What is meant by "Nothing up your sleeves"
Background: Hi, this one is my first question on this site. Until now I was just a developer asking for help on stackoverflow.com.
So today I was watching the movie Now you see me, where they all get caught and then Jesse Eisenberg tells the cop "Listen you have what we call in business Nothing up your sleeves".
What I have tried:
So I tried to Google it, using define nothing up your sleeves but no answer or definition came up! So I tried to go to some other sites. But no success!
My Question:
All that I know is that this is something about magic, like magicians have a card up their sleeves! But what is meant by that phrase or whatever, I am not sure.
That why I asked the question. What is meant by: "Nothing up your sleeves"?
It comes from magic, but it is often used figuratively simply to mean that the speaker is not hiding anything.
The idiom mainly comes from magic shows, where the magician would, prior to doing some slight of hand trick, say "There's nothing up my sleeves" and push up the floppy sleeves of his jacket to show that nothing was hidden there. (The idiom also references, of course, the practice of hiding cards up ones sleeves when cheating at cards. It's probably impossible to assign the origin of the idiom to one scenario or the other.)
Of course, magician's action was very likely a distraction (in a fashion typical of prestidigitators) while he in fact hid something up his sleeve or otherwise set up the trick, but such deceit is not implied by the idiom, which, in its simplest interpretation, means "I'm not hiding anything".
The idiom may also be used (with a slightly different meaning) in, say, a business discussion, where a problem is being discussed, and one party asks another if he has anything up his sleeve to address the issue. In this case, the question is asking whether the second party has any useful ideas or information which he may not have thought to mention. (The question is not used in an accusative sense, but rather to promote open discussion.)
It's unclear what the context is in the original question, but if someone tells a cop or (more likely) a prosecutor that he (the cop/prosecutor) has nothing up his sleeves then the intended meaning may be more like the business sense, and the speaker may be saying that the cop/prosecutor has no case and no hidden information he can use to make a case.