Death Is My Dancing Partner

One The Dancer and the Man

Crouched within the slanting diagonal shadow that bisected the temple doorway like a dark blue guillotine-blade, she stood waiting her turn to go down the steps and perform. She was Mari, and she did the Dance of Death. No one else could do it. No one else would do it, dreading what might befall. They had started training her for it when she was nine, and she was nineteen now.

Every once in a while she would edge forward a little and peer down. Not at the other girls posturing weirdly in stylized dance there on the platform midway down the steps. She’d seen them do it a thousand times. Not at the little group of cruise-ship passengers standing below in the courtyard. She’d seen groups like that dozens of times. Just at him.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She’d seen him when he came in with the others, and they dutifully took off their shoes just before the entrance, as custom prescribed. First she’d just glanced at him. Then her look came back, and back, and back, and stayed longer each time.

Her heart seemed to grow softer and warmer. She’d never been in love. She wondered if this was it now, the beginning of it. If it was, how quickly it began! Just with one look. Could it begin that quickly, she wondered? They didn’t teach you that at the temple. They taught you everything else, but they didn’t teach you about that. You had to find out for yourself.

He saw her now. She had looked once too often. He raised his head, and looked up at her, and their eyes met. She ventured a little smile, hoping he could see it all that distance away. And then he smiled back. And oh, his smile was like sunrise on the water. Then she drew her head back out of sight, so that nobody else would notice or would see.

First love. All her life in a temple, with only girls around her, and yet it had come to her and found her out.

She beckoned backhand without turning her head, and one of a little group of aging women standing at the other end of the passage — former dancers themselves and now more or less servants — came forward.

“Yes, my pearl?”

“More shadowing for my brows.”

The old woman produced a thin sliver of charcoal, reached upward with it.

The girl took it away from her. “I will do it myself. Now give me one of those papers I have sometimes seen you roll and smoke.”

A look of consternation appeared on the wizened face.

“Don’t deny it. I have seen you do it when you thought no one was watching.”

The old woman fumbled reluctantly, handed her something. “But if someone should see you—”

“I am not going to smoke it.” The girl motioned her off. “Now go back. I have to go down there soon.”

She waited until the figure had receded, then turning so that her back covered what she did, held the flimsy little leaf of rice paper flat against the wall and with the charcoal-stick painfully printed four words. Not in the native characters, in the English alphabet.

Then, as though regretting what she had just done, or changing her mind, she crumpled it into a tiny pellet and held it hidden in her hand.

The dance suddenly came to an end, and the temple girls filed up the steps, between the priests who had formed a background to the performance, and disappeared within the gloomy edifice single file.

In the silence that followed for a moment or two, one of the onlookers turned and began to address the other members of the party. He raised his voice a little, so that they might all be sure to hear him, and she could distinguish every word clearly up there where she waited. She had heard the same thing many times before. He was a cruise-director or guide, and every party that came here whenever a ship touched the island was accompanied by one of them.

“I’ve persuaded them to show us something that’s very rarely allowed to be seen. It’s a symbolic death dance, in honor of Kali the Destroyer, goddess of death. I may as well warn you ahead of time this dance has a very unpleasant reputation. There’s a superstition that it will bring Kali down among the onlookers if it is performed too often. In other words, cause death to strike somewhere in its immediate vicinity. If you look around you’ll notice the natives all keep their eyes tightly closed while its gong on, even the drum-beaters. And yet, to turn their backs or try to leave would be sacrilegious, they’d be afraid to risk it. It’s danced by an individual performer taking two parts. If you follow closely, you’ll be able to get the symbolism. She’s Kali, in the form of a cobra, and also Kali’s victim, whom the goddess destroys at the end of the dance, and who falls headlong down the steps.”

The drums started to pulse again as he stopped speaking, but there was an ominous funereal depth to them now that they had lacked before. The old woman tiptoed up behind her and threw a finespun grayish veil over her head and shoulders, then quickly retreated again.

The girl came into view, started down the steps with static slowness. First her body was held rigid, then little by little her wrists began to flicker, then they began to dart singly in and out of the folds of the veil. Then at last her arms rose, like a cobra rearing for its strike, and began twining serpentinely above her head.

The veil was suddenly cast back, and a ripple of tension surged outward into the air from the gesture, like an explosion of terror. Her figure was scarcely moving meanwhile. Only the wrists continued to lick sluggishly just over the top of her head, with the horrible suggestiveness of a questing, down-hanging snake.

Something stirred in the still air overhead. A buzzard alighted on one of the temple’s grotesque gables. A second skimmed winglessly about for a moment, finally came down to join the first. Their necks were sickeningly craned downward into the compound below, as if eying what was taking place in it with a sort of loathsome intelligence of their own. Buzzards, the carrion birds of death.

The sinuousness had crept downward from her wrists now to the arms and shoulders and torso. Her waist rotated in horrid realistic simulation of a snake’s coils. Suddenly she leaped lightly across to face the other way, took up the pantomime of the death-victim, helpless, unable to escape, shivering from head to foot in one continuous ripple. Then as the beat of the drums quickened to a crescendo, the cobra finally lashed out in fury and struck.

There was a complete pause, a sudden stoppage of all motion. Her limbs froze momentarily into the last random attitude they had been overtaken in. It was the knowledge of death entering: the venom was in now, it was too late, there was no escaping death any more.

Slowly, motion set in again. Convulsive spasms coursed down her body, almost seeming to swell it each time with their passage. She arched upward, then toppled headfirst down the stone steps, one bent arm protecting her face.

