“Enough budget!” Brown snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. “If you only knew what we spent on the air pumps already … Money’s … what they call it … no object. You get it? Now back that truck up here!”
“I dunno. This whole thing—how do I know it’s on the up-and-up if the guy who ordered ain’t here to sign? Who’s in charge at Seaworthy if it isn’t Ryan?”
“Ryan’s the owner, you damned…” He took a deep breath, removed his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief. That seemed to calm him. “Ryan’s the owner. Man named Rizzo, over at the administration office, he’s in charge.”
Brown turned to sign a manifest held up for him by a thickset black man in overalls. Gorland leaned over, trying to make out what was on it. All he could gather was Air purification system bldg 32, 33. And the cost of that system added up to well over a million dollars …
Brown saw Gorland trying to see the manifest and stepped to block his view. “Mister, you sure are a nosy sort…”
Gorland shrugged. “Just as curious as anybody else. Well, I can’t let you sign for this stuff. Where’s this Rizzo’s office at? Maybe I better talk to him…”
Brown hesitated, looking at him suspiciously. Then he shrugged and told him, and Gorland wrote it down on the clipboard. He turned to peer inside the warehouse. “Hey—that one of those bathysphere things?”
Brown stared at him. “What delivery company you say you were with?”
“Me? Acme. Name’s Foster.”
“Yeah? Let me have another look at that clipboard of yours…”
“Now who’s the nosy one? See you when I get the signature, pal.” Gorland turned and hurried down the stairs. He felt the men on the loading dock staring at him. He glanced back and saw one big fist-faced palooka take a sap out of his pocket, and slap it in his palm.
He hurried to the truck, forcing himself not to run, and got out of there as fast as he could. Smiling to himself as he drove away. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a blackmail operation. Maybe it’d be something much bigger …
Yeah. If he figured out where to stand, it’d be raining money—and all he needed was a bucket.
* * *
“It’s not generally known that I sometimes back Broadway musicals,” said Andrew Ryan, as the limousine pulled up in front of the theater. “I prefer to do it quietly. I have a rather old-fashioned taste in music, they tell me—George M. Cohan or Jolson, they’re more my style. Or Rudy Vallee. I don’t care much for this jitterbug business. Don’t understand it.” He waved a hand at the marquee. “You know the work of Sander Cohen? Some say he is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I think he’s every bit the musical genius he ever was … a Renaissance man of the arts, really.”
Bill read the marquee: SANDER COHEN IN “YOUNG DANDIES.”
“Cor!” he burst out. “Me ma took a liking to Sander Cohen, a few years back. Fair wore out his ‘Kissing the Tulip’ on her old Victrola!”
“Ah yes. I was a fan of his ‘No One Understands Me.’ You shall meet him tonight, my boy! We’re just in time to catch his final number—I’ve seen the show many times of course—and we’ll have a word backstage. Karlosky—this is fine here!”
The chauffeur, Ivan Karlosky, was a pale-haired man, scarred and impassive, with a distinctively Russian bone structure. He gave a small salute with his gloved hand and nodded. Bill had heard that Karlosky was not only one of the finest auto mechanics around but also pretty much invincible. No one messed with Karlosky.
Bill got out of the limo, instinctively holding the door for Ryan and closing it behind him. A group of swells spilled out of the theater, laughing—though the music of the show could be heard through the open theater door. The show was still going on. A bored-looking man in spats and tuxedo was escorting a platinum-haired girl in a white mink; two other young men followed with elaborately coifed girls on their arms, all of them tipsy from intermission cocktails.
Bill hesitated as Ryan paused, glowering at the swells, seeming to disapprove of them leaving the theater early.
“Say,” laughed one in a top hat, “that Sander Cohen is a funny old character!”
“I heard some young men go into his dressing room never come out again!” said a sleepy-eyed swell in a bowler hat more seriously, voice low.
“Well, you won’t get me to one of his shows again,” said the top hat, as they strolled wobblingly off. “Mincing about like that! Constantly in the spotlight! All that makeup! Looked like a clown!”
