Death in the Fifth Position

CHAPTER ONE

1

“You see,” said Mr. Washburn. “We’ve been havig trouble.”

I nodded. “What sort of trouble?”

He looked vaguely out the window. “Oh, one thing and the other.”

“That’s not much to go on, is it?” I said gently; it never does to be stern with a client before one is formally engaged.

“Well, there’s the matter of these pickets.”

I don’t know why but the word “picket” at this moment suggested small gnomes hiding in the earth. So I said, “Ah.”

“They are coming tonight,” he added.

“What time do they usually come?” I asked, getting into the spirit of the thing.

“I don’t know. We’ve never had them before.”

Never had them before, I wrote in my notebook, just to be doing something.

“You were very highly recommended to me,” said Mr. Washburn, in a tone which was almost accusing; obviously I had given him no cause for confidence.

“I’ve handled a few big jobs, from time to time,” I said quietly, exuding competence.

“I want you for the rest of the season, the New York season. You are to handle all our public relations, except for the routine stuff which this office does automatically: sending out photographs of the dancers and so on. Your job will be to work with the columnists, that kind of thing … to see we’re not smeared.”

“Why do you think you might be smeared?” The psychological moment had come for a direct question.

“The pickets,” said Mr. Washburn with a sigh. He was a tall heavy man with a bald pink head which glittered as though it had been waxed; his eyes were gray and shifty: as all honest men’s eyes are supposed to be according to those psychologists who maintain that there is nothing quite so dishonest as a level, unwavering gaze.

I finally understood him. “You mean you are going to be picketed?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Bad labor relations?”

“Communism.”

“You mean the Communists are going to picket you?”

The impresario of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet looked at me sadly, as though once again his faith had been unjustified. Then he began at the beginning. “I called you over here this morning because I was told that you were one of the best of the younger public relations men in New York, and I prefer to work with young people. As you may or may not know, my company is going to première an important new ballet tonight. The first major modern ballet we have presented in many years and the choreographer is a man named Jed Wilbur.”

“I’m a great admirer of his,” I said, just to show that I knew something about ballet. As a matter of fact, it isn’t possible to be around the theater and not know of Wilbur. He is the hottest choreographer in town at the moment, the most fashionable … not only in ballet but also in musical comedies.

“Wilbur has been accused of being a Communist several times but since he has already been cleared by two boards I have every confidence in him. The United Veterans Committee, however, have not. They wired me yesterday that if we did his new ballet they would picket every performance until it was withdrawn.”

“That’s bad,” I said, frowning, making it sound worse than it was: after all I had a good job at stake. “May I see their telegram?” Mr. Washburn handed it to me and I read:

To Ivan Washburn Director Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet Company Metropolitan Opera House New York City: WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT JED WILBUR IS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THAT COMMA TO PROTECT OUR CHERISHED WAY OF LIFE AND THOSE IDEALS WHICH SO FINELY FORGED A NATION OUT OF THE WILDERNESS COMMA THE SUBVERSIVE WORK OF ARTISTS LIKE WILBUR SHOULD BE BANNED PERIOD SHOULD YOU DISREGARD THIS PLEA TO PROTECT OUR AMERICAN WAY WE WILL BE FORCED TO PICKET EVERY PERFORMANCE OF SAID WILBUR’S WORK PERIOD IN A TRUE DEMOCRACY THERE IS NO PLACE FOR A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION ON GREAT ISSUES CORDIALLY ABNER S. FLEER SECRETARY.

“A poignant composition,” I said.

“We’ve had a bad season so far this year. We’re the fifth ballet company to arrive in town this spring and even though we’re the original Russian ballet it’s not been easy to fill the Met. Wilbur is our ace-in-the-hole. It’s his first ballet for this company. It’s his first new work in over a year. Everyone is going to be on hand tonight … and nothing must go wrong. That will be your job, too, by the way: to publicize the première.”

“If I’d had a few weeks of preparation I could have got Life to cover the performance,” I said with that modesty which characterizes my profession.

Washburn was not impressed. “In any case, I’m told that you’ve got a good many contacts among the columnists. They’re the people who make opinion, for us at least. You’ve got to convince them that Wilbur is as pure as …”

“The driven snow,” I finished, master that I am of the worn cliché. “But is he?”

“Is he what?”

“Pure as … I mean is he a Communist?”

“How in the name of God should I know? He could be an anarchist for all I care. The only thing I’m interested in is a successful season. Besides, what has politics to do with Eclipse?”

“With what?”

“Eclipse is the name of the new ballet. I want you to go over to the Met and watch the dress rehearsal at two-thirty. You’ll be able to get some idea of the company then … meet the cast and so on. Meet Wilbur, too; he’s full of ideas on how to handle this … too damn many ideas.”

“Then I am officially employed?”

“As of this minute … for the rest of the season, two weeks altogether. If we’re still having trouble by the time we go on tour I’d like you to go with us as far as Chicago … if that’s agreeable.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

“Fine.” Mr. Washburn rose and so did I. “You’ll probably want to make some preparations between now and two-thirty. You can use the office next to mine … Miss Ruger will show you which one.”

“That will be perfect,” I said. We shooks hands solemnly.

