I turned to the mirror in my tiny dressing room. The midnight blue looked good. I practiced looking noir, world-weary, Twentieth Century, until I thought I had it right, and made my way backstage.
Curiosity and novelty had, as Jo promised, brought a pretty decent crowd to the lounge for its opening night. Peering out from behind the curtain, I counted twenty-nine customers in a room that could hold 40. If they liked the show they’d come back and bring their friends.
I noticed Drew in the doorway. He slid into a chair at the back, disappearing into the shadows holding his wounded arm close to his side. Hannah Karlow was there, too. You’d have thought that after a hard day on the battlefield they’d have both been ready for bed by now. I could barely see Drew, but Hannah’s worn-out face didn’t look any different than usual. She’d agreed readily to the meeting later and now she’d come early enough to get a table up front. Once again, she was by herself, drinking a glass of red wine. I was surprised by a stab of pity. I’d disliked her almost at first sight and I guessed a lot of other people felt that way, too. That made her even more alone than I was.
The piano player, Andy, was also a bartender. He was a big, bald man who stood out in a crowd. I hadn’t seen him at the clearing the day of the war games. More the indoor type, I guessed.
He was wearing a jumpsuit that was all wrong for this night’s show, but he was good enough so the half hour Jo had given us to get used to each other— he told me she’d only talked to him about it late that afternoon— was almost enough. We’d run through some songs together. I’d asked him if he had anything period to wear next time, one of those suits or a tuxedo or something, and he’d looked at me like I’d asked him to drink from a dead-pond. I shrugged and smiled to show that it didn’t really matter, and he relaxed.
To my relief he was a good musician, knew several of the songs, and picked up the others quickly from the sheet music and by ear, so I was happy enough to go with the yellow jump that made him look like a big round piece of bald lemon candy.
Because this was opening night, Jo had said she’d do the introductions. And there she was, suddenly, striding toward the stage, lace collar and cuffs, purple knickers. She got the crowd’s attention by walking in; she didn’t have to quiet them when she jumped up onto the stage wearing a wider, friendlier smile than I’d seen before. Jo liked an audience.
The intro was short and sweet, just like Jo herself.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome you on behalf of the Coleman family to the new Blackjack lounge.” Hannah Karlow applauded, and the others joined in. Jo held up her hands.
“You’re going to love what we have for you. Andy Woolly, at the piano— a lot of you know him from the bar.” Laughter and enthusiastic applause all around. “And a really exciting talent, first time in Tahoe— Rica Marin!” She waved me onto the stage and hopped down. The crowd, again led by Hannah, applauded, but only politely this time. After all, they might not like me. They didn’t know yet. Jo had stopped at the door and was standing there watching, her arms folded across her pretty ruffled chest, making me feel nervous.
Once I got into the first song or two, I settled down. I glided through “I’ll Be Seeing You,” slow and soft, and they loved it. All romance and tragedy for the next hour. Andy and I had only a couple of rough spots, a near miracle considering how little rehearsal we’d had.
Sometime during “I’ll Walk Alone” I realized Jo had taken a table off to the side.
* * *
Drew, in his dark corner, finally managed to get the attention of the waiter, a new guy hired for the lounge.
“Beer,” Drew said, dropping his voice into a rougher register. “Coleman Ale. The draft.” He was old enough, and Mom let him drink beer, but for some stupid reason he wanted this waiter to think he was older. Why would he care what he thought? The waiter winked at him and went off to get the beer. What was that about? Did the guy wink at every young man who came in? Did he think Drew was interested in him? Did he know who Drew was? Did he think maybe the boss’s kid was too young to be drinking? Was the wink meant to tell Drew he was letting it slide? Or did he smell the nervous sweat oozing out of his pores? Could he tell that Drew was barely able to sit quiet in his chair waiting for Rica to come out and sing?
