by Bruce Barber
Jon-Clod, I see you’ve found your true calling at last!”
Keyes laughed. O’Reilly was high as the proverbial kite and hadn’t yet had a thing to drink.
“Publican! A jug o’ punch!”
Bruno understood this to mean O’Reilly wanted his usual. He set up a shot of Bushmill’s and drew a pint of Guinness to go beside it.
“There you go, Seamus,” Bruno said. “It went well, then?”
There was no answer until the whiskey and a long draft of beer had disappeared down the Irishman’s gullet.
“There were many bravos, Bruno – bravos and bravos and arcibravos.”
“Congratulations,” Bruno said. “I wish I could have been there. That one’s on the house.”
“Grammercy, noble sir...”
Keyes was so entertained by O’Reilly that he missed Sandra’s entrance. When he did see her, she was established at the great man’s elbow but was playing her presence down in deference to his success that evening as Prospero. It was unlikely that O’Reilly would play the role again, age and politics being what they were. Like all good actors, Sandra knew when not to call attention to herself. It must have taken every ounce of her talent and skill, dressed as she was.
Sandra had chosen to come to the party as Othello, in blackface and outrageous drag. Her costume was gold brocade above and lavender tights below. Her hair was hidden by a jewel-studded turban. She wore an elaborate earring, and only one. She was carrying a rapier on harnesses at her waist and sporting a superb codpiece.
Beside Sandra, in a pale and nearly transparent nightdress, was someone playing Desdemona to Sandra’s Moor, someone who had to be Grace, although Keyes did not recognize her at first. She was wearing a blonde wig and was made up exquisitely. Her meagre lips were fuller; her colour was higher, richer. Her large dark eyes had been made to seem larger and darker. Most remarkable of all was her figure, which Keyes had never before noticed because of the tackiness of her daily dress. Now, in the soft, flowing gown of Desdemona’s death scene, Grace’s body was revealed.
“Is that Grace?” Bruno whispered across the bar to Keyes.
“I think it has to be.”
“She’s a stunner.”
Keyes nodded. “She certainly is. Amazing what a wig can do.”
“Sure, Claude... a wig.”
Keyes looked again at Sandra. There was nothing in her face tonight to suggest the anxiety and pain that had marked it during their last encounter. If Sandra was feeling any remorse, it didn’t show. It didn’t show at all.
The magnificent turbaned head turned. Sandra caught Keyes studying her. There was a flash of recognition in her eyes, a blaze of terrible understanding, but the expression on the dark face did not change. Sandra looked hard at Keyes, then looked through him.
He wondered how she would deal with him, now that she was, in a sense, in his debt.
“There are two kinds of friends,” O’Reilly had often said, “Those who would hide you from the police if you were in a jam, and those who wouldn’t.”
Both Sandra and Keyes had heard him say it, and both of them had admitted to agreeing with him.
She’ll count on that, Keyes thought, but the power has shifted.
“She no longer has it,” he muttered to the still untasted beer which the clown nose had made him eligible to purchase.
“You’re not talking about me, I hope,” said a woman seated on the stool next to his. He hadn’t noticed her before, but now remembered her vaguely from the old days. He couldn’t recall her name, only that she worked on costumes – dyeing or sewing or embroidering.
“No, madam, not about you,” Keyes said. “l was talking about a woman who only loves her slaves.”
When Keyes looked again across the bar, Sandra had turned away to speak to Grace. Keyes saw Sandra again that evening, but only from a distance.
A corner had been cleared in the back of the pub where instruments and amplification equipment had been arranged, and the band was beginning to tune up. There was a nudge at Keyes’ elbow, and he turned to find a white rose at his side, or rather, Betty Beardsley in a white-rose suit. “I hope those people are going to play something decent!” she said.
“You’d best watch out, Betty,” Keyes said. “someone will be trying to water you!”
She raised a glass of Scotch to her lips. “I’m looking after that myself,” she said loftily. “Very attractive nose, Claude.”
The musicians began a jazzy city-blues number, and Keyes saw that the vocals were done by three women outfitted as Roaring Twenties flappers: Smoke, Mirrors, and the barmaid Julia crooned a Billie Holiday song about losing a man, but did so with such wide grins on their lovely faces that everyone knew whose loss it really was.