Ryan growled audibly to himself as he glared after them. “Drunks!” He shook his head, stalking toward the alley between the theaters that led to the stage door. Bill followed, feeling a bit squiffy himself though he hadn’t had a drop today. He felt socially out of his depth with Ryan—but the whole experience exhilarated him too.
“This way, Bill,” Ryan muttered. “… Those decadent young poltroons … but it’s ever that way. Inconsequential people know only mockery—only the great understand the great…”
He rapped on the stage door, which was opened by a cigar-chewing bulldog of a man. “Well? Who is it now?”—and then his cigar dropped from his slack mouth. “Oh! Sorry, Mr. Ryan, I didn’t realize it was you, please come in sir, right this way sir, nice night ain’t it?”
What an arse kisser, Bill thought, as the man, practically curtseying, let them in. An echoing passage, and then they were backstage, standing in the wings, watching Sander Cohen. He was just finishing off his climactic number, “Hop Away to Heaven.”
Strange to see a stage show from this angle, everything looking oddly overlit, the clack of heels on the wooden stage audible, the extreme angle not showing the dancers to best effect. They seemed almost to lumber around.
And Sander Cohen was stranger still. The fading Broadway star was wearing a silvery jacket that might have seemed more natural on a Busby Berkeley dancing girl. He had matching silvery trousers with a red stripe down the side; his boots, with heels like a flamenco dancer’s, glittered too. He had a rather bulbous head, with thinning hair emphasized by a great pale swath of forehead not much helped by a spit curl, and a puckish little mustache, upturned at the ends. He did wear a surprising amount of pancake—and what seemed to be eyeliner.
Cohen was sashaying rhythmically about, singing in a jaunty tenor, spinning a silvery walking stick in his fingers. Two rows of very handsome young men and pretty girls danced in chorus patterns behind him. Cohen sang:
“If you want to hop hop hop with me
We’ll multiply like crazy
Like a couple of bunnies
Oh hop to Heaven, just hop to Heaven—with meeeeeeee!”
“Admittedly, a trivial number,” said Ryan, leaning over to whisper behind his hand to Bill, “but the public needs that sort of thing, you know, something light from time to time. Sander would like to be more serious. Artists should have their chance to work without interference. So long as it’s profitable, of course…”
Bill nodded, hoping that this blighter did have some better numbers than this rubbish. He wouldn’t have pictured Ryan listening to this prancing chap—would have thought him more the Wagner type, or maybe Tchaikovsky. But then, you never knew what kind of music a man might relax with. He’d once known a bare-fisted bruiser of a longshoreman who thought nothing of taking on three men in a bar fight—but burst into sentimental tears when he saw Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Wiping his eyes, sniffing, “Ain’t she a pip?”
The curtain rang down to a rather puny spatter of applause and went back up almost immediately so that Cohen could take several bows that no one was asking for. The dancers hurried offstage.
A gesture from Ryan, and one of the dancers lingered: a corn-fed chorus girl in a bathing suit trimmed in white fur; a great flowing spill of blond hair fell over her pink shoulders; golden bangs stuck to her forehead in a light sheen of perspiration. She was a big girl, in an Amazonian, voluptuous way, and seemed several inches taller than Ryan—but almost shrank in his presence, while her china-blue eyes grew large.
“Mr. Ryan!” Her voice was not melodious. It was rather squeakily grating, to Bill—he hoped she was a good dancer.
Ryan gazed at her benevolently—but with a hungry light in his hard eyes. Then the hunger was somehow folded away, and he seemed almost paternal—carefully reserved. “You positively glowed with talent tonight, Jasmine,” Ryan said. “Ah—allow me to present my business associate, Mr. Bill McDonagh.”
She barely glanced at Bill. “Did you really think I was good, Mr. Ryan? You could see me out there?”
“Of course, my dear. I’ve watched you dance many times. You’re always stimulating.”
