Phantom lady Read online

  He lit their cigarettes, they stayed with their cognacs awhile, and then they left.

  It was only in the foyer—at a full-length glass out in the foyer—that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again. It was wonderful, he reflected, what that hat could do to her. It was like turning on the current in a glass chandelier.

  A gigantic theater doorman, fully six-four, opened the cab door for them when it had driven up, and his eyes boggled comically as the hat swept past, almost directly under them. He had white walrus-tusk mustaches, almost looked like a line drawing of a theater-doorman in the New Yorker. His bulging eyes followed it from right to left as its wearer stepped down and brushed past him. Henderson noted this comic bit of optic byplay, to forget it again a moment later. If anything is ever really forgotten.

  The completely deserted theater lobby was the best possible criterion of how late they actually were. Even the ticket taker at the door had deserted his post by now. An anonymous silhouette against the stage glow, presumably an usher, accosted them just inside the door, sighted their tickets by flashlight, then led them down the aisle, trailing an oval of light backhand along the floor to guide their advancing feet.

  Their seats were in the first row. Almost too close. The stage was an orange blur for a moment or two, until their eyes had grown used to the foreshortened perspective.

  They sat patiently watching the montage of the revue, scene blending into scene with the superimposed effect of motion picture dissolves. She would beam occasionally, even laugh outright now and then. The most he would do was give a strained smile, as though under obligation to do it. The noise, color, and brilliance of lighting reached a crescendo, and then the curtains rippled together, ending the first half.

  The house lights came on, and there was a stir all around them as people got up and went outside.

  “Care for a smoke?” he asked her.

  “Let’s stay where we are. We haven’t been sitting as long as the rest of them.” She drew the collar of her coat closer around the back of her neck. The theater was stifling already, so the purpose of it, he conjectured, was to screen her profile from observation as far as possible.

  “Come across some name you’ve recognized?” she murmured presently, with a smile.

  He looked down and found his fingers had been busily turning down the upper right-hand corner of each leaf of his program, one by one, from front to back. They were all blunted now, with neat little turned-back triangles superimposed one on the other. “I always do that, fidgety habit I’ve had for years. A variation of doodling, I guess you’d call it. I never know I’m doing it, either.”

  The trap under the stage opened and the orchestra started to file back into the pit for the second half. The trap-drummer was nearest to them, just across the partition rail. He was a rodentlike individual, who looked as though he hadn’t been out in the open air for ten years past. Skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, hair so flattened and glistening it almost looked like a wet bathing cap with a white seam bisecting it. He had a little twig of a mustache that almost seemed like smudge from his nose.

  He didn’t look outward into the audience at first; busied himself adjusting his chair and tightening something or other on his instrument. Then, set, he turned idly, and almost at once became aware of her and of the hat.

  It seemed to do something to him. His vapid, unintelligent face froze into an almost hypnotic fascination. His mouth even opened slightly, like a fish’s, stayed that way. He would try to stop staring at her every once in a while, but she was on his mind, he couldn’t keep his eyes away very long, they would stray back to her each time.

  Henderson took it in for a while, with a sort of detached, humorous curiosity. Then finally, seeing that it was beginning to make her acutely uncomfortable, he put a stop to it in short order, by sending such a sizzling glare at him that he turned back to his music rack forthwith and for good. You could tell, though, even with his head turned the other way, that he was still thinking about her, by the rather conscious, stiff way he held his neck.

  “I seem to have made an impression,” she chuckled under her breath.

  “Perfectly good trap-drummer ruined for the evening,” he assented.

  The gaps behind them had filled up again now. The house lights dimmed, the foots welled up, and the overture to the second act began. He went ahead moodily pleating the upper corners of his dog-eared program.

  Midway through the second half there was a crescendo build-up, then the American house orchestra laid down its instruments. An exotic thumping of tom-toms and rattling of gourds onstage took its place, and the main attraction of the show. Estela Mendoza, the South American sensation, appeared.

  A sharp nudge from his seat mate reached him even before he had had time to make the discovery for himself. He looked at her without understanding, then back to the stage again.

  The two women had already become mutually aware of the fatal fact that was still eluding his slower masculine perceptions. A cryptic whisper reached him. “Just look at her face. I’m glad there are footlights between us. She could kill me.”

  There was a distinct glitter of animosity visible in the expressive black eyes of the figure onstage, over and above her toothsome smile, as they rested on the identical replica of her own headgear, flaunted by his companion there in the very first row where it couldn’t be missed.

  “Now I understand where they got the inspiration for this particular creation,” she murmured ruefully.

  “But why get sore about it? I should think she’d be flattered.”

  “It’s no use expecting a man to understand. Steal my jewelry, steal the gold fillings from my teeth, but don’t steal my hat. And over and above that, in this particular case it’s a distinctive part of her act, part of her trademark. It’s probably been pirated, I doubt that she’d give permission to—”

  “I suppose it is a form of plagiarism.” He watched with slightly heightened interest, if not yet complete self-forget-fulness.