He’d tried to sneak away when Lizzie wasn’t looking, but of course she’d noticed, so he had to lie to her. He told her he was going to lie down for a while. He probably should have, but as Samm so often said, time for rest when I’m dead. He just wanted to watch Rica from a dark corner and hear her and build up some dreams for later. Funny thing. He usually liked dark-haired girls. Dark-haired women. Well, this was the first actual woman. Shit. This was really stupid. If Lizzie ever guessed he was in love with Rica she’d torture him or even worse, try to help.
It wasn’t that he thought she’d tell anyone. He had too much on her for that. But she’d be jabbing and poking and driving him sideways and he didn’t want even one person knowing, let alone Lizzie.
It must be almost time for the show. He made an effort to relax his neck and shoulders, trying not to feel his exhaustion, trying to find a comfortable way to hold his injured arm.
Rica was a mystery. He had this feeling, you know, this feeling that something secret was going on inside. But she made him feel good. She was tall enough for a woman but still shorter than he was. That was more important than age, wasn’t it? Her auburn hair fell in her blue eyes sometimes, eyes full of smiles and secrets. How could they hold all that?
He wanted to sit in the dark and watch her and pretend… things.
The waiter brought Drew’s glass of beer and zigzagged his way back to the bar. The place was crowded. Nearly full. Must have been 35 people there. He glanced around, trying to look sophisticated, like he did this all the time. That was when he noticed Samm, sitting right up front. Had Samm seen him come in? He didn’t think so.
This made it hard. Drew was torn. He could sit with Samm. Or he could sit back here and watch Rica, alone. He’d never done anything like this with Samm, gone to a show or a bar or anything men did. He could do it. Just get up, stroll over there all tough and slow, drop into a chair. Sit with the starriest and darkest man in Tahoe. That would be so tribal.
But if he sat with Samm, he’d have to be really careful to hide his feelings about Rica. He wasn’t sure he could do that yet. He hadn’t practiced enough. Shit.
So he just sat there. Then he resigned himself to just sitting there. Then, a couple of minutes after he’d succeeded in soothing his frustration by reminding himself that this was what he’d intended to do all along, Jo walked into the spotlight at center stage and introduced Rica, who was wearing a dress covered with blue shiny stuff that hid everything and hid nothing at all. She smiled. His throat tightened. He coughed. The crowd applauded.
“Tonight I’m going to take you all the way back, more than a hundred years, to World War Two and the middle of the Twentieth Century. A long time ago, when millions of people heard these songs, and sang them, and thought about the ones they loved.”
Drew loved her even more. He was fascinated by that war and that century. What an amazing time. So crowded, so itchy for bigger and better tech. World on a string, ass in a sling, his mother said sometimes. And romantic and violent and kind of spotty and they really thought they had everything tied down, really thought the USA was forever. He wondered: how could all those people have gone through the wars they went through, with countries swallowing countries and spitting them out again, and think that anything in their over-organized, chaotic, inefficient and smug too-big world would last? But it must have been really exciting.
Rica started singing. He hadn’t caught the name of the song, maybe she never said it, but it started with the lines, “Kiss me once, kiss me twice, kiss me once again, it’s been a long, long, time…”
He took a deep breath. The way she sang “kiss” sounded like a kiss. He felt warm. No, hot.
He leaned back, trying to find room for hims
elf in his clothes. Someone brushed past his chair, startling him.
Jo. She hadn’t seemed to notice him, just walked right by, her eyes on the stage. She glanced toward Samm, he thought, and turned, deliberately going the other way, choosing a table way over on the right side. What was that about? Had they had an argument? Not that he knew about. He focused on Rica again until her song ended. The audience clapped and cheered, warming up. She smiled, waited for the appreciation to die down, and said, “This one’s called ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’ ”
He’d heard the song somewhere, once before. Sad. Did she have tears in her eyes? They looked glittery, soft. He thought he would melt into his chair or explode, he didn’t know which. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and let them drift over to Jo, and then to Samm.
Both completely engrossed, very still. The three of them made a triangle, Samm at the front, Jo at the side, Drew at the back. Each of them alone, and, it seemed, deliberately alone.
