Sirius (12 page)

“Let’s have a party!” cries Rahel.

An excellent idea.

“We do party planning, too,” say the four men in chorus.

That very same day ushers in an unforgettable evening. The glass house has been transformed beyond recognition. Any birds flying by right now could easily think they’ve detoured to Hong Kong by mistake.

One of the four party planners, a Chinese man and clearly the decorator of the quartet, has illuminated the terrace with lanterns made from red tissue paper. The lantern, he explains, is a symbol of fertility.

There are bulbs of garlic all over the place. To bring luck for the birth of a son. And mandarins too, in case it should be a girl.

By the entrance stand torches which smell of sulphur. They are to scare away the demons.

Luckily there is something decent to eat and drink too.

Georg comes with Electra. She is now his girlfriend. The Korngolds are there. And the sheriff, of course. John Clark, alone, for he has recently left his wife.

Carl lifts his glass to toast Else and Andreas.

“You learnt to love each other during our family’s darkest hour,” he says, “and your love has now given us the brightest day of our lives. We thank you both for that,” he continues, hand in hand with Rahel. “Your old family wishes your young family all the luck in the world,”

“Good luck!” everyone cries.

The Chinese man hands each of the guests a nail. The symbol for the succession of generations.

Erich Korngold sits down at the piano and plays songs by Cole Porter. Everyone knows
Night and Day
, sung by Fred Astaire, but when the sheriff suddenly strikes up the melody and sings, the song becomes even closer to people’s hearts. Soon even John Clark is joining in at the top of his voice. And it doesn’t take long before everyone is singing and dancing.

“Hey, Crown!” calls a voice.

There he is again, the strange Austrian with the cocked hat. He’s dancing with Else.

Carl rubs his eyes in astonishment.

The hat means that Peter Lorre can’t be far away. And sure enough, he has just arrived.

“We’re late, I know,” Lorre apologises. “Billy got us lost.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” winks Billy. The line has improved.

“Unbelievable,” says Lorre. “Hercules is making more at the box office than me. You should be paying me a commission. After all, it was me who brought you all here!”

Carl thanks him awkwardly.

“Just a little joke,” says Lorre.

Billy reports that Marlene Dietrich makes the best fried potatoes and scrambled eggs. “Marlene should have done the cooking tonight,” he declares, “not the Chinese.”

Where is Sirius anyway? Sometimes he’s here, sometimes he’s there. That’s how it is when there’s company. One person strokes him, another hands him a nibble. It’s a lovely thing to be a dog in a happy house.

The “new life” in Hollywood, it hasn’t even been that long yet and already there are “old times”. The Korngolds think back to their time with Else. John Clark misses his guardian angel. The sheriff waxes lyrical about Luckyville.

Strangely, no-one notices the dark clouds hanging over the house, perhaps because they seem to be coming from the barbecue in the garden.

But appearances can be deceiving.

The Chinese man knows better. Smoke means
change
, and clouds mean
big change
.

*

“Has my friend recovered?” asks Jack Warner.

“I think so,” says Crown. “He’s doing better.”

Sirius is pleased by the expression of concern.

Warner didn’t call them both over to his office in order to be compassionate, but he tries to see things from Sirius’ perspective for a moment longer before he comes to the point.

“What kind of life is it?” he ruminates. “Always being in front of the camera – it’s annoying, isn’t it?”

Sirius pricks up his ears.

“The dream world,” he continues, leaning back in his chair. “You want to get out into real life, the real world at last, right?”

Sirius stares at him, wide-eyed.

Jack Warner comes to the point: “Yesterday, John Ringling North called me. He owns the biggest circus in the world, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. He wants Hercules!”

Crown is speechless, Sirius likewise.

“Hercules – live!” rejoices Warner. “Just imagine: Hercules, the star of The Greatest Show on Earth! That’s the name of his tour.”

Sirius looks as though he’s not grasping the scale of the opportunity, so Warner adds: “You’ll be sniffing circus air! You’ll travel the world! Be amongst animals!” He corrects himself: “Animals? Not just any old animals. Jumbo, the king of the elephants. Gargantua, the famous gorilla!”