  Her art was a simple thing. As real art always is. And as getting away with something at times is. too. She sang in Spanish, but even in that language there was very little intellect to the lyric. Something like this:

  “Chica chica boom boom Chica chica boom boom”

  Over and over. Meanwhile she kept rolling her eyes from side to side, throwing one hip out of joint at every step she took, and throwing little nosegays out to the women members of the audience from a flat basket she carried slung at her side.

  By the time she had run through two choruses of the thing, every woman in the first two or three rows was in possession of one of her floral tokens. With the notable exception of Henderson’s companion. “She purposely held out on me, to get even for the hat,” she whispered knowingly. And as a matter of fact, every time the hitching, heel-stamping figure on the stage had slowly worked her way past their particular vantage point, there had been an ominous flash, an almost electrical crackling, visible in her fuselike eves as they glided over that particular location.

  “Watch me call her on it,” she remarked under her breath for his benefit. She clasped her hands together, just below her face, in vise formation.

  The hint was patently ignored.

  She extended them out before her,, at half arm’s length, held them that way in solicitation.

  The eyes on the stage slitted for a minute, then resumed their natural contour, strayed elsewhere.

  Suddenly there was a distinct snap of the fingers from Henderson’s companion. A crackling snap, sharp enough to top the music. The eyes rolled back again, glowered maniacally at the offender. Another flower came out and winged over, but still not to her.

  “I never know when I’m beaten,” he heard her mutter doggedly. Before he knew what she meant, she had risen to her feet, stood there in her seat, smiling beatifically. passively claiming her due.

  For a moment there was a deadlock between the two. But the odds we
re too unequal. The performer, after all was said and done, was at the mercy of this individualistic spectator, for she had an illusion of sweetness and charm to maintain at all costs in the sight of the rest of the audience.

  The alteration in the stature of Henderson’s seat mate also had an unforeseen result in another respect. As the hip-hiker slowly made the return trip, the spotlight, obediently following her and slanted low, cut across the head and shoulders of this lone vertical impediment, standing up on the orchestra floor. The result was that the similarity of the two hats was brought explosively to everyone’s attention. A centripetal ripple of comment began to spread outward, as when a stone is dropped into heretofore still waters.

  The performer capitulated and capitulated fast, to put an end to this odious comparison. Up came a blackmail-extorted flower, out it went over the footlights in a graceful little curve. She covered up the omission by making a rueful little moue, as if to say, “Did I overlook you? Forgive me, I didn’t meant to.” Behind it, however, could be detected the subcutaneous pallor of a lethal tropical rage.

  Henderson’s companion had deftly caught the token and subsided into her seat again with a gracious lip movement. Only he detected the wordage that actually emerged, “Thank you—you Latin louse!” He choked on something in his throat.

  The worsted performer slowly worked her way off into the wings with little spasmodic hitches, while the music died down like the clatter of train wheels receding into the distance.

  In the wings they glimpsed a momentary but highly revealing vignette, while the house was still rocking with applause. A pair of shirt-sleeved masculine arms, most likely the stage manager’s, were bodily restraining the performer from rushing back onstage again. Obviously for some purpose over and above merely taking bows. Her hands, held down at her sides by his bear-hug embrace, were visibly clenched into fists and twitching with punitive intent. Then the stage blacked out and another number came on.

  At the final curtain, as they rose to go. he tossed his program into the discard, onto the seat he had just quitted.

  To his surprise she reached down for it, added it to her own, which she was retaining. “Just as a memento,” she remarked.

  “I didn’t think you were sentimental,” he said, moving slowly up the choked aisle at her heels.

  “Not sentimental, strictly speaking. It’s just that—I like to gloat over my own impulsiveness at times, and these things will help.”

  Impulsiveness? Because she had joined forces with him for the evening, without ever having seen him before, he supposed. He shrugged—inwardly, if not visibly.

  As they were fighting their way toward a taxi, in the melee outside the entrance, an odd little mischance occurred. They had already claimed their cab, but before they could get into it, a blind beggar approached, hovered beside her in mute appeal, alms cup all but nudging her. The lighted cigarette she was holding was jarred from her fingers in some way, either by the beggar himself or someone nearby, and fell into the cup. Henderson saw it happen, she didn’t. Before he could interfere the trustful unfortunate had thrust probing fingers in after it, and then snatched them back again in pain.

  Henderson quickly dug the ember out for him himself, and put a dollar bill in his hand to make amends. “Sorry, old timer, that wasn’t intentional,” he murmured. Then noting that the sufferer was still blowing ruefully on his smarting finger, he added a second bill to the first, simply because the incident could have been so easily misconstrued as the height of calloused mockery, and he could tell by looking at her it hadn’t been intended as such.

  He followed her into the cab and they drove off. “Wasn’t that pathetic?” was all she said.

  He had given the driver no direction as yet.

  “What time is it?” she asked presently.

  “Going on quarter of twelve.”

  “Suppose we go back to Anselmo’s, where we first met.

  We’ll have a night cap and then we’ll part there. You go your way and I’ll go mine. I like completed circles.”

