The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  Another man, handsome, taller and far more powerful-looking than Helpman, strode up to us in an overly tight pair of white tights and a loose black T-shirt with the word ‘IF?’ emblazoned across the chest.

  “What is this I hear for Thousand Island dressing? I love the Thousand Island!”

  “Oh, Bruno, shhh.”

  Mocha seemed disproportionately annoyed now. It was a sad thing to see the mischief scarper.

  “Roy, this is my dance partner, Bruno Lermentov. He’s from Slobokia.”

  “Is that a real country?”

  “Ahh, of course, of course! Very nice to meet you, Mr. Roy,” Bruno said, all odd eastern European twang, shaking my hand with a surprisingly strong grip that made my bones creak. Then he leaned in close, glittery eyes beneath a brunette fringe. “Am I not magnificent?”

  “Sorry. It’s a bit of a madhouse.”

  We were in a reasonably large dressing room that Mocha scored for herself. It even had her name on the door — my dream.

  One wall was naked brickwork and opposite that a huge mirror sat above a dresser. Light bulbs surrounded the looking glass and a clothesline dangled across it just above head-height, holding an assortment of undergarments and jewellery.

  Below, the dresser was jammed with powders, creams, rouge, lipsticks, brushes and other bric-à-brac I had no hope of recognizing.

  “D’you mean it’s a madhouse right here or the ballet company in general?”

  “Both?” Mocha giggled.

  I barely recognized the woman.

  She’d changed into a sequined leotard with a wide, frilly tutu, while on her face she’d slapped a thick layer of white greasepaint, black eyeliner and ridiculously long false lashes. An ostrich-feather headpiece up top set it all off. Her midriff above the tutu was bare — a narrow, muscled thing that had absolutely no excess puppy fat. This was difficult to keep my hands off.

  At that particular moment Mocha was grinding her feet in a small wooden box on the ground.

  “Kitty litter?” I asked from my crap fold-up captain’s chair by the door.

  “Ha-Ha. No. This is ballet rosin, a powder resin we rub our toes and heels in to avoid slippage.”

  “Oh, I get it — a fancy version of the blue chalk we use on billiard cues for a game of pool.”

  “Mmm.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by her tone there.

  “Anyway, I have a performance. I’ve reserved a seat for you in the wings.” She stepped out of the tray and pushed a ticket into my hands. “I’ll see you after?”

  “Sure. Might do a spot of snooping.”

  “If you’re hungry — well, you’ll have to pop out for something. There’s a half-decent restaurant next door called The Archers, so try that. None of the other dancers have anything decent except rabbit food, and since he took over I’m certain Murray is trying to starve us all to death.”

  “How long’s he been in charge?”

  “Two months, ever since Pat Hingle’s terrible accident.”

  “In what way terrible?”

  “She was found in the loo — disembowelled, stabbed multiple times, and hung from a doorframe with her own tights.”

  “You call that an accident?”

  “The police did. Anyway, I can’t complain. Pat tended to ignore me, but once Murray took over he gave me the promotion.”

  The woman placed her arms in an ‘L’ position — the left one out straight beside her, the right pointed my way, and then she pirouetted on one leg several times, so swiftly her body became a blur. When she finished the rotation she struck a pose with her arms crossed low in front and one foot forward.

  “Bras Croisé,” she announced.

  I couldn’t help myself — I gave a healthy round of applause.

  Mocha winked at me. “Warm up.” Her gaze whipped over to a digital clock half hidden behind paraphernalia on that crowded dresser. “Gotta go, Roy — duty calls. Ciao!”

  About three hours later, after countless curtain calls and once the orchestra had packed up and the audience piled out, Mocha came to find me in the right wing seats. She was still dolled-up, but had wrapped herself in a bland cream woolen cardigan and had her ostrich feathers at a jaunty angle. Surprisingly her makeup had held together okay. She also looked sweaty, and the complete package was sexy.