Silence came down like a mallet on the skull, as the last drumbeat winged off. She lay there exhausted but unhurt. With one eyelid slightly open she saw him bend over and reach down to the ground for a minute, touch something lying directly in front of his feet. When he had straightened up again, the little paper pellet she had rolled there was gone. She saw him give a sidelong look to see if anyone else was watching.

Priests and attendants lifted her up just as she lay and carried her bodily up the steps, feet first and head down. She maintained the inert position she had fallen into. The shadowy blade darkening the doorway sliced downward, and she was gone from view.

There was a sudden commotion from the natives who had been huddled at the foot of the steps, apart from the sightseeing party. They had all risen now except one. He remained humped-over limply, face to ground. They formed a jabbering circle around him. One of them touched him tentatively with his toe, and his lumped body promptly fell over sidewise and straightened out, lifeless. They hurriedly lifted him and carried him off somewhere, around the side of the building.

The courtyard cleared itself as if by magic. The crowd melted away, casting terrified looks over their shoulders. Even the whites looked highly nervous. Overhead the buzzards ruffled their plumage impatiently, as if anxious to dip down and begin their work under cover of the concealing darkness that was fast approaching.

The moon rose early, for it was the period of its full. As its light yellowed the temple roof-tiles and seemed to sprinkle the courtyard with powdered sulphur, the old woman and she came stealing furtively down the steps together, both their figures shrouded from head to foot.

“But if it is found out, I am the one who will be punished.”

“Quiet. Were you never young at all yourself?”

“But I never did this!”

“Then I feel sorry for you. Not to love once is not to live at all.”

The old woman fumbled with the wooden crossbar securing the courtyard gate. “I cannot get it open unaided.”

“Then I will help you. You raise it from that end, I will raise it from this.” Between them they set it down on the ground, careful not to make noise. The girl tugged at the heavy wooden barrier and it began to turn inward, creaking and cracking. She stopped moving it when there was just enough space to squeeze out through. “Now wait here by it, lest somebody come along and close it, so that I cannot get back in again.”

“Ai,” whined the old woman, turning her face upward. “Why did he have to come here this day? Why did the moon have to rise this night?”

“Old coward,” mocked the girl, but almost tenderly, and slipped outside alone. “I’m not afraid of love, even if you are.”

A cigarette hopped to the ground like a red firefly, and he stepped out from under the shadow of a tree where he had been waiting. She ran to him, short as the distance was — even that early in their game. Then stood there breathlessly, looking up at him.

“Hello,” he said finally.

“Hello,” she whispered.

“I wasn’t sure if you meant it or not, but I had to find out.”

“Everything in love, I mean.”

“Hey,” he marvelled. “You talk English. I wasn’t even sure you would.”

She shrugged. “I’m what they call a European here, although I’ve never seen Europe, I was born here on the island. Both my parents were full-blooded Dutch. This used to be a Dutch colony, before it became independent. My father was a plantation owner. Then the Japanese came, and my mother disappeared. After the war, he couldn’t look after me any more, so he turned me over to the temple.” She saw the look he gave her. “It’s not immoral, you know. It’s more like a school, a religious school. They feed us and take care of us, and train us for dancing. We’re not—” She dropped her eyes for a moment, “—like what you think.”

“That dance,” he said.

She smiled deprecatingly. “You weren’t inside afterward, or you would have seen him pick himself up and dust himself off, and accept a few coins from the priests for his helpfulness.”

“And you,” he said emphatically, “weren’t outside the gate afterward when we were all leaving. One of the others, somebody entirely different, keeled over in his tracks then and there. And he was dead.”

She shrugged slightly. “If you believe, you believe. If you don’t, you don’t.”

“Do you?”

“I’d rather talk about — you and me. Every night of my life, I have the dance. Tonight, I have — you.”

“What do they call you?”

“Mari.”

“That’s not a very strange name. It’s almost like Mary. Only the way you say it comes out Mah-ri.”

“It is Mary. Maria is my name. Dutch for Mary. Only here they call me Mari. And what do they call you?”

“Maxwell Jones. I’m the ship’s ork leader.”

She looked blank.

“Band leader,” he translated. “You know what a band is, don’t you?”

“Musicians.”

“Maxie Jones, King of the Saxophones. That’s the trade-tag. You know what a saxophone is, don’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It goes down like this. And it’s got keys running down it.”

“To keep it locked up when you’re not using it.”

He laughed. “I bet you don’t even know what a telephone is.”

“That I do know. I’ve never used one, because they have them here. But I know what they are.”

“Gee,” he burst out animatedly, “I’d like to take you around with me, show you the sights. All the things you’ve never seen before. TV sets and refrigerators and evening gowns. What kicks for you — and what kicks for me. Think what a place like Paris would do to you. And when it comes right down to it, think what you would do to Paris.”

She moved in closer, until a piece of tissue paper would have had a hard time getting down past their lips. “Take me with you. Show me Paris, show me London, show me New York. But above all, show me love.”

“In just that order?”

“Show me saxophones and telephones. But above all show me love.”

He grimaced quizzically. “That keeps getting in there, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t you like love?”

“I love it. But it’s like flypaper. You touch it once, with just the tip of your pinky, and after that the whole thing comes with you wherever you go.”

“What is flypaper?”

“For that matter, what is love?” He put two fingers to her chin. “Why’d you fall for me like this, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why me? There were better-looking fellows in that crowd.”

“Not to me.”

“There were taller fellows in that crowd.”

“Not to me.”

