Death Is My Dancing Partner

1

Her first opening night. Her first audience. The Perroquet Club. Very small but very swank. Tails and white tie. If you wore only a dinner jacket, you were put over by the kitchen door. If you wore anything less, you didn’t get in at all.

She was sitting there cowering in front of the light-surrounded mirror and Bee was helping her put her makeup on. They were playing Number Ten in the book, and she had fifteen minutes to be afraid in yet. That’s an awful lot of time to be afraid in.

“Nervous, honey?”

“I feel like I’m going to die. I wish I were, but I’m afraid I’m not. Not soon enough.”

“That’s the spirit,” approved Bee briskly. “That’s the way it should be. If you told me you were calm and didn’t feel anything, I’d worry and send out for a doctor.” The patient began to take a little more interest in the proceedings. “What’re you doing that for?”

“Your face doesn’t match your specialty, honey. You look like a freshman at Vassar. Your face is years too soon for what you’re doing with your muscles.” She scanned the result. “Now you only look like a freshman at Vassar that’s been up studying all night.”

“Wait a minute. Let me try something.”

She tried something.

“That does it. That kills that pasteurized, dairy-fresh—” The subject wriggled terrifiedly. “Oo, they’ve stopped!”

She tried to rise from the chair, coifed and betowelled as she was. Bee had to press her down into it again.

“Whoa! There’s plenty of time yet. That’s a ten-minute break before they play your music.”

They all came in to wish her luck. They all crowded around her. The place was suddenly jam-packed with men.

“Wait a minute, what is this!” bawled Bee the demon chaperone. “Gents’ night at a Turkish bath?”

“She’s our little sister, and we’re her big brothers,” somebody asserted.

“Well, now that you’ve flashed your birth certificates at her, suppose you get the hell—”

“Let them stay,” she quavered. “I don’t feel afraid when I’m in the middle of all of them like this.”

“A pat of cheese in the middle of a congregation of rats, and she don’t feel afraid,” said Bee.

“We’ve been called rats,” one of them pointed out.

“Who by?”

“By that big mouse over there.”

“Don’t pat her so much on the shoulders,” ordered Bee, flinging off somebody’s hand. “She’s got to shimmy with those places.”

Jones suddenly showed up in the already overcrowded room, a bottle of champagne slanted in his arm. A waiter followed him in with a tray of glasses.

“Are you crazy?” squalled Bee. “Over my dead body! The kid’s ready to come apart as it is.”

A cork, pulling a tail of foam after it like a splashy comet, shot against the wall. Jones strewed a little into his palm, held it up over Mari’s head, deliberately sprinkled it over her.

“Whaddye think she is, a ship?” Bee protested.

“Fame and fortune, honey, and happiness,” he wished her. “For you, and all of us.” They all drank on it.

“Makes your eyes steam up, that stuff,” lied Bee. “Always does with me.” She leaned over impulsively and kissed her protégée atop the head. She took the wraps off her. “How d’you like her, boss-man? I did her makeup myself.”

“Sa-a-ay,” he drawled admiringly. “You’re good. That’s just the way I wanted her to look.”

She shivered and clung to Bee. “Scared witless,” the latter breathed in a confidential aside to him.

“Hold her here till she’s cued, Bee. Then take her out as far as the wings. Don’t let her go alone.”

“I know,” Bee said. “The last mile.”

He went over to the doorway. “Max!” Mari called out suddenly, almost in desperation.

He turned back.

“Would you... would you kiss me for good luck?”

“He has to be asked, yet,” said Bee drily, under her breath.

He came back to her and kissed her. He aimed it for her forehead, but she suddenly tilted her face, and he missed, landed on her lips.

He went on out. The two girls stood there alone together in the little dressing room, Bee’s one arm around her.

“It’s funny, but I’m not afraid any more,” she murmured. “Why is that?”

Bee shrugged. “Couldn’t be that stingy little kiss he just gave you. Shall we start walking, honey, so we get out there in time?”

Bee beside her, and her arm about her waist, she went on out. To her fame, and fortune, and maybe happiness.

Anyway, to her fame and fortune.

2

The first night was over now. The opening was over. And she was sitting there alone broadside to the mirror, just waiting. In a plaid coat that fitted her like the tarpaulin covering a statue before its unveiling. And a beret that slopped over below her ear.