  “So — what did you think of Le Corsaire?” she asked as she flopped next to me and stuck her pointe shoes on the chair in front. “I presumed you might enjoy it since there’re pirates tucked away in the faintly ridiculous plot.”

  I glanced at her. “Honest answer?”

  “Go on.”

  “I dozed through most of it.”

  “And I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on me.”

  “I had my leftie half-open.”

  “Does that count?”

  “In my book, yep. Quite the struggle.”

  “Did you find any typewriters?”

  “Forgot to bring my magnifying glass. Bring me up to speed on the yarn behind the ballet.”

  “There really isn’t one. Remember I said it was faintly ridiculous?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s the performance that matters. Kind of.”

  “Right.” I rubbed my face and peered around the empty auditorium. “Big place. How many people does it hold?”

  “A thousand at capacity.”

  “How many were here today.”

  “A thousand.”

  Mocha stood then and took my hand, which surprised me. I allowed her to lead me away from the comfy chair to a small set of stairs, and then up onto the stage.

  Some of the spots high above still glowed, but the arena and its ramshackle sets created a dark forest effect that looked vaguely menacing — in a wire clothes hanger and papier-mâché way.

  “Don’t you get stage-fright in front of all those gawking plebs out there?”

  “Sometimes my heart is in my stomach. Other times, I don’t care. They’re going to be building a larger theatre next door — it’s going to hold five times as many people, apparently. Scary.”

  “Ballet is that popular?”

  “I didn’t think so, but I don’t make these decisions. An audience of five thousand is too big — can you see the dancers at all from the back pews? Next up, they’ll erect video screens in the rear for those people — which means they might as well save their money and enjoy the spectacle on a telly at home.”

  I decided on the spot the girl was cute when she soapboxed.

  “How long’ve you been prancing partners with Bruno the Magnificent?”

  “Ouch.”

  Mocha slid off the humdrum cardigan and watched it fall to the boards.

  “You make us sound like some kind of glitzy ballroom dancing duo. We’ve been together a month, since I was elevated to principal. Bruno was Neve’s partner before that.”

  “Bound to make waves.”

  “A drop in the ocean.” Mocha smiled.

  “So no death notes in your locker this afternoon?”

  “Nothing. But we’ve only been here half a day. Rome wasn’t built in twice that.”

  “Neither was my attention span. How long did it take to build Rome?”

  “I don’t remember them teaching us — we learned only the idiom.”

  “That figures.”

  I gazed up at the pulleys and ropes, lights and wire several dozen metres above, at the same time that I stretched the muscles in my back.

  “Before you became a principal dancer you were one of those background people?”

  “A member of the corps de ballet? Yep.”

  “What’s the wire on them? Any grumpsters amongst that lot?”

  “People annoyed by my promotion? I don’t know. Haven’t thought to take a survey.” Perhaps feeling guilty, the girl picked up her cardigan and hung it on a small faux rock.

  “When were you upped to prima?”

  “Five weeks ago.”

  “When did the fan ma
il begin?”

  “Five weeks ago.”

  I looked at her. “The same day you were promoted?”

  “Yep — that was the night I received the one in the locker. After that they’ve been hand-delivered by the arsehole to my apartment.”

  “Before or after the announcement?”

  “Which one?” Mocha was confused.

  “The announcement about your upgrade — promotion.”

  “God, I don’t know. It was ages ago.”

  “Try to remember.”

  Mocha frowned and her eyes darted about as she searched her memory. It seemed to be a losing battle, but then the girl parted her cherry-red lips and stared at me.

  “Before? Crap — yes. You’re right. It was before. We had a matinée performance of The Sleeping Beauty. Neve was Aurora, Bruno the Prince and I was the Lilac Fairy. Neve was so beautiful, Roy. I’d never, ever seen anyone dance Aurora so—”

  I cleared my throat. “The letter, Mocha.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The letter in the locker.”

  “Oh! Yes, sorry. After the performance ended I brushed out my hair, had a shower, got changed to go to the company fundraiser upstairs that evening — that was where the announcement about my promotion was to be made. I found the letter beforehand, squeezed into my locker through the grille.”

