Tricks of the Heart – A Hardy InstallmentInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Old Family Venue

There were just two things Tom Hardy couldn’t stand and both of them were staring him in the face: an empty bottle of viejo abuelo and the likelihood of a painful death. The empty bottle stood upright and behind it, leaning on the bar, was a woman he had just met and the gun he met even more recently.

“Where did you learn the trick?” the barmaid asked.

Her finger was still outside of the trigger guard of the .38 revolver. That was a hopeful sign. Other than the distraction presented by the nickel-plated and fully loaded weapon, Ayudante was not an unattractive woman. She looked to be in her late twenties and in good condition.

Hardy had thought it amazing that unlike most of the bar maids in this border town on the wrong side of the border, she still seemed to have some innocence and trust left. He hadn’t picked her to a pull a gun on a guy just because he performed a magic trick. That’s the kind of stuff he’d expect at Agujero Fácil or Puntito Mojado but not here in the Chili’s or T.G.I.F. of San Cansado.

“What’s with the gun?” the old magician asked as he gazed back towards the empty bottle. “And what’s it take to get another drink around here?”

His stare towards the bottle was interrupted by the muzzle of the snub-nosed .38 being shoved into his forehead. He looked up slowly and thought that even if Ayudante was a terrible shot, she probably would not miss his head…

Old Family Venue

“Where did you learn the trick?” the barmaid asked.

“What’s with the gun?” the old magician asked as he gazed back towards the empty bottle. “And what’s it take to get another drink around here?”

“Where did you learn the trick, señor?”

Her voice was no longer confident or even aggressive. Now it gave off the sense of impending break-down. Hardy looked into the light brown eyes of the woman as he moved the muzzle of the weapon back from his skull. He said nothing but waited. Very shortly, Ayudante’s bottom lip began to tremble and her eyes flooded with tears.

“Where did you learn it, señor?” she asked again, this time without any sense of anger.

Hardy slowly reached for the weapon and was able to direct its likely trajectory from his face to the ceiling before removing it from her trembling hand. If she hadn’t just held a gun to his forehead, he would have felt much more pity for the young girl. He was a sucker for a woman’s tears but he would first have to pass through the “fight-flight” regions of his brain to get to the “sucker” part.

She reached beneath the bar to grab something. Her moves were slow and seemed to be in tempo with her sobs. She said nothing now but her actions caused Hardy to flip the revolver around in his right hand and to cock the trigger with the crease between his thumb and forefinger.

She seemed unfazed by the noise. Either she had heard it before and lived or she just didn’t care. Either way, Hardy figured, she knew the risks associated with quick or dangerous movements. She did not rush or slow her actions. Slowly she lifted a new bottle of whisky from beneath the counter and set it beside Hardy’s empty shot glass.

“Please, señor, tell me where you learned this?”

Hardy took his time, pulled the cork from the top of the bottle, poured a little more than a legal shot, and drained the glass; all with his left hand while he kept the revolver trained on Ayudante.

“I invented it,” Hardy said as he pocketed the revolver in the outside pocket of his seersucker suit. “I take it you’ve seen it before?”

Ayudante nodded in silence but her eyes began to well with tears once more.

“Another magician?” he asked?

“Yes, señor.”

“Tell me about it,” Hardy asked as he removed the weapon from his pocket, snapped it open and removed the bullets before looking down the muzzle and handing it back to the bartender.

“This man come from the circus several years ago. He was in our city to do a circus show for just three days. Each night he come here, to the bar of my family – we live here, upstairs – and he talk to me.”

Hardy nodded and poured another drink, offered the glass to Ayudante and to his surprise, she took it and downed it in one gulp. He poured a second glass and she took this one as well but only sipped it slowly. She handed her customer a clean glass.

“What did you talk about?” Thomas Hardy asked as he poured a drink into his new glass.

“The first night, it was nothing, nothing at all. The second night, he talk to me about his life and how he never found the perfect match his heart desired always.”

Hardy nodded. He was thought he knew where this was heading and knew he was already feeling sorry for what had happened.

“And?” Hardy asked.

“The last night, the restaurante was closed, like now.”

Hardy hadn’t intended on closing the place, but once the gun was pulled, he felt obligated to stay.

He looked to her to continue.

“Entonces, he said to me that he wanted to see something for his curiousness. He took out cards like you did tonight. He have me shuffle them and then say “Pick one card and hold it to you chest, to you heart.”

Hardy took a sip and looked down at the deck on the counter. He didn’t want to look up into her eyes.

“He said to me,” Ayudante said slowly, not crying now, “he said to me, ‘I will take a card too and if they match together then you are the one I have been looking for.”

