by John Varley
The people who put the con together let her worry about it for a suitable length of time. Their thinking was that, after she'd stewed about it, she'd be ripe for an opportunity to see the rascals in jail. Enter K. C. Valentine, who just blew in from parts unknown, made contact with one of the swindle ring, and asked if they had anything going suitable to his talents. They steered me to Miranda and off I went, Junior G-Man badge in hand, armed with nothing but Friday's flat voice, stare, smile, and feet.
As it turned out, the waiting time hadn't been necessary. Revenge was the farthest thing from Miranda's mind. The sum of money in question, though large by my standards, had literally been forgotten in the madcap, dizzy fandango that qualified as a life in her circle of friends. I had to remind her that she'd been taken, then keep bringing her attention back from unknown areas as I explained that at last we had a lead in her case and that I, Friday, was the man to run it down. We had learned there really was a dishonest teller at her bank, and that he had been in cahoots with the swindlers all the time. Now we intended to catch him dead to rights, and get him to squeal, to rat out his gang of nefarious hoodlums. All she had to do to help us bring this about was to withdraw X number of shekels from her account so we could... well, by now you should be able to fill in the blanks with a story of your own.
She couldn't have been more delighted to help. Her guileless, canine eyes danced with excitement when I used words like "squeal" and "cahoots," but went a little glassy at "nefarious." So in the end it was her relentless stupidity... sorry, I meant unblemished honesty... that led her into folly again.
And so it was that I found myself walking along beside the equestrian park in the richest neighborhood in Pluto, carrying an unaccustomed amount of money, paced by a lanky conscience, and trailed by a pissed-off poodle-dog. I should have been happy, but my heart was, I admit, a bit heavy. But my wallet was about to become even heavier. These things even out.
If only she hadn't been so goddam honest.
* * *
When a felon's not engaged in his employment or maturing his felonious little plans, where do you suppose he goes?
I went to church. You have to fence the loot somewhere.
If any of you in the audience are true-believing members of the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints, better known as the Flacks, you might want to skip this next scene. The fact is, wherever you attend services, from Coronaville to Brementon and points beyond, you have found your way into a den of thieves. The chances are excellent that the fellow standing next to you, helping you hold the hymnal and bellowing "Blue Suede Shoes" off-key in a state of exalted presleyan bliss, is not somebody you'd be eager to see marry your brother or sister. He might very well be... well, somebody like me.
A lot of Flackites I've mentioned this to have a hard time believing it. As my father used to say, "Denial is more than a big river in Egypt."
All churches have their share of sinners, of course. You might say that's what they're for. You can't get very far in the redemption business without some genuine sinners. But in other churches they're not organized into a band of brothers. I doubt that most churches often see actual crimes being originated and planned at meetings in the church basement. It would surprise me to learn that stolen goods were actually being fenced on the grounds of, say, the synagogue down the lane. And aside from a little bingo and the occasional bit of buggery, Catholic churches are relatively free of crime. As for Diabolists, don't ask me. It's all veiled in secrecy.
But if it's a spot of larceny you're after, I recommend the Flackites. Every grifter I know shows up there regularly, to find out what's going down, coming off, falling together. It's where I heard about the Mayard-Tate sting, and it's where I went, swag in hand, to dispose of it.
Uncle Roy is choreographer in chief at the Main Planetary Studio, First Latitudinarian Church, Pandemonium, Phlegethon Province, Pluto. As a song-and-dance man he had been only mediocre, and he wasn't exactly setting the planet on fire now that he'd hung up his tap shoes. Busby Berkeley's ghost had nothing to fear from Roy. But he was the guy to see if buying wholesale no longer satisfied you, if what you were seeking was really deep discounts. That is, as long as what you were shopping for didn't require a legal tide, and if you didn't mind that the serial numbers had been filed off, there was no owner's manual, and the merchandise might have a few dents and scratches from falling off the back of a freightlorry.
