Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (30 page)

It had once been a film palace. It had been an old Arthur Rank
cinema, but Jury liked to remember these massive structures with their
giant marquees and tiers of balconies as palatial venues that set
Saturday afternoons off from the rest of a dreary wartime week. He
remembered little of life before the war. Why should he? War had bred
him, then killed his father, killed his mother.

Jury came up from a confusion of tunnel that reminded him of the
flights to an air-raid shelter to a network of streets beneath the
deadly Hammersmith flyover. In its bleakness the street looked
war-torn. Scraps of newspapers, discarded tin cans, a savaged cat—all
appeared to be the detritus from the last concert blown out from the
doors of the Hammersmith Odeon, right down to the battered cat slinking
alleywise past the announcement of Sirocco and three other groups,
together with their warm-up bands. Sirocco didn't need a warm-up.
There was the picture of Charles Raine that had appeared on the cover
of
Time Out
magazine. The fresh poster had been crookedly
pasted over the faded. Yesterday's concert was like yesterday's news.

SIROCCO rode in two-foot-high black letters on the white marquee,
where a young man on a very high ladder was making a slight artistic
change; the S was tilted and from its end shot a narrow black line.
Jury supposed that the effect was to make it look wind-whipped.

The man climbed slowly down; he was a lad really, proba-bly nineteen
or so, wiped his dirty hands on a towel that he stuffed in the rear
pocket of his jeans, all the while backing up and looking at his
handiwork. Another boy, probably about this one's age, and carrying
what looked like three or four instrument cases and a black amp, had
crossed the street and was apparently asking directions as he hitched
one of the two gig bags more comfortably over his shoulder. He wiped
his windblown hair out of his face, pushed his Silva-thin sunglasses
back on his nose and entered through a pair of double doors.

The artist of the marquee-board walked backward to get a better look
at his artistry and nearly stepped on Jury's feet. "Oh, sorry." Then,
as if Jury had come for the same reason, as adviser or overseer of this
enterprise, the kid said to him, "Think it adds a bit of class, right?"
He shook his longish hair from his forehead and folded his arms across
his chest, hands clamped under his armpits.

"It's ingenious. Especially that line that trails off from the
bottom of the S. How'd you do that?"

"With three I's, flat down. Hard to do tricky stuff with a marquee,
I can tell you. See, I was trying to get the idea of a wind blowing
through the name. That's what it means, you know—'sirocco'—a wind
blowing," he added instructively. A stiff wind gusted from the alley
the cat had bellied along, a good omen, perhaps. They both shivered.
"Bleedin' cold. I been out here over an hour working on that lot. Think
they'll like it, then?"

Jury smiled. "Absolutely."

"You come for tickets? Been sold out since it was announced.
Listen: I'll give you a tip. Come round on Friday, day of performance,
ten a.m. The doors are open, but returns don't go on sale until
twelve. Mary Lee, though, she keeps back five, maybe six in case some
nob comes along." The boy's laugh was wheezy. "A couple did once. I
think they were some duke's kids. Mary Lee really kept 'em on the
ropes. I think she permed her hair while they hung around the window
looking like they had to pee. After you." With a grand gesture he
opened the door.

"Thanks. And thanks for the tip."

The boy waved and hustled across the big lobby and took the wide
stairs two at a time. Jury looked round at the emptiness and pictured
what a crush it would be two nights from then. The deserted lobby still
had that gummy smell of packed bodies, sweat, and beer. Breathing must
be difficult. Did Wiggins really go to these concerts? He craned his
neck upward to gaze at the huge, open circle over whose railing
hundreds of beery smiles would look down on that night. And farther up
in space to a baroque ceiling that brought his fancy back to those
long-ago afternoons. The picture palace.

"We're sold out!" The childishly nasal voice pulled Jury from his
fancies of picture palaces and he turned and saw a youngish woman with
a haircut that looked done by a lawn mower on burnt grass hitting a
cold-drink machine. Her face looked as parched as her hair, as if this
mirage of a machine was the only thing that would keep her from dying
of thirst.

"Mary Lee?"

That
did
surprise her out of her rotten mood, at least
long enough to ask, "Who're you?"