I was halfway out the door when Mr. Washburn said, “I think I should warn you that ballet dancers are very temperamental people. Don’t take them too seriously. Their little quarrels are always a bit louder than life.” Which, in the light of what happened later, was something of an understatement.

2

Until my interview with Ivan Washburn I could take ballet or leave it alone and since in earlier days I was busy writing theater reviews for Milton Haddock of the New York Globe, I left it alone: besides, the music critic always handled ballet and what with doing Mr. Haddock’s work as well as my own I had very little time for that sort of thing, between eight-thirty and eleven anyway. Mr. Haddock, God knows, is a fine critic and a finer man and it is a fact that his reviews in the Globe were more respected than almost anyone else’s; they should have been since I wrote nearly all of them between 1947 and 1949 at which latter date I was separated from the Globe, as we used to say in the army. Not that I am implying Mr. Haddock, who was writing about the theater the year I was born, couldn’t do just as well as I did … he could, but there is a limit to the amount of work you can accomplish on Scotch whisky, taken without water or ice, directly from the bottle if he was in the privacy of his office or from a discreet prohibition flask if we were at the theater: he on the aisle fifth row from the stage and I just behind him in the sixth row, with instructions to poke the back of his neck if he snored too loud.

In a way, I had a perfect setup; Mr. Haddock was fond of me in a distant fatherly way (he often had a struggle recalling my name) and I was allowed all the pleasure of unedited authorship for he never changed a line of my reviews on those occasions when he read them at all. The absence of public credit never distressed me; after all I was Harvard class of 1946 (three years must be added to my age, however, during which time I served the nation on at least one very far-flung battlefront) and most of my classmates are still struggling along in the lower echelons of advertising firms or working anonymously for Time and Life and worrying about their integrity as liberals in a capitalistic organization. Anyway I knew a good thing when I saw it but after three years of being the real drama critic for the Globe I began to feel my oats and I made the mistake of asking for a raise at the wrong time: a fault in timing which must be ascribed to my extreme youth and natural arrogance, to quote Mr. Haddock quoting the managing editor, and since I had unfortunately phrased my request as an ultimatum I was forced to resign and Mr. Haddock looked very sorry and confused the day I left, saying: “All the best, Jim.” My name is Peter Cutler Sargeant II, but what the hell; I shook his hand and told him that everything I knew about writing I had learned from him … which pleased the old fool.

For over a year now I have been in public relations, with my own office, consisting of a middle-aged lady and a filing cabinet. The middle-aged lady, Miss Flynn, is my official conscience and she has been very good to me, reminding me that money is not everything and that Jesus is my redeemer. She is a Baptist and stern in the presence of moral weakness. I firmly believe that the main reason she consents to work for me is that I constitute a challenge to her better instincts, to that evangelical spirit which burns secretly but brightly in her bosom. She will save me yet. We have both accepted that fact. But in the meantime she helps me in my work, quite unaware that she is a party to that vast conspiracy to dupe the public in which I and my kind are eternally engaged.

“Miss Flynn, I have been hired.”

“The dancers?” She looked at me, her gray lips tight. Women in tights are dancers to her, not ballerinas.

“For two weeks, starting now.”

“I am very happy for you, Mr. Sargeant,” she said, in the tone of one bidding a friend farewell on the banks of the Styx.

“I’m happy, too,” I said. I then gave her a few instructions about my other accounts (a hat company in the Bronx, a television actress and a night school); then I left my one-room Madison Avenue office and headed for the Metropolitan Opera House, leaving my conscience behind.

Mr. Washburn met me at the stage door and escorted me past several open dressing rooms to a flight of steps which led down to the vast stage itself. Everything was in great confusion. Small fat women ran back and forth carrying costumes, while dancers in tights stood about practicing difficult variations with the intensely vacuous expressions of weight-lifters or of those restaurant cooks who scramble eggs in front of plate-glass windows. Workmen, carrying parts of scenery, shouted to one another and cursed the dancers who seemed always to be in their way. In the pit the orchestra was making an awful noise warming up, while, beyond, the great red and gold opera house was empty and still … a little ominous, I thought, for no reason at all.

“The rehearsal is almost ready to begin,” said my employer as we moved out onto the stage, toward a group of dancers in tights and T-shirts, the standard rehearsal costume of both boys and girls, which was very nice I thought, looking at the girls. “I’ll introduce you to the principals in a minute,” said Mr. Washburn. “If you …” But then someone waved to him from the other side of the stage and he walked away, leaving his sentence unfinished.

“Are you the new boy?” asked a female voice behind me.

I turned and saw a very pretty girl standing behind me; she wore black tights and a white T-shirt through which her breasts showed, small and neat. She was combing her dark gold hair back. For some inscrutable reason she had a rubber band in her mouth; it impaired her diction.

“Well, I guess in a way I am,” I said.

“You better get your clothes off. I’m Jane Garden.”

“My name’s Peter Sargeant.”

“You better hurry. You’ve got to learn the whole thing this afternoon.” She pulled her hair straight back and then slipped the back hair through the rubber band; it looked like a horse’s tail, a very nice horse’s tail.

