Spoonbenders

Suddenly Buddy charged into the kitchen, looked around wildly, and then lunged for the phone. It rang just as he picked it up. He stared at it a second, then held it out toward Teddy.

“Hello?” Teddy asked.

“So your calling card is a two?”

“Graciella,” he said. Couldn’t help smiling.

“I would have thought you’d pick an ace at least,” she said.

Teddy ignored Frankie’s questioning look, then walked outside with the phone. God damn he needed a cordless in this house full of people. “See, if I give you an ace, you’d think I was bragging,” he said. “I could go down to a face card, but then there’s no room to write. But the deuce, well, it may not look like much, but it’s wild.”

“So,” Graciella said. “Degloving.”

“Ah. As I said, I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“Tell me the story, Teddy.”

“Not over the phone. How about the diner by Dominick’s?” Where we first met, he didn’t add.

“They don’t have a bar. I’m going to need a drink.”

“I know a place,” he said.

“I’ve already called the babysitter,” she said.

He went back inside, resumed his seat. Took a long, bittersweet sip of the Hendrick’s. Leaned back.

Frankie was looking at him with an odd expression. “What just happened?” he asked.

“Nothing, my boy. Nothing.”

“You’re smiling at something.”

Teddy swirled his glass, thinking.

Frankie nodded slowly. “So…”

“All right, all right,” Teddy said with an artificial sigh. “One box.”

On the bus ride home from Fort Meade, Maureen was silent, her expression distracted.

“Don’t you worry,” Teddy told her. “That machine don’t mean a thing.” She didn’t answer. Because of course it did mean something, because Smalls believed in it. And how could he not? The results corresponded with all his biases.

G. Randall Archibald had tested each of them. They didn’t start with Teddy, because Jonathan Jones was so anxious to go first. Archibald fastened electrodes to the boy’s arms and temples, then plugged him into the stack of electronic devices—which in aggregate evidently formed this torsion field detector. The boxes hummed and whirred and emitted a smell of hot rubber. Archibald asked Jones to go through a remote-viewing exercise, and the staff watched tensely as the dials of the machine twitched and swung. Afterward, Archibald wrote down numbers on a pad, harrumphed to himself, and then called up Bob Nickles. The retiree performed about the same as Jones.

Then came Maureen. As soon as she closed her eyes to concentrate on a target on Russian soil, the gauges slammed to the right like Barney Oldfield’s speedometer.

Archibald seemed shocked, and mumbled something about recalibrating the device, but Smalls reassured him. As far as he was concerned, the detector was right on the money.

Teddy went last. Archibald taped the electrodes to Teddy’s skin, turned on the machine…and waited. The gauges didn’t move. Teddy made a joke about Maureen burning them out, and no one laughed, not even Maureen. A second round of testing with the group returned similar results: Jones and Nickles were active but feeble, Maureen was a powerhouse, and Teddy was a dud.

“It’s the oldest scam in the book,” Teddy said to Maureen, still trying to cheer her up as the bus rumbled toward Odenton. “That guy, Archibald? He’s going to make a mint ripping off the government. It’s a better deal than being a psychic, that’s for sure. He’s taking Smalls for a ride. There’s no better sucker than a man with signing approval on a governmental line item.”

Still Maureen didn’t speak.

“Okay, does it work?” Teddy asked rhetorically. “Maybe.” That was a lie, but for her own good. “It sure was right about you, though.”

Maureen finally looked at him, and he was shocked to see that her eyes were gleaming. It tore him up to see her holding back tears. Worse than full-fledged crying. She said, “You believe in me now?”

“Babe, you’re asking a born second-deal man whether he believes in psychic powers. I know every trick in the book, and the ones that aren’t in the book? Well, I know enough to watch the left hand when the right one’s waving around. And kid, I’ve been watching every move you’ve made since last summer.”

He sighed. “But God damn if I could catch you. Every day in Dr. Eldon’s lab you had me turned around, mystified, and befuddled. And then we got out here, and I thought, at last, I’ll be able to watch her every day, there’s no way she could fool me every minute. Smalls maybe, but not Teddy Telemachus. And you know what? I was right.”

“What? I never—”

“You didn’t fool me, Maureen McKinnon, because you weren’t trying to. You’re the real thing. It took me long enough to believe it—it’s against my nature. I’d be damned if some blue-eyed Chicago beauty was going to make a mark out of me. But you, you’ve got the goods. You’re an honest-to-God psychic. And I’m in love with you.”

She sat back in the vinyl seat, and now a tear had escaped to track down her cheek. He was mystified again. Was she happy or upset? He decided to go with happy, because the alternative would crush him.