Spoonbenders

Her eyes snapped open. “I told you where he is,” she said before he could answer. The doc sighed, and started scribbling in his notebook. “Small room, curving metal walls. And above him, an expanse of snow and ice, which is why I said the Arctic. Though I suppose it could be the Antarctic.”

“Fine,” Dr. Eldon said. He wrote all this down reluctantly, like a man signing a confession. “Arctic or Antarctic. Anything else?”

Maureen closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s gone now. I think I scared him.”

“What?”

“He saw me. I think that’s why I honed in on him so easily. Are you looking for another psychic?”

“No, I’m not—at least I don’t think so. Can we please get back on track?” He should have been more excited, but instead he seemed shook up. Nervous. “Teddy, what did you see?”

“It was a metal room I saw, too,” Teddy said. “And I sensed the difference between the surface. I thought he was up high, in a skyscraper or something, but down low would make sense, too.”

Teddy did not dare glance at Maureen, afraid that she was glaring at him.

Dr. Eldon ran a hand through his thatch of hair and told them to take a recess. He said they’d resume in twenty or thirty minutes.

“Submarine?” Teddy said, as they walked arm in arm. “Submarine?”

She suppressed a smile.

“You have to admit, that’s a ridiculous answer,” he said.

“You certainly hopped on the bandwagon,” she said calmly.

“You gave me no choice! Next time, don’t say crazy stuff like that. Like that business about him being another psychic! Say probable things, likely things, and, most important, vague

things. You don’t tell somebody their grandmother’s missing locket is, I don’t know, on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, being held by Winston Churchill.”

“Oh, Mr. Telemachus,” she said. “Why don’t you trust your own gift?”

“I do trust my gift. Which includes knowing when to let the mark fill in the details.”

She shook her head. “You just insist on doing everything the hard way.”

When they returned to the observation room, Dr. Eldon was gone. Standing in front of the desk, arms straight at his sides, was a man in a black suit. His face seemed to consist entirely of a square jaw and a high-top haircut.

Cop, Teddy thought. Pure cop.

“Where’d the doc go?” Teddy asked.

“Please, have a seat,” the man said.

“And you are?” Teddy asked. He was not about to sit, and neither was Maureen.

“I’m your new supervisor,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Maureen asked.

“Four weeks ago, the man in that picture boarded K-159, a nuclear submarine of the Soviet North Fleet. The boat is on a three-month tour that we believe will cross under the polar ice cap.”

“Who the hell is we?” Teddy said, though he was getting a pretty good idea. His stomach had gone cold. Scamming an egghead professor out of his grant money was one thing, but this? These people could look up his records.

“The man’s presence on the submarine was top secret, known only to a handful of people. Well, a handful of people outside Russia.”

“There’s something I need to explain,” Teddy said.

“Shut up,” Maureen said quietly.

“We have important work for you to do,” the stranger said.

“Sure, sure,” Teddy said. He patted Maureen’s arm and turned to go. “You’ll do swell, kid.”

“Both of you.” He held out his hand. “My name is Destin Smalls, and your government needs you.”

The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances: traffic fumes and blaring radios and fast-food containers tumbling along the sidewalk. Even an afternoon such as this, spent cooling his heels in a well-appointed park, under a sky as clear as a nun’s conscience, was chock-full of imperfections that disqualified it from top ten status. Why were the children on the soccer field so fat? Why couldn’t people keep their dogs on leash? Why did these moms insist on yelling so much?

Waiting made his fingers itch for cards. Before the accident he never went anywhere without a couple of decks in his pockets. He spent endless hours at diners and bars running through his repertoire—the second strike, the bottom deal, the Greek deal, the family of false cuts and false shuffles. The trick was not to make them look like tricks. Do anything that looked like a “move” and you were asking for a beating.