Magician’s Enchanted Life Is No Illusion : Performer: Sleight of hand helped Petrick Krejcik escape Czechoslovakia and become a success in the West.

Petrick Krejcik doesn’t particularly look like a daredevil or a magician. At 40, going gray at the temples and living quietly in a Moorpark subdivision with his wife, Mia, he could pass for a shy violinist. Or a Xerox repairman.

But it’s an illusion. And that’s what this story is about.

As he and Mia tell it in their living room, they are often interrupted by a number of things that go bump in the house. These are solid objects that suddenly fly onto shoulders or run between legs, leaving the impression of an enchanted household, which is not wholly incorrect.

Seven large birds live here, restricted to the dining area (no one else eats there). And there is an Angora rabbit called Hocus Pocus whose feet are faster than the eye.

Each of them--except the two youngest cockatoos--has a stage role to perform, although the work is largely passive; they wait for Petrick to materialize them from thin air. Mack, the eldest macaw, is the exception--he does one card trick, with direction.

Magic is not a hobby for Krejcik. It has been his life since he was 14.

It all began in Prague, Czechoslovakia, when Krejcik jumped down a school staircase and broke his leg. He was put in a hospital ward in a bed next to a stage performer. The man taught him three tricks, which the boy practiced endlessly.

Later, he went to see his first magic show, observed the routines, and improvised. At 17, he entered a national magic competition and won.

The same year, 1969, he was with a crowd of boys who were protesting the first anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Prague. He threw rocks at Communist guards in the city square and was fired on, a bullet narrowly missing his head.

“This is a sound you never forget, you know?” he says from a quarter of a century later and halfway around the world.

He graduated from high school and went headlong into magic, practicing about 12 hours a day. He began to get bookings.

In a resort town where he was performing, he met Mia, who had a college degree and a life plan for herself in hotel management. She was not immediately swept off her feet by a man who spent his entire day practicing tricks. But he grew on her. They married in 1975.

Meanwhile, he entered an international magic competition in Paris. “It’s like the Olympics,” he remembered. Here he introduced his jumbo ball trick--which still confounds colleagues. Krejcik caused a series of nine grapefruit-sized metal balls to appear onstage and earned a special award for originality.

After that, he was in demand all over Europe. And when he convinced his bride to join the act, it became even more popular. At home, the couple’s income rose to many times the national average. They bought a luxury item--a Ford Cortina.

In 1978, at a winter resort in Poland where they had an engagement, the car, Krejcik said, was singled out for a parking ticket among a row of similarly parked vehicles.

Krejcik said he took the ticket to a policeman, who asked him for his passport, then asked for 3,000 zloty (“about a month’s salary for a person in Poland”) for the passport’s return.

Krejcik demanded to see the chief of police. He was taken, he said, to the local jail, where he was seriously beaten. Krejcik ran to a window and yelled to his wife.

Mia, he said, called the Czech embassy, and because of her husband’s status as an entertainer, a charge of inciting an anti-Communist demonstration was dropped. Half a day later, Krejcik’s passport was thrown at him, and he walked away--but not without a plan.

It was to leave behind their lifestyle, their families, possessions and a certain fame, and defect to the West, Krejcik said. The pair had a starting point: an invitation to appear at the Magic Castle in Hollywood from co-founder and then president, the late Bill Larsen, who had seen the couple’s act in France. They requested permission from their government to accept the offer. It was turned down flat.

Then, says Krejcik modestly, “I created a plan--it was really amazing!”

The plan was to crash through the border gates to the West in a reinforced Ford Cortina, causing guards to fire on the car and guaranteeing fame and stage bookings for its occupants--should they survive.

When the day came to make their break, the pair loaded the car with magic inventions, plane fare in Western currency bought on the black market, and passports that were lacking visas to the West.

At the border, they waited for a line of cars to inch into Austria. When they were second in line, braced for the crash toward freedom, a guard strode to the window and ordered the driver out.

The amazing plan was history. Krejcik climbed out and handed over the papers.

But fortunately, the life of a border guard cries out for diversion.

“I’m a magician,” he told the frowning officer. “We had a last-minute booking, and didn’t have time to get the proper papers. Let me show you a trick.”

A quarter-hour of sleight of hand followed, in which cards disappeared before the man’s eyes and his watch moved from his wrist to the magician’s pocket. When Krejcik returned it, he was rewarded with a smile and the words, “Just go.”

As Krejcik turned to enter the car, the guard called, “You forgot your passports!”

“No, I didn’t,” the magician said, extracting the passports from his coat and waving them.

“He loved it,” Krejcik remembers.

All that remained was to obtain political asylum in the United States, learn English and establish an income after the Hollywood booking ran out. With the help of the Larsen family, all of this happened.

The Petrick and Mia act has appeared on the “Wonderful World of Magic,” and there have been bookings across the country, which they hope to increase. But much of their income presently comes from Krejcik’s inventions.

Together he and Mia have established PM Magic, a mail-order company that markets a full line of his original tricks, including such devices as “The Devil’s Pitchfork” and “Bewildering Bracelets.”

The inventing takes up much of Krejcik’s time.

“Sometimes,” says Mia, detaching a cockatoo from a well-shredded palm tree, “when he has an idea, he is unbelievable. When you are talking to him, you don’t know if he will answer you . . . sometimes, he will eat only once a day.”

The magician agrees that his work is absorbing. He must not only invent commercial tricks, but develop other, more baffling ones, for his own routine. And find time to perfect them.

To do this, he has developed a way of combining magic with the mundane. He fills television viewing time with card tricks and admits driving--in slow traffic--while doing one-hand maneuvers. Better yet, he has Mia drive so he can use both hands.

“You know,” he says with a smile, “so I don’t waste my time.”