“There were smarter fellows in that crowd.”

“I don’t want you smart. I just want you the way you are.”

“I should’ve quit while I was ahead,” he said dourly. “Take me with you.”

“Better not ask me that again or I will; You’re not so hard to take with, you know.”

“If they find out I did this, they make me stay out altogether. Then I starve. Then you have to take me with you anyway.”

He grinned. “Then why did you do it?”

“I ask my heart, and she don’t answer.”

“Let’s move around a little,” he suggested. “I don’t like to stay so close to this place.”

He put his arm around her waist, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and they strolled along like that, in and out of drippings of moonglow that ran down their backs like tiger stripes as they moved along.

He squinted upward. “Boy, that moon!”

“Is it bad or is it good?”

“Good for you. Bad for me. It’s making me do things I hadn’t orter wanter do. Like this.” He held her. “And this.” He kissed her.

After a few of them, he asked her, “Have you ever been kissed before?”

“Not by a man. Have you?”

“Not by a temple-dancer. So we start out both even. But watch me on the curves, honey. It’s a shame to do this to you.”

“What curves?”

“Dangerous curves ahead.”

“I go around them with you.”

“I’m in a Jaguar and you’re in a jalopy.”

She shivered suddenly and turned to look back.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“Don’t you hear?”

This time he heard it, and it wasn’t reassuring. There was a sudden commotion at the partly-open gate. The old woman gave a whimpering cry of anguish. A man shouted something hoarsely. Answering shouts came back. Bare feet pattered across courtyard flagstones. Some sort of an alarm-gong started to throb out. Lights winked here and there. The whole temple came alive like an angry beehive.

“Let’s take five,” said Jones hastily, “or for that matter, fifteen or fifty.” They started running, his arm still around her waist.

“I left a ricksha back here someplace on the road,” he panted.

They found it, the driver squatting on the ground smoking a cigarette. Jones rammed a hand into his pocket waved money in front of his face. “Fifty of this-whatever it is — if you can make town ahead of the Klu Klux back there!” he promised him.

Once in, their pace — misleadingly — seemed painfully slow. Actually, they were flying along, every bump and jar a long arc in the air aboveground.

“I left my piano player at a Portuguese bar,” Jones chattered, trying to keep his teeth from getting knocked out.

She translated for him to their human eight-cylinder.

Behind them the commotion was dwindling, meaning they were outdistancing it. But this was only a temporary advantage; they were bound to catch up sooner or later, if only because they knew which direction was the only one the fugitives could take.

They made town and came flying down the “main street,” finely powdered dust streaming out from beneath the wheels like spray from a pair of outboard motors.

A figure was prancing around in mid-roadway, in the oblong of tawny light cast outside by the open bardoorway.

“That’s him, that’s Fingers,” Jones told her unnecessarily.

The ricksha came to a sudden halt, and they nearly went sailing out through the front of it, over the driver’s bent back and all.

“Good work,” said Fingers caustically. “What’d you do, wake up the whole works? Punch a time-clock leaving the temple?”

He had with him a lady of the town, whom he’d picked up while waiting. She had on a hat whose brim was about the size of a bicycle wheel, supporting a whole flower-garden. She was a little bit Portuguese, a little bit native, a little dash of this, a little dash of that. A fruit salad of a lady. But a fruit salad left standing out of the refrigerator a little too long. She even spoke a rusted sort of English, probably scraped off the hulls of ships.

“Hurry up, get in!” Jones ordered Fingers. “They’ll be down on us any minute!”

“Three of us in that? Too much weight for him to pull. We’ll never make the launch. He’s busting a gasket right now, as it is! I’ve got a better idea. Get out, both of you! Hurry up, get out!”

Jones vaulted out, lifted Mari down bodily.

“Now gimme that wrap she’s got around her, quick!” Fingers barked. “Peel, lady, peel like you were on a run way!” He turned to the lady of the town. “You want to make ten dollars?”

“For ten dolla you can troway calendar, you got me booked for rest of season,” was the business-like answer. “Here. Now gimme that hat. Wrap yourself up in this all over. Cover your head too. Now get in that thing and get going. All over town. Double back and go upcountry again, if you have the chance.” He snatched his own hat off his head, perched it on her shoulder. “Keep this on there, and sit low in the ricky, they won’t know the difference.”

The ricksha scooted off again. Fingers slammed the flower-garden hat down over Mari. It flopped almost to her shoulders. The three of them dove inside the bar.

A minute or two later, when angry inquiring faces stopped to peer in from the doorway, the Portuguese barman’s midget radio was plinking away and Fingers was dancing lazily with a droopy lady of the town, who held a beer-bottle loosely in one hand.

Somebody spat over the threshold with projectile-like violence, to show what they thought of such associations Unclean! Daughter of the devil who walks the streets all night seeking money.

“Never heard of cuspidors, I guess,” Fingers observed, but careful to keep his voice down.

The faces withdrew and resumed their pursuit down the street.

“All right, end of set,” said Fingers, releasing her. He gave a low whistle, and Jones came out of a door at the back, behind which he’d been lurking. “What this place needs,” he complained, “is a new John.”

Fingers had been casing the street from the doorway. All clear, he reported. “Let’s go. They must have gone back up the other way again, like I was hoping they would.”

The way to the waterfront lay unobstructed. When they had reached it they helped her down into the little tender waiting to take them back to the cruise ship, whose lights blinked and winked peacefully at them from tar out in the open roadstead.

Sitting in it, coursing across the starlit water, Fingers asked all at once, “Now that you’ve got her, what’re you going to do with her?”

