work?” another woman wanted to know.

Toby grabbed my wrist, and we wove our way to the bar. Women popped up on all sides. They wanted their cigarettes lit. They wanted their drinks refilled. They wanted to slip twenty-dollar tips into the pockets of Toby’s green suit.

“Wow,” I said when we found space in the bar off the casino’s main floor. “What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know,” Toby replied. “Started two weeks ago. I was meant to lure the husbands into emptying their pockets, but it seems I’ve won over the wives. The manager was angry after the first week. Said that I was hired to charm the gamblers, trick them into loosening their purse strings. He said I should give my show a more masculine angle. For a few days, nothing worked. Gamblers, especially in this place, are tough guys. They don’t want flowers or silk handkerchiefs. They want top-of-the-line card tricks or they want to see girls being cut in half. Blood or money. But then the women started coming. All sorts of women.”

“What made them come?”

“I don’t know. There was a poker tournament in town. Maybe that was the reason—something to distract them while their husbands sweated it out at the tables. Maybe they were bored with the testosterone of Fremont Street. Or maybe it was just a coincidence.”

“You are very charming,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Toby replied with a wink. Then all the playfulness left his face. “This is the first time in ages that I’ve had the chance to be charming.” He laced his long fingers through mine. “You started all this. You were the first.”

I shook my head. “Meeting you was just luck.”

“A good magician doesn’t believe in luck.”

“What about the one-armed bandit at the gas station?”

Toby shook his head.

“Then what?”

“Some things are meant to be, and some are brought about by circumstances we don’t understand.”

I stared out over the rippling lights on the casino’s floor, over the coiffed heads of Toby’s new fans and wondered how he was luring these women to him. Then my thoughts rewound to the Red Rock Diner, to another girl Toby seemed to have pulled to his side. And finally my mind landed in Tonopah, where we met and where this chain of women seemed to start.

The noise on the casino floor was growing louder, a cacophony of smoky cackles and hoarse titters. The bar was starting to smell