Instead of answering, Jury walked over to the machine and with a
hand on each side tried to sway it a little. The can plonked down into
the opening. Mary Lee made a little sound, popped the cap, and then
arranged her miniskirted thighs and scoop-necked sweater to their best
advantage. "Well, wherever'd you learn that?"

"From when I was broke."

"How'd you know me?" Mary Lee glanced up from the Coke can she was
licking her tongue around and slowly blinked her sand-colored lashes.

Poor girl, she could have done with a bit of lipstick for some
color. But at least there was some glitter in the hoop earrings and the
rhinestone-studded locket that lay strategi-cally placed above the
cleavage. "Friend told me you more-or-less managed the place. I just
wanted a look round."

From the way she ran her long pearlescent fingernails through her
half-cropped hair and tried to look like a manager, it was clear she
hardly knew what to do with this information—she certainly didn't want
to out-and-out deny it. "Well, I expect I wouldn't say
that
,
exactly. I'm more his assistant. I can't
auth-or-ize
you
going over the place. In-side's about as pretty as an airplane hangar.
Whatcha want to see it for? The roadies are in there anyways, setting
up. For Sirocco." Her eyes glinted like the shiny aluminum of the can.
"All I want's to meet Charlie."

"Do you get to meet the stars who come here?"

"I did Eric Clapton. I nearly shook for a week." Realizing the
persona might be slipping, she added, "Of course, there aren't many
like him. Most are pretty run-of-the-mill."

The door to the auditorium opened and the young man, one of the
"roadies" upon whom she cast an experienced and disdainful look, came
through and walked over to the soft-drink machine.

As he was about to put in a coin, she called, "That's for staff, if
you
don't
mind. You got your own up in the dressing rooms."

He turned, surprised, looked a little helpless, and Jury recognized
him as the same person who'd passed by them under the marquee. "Sorry,"
he said and retreated into the auditorium.

"I don't know why they're mucking about here a day ahead of time."

"Do they use the place for practice sessions?"

"
Them
? Wouldn't be caught dead outside their
suite
at the Ritz. I expect when you're that famous you don't need to do
sessions. Ever so handsome, ihn't he?"

"Who? The chap that just walked out here?"

'Wo. Charlie Raine. He's single, too."

She sighed, looked down at her obviously new shoes, and lifted an
ankle. "Do you like them? Paid nearly thirty quid for these ones and
that
was sale price." She brought the ankle down and drew the other one in
straight and bent her head to stare at them appreciatively. "Look like
glass, don't they?"

Not precisely. More like acrylic, the uppers clear, the high heels
smoke-toned, and the ankle straps thin slivers of acrylic dotted with
tiny beads to match the heels. "Beautiful," said Jury. "They're very
smart; you'd have to pay twice that for the ones I saw in the window
of—" Jury thought for a moment. "—Fortnum and Mason."

"You never." Mary Lee breathed this out in a whispery way.

Jury couldn't, actually, remember the last time he'd looked in the
windows of Fortnum and Mason. Much too pricey. Yet people actually
bought produce there: carrots, lettuces, cabbages, kings, no doubt. But
he merely nodded his head solemnly.

Mary Lee turned at the sound of the telephone, disgusted, and
started off on swaying ankles to the ticket window to answer, then came
back quickly and whispered, "Look, you just want a deco, go on in. But
don't tell no one, okay?" She gave him a wink and hurried toward the
repeated
brr brr
.

That morning, before taking the tube to Hammersmith, the first thing
he had done was to start his search for the copy of
Time Out
that he hadn't been able to find before he went to sleep on the sofa,
fully clothed.

Jury fingered through stacks of spilled magazines and papers,
turned over cushions, flayed the sheets on the bed, vandalized drawers
and cupboards. If the place had been a mess before, it was now a
shambles. And he knew all the while the search was useless; the
magazine had been on top of that pile . . . Carole-anne ... of course.

Jury yanked off his jacket and pulled a heavy sweater over his head,
dark brown with a sort of lopsided moose woven into its woolly strands.
It was a present from Carole-anne, who seemed to be as interested in
dressing him down as she was in dressing Mrs. Wassermann up.

