Kid with the Golden Touch

I don’t chalk up many failures. But this kid had me stopped.

There aren’t many of us in the business. I’m on call with some of the best private agencies, which is where most of my work comes from. You take a nice club, if they suspect a member of cheating, they don’t go to the local law, they get hold of a good agency. If it happens at your club, it’s about a 50–50 chance that I will show up. I won’t look like what you expect. I’m fat and bald and closer to 60 than I care to admit. Back in Keith circuit days I had a magic act. Mostly card stuff. I got interested in the sharpies. I used to go on lecture tours after that, wearing a black mask. Then I worked the big passenger liners, tying a can to the sharpies until my face got too well known in the trade.

Now I’ve got a little magic shop in Manhattan, and a good kid I can leave in charge when I go out on call. The calls usually don’t last long.

This was a nice club, a men’s club in the middle of a pleasant city in Pennsylvania. The club had been going a long time. You could smell the money. Old, dark, heavy furniture, a look of long-established security.

I checked in at a hotel and phoned the contact. He worked in a bank; his name was Tellford. He came over to the room. We had a talk. He said that only three members were in on it. I told him that I had registered under the name of John Harrison, just in case his pigeon happened to be a pro who would recognize my name. He said he would make arrangements at the desk of the club.

He gave me the background. “We have a group who have been playing bridge regularly together for several years. It’s a cut-in game. The stakes sound high, three cents a point, but they aren’t actually that high in effect, because we’re all about the same caliber. At the end of a year we aren’t many dollars apart. We get together every Tuesday night in the card room. We play from eight until about two in the morning. Last year one of the regulars died of a heart attack. A young man named Carl Breton had joined the club a few months before that. He was put up for membership by his employer. Breton works in the accounting department of a local manufacturing plant. He’s about 33, a quiet pleasant young man. We knew he played good bridge, but we didn’t think he would want to play for those stakes. A year ago we asked him to join us tentatively. He accepted. It brought our roster back up to six, a good number for a cut-in game.”

“And ever since that, he has won consistently,” I said.

“Precisely. Forty, 60, 100 dollars every Tuesday. We can well afford the loss. We thought for some time that it was because he played better bridge. But our sort of a game gives you plenty to kibitz. I’ve sat behind him and seen him make mistakes. I have seen him make improper bids. You, of course, understand the game.”

“I understand it. And it’s one of the tougher games to cheat in. Does he ever lose?”

“Very infrequently, and then it’s a small amount. And one night he won $300. A very exceptional evening for him. We hesitated a long time over calling in... an expert.”

“Why did you decide he was cheating?”

“He seems to know precisely where every card is before the play of the hand is begun. His finesses work too often. In the long run, without any information from the bidding, a finesse should work 50 per cent of the time. His are closer to 90. He misses once in a while. And, by the same token, his opening leads are... pretty devastating.”

“That sounds like he was using readers. How about the cards?”

“We start with two new decks every Tuesday evening.”

“Examined them afterward?”

“We thought he might be marking them somehow. We can’t find any marks.”

“I know how to handle it. I’ll discover the method. Then you and I will have a private talk with him, Mr. Tellford. He’ll resign quietly. You’ve arranged to get me into the game?”

“The two men who know who you are aren’t going to show up tomorrow night. Another member is out of town. So it will be just you and I, Mr. Breton, and a man named Mueller. We’ll cut for partners after each rubber. I’ll bring you along to fill in. I thought that would give you the best chance. If you wish, one of the other men could come and then you’d get a chance to sit behind Carl Breton during the...”

“I can learn what he’s doing by playing with him,” I said. I was very confident.

The next night Tellford and I arrived first. It was a pleasant place to play. Green felt table top, low-hanging shaded light, a handy button to push for a drink, smaller tables with ash trays at your elbow. Tellford, for practice, called me John and I called him Dick. Mueller arrived next. Barney Mueller, a big asthmatic man with a wheezing laugh. Carl Breton was the last, apologizing for being a few minutes late. He was a tall, nice-looking young man with a shy pleasant smile.

They played seriously. No small talk. The ripple sound of the cards, the monosyllables of the bidding. I drew Mueller first. It was competent bridge; nothing really tournament class, but nothing to be ashamed of either. I watched Breton’s hands, particularly when it was his turn to shuffle, and his turn to deal. He was no mechanic. I could spot that. The fingers of the left hand didn’t curl around the cards in the mechanic’s grip. Nothing much happened in the first rubber. Mueller and I got ourselves a 900 rubber in five hands.

