Chapter 2

Thistime she laid the cards with a slow, deliberate, even careful manner, pausing slightly between each card. I watched this with growing amused appreciation: whatever else, this was effective theatre. I chuckled inwardly, thinking: Give the mark his money’s worth.

Still, there was a part of me that was notcynical, a part that wantedto believe. It was the contamination of the soul of every rational but romantic person, the ardent desire for the world to be more than just mechanism and physical laws.

The woman laid the six cards of the cross in a slow, methodical manner, only grunting once when she had laid the card at the top of the cross, the Lovers, I noted. Then, moving on to laying the four cards of the column, when she laid the second of these, she paused and made a low noise in her throat. I looked at her intently, saw she was frowning. I examined her face, trying to detect what this reaction meant, and, even more important, whether it was indeed something genuine, or merely more of her good theatre.

Her hand rested for several seconds on the top card of the deck before she laid down the third card. I had been keeping a careful eye on her hand movements during this dealing process, to see whether there was some trickery involved. But it seemed pretty clear that she was laying the cards, each directly from the top of the deck as I had shuffled them.

It almost seemed as if she were reluctant to lay the third card, but she did so at last, and then gave what was undeniably a gasp. This made me look at the cards in the column.

They were all nines. The Nine of Cups, of Wands, and of Swords. I stared at them, then at the woman, who was staring at them, too—though it seemed that part of her attention was focused “inwardly” in some sense. I almost laughed aloud at this: It really wasgood theatre! I felt a rush of pleasure at the sheer haunting nature of the experience. It was, in a certain way, fun!

Still. I looked at the three nines in a column. What, I thought, was the probability of that?

The woman’s hand, which I noticed for the first time had rings on all of its fingers, rested on the deck held in her other hand. I was momentarily distracted by this observation. It was like something in me, some new awareness, had woken up. And that made me slightly uncomfortable. I watched with some trepidation as she slowly lifted the fourth card and, turning it over, laid it down above the other three. She gave a sharp intake of breath, and stared at the card.

It was the Nine of Coins.

“Oh!” I said involuntarily. “Four of a kind, all nines. How odd.”

The woman nodded once slowly but then became completely still for a time. She almost looked frozen. When at last she did move it was only to shake her head slowly from side to side, in what seemed to be a worried manner, as if she were saying: No, that’s not possible!

“What does it mean?” I asked.

My question seemed to break the spell. The woman sat up straight in her chair and looked in my direction, though not quitemaking eye contact. In fact, her eyes seemed unfocused and her face slightly pinched. It was as though my question or my mere presencewas at that moment a kind of unwelcome distraction. I was nonplused and just watched, waiting for whatever would happen next.

At last, she made a small noise in her throat and waved one hand in a dismissive fashion. And now I began to feel a slight irritation, as might an audience member feel when a certain point in the entertainment was being played out too long.

I was about to repeat my question, when the woman’s eyes seemed to return from wherever and focused on me. She regarded me with a very intense gaze, her dark eyes looking like pools of infinite depth. She seemed to be trying to bore into me, something I found disquieting.

I shifted in my seat, at which she blinked several times. Her gaze became less intense.

“Oh!” she said, and then paused. “Well, you know, it’s—not quite that easy.”

I had to think before realizing her statement was actually answering my question. Now she laid the deck carefully on the table and pointed to the cards on the left.

“This is the cross section of the reading,” she said. Then she tapped a long, scarlet-nailed forefinger to the top card of the overlaid pair at the center of the cross, which was the only card to have been placed horizontally.