“Looking for something to read?” the woman asked, and he blinked and stared at her.
She’d been there all along, of course, but it felt almost as if he’d dreamed her into being. Slender and fit, perhaps forty, she wore black pants and shoes and a tight pink tank with a bright red rose silhouette stretched across her breasts. Rose—for how could she have been anyone else?—had an olive complexion and a proud Roman nose, and she wore a kindly expression, her gaze alert and attentive. Though the interior of the mobile book fair was lit mainly with strings of old white Christmas lights, he could see that her eyes were icy blue. It both pleased and unnerved him to have someone study him with such intensity—such intimacy. People looked at him all the time when he had his clown makeup on, but he couldn’t remember how long it had been since anyone had really seen him when he didn’t have it on.
“I doubt you’d have anything for me,” he said. “I’m not a big reader.”
“Didn’t you see the sign?” she said, amused. “Something for everyone. What do you do here?”
He almost lied, but she would’ve taken one look at his little potbelly and stiff shoulders and known he wasn’t an acrobat.
“I’m a clown.”
Her eyes lit up. “I’ve got a small section back here. Not a whole shelf, but a handful of interesting antiquarian books I picked up from an old guy in Cheektowaga, when his carnival went belly-up.”
Most of the books were things he’d seen before. Way back in high school, he’d researched Grimaldi and Tovolo and Ricketts, studied the Fratellinis, and watched the films of the great movie directors who had started their careers as circus clowns, like Fellini and Jodorowsky. Charlie Chaplin had become his god, and he mastered the rolling walk of the Little Tramp. There were many schools of comedy, but Benny had never been much interested in telling jokes or doing stand-up. In his heart, he had always been a clown. Though some of them were probably quite valuable, none of the books Rose’s Mobile Book Fair had on her shelves were unfamiliar to him.
He’d just begun to turn away when he noticed the frayed spine of a book lying on its side atop the dozen or so she had shelved at the end of her boys’ adventure section. The worn, faded lettering was almost unreadable in the shadows, but when he slipped his slender fingers in and slid the volume out, the cloth cover made him stiffen in surprise. The comedy and tragedy masks were there, along with the initials G.T.
Quickly he leafed to the title page and a warm feeling spread through him. Charade: The Secret to Being a Clown, by Giovanni Tovolo. He had never even heard of the book, had not run across it in any of his reading and research, even in the biography of Tovolo he’d read. The famous Italian character clown had retired after a horrifying accident had taken sixteen lives in a big-top fire outside Chicago in 1917. All but forgotten, Tovolo had been a particular fascination of Benny’s because the man had earned his reputation doing characters. Most of the famous clowns were whitefaces or augustes. Tovolo could do anything, at least according to what Benny had read . . . but now, to read it in Tovolo’s own words . . .
Maybe Tovolo could help him figure out how he ended up spending four years at the wrong end of clown alley. He glanced up at Rose, unable to stifle his excitement and hoping she wouldn’t take advantage of him.
“How much do you want for this one?” he asked.
She took it from his hand, opened it to see the price she’d penciled on the first page. “Twenty-two dollars.”
Benny swallowed hard, knowing his smile was too thin. Did she not realize that, to certain collectors, this book would be worth a hundred times that? Or did she simply not care, having paid next to nothing for it herself?
He smiled. “I’ll take it.”
Benny’s mother always thought he was funny. All through his childhood he had been encouraged by her laughter, egged on by the way her face would redden and she would wipe at her eyes when he made silly faces or did the big, galumphing walk that would one day become his trademark. At the age of nine he had begun rearranging living room furniture so that he could stumble over it, practicing pratfalls and somersaults and rubber-leg gags—anything that might elicit laughter from his mother. Once she had laughed so hard that she had to wave at him to stop so she could catch her breath. Her chest ached for days afterward, and she had joked often that if he wasn’t careful he would give her a heart attack.
That’s how funny Benny Martini was as a kid.
He loved to make her laugh. He watched the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and forced his friends into helping him reenact their gags. Mrs. Martini took young Benny to the circus every year, and when the clowns made the audience roar with their hilarious antics, he watched with fascination and a dawning envy. For weeks after a circus trip, he would mimic the clowns, practicing the faces they pulled, their walks, their timing.
In school, he put whoopee cushions on the seats of teachers and thumbtacks on the chairs of the girls he liked. In the eighth grade, he had taped a sign to Tim Rivard’s back that read HONK IF YOU THINK I’M A MORON. Only other jocks had been brave enough to make honking noises when Rivard walked down the hall, but it took the football player until fourth period to really start to wonder what all the honking was about. He’d slammed Benny’s head into a locker, but the sign alone hadn’t been enough to prompt the violence. That had come when Benny had pointed out that Rivard going most of the day without noticing the sign pretty much proved his point.
When Benny told his mother what he’d done, she’d put a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. And when he confessed that he’d been suspended for three days—even though he was the one with the black eye—she’d laughed so hard she had cried, tears streaming down her pretty face, ruining her makeup.
Benny had become the class clown by design. He knew every class had to have one, and he’d be damned if he let some other guy take on that role. His classmates—hell, the whole school—would remember him forever as that guy, the one with the jokes, the one with the faces, the one who couldn’t be serious for two seconds.
There were dark moods, of course. Who didn’t have them? Who hadn’t spent a little time studying his own face in the mirror, trying to recognize something, anything, of value? Who hadn’t tested the edges of the sharpest knives on the hidden parts of his skin just to see how sharp they really were, or sat in the dark for a while and wondered if people were laughing with him or at him?