“Shall I take them off right here?”

“Don’t be silly. The boys’ dressing room is on the second floor.”

I then explained to her who I was and she giggled, but not in a squeaky manner: her voice was low and her eyes, I noticed, were a fine arctic blue.

“Do you know anything about ballet?” she asked, glancing anxiously toward the other dancers. They were not ready, however. The orchestra was still warming up. The principals hadn’t arrived yet. The noise was deafening.

“Not much,” I said. “Are you one of the leads?”

“Nowhere near being a lead. Although they’ve made me understudy in this ballet.”

“To whom?”

“Why, to Ella Sutton. She’s the star of the ballet … I mean of this particular one. Actually she’s the second-ranking ballerina … after Eglanova.”

I knew who Eglanova was. Everyone, I suspect, who has ever heard of ballet knows about Anna Eglanova. I had even read up on her that morning before my interview with Mr. Washburn, just so I wouldn’t appear too ignorant. The program notes and the facts, however, did not coincide as I found out soon enough … even though the program is approximately correct; she was a star at the same time as Nijinski and she is a genuine Russian dancer from the old Imperial School, but she is fifty-one not thirty-eight and she has been married five times, not once, and she was not the greatest ballerina of the Diaghilev era; as a matter of fact she was considered the least promising of the lot: how were her contemporaries to know that she had joints like ball bearings and a pair of lungs like rubber water wings and that with this equipment she would outlive all her generation, existing finally as a legend whose appearance on a stage was enough to break up a whole audience, causing tears of nostalgia to come to the eyes of characters who never saw a ballet before the last war.

“Where is Sutton?” I asked.

“Over there, talking to Wilbur … in the wings.”

Sutton was a good-looking woman, with hair dyed jet-black and worn severely combed back with a part in the middle: the classic ballerina fashion. She had large but good features and a vividly painted face; she was in costume, a full-skirted white dress with red roses in her hair. Her body was good for a female dancer though the muscles tended to bunch a little unpleasantly at the calves. Jane Garden’s did not, I noticed.

“Why aren’t you in costume?” I asked. “Isn’t this the dress rehearsal?”

“My costume isn’t ready. I wish they’d hurry up and start.”

“Why don’t they?”

“I suppose they’re waiting for Louis … Louis Giraud, he’s the first dancer and he’s always late. He sleeps most of the time. It drives everyone crazy … especially Wilbur.”

“Why doesn’t he do something about it?”

“Who? Wilbur? Why, he’s in love.”

“In love?”

“Of course … everybody knows it. He’s just crazy about Louis.”

Well, this is ballet, I decided, making a mental note to keep Miss Flynn in complete darkness as to the character of my new associates.

“I wonder,” I said thoughtfully, sincerely, “if you might perhaps have a minute after the show tonight … we might go somewhere and have something to eat. You see,” (speaking quickly now, gathering momentum), “I have to learn an awful lot about ballet very fast. It would help if you were to explain it all to me.”

“You’re sweet,” said Miss Garden with an unexpected smile, her teeth shone glacier-white in her warm pink face. “Maybe I will. Oh, here comes the conductor. You better get out of the way now … we’re going to start.”

Mr. Washburn collected me at that moment and we went around to the front of the house. Here I was introduced to a number of patrons and hangers-on, as well as the regisseur or director of the company, Alyosha Rudin, a nice old man, and the set designer whose name I didn’t get.

Jed Wilbur, a thin prematurely gray young man, came out on stage and began to lecture the dancers in a high nasal voice. They looked very pretty I thought. The girls in gray with pink roses in their hair and the boys dressed like 1910. But all was not ready.

“Where’s Louis?” asked Wilbur suddenly. “Doesn’t he know this is dress rehearsal?”

“He’s always late,” said Ella, fixing one of her false eyelashes in place. “I suppose he’s sleeping.”

“Just resting my legs,” said Louis, ambling out onto the stage with that funny duck-like walk all dancers have from continually turning their feet out. He was a big-boned man, about thirty and, for a dancer, rather tall and muscular, with black curly hair and blue eyes.

“Why can’t you ever be on time?” complained Wilbur, the eye of love eclipsed by the greater love of art and reputation; this was obviously an important moment for him, a major work … all the critics would be out front tonight and maybe even Margaret Truman.

“I get here, Jed. Now you start.” Ella glared at him. Wilbur muttered something disagreeable. Then the overture began.

The set was a handsome one. A blue sky, which was dark when the curtain rose, gradually filled with light as the music swelled and the corps de ballet (eight boys and eight girls) appeared. In the center of the stage was a large rock of gray canvas while at the top of the blue sky, about forty feet up, was a yellow Van Gogh sun.