“Make my band the top name band in the country,” Jones answered confidently, “with that dance she does.”

Fingers gave him a long long look. A look with a price tag on it. A reduced-value price tag. “So that’s all it is,” he said. “The band. And what about the kid herself?”

“That’s all it ever is, the band,” Jones answered. “That’s all it ever will be, the band. First, last, and always. I warned her, back there. I warned her. I told her how it would be. If she wants to take her chances...”

She nestled happily against Jones, snuggled her head upon his shoulder. Then suddenly turned her face upward and gave him a fervent kiss on the cheek. A kiss he didn’t return.

“I can just see her now, doing that specialty, with my music to back her up—”

Fingers murmured something half-audibly.

She turned to him suddenly. “What’s a heel? Why did you say that just then?”

“I’m afraid, honey,” he told her almost sadly, “it’s something you’re going to learn a lot about in the next year or two. Something you’re going to have a lot of experience with.”

J. Mortimer Rubin, the agent, was busy at his desk, doing nothing, when a call came through about two-thirty that Friday afternoon.

Goldie, his switchboard girl, said over the phone, “Maxie Jones is on the line.”

J. Mortimer winced. “Oh, they’re back? Now my troubles start in again.” But he said it with an indulgent grin on his face.

He leaned back at a calisthenic angle. He put one leg up along the side of his desk. He lit a cigar. He always lit a cigar when speaking on the phone; it helped him to talk better. (“You should cut down,” his doctor had warned him. “Then have the phone taken out,” he had shrugged.)

“How was the trip? How’s the bunch?” he said affably, on a single breath.

Then, “So where are you?” Then, “It hadda be that hotel? It couldn’t be anything plainer? So who’s paying for it?” Then, in answer to the answer, he commented wryly, “I figured I was.”

His cigar did an about-face in his mouth, rolled over to the other side.

I got some money waiting for you here. When you coming up I should turn it over to you?

“You’re rehearsing?” J. Mortimer became paternal. “Fine. That I like to hear. Too much rehearsing wouldn’t wear out any band.”

A deluge of enthusiasm now seemed to pour out — or rather, in to his ear. He didn’t have a chance to say anything for some moments, though he made several restless shifts about in his chair.

Finally he was given an opening; presumably Maxwell Jones had to breathe now and then.

“A dancer you brought with you? You hadda go shopping? They come out from between the stones here, and you hadda bring one more back with you! Why didn’t you bring something that’s scarce, like, like—” He couldn’t for a moment think of anything that was scarce.

“I wouldn’t believe it when I see her? So then why should I go all the way down there and watch her, if I wouldn’t believe it when I see her? Better I should stay here, take it easy, and not believe it from where I am already, without moving.”

Hectic protestations followed. He finally capitulated.

“All right, Maxie, all right. I was going to the bobber-shop anyway, so I’ll go to the bobbershop the long way around and stop in by you on the way. Where you rehearsing? Ryan Hall, the third floor.

“And listen, Maxie, not too loud. Good, but not too loud. I get headaches from band rehearsals, you know that already.”

He hung up. He put out his cigar, the conversation now being over. He put on his hat, and no one could wear his hat as jauntily as J. Mortimer Rubin. Finally he looked in his desk drawer for something which he failed to find. He went outside to Goldie.

“You got some aspirin?” he said. “Maxwell Jones is back.”

She apparently liked them too. “That bunch of wild Indians,” she commiserated good-naturedly. She handed him the aspirin.

“It ain’t that they play bad,” he explained, “its just that they play so loud.”

“I know,” she admitted wistfully, “I kind of like Viennese waltzes myself.”

He paused at the door. “Make a memo I should call up that fellow that runs that place in Perth Amboy.”

“Should I call him for you right now, Mr. Rubin?”

He pursed his lip, he fingered it. “Maybe I better listen to them first before you call up anybody. They got some dancer they brought back with them. Even in Perth Amboy I can’t afford to make enemies.”

Though the distance was not insuperable, he took a taxi. This was more a matter of professional prestige than of aversion to exertion. No matter where he was going, an agent should arrive in a taxi, he felt.

He handed the driver a ten per cent tip when he alighted. This had nothing whatever to do with economy, but it was hard to convince most drivers that this was the case.

The present one looked at it a moment longer than was strictly necessary. “Well, thanks!” he exclaimed, somewhat less than appreciatively.

“Listen,” said J. Mortimer firmly, “when I get more than ten per cent, so will you.”

Ryan Hall was a tall, thin, and rather elderly building, overlooking a small, treeless, block-square park, more frequented by pigeons and derelicts than anyone else the park, that is to say — because of its cramped situation in the very heart of the bustling city. The building had been used from time immemorial for any and all kinds of theatrical rehearsals.

Even on the street outside a blurred conglomeration of sounds could be heard issuing from its windows: the hailstone-like patter of choral tap-dancing coming from the second floor, with a tinny piano to keep the beat; a soprano soloist practising a popular song somewhere on the fourth. But loudest of all was the brassy oompah swelling from the third-floor windows, and drowning everything else out intermittently, when it was really going strong.

J. Mortimer knew the various attaches of the building. Eddie, the elevator boy; Sam, the man behind the cigar and newspaper concession in the foyer. And above all, Luke, the colored shoeshine man, who had his two platformed chairs there on one side of the entry. He said, “Hello, Sam, hello, Eddie.” Luke he pressed fondly on the shoulder for a moment in passing. “Come on up to the third-floor rehearsal room in a few minutes, Luke. You should give me a shine while I’m listening.”