A lot of bustle outside, passing back and forth, but no more music.

Going home time.

She just sat there waiting, forgotten by everyone.

Bee suddenly came hustling in, after something she’d left behind; saw her, was reminded of her then.

“You still...?” She went back to the doorway, inquired in a train despatcher’s voice, “Who’s taking the kid home?”

The head in the beret remained passively downturned. “Never mind. I can find my own—”

Jones’ voice suddenly came back in answer from somewhere out of sight down the passage. “It’s all right, Bee. I’ll see that she gets home.”

Bee relayed the message, gratuitously. “Your quote husband unquote is going to take you home, honey.”

The head in the beret came erect. Suddenly she was concerned with her appearance.

“This coat fits me like a tent. Why does there have to be so much of it?”

She turned plaintively mirrorward.

“Why did I have to buy a beret? Every other girl in New York looked good in them. And I look like a tadpole.”

“You look all right to me, honey. Anyway, you’re only going home to sleep, aren’t you? Max said he wants you to get all the rest you can, that’s why he wouldn’t let you come to the party with the rest of us.”

“Yes, but if the party is in celebration of my success, why can’t I be at it? He’s not my father. He’s not my brother. He’s not even my doctor.”

“He’s your boss, honey,” Bee reminded her gently. “Anyway, you don’t want to go there. I know those parties, they’re all alike. They just stand around holding stingers and telling dirty jokes.”

“Does he?” was the rapt inquiry.

“Does he,” she got back.

“Well, why can’t I be told one? I know how to laugh too.”

“All right, remind me to tell you a dirty joke sometime.”

“I don’t want ’em from you.”

“Then who would you like one from?” Bee wanted to know inattentively.

No answer.

“I’ve got to go, honey. Brad’s waiting. Get a good night’s rest.”

Jones came in her wake. “Oh, there you are. All set?”

He crooked his arm at her, and she fastened herself on it like a barnacle. He looked around. “Got everything?”

She tightened her grip, choked the life out of his arm. “Everything,” she murmured shyly. It went over into the outfield bleachers behind him.

He put out the dressing-room light.

“Was I good?” she asked, trotting dutifully down the passage.

“You mean you don’t know yet?”

“Well... it was so still.”

“That’s your answer. That was your applause. Others may get the beat of hands. You get the greatest tribute than an audience can give: perfect silence. It took fifteen minutes for it to wear off.”

She didn’t seem one hundred per cent satisfied. “I mean, did you like me?” she persisted.

“Like?” he said. “What kind of a word is that? I don’t know where you came from, and I don’t know where you’ll go. I don’t know how I got you. I only know—”

“What?” she begged. “What?” she pleaded.

He shrugged it off lightly, with a quirk and a smile. “You’re my magic. You’re my charm. G’night, Mari.”

Couldn’t I be more than that? something inside her mourned. And the backstage doorman had had to horn into it and spoil it anyway.

They hustled up the little side alley to the street.

“What’s the party going to be like?” she hinted broadly. “It’s only about two o’clock, isn’t it?”

She never got the chance to find out, on either count. There was a girl standing there alone, further down from where they’d emerged, in front of the club’s main entrance. Nothing cheap. Hourglass-tight in an expensive wrap, gown touching the sidewalk. Tapping the seconds out of a minute with the tip of one foot.

The kind of girl who doesn’t stand like that very long, in front of a club entrance or anywhere else. Who doesn’t stand for it if she does have to stand.

She turned and saw them come out to the curb. She seemed to recognize him. A velvety contralto reached them in inquiry. Inquiry that was really a command. “Well, Max? How about it?”

He waved his arm to her propitiatingly. “Right with you, dear.”

He handed Mari into the cab. He handed the driver a bill.

“Take this young lady to the Mount Royal. See that she gets there safe, now. Take very good care of her. She’s something special.”

He closed the door on her.

He tipped his hat.

He stayed behind.

The cab driver bent down concernedly a few minutes later to investigate something in the region of his pedals and clutches.

“That’s not your motor, driver,” she said tearfully in back of him. “I was just pounding both feet together on the floor.”

3

Bill Smart came in, third performance, with a briefcaseful of publicity releases, dumped them all out on the dressing-table and demanded zestfully, “Wherza chief?”