The plot, if Eclipse could be said to have a plot, seemed to be about a girl (Sutton) who was in love with a boy (Louis) who liked all the girls in the company except her. So, frustrated and miserable, she took her revenge when, not having been laid as she so dearly wanted, she rushed furiously away from the happy boys and girls who at this point were indulging in some pretty sophisticated fornication on stage (so stylized, however, that one’s grandmother would never suspect what was happening); for a few dozen bars Ella hid behind the rock while Louis did his solo. Then, when he was finished, she reappeared and with a look of sheer malevolence slowly ascended into the air, spinning like an avenging spirit until she had at last eclipsed the sun. It was quite a tour de force, I thought … in spite of the dress rehearsal which was sufficiently godawful to make everyone think that tonight’s performance would be a technical triumph: Louis dropped Ella in the midst of a complicated lift shortly after her entrance and they never got back with the music again, while the corps de ballet plunged wildly about in the best St. Petersburg tradition, knocking into scenery and one another, justifying all the cruel remarks I’d heard made about them by the more refined balletomanes.

“What do you think?” asked Washburn when the rehearsal ended.

“Wonderful!” I said, like a press agent.

“I think …” began Mr. Washburn, but he was not allowed to finish because they were having a row on stage. The curtain had remained up and the lights were on again. Louis, stretched out with his back to the proscenium, was carefully wiping the sweat from his face with a piece of Kleenex. The boys and girls stood puffing at the rear of the stage while Ella and Wilbur quarreled.

“You’ve got to change it, Jed. I insist. I will not go sailing up on that damn thing again.”

“It’s the whole point to the ballet.”

“So what? I won’t do it. I get dizzy and I can’t make those turns off the ground.”

“We can have one of the workmen turn you backstage … he’ll jerk the cable …”

“Oh, no he won’t!”

“The idea never seemed to bother you before.”

“The idea still doesn’t bother me. I never realized how high it was until now.”

“Why don’t you get her a net?” suggested Louis.

“And that lift!” she said furiously, turning on him. “I could have broken a leg. You did it deliberately. I swear he dropped me deliberately.”

Mr. Washburn let them fight it out a few minutes more; then he went up on the stage, accompanied by me, and quickly made peace. It was agreed that Ella would ascend by cable tonight, but more slowly than before, and, further, she would not have to turn in the air.

“Very statesmanlike,” I said to Mr. Washburn, as we moved toward the dressing rooms on the north side of the stage.

“We always have these little disagreements before a première … divertissements I like to call them.” Despite his attempt at lightness, however, he seemed not at all diverted. “Have you had any ideas yet about those pickets?”

I nodded. “I’ve already called Elmer Bush at the Globe … that’s where I used to work … and he’s doing a column called ‘Witch-Hunt in the Theater,’ all about Wilbur and the ballet.”

“First-rate,” said Mr. Washburn, obviously impressed. I made a mental note to call Elmer Bush and suggest such a column to him. For all I knew he might even do it.

“I would rather wait until after we see the pickets before I do anything more. I mean we may get a lead from them … you know, something about bad behavior, bullying is un-American, that kind of thing. By the way,” I added, “speaking of bad behavior, does Miss Sutton often make scenes like this?”

“Not often,” said Mr. Washburn, as we approached a dressing room with a dusty star on the door. “She usually saves them for her husband.”

“Her husband?”

“Miles Sutton. He’s the conductor … big fellow with the beard.”

My head was beginning to spin. Everyone was related to everyone else, either officially or unofficially. I couldn’t keep them straight. The ballerina Ella Sutton was the wife of the conductor Miles Sutton and the choreographer Jed Wilbur was in love with the lead dancer Louis Giraud and Jane Garden the understudy to Ella Sutton was my idea of a fine specimen while Anna Eglanova the prima ballerina stood before me naked from the waist up. It was disconcerting. I was standing beside Mr. Washburn in the doorway of her dressing room; her maid had suddenly opened the door and darted by, leaving her mistress exposed to our gaze.

“Come in, Ivan,” said the great ballerina. “Who is the young man?”

“Peter Sargeant, Anna, our new public relations man.”

“So young! Ah!” She sat down before her dressing table and began to arrange her hair. She looked young for fifty. Her body was firm … the skin like antique ivory and the breasts more like worn china door knobs than glands intended for the suckling of the young. Her neck was slightly corded and her face was ugly but exotic, with deep lines about the mouth, a beaked nose and narrow slanting Mongol eyes. Her hair was dyed dark red.

“I get ready now for pas de deux, Ivan.” Her English was so heavily accented that it sounded to me like a different language altogether. In fact everything about her was different, including her casual disregard for the conventions.

“I think I better go,” I said, a little hastily. “I’ve got some calls to make. I’m going to try and head the newspaper photographers off.”

“Good plan,” said Mr. Washburn.

“Nice boy,” said Anna, as I left.

Halfway down the hall, a loud voice said, “Hey, Baby, come in here.”

Now I am twenty-eight years old and shave every day of my life and, though I wear a crewcut in deference to my collegiate past, I flatter myself that I look every inch a man of the world. But Louis Giraud obviously had about as much respect for other men as Don Juan had for little girls so I controlled myself. I walked into his dressing room.

He was lying on a steel cot. He had an electric fan going just above his head and a pair of sweaty tights were hanging over the radiator to dry. He wore nothing except a towel around his middle.

I said, “Hi.”

“You like the ballet tonight?” He spoke good English with only a faint French accent; he had started life as a longshoreman in Marseille. No one knew how he had got started in ballet but I suspect that the rumor a certain rich gentleman discovered him in a bordello and took him to Paris was probably true.

