Without Troubling to Read the Inscription

“…so Arthur strode up to the sword, and, without troubling to read the inscription, tugged it free.”

Le Morte D’Arthur

I’m a magician, but I’m not the magician. The magician is someone like Houdini, or Howard Thurston, or for us, it was Tony Slydini.
One evening, a few years ago, me and a bunch of the other guys went downtown to this diner. Lots of magicians go there to hang out, exchange new tricks, and stuff like that.
     We all went there because that’s where Slydini used to hang out. He had retired, but he was still the magician. He would come almost every night, sit at the same table in the corner, and he would leave really late, a lot later than any of us. Once in a while, one of us would show him some new trick we had, trying to fool him, but of course we never did.
     Well, that one night, we were all sitting at our usual spot, a few tables away from  Tony’s corner, and I hear the bell above the door ring, so I look over, and this kid walks in, maybe twelve or thirteen, a kid, and the screwy thing was, he was wearing a top hat, and a suit, and he looked for all the world like a magician, but one from years ago, when magicians actually dressed like that.
     Now, this kid looks around for a minute, and then walks over to Tony’s corner. I’m watching—it’s hard to see, what with the waitress, and customers coming and going—but I can see him talking to Tony, and then he sits down.
     “Guys, look at this,” I said, and everybody turned around to look. We could see the kid taking off his hat, and setting it bottom up on the table. Then he starts picking up some napkins…
     “He’s doing magic!” I said.
     “And you know what else?” one of the others said. “He’s doing ‘The Paper Balls in the Hat!’”
     “He’s right!” I said.
     “But that’s Tony’s trick!” somebody else said.
     So, he finishes the trick, and Tony—Tony starts clapping!
     “He must be doing good!” one of the guys said.
     Then the kid takes something out of his pocket. We’re all watching as closely as we can, and someone says, “It’s a deck of cards,” and then, a little later, I say “He’s doing ‘The Helicopter Card!’” which is another Slydini trick. He does two more tricks: “Slydini’s One Coin Routine,” and “The Slydini Silks,” and we’re all laughing our heads off, but Tony and the kid don’t notice.
     After the silks, the kid does one last trick. Now, right about now the place got really busy, so we really couldn’t see this one too well, but we all agreed on one thing: it had to be an original. We’re all professionals, and not one of us had ever seen anything like it; it was some kind of combination card and coin trick, and they kept jumping around.
I said what we were all thinking: “That’s a new one, isn’t it?”
     After that, the kid stood up and bowed, and Tony clapped some more. He said something I couldn’t hear and gave the kid a buck, which went straight to the counter for an ice-cream soda. Tony got up, put on his coat, and walked right over to us, big smile on his face. He said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” in that beautiful Italian accent of his, and he left.
     Well, we all rushed over to the counter, of course. We all threw questions at him at once, until he said, “What’s going on?” And I said, “Don’t you know who that was?”
     “Who?”
     “The guy you did magic for—that was Tony Slydini!”
     The kid just sat there for a moment. Then he said “But all those tricks I did, they were all Slydini tricks, the paper balls, the helicopter card…” He looked over at the door. “That was Slydini?”
     “Hey, was that last one an original?” I asked.
     “Yeah, yeah it’s mine…”
     After a pause, somebody said “Well, did he like your trick?” And the kid said “Yeah he said he liked it…”
    “And?”
     “And then after he gave me a dollar, he said…” Then the kid got this big smile on his face.
     “What did he say?!” we all shouted.
     “He said, ‘By the way, how did you do that last one?’”


Timothy  J. Foley
  Magus Mirificus