“We’re not an Indian tribe,” remarked Bee drily, looking up from inspecting a pair of nylons. “And if you mean that train that runs to the Coast, you’ll find it in Chicago, two blocks that way and then three to the right.”

“All right, end-lady. Where’s the guy you work for? That suit you better?”

“Look, watch where you dump all that wastepaper, will you? The kid’s got to make up yet, and she’s going to be pasting newspaper-clippings onto her eyelashes instead of mascara.”

She couldn’t dampen him. “Get this. It goes into all the papers, tomorrow’s editions.”

She scanned the ad layout he handed her, Mari peering over her shoulder.

“Will it happen here?” in big black letters, for a head. And then in smaller letters: “Every place she dances...” He superimposed another on it. “And latch onto this one.”

Bee read it aloud. “Is your life insurance fully paid up? If not, don’t go to Le Perroquet tonight to see...”

“Oh, and that reminds me.” He turned to Mari. “I’ve made an appointment for you with a photographer. Tomorrow afternoon. I want you to have some new stills taken. I want you down like this...”

He got down on his belly on the floor, in front of the two horrified girls. Then he propped his elbows close together. Then he cupped his hands. Then he propped his chin in them. Then he stared pie-eyed at, insofar as they could judge, a balled-up discarded towel that somebody had flung down over by the baseboard.

“You insanitary thing,” jeered one of the bandsmen, who had been standing watching from the doorway. “What’re you doing down there?”

Smart ignored him. “In front of your face there’ll be a cobra. You know, sitting on its tail, like they do. You’re staring soulfully into its eyes, and it’s staring into yours.” Mari gave an exclamation of alarm at this point, and clutched tightly at Bee for protection.

“Not a live one,” he said testily. “I found a guy here that can make all sorts of things. He’s making me one up, out of rubber and papier-mâché and things. We’ll have an invisible wire rigged to hold it upright—”

“Then you stare it in the eye!” burst out the doughty Bee. “Spit in its eye, for all I care, and for my part it should spit right back in yours! What’re you trying to turn her into, a Coney Island sideshow attraction? How many times have you seen her do this dance? It’s an allegory; there’s no snake in it, not even a reproduction of one. It’s her own muscles that give the illusion of one!”

“I never saw one of those things, even out there,” protested Mari firmly. “The whole time I lived there. The first time I ever saw a snake in my life was when Mr. Bradley’s parents took me to the Bronx Zoo in New York a few weeks ago. They thought I liked them! I ran so fast they had to run after me to catch up with me. I hate them even worse than you people do here in the United States.”

“Never mind, honey.” Bee patted her consolingly. “You’re not going to make goo-goo eyes at any snake. Not down on the floor and not anywhere else.”

“Oh, so my ideas don’t suit you,” Smart said indignantly.

The answer he got was nothing if not frank. “I got a strong stomach,” proclaimed Bee. “But somebody hand me that old hat of Brad’s pegged up there, and then stand clear.”

Jones had been standing there looking over the releases. “These’re all right,” he said approvingly. “And you’re doing a good job, Bill.” He came over and back-slapped him appeasingly. “But... we’ll forget about the stills with the snake, huh?”

“Okay,” said Smart, “Okay. No snakes, then no snakes. Y’got a good band, Max,” he added loudly, as though Jones were some distance off. “But there’s just one thing. You’ve got too many blondes in it.”

“Hand me the shoe-blacking,” murmured Bee demurely.

“Well, I’ve got to be on my way,” Smart said, when the laugh had tapered. “This is just the groundwork. I haven’t even begun yet. You’re already going up like an express elevator. You’re going to go up like a skyrocket, when I touch off my little fuse.” He rubbed his hands dynamically. “This is Wednesday, right? I’m going to let it ride three more nights. But watch Saturday. That’s the big night. Just watch Saturday.”

“What does he mean?” somebody wondered.

“Don’t you know?” said Bee knowingly. “Give you three guesses.”

4

Bee and Mari were sitting there after the latter’s performance the following night, with the door left open, when a slow wash of perfume came floating in and engulfed them. The kind that comes out of machines in theater lounges at ten cents a squirt — machines that have stood too long without having their oil changed. Bee, bending low, sniffed suspiciously. “Somebody’s burning French pancakes out in the gal—” she started to opine. Then she turned and looked. Mari did too.