A triangle? Were they all there for the same reason? No. Couldn’t be. Samm maybe. Samm was a soldier, a real man, not some drooling virgin godder. Why would he not want Rica? But Jo? She hadn’t had anyone in a long time. Didn’t seem to want to. Too much in her head. He couldn’t see her with Rica. No, there was no way Jo would be interested in Rica or Rica in Jo. Samm, maybe. Probably.
Was that better or worse? He didn’t know. The beer tasted bitter. His stomach hurt. How could he compete with Samm? Or Jo? Unless Rica liked young guys. Some older women did, he knew that. There had been that tourist from Rocky, that one time. But just the one time, because the day after, she went home again.
He was disappointed when the show ended. And burned when he saw Samm stand up and pull out a chair at his table for Rica, even though he hadn’t planned on doing that himself. He glanced at Jo. She was watching, just like he was. He shoved his chair back, nearly tipping it over, and left the lounge.
* * *
No doubt about it, Jo thought, Rica looked good and sounded good, and she knew how to deliver a song. It took an actor to do that so well.
Which worried Jo. Rica could be concealing anything. What that anything might be, Jo couldn’t even begin to guess and she was probably wasting mental fuel thinking about it. She was just here to check out the performance. Beyond that, she needed all the focus she could muster and she didn’t want distraction. Needed to set up a real government. Needed to get the Scorsis off her back. She wanted to fight Scorsis. Especially Newt. She hadn’t had the pleasure of injuring him for many years, and she’d always regretted not hurting him more than she had.
Rica was an impulse she needed to control. She didn’t have time to be sitting here watching this beautiful woman sing, and having paranoid fantasies about that woman at the same time. Or any kind of fantasies, for that matter.
And Samm! What was he doing here? He was supposed to be dealing poker. Sitting up in front, too. And Drew, for god’s sake. She’d pretended she hadn’t seen him, huddled back there in the dark, where she’d been thinking of sitting. Let him think no one noticed he was there, let him have the last of his adolescence without adult interference. He’d be an adult soon enough.
What kind of adult? She didn’t see him as a soldier, even if he thought he wanted to do that now. He was so much like his mother. A thinker. A governor. Jo was beginning to see Lizzie as a more likely successor to Samm, if they ever needed one, than Drew would be. If she could calm down a little.
Her eyes wandered around the room, catching the excitement of the audience, and focused again on Rica, singing about sadness and love up there on the stage. The hell with sadness. The hell with love. Love hadn’t worked for her and sadness was just plain useless.
She had more important things to do. Sometimes she wished it were all over now. That she could use her power base in Tahoe to go for all of Sierra and Redwood.
But they’d barely begun. They could run into some heavy opposition if they weren’t careful. She didn’t want to alarm the Sierra Council and end up having to take on the guard. The elections next month were key. If she could get a couple more of her own elected to the council, and turn the chief, as she thought she could, the people she had inside now thought Sierra would fall to Coleman power easily enough. All of it could be done peacefully. If she had to shed some Scorsi blood to get to the peaceful part, well, that was a shame.
Then came Redwood. She would show them that they needed protection from Rocky, and that Sierra was their buffer. It shouldn’t be hard to do; no one liked Rocky, with its lurking spies and self-righteous tourists. She was convinced that the country to the east would be a danger someday soon. And the offer of cheap vax would buy a lot of support among Redwooders who didn’t believe in the Rocky threat.
She and Judith would organize everything, end the chaos. Build a big, strong country. No more messy little bits and pieces. No more vax black market, no more poison or provincial ignorance. Like it used to be, only smarter.
People were the hard part. Samm was an icon, but like so many icons, he was vain and impatient. Judith was careful, more careful, sometimes, than Jo thought was necessary. Drew? Soon. Lizzie? Eventually. Who else? Her eyes followed her thoughts back to Rica. Too clever to be working as a server, even as a server-entertainer. The brain and spirit she saw there were wildly attractive, but she didn’t trust it.
And that was why she had one of her spies checking up on her.
Jo smiled to herself again. If nothing else, it always paid to know whatever you could about a woman you thought you might want. Sometimes she wondered which she enjoyed more: chasing political power or pursuing a lover. It was a great game either way.