Sirius is certainly keen on the idea of playing with other animals more often, but does it really have to be a gorilla?

Warner guesses his thoughts and, to encourage him, tells him Gargantua’s story. Ten years ago, the gorilla was captured in the Congo and ended up in the possession of an eccentric old woman in Brooklyn called Gertrude Lintz. She had another gorilla, too, as well as numerous chimpanzees, and treated the monkeys like they were her own children. They wore made-to-measure clothes, ate dinner at the table, and even joined her for walks around the city.

“Isn’t that amazing?” delights Warner.

Gargantua got bigger and bigger, and eventually he weighed 200 kilos and no longer fitted into the house. Gertrude Linz sold him to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. Since then, the circus has billed him as the “world’s most dangerous gorilla.”

“Oh, the magic of the circus ring,” sighs Warner. “The tent, the artists, the clowns, the magicians, the wild animals. And right in the midst of it all: Hercules.”

Sirius has to admit that the idea has a certain appeal.

“And another thing,” says Warner. “Direct contact with the public. The expressions of amazement on their faces. Children’s laughter. The applause.”

Crown is wondering what Jack Warner is up to. He’s not the kind of man to give up
Hercules Part III
just because he wants a dog to experience the magic of the circus ring.

“I didn’t know you were a fan of the circus,” says Crown.

“I’m not,” replies Warner. “It smells funny in the tent, and I get claustrophobic.”

But – this is good business in the making. As an example, he explains the Clark Gable deal. Selznick, the producer of
Gone With the Wind
, wanted Gable at all costs, but he was under contract with MGM. So he had to borrow him, and of course the sum that MGM got from Selznick was higher than the fee MGM was contracted to pay Gable.

“Do you see?” beams Warner. “This is how we do things in Hollywood.”

Crown sees. And Sirius can’t hide the fact that he feels flattered to be mentioned in the same breath as Clark Gable.

But Warner promptly puts a damper on the comparison. “Clark Gable had bad breath. Because of his decaying teeth, you see. It was really bad. That’s why he agreed to the deal only on the condition that he could earn a share of the profits and finally have money for the dentist.”

Well, sometimes masterpieces arise from the strangest of circumstances.

“So,” says Warner. “Let’s talk turkey. The tour lasts six months. After that, Hercules will come back, and we’ll go to old Rome. Agreed?”

Crown leans down to Sirius and looks him deep in the eyes.

“Do you want to go to the circus?”

Sirius wags his tail.

“Right then,” smirks Warner. “Good decision. I’ll add on another 100 dollars a week. For the Clark Gable of the dog world.”

“When do we start?” asks Crown.

“Immediately,” says Warner. “After all, the new star of the circus ring stills need to figure out what his performance is going to be.”

*

Sarasota is a small backwater in southern Florida. The only reason it’s on the map at all is because the headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey are here.

Crown has accompanied Sirius on the long, cross-country journey so that they have time to say goodbye to each other. It is hard for him to watch as the little dog walks away, glancing back one last time before disappearing into the big tent.

So Sirius is now a circus dog.

He lives in the “village.” That’s the name for the meadow behind the tent where the artists’ caravans are parked. Four-legged artists usually live in the “zoo.” That’s what they call the adjoining meadow with the stalls, enclosures and cages. Gargantua lives here too, in a special cage of course. It’s made of bulletproof glass, has air conditioning, and is pulled by six greys when it needs to be transported to the tent.

But Sirius lives in the village, because he’s primarily involved with the two-legged artists. Starting with the planned opening number: Hercules will compete against “Drago, the world’s strongest man”, whose signature stunt is supporting his own mountain of muscles on a single-finger handstand.

Before the break, the great magician Manzini will present his famous time machine, which is to make Hercules smaller and smaller until – eventually – he goes from being a young pup in Manzini’s hand to evaporating into thin air.

The highlight will be the final stunt. Barbarossa, the legendary lion tamer – who lost his right hand after Benares the lion almost mauled him to death – will have Hercules ride on Benares’ back. For the first time in the history of the animal kingdom, a terrier and a lion will confront one another.