Later in the evening, Hobart Porliss took a turn at the microphone, and gave an astonishing rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Although Keyes was exercising a certain amount of moderation, he found it necessary to make a trip to the washroom. He was drinking beer, which always had that effect on him. When he reached the latrines, he found himself standing beside George Brocken.
“Having fun, Claude?” Brocken asked as he buttoned the fly of his tuxedo trousers.
“Yes, George,” he said, then, with much more conviction, “yes, I am.”
The crowd was dense when Keyes returned to the bar. His place had been taken by three people: someone dressed as a doctor, in a white coat with a stethoscope about his neck, and two Charlie Chaplins.
“Sorry,” Keyes said, squeezing in beside them. The Little Tramp closest to him, he discovered not unpleasantly, was a woman.
“Make yourself at home,” she said amiably enough.
Keyes waved at Bruno.
“Where have you been?” the bartender said. “We were looking for you.”
“Where do you think I’ve been? I need another beer.”
“Coming up, but first there’s this.” Bruno handed a plain brown envelope across the buxom Chaplin to Keyes.
“A summons?”
“Open it, Bozo, and fix your nose. It’s crooked.”
“Out of joint,” Keyes muttered as he adjusted the red rubber knob.
“Open the envelope.”
Keyes was suddenly aware of a hush in the big room. He looked around. Everyone was watching him.
“What the hell is it?”
“Will you stop clowning around and open the envelope?” Bruno growled.
Keyes did as he was told. Inside the envelope there was money, most of it in small bills. There was a round of applause from the revellers.
“I don’t get it,” Keyes said.
“It’s the money from the pool,” Bruno explained. “You won it.”
“The pool?”
“The Death Pool. A hundred and five dollars. We just made the draw.”
Keyes handled the money in a gingerly fashion, as if each of the bills was covered with something nasty.
“I did it,” said a small voice, an untrained contralto, from the far end of the pub.
Not quite trusting his ears, Keyes looked down the length of the bar. Grace was standing there.
“I drew your name out of the hat,” she said.
Jean-Claude Keyes laughed nervously, then more comfortably, then loudly and for a very long time.
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
Today is December 9th – my birthday, which, I see by my calendar, I share with John Milton. I celebrated by finishing the next-to-last draft of Seamus O’Reilly’s biography, and mailing off a copy to him in Stratford; I can hear him screaming his protests from here...
I also seem to have quit smoking, for now. At least it will keep me from making another New Year’s resolution that I’d only break anyway.
The Stratford police department finally revealed in today’s paper that Alan Wales died from a stab wound, but other than that they have made no progress toward apprehending the killer. I suspect that Wales’ murder will go down in their files as unsolved.
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(5:4) Stratford, deep winter
Soon after the closing party, Keyes had returned to Toronto. He spent a lonely Christmas there, and saw the New Year in with nobody to keep him company but the folks in his record collection – blues singers, most of them. Despite his solitude he kept his drinking to a reasonable level; because of it he did a great deal of work.
In the middle of January, however, he found it necessary to board the train for Stratford once again. He had two reasons for making this trip. The first was to get Seamus O’Reilly’s emendations to the penultimate draft of his biography. The second was to celebrate the old actor’s birthday, which was January 15th – the Ides of January, as O’Reilly insisted on calling it. No one knew just how old O’Reilly was. Keyes knew he was perhaps a decade older than the fifty-eight he claimed to be.
There had been little news from Stratford since November, and Keyes was content to let the macabre events of that gloomy month slip away behind him into what O’Reilly liked to call the “Mists of Time.” Keyes had carried away no souvenirs from his visit to the Festival City, nothing to remind him of his stay there – nothing, that is, except the money he had won in the pool.
He hadn’t spent the money, hadn’t been able to bring himself even to touch it. The brown envelope lay at the bottom of a desk drawer along with lots of other envelopes.
For reasons that he didn’t quite understand, or particularly want to understand, he thought several times of giving the money to Kiri Ellison. He even tried to find out her address, so that he could send it to her.
“Maybe she can buy herself a new dress for the next time she goes to the theatre,” he told himself in an