A fairly buxom female of considerable, if slightly shopworn, flounciness and finery, had paused briefly on her way past to look in at them. Seeing that she had attracted their attention, she resumed her indolent progress with a reassuring “No ’arm, lydies; just strolling parst,” and drifted from sight.

“Did you see that?” Bee demanded. “Is she made up to go on like that, or does she always go around looking that way? Wait a minute. There’s no floorshow here. She must be on the level. One of those gals that stand leaning against lampposts in the evening.”

Mari tittered. “I know what you mean.”

“Did you lamp the low-traction handbag, down at about ankle-level? And the peek-a-boo blouse. All boo and no peek.”

“Oo, that perfume!” complained Mari hilariously, fanning her face. “What is it?”

“Lilies of the ashcan and burnt feathers, with just a dash of lighter fluid.” She went over toward the doorway flapping a towel before her. “Let me see if I can’t get some of it out of here.”

Something caught her eye. She paused, peering narrowly past the opening.

“She’s standing down there at the end of the passage, just back of the bandstand, stealing a free look at the dancers on the floor,” she reported.

At that moment the music stopped.

“Here come the boys,” she said. She returned to Mari. “Keep count in the glass,” she instructed her. “They’re going to have to pass her, up at that end. And then they’re going to have to pass us, down here at this. Just let’s see if anybody’s missing.”

Trumpet went by.

Drums and percussion went by.

Piano went by. Not literally, that is — the space wouldn’t have been wide enough — but as symbolized by Fingers.

All of them puffing like chimneys.

Each one clocked himself on the mirror.

Clarinet went by.

Steel guitar went by.

Finally even Jones went by, paper cup of Coca-Cola (to give him the benefit of the doubt) held brimmingly balanced in his hand.

He turned and glanced in, without stopping. “Hello, ladies,” he saluted them, with a hoist of his paper cup that didn’t spill a drop. Of either Coca-Cola, or benefit-of-the-doubt.

Bee’s long tapered nails began to drum on the edge of the dressing-table. “How many did you count?” she asked with adding-machine precision.

“Six,” said Mari.

“That’s what I got too. Somebody’s been detoured. And never mind telling me who, I’m way ahead of you.”

She strode over to the doorway, looked down the passage. She folded her arms with heavy confirmation, she nodded ponderously for Mari’s benefit. She came back into the room again.

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. Every one of those boys was holding a smoke in his hands. You saw them. But who gets stopped, and who gets asked for a light, and who has to stand there making an Indian fire-dance ritual out of it! Ev-’ry time!” She slapped herself on the thigh in punctuation.

Mari laughed a little, charitably. “It’s hard to refuse when somebody asks. Especially a Woman.”

Bee eased back to the doorway again, to take a few more bird’s-eye views. “I wish you could see him. Standing there with his cigarette pushing hers, the two of them curved over like they were playing London Bridge is Falling Down. He can’t just hand her a match, he has to get her started person-to-person!”

She contemplated the hidden tableau with leashed exasperation.

“I never saw a cigarette take so long to light up,” she relayed. “He must be breathing in while she’s breathing out.”

“Maybe one of them’s wet,” said Mari eruditely.

“One of them is,” glowered Bee. “All wet. And I don’t mean the cigarette either.”

“How can he get that close to all that terrible perfume?” wondered Mari.

“Oh, what do they know?” said Bee disparagingly. “To one of them it probably smells good.”

She reconnoitred some more. “He has to lean toward her, like the Tower of Pisa,” she reported embitteredly, “with his heinie sticking elegantly out.”

She strode back to the table again, this time in explosive decision. “This is too good to miss, the way he’s turned and the position he’s in!”

She picked up a long-handled hairbrush of Mari’s and glided from view down the passage, weighting it tentatively in her hand as she went.

For several moments the passage remained silent. Then there was the sound of a reverberating impact, a squeal of feminine dismay, and a figure went flitting hurriedly past the doorway, finery shimmering with haste.

Bee reappeared, at a far more leisurely gait, a grim smile of satisfaction on her face. She flung the hairbrush, which had become fractured in the middle and hung limp, back where she had taken it from. “That broke that up,” she reported. “You should have seen the shower of sparks went up between them. Like a blowtorch backfiring. I saw one cigarette go kiting up in the air. I think he must have swallowed his.”

Bradley trailed in, even more slowly, looking extremely disconcerted, red in the face, and rubbing himself ruefully.