Luke beamed. J. Mortimer never had change when you gave him a shine. Though you could hear it jingle in all his pockets all over him, he never could seem to find anything less than a dollar. Then he never would take anything back from it. “All right, you owe me one next time, was his standard evasion. Next time never came.”

The difference, probably, was that in this case, unlike the taxi drivers, Luke was his own entrepreneur, there was no commission involved, he was his own business.

The blare was terrific as he stepped out of the elevator and pushed open the hinged doors of the rehearsal hall. He winced for a minute. As he had often remarked, it wasn’t his kind of music. “I sell it, but enjoy it I don’t have to.”

It broke up at first sight of him. They came pouring down from the stand, almost throwing their instruments away in their haste to get over to him. With the exception of the piano, of course, which was abandoned where and as it stood. Even Bee Bradley, the singer, threw up (not down) the arrangement she had been studying to herself while walking back and forth along the row of windows, so that it disintegrated into several loose sheets as it came down on the floor.

A second feminine figure — “Her,” he said to himself with misgivings — remained seated unobtrusively on a straight-backed chair against the wall, knees tight together and hands demurely clasping them. He had no time to take further note of her just then; pandemonium had broken all around him.

“Morty!”

“Baby!”

“Hel-lo, Pop-pa!”

“I could kiss you!”

This from one of the males. But Bee, in fact, did — energetically and several times in succession, with a vocal accompaniment. “Yum! Yum! Yum! You old sweetheart. Did you miss us?”

“That you could count on,” he said owlishly. “It was so quiet around here. Ask Goldie. I didn’t know my own office.”

They roared delightedly.

“Did you get my postcard from Marseille?” Bee chirped. “I sent you a postcard from Marseille. Ooh, that Marseille!”

He nodded rebukingly. “You hurt yourself. One postcard the whole trip.”

“I was going to send you one from— What was that other place?” she protested ear-splittingly. “We couldn’t find any. The only kind they had was that dirty kind. I couldn’t send one of them to you.”

He pinched her derisively on the chin. “Never mind. I know you. You’re a good little schnorrer.”

Jones was beckoning to the forlorn-looking girl in the background. “Come on, honey. Come on over here a minute.”

She got up and came toward them a little timidly.

Jones put his arm about her waist to encourage her.

An extremely noncommittal look made its appearance on J. Mortimer’s face for a moment.

“She speaks English?” he said dubiously to Jones.

“Oh, sure. She just grew up out there. She was like educated in one of their temples. Regular lessons and all. They raised her in one of their temples.”

J. Mortimer was still extremely dubious. “She comes from a temple? You didn’t tell me this before.”

“I was going to,” Jones temporized. Then he rushed on. “But the way they taught her to dance! You should see the way they taught her to dance!”

“In temples they dance?” J. Mortimer was completely nonplussed. “My rabbi, Dr. Meyer, should hear about this.”

“It’s not your kind of a temple, Morty,” one of the others hurriedly interposed. “It’s more like a boarding-school. They got a different kind of religion from yours.”

“That I wouldn’t argue,” said J. Mortimer with conviction, eying her from head to foot.

“Say hello to Morty, honey,” Jones said encouragingly. “We call her Mari for short. Her legal name is Gertrud Maria Ruyter. What can you do with that for a dancer? She’s hundred per cent Dutch, you know. Her father turned her over to the temple to rear for him, after her mother died. He... er, hung around down on the beach a good deal, if you get what I mean. Go on, say hello to Mr. Rubin, honey.”

“Hello to Mr. Rubin honey,” she said.

“We’re married to her,” somebody spoke up impishly. “We’re not working at it,” Jones quickly protested. “Just a business arrangement. She wouldn’t have been allowed to land otherwise. She shared Bee’s cabin on the ship, and I bunked up with Fingers and Bradley.” He turned to her for corroboration. “Right, honey? You tell him.”

“Right,” she said wistfully.

J. Mortimer shook his head. “A fine kind of marriage. Go ahead, it’s your own funeral.”

“Bring over a chair for Mort,” ordered Jones, all business. “I want him to catch this.”

“Catch?” said Rubin, as though he didn’t like the word. He seated himself somewhat gingerly. He took off his glasses, he polished them, he put them on again. He focussed. “So?” he said.

“Places,” snapped Jones. “Get out of the way, Bee. Go over by the window.”

“Pardon me for living.” She perched herself on the sill.

“I’ll give you the script,” continued Jones. “So you’ll understand what she’s trying to do. Now, it’s a death dance. She takes two parts—”

“Before and after,” came softly from the windowsill.

“Bee,” rasped Jones severely. “Take her out of here, Brad. Keep her in the hall. Now, as I was saying, Mort. You got to imagine a snake.”

“I should imagine a snake?” said Rubin uneasily, with the look of a man who is trying to keep an open mind.

“She’s struggling with it. First she’s the snake, then herself. The snakes bites her.”

“I-f-f-ff,” shuddered Rubin involuntarily.

“She falls down, and she dies. That’s the story of the dance.”

Rubin gave the impression of someone who has been left behind some time ago. He picked his way dutifully along. “First she’s a snake, then she ain’t. When she ain’t, the snake bites her. She falls down and—” He got stuck. “She falls down or the snake falls down?”

“She falls down, and dies.”

Rubin gave it a capsule criticism then and there. “Who done this?” he demanded almost indignantly, as though of a mind to lodge a complaint with ASCAP at the first opportunity.