“I liked it pretty good,” I said.

“Real lousy,” said Louis, stretching his long knotty legs until the joints cracked. “I hate this ugly modern stuff. Giselle was good enough for Nijinski and it’s good enough for me. All these people running around stage with funny faces. Merde!” He had a deep voice and he wasn’t at all like the other boys in the company who were inclined to be rather tender: Louis had shoulders like a boxer. I decided I wouldn’t like to tangle with him and so I sat near the open door, ready to make a quick exit if he should decide to tear off a quick piece.

“Well, it’s a new medium,” I said absently, noting the comic books and movie magazines on the floor by the bed. Each to his taste, I said to myself in flawless French.

“But it’s not ballet.” Louis looked at me and grinned. “Hey, why’re you trying to fool me, Baby?”

I measured the distance from my chair to the door: two long steps or one broad jump, I decided coolly. “Who’s trying to fool you?” I asked, getting up slowly with a look of innocence which would have done credit to Tom Sawyer. He was too quick for me, though. I made a leap for the door but he got there first. It was a very silly moment.

“Now, look here, Louis,” I said as he made a grab for me. We played tag a moment and then he grabbed me, holding me the way a boxer holds another boxer in a clinch and both of us trying not to make any noise, for different reasons. I wondered whether to knee him or not; the towel had fallen off. I decided against it for the good of the company. I would be fired if I did. On the other hand I was in danger of being ravished; I couldn’t move without seriously injuring him and, on the other hand, I couldn’t stand like this forever pressed against his front while he fumbled and groped with his one free hand, embarrassing me very much. He smelled like a horse. Controlling myself with great effort I said in a very even and dignified voice, “If you don’t let go of me, I will break every one of your toes.” And with that, fairly gently, I put one hard leather heel on top of his left foot. He jumped at that and, breathing hard, I slid out the door.

I was mad as hell for several minutes but then, since no damage was done, I began to see the funny side and as I walked across the stage to the other set of dressing rooms I wondered if I should tell Jane what had happened. For one reason and another I had decided not to when I came upon Miles and Ella Sutton, quarreling. He was standing in the door of her dressing room; she was sitting at her make-up table in an old gray bathrobe. I caught one quick glimpse of her as I walked by, as though on urgent business. I have found that people who hang around to watch fights usually end by getting involved.

As I walked by, however, I heard Miles Sutton threatening to kill his wife. It gave me quite a turn. I mean temperament is all very well but there are times when it can be carried too far.

3

Now that I look back on that night it is perfectly apparent to me that almost everyone, including myself, sensed that something serious had gone wrong … but what? I knew of course that there was always a great deal of tension before a première and the childish bad temper of ballet dancers was familiar to me, by reputation anyway. Yet when the curtain went up on the blue-lit stage for the first ballet of the evening, Swan Lake, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach.

I remember taking a good look at the audience just before the house lights were dimmed and I remember feeling thankful that I didn’t have to appear on a stage in front of all those people, for the interior of the Met, seen from the stage, is like the mouth of a great monster, wide open, yawning and red, with tiers of golden teeth.

I have always had a personal superstition that when something begins badly it will end well and vice versa. Since that night I have discarded the superstition of a lifetime for this particular evening began badly and ended tragically.

The pickets arrived at seven-thirty, twenty well-fed veterans of the First World War; they were quiet but grim and their placards suggested in red ink that Wilbur go back to Russia if he liked it so much there. I had already telephoned the photographers, tipping them off; all publicity is good is my conviction and I had a scheme by which we might eventually be able to make considerable capital out of the veterans. Mr. Washburn took a dark view of this but I reassured him. I even wrote him a little speech to make to the audience right after Swan Lake, before Eclipse, saying that Jed Wilbur was a hundred per cent patriot and so on.

The trouble began, officially, after Swan Lake when one of the girls collapsed in the wings and had to be carried up to her dressing room.

I was standing beside Alyosha Rudin to stage right when this happened.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked.

The old man sighed. “A foolish girl. Her name is Magda … a little heavy to be good dancer but she has the heart.”

“You mean she has a weak heart?”

Alyosha chuckled. “No, she is passionate. Shall we go out front?”

On our way we passed Mr. Washburn. He was dressed in white tie and tails and his glittering skull looked pale to me in the dim light of backstage. He was very nervous. “I don’t think I’ll be able to go through with it,” he said in a voice which trembled.

“With what?” I asked.

“The curtain speech.”

“Courage, Ivan,” said Alyosha. “You always say that; then, when the time comes, you have the courage of a lion.”

“All those people,” moaned Mr. Washburn, moving toward the lavatory.

Alyosha was a pleasant companion and most knowledgeable of ballet; as he should be since, like Eglanova, he is a genuine Russian dating back to the Fall of Rome … perhaps even to the pyramids for he is very old with the classic Russian greyhound head: hair brushed back, long features and eyes like gray metal. He looked very old-world and distinguished in a smoking jacket of mulberry velvet. We found ourselves two seats in the front row.

“What was wrong with that girl?” I asked when we were seated. Already I was beginning to think of a press release … dancer upset by pickets: lover killed in Korea.