“What was that for?” he complained. “Sneaking up behind me without any warning and whacking the daylights out of me! I got singed from sparks all down the inside of my collar.” He clutched at it and shook it out a little.

Bee turned on him in denunciation. “How many times I have to tell you, keep away from strange streetwalkers when you’re around me!” she thundered.

“She couldn’t find her way out and asked me which way the alley was, that’s all,” he protested.

Bee brayed raucous derision. “She don’t need to ask anyone how to get to alleys; she spends her whole time in them. I bet she can show you alleys that no one else even knew was around.”

“I never saw anyone like you,” he complained mildly, dabbing a little cold cream on his neck here and there with the tip of one finger. “She asked me could I oblige her with a light, why should I turn her down?”

“Then throw her a match. You don’t have to put it to her like that.”

“Please. This kid’s fresh out of a heathen temple,” he reminded her virtuously.

“The cigarette,” explained Bee in an outraged basso profundo. She turned to Mari, spread her hands explanatorily. “I don’t object to competition. What I object to is the kind of competition I get. Other women have to worry about these smart, clever little tricks that come along, baby faces, wearing a million dollars worth of clothes; you know, really high-class competition. Do I? No, I’m up against the trade-unions. Some bedraggled sidewalk-pounder’ll toil by, practically wearing an excavation-lantern on her arm, and he’ll put his neck out of joint for blocks afterwards, staring back at her. Even with me right there beside him. Trying to let on that he’s looking for a taxi, or that he’s trying to figure out how far we’ve walked and where we are right now. I purposely led him into a fire-hydrant once and he nearly gutted himself.”

“No, you don’t understand,” he tried to convince her. “I’m not interested in them personally, it’s just from a... from a... well, like a scientific point of view. I never can figure them out at first sight, like some people can.

I never can tell, right off, if they are or aren’t. So sometimes, when I look around like that, all I’m doing is wondering if they are or aren’t.”

“If you look around at them, brother, they are, all right!” she let him know in no uncertain tone.

He shook his head like a person who feels he is completely misunderstood, went out and closed the door after him.

Bee waited first to make sure he was out of earshot. Then she dropped her voice a little. “I can’t really get sore at him. Or stay sore, anyway. It’s like a game we play with each other. It’s our way of still courting each other, I guess. You see... I’m crazy in love with him. Which is the same as saying crazy, period.”

5

In the taverns on St. Antoine Street, Bill Smart was spending the evening playing hop-scotch along the bars. A version of it that was all his own. He used a glass of mixed ale and stout for marker, known colloquially as “Hoff ‘n’ Hoff” (most of the barmen were Limeys). He touched each vacant space with the bottom of it, and he touched his underlip with the rim of it, once to each position, and that was all he did with it; the level of its contents didn’t subside any. He didn’t hop on one foot the way kids do, and there were no chalked boxes on the floor to guide him, but it was hop-scotch all right, if anything ever was.

He would start at the upper end of each bar (he’d been in three already, doing this, by eleven), and then he would “skip” from there into each vacant space in turn, “hopping” over the intervening contestant. Although they didn’t even know they were in the game at all. He didn’t go over their heads, but around back of them, and into the vacant bar-space on the other side. When there was no vacant space, he made one, by insinuating his person, with a disarming grin and murmured apology to avert trouble. He only lighted alongside single or individual bar-standers, never when there was more than one together. Two lines of dialogue, sometimes only one, and he moved on again.

Heads turned after him, as he progressed, and fingers were tapped suggestively against skulls, but since he was not actually disturbing the peace or giving offense, no move was made to check him.

And then besides, the expression “buddy” instantaneously gave him away as an American, and Americans are a little odd, the whole world knows that. They just might go in for playing one-man hop-scotch in taverns.

The lines of dialogue, never varied, were: First line, “You working, buddy?”

If the answer was yes, no second line, instead a hop to the next box.

If the answer was no, second line: “You want to be?”

Sometimes he was forestalled and never got a chance to use the second line. Such as:

“No, and I don’t ’ime to be neither.”

“And ’oo the ’ell are you to be arsking? Bevin?”

“Think I’m soft in me ’ead or something? And what ’appens to me bloomin’ unemployment pension, in that case?”