“It’s ages old. It’s a ritual, like,” said the knowledgeable Jones. “It came down from history.”

“It should have stayed there,” snapped Rubin. He turned his head sharply aside and wiped off his mouth. “Phooey,” he said. “After a heavy dinner, yet, you should show this to people.”

Jones’ expression was a little death in itself.

“All right, all right,” Rubin relented brusquely. “Show me. Show me. I’ll watch.”

“Number One on the books, boys!” cried out Jones triumphantly.

The door opened and closed and Luke edged up to Rubin diffidently, shoeshine box in hand. “You want your shine now, Mr. Rubin?”

“Absolutely,” said Rubin, almost with relief. “It may keep my mind busy, sitting here.” He meticulously adjusted his trouser-legs. “Look, Luke,” he cautioned him indulgently, “I got white socks on, yes? Try you shouldn’t get streaks on them from the polish over the top of the shoes. Keep it down below.”

“I’ll be careful, Mr. Rubin,” Luke promised.

(“I’m watching, I’m watching,” said Rubin parenthetically to Jones, in answer to a hurt look. “She’s the snake now, right?” He corrected himself. “No, she’s the other one.”)

Luke, buffering away, turned his head curiously for a moment.

“Better you should look at my shoes than what I got to look at,” his patron commented sotto voce. “You ain’t missing nothing.”

“Very interesting,” he declared more publicly, more out of kindness of heart, perhaps, than any actual enthusiasm. “Very good, dolling. You dung that very good. Like Gilda Gray years ago it reminds me, only even looser.”

Something attracted his attention below.

“Luke, my socks. You’re getting streaks from your cloth. How can you see if you’re leaning your face so close, against my knees?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rubin,” Luke said faintly, trying to draw back to an upright position on his knees. His eyes rolled in his head.

“Luke!” Rubin cried sharply. “You don’t feel well? What’s the matter? You want to rest a minute, son?” Luke tried to plant a fresh dab of polish on one of the toecaps, missed it entirely, and his hand landed on the floor offside. A moment later his body went over after it, stayed doubled for a moment, face down, then slowly straightened out and went limp.

Rubin jumped up, stepped over him to give himself room, bent down and tried to raise his head and shoulders.

“Luke! Luke!” He shook him, patted him frantically on the cheeks.

Behind him, on the floor, Jones’ dancer lay equally flat and equally motionless. Or almost so, but not quite, for her eyes still blinked as she stared upward at them. Luke’s didn’t any more.

“Scots whiskey!” commanded Rubin frightenedly. “Stop with those drums, I’m trying to hear his heart. Bring another chair, put it next here. Help me stretch him out on them. Look out with his shoe polish, you’re kicking it.”

Whiskey, whether Scotch or not, was produced with back-pocket immediacy, poured between Luke’s statically parted lips.

“It don’t stay in,” Rubin breathed, hoarsely fearful.

They stopped that. Somebody wiped at the side of his neck, where it had run down.

“Call an ambulance,” Rubin urged. “Can’t you see he needs help?”

Somebody already had. Brad came back from the hall.

It took a little while. As it always does with those things. A little while that seemed a long while. They all stood around him, looking at him helplessly. All but just one of them.

The girl. She had picked herself up long ago, unhelped, unnoticed. She stood the width of the room away from all of them. Cowering back against the wall, hands defensively pushed behind her, as though they’d been guilty of something and were trying to hide. No one remembered her, no one looked at her.

Finally the harrowing moan in the street got there, broke off short with a crash of silence. An interne and a pair of stretcher-bearers came in.

“You should have left him on the floor,” he rebuked, before he’d even got past the door. “Never move anyone.”

It only took him a moment once he’d reached the recumbent form. He straightened up again.

“Nothing to be done,” he said. “He’s dead.”

No one said anything. No one at all. What is there to say? What can be added, once death has had the last word?

They looked at him, and they thought about him, each one privately, by himself. Then they looked away, but they still thought about him, each one privately, by himself. One looked out the window. One at his saxophone as he turned it over speculatively in his hands. One at a safely barren part of the floor where there was nothing but floor. One at a pari-mutuel racing ticket, though he’d seen it before and knew it by heart. One — Rubin — down at his black-streaked white socks. Almost fondly, as though he prized them now.

Then he was gone, they’d taken him out. All but a little bottle of black shoe polish. That stayed there. Finally Rubin picked it up, and he tore one sheet of a newspaper and wrapped it in it, and then he thrust it standing upright into the outside pocket of his jacket. He couldn’t have said why, nor what he wanted it for; it just seemed kinder to do that with it, not leave it there scorned and cast off.

The policeman who had come in immediately following the interne lingered to ask Rubin a few low-voiced questions, and jotted down while he asked. Then even he went.

Just they were left, and the instruments. They didn’t play any more, they didn’t dance any more, sing any more. Who wanted to play now?

They broke it up for the day. They spoke a little as they broke it up, sparingly, subduedly. A stranger had died in their midst.

“Which way you going, Fingers?”

“Monday, fellows.”

“Try to get another hall, will you, boss?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“These your lyrics, Bee? Better take ’em with you.”

“They’re so important. What a funny thing I do. Sing words from a paper for a living.” She sauntered toward the door, singing under her breath, “Proving that there’s a way. To shake your cares away... But thinking about death.”

Somebody said, “Funny it should happen right while she’s doing that death dance of hers.”

Sudden silence. As though one voice had, uncannily, spoken for all six of them.

Rubin and Jones were in his office the next day when the phone rang.