I found him in the studio itself, sitting in the third row with his hands steepled in front of him, watching with great concentration what looked to be a final dress rehearsal. The stage was jammed with sequined chorus dancers, just a-hoofin' their little hearts out, and dazzling spotlights swept them like the fingers of angels. I paused to drink it in. When the houselights go down and the stage lights brighten, a new world is created, a world where I've spent most of my life. It's a magic trick I never grow tired of.
I recognized the show immediately as Work in Progress, the musical version of Finnegans Wake that had bombed at its opening on the Alameda in King City fifty years ago. I know it bombed, because I was there, in the part of Cromwell. ("Val Tiner turns in his usual competent performance in a production more confusing than its source material."—News Nipple) Since then Work had developed quite a cult following. I myself had revisited it only ten years earlier, this time in the lead role of Humphrey Earwicker/Joyce, ("overwrung. A charmful waterloose prixducktion, dacently gaylaboring the auld meanderthalltale from jayjay's mythink Dyoublong of farago. D'ya dismember what a mnice old mness it all mnakes? But Hark! Hark! Tray chairs fur Muster Casey Valentoon in a roustering vendition of 'Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake,' the topsiest mnoment of a quarky under-parformance. Stillanall, the shows a way a lone a last a long a little"—Arean Gazette).
The Pluto studio is one of the largest indoor proscenium theaters in the system. It seats twenty thousand, which means the cheap seats are in a different postal zone, and high enough for a nosebleed. I've been in the last row, and from that vantage you might as well be watching A Doll's House performed by a flea circus. From the stage, you can get through most of Hamlet's soliloquy before the echo of your voice reverberates the first "to be" back to your waiting ears. There's a fair chance of a rain delay on account of thunderheads forming in the fly lofts.
But not to worry. The hall is surrounded by several thousand television screens, from a few inches to twenty feet across. The people in back see just about the same show you get from front row center, from a bigger variety of camera angles.
Not my sort of house at all. Give me a three- or four-hundred seater and I'm a happy man. Let it be my own leathery lungs shouting down the rafters, or making them lean forward in dead silence to catch my whispered words.
Uncle Roy glanced over at me as I sat at the end of the row. I nodded, and he smiled briefly, then stood and started pacing rapidly back and forth at the edge of the orchestra pit, pointing at people and shouting things I couldn't hear over the thunder of the music. The conductor frowned at Roy over his shoulder, but by this time he must have learned better than to protest. He hunched his shoulders and continued to saw at the air with his big, glowing baton.
I don't know Uncle Roy's last name, nor why he's universally called uncle. There's probably a story behind it. If you hear it, let me know. I love stories like that. He's a big man who has pegged his apparent age in the late fifties, with a wrinkled face and receding hairline. He has a shock of unkempt silvery hair streaked with black, and eyes of purest newman blue. His lips are thick and rubbery, and he has a habit of chewing on the lower one when he's thinking. When he's not thinking he chews tobaccoid, certainly the least attractive retro fad in the last century, one that's finally showing signs of having outworn its welcome. Forget the occasional brown drool from the corners of one's mouth, or the necessity of carrying around a can sloshing with the vilest stuff imaginable, or the truly disgusting sight of someone spitting into it. The habit kept Roy's teeth stained an abhorrent greenish brown, like fungu
s growing on a corpse. If the smell of his mouth was any guide, the taste of it must have been unimaginable.
Like quite a few dancers I've known, as soon as Roy left the chorus line he blimped up like a satyriastic's condom, twenty, thirty kilos above his boogeying weight. He claimed it was all by design, part of his scheme to be a more physically commanding presence, the other parts being his high forehead, white hair, and wrinkled face. A director ought to have dignity. I had done a little experimenting myself, the few times I had lowered myself into the director's chair. I'd helmed productions looking like King Lear, and like Shirley Temple, and got about the same amount of respect and attention either way—which is to say, very little.
