The affront to my late idol, a legend for this very trick, irks me but briefly. More pressingly, I struggle to decipher Charles’s intentions as he strides past the volunteers to reach center stage, his slicked ebony hair tousled from his costume change. “Observe, for instance, zis emergency tool, which I have primed with a hacksaw. For what, you ask? Why, to do…zis.” Against an edge of the milk can, he slams the ax handle—once, twice—and breaks the handle in two.

My chest tightens, despite murmurs of surprise and delight. Charles slings the pieces aside with a hearty “voilà,” barely missing my T-strap heels. Even the four-piece band, routinely dispassionate in the pit, gawks with interest.

“What is more,” he proclaims, swooping toward me barefoot, “one with supernatural gifts has no need for caution. Is it not so, Mademoiselle Vos?” I’m still eyeing the can—finding no damage, gratefully—when he snatches from me the tiny ring of keys. He jangles them high, pinkie in the air, as if ringing a bell for tea service, before tossing them into his mouth and swallowing them whole.

A ripple of gasps. A mix of groans.

Another maddening, bewildering detour.

Unless vitally called for, never stray from the act. Of the many rules I’ve taught him, this was the first. The most crucial.

I dredge up a smile nonetheless, bright with Victory Red lips, ever accustomed to wearing a mask as much onstage as off. And besides, I’m well aware the keys are unnecessary, the padlocks a ruse. The neck of the can is, after all, rigged with an outer and inner wall. Telescoped upward, the lid detaches with secured locks intact. It’s a deceit based on presumption, a twist on a story viewers convince themselves to be true. Just as experience tells them a book holds full-sheeted pages and a shoe heel is built solidly through, to their minds, a milk can opens only one way.

Mind you, Charles’s ingesting of the keys is real. For escapologists, a trained resistance to gagging is required to handily swallow an item, then reproduce it on cue. Compliments of a sword swallower, I learned the rather unsavory skill while on breaks from my old sleight-of-hand acts. It was at the very dime museum where I first met Charles, back when his unruly black hair wasn’t yet slicked with tonic, his average if pleasing face still free of smugness; when labeled a “curiosity,” he drew the upper crust of society to point and cringe.

Who could have guessed he’d become my greatest illusion?

“Alors, zee final touches!” Charles holds out his wrists and regards me with a jerk of his chin, a sign to administer the handcuffs and resume my patter. His granting of permission.

Annoyance curls my fingers, interrupted by a heckling sailor.

“Hey, honey, I could think of some better ways to use those handcuffs!”