“She will have baby,” said Alyosha.

“But she shouldn’t be dancing if she’s pregnant.”

“The poor child. She must. She has no husband and her family doesn’t know.”

“Do you know who the father is?”

Alyosha smiled sadly; his teeth were like black pearls. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter,” he said gently.

Then the house lights were turned down and Mr. Washburn made his curtain speech; there was polite applause. Miles Sutton, looking nervous and sick, I thought (we were sitting right behind him), rapped his baton sharply on the music stand and the ballet began.

Artistically, everything went off quite well, according to the critics the next day. Both Martin of the Times and Terry of the Tribune thought Eclipse a triumphant modern work, praising Wilbur, Sutton’s interpretation of the Bartok music, the set designer, Louis and, above all, the ballerina Ella Sutton who, they both felt, gave her finest performance: a dedicated artist to the very end for, when the cable broke thirty odd feet in the air, she maintained complete silence as she fell in fifth position onto the stage with a loud crash, still on beat.

Alyosha who was sitting beside me, gasped and said something very loud in Russian; then he crossed himself as the curtain swept down over the stage and the house lights went on. The audience was too stunned to react. Mr. Washburn came on stage but I missed his announcement for I was already backstage.

Ella Sutton lay in a heap in the middle of the stage, her body curiously twisted, like a contortionist’s. A doctor had been summoned and he was kneeling beside her, his hand on her pulse. The dancers stood in shocked attitudes around the still figure.

Then Ella was pronounced dead (her back was broken) and she was carried to her dressing room. Alyosha ordered the dancers to change for the next ballet, Scheherazade. Mr. Washburn led the doctor away. The impassive workmen struck the set and I suddenly found that I was alone on the stage. Not even Alyosha was in sight.

I wandered down the corridor which led to the north side dressing rooms, but I could find no one. I paused at Eglanova’s room and looked in. It was empty. Everything was in a tangle: costumes, telegrams, press clippings, flowers fresh and dying, all the paraphernalia of stardom. On impulse, I entered, feeling like a small boy who has been deserted in a haunted house. I knew, if I waited long enough, that she’d reappear: her dressing room was the clubhouse of the ballet … at least of the top echelon who, I was told, usually came here to drink hot tea and lemon Russian style and discuss, with some severity, those not present. But the club was deserted. Not even Eglanova’s maid was in sight.

A little worried, I turned to go when, quite by chance, I glanced at the wastepaper basket which stood just inside the door: something glittered underneath the make-up-stained pieces of Kleenex and the dead roses. I bent over and picked up a large pair of brand-new shears.

I have since tried, unsuccessfully, to recall what I thought at that moment. As far as I can recollect I thought, rather idly, that it was curious that a perfectly good set of shears should be thrown out like that, and in Eglanova’s dressing room, too. I had perhaps some vague notion that her maid might have borrowed them from one of the grips and then had absently thrown them out. In any event, I took them out of the dressing room and placed them neatly on top of a tool chest near the north side entrance.

It wasn’t until an hour later, after the performance was over, that I began to worry a little because, by that time, the assistant district attorney had arrived, accompanied by a medical examiner and a detective named Gleason who announced to the assembled company that someone had deliberately cut all but a strand of that wire cable with a pair of shears, or maybe a saw, and that Ella Sutton had been murdered.

The company was kept backstage until nearly dawn. The questioning was conducted by Gleason, an autocratic little man who forbade me to call the press until the first of what proved to be a long set of interviews was concluded.

4

We met, almost by accident on Seventh Avenue at four-thirty in the morning. She looked very demure, I thought, in a plain cotton dress, and carrying a briefcase which contained her ballet clothes. I stopped beside her on the corner and we both waited for the light to turn green. Lonely taxicabs hurtled by; the city was still and a gray light shone dull in the east, above the granite and steel peaks, beyond the slow river.

“Hello, Jane,” I said.

For a moment she didn’t recognize me; then, remembering, she smiled wanly, and her face pale by street lamp, she said, “Are you going to take me out to dinner?”

“What about breakfast?”

“I never get up this early,” she said; and we crossed the street. The light was green. A sudden gust of warm wind came bowling up the alley and I caught her scent as Edgar Rice Burroughs was wont to say: warm flesh and Ivory soap.

“Can I walk you home?” I asked.

“If you want to. I live on Second Avenue.” We walked nine uptown blocks and seven crosstown blocks to the brownstone where she lived. We paused below in the street … the hot wind, redolent of summer and river and early morning, stirred her streaked blond hair as we stood before a delicatessen while the drama of courtship took place. The dialogue, I must admit, was similar to that of every other couple in this same predicament at this same hour in the quiet city. Should we or should we not? was the moon right? and was this wise? or was it love? Fortunately, being a well-trained girl of casual habits, this last point wasn’t worried too much and at last we walked up the two flights to her apartment.

The dialogue continued as, both seated on a studio couch in her two-roomed apartment, we were momentarily diverted from my central interest by the murder and, though we were both dead-tired and stifling yawns heroically in deference to my lust, we talked of the death of Ella Sutton.