Then Mueller drew Breton, and I was on Breton’s left. They worked tentative bidding up to four spades. I had a legitimate double. Breton played. He needed to make three out of four finesses to fake. He made the full four for an overtrick. I knew he hadn’t peeked at my hand. Nor had he had a chance to see my partner’s. Tellford gave me a meaningful glance across the table.

Tellford was declarer on the next bid. It looked safe. But Breton made a beautiful and unorthodox lead through my dummy strength on an unbid suit. That lead set us. I studied Carl Breton’s mannerisms. He played almost woodenly, his face expressionless, lips compressed. He did not seem to glance at the backs of the cards held by the other players. He kept his eyes directed at the center of the table where the light was brightest.

I went through all the tricks I could remember. Like the man who had a cigarette lighter with a mirror surface, and dealt the cards over it, reading the spots and remembering as he dealt rapidly. The bandaged-finger trick, with a sharpened, cut down thumbtack under the bandage to mark each ace and face with a tiny, almost imperceptible, puncture code. Nothing worked. The guy read the cards and he kept on reading them, and I couldn’t find out how.

Later I sat in Tellford’s car outside the hotel and said, “It’s something new. It’s a gimmick I’ve never run into. Mathematically, what he’s doing is impossible. Nobody guesses right that often, in spite of what they claim at Duke University. See if you can arrange a game for tomorrow night, or Thursday night.”

“We’d better make it Thursday.”

“Okay. If he’s that sharp, then he’s going to recognize the other forms of cheating. I’ll use half the evening trying to spot what he’s doing. Then I’ll turn mechanic and see if we can get a yelp out of him.”

“Why?”

“If he spots it, then changes his style of game and doesn’t yelp, it means he’s recognizing me as one of the brethren.”

The game was set up. Mueller couldn’t play. A man named Howe played. He was one of the ones in on my reason for being there. By 11:30 I hadn’t spotted a thing. In my next shuffle, I got a spade into every fourth slot and crimped the deck just enough so that I led Tellford, the man across from me, into the cut I wanted, and Breton into dealing me my 13 spades. I had arranged a later payback, so I used demand bidding to work my way hesitantly into the seven spade contract, happily redoubling Breton’s double, which was based on a pair of aces and a couple of outside kings. His partner led and I spread the hand, watching Breton. He gasped and gaped, and I didn’t know if it was honest surprise, or a good masking of suspicion. I notched the cards with my thumbnail, second dealt whenever it was my deal, stacked the deck whenever it was my shuffle. I cleaned up, of course. But Breton still went home with 12 dollars, all that was left of what he had won before I turned mechanic.

When we parked in front of the hotel, I sensed that Tellford was disappointed with the service he was getting. I was too disheartened to even try to bluff. I told him I had never missed, and maybe this was the first time; and if so, no fee.

I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed and lighted a cigar. I tried to remember what it was, if anything, that set Carl Breton apart from other bridge players. If anything, it was that curious woodenness. After the hand had ended, instead of leaning back and relaxing like most players do, he would stay in that curious immobility. Not for long; for about ten seconds, then you could see him relax and wait for the next hand. Why in the world did he do that?

And there was one other thing. A very vague thing. A sort of cyclical aspect in his guessing. Once in a while he would make bad guesses. Not often. Just once in a while. But what happened each time before one of those hands where his guesses weren’t so sharp? Something tugged at my mind.

It wasn’t until I was stretched out flat again, cigar finished, that it came to me! His guesses went bad on the second hand following a hand that had been thrown in because there was no bid. I sat up and grinned into the darkness, then lay back and fell asleep.

At ten the next morning I rang the doorbell of Carl Breton’s small white house. The lawn was green and tailored. The house looked freshly painted. I knew he was at work. I had checked. The door was opened and the woman wheeled herself back away from it. She was fresh and pretty. She handled the wheel chair in a way that showed long practice. There were a few lines around her mouth, lines of old pain, I guessed.

“Good morning,” I said. “Have you ever forgotten anything?”

“What a weird way to start a conversation,” she answered, cocking her head.

I put on a doleful look. “It sure is. But according to the company, that’s the way I’m supposed to start out. They claim it works.”

She laughed. It was a good laugh. “You poor man! I bet you get tired of saying that. What in the world are you selling?”

“A memory course, Madame. The Acme method of memory building. A half-hour a day of simple instruction and at the end of the course you’ll never forget a name or a face. A simple example. You are introduced to a Mrs. Ferris. No. I won’t use that example. Please tell me what your name it.”

“Dorothy Breton.”