And there's this about ex-dancers: I think a lot of them are just plain tired of being human greyhounds. The girls cultivate exuberant boobs of the sort never seen jiggling beneath a tutu. A lady with a butt like two BBs suddenly lets her hips spread out, finds she has something comfortable to sit on for a change. The guys turn into the spitting image of a nineteenth-century banker: prosperous, corpulent, paunchy, chipmunk-cheeked. The reason for such a delightful word as portly. And all of them like to lounge around like neutered house cats in the sunshine, thinking about supper.
"...and five, and six and seven and EIGHT!" Uncle Roy was bellowing over the roar of the orchestra. "And lights out! Aaaaaand... curtain, curtain, applause, applause, applause... okay, stop the curtain. Houselights, please!"
From far overhead a few harsh, unshielded work lights descended on cords, cruel things no performer would ever let into his house because of the ghastly effect they had on tired, sweating people in pancake makeup. It makes us all look like the charpeople those lights were designed to aid when they descended on the spilled drinks, crumpled programs, and wilted flowers, long after the magic had retired to wherever it is magic goes between performances.
These lights revealed a stage full of people in outrageous costumes, breathing hard, some sitting down, others leaning on friends. The shadowless, sourceless light had no mercy. Gold turned to tinsel, silver to tinfoil, diamonds became rhinestones. Every chipped nail and scuffed shoe was exposed. Pearly white teeth turned out to be flaked with lipstick.
When the magic is over, it's over.
"One hour for tiffin, boys and girls," Roy said, leaping onto the plank that spanned the orchestra pit and striding confidently among his players. I followed, more slowly. "Except you, Haynes, and you, Dallman. You get to go down to the rehearsal hall and do it again, and again, and again, until you get it right three times in a row. You know the part I'm talking about." A man and a woman, presumably Haynes and Dallman, slumped off to the wings. Roy whistled loudly, looking up into the fly loft. "Mr. Lacon, if you please. If your people can't get the bar set rung off in twelve seconds tonight, I'll tie you to a rope and use you for a sandbag." There was angry shouting from on high, which I didn't understand and Roy didn't listen to. He was putting a beefy arm around my shoulders and guiding me through the bustling wings and through a door with a big star on it, labeled DIRECTOR. He slammed the door behind us, threw himself into a groaning jurist's chair, leaned back, and laced his fingers behind his head.
"So. What did you think?" he asked.
"All I saw was the Flying Dutchman number," I said. "How's your budget? Do you have elephants?"
"I've got elephants."
"Then I don't see how you can go wrong."
"Elephants? Hell, I got ten elephants. I got peacocks and horse-drawn carts, and I got horses guaranteed not to crap on anybody's tap shoes. I have a trained seal. I have thirty-seven set changes. I have three ultracopters to bring people in from the lofts, gonna land 'em right there on the stage. I have a thirty-foot pool, seventeen fountain jets, and eight gals willing to give up sex for the run of the show so we can morph them into mermaids. I got every piece of gimcrackery anybody ever thought of when they were staging this overblown turkey, and I got a guaranteed opening night sellout. I even have a chorus line that can get across the stage without tripping over either of their left feet."
He paused to draw a breath, then leaned slightly forward and spoke in a more confidential tone.
"You know what I don't have? Ask me what I don't have, Sparky."
"Leapin' lizards, Uncle Roy!" I squeaked, in my old "Sparky" voice. "What don't you have?"
He leaned over even farther.
"What I don't have is an Anna Livia Plurabelle who can reach a high C three times in a row without I shove a hot poker up her ass." He leaned back in his chair. "Which I'd be perfectly happy to do."
I tsked a few sympathetic-sounding tsks.
My sympathies for directors who miscast and then complain about it are severely limited. After all, it's usually me out there trying my best to make some pathetic hambone look good, and cursing the moment the little shit got into the mighty director's pants.
"Who is this up-and-comer?" I asked. "Was that Haynes?"
"Little Miss Drury Haynes," he confirmed. "Sparky, you know that montage in Citizen Kane, the one where the no-talent broad tries to sing grand opera and stinks up the place? That no-talent broad looks good compared to Drury Haynes. Or how about the traveling troupe in The Court of Babylon? Take the worst of those mugs and stand her up against Drury...." He finally ran out of steam. He glared down at his desk, then looked up at me again.