  They’re usually empty in the middle, it occurred to him, but it seemed ungallant to mention this, so he didn’t.

  The bar was considerably more crowded now, when they got there, than it had been at six. However, he managed to secure a stool for her all the way around at the very end of the bar, up against the wall, and posted himself at her shoulder.

  “Well,” she said, holding her glass just an inch above bar level and eyeing it speculatively, “hail and farewell. Nice having met you.”

  “Nice of you to say so.”

  They drank; he to completion, she only partially. “I’ll remain here for a short while,” she said by way of dismissal. She offered him her hand. “Good night—and good luck.” They shook briefly, as acquaintances of an evening should. Then just as he was about to turn away, she crinkled her eyes at him in remonstrative afterthought. “Now that you’ve got it out of your system, why don’t you go back and make up with her?”

  He gave her a slightly surprised look.

  “I’ve understood all evening,” she said quietly.

  On that note they parted. He moved toward the door, she turned back to her drink. The episode was over.

  He glanced back when he had reached the street entrance, and he could still see her sitting there, all the way over against the wall at the end of the curved bar, looking down pensively, probably fiddling idly with the stem of her glass. The bright orange of the hat showed through a V-shaped opening left between two pairs of shoulders around the turn of the bar from her.

  That was the last thing of all, the bright orange of her hat peering blurredly through the cigarette haze and shadows, all the way back there behind him, as in a dream, as in a scene that wasn’t real and never had been.

  2 The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution

  MIDNIGHT

  TEN minutes later and only eight blocks away in a straight line—two straight lines: seven blocks up one way and then one over to the left—he got out of the cab in front of an apartment house on the corner.

  He put the change left over from the fare into his pocket, opened the vestibule door with his own key, and went inside.

  There was a man hanging around in the lobby waiting for somebody. He was on his feet, drifting aimlessly around, from here to there, from there to the next place, the way a man waiting in a lobby does. He didn’t live in the building; Henderson had never seen him before. He wasn’t waiting for the car to take him up, because the indicator was un-lighted; it was motionless somewhere up above.

  Henderson passed him without a second glance, and pushed the button for himself, to bring it down.

  The other had found a picture on the wall now, and was staring at it far beyond its merits. He stood with his back to Henderson. In fact he made it a point to seem unaware there was anyone else in the lobby with him at all, which was overdoing it a little.

  He must have a guilty conscience, Henderson decided. That picture wasn’t worth all that close attention. He must be waiting for someone to join him down here, someone whom he had no right to escort out.

  Henderson thought: what the hell did he care, what was it to him anyway?

  The car arrived and he stepped in. The heavy bronze door swung closed by itself after him. He thumbed the six-button, the top of the rack. The lobby started to drop from sight, seen through the little diamond-shaped glass insert let into the shaft door. Just before it did so he saw the picture-gazer, evidently impatient at being kept waiting this long by his prospective date, finally detach himself and take a preliminary step over toward the switchboard. Just a vignette that was no possible concern of his.

  He got out on the sixth floor and fumbled for his latch key. The hall was quiet; there wasn’t a sound around him but the slight tinkle of the loose change in his own pocket as he sought for the key.

  He fitted it into his own door, the one to the right as you came off the car, and opened it. The lights were out, it was pitch dark on the othe
r side of it. At this, for some reason or other, he gave a sound of scornful disbelief, deep in his throat.

  He snapped a light switch, and a small neat foyer came into existence. But the light only took care of just this one cubicle. Beyond the arched opening facing him across it, it was still as dark, as impenetrable, as ever.

  He closed the door behind him, flung down his hat and coat on a chair out there. The silence, the continuing darkness, seemed to irritate him. The sullenness was starting to come back into his face again, the sullenness that had been so conspicuously there at six, out on the street.

  He called out a name, called it through into the darkness lying beyond the inscrutable arched opening. “Marcella!” He called it imperatively, and not particularly friendlily.

  The darkness didn’t answer.

  He strode into it, speaking in that same harsh, demanding tone as he went. “Come on, cut it out! You’re awake, who do you think you’re kidding? I saw the light in your bedroom window from the street just now. Grow up, this isn’t going to get us anywhere!”

  The silence didn’t answer.

  He cut diagonally through the dark, toward some particular point on the wall, known to him by heart. He was grumbling in a less strident voice now. “Until I come back, you’re wide awake! The minute you hear me, you’re sound asleep! That’s just dodging the issue!”

  His arm was reaching out before him. The click came before it had touched anything. The sudden bath of light made him jump slightly; it had come too soon, before he was expecting it.

  He looked along his own arm. and the switch was still inches out past it; they hadn’t come together yet. There was a hand just leaving it, sidling away from it along the wall. His eyes raced up the sleeve the hand protruded from and found a man’s face.

  He gave a startled half turn, and there was another one looking at him from that direction. He gave an additional turn, still further rearward, having nearly reversed himself now. and there was a third, directly behind him. The three stood impassive, motionless as statues, in a half circle around him.