But anyway, there’s the size and shape of things to come. Now, none of that is swami. That is to say, I can wear a good swami hat and I like these bath towels and ten - cent - store diamonds; it’s just really marvelous. Go to a party and wrap a bath towel around your head and put a Woolworth diamond on the front of the bath towel and tell people’s fortunes. That used to be one of my biggest gags, and so forth, only I’d tell them what I saw in their banks.¹

An FBI man, at one time or another, at a party where it was gagged up there in Washington, a bunch of departmental heads and that sort of thing - this FBI man, I’d already told him the case he was working on slightly, and this had mystified him because that was dead secret, don’t you see? I told his fortune with this deck of cards, you see. And he “Er - er - and so on” - very creepy about the whole thing. But he knew there was something false mixed up with this. He hung around the edges and he watched me tell the fortunes to an awful lot of other people around there. And eventually, when I’d finally taken off the bath towel that some girl had gotten me and given the old dowager back her brooch, why, he came around to me.

Hostess had given me a drink, and soon as she went away, he leaned over to me and said, “How were you doing that?”

“Oh,” I said, “dead simple.” And I pulled the cards out of my pocket and showed them to him, turned them over on the back, and I said, “You see these baseballs, well now, you notice the number of stitches in that baseball? And you notice this next card over here? Well, the number of stitches in that baseball,” I said, “well, that’s seven stitches and then they’re at a certain pattern and that makes a seven of diamonds.”

I turned it over and showed him it was the seven of diamonds.

He said, “Oh,” he said, “marked cards,” he said, “of course,” and went away.