“Frank Palmieri of The Palms at Perth Amboy,” announced Goldie.

“Poms,” scoffed J. Mortimer in an aside. “It ain’t got a pom in it. In all Perth Amboy isn’t one pom. In the hull state of New Jersey you couldn’t find one. So he calls it The Poms. Put him on.”

He was extremely haughty, patronizing even.

“Forget about it, Frank. My client wouldn’t be interested.”

“I know, but I culled you too soon. Was just tucking it over with him now before you wrong up. Is a different situation entirely. Even if he wanted to, I wouldn’t let him.”

“Three thousand? Poddon me. [yawn] You keep in touch with me, I’ll find you some nice little band. Is lots around.”

“Hey, was that for us?” bleated Jones when he’d hung up. “What was that, a week? Are you crazy?”

“Look. I’m handling you like I want, not like you want. You want to have cake? Then don’t holler because I take away from you doughnuts.”

He shifted papers on his desk indignantly.

“Is also here a telegram, somewhere. The Roxy wants you for a stage show. I’m turning it down.”

“Oh, no!” pleaded Jones, holding his forehead crosswise. “The Roxy at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth?”

“The Roxy in Plainfield, Ohio,” said Rubin adamantly.

The phone rang again.

“Mr. Smart here to see you.”

“Send him in. Is a publicity man, high class,” he informed Jones. “I want he should handle you. You’re going to see now a live wire.”

The live wire was a very well-insulated live wire. Almost a padded one. Even after a mattress-thick vicuna coat had been peeled off, there was still a lot of substance. Energy and heft combined. A very neat little mustache, like a freshly-sharpened pencil point at each end, that must have done things to women. A wristwatch that had everything on it but the weather forecast. Clothes that were expensive, and insisted they were from all the way over on the other side of the street. Just a walking business boom.

He sat down.

“Bill,” began Rubin, “this is Maxwell Jones. He has a band.”

“Now, Morty,” protested Smart disgruntledly, “I’ve asked you not to do this to me.” He seemed to be about ready to get up again and leave. At least a few preliminary shiftings indicated so.

“Bill,” said Rubin appeasingly, “did you come up to my office one day three years ago, just like now, and I had you meet four sisters? And they were ugly, they had ponims like Roy Rogers’ huss, they weren’t even so young any more—”

“The Anderson Sisters, ‘The Old Maids’ Quartet’,” supplied Smart. “And we made them even older and uglier, groomed them in reverse.” He glanced at his fabulous wristwatch, not at the time on it but as though it had some reference to that occasion.

“Now you can’t get away from them. From every dial they leak out, even from empty outlets in the wall.”

“Well,” said Smart modestly, “that’s me.”

“So you’re through, you can’t do it again? The world ended with the Anderson sisters, is nobody more comes after them?”

“I’m coasting now. I don’t like these uphill climbs.”

“With him you wouldn’t have to climb. Just a push, and you’re uff. Let me give you this boy’s story.”

Smart fronted a negligent palm. “I don’t care if he can play like an angel, I don’t care if he doesn’t know one note from another. All music sounds the same above the ya-ta-ta in a night-spot; it isn’t supposed to be listened to anyway. All I ask is one thing. Has he got a gimmick? Has he got something I can latch onto?”

“You be the judge,” urged Rubin. He dropped his voice confidentially. “He has brought back with him a dancer, from — where was it? I can’t remember the name. It uses up the whole alphabet nearly. All right, so the East. You know which East I mean? Not the East here, like Lung Island. By the Orient, the East. This dancer does a dance—”

“Don’t most dancers dance?” interrupted Smart languidly.

“Like this one, no!” insisted Rubin emphatically. “With this dance comes a superstition. In their beliff, could bring down something from the sky. Is liable to happen something, is taking a chance. Who knows what, I’m no expert. Right yesterday, here in New York — look, read this.” He shoved a paper at him.

“You mean, about this twenty-minute tie-up in the BMT?”

“No, no, no. The little one. The two lines under that. Look close, is very small print.” And when Smart had finished with the curt account of Luke’s passing, Rubin concluded, “Now you take it from there. You got a good in with the papers? You got contacts?”

Smart swept the paper aside. Then he sat very still for several moments, almost as if in a trance. He was holding a rapt finger pointed at attention, as if indicating an unseen feature-head blazoned across the wall before him that only he could see. “‘Death Comes Out of the East,’” he deciphered softly. “‘The Dance that May Kill if You Look Too Close.’” Suddenly he gave a galvanic jump, as though he had succeeded in frightening himself. Actually, it wasn’t fear that was involved, it was high-octane enthusiasm. He slammed at both his knees with his two hands at once, as though he were trying to fracture them then and there.

He answered his own question of awhile before. “Has he got a gimmick! Why, he doesn’t need to be handled, he’s self-propelled! He just needs to be wound up, and he’ll go off by himself, all over the place! I can get his name into every night-club column and onto every nightlife page that’s being printed today. Better than that! With that, I can get it into the straight-news sections of the papers, way up front. Sunday pictorial spreads are a pushover. I can have him set in three weeks, and ready to go. What am I doing sitting here?”

He got up and went, on an updraft.

He came back in again for his coat, on a downdraft.

“They shouldn’t expect a dead body every time she dances, hunh?” Rubin cautioned him. “That much nobody is guaranteeing. Just every once in a while a dead body. Maybe this time, maybe next, could be, who knows?”