Rica had finished her war medley and was singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Why can’t you fly over the rainbow, pretty Rica? Maybe you can. Amazing. She made even that ancient warhorse sound like a torch song. Who was this woman torching for, anyway? Truly, if this was all an act, she was capable of any kind of deception.
And Jo had no time for this!
At the end of the set, Rica took her bows and accepted Samm’s invitation to join him at his table. Jo glanced back, toward the table where Drew sat. He was watching Rica with Samm, she thought, but it was too dark in that corner to see his face. She guessed it was not wearing an expression of benign interest, of admiration for the handsome couple. Or maybe that was just her own mood. No, it was his, too. He lurched to his feet, nearly breaking the chair. Leaving.
Jo wasn’t about to do that.
* * *
I was a hit. The applause got less and less polite through the show and more and more enthusiastic. I even saw tears glittering in the eyes of an old woman sitting up front. The crowd was clapping wildly; I heard a sharp whistle or two. Hannah stood, still applauding, and like a wave rising, the rest of the room followed suit. Jo was smiling broadly, nodding at me.
Someone yelled encore and I obliged. I sang two more songs before they’d let me quit.
When the crowd began to wander back out to the casino, Hannah stood. Tall. Maybe six feet. The wiry body, the long white scar, the ready way she held herself. She looked like a hard-driven merc to me. She caught my eye and grinned. I glared back at her and she just kept grinning. The moment of pity I’d felt earlier was irretrievable, and I thought its passing was probably a good thing.
Was she or was she not going to out me with the Colemans? She hadn’t so far, unless they were playing some unfathomable game with me. I intended to find out later that night in the parking lot.
Right now, though, there was Samm. I was about to have a chance to talk to him over a drink. If Hannah had so much as hinted to him that I needed to be watched, I should be able to see the suspicion in his behavior. And if that was not an issue, he might trust me enough to tell me something useful about the Colemans. How should I approach our conversation? The open-ended personal question, after the introductory chat? Of course I’d done this kind of thing a thousand times before, looking for information. Women sometimes saw t
hrough my fiery, fascinating-and-yet-attentive-redhead act; men usually wanted to believe it. But this man seemed sharper than most, more watchful. I joined him at his table.
“Great performance, Rica.”
“Thanks, Samm.” I took the chair he offered. We both sat. “I was so happy to see a good crowd here. Hope I don’t chase them away.” I laughed. Modest, humorous yet begging for reassurance, compassion. People tend to trust and like those they can reassure, those who ask for support. I learned that a long time ago, the honest way, by needing and asking.
His strong face relaxed, the lines around his mouth softening. “The place was full, Rica. Not an empty table that I could see. You pulled in a crowd, and they love you. The room might end up being too small.”
I gave him a warm smile. It wasn’t hard to do.
Samm didn’t look suspicious, not at all. I asked him a few inconsequential questions: how long have you known the Colemans, how many nights a week do you work the poker table, how long have you been doing it, that kind of thing. I was just about to segue into some deeper chat about the casino, the Colemans, find a way to mention Hannah, when we were interrupted by a soft dark voice saying hello.
Jo. Damn. But didn’t she look good. Samm didn’t invite her to sit but I realized that if I didn’t she’d think I was after Samm. Or worse, wanted to talk to him alone. I couldn’t let her believe either of those things.
“Sit down, Jo. Join us. I can’t stay long anyway.” It was true. I needed to get back to the restaurant for my second shift. She pulled up a chair. Okay, maybe I could learn something by playing them off against each other. Make it look like a double flirtation, no problem there, and get to know more about each of them in the process. Maybe even set up a tiny rivalry that could open someone up. Put someone off guard. I wondered if Jo was ever off guard. Probably not.
Then I had a truly uncomfortable thought: were these two doing this deliberately? Working together to find out more about me? Oh, hell, that was just stupid. They had no reason to do that. Too elaborate. All they had to do was say, “Why were you spying on the war games?”
Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy Page 15
