The Black Angel (27 page)

I turned and slunk back toward the dressing room, and even the gown couldn't make me anything but a skinny, whipped little thing now. All those days and nights of drudgery for nothing. All those black-and-blue marks for nothing.

Each time I'd come off the floor I'd ask: “Was Mr. McKee out there tonight? Did he see me?”

Sometimes they said, “He was around before. He left just a little while ago.”

Sometimes they said, “He hasn't been here tonight yet. They expect him over a little later.”

Five nights went by like that.

The sixth night I kept the dress on after I'd come off the floor. I sat there in the dressing room in it, waiting, and when the wardrobe woman came to take it from me I said, “I'm staying in it.”

“You ain't supposed to,” she said. “I'm rissponsible for it; it's got to go away. Now gimme it here.”

“I'm staying in it awhile!” I snarled threateningly.

They all came spilling in. “Hey, what're you waiting for, an encore? The show's over; didn't you know that?”

Yes, I was waiting for an encore. Or rather a première. But not the kind they meant.

The old woman kept badgering me. “I gotta go home; gimme that dress!”

“If you want it you'll have to pull it off me piece by piece.”

The brunette stopped at the door on her way out, gave me a look. Then she changed her mind, came back a minute. “I think I get it,” she said. She gave her head a hitch toward the door. “He's out there now. He just came in before the finale.”

I acted as though I hadn't heard her, didn't move.

When the last of them had gone I got up. I warded off the old woman's shakily interfering hands and opened the door and went out. I stood there for a minute at the mouth of the dressing-room passage, looking into the club room proper. He was at a ringside table over at the left, on the other side of the bandstand. There were two men with him, the same two that were always with him.

There was a small table far back against the wall that had been recently vacated. It wasn't a very good one, but I made my way over toward it at an obtuse angle—by way of his table.

They were talking avidly as I went by.

They stopped talking on the down syllable.

“I've made it,” I said to myself.

I heard him ask in an undertone, “Who's the angel with the folded wings?”

I sat down all the way over against the wall and didn't look at anyone in the room. A couple of minutes went by. Then a light-toned shadow blotted some of the cloth's whiteness.

“Haven't I seen you before? Now please, before you answer, I know that's old, but I'm asking it in all sincerity; it's not a wisecrack.”

“I work for you here, Mr. McKee.”

“How much do I pay you?” Then before I could answer he said to someone, “Call Dolan over here a minute; is he still around?”

Dolan got there fast.

“Double this young lady's salary. By the way, what's her name?”

“Miss Alberta French.”

“What does she do?”

This time I answered. “I sit down on the floor, Mr. McKee. From where I come in, all the way across the room in a straight line, over to where I go off. Don't you remember me? I did it by mistake the first day, and now they have me doing it every night.”

Something about it made him sore. It was his own idea, but he'd forgotten that. “You did it for the last time tonight. What's the matter? Haven't they got any sense around here?”

Dolan got out of the way fast.

He said, “Come on back to my table. It isn't often that I have a chance to sit with an angel. I want everyone to see.”

He didn't waste finesse on the two men he'd been with. “All right,” he said curtly to one, and “See you around” to the other, and they both got up without delay, drifted away.

I caught something one said to the other, though, before they'd quite gone beyond earshot. “It was about due. It's been a long time now.” It wasn't said maliciously; it was said philosophically.

While we were waiting for the champagne I thought a little about Kirk. A voice penetrated my thoughts dimly. “Gee, you look so sad. I've never seen anything so lovely.” The voice of somebody or other from outside my innermost thoughts; they couldn't exactly identify who it was at the moment. I sat and thought a little about Kirk while we were waiting for the champagne.

It was excruciatingly hard to get rid of him at the door.

“Words are curious things, aren't they?” I said through the narrowing gap I'd finally achieved. “Their meanings are so often just the opposite to what you think they are. To like someone, to think a lot of someone, then, that means to force yourself on them, to make them unhappy and cause them distress, to harm them and make them ashamed. Doesn't it? I must remember; I didn't understand that until now.”

He looked down at the floor. “No,” he said almost inaudibly. And all of a sudden he was sober, penitent; all the champagne was gone.

“Good night,” I said with warm friendliness. I closed the door slowly and cut his face in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across.

After a long time I heard someone go away on the other side of it. I'd been thinking of Kirk; my innermost thoughts couldn't remember who it was for a minute. Someone outside their pale, someone out there on the other side of the door.

It was effortlessly easy to get rid of him outside the door.

“Don't stand there looking at me like that, McKee. I have no answer for a look like that, and you know it.”

“Don't be sore at me. You're like an angel fading from view. Just smile at me once more before you close it. Is that asking you so much, a smile through a door as you close it?”

I closed the door slowly and cut the smile in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across. After a long time I heard someone go away. I'd been thinking of Kirk; I wasn't sure who it was. Just someone on the other side of my door.

The sit-down falls had ended since the night I'd first met him. All I did was stand there now with a line behind me doing the work. Not literally stand there, but that was all it amounted to practically. He'd got hold of someone to teach me a few simple turns and dips and bends. Just enough to give the illusion of dancing. “No one looks at anything but your face when you're out there, so just if you move across the floor a little, that'll do,” as Dolan had said.

Not a word was breathed in the back room. The combustive violence of the suppressed thoughts, however, made it dangerous to strike a match in there. Once somebody wrote in eyebrow pencil “Du Barry” across my section of the glass. I hadn't known there was anyone that literate in there. I didn't care; what did I care?

And then one night this arrangement ended too. As dramatically as everything else that happened with him.

We were in the middle of it, and he'd just come in. With Skeeter and with Kittens, of course, never alone. He stood there for just a moment, looking at me. Something got him. I don't know what it was—jealousy, some possessive instinct or other.

