The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) by John Gaspard Page A

readers, astrologists, healers, spoon benders, and that sort…you have to adjust your techniques in order to uncover their methods.”
    I was feeling tongue-tied and remembered how much I hated being interviewed.
    “Excellent,” he said as he made some indecipherable notes about my blathering on his pad. “Now then,” he said. He leaned back as far as he could on the stool and bit down thoughtfully on the tip of his pen.
    “Back in the day of Houdini, it was not uncommon for highly-educated people to be completely taken in by paranormal charlatans. Even Arthur Conan Doyle himself was famously fooled by two teenage girls and their fake fairy photos,” he said, hitting the alliteration hard as he spoke. “Do you think people are, as a rule, more sophisticated today?”
    “Well, yes, I’d like to think that people are better educated and less susceptible to sham—”
    I was cut off by Harry, who burst through the red curtain like a freight train. He had his head down, a man on a mission. He didn’t look in our direction as he spoke. “Nonsense. People never change. They are the same today as they have always been,” he declared as he ducked behind a counter and stooped down to open a drawer. I could hear him digging through the drawer as he spoke, his disembodied voice bellowing up from behind the display case. “They aren’t any more sophisticated and neither, for that matter, are the psychics who consistently fool them. And it’s the very fact that they think they’re more sophisticated that gets them into trouble in the first place. Take it from me…people are idiots.”
    He popped up from behind the counter holding three boxes of Screaming Dice, looked at the boxes, glanced at us for a split second, and then disappeared back behind the red curtain. I suppressed a smile, because I knew for a fact that there were four cases of Screaming Dice in the back room sitting on the worktable.
    I looked back at Clive, who sat frozen for a moment. Then he jerked into action and began to furiously jot down what Harry had just said.
    “Excellent,” he murmured as he scribbled.
    “So, what spurred the idea for this article?” I asked while he wrote, hoping to turn his attention away from me. “Is it just some kind of an assignment or is there a more personal reason for your interest?”
    He stopped writing and looked up at me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face and a moment later I didn’t have to, as his countenance had returned to his earlier bright, smiling appearance.
    “Oh, it’s a freelance piece, to be sure,” he said, offhandedly. “I’ve had a couple run-ins with the psychics back in London, in Belgrade Square, but nothing to speak of. Just always interested in the topic and thought there might be a story in it.”
    “So the article isn’t what brought you to the U.S.?” I asked.
    “Oh, no, I’ve been here for years, on and off. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a whirligig. I file reports from all over. It suits me.”
    He looked back at his notes and then spoke again before I could interject another question. “So what is it about magicians and psychics? Harry Houdini railed against them in his time. And your uncle’s work is, in a word, legendary. Why the antipathy? I mean, aren’t you all basically the same when it comes right down to it? You’re both just fooling people, isn’t that so?”
    “Well, not exactly,” I said. “The difference is —”
    “The difference is,” Harry said, once again bursting out of the back room, “that a magician stands in front of an audience and tells them, in effect, ‘Everything I’m about to do is a lie.’ We are, at our core, honest about our contract with the audience. The psychic, on the other hand, stands in front of his crowd and says, ‘Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth.’ And then he proceeds to lie to them. It’s as different as night and day.”
    As soon as he finished speaking, Harry realized that, in his