By midnight he was taking a disheartened view of the Canadian economic situation, postwar variety. All the right sort of people seemed to be employed, and all the wrong sort of people seemed to be unemployed. By one he’d acquired a future lifelong distaste to ale and stout, both separate and combined. And also to Buckingham cigarettes, and fifty-cent pieces with effigies of Elizabeth II on them, and the mother-tongue as spoken from up between the eyes somewhere. By two he’d quit playing for the night, and was on his way on foot back to his room. There still remained a lot of other streets, and a lot of other taverns, but not an awful lot of other nights.

There was a touch on his arm, and a figure shuffled up alongside of him, materializing from the gloom of some doorway he’d just passed.

“Got the price of a cup of coffee, guv’nor?”

He stopped short, whirled about, and peered almost fiercely, trying to penetrate the dimness.

The supplicant, mistaking the stiletto-sharpness of the scrutiny, raised dissuading palms and prepared to retreat. “Now, if you’re going to get that mad, guv’nor, just forget I asked you.”

“Hold it.” Smart dug into his pocket, flipped an Elizabeth II into the obscurity, palm-flesh clapped, and it never hit the ground.

“Let me see you in the light,” Smart ordered. “Come over here. Now turn. Walk away from me. Now turn. Come on back.”

“What do I have to do, drill for a cup of coffee? I only want to drink it, I don’t want to defend it.”

“Take that thing off. That thing on your head.”

“I already thanked you, guv’nor. What do I have to do, uncover and bow me head too?”

“You look good and pale.”

“I look pale, but what’s good about it?”

Smart didn’t answer that. “How old are you? Mind my asking?”

“Nice of you to take an interest, guv’nor,” was the sarcastic answer. “Sixty-five.”

“Oh, come on now, you’re still thinking about handouts. On the level.”

“Fifty-five?”

“I don’t want anyone too old.”

“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Forty-seven; and I couldn’t go below that for my own brother.”

“Want to work?”

“Not if it’s lifting anything heavy.”

“Just lifting a champagne-glass. That too heavy?”

“Packing them, you mean? I’m allergic to excelsior, gets in my nose.”

“No, just one glass. The same glass, for about half an hour or so. Up and down, up and down.”

“Anything in it?”

“Champagne in it.”

“I do that, and get money too?”

“There’s a little more to it than that. Oh, nothing to be frightened of. Ever do any acting?”

“I’ve done a bit of everything, in my time. I’ve played a walk-on a couple of times, in traveling road companies.”

“Well, this is like a walk-on too, in a way. You walk on. And then you just have to let yourself be carried off. Look, it’s kind of late now. I’ll tell you all about the rest of it tomorrow. Look me up at my hotel, ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Ford Hotel. Don’t come into the lobby, looking the way you do. I’ll meet you outside of it, down on the corner. Ten sharp.”

“Right-o, guv’nor.”

“And don’t keep calling me governor. I haven’t a state to my name. Now there’s money in this, so you’re a fool if you’re not there.”

“Oh, I’ll be there all right, guv — I mean, you can count on me.”

“I don’t believe you will. But I think I know a way of making sure you are.” He opened his billfold, canvassed its inserts, finally withdrew a ten-dollar Canadian bank certificate. He held it taut the long way, between both hands. “See this?”

“Do I see it? Can’t you hear the patter of the little drops as they roll down off my chin?”

“You’ve got a sense of humor too; I like that. No, keep your hands down. All right, just to wipe off your mouth, if you must. All right, if you show up you’ve got yourself ten dollars just for standing on a corner.”

“And to think of the many times I’ve done it for free,” murmured the recipient ruefully.

In the snappy morning sunlight the figure standing waiting for Smart on the corner didn’t look so good. The darkness the night before had done him a favor. All he needed was a few sheaves of corn sprouting around his feet to give a crow a bad scare. In fact, Smart walked all the way around him three times in a tight little circle before he made up his mind.

“This is going to earn you a hundred dollars, did you know that?”

“No, but it’s sure nice to find it out. How many months can I get for it, whatever it is?”

“There’s not a law against it; not an ordinance, not a single restriction as far as I know. They can’t even pull you in for it.”

“First,” Smart went on, “we’ll do a little necessary outside repair work. Just enough to get you through the lobby without being turned back.”

He led him down the street to a barbershop, stepped in with him, handed the master barber a bill. “Give this man a shave, a haircut — and above all, a shampoo. I’ll be waiting outside.”