“Hmm. That’s a tough one. Breton. Let me see. With that blonde hair and that complexion you have sort of a Dutch girl look. Like your hair should be in braids. Braidon. Breton. Far fetched, I know. But now I’ve given my memory a key to you. I’ll never forget your name.”

She gave me a wide-eyed look. “But, goodness, I never forget names anyway.”

“Hard to sell, eh?” I was enjoying her. She was likeable. She was having fun. It was time for my jack pot question. “How about your husband then?”

“There,” she said, flattening my hopes, “you might have something. He’s absolutely helpless. He lays something down and the next minute he can’t remember where he put it. He’s terrible with names and faces.”

“Maybe he’s my customer then,” I said, maintaining my smile with an effort.

She frowned. “I don’t know. It’s the strangest darn thing about Carl. He can recite a list of all the names of the vice-presidents, and all the pharaohs of Egypt, and if you let him read a list of numbers from here to there, he can read it once and give it to you perfectly an hour later. But he can’t ever find his tie clip.”

Now I had it, and my smile was complete again. I felt fine. Record unimpaired. “You ought to buy him the course, Mrs. Breton, and make sure that he takes it.”

“Did you say 30 days? I won’t be around that long. I’m going off next week for some hatchet work. They’re trying to get me off wheels.” She said it without the slightest trace of self-consciousness.

“Are they going to?” I asked her.

“Sooner or later. But it’s so darn slow, and so darn expensive. It keeps us broke most of the time, but Carl doesn’t kick. He’s a dear. Would you like some coffee? I’ve got some on the stove.”

We talked in the kitchen. She had a good attitude. It had been a bad accident. Compound fractures of both legs. The car had skidded and thrown her against the door, the door had opened and she had gone out. She had braced her feet during the skid so they were caught behind the heater. And she made good coffee. They had two kids, both in grade school. Each time she went to Philadelphia for more bone surgery they had to hire a housekeeper.

She wished me luck in my door-to-door selling. I walked down the street and looked back at the house. A nice flavor of happiness there. Made me think of old days, of chances lost, of a girl whose hair had been just a bit darker than Dorothy Breton’s, and of a stupid guy who wanted to get out of that small town for keeps...

I checked out of the hotel, left my suitcase at the station, and went to the bank to see Tellford. He had a nice office. The bank was busy. A rustling sound, as if everybody was counting money.

I sat down and said, “Well, I’ve got it.”

He nodded, his eyes narrowing. “Hoped you would. What is it?”

“I know exactly what he’s doing and how. But I’m not going to tell you.”

His eyes turned very frosty. I was glad I wasn’t asking him for a loan. “I think you’d better explain that.”

“What Breton is doing is perfectly ethical, legitimate, legal. Any of you other gentlemen could do the same thing.” I paused, then sank the barb, praying that it was deep enough. I shrugged, to make it a little better. “You men can always stop playing with him. Protect your money. But if you can find out what he does, you might all become better bridge players. Tournament class, maybe. Good day, Mr. Tellford.”

He didn’t stop me. I got on my train. I sat in the coach, looked out of the window and felt a good deal of admiration for Mr. Carl Breton. He had to play each hand carefully and well, keeping track of the cards. And at the same time he had to remember the sequence of the cards in each trick that was picked up, see exactly in what order they were picked up. He had to remember two sequences. The opposition’s tricks and his own. Then see the order in which the two stacks of tricks were placed. That time of wooden immobility was when he re-affixed the order of the whole deck of cards in his mind. Then, almost incredibly, he had to set that sequence aside and give his whole attention to the other deck, the one to be played with next, the order of which he had previously memorized.

Check it yourself. Take a new deck in order. Give it the same casual shuffle and cut as you would in a game with friends. Deal out four hands. Pick up one. Got the queen of hearts? Then nine times out of ten the king will be either in the hand on your left, or in you partner’s hand. If you have to finesse, you know which way to go.

My best clue was the way his guesses were more shaky two hands after a hand had been thrown in. The double shuffle of the discarded hand distributed the sequence too much. And no wonder the guy acted wooden and remote. Each hand he played was an almost incredible feat of multiple memory. For, during each hand he had to remember the old sequence of those same cards so he could play cleverly. And he had to remember the order in which the tricks were being stacked. And, back in his mind, he had to keep on file the sequence of the cards which would be used for the next hand. The boy was earning his money.

I wondered if I was getting soft. I had decided to tell Tellford a neat way he could lick the method. Three more riffles on each shuffle. Then I said nothing. I couldn’t collect a fee. I didn’t want it. Let them sweat it out. They had the time and the money and the brains. Sooner or later they would catch on.

But by then maybe Breton would have his lady off wheels.