Suddenly, in the music-underscored silence, his voice boomed out, shattering the illusion like a hand grenade tossed onto the floor. “Kill that music! Kill that spotlight! Hey, you back there, take that spotlight off her, hear what I say? If you don't I'll come back there and make matchwood out of your whole booth!”

The music died. The spotlight dimmed. The girls behind me stopped, knees elevated. I stopped, and the swirling black mists settled about me.

He was wild-eyed and I was scared; I couldn't tell what was the matter. It wasn't drink; though his face was mottled, his hair, his tie, his clothes still retained the perfect grooming of sobriety.

His voice was a bay that shook the walls of the confined place. “Get 'em outta here! Clear the tables! Never mind settling their bills; get rid of 'em! They're not gonna look at her any more! I won't let 'em look at her like this every night!”

Skeeter was trying to hold him back by one arm. And yet trying not to be too obtrusive about it too. I think he was afraid he'd draw a gun.

In another minute there would have been a full-fledged panic on. Already a two-way rush had started in, was gathering headway. Some of the more timorous customers were making for the front entrance; the floor girls all started spilling toward the back, in toward the dressing room.

“What is it, hop?” I heard one of them breathe frightenedly to another, directly behind me.

I heard the answer too.

“No. Love.”

That cold slug of fear I'd experienced the first day I walked in here bedded itself in me again. I stood rooted there where I'd been originally, almost the only one in the place who wasn't on the run.

The club manager was pleading, “Mr. McKee,
don't!
We're doing a landslide business. Mr. McKee, think what you're doing. Take the young lady out of here if you want—I've sent someone back for her coat—but at least let me go ahead serving them; let them dance with each other. What harm is that?” And then he kept wheedling interrogatively, “All right, Mr. McKee? All right, Mr. McKee?” over and over.

“All right!” he raged back at last. “Let 'em dance; let 'em drink till they can't see straight; I don't give a——what they do! But they're not going to look at
her
any more! Nobody's going to look at her any more—but me!”

The club manager snapped his fingers in an urgent aside. “Boys! A quick rumba. Hurry up, before we lose any more of them!”

Somebody put my coat around me from behind, just the way I was, angel outfit and all, and I was gently but insistently pushed toward him by about six or eight hands at once. The way a noontime meal is prodded gingerly toward a raging lion's maw.

Those few straggling steps I took across the floor—that was the flare path leading to him that I was crossing at last. And at the other end of it he stood waiting with his arms extended to receive me, to shepherd and take me in tow.

And as I reached him, as we came together, there in that crowd around us, suddenly—I don't know—he was so docile; he was so contrite; he was all over again just what he'd been all along, someone I could wrap around my little finger.

He adjusted my coat about me, put his arm around behind my waist. “Come on, Angel, don't be frightened,” he said with husky solicitude. “It's only that I'm taking you out of here with me.”

I'd made it all right. But it occurred to me to wonder how I was ever going to manage the return trip—away from him again—when the time came.

It was a strange place he had. A fantastic place. High up on a turret on Central Park West. New York has more than a few such, I suppose, but not more than a few people ever get into them and see them. It was hard to say what there was about it that called for the adjective “strange.” Hard to put your finger on what it was. It wasn't its size; the Mason apartment had been even larger. It wasn't any definite freakishness or bizarreness of appointment; he seemed to have turned over the entire job to a decorator, and it didn't sin particularly in that respect, although it may have been a little too coldly formalized, as such jobs usually turn out to be. The trouble was there was a certain discord to it. The setting and the occupants didn't blend, clashed at every turn.

You would stop before this impeccable, carefully atmosphered drawing room, and at a glance the whole thing would fly to pieces around the figure of a man sitting there coatless, shirt sleeves flowing through the arm-holes of his vest, a bottle of beer standing on the floor at his feet, playing solitaire upon a knee-high inlaid table.

Or you would come upon a guest bedroom, tailored for masculine occupancy, perfect in every detail, and he'd widen the already partly open door to display it to you with pardonable pride. “This is one of the boys' rooms.”

And the boy in question—Kittens or the other one—would be sprawled sidewise athwart the bed with a pipe cleaner in one hand, a loosely dangling revolver in the other. He'd flip it up by the trigger, blow through the bore. And on the wall, superimposed along with the carefully chosen hunting prints that had originally been placed there, a startling photograph of a nude, clipped from some art magazine.

Whereupon my host ejaculated testily, “Cover that thing up—what's matter with you?—I want to show her your room!”

The room's owner got up from the bed, went over to it, planted one outspread hand strategically in the middle of it, and stood there like that, waiting for our visit to be completed.

I felt neither embarrassed nor yet secretly amused, but only supremely silly. I worked in a night club, after all.

That sort of thing. A certain discord between the occupants and the surroundings.

He didn't try anything.

He only said, unobtrusively at one point, “You could have all this.”

I didn't pretend not to have heard. I merely closed my eyes briefly, opened them again.

I stayed there about an hour.

There was a slight crackling sound from the pocket of my coat when I got back and took it off and threw it carelessly down.

I put my hand in and found a check that hadn't been there yet when I went up to his place. It was signed “Jerome J. McKee” and endorsed on the back, as a sop to my scruples: “For one year's salary in advance, for professional services to have been rendered, Club Ninety.” It was for ten thousand dollars.

I had become the most highly paid performer in New York in one night.

I knew how to use it most effectively. He was putting my own weapons into my hands.

I put a stamp on an envelope and addressed it to him. I put some red on my lips and made a print of them just under the endorsement. I wrote beneath that: “But no.” I put it in the envelope and mailed it back.

That meant I would be getting the highest possible return out of my money.