“You’re so brutally frank,” said the patient, letting himself into one of the chairs.

Then he took him to a Turkish bath. “Now go in there. Nothing fancy, just a good stiff hose and a scrubbing.” He handed him a brown-paper parcel. “Put these on after you’re through. I don’t know your size, but it doesn’t matter too much.”

“At five dollars, I’d be insulted,” said the man uncomplainingly. “Not at a hundred.”

“Now I think that’ll do,” Smart said when he’d come out again. “Come on up to the room now. I’m going to rehearse you up there.”

He closed the door behind them.

“Take off your coat. I want you to have plenty of room. Now before we begin, you better let me know. Nothing wrong with your heart, is there?”

“Sound as a whistle,” bragged the man, whomping himself on the chest. “Outdoor life, you know.”

Smart brought forward a straight-backed chair.

“Get on this.”

He took a lamp down, coasted a small table up in front of him.

“Now, you’re sitting at a night-club table.”

He put a water-tumbler down in front of him.

“This is champagne here.”

The man glanced into its dry depths, then up again. “How can you do this to me?”

Smart planted hands to knees, crouched forward. “All right. Let me see you fall off that chair.”

The man swerved aside, one leg went up, and one arm went down.

“I didn’t say duck a flying pop-bottle. Try it again.”

The man tried it again.

“Keep that leg down. You act like a human pointer in reverse. Look, drop dead, will you?”

“You drop dead yourself,” said the man with not unjustifiable aggrievement.

“No, no, I’m not making a wish. I’m trying to get you to act a part for me. Fluid, see? Fluid drive. Sort of spill off the chair. Sort of ripple. Think of a waterfall. Make like a waterfall — splosh! splosh! splash!”

“How was that?” asked the man, looking up at him from below the table.

“Don’t wiggle your hips. And above all keep those spirals with your stomach out of it. You’re not a corkscrew going down into the neck of a bottle.”

“Please,” pleaded the subject, moistening his lips, “some other illustration.”

“Let’s see it again,” said the inexorable Smart. “Dress it up a little. You’re not expecting this to happen, you know—”

“I am now,” mourned the exhibit to himself.

“—Relax, tap a cigarette, be nonchalant. Now! Upps! Just like that!”

The man looked up mutely, stiff-arming himself against the floor.

“Well, it’s not too good, but it’s not too bad either. Nobody’ll be watching you during this part of it, anyway. It’s what comes after that counts.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You don’t move from then on. Dozens of eyes’ll be on you, and if you make the slightest move, you’ve spoiled the whole thing. No matter what goes on don’t stir. You’ll feel your shirt being opened, maybe. Or maybe even one of your eyelids’ll be tipped up and then dropped again. That’ll just be the doctor. At least they’ll think he’s a doctor, he’ll have a medical kit with him. Then you’ll be carried out and shoved into an ambulance. It’s just a rented ambulance, a private one. It’ll take you for a short ride. As soon as you get around the corner, you can climb out and go off and enjoy your hundred dollars in peace. Now get back on the chair and let’s give it a good polish.”

Smart started to keep time with one arm, like a bandmaster.

“Drop dead. Over you go. Upsa-daisy. Back on the chair.

“Drop dead. Over you go. Upsa-daisy. Back on the chair.”

The man fanned himself; his tongue lolled out. “Please, guv’nor,” he panted. “Give me a minute to catch my breath, will you? I never dropped dead so often in me life before.”

6

They gave him a table for one, on the tip of the dance floor. He was in tails and white tie. He even wore a monocle in his eye. He looked like pre-war aristocracy. He carried himself like the Russian Grand Dukes did when they commuted regularly between St. Petersburg and the Paris cabarets.

The next time anyone noticed him, there was champagne before him. Not to say that they did, but if they did, it was there. He wasn’t noticeably drinking it (he wasn’t obvious about anything), but his table waiter was at his side a good deal.

The cigarette girl, moving away from him, had an almost beatific expression on her face as she fumbled at the neckline of her costume, putting his tip away.

He took out his monocle, polished it, slotted it in again.

That was all there was time for. Mari suddenly swooped from nowhere into a pool of greenish-gold, was holding herself still as if she were drinking deeply of it from off the floor. Then and only then a low throbbing of drums, which had started some moments before, filtered into the general awareness. Then and only then, lights began to go off.