“I never thought such a thing could happen to anybody I knew,” said Jane, lying back on the bed, a pillow under her head. One paper lantern illuminated the room with red and yellow light. The furniture was shabby Victorian, very homelike, with photographs of family and fellow dancers on the walls, over the mantel of the walled-up fireplace. The ceilings were high and the curtains were of faded red plush.

“Do you think it was really murder?”

“That awful little man certainly thought it was. Somebody cut the cable … that’s what he said.”

“I wonder who?”

“Oh, almost anybody,” she said vaguely, scratching her stomach comfortably.

“Don’t tell me now that everybody hated Ella … it would be much too pat.”

“Well, almost everybody did. Oh, she was just terrible. But that’s an awful thing to say … her being dead, I mean.”

“I expect we’ll be hearing a lot about how terrible she was,” I said, moving closer to her on the couch, my cup of tea in my hand (tea was the fiction we had both agreed upon to bring us together).

“Well, she wasn’t that awful,” said Jane, in the tone of one who wants to think only good of others. “I suppose she had her nice side.” Then she gave up. “God knows what it was, though. I never saw it.”

“Perhaps God does know,” I said, rolling my eyes upward. Jane sighed. I moved closer, the teacup rattling in my hand.

“She was such a schemer,” said Jane thoughtfully. “She was conniving every minute of the day. That was why she married Miles … he was the conductor and very important to the company. So she married him and then lo and behold she began to get some leads … though the marriage was always a farce.”

“Didn’t she like him?”

“Of course not … and after the first few months he was on to her, too. Only she’d never let him get a divorce. He was too useful to her, a perfect front …”

“And then he killed her.”

Jane shuddered. “Don’t even think it,” she said in a low voice. “He’s so wonderful … I mean as a conductor; I don’t know him very well outside the theater. Anyway he’s a nice man and Ella was a bitch and I see no reason for him to get in trouble on her account,” she concluded spiritedly, disregarding all ethics in her emotional summary.

“I suppose he’s the likeliest suspect,” I said. I was curious about the whole affair, as anyone would be. It was an unusual experience to be involved in a murder during one’s first day on a new job. Yet, aside from the novelty of my situation, it had occurred to me dimly that some end might be served by this event, that I might somehow be able to make use of this tragedy, an ignoble sentiment certainly but then I belong to an ignoble tribe which trades on the peculiarities and talents of others, even on their disasters.

“I guess so,” said Jane unhappily. “Lord knows he hated her. On the other hand so did a lot of people. Eglanova, for instance.”

“Why? What did she have against Ella?”

“Don’t you know?” And for the first time (but not the last) I received that pitying dancer’s glance which implied that though I might not be entirely a square I was none the less hopelessly ignorant of all that really mattered: the dance and its intricate politics. I said I didn’t know, humbly.

“Mr. Washburn was all set to fire Eglanova this year. She’s practically blind you know. It’s got so even the audience notices it … why they even applaud her when she finishes a pirouette in the right direction … then she’s always losing her partner in Giselle. She’s lucky she’s got Louis. He adores her and he follows her around on stage like a Saint Bernard. If she had any other partner she’d’ve ended up among the violins in the orchestra pit long ago.”

“So Washburn was going to get rid of her?”

“I should say so. Only he acted as though she were retiring of her own free will. We were to end this season at the Met with a Gala Eglanova Evening, to celebrate her thirty-one years as a star; only now … well, I suppose she’ll have to do the next season. You see Ella was all set to take her place.”

“Can’t they get somebody else?”

Jane looked as incredulous as any girl can at five in the morning after a tough night’s performance and a questioning by the police. “You don’t seem to realize that this is the oldest ballet company in the world and that it has to have a prima ballerina assoluta and there’s only a half dozen of those in the world and they’re all engaged like Markova, Fonteyn, Danilova, Toumanova, Alonso … or else too expensive for Mr. Washburn,” she added, deflating somewhat the pretensions of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet. I knew already, from personal experience, that Mr. Washburn was a tight man with a dollar.

“So Eglanova might have cut that cable?” The memory of those shears still bothered me; I tried to think of something else … I had not yet mentioned finding them to the police … or to anyone.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Jane. But she had no other comment to make about this theory.

“She must’ve been awfully ambitious,” I said sleepily; my eyes beginning to twitch with fatigue.

“Ella? Oh, I’ll say she was. She wanted to do Swan Lake at the Met on opening night … instead of on Wednesday matinees and every night in all cities with a population under a hundred thousand. And she would’ve too.”

“Was she that good?” It was hopeless to ask one dancer about the talents of another but I was thinking of something else now. I paid no attention to what we were saying. My hand was now on top of hers and I was so close to her that I could feel through my own body the quickened beating of her heart.

Jane told me very seriously that Ella had been a good actress and a good technician but that she had always been remarkably unmusical and that if she had not been married to the conductor she would probably never have become a star.

“Did she get on with Louis?” I asked, my lips so close to her cheek that I could feel the warmth of my own breath come back to me.

“I don’t think he ever let her get away with anything. He’s just as vain as she was only in a nice way. Everybody likes Louis. He pads, you know.”

“He what?”

“You know … like a falsie: well, they say he wears one, too, when he’s in tights.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t,” I said, remembering my little tussle with the ballet’s glamour boy.