“I’ll ration them.” To Jones he tossed off an airy, “Get ready to be somebody, young fellow. Bill Smart has started on you. Change your quarters, change your tailor, change your girl-friend, change your socks. Once it hits you, it’s going to hit you awful fast. Don’t let ’em catch you with your fame down.”

“Wha-what do you think we’ll be worth, once you have us set up, Mr. Smart?” Jones asked, almost overawed by so much assurance.

“You won’t be worth a plugged nickel more than you are at this minute! But no one’s paid what they’re worth, who ever heard of that? You’re paid what you make them think it’s worth to them, to have you, the fellows doing the buying. We’ll give it a reverse twist; ask fifteen, and then hold out until they’ve gone up to twenty.”

“Fif-teen hundred?” faltered Jones.

“Thousand,” snapped Smart. “Per week.”

He and his coat both went together, this time on a straight-away breeze. Some strategic weeks of Smart’s campaigning, and then the summons finally came. From Rubin to Jones.

“All right, pack your bags, case your instruments, be down here at my office inside the next hour. All of you, everybody together.”

And when they had collected and arrived, he greeted Jones with a fountain pen held bottom foremost toward his midriff.

“Sign here. And sign here. And sign here. Never mind reading. With a microscope I’ve gone over it already.”

Jones glanced curiously at the bottoms of the contracts as he finished with them. “What’d the guy sign it in red for?”

“He has a sense of humor,” offered Bill Smart, who was very much present. “Or maybe he wasn’t kidding at that. He explained to me there were two reasons for that. One was that this contract was drawn out of his own blood, so it should be signed to match. And two, that was the condition he was going to be left in at the end of the engagement; in the red.”

“Is it that good?”

“Good! Y’know what he suggested at the end, when the deal was winding up? He wanted to know if we wouldn’t take over his club and just let him front the band and work for us instead. He said he stood to come out ahead that way.”

“It’s an agent’s dream,” admitted Rubin. “I’m only worried I should wake up too soon. All right, get going. You got a train to make.”

Jones suddenly seemed to leak oblong chits of paper at every pocket. They all collected on the desk in front of Rubin like an autumn fall of albino leaves. “Pay these bills for me, Morty. So they won’t think I’m skipping town.”

“I woke up,” said Rubin glumly. He started winnowing through them. “Hosiery, twenty-five dollars.”

“He told me to change my socks,” Jones shrugged.

“Six suits, custom-made—”

“He told me to change my tailor.”

Rubin popped a hand to his cheek calamitously at the next. “You had to go there? Into a tower? You couldn’t stay closer to the ground? You got to make like eagles?”

“He told me to change my quarters.”

Rubin shook his head lugubriously when he’d come to the end of them. “You sure you didn’t leave out something? You mean this is all? Think hard, now. I wouldn’t want you should deny yourself anything.”

“I couldn’t change my girl,” said Jones blandly, “because I didn’t have any to begin with.”

A melting sigh sounded from over by the wall in the background where Mari was sitting docilely waiting along with the rest of the baggage. She gave him a soulful look, but it didn’t even register.

“You can pick one up after you get there,” Smart reassured him lightly. “They carry them anywhere you go. Best imported materials. Besides, you duck the excise tax that way.”

“All right, we ain’t got time for this light bandaging,” Rubin ordered, flagging them out with interplaying arms. “Make sure you got everything now. Pick up that trombone, pick up that — oh, excuse me, dolling, I didn’t know it was you — somebody take along the little dancer. In twenty minutes the train pulls out.”

Arrived under escort of Rubin and Smart at Grand Central Terminal, Lower Level, Track Seven, they all piled into one of the compartments, though technically it had been reserved solely for Bee and Mari, the rest of them just had coach seats.

Rubin shook hands all around, gave Mari a desultory pat on the head as though she were some kind of a mascot, and addressed a few words of paternal advice to them from the compartment-doorway, before getting off again. “All right, mazeltov, everybody, is all I can say. Which is meaning good luck, God bless you, and play good. I wouldn’t ask you to be saints, but if you got to be stinkers, be high-class stinkers. Remember, you’re in the big time now, you’re a star attraction. Make me proud I should say, ‘I am their agent.’ Come back wealthy.”

The door closed, and various bleeps and bloops sounded off from some of the instruments, in sheer animalistic high spirits.

“Put that bottle away. Morty’s looking right in the window at you from outside.”

“I am putting it away,” was the irrefutable answer, as the tilted head righted itself again.

“You frightened, honey?” crooned Bee solicitously. “Tame it down a little, boys, it’s the kid’s first tour.”

“No,” Mari smiled wanly. “Not if I can sit next to M-max.”

Bee plucked at someone, hauled him out, and made room for her. “Get up, lazy, and give it a chance to air.”

Mari nestled against him and he slung a proprietary, and thoroughly inattentive, arm about her. “Papa’s little gold mine. Papa’s little bonanza.” But he was looking the other way, out the window at Rubin.

“That’s tender talk for you,” Bee muttered sourly. “Hard and yellow, he calls her. And even covered with dirt.”

“Ba-a-a-awrd!” echoed sepulchrally along the tunnel outside.

Suddenly someone bethought himself of a very minor matter. The merest of afterthoughts. “Hey, what is this the train for, anybody know? I know it’s going, but where to?”

Jones flung up the window, hollered out into Rubin’s face, “Hey, where is it? You forgot to tell us! Where we booked into?”

“Details, details,” Rubin palmed calmingly at him. “The train knows the way, you wouldn’t go astray. You open tomorrow night at the Club Perroquet, Montreal, Canada. At the biggest salary for a band in all North America.”