by Bruce Barber
things got hectic.
A rehearsal hall on the top level of the Festival theatre had been taken over for the Ricardo Cabaret. The cavernous room was dominated by a replica of the main thrust-stage, on which the actors could practice their paces. Tonight however, the mock stage was to host a variety of musical groups, skits, and speeches; part of the area in front of the stage was bare, to serve as a dance floor, and small tables were dotted elsewhere, complete with chequered table-cloths and candles stuck in wine bottles. A bar and hors d’oeuvres table guarded the entrance doors.
The function did not begin until 10:30 p.m., since most of the company and crew could not attend until the evening performances were over, but special permits and dispensations had been sought out in order that it could continue until the early hours of the morning. Keyes arrived at about midnight and the room was nearly full to capacity. Many in the crowd had not even bothered to remove their stage make-up. One of the bands was in full swing, playing aggressive and loud rock and roll. Keyes grinned to himself, thinking of Betty – this music would drive her crazy, and she would probably spend half the night trying to get somebody to turn down the volume.
Keyes wanted to talk to George Brocken. In fact he felt he had to talk to him. The costume drawing he had seen at Smoke and Mirrors had worked strangely on his imagination since he saw it. The drawing suggested... he didn’t quite know what. He had to talk to Brocken.
At first he had trouble finding the designer.
“Have you seen George Brocken?” he asked Hobart Porliss as the plump director waddled past.
“George? Oh yes, frequently.” And then he was gone, lost from view in the midst of a crowd of boozy thespians.
Keyes tried O’Reilly, too.
“Brocken? Over by the bar. I’m headed that way myself.”
Together Keyes and O’Reilly went to the bar. Together they had a drink. Brocken was not there.
Sandra and Grace appeared, arm in arm, and dressed almost identically, which made a very strange effect. The short jacket, long skirt, and black boots, Keyes noticed, made Sandra look like a White Russian countess. The same outfit made Grace look uncomfortable.
“I saw him earlier,” Sandra said. “Maybe he’s gone home? What do you want him for?”
“I saw a drawing of his that interested me,” Keyes explained not very candidly.
“Well, if you want to buy it, don’t bother. He hates doing business, especially after hours.”
“No, it’s not that,” Keyes said. “I’m not a collector. I just wanted to ask him some questions.”
“George doesn’t really care much for answering questions, either,” Sandra observed.
Keyes spotted Betty, who was standing at the edge of the dance floor glaring at the musicians. It seemed a good idea to avoid her for the moment, as she would be in a foul mood until she had forced a change in music. There was a coffee urn near the bar, and Keyes poured himself a cup, then found an empty table in a dim corner, from where he could comfortably observe the proceedings. He watched Sandra whenever he could find her among the dancers and drinkers.
After a while, his stomach announced to him with a loud rumble that it was interested in whatever was going on over at the snack table. He found himself in a disorganized line-up,
containing acquaintances and strangers (including Betty, who had abandoned her musical crusade) temporarily bound by the primal urge of hunger. George Brocken was not among these.
“I can eat it,” said someone at Keyes’ shoulder, someone speaking with a soprano voice, or in falsetto, “but I don’t hanker after it.”
“The pickled squid?” A tenor – a lighting designer named De Soto – said, not without a hint of superiority. “Step aside then and make way for those who do.”
“Try the eggplant, love,” a contralto voice suggested from somewhere not too far away. Keyes recognized Sandra in it, but when he turned to see her, she was gone.
“And the heli skaras,” rumbled O’Reilly’s baritone.
“Lei, non troppo malo lei stesso,” an actress wearing fringe and little else playfully replied in pidgin Italian to something whispered into her ear by song-and-dance man Caspar Sax.
“What’s that you’re saying?” O’Reilly demanded.
“Italian, apparently, isn’t your forte.”
O’Reilly growled something incomprehensible and veered off toward the bar.
Irish, Keyes supposed, although he knew none of that curious tongue himself.
“Italian isn’t my forte either,” the fringed actress confided to Sax, “but I’ve managed nicely with my smattering of it on more than one corso.”
“I saw Billy while I was in Lausanne,” the soprano said.
“What on earth is he doing in Lausanne?” asked De Soto, astonished.
“She.”
“Oh, that Billy.”
“Did you say ‘Billy’?” Sax wondered.