"I want you to ask me one more question, Sparky," he said.
"Roy..."
"Just one more. Ask me the name of the Grand Exalted Super-Flack of this particular Studio."
"Uh-oh."
"Aloysius J. Haynes is the good worthy's name, and he just couldn't be prouder of fathering little Drury, who thinks the musical theater is simply ripping, and who has wanted to be a singer and an actress just ever so long. And who has been taking singing lessons since she was three from a series of increasingly desperate voice teachers, at least three of whom can be seen this very moment sitting on filthy beds in the charity ward of Pandemonium General, gibbering to themselves, in restraints to prevent them from driving sharp objects into their ears.
"So when little Drury showed up at the auditions and the word came down that she was to be treated 'just like any other singer,' that's exactly what I did. I treated her just like any other producer's favorite daughter, and gave her the part. 'I can fix it,' I said to myself at the time. 'She'll get better.' We can mike her and cover it up. Or I can pull a Singin' in the Rain, have a real singer behind a curtain. Something. Only when I tried, she went running to daddy, of course. And the Word came down.
"And if you were still asking questions, Sparky, I'd ask you to ask me if I give a free-falling fuck anymore about the Word coming down, and you know what I'd answer? I'd say no. Because yesterday I found myself cleaning out my left ear with a very sharp pencil, and wondering what it'd feel like, and thinking it might not be half-bad. And in my dreams I see them making up the empty fourth bed in that padded ward in the giggle academy, and I see them putting me in it and murmuring 'There, there, Roy. There, there.' "
I admit my attention had drifted. Roy likes to hear himself expound, and this all had the sound of a set piece, one he'd honed on many an unsympathetic ear over the last few weeks. But now he stood up and leaned over the desk, putting his weight on his clenched fists, and he got my attention in about the only way he could have done.
"So how about it, old friend? The part's yours. Say the word."
I opened my mouth to say yes. Folks, unless you have the acting fever yourself you can't possibly know the idiotic things one will do to get a shot at a part he has never played. Or one he's already played, and knows he could do again, and better.
Or a chance to carry a gold-painted wooden spear onto the stage and shout "Caesar approaches!" to an audience of bored schoolchildren.
I am an absolute sucker for somebody who says those magic words: "You've got the part." It has got me into more hot water than yearly flows through Phlegethon, the famous River of Fire in Pandemonium Park, not three miles from
where I sat. It has made a shambles of my life, this puppy-dog-like eagerness to perform.
So I was a tenth of a second from taking the part, when I looked up and saw that Elwood had silently opened the door behind Uncle Roy just enough to stick his narrow, dour physiognomy through the crack. He was looking at me, pursing his lips in that pensive way of his, and shaking his head.
"I'm not a singer," I managed to cough.
"You're not primarily a singer, granted," Roy said. "However, we're not talking grand opera soprano here. We're talking Broadway, Sparky, we're talking musical comedy, and I don't know anybody in the system can handle that kind of part any better than you. Believe me, you're ten times the singer Drury is. I saw you—what was it, ten years ago? Fifteen?—as Mrs. Lovett. Best I ever saw, and that music is lots tougher than Work. Then there was... what was it... The Three Masks. I've never heard Mabel Parsons sung better. Swear to god, Sparky, you had me thinking Streisand."
Well. How bad could it be? I'd already done the male lead for several hundred performances; I could swot up Anna Livia's lines in a few hours' intense cramming. I'm a very quick study. I looked up to say yes...
...and Elwood was still shaking his head, no. There were frown lines on his forehead now.
"...I'm pretty much sticking to male roles these days." This was partially true. The memory of my recent painful Juliet was still fresh enough in my mind that I didn't regard a radical body shift in a short time with a lot of enthusiasm.
"Please, Sparky," he said, leaning across his desk with his hands folded. If he came across and grabbed my lapels I'd have no choice but to run like a scared rabbit. There was no other resistance I could offer.