“Enough for a lead? I can’t seem to get anywhere in this business, Mr. Ryan. I mean—I got here, but I can’t get any farther than the chorus. I’ve tried to talk to Sander, but he doesn’t seem interested in me. He’s so involved with his, what does he call them, his protégés…”
“A big talent like yours will pop out in good time, Jasmine, don’t you worry,” Ryan said as the curtain closed on another uncalled-for bow by Sander Cohen.
“Do you really think so, Mr. Ryan? I mean, if you wanted to—”
“In fact—” Ryan interrupted—with such authority that her voice cut off in midsqueak. “I’m going to help you—I’m going to pay for you to take elocution lessons. Your only weakness as an artist is … shall we call it vocal presentation. I took such lessons myself, once. You’ll sound differently—and people will look at you differently.”
“El-o-quew-shun! Sure, I know what that is!” She seemed a bit frustrated, though. Seemed improving her elocution wasn’t what she’d had in mind.
“I am founding … a new community,” he said, glancing about them. “In another place, some distance away. You might call it a resort—in a sense. It will take a while to complete. But, given the right dedication, you could work there—in show business. It would definitely be a new start.”
“Where will it be exactly?”
“Oh—foreign places. You know.”
“Like Bermuda?”
“Well—um, more or less. Ah, Sander!”
“Ooh, a resort, that’d be swell!” she said, walking away but looking at him as she went—so that she almost collided with Sander Cohen.
“Do excuse me, my dear,” Cohen muttered, with a forced smile. Cohen brightened when he saw Ryan, putting on a completely different aspect, beaming, one eyebrow arched. “Andrew! My dear fellow! You caught the show after all!”
“We have been standing here entranced. Allow me to introduce you to Bill McDonagh.”
“Bill, eh?” Cohen scrutinized him with sleepy eyes. “Mm—earthy!”
“Right you are,” Bill said. “Keep the ol’ feet on the ground, me.”
“And British! How charming. You know, just the other day I was saying to Noël Coward…” He went into a lengthy anecdote, much of which was lost in the buzz of the backstage bustle, but it seemed to be something about Coward’s rather embarrassing admiration for Cohen. “… one wishes he wouldn’t fawn so.”
Bill noticed that Cohen’s left eyebrow seemed permanently cocked, stuck higher than the other, never going down—as if he’d been paralyzed in a condition of irony.
“You’re a real artist, not just a cocktail wit like Noël Coward,” Ryan said, “it’s only natural the man should be overwhelmed.”
“You are too good, Andrew!”
It bothered Bill, hearing this man call Mr. Ryan by his first name. Didn’t seem right, somehow. He took a step back, feeling that Cohen was standing rather too near him.
“Andrew—can I expect you at my little opening in the Village?”
Ryan frowned. “Opening?”
“Did you not receive the invitation? I shall have to positively flay my personal assistant alive! Ha ha! I have a bit of a gallery show, at the Verlaine Club. My new obsession. An art form almost unknown in America.” Looking sleepy eyed again, he turned to explain to Bill. “It’s a tableau vivant show.”
“Ah yes,” Ryan said to Bill. “Tableau vivant. It’s a French artistic tradition—they pose people on a stage, in different ways, to represent scenes from history or drama. They stand there in costume … almost like sculptures.”
“Precisely!” Cohen crowed, clapping his hands together with delight. “Living sculptures, in a way—in this case they are representing scenes from the life of the Roman emperor Caligula.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Ryan said, frowning slightly. “Caligula. Well, well, well.”
“My protégés, such artistic courage—they stand there posed in a state of near undress in a cold room, minute after minute, as if frozen in place!” He tossed his head like a stallion and whispered, “They’re in fierce competition to please me! Oh how hard they work at it—but art calls for an agony of self-sacrifice, for submission, an inverted immolation upon its altar!”
“That’s what I admire about you, Sander,” Ryan said. “Your complete devotion to your art. No matter what anyone thinks! You are yourself completely. That’s essential to art, it seems to me. Expressing one’s true self…”
But it seemed to Bill that whatever Sander Cohen really was, it was all hidden away, even as he presented another side of himself to the world with great verve. It was like there was a scared little animal looking out of his sleepy eyes. And yet he
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