  “You weren’t concerned?”

  “I didn’t take the thing seriously, wasn’t sure if it was a joke or some silly stalker’s handiwork. I didn’t have the time to fret.”

  “Who knew you were being promoted?”

  I was thinking of either Bruno the Magnificent or Neve, the forced retiree.

  Incriminating ballet shoes best fit the two of them. Frankly, nothing would make me happier than to pin the wrong number tag on the guy who’d crushed my fingers — they still ached.

  “Did Bruno or Neve know about the promotion?” I added.

  “No. Well, I’m pretty sure no. Even I didn’t know until the announcement was made. I spotted Neve’s face straight after — she was horrified, but she also looked shocked. The woman played a wonderful Aurora, but she’s not that great an actress.”

  “Bruno?”

  “Off chasing tutu. He’d slipped out straight after the encore to catch a flight to Sydney. Some dancer up there he has his hands all over.”

  I breathed out loudly and looked around us. We were alone. I never realized a theatre would be so eerie when no one was in it.

  “When is this place closed up for the night?”

  “The theatre? They’ll be switching off the lights in an hour or two.”

  “Do they object to people hanging round like we are now?”

  “Usually it’s okay.”

  “So security is lax. People come, people go.”

  “I never gave it much thought. Yes.”

  After testing its stability I sat down on a prop representing an anchor. “The key is the typewriter, but I doubt we’ll find that here. You’d hear a manual a mile off.”

  “We can’t exactly ransack people’s homes.”

  “Who says? Art does it all the time.”

  “And you?”

  “The only ransacking I ever did was my older brother’s room, looking for his chocolate stash.”

  I performed the usual head scratch.

  “Let’s go back a way. Who would have known before the announcement? Who decides these things? And had the time to whiz home, type up the note on their fancy antique typewriter that probably needed to be oiled down beforehand, and then get back here — all this before the party — to make a letter drop?”

  We glanced at each other.

  “Helpman.”

  Straight after, I was seeing stars.

  Something damnably hard had hammered me from behind across the back of my skull, knocked me right off the anchor, and I lay on my face on the stage. The pain was excruciating and I thought I’d pass out — but didn’t. I held on for dear life, since I knew life was probably something give or take in that moment.

  It took a while to pull myself to my hands and knees, idiotic notions of protecting Mocha flying bat-crazy across my senses. I had to wait longer still to clearly see anything.

  When I finally did, there was a sprinkling of blood on the floorboards around me — mine? Mocha’s?

  Velveteen stage curtains hung nearby and I used them to pull myself to my feet. I felt woozy and things threatened to bank sideways, but at least they’d stopped spinning.

  Bruno the Magnificent stood a few metres away at the edge of the orchestra pit, a glassy look on his face as he watched me totter.

  “You?” I said.

  The dancer peered down at his right hand.

  There was an iron weight there, something heavy enough to have been the object that whacked me — and, in fact, there was hair and a tuft of scalp attached to it, but the hair was the wrong colour.

  It was black instead of my brown.

  A thick trickle of blood from his hairline coursed down the Slobokian’s face.

  “It fell on my head, yet!” he declared of the metal weight, holding it aloft for conjecture, and then he collapsed sideways with a loud thud.

  “A wonderful dancer, but in all other respects a cretin.”

  The theatre director, Helpman, came around the corner of a towering prop of the pirate ship the anchor belonged to. This newcomer kicked Bruno’s body, which remained still, and he smiled.

  “All that gutter English and poorly pronounced nonsense. Perhaps I should have bludgeoned him earlier?”

  “Then you’re the one that slugged me.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Where’s Mocha?”

  My skull puttered as I again fell to my knees. Yes, concern had come to bat, and I also decided I had to play for time — weak sister I might’ve been, but at the current moment I was in no state to put up half-decent resistance.

  Time. I needed time. For a miracle to happen.