Hardy knew how this would end. It would end the same way his trick had ended but likely with a different impact – he doubted the young barmaid pulled a gun on the other magician.

“He looked in my eyes and I looked in his and he started to cry, just a tear in his eye, and he ask me to turn around my card. I did and it was Queen of Hearts. He smiled and turned his around, it was Queen of Diamonds.”

Hardy felt suddenly very self-conscious. He downed a shot and poured one more for him and a half a glass for her. He urged her to drink up but she wanted to continue down this painful road.

The effect of the adrenaline mixed with three shots was beginning to take hold. Still, he kept his eyes on hers.

“And what happened?” Hardy asked.

“We . . .” her voice broke off and she held her hands to her face as if to hide both shame and grief.

The older man put his hand on the young woman’s heaving shoulder.

“It’s alright, honey. It’s alright.”

She pulled her hands away and looked at the magician. There was something familiar in his voice, his touch and his choice of words.

“Did you ever hear from him again?” Hardy asked.

Ayudante shook her head. She continued to stare at him; trying to discern what was so familiar about this man she had just met before closing time.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, honey,” Hardy said as he put the cork back in the bottle of whisky. “It was just a trick. He was just using it to get to you.”

She nodded. “Señor, is this a trick many magician’s know?”

Hardy nodded.

“But, you made it? This man learned it from you?”

Hardy nodded.

“Do you know this man, señor?”

Hardy nodded.

“How is it you know this man?” Ayudante seemed unready for any answer Hardy would give but unable to resist hearing it.

“He is my son,” Hardy said slowly as if admitting a felony.

Ayudante said nothing but looked down.

Then, “you teached him this trick to take women?”

Hardy shook his head.

“No, Ayudante. He is copying what he saw me do when he was very young. He has figured out some sleight-of-hand – you know what I mean by ‘sleight-of-hand?’”

She nodded.

He tried to define it anyway, “truco de la mano?”

She nodded.

“It was very sad that he tried to trick you like that.”

The two were silent for a while; each finishing the drinks before them.

Ayudante looked up as if she had just had a revelation.

“You said your ‘son’ – what is his name?”

“His stage name is ‘Li’l Tom Hardy – America’s Foremost Psychic Entertainer.”

She smiled as if she had been let in on a joke.

“He is ‘Little’ because he is your son. Are you ‘Big Tom Hardy?’”

“No, I am just Thomas Hardy.”

“And you are a magician too?” she asked.

“No.”

Ayudante looked surprised to hear the answer. She clearly had expected a different answer in her cross-examination.

“What are you, then?” Ayudante asked.

Hardy breathed slowly, deeply and exhaled softly as he pulled the cork from the top of the bottle and poured Ayudante and himself another. He put the cork back in the bottle and observed the young woman’s attempt to guide the glass to her lips. She was clearly feeling the effects of the 124 proof whisky and the emotional roller-coaster she’d just stepped from.

“You said he copied your trick,” the young woman said. She sipped strongly at the shot glass and finally was able to bring some of the spirits to her mouth.

“No, honey, what he did that night for you was a trick. It was just sleight-of-hand. He copied what he saw me do.”

Ayudante looked at him carefully as if she had to manually focus her eyes on the older man.

“You didn’t do a trick?” she asked, her words now began to sound slurred.

“No, no. I don’t know the first thing about doing a magic trick. Tonight, when I said that I had been looking for someone special, someone to spend my remaining days with; I was telling you the truth. When your card matched mine that was the first time that has happened in 36 years and six and a half months.

“How do you remember that time?” Ayudante asked softly.

“The last person I matched with was my wife, “Li’l Tom’s mother.”

“Where is she now?” Ayudante blurted.

“I believe she is in heaven. She was such a good woman.”

Ayudante was silent.

“I used to tell my son about how his mother and I met, and I think he just developed a trick to duplicate it.”

The young barmaid came from around the counter and stood directly in front of her only patron. She looked into his eyes, deeply and moved forward as if to kiss him and then stopped. Hardy looked down and then met her gaze and moved towards her lips.

They kissed as she wrapped her thin arms around his waist and pulled him close.

Hardy leaned into the young woman’s hug and kissed her softly on the neck, behind the ear and along her chin before reaching her lips. Ayudante giggled and rubbed the older man’s back as she kissed him in a similar manner. So exciting was the moment for Hardy that he did not feel Ayudante’s left hand slide into his coat pocket and remove three of the six bullets he had taken from her.

“Would you like to go out back to my apartment?” Ayudante whispered excitedly in his ear.

“I thought you would never ask,” Hardy said with a broad smile as he stood up from the stool.