“You, too?” She sat bolt upright.

“Me too what?”

“He didn’t … go after you, too, did he?”

“Well as a matter of fact he did but I fought him off.” And I told her the story of how I had saved my honor.

She was very skeptical. “He’s had every boy in the company … even the ones who like girls … I expect he’s irresistible.”

“I resisted.”

“Well …” And then it began.

5

“Jane.” There was no answer. Light streamed into the room but she wore a black mask over her eyes, and nothing else … the sheets lay tangled in a heap upon the floor beside the bed. It was another hot day I could tell. Yawning, I sat up and looked at my watch which I had placed on the night table; I’ve always taken it off, ever since a girl from Vassar complained that it scratched. Ten-thirty.

I lit a cigarette and studied the body sprawled next to me in a position which, in any other woman, would have been unattractive. In her case, however, she could be suspended from a chandelier and she would look good enough to take home right then and there.

I leaned over and tickled her smooth belly, like pink alabaster, to become lyric, warm pink alabaster, gently curved, with hips strong and fatless and lovely breasts tilted neither up nor down nor sagging, but properly centered, the work of a first-rate architect: not one of those slapdash jobs you come across so often in this life. She sighed and moved away, not yet awake. I then tickled the breast nearest me and she said, very clearly, “You cut that out.”

“That’s not a very romantic way to begin the morning,” I said.

She pulled off her mask and scowled in the sunlight which streamed into the high-ceilinged dusty room. Then she smiled when she saw me. “I forgot,” she said. She stretched.

“I’m scared to look at the papers,” I said.

She groaned. “And I thought it was going to be such a perfect day. It’s so hot,” she added irrelevantly, sitting up. I admired her nonchalance. She was the first girl I had ever known who had been agreeable and affectionate without ever once speaking of love. I decided that I was going to like ballet very much.

“I have a headache,” she announced, blinking her eyes and pressing her temples with her hands.

“I got just the cure for it,” I said, rolling toward her.

She took one look and said, “Not now. It’s too hot.” But her voice lacked conviction and our bodies met as we repeated with even greater intensity the act of the night before, our breath coming in short gasps until, at the climax, there was no one else in the whole world but the two of us on that bed, the sunlight streaming in the window and the springs creaking, our bodies making funny wet noises as the bellies pushed one against the other.

When it was over, Jane went into the bathroom and I lay with my eyes shut, the sweat drying on my body, as blissfully relaxed as that young man in the painting by Michelangelo. But then, in the midst of this euphoria, I decided that I should call Mr. Washburn and get my orders for the day. It was early of course for our business and, in ordinary times, no one would be stirring at this hour during the season but today with a murder on our hands … a murder.… It wasn’t until that moment, lying contented and exhausted on a strange girl’s bed that I realized the significance of what had happened, of what the sudden death of Ella Sutton might mean to all of us, including me, the newcomer, the fool who had found a pair of shears and.…

I got Mr. Washburn on the line. “Been trying to locate you,” he said and I could tell from his voice that he was worried. “Get over to the Met at eleven, will you? The police are going to talk to us, to the principals.”

“I’ll be there, sir.”

“Did you see the papers this morning?”

“Quite something, weren’t they?” I said, implying I had read them which I had not.

“Made the front page … even of the Times,” said my employer in a voice which sounded almost joyous. “We’ll have to change our strategy … but I’ll go into all that when I see you.”

I then called Miss Flynn at my own office.

“I tried to reach you at your home, Mr. Sargeant, but there was no answer.” Miss Flynn is the only human being I have ever known who could talk not only in italics but, on occasion, could make her silences sound as meaningful as asterisks.

“I was busy all night … working,” I said lamely.

“I hope you will try and get some rest today, Mr. Sargeant.”

“I hope so, too. But you know what happened …”

“Yes, I saw some mention of it in the Times. One of those dancers was murdered.”

“Yes, and we’re all being questioned. It’s going to be quite a public relations job.”

“* * * * * * *”

“I probably won’t get to the office today … so refer any calls to me at the office of the ballet.”

“Yes, Mr. Sargeant.”

I then gave her some instructions about the night school, the hat company and the television actress who had just been voted Miss Tangerine of Central California by an old buddy of mine who lived out there and was a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Marysville.

Jane was dressed by the time I had finished … like all girls connected with the theater she could be a quick changer if she wanted. I told her that I had to join Washburn and the principals at the opera house. While I dressed it was agreed that we meet after tonight’s performance and come directly here … presuming, of course, that there would be a performance. I had no idea of what the police attitude would be.

“I’ll go take class now,” she said, pinning her hair up. “Then I suppose I should go and see poor Magda.”

“Magda who?” I had forgotten.

“The girl who fainted last night. She’s a good friend of mine.”

“The one who was pregnant?”

“How did you know?”

“Everybody knows,” I said, as though I had been in ballet all my life. But then curiosity got the better of me. “Who was the father?”

Jane smiled. “I thought you would have found that out, too. Everybody knows.”

“They forgot to tell me.”

“Miles Sutton is the lucky man,” said Jane, but she wasn’t smiling now and I could see why.