“Surely you remember Billy.”
“Oh yes. Bits of her, anyway...”
“Billy is the most extraordinary fund...” began Betty.
Ms. Fringe objected: “She’s large, I know, but is ‘fund’ quite fair?”
“I was going to say, fund of curious information.”
“That still sounds...”
“It was she,” Betty persisted, “who told me about Blue Whales.”
“Was that one of Alan’s nicknames?” asked De Soto.
“Whales with an ‘H,”’ Betty explained impatiently. “The male of the species, Billy claims, has a penis three metres long.”
“Three metres!” exclaimed in unison De Soto and Sax.
“Of course he keeps it hidden most of the time.”
“Sly puss!” said a person from props with what seemed to be real appreciation.
“Has anyone seen George Brocken?” Keyes managed to say before these speculations on natural history continued.
Everyone spoke at once:
“Over by the bar...”
“Talking to Hobie...”
“Is he here tonight?”
Keyes thanked them and moved on. Hobart Porliss loomed before him.
“I agree with Robin,” he was saying to Damian Pace. “Hangovers are often more interesting than the parties that bring them on.”
“Robin makes me tired,” the company’s Macbeth grumbled. “He’s perverse. He drinks too much.”
“Some of us are less exacting, dear boy, than you.”
Keyes asked his question again with results as confusing and useless as before. Then he saw O’Reilly again, talking to the Smoke and Mirrors women, whose names were actually Josephine and Francesca, and Julia, who was happily sipping drinks rather than serving them.
“I aspire...” Julia said almost soulfully.
“I know, I know!” Frankie, as she was called, sympathized.
“If only life were more like art,” Jo put in. “The great geishas...”
“Oh lord!” said O’Reilly. “For God’s sake let’s have some heli skaras, if only to stop that gob.”
He went off, ostensibly in search of the delicacy, but more likely seeking fresh Bushmill’s.
“Barbarian!” Julia good-naturedly hissed after him.
“Speaking of the East,” Jo said, perhaps to change the subject, “I had a letter from Io. Apparently she’s leaving Pavel after all.”
“At last!” Julia said. “She’s finally tired of his affairs.”
“Just tired of him, I think, or of herself with him, which is worse.”
“Io and I crossed paths,” Frankie said, “couple of years ago. She was on the arm, rather pointedly, of a short dark man with crooked teeth.”
“Really?” Jo said. “Where?”
“Would you believe Bomarzo?”
“When you were in Italy on that buying trip? There’s nothing to buy at Bomarzo.”
“I don’t pretend to work all the time when I’m away,” Frankie said.
Keyes wondered if the two shop owners weren’t suffering from the end-
of-the-season blues. It wasn’t only actors who came down with that malady when autumn came around. The whole town tended to get a little crazy.
Frankie shrugged, then frowned and finished her drink, which seemed to contain plain fruit juice.
“Anyway,” she went on, in a voice with the sound of ground glass in it, “despite my Venetian trews, Io pretended not to see me.”
“Good for her,” Julia said. “I mean, for leaving Pavel. He’s a horrid old creature. Girls half his age!”
“More like a third,” Jo said.
“‘Maidens, like moths,”’ Keyes quoted in the hope of finding a way into the conversation so he could ask about Brocken, “‘are ever caught by the glare’...”
The three women looked at him as if he had tapioca for brains.
“What?” they said. Then they went back to the unfortunate Pavel.
“It’s disgusting,” Julia said. “You’d think he’d have learned by now...”
“At Pavel’s age,” said Sandra, who materialized suddenly on the edge of their group, Grace in her shadow, “there may be nothing left to learn, except what’s taught by youth.”
“Hello, Sandra,” Keyes said. “I’m still looking for George Brocken.”
“Are you, love? That’s very tiresome for you, because he’s left already.”
“Are you sure? Hobie said...”
“Well, if he’s still here,” Sandra said as she turned grandly away, “l certainly haven’t noticed him recently.”
Keyes smiled wistfully and watched her go. Of course she hasn’t noticed him, he told himself. She can’t see anybody at parties except men she wants to flirt with, usually young men.
The band, approaching the end of a set, played at an ever more feverish pitch and rose to ever more thunderous loudness. Betty appeared before Keyes with a real berserker’s look in her eye.
“Afar