He was erased from people’s minds. Mari was in them instead, was in every brain. Limned in greenish-gold, writhing, swaying.

He fell off the chair most artistically. Oozed off it, with no sharp angles, no bumps. Just the way Bill Smart had been trying to say it should be done. Pulled the cloth just a little with him, and then let go of it again, so that not even the champagne upset, just gave a disruptive swirl at the top of its goblet.

Then he spread himself out on the floor, uncoiled, so to speak. Relaxed, almost as if — well, as if he were tired, and he liked it down there, and he’d decided to stay there, now that he was down there. And then he did stay, on his back and with his face turned up.

Almost unbelievably, the monocle was still in place in his eye. The light gave off a glassy gleam from it, made him seem blind in one eye.

There had been a minimum of noise. It was a well-bred death if there ever was one. No noise at all, in fact. Just the soft fall.

Only those immediately around his table were aware of what had happened. Nobody else in the place, for some moments, was. A headwaiter hastened forward, and dipped from sight. A second waiter joined him.

They picked him up between them and carried him back out of sight. And Mari was lying prostrate on the floor. And the drums had stopped at last.

They carried him into the manager’s office and placed him on a settee in there. The manager took the monocle out of his eye, only now, and it was a curious thing to see how the deep-etched skin-creases slowly relaxed. “Bring in a doctor, quickly!” the manager ordered, with low-voiced curtness. He hated to have things like this happen in his place.

A doctor — or at least a man who said he was one — was ushered in with such rapidity that it was almost as if he had been waiting just on the other side of the door for his cue.

He went straight to the patient, bent down low beside him. And the rest of it was just as Smart had foretold. He tipped one eyelid, closed it again. He opened his shirt-front briefly, did something there, then let it be again. And that was all. The next they knew he had risen and was going away once more. He shook his head, but he didn’t stop, he just kept going. Back to whatever table and whatever party was still waiting for him out there, and more agreeable than this.

“Can’t help you,” he said, turning toward them from the door. “Nothing to be done. He’s stone dead. I have a lobster Newburg coming up out there, and those things spoil when they stand. Better notify the police.”

He opened the door and went out.

In the wings Jones was just setting Mari down on her own feet. He kissed her between the eyes, but professionally, strictly professionally.

“Oh, this is a miracle!” he breathed devoutly. “This is a dream! Listen to that silence! Listen to them sighing and slowly coming back to themselves!”

She took his arm and they started for the dressing room.

“Did you see what happened out there just now?” she whispered.

That was one of Bill Smart’s brain waves. I think it muffed, if you ask me. It went off too quietly.

“Where is he?” Jones asked Bee as they entered the dressing room. “I suppose we have to show our appreciation.”

“Paying off the corpse, probably,” she answered drily.

“I wonder how much he gave the stiff for his work. They don’t have a union scale, as I understand it. I was watching it from the wings. I’ll tell you one thing; that guy was hammy, if anyone ever was.”

“I thought he was real good,” said Bradley, coming in with the rest of the bandsmen. “Who’d you expect him to get for it, Lunt?”

“He was good,” somebody else corroborated. “He had real talent.”

“Yeah, well you had the lights in your eyes,” Bee argued. “He didn’t fool me for a minute.”

They all turned their heads. Bill Smart was standing there in the doorway, riffling through a stacked handful of paper currency. They all went over and ganged up around him, everybody trying to get in a word at once. “Good stunt, Bill! You pulled it off just right.”

“It was so natural. Just like real life.”

“How much’re you shelling out for getting the guy to do it?” asked Bee, the nosey.

“Ten dollars,” said Smart, very tight-lipped. “And that’s only to keep his mouth shut. Hey, you,” he called over his shoulder. A figure in tails and white tie appeared in the dressing-room doorway. Smart shoved one of the bills at him, put the rest away. “Take this and get out of here. Don’t let me see you again. You can keep the clothes.”

“Ten dollars!” squawked Bee, incredulous.

Bill Smart swallowed a lump in his throat. He swung the door closed, full into the disappointed face of the rented corpse. “You see, the guy that keeled over and died, out there, just now,” he explained, with a constrictive shortage of breath, “wasn’t the guy that I planted there. Wasn’t this guy you just saw me pay off, but somebody else entirely. Somebody who really did keel over and die.”