  “And a fine question that is,” Helpman nattered — like all good villains should, wasting precious seconds. “I thought she would be with you. Where has the girl got to?”

  The man glanced about, displaying a relatively minor sense of unease.

  If she’d taken a powder, good for her. Lot less to worry about. But I still needed the time I talked up, and clarity — p’raps I could even convince him to tip his mitt, for all the good that’d do me. Curiosity always was my weak point.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “This depends, does it not?”

  “On what exactly?”

  “On the question, of course.”

  “Well, okay, whatever. Yeah.” I shook my head. My vision was blurring again, but I kept to the chase like Art used to tell me about. “Anyway, d’you happen to have a manual typewriter?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Does it get stuck on its ‘L’s?”

  “Ahh. I see where you’re taking this, Roger.”

  “Roy.”

  “I don’t think your name is something you need to worry about ever again.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that. But one thing I don’t get — you’re the one who sent Mocha those crazy notes.”

  “Hands up, guilty parties!” Helpman raised five fingers into the air and he laughed in a mad, unnerving kind of way.

  “Funny. Why? You promoted her to principal ballerina.”

  That killed the laughter.

  “Dancer. Good Lord, nobody says ‘ballerina’ anymore.”

  “Dancer. Same question.”

  Helpman raised both arms now, outstretching them toward the empty seats of the theatre.

  “Great agony of body and spirit can only be achieved by a great impression of simplicity!” he declared with a booming voice — either clearly insane or up for a bit of ham acting.

  As I studied the palooka I also felt more than a little confused, and was pretty certain this wasn’t concussion-related.

  “I think you want to word that the other way ro
und, mate,” I decided.

  “And who, pray tell, is the artistic director here?”

  “I doubt you are. You strike me as more a professional nutjob.”

  “Oh, ho!” Helpman chuckled, without genuine mirth. “Do get these giddy expressions off your chest, before I crack your head wide open.”

  “No, I’ve got a better idea.”

  “You do?”

  Time was working its little magic. I could see better and my head didn’t feel like it had quite so many trolls tap-dancing about.

  “Yeah, I do — let’s bite the bullet here and now. You’re going to kill me, so let’s be upfront. I’m Roy Scherer and I work for a detective agency. The training wheels still haven’t been detached, but there you go. I live in a mate’s apartment, sleeping on his couch, and I have no money in the bank. My sad story in a nutshell. But Art Miller, my boss, knows I’m here and you don’t want to mess with him.”

  I wiped the back of my head. It was wet. When I put my hand in front of my face, it was covered with sticky blood. I blinked a few times, feeling ill.

  “Now you,” I muttered. “What’s your real name? I know Helpman is a sham.”

  “And why should I bother going into such detail?”

  “Why not?”

  He smiled. “Pathetic. My name is Ivan Boleslawsky.”

  “Okay. Never remember that. And your caper?”

  “If you’re asking me what this is about, you ought to direct the question to Mocha’s mother. Mocha?”

  The man turned full circle on the stage.

  “Where the devil has she got to? She can’t escape. I’ve locked all the doors, and the keys are right here.” He tapped the breast pocket of his blazer.

  I felt like I was going to pass out. Not yet. “Go on,” I urged.

  “Hmm?” The man stopped looking around. “Oh yes, of course, the story! Well, many years ago, Mocha’s mother — a hack journalist, I must say — wrote a review of one of my father’s movies. Do you know the famous Ruritanian director Rudolf Boleslawsky?”

  “Nup.”

  “A great man. His cinema style was sublime, moving, and—”

  “You talked up a review.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. This film ‘review’ was first published in The Age newspaper here in Melbourne. That would have been damaging enough, but the harpy syndicated the piece to The Independent in England and The New York Times in America. It even appeared in the esteemed Ruritanian Gazette. That five hundred-word critique destroyed my father’s career and broke his heart — a year later he tried to drown my mother in the kitchen sink and was then committed to a mental institution. I was sixteen years old. It was a humiliating experience.”