Down the stone front steps and right to a smaller set of steps
leading to Mrs. Wassermann's basement flat Jury ran.

At his first knock, she opened the door and threw up her hands as if
she'd just been delivered from a family of thieves. "At last, at last
you are back." The hands then clasped beneath her chin in a gesture of
thanks to the angels.

But this Mrs. Wassermann was not quite the one he'd left. Her gray
hair was frizzed out with a new perm that did not strike Jury as a
viable alternative to the ordinarily neat, pulled-back hair tucked in a
bun at the nape of the neck. Carole-anne had obviously been raiding his
flat and commandeering Mrs. Wassermann round the beauty salons. But he
merely smiled and complimented her on the wave.

"No, no.
Not
a perm, Mr. Jury. It's scrunched."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Scrunched. Sassoon. They only scrunch and diffuse." She waved her
hand back and forth slowly, in simulation of a hair-dryer. "No brushes,
just diffusion. Sassoon believes in letting the hair be natural."

Jury leaned against the doorjamb. "Tell me, did Carole-anne sit in
for some scrunching, too? Or some diffusion?"

"Oh, no. Not with
her
hair. Sassoon said it was so
glorious just to let it be." Mrs. Wassermann made it sound as if Vidal
himself had been in attendance.

"Of course. Well, do you think I could have the extra key to the
Glorious One's flat?"

"Of course, of course." She turned to her bookshelves. "It's right
behind Mr. le Carre."

Mrs. Wassermann always referred to her books by the surnames of the
authors. Miss Austen. Mr. Dickens. Miss Krantz.

She placed the key in his hand and asked for no information in
return. It was Mrs. Wassermann's great virtue; she never intruded with
questions. She was the greatest re-specter of privacy he had ever
known.
Too bad Miss Palut-ski didn't take a page from that book.

"I wish she'd stop using my room as if it were a waiting lounge
between flights."

"Ah, yes, but you know she cannot afford to be on the phone."

"Why should she? She's on mine.
And
I wish she'd
stop taking things. I had a copy of
Time Out
and I need it"

"Oh,
that
I have it right here . . ." She swept away
again. "She thought I should know what's going on around town."

That boded ill. "Thanks, Mis. Wassermann . . ."

"Do not be too upset with Carole-anne, Mr. Jury. You know she's been
under great stress lately."

Jury turned back, his foot on the steps leading upward. "Yes, she
was going totally crazy when I left."

Mrs. Wassermann lowered her eyelids and made a tch-tching with her
tongue as if he were speaking ill of the dead.

Looking grave, Mrs. Wassermann said, "No, she does not read her
maps—"

Her
maps? Everything seemed to come under Carole-anne's
provenance, including the Atlantic. She shouldn't be reading the Tarot
and telling fortunes down at the Starrdust; she should join up with
whatever Balboas and Byrds were still around.

"—and she has grown very dismal."

"Dismal. No,
that
I'll never believe." Crazy, yes. Dismal,
no. He was happy her obsession was only with maps and the schedules of
the ferries from Cork and Belfast. What dangerous waters she was
charting on her way to Atlantis, he couldn't imagine; he only knew that
Carole-anne would skim across seas with total confidence, and God save
the sharks.

"She's down-in-the-mouth, Mr. Jury. You should see her, cheer her
up. It must be that she didn't get that part she'd been working so hard
on."

Carole-anne had been, he thought, extremely vague about this acting
"part," except that she was doing a good bit of practicing blindness.
White cane, tapping, face held slightly askew, eyes attempting to glaze
over.

This (Jury thought, smiling inwardly again) was impossible. The
lapis-lazuli eyes attempting to appear expressionless and empty—that
would be too much for anyone, much less a part-time actress with a
limited repertoire.

Actually, Carole-anne was a full-time actress with a vast
repertoire, the result merely of being Carole-anne. It was extremely
difficult to get down to some central core of being with the girl.
Woman. Young lady. He was never sure; her age kept changing.

"Thanks." He saluted Mrs. Wassermann with the rolled-up magazine.
"I'll see her."