Presently the hissing stopped short with one final spit, there was a deep-drawn “Aaah!” of satisfaction, and a rotund coffee-colored little man in a white jacket, towering chefs cap on his head and weaving his head with satisfaction, marched out. around, and in again at the next door
Up, carrying something on a domed salver.
There was a momentary lull after that. Momentary only. Then an upheaval that made the previous clamor seem to have been golden silence, detonated. It had everything previous in it and some new additions of its own: soprano shrieks, baritone bellows, nail-head squeaks, and the deep gonghke clash of a violently thrown chafing dish cover striking the wall and rolling halfway around the room, after that giving out fractured chimes.
The small rotund man came out, fast and outraged; no longer cofifee complected but streaked with what looked like egg yolks and red peppers. His arms were going around like windmills. “This time I go back! On the next ship I go back! This time she can get down on her broken knees to me and I do not stay!”
Lombard bent slightly forward in his chair and tried stopping up his ears with the points of his pinkies, to give them a rest. After all, the human eardrum is a delicate membrane, it can stand just so much abuse and no more.
When he uncovered them again he found to his relief that the establishment had toned down once more to the state of only partial frenzy that was seemingly its norm. At least you could hear what you were thinking again. Presently the doorbell rang by way of variation instead of the telephone, and the maid admitted a dark-haired, daintily mus-tached individual who sat down and joined him in waiting. But with much less fortitude than Lombard himself was displaying. He got up again almost at once and began walking briskly back and forth, but with paces that were just a trifle too short to fit comfortably into the laps he was giving himself. Then he discovered one of the aggregations of Lombard’s sweet peas, stopped, extracted one. and put it to his nose. Lombard at this point promptly broke off all further thought of entering into diplomatic relations, even if any had been contemplated.
“Will she be ready for me soon?” the newcomer demanded of the maid on one of her flying visits. “I have a
new idea. I would like to get the feel of it between my hands before it escapes me.”
“So would I,” thought Lombard, eyeing his neck truculently.
The sweet pea smeller sat down again. Then he stood up again, with every appearance of vibrating impatiently down around the knees. “It’s leaving me,” he warned. “1 am losing it. Once it goes, I will have to go back to the old way again!” The maid fled inside with these dire tidings.
Lombard murmured half audibly, “You should have gone back to the old way long ago.”
It worked, at any rate. The maid came out again, beckoned with suppressed urgency, and he was in. Lombard swung at the sweet pea he had dropped, caught it neatly with the toe of his shoe, and kited it upv/ard with grim zest, as though doing that made him feel a lot better.
The maid came out and bent over him confidentially, to salve his impatience. “She will positively squeeze you in between him and her costume fitter. He’s hard to handle, you know.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lombard demurred, twitching his extended foot slightly and eyeing it longingly.
There was a good long lull after that. At least, comparatively. The maid only came out once or twice and the telephone only rang once or twice. Even the machine-gun Spanish only came in disconnected salvos now. The private chef who had been going back on the next ship appeared, more rotund than ever in beret, muffler, and fuzzy overcoat, but only to inquire with injured mien, “Ask if she is dining in tonight. I cannot do it myself, I am not speaking with her.”
Lombard’s predecessor emerged finally, small kit in hand, and departed. Not without detouring first and hijacking another one of the sweet peas. Lombard’s foot crept toward the receptacle that held the rest of them, as though he were aching to let him have all of them at once, but he conscientiously curbed the impulse.
The maid reappeared outside the holy of holies, an-
nounced, “The senorita will see you now.” He found, when he tried to stand up, that his legs had gone to sleep. He slapped at them fore and aft a couple of times, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs, and stepped through.
He had no more than glimpsed a figure stretched out Cleopatra-like on a chaise-longue, when a soft furry projectile of some sort shot through the air at him and landed on his shoulder with a squeaking sound. One of those same nail-on-glass squeaks that had reached him outside every now and then. He shied nervously at the impact. Something that felt like a long velvet snake coiled itself affectionately around his throat.
The figure on the chaise beamed at him, like a fond parent watching its offspring cut up. “Don’t be alarmed, seiior. Is unly little Bibi.”
Giving it a pet name was only partial reassurance as far as Lombard was concerned. He kept trying to turn his head to get a look at it, but it was too close in. He managed a grin of strained geniality, for the sake of furthering his own cause.
“I go by Bibi,” his hostess confided. “Bibi is, how you say it, my welcoam committee. If Bibi don’t like, he duck under sofa; I get rid of them queek. If Bibi like, he jomp to their neck; then is all right they stay.” She shrugged dis-armingly. “You he must like. Bibi, come down off the man’s neck,” she coaxed insincerely.
“No, let him stay, I don’t mind him in the least,” he drawled tolerantly. It would have been a faux pas of the first water, he realized, to have taken her reproach at face value. His nose had identified the encumbrance as a small monkey by now, in spite of the cologne it had been saturated with. The tail reversed, to rewind itself the other way around. He had evidently made a hit. He could feel strands of his hair being painstakingly separated and examined, as if in search of something.