That’s the plan, at least. Now they just have to make it work.

Sirius shares a caravan with Manzini. Primarily because no-one else is allowed to discover the secret behind the time machine, which is also in the caravan, covered with a black cloth. Manzini is so secretive that he even keeps the curtains closed.

Barbarossa doesn’t need a caravan. He sleeps with the beasts of prey. He sometimes has straw in his hair in the mornings, and even smells like a lion.

Drago can be recognized by the fact that he gets around solely by walking on his hands. To him, this seems completely normal. When someone is talking with him, his knees are at eye level, and his head answers from below, upside down. Conversations with him are always interesting, in any case.

What a wonderful village, thinks Sirius to himself. There can’t be any other village in existence with this many things to see. Where else could you see a Lilliputian cheerfully greet five Chinese women who are juggling tea cups on a unicycle, while nearby a man chains his wife to a spinning wheel and throws knives at her?

The man, by the way, is the infamous “El Diablo”, who made headlines when he threw a dagger straight into his first wife’s heart. He was completely drunk during the performance, and therefore not criminally responsible.

And Sirius hasn’t met everyone in the village yet, not even close. The Lilliputian, for example, is alleged to speak eighty-four languages, even Irku, a language which is only spoken in the southern Antarctic. The Lilliputian was put to the test when a tightrope walker arrived from this very region; he had an acrobatic penguin in the programme. And he confirmed it: the Lilliputian speaks fluent Irku.

Manzini doesn’t speak at all. He cloaks himself in silence. Presumably because he fears that some unguarded word might slip out, enabling people to decipher the secret of his time machine.

Each evening, he sits on his bed and listens to the same radio station. Food is brought to him from the canteen, and he silently puts it onto two plates in order to share with Sirius. Later, he nods politely to Sirius, which is intended to mean
good night
, and turns out the light.

Strangely, he talks in his sleep. But as soon as he utters the words
macchina del tempo
, he awakes with a start and shines the beam of his torch around the room. Then he goes back to sleep.

What could the secret be, wonders Sirius?

*

A magician can rehearse anywhere, but a lion tamer needs the circus tent. As does an acrobat. One person’s wild animal cage in the circus ring is another’s trapeze under the dome of the Big Top.

Barbarossa is going “big-topping” today. That’s how he puts it to Sirius. He grins and rips his shirt from his body as he heads off. “Lions hate shirts,” he says. His naked torso resembles a battlefield. It gives a good indication of just how many times the paws have already caught him. A scar runs diagonally across his back, and of all places right through the middle of the tattooed lion’s head between his shoulder blades.

He had “Krone” tattooed on the hand he lost. The Krone Circus was where Barbarossa started out.

Benares is already waiting inside his cage in the circus ring. He circles nervously, impatiently, close to the bars. He is a fine specimen of a wild cat. Every movement he makes exudes unbridled strength.

The lion snarls as he catches sight of the dog.

“That means
hello
,” translates Barbarossa.

Sirius doesn’t want to know what it sounds like when Benares is saying
adieu
.

Benares rises up on his haunches to his full height to greet Barbarossa. He towers over him by at least a metre.

Sirius is trembling all over.

This doesn’t escape Barbarossa’s attention, so he says: “You don’t need to be afraid. He’s not hungry anymore.”

To be on the safe side, the keeper throws another small animal carcass into the cage, which Benares promptly devours in one go.

“Come on, we’re going in,” says Barbarossa, picking Sirius up and opening the cage door.

Benares skulks at the other end of the cage. He snorts as his nose picks up the scent.

“This is Hercules,” says Barbarossa by way of introduction. To Sirius, he whispers softly: “Always wait for
him
to come to you. Never approach him. Otherwise he’ll defend his territory.”

The lion tamer goes on to offer more advice: “It’s best to ignore him. Then he’ll ignore you too.”

It’s not easy to ignore a lion. And it’s especially hard for small dogs to do so.

Sirius sees Benares slowly approaching him, coming closer and closer, until the head and mighty mane are so close in front of his eyes that warm breath blows into his face.