The actress crowed delightedly. If anything could put her in a receptive mood, this simian seemed able to, so Lorn-
bard felt he couldn’t afford to resent the way it was getting personal with him. “Sit down,” she urged cordially. He walked rather stiffly to a chair and sank into it, careful not to disturb his head balance. He got his first good look at her. She had on a shoulder-cape of pink marabou over black velvet pajamas, each trouser leg of which was the width of a full skirt. A somewhat horrifying arrangement that looked like molten lava had been deposited on top of her head by the sweet pea fiend who had been in here before him. The maid was standing behind her fanning at it with a palm leaf as if to cool it off. “I have a minute while this sets,” the wearer explained graciously. He saw her surreptitiously consult the card he had sent up with the flowers a while ago, to remind herself of his name.
“How nice it was to get my flowers in Spanish for a change, Senor Lombard. You say you have just come up from mi tierra. We met down there?”
She had, fortunately, glided past this point before it was necessary for him to commit himself outright. Her large dark eyes took on a soulful expression, went searchingly upward toward the ceiling; she made a cushion of her hands and pressed one cheek against them. “Ah, my Buenos Aires,” she breathed, “my Buenos Aires. How I miss it! The lights of the Calle Florida shining in the even-ning—”
Not for nothing had he spent several hours poring over travel folders before coming up here. “The beach at La Plata, down by the shore,” he supplied softly, “the races at Palermo Park—”
“Don’t,” she winced. “Don’t, you make me cry.” She wasn’t just acting. Or at least she wasn’t entirely acting, he could tell. She was simply dramatizing emotions that were already there, that were basically sincere, as is the way with the theatrical temperament. “Why did I leave it, why am I opp here so far away?”
Seven thousand dollars a week and ten per cent of the show might have had something to do with it, it occurred to him, but he wisely kept that to himself.
Bibi, meanwhile, having failed to find anything that required exterminating on his scalp, lost interest, ran d
own his arm, and took a flying leap off on to the floor. It made conversation a lot easier, even though his thatch was left looking like a haystack that had been hit by a high wind. He refrained from smoothing it down lest this give offense to the pest’s mercurial mistress. She was now in as soft a mood as he could ever hope to get her into, on such short acquaintance, so he took the plunge.
“I have come to you because you are known to be as intelligent as you are talented and beautiful,” he said, laying it on with a shovel.
“It is true, nobody has ever said I am a dunce.” the celebrity admitted with refreshing unselfconsciousness, studying her fingernails.
He hitched his chair slightly forward. “You recall a number you did in last season’s show, in which you threw nosegays, little flowers, to the ladies in your audiences?”
She poised a warning finger toward the ceiling. Her eyes sparkled. “Ah, Chica Chica Boom! Si, si! You like? Wasn’t it good?” she agreed warmly.
“Perfect,” he assented, with a concealed fluctuation of his Adam’s apple. “Now one night a friend of mine—”
That was as far as he got on that try. The maid, who had just quit fanning a moment before, stepped in again. “William would like his orders for the day, sefiorita.”
“Excuse me a minute.” She turned her head toward the doorway. A stalwart individual in chauffeur’s uniform stepped forward, stood at attention. “I won’t nidd you until twelve. I go to the Coq Bleu for launch, so you be downstairs at ten to.” Then she added without any change of inflection, “And you better take that with you while you here, you left it behind.”
He stepped over to the vanity table she had indicated, removed a hammered silver cigarette case, spaded it into his pocket and stepped outside again, all with perfect nonchalance.
“It didn’t come from the five and ten, you know,” she called after him, with, it seemed to Lombard, a slight touch of asperity. Judging by the snap in her eyes, he didn’t give William much longer.
She turned back to him again, let her filaments slowly darken.
“I was saying, a friend of mine attended a performance one night with a certain woman. That is why I have come to you.”
“Ah?”
“I am trying to find her for him.”
She misunderstood. Her eyes coruscated with renewed zest. “Ah, a romance! I loave a romance!”
“I’m afraid not. It’s a matter of life and death.” As with all the rest, he was afraid to give her too many details, lest she shy away from it.
She seemed to like this even better. “Ah, a mees-tirry! I loave a mees-tirry”—she shrugged—“as long as it don’t happen to me.”
Something suddenly stopped her dead. Apparently some calamity, judging by the effect it had. She eyed a tiny diamond studded particle on her wrist. Suddenly she had reared upright, begun snapping her fingers all over the place, like a string of firecrackers going off. The maid came running in on the fly. Lombard thought he was about to be unceremoniously dismissed, in favor of the next comer.
“You know what time is it?” the dancer said accusingly. “I don’t have told you to watch it closely? You are very careless. You nearly let it go past too far. The doctor said once itch hour, on the hour. Get the calomel—”
Before Lombard knew it, another of those seasonal typhoons that seemed to occur regularly in here, was swirling around him full blast. Machine-gun Spanish, nail-head squeaks, and the maid going around and around the room after Bibi, until Lombard felt as though he were the center pole of a carrousel.
He finally raised his own voice and added it to the din.
“Why don’t you stop short, and turn back the other way?” he shouted above the racket.
That did it. Bibi ran into the maid—and the calomel ran into Bibi.
When that was over with, and the patient was clinging forlornly to his mistress, both arms about her neck, giving her a momentary resemblance to a bearded lady, he resumed his own job.
‘i realize how hopeless it is to expect you to remember any particular individual out of that sea of faces before you each night. I realize you played six nights a week and two matinees, all season long, to packed houses—”
“I have never play to an empty house in my hull career,” she contributed, with more of her characteristic modesty. “Even a fire cannot compete with me. Once in Buenos Aires the theater start to bum. You think they left—?”
He waited until that was out of the way. “My friend and this woman were sitting in the first row, on the aisle.” He consulted something on a scrap of paper taken from his pocket. “That would be on your left, as you faced the audience. Now, the only help I can give you at all is this. She stood up in her seat, oh along about the second or third chorus of the song.”
A speculative glint flickered across her eyes. “She stood opp? While Mendoza was on stage? This interests me very much. I have never known it to happen before.” Her shapely fingers, he noticed, were beginning to claw tentatively at the velvet of her trouser leg, as if whetting themselves for reprisal. “She did not care for my singing, perhaps? She had a train to catch, perhaps?”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand,” he reassured her hastily. “Who could do that to you? No, here’s what it was. It was during the Chica Chica Boom number. You forgot to throw one of the little souvenirs to her. and she stood up to attract your attention. For just a moment or two she stood there right in front of you, and we were hoping—”
She shuttered her eyes rapidly two or three times, trying
to recapture the incident. She even poked one long finger just behind her ear, careful not to disturb the hair-do. “I see if I can remember it for you.” She obviously was doing her best. She did all the things likely to be conducive to memory quickening. She even lit a cigarette, although she was not, judging by the stiff way she handled it, an habitual smoker. She simply held it, letting it burn down in her fingers.
“No, I cannot,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I try hard. For me last season is like twenty years ago.” She shook her head morosely, clicked her tongue compassionately a couple of times.
He started to return the futile scrap of paper to his pocket, glanced at it as he did so. “Oh, and here’s another thing—although I suppose it’s no more help than the first. She had on the same hat that you did, my friend tells me. I mean a duplication of it, an exact copy.”
She straightened suddenly, as though she were on the point of getting something from that. He obviously had her whole undivided attention at last, if he hadn’t before. Her eyes narrowed speculatively. Then they glittered behind their threadlike constriction. He was almost afraid to move or breathe. Even Bibi looked at her curiously from a fur huddle on the carpet at her feet.
Suddenly it came. She stabbed her cigarette out with a single vicious lunge. She emitted a strident, macawlike cry, that wouldn’t have been out of place in a jungle. “A-a-ai! Now I remember! Now!” A flash flood of Spanish swept her off his conversational track. Finally, after a lot of eddying around, she got back onto it in English again. “That thing that stood up there! That criatura that stand in front of the hull house, in my hat, to show she is wearing it! She even stop the spotlight, clip some of it off from me! Hanh! Do I recall? You bet I recall! You think I’m going to forget a thing like that in a horry? Hanh! You don’t know Mendoza!” She snorted with such violence that Bibi gave the appearance of being swept across the floor for a distance of several feet like a dried leaf, although it was probably a scuttle for shelter under his own power.
The maid chose this most unpropitious moment to intrude. “The costumer has been waiting for some time now, senorita.”
She semaphored violently, crossing and recrossing her arms over her head. “She should keep on wetting some more! I am hstening to something I don’t like to hear!”
She climbed down the chaise-longue toward Lombard, balancing on one bent knee over the lower end of it. She even seemed to regard her own overheated state of mind as a prideful accomplis
hment. She flung out her arms to show him, then tapped herself like a woodpecker on the chest. “Look how I get! Look how angry it still make me, even sotch a long time after! Look what it do!”
After which she rose to her feet, squeezed herself tightly around the waist with both arms in a belligerent embrace, as if holding herself in, and began to stalk back and forth, turning at the end of each short heat with a great fanning out of her wide trouser bottoms. Bibi crouched in a far corner, head bowed in desolation and his skinny arms flung up over it.
“And what you want her for, you and this friend of yours?” she demanded suddenly. “You haven’t told me yet!”
He could tell by her challenging inflection that if it was anything that had to do with making the style pirate happy, he wasn’t going to get any help from Mendoza, even if she had been in a position to give it. He wisely marshaled the facts in such a way that her purpose would swing over to coincide with his, even though both had not quite the same end in view. “He is in serious trouble, believe me, seniorita. I won’t bore you with the details, but she is the only one who can get him out of it. He has to prove that he was with her that night, and not where they say he was. He only met her that night; we don’t know her name, we don’t know where she lives, we don’t know anything about her. That's why we’re looking high and low—”
He could see her mulling it over. After a moment she informed him, “I like to help you. I give anything to tell you who she is.” Then her face dropped, she spread her hands helplessly. “But I never see her before. I never see her after. I just see her stand opp like that. That’s all, I can’t tell you no more about her than that.” At least facially, she seemed to be even more disappointed than he was about it.
“Did you notice him at all, the man with her?”
Phantom lady Page 17