By the time senior year of high school rolled around, Benny didn’t know how to be anything but funny, and he didn’t want to learn. His mother had told him he ought to try to do birthday parties, paint himself up as a clown and make children laugh. Benny would rather have cut his own throat. He didn’t want to do gags at birthday parties for a bunch of nose-picking brats; he wanted to perform in a circus.
The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe came to town in the spring of his senior year. The Macintosh was small enough that it still relied on posters hung at ice cream stands and grocery stores and barbershops to pull in an audience. In a little town like Corriveau, Vermont, that sort of thing still worked.
He’d gone to the circus every day, hung around before and after shows, talked to the workers, the animal trainers, the ticket takers, and eventually worked up the courage to talk to the clowns. By the third day, after hours, they invited him into clown alley to talk with them while they removed their makeup and hung up costumes and props. Benny could barely breathe. It had felt to him as though he had stepped into a film, or into history. He could smell the greasepaint, could practically feel the texture of the costumes, could hear the roar of the crowd, even though the tent stood empty by then.
The second-to-last night, his hopes of an invitation fast fading, he confessed his hopes and dreams and begged for an apprenticeship. The clowns had indulged him, patted him on the back, told stories of their own glory days, but none of them had encouraged him. It was a hell of a life, they’d said, something they would never wish on anybody. It was brutal on family and worse on love. Circus
life set them apart from the rest of the world, created a distance that could never be bridged. Once you were in, you were in. They were trying to scare him off, but Benny persisted.
Two hours after their final performance, as they were packing to move on, Zerbo—the boss clown—had given him the word. They’d take him on for the rest of the season, no pay, just food and a place to lay his head. If he was good enough to take part in the act by the season’s end and could get some laughs of his own, the circus manager—Mr. Appleby—would hire him on. If not, he’d be sent home.
Benny had given it his all, pulled out every gag, every funny face, every silly walk he had ever learned. He had studied the troupe, could stand in for almost any of them if someone fell ill. At the end of the season, on the fairgrounds in Briarwood, Connecticut, they were as good as their word—a spotlight of his own, a chance to prove himself.
The laughs had been thin and the applause halfhearted, but Zerbo had given him the thumbs-up. Tiny had told him later that it had been a near thing, but he’d worked so hard they had wanted to give him a second chance.
Now, four years of second chances later, he still felt like an apprentice.
That Friday night, Rose moved on. She’d mentioned a carnival somewhere, and a Little League baseball tournament later in the week, but Benny hadn’t really been listening. Kind as she’d been to him, a woman as attractive as Rose wasn’t interested in doing more than selling him a book, and she’d done that already.
He stayed up all through that cool night, reading Tovolo’s words over and over until the battery of his flashlight began to give out, the light to dim. By then, the horizon had begun to glow with the promise of dawn, but Benny read the final chapter of the book over a few more times. At first, he’d thought the whole thing was some kind of joke, Tovolo trying to pull one over on the reader or attempting some tongue-in-cheek social commentary about circus life that didn’t quite translate in his imperfect English. The book had been broken down into thirds—part one a memoir of his life, part two a kind of compendium of what he considered the funniest gags, and part three a reminiscence about his lifelong interest in the darker aspects of the history of clowns, everything from suicides and murders to haunted circuses and black magic.
The final chapter concerned Tovolo’s lifelong struggle with his own talent and his belief that he had never been funny enough. Two small circuses had merged, forcing him to perform alongside his longtime rival, Vincenzo Mellace, and every time the audience laughed for Mellace, Tovolo had wanted to set himself on fire. The reference to self-immolation made Benny shiver every time he read it, and he wondered if it had been written before or after the tragic blaze that had led to the Italian’s retirement.
Tovolo had befriended a Belgian fire-eater who had come over from the other circus and who shared his hatred of Vincenzo Mellace. The fire-eater’s mother traveled with her son and sometimes told fortunes on the show grounds after the audience had gone home and the circus folk had drunk too much wine.
She had been the one to instruct him as to the ingredients for the elixir and to explain to him precisely how to summon the spirit of Polichinelle, the patron of clowns, the demon known to children as the jester puppet Punch.
As the circus folk began to rise that Saturday morning, the day arriving overcast and bleak, Benny read Tovolo’s final chapter over and over. Each time, he held his breath as he read the last few lines.
Mellace’s routine was a disaster, he had written. He had performed Busy Bee thousands of times, and yet it seemed like his first. Laughter was sporadic at best, and mostly sympathetic at that. There were boos. For myself . . . I could do no wrong. They laughed at a simple chase on the Hippodrome Track. They howled when Rostoni and I performed the Shoot-out. And when I went out to do the Cooking Class gag on my own, it felt like a dream of how smoothly I had always wished for a performance to unfold.
God, how they laughed.
I cannot say for certain that Polichinelle was in my corner that night, but he was certainly no friend to Mellace. If offering the demon a little of my blood and a handful of days at the end of my life was all that was required for me to become the greatest clown in the world, it was a small price to pay.
When Benny heard Oscar and Tiny calling for him, he closed the book, yet as he went about his morning, he could think of nothing but the elixir and the summoning spell that the fire-eater’s mother had given to Tovolo. One line kept repeating itself in his head.
God, how they laughed.
The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.
It looked like it hurt.
The audience roared.
He’d asked the demon Polichinelle for his heart’s desire—to be the funniest clown in the circus. As blood flew from Clancy the Cop’s split lip, Benny began to have second thoughts. He staggered backward, tripped over his own big clown feet, and let himself roll with the fall. His whole life had been spent performing such antics, so if there was anything he knew how to do, it was fall. He rolled on his curving spine, then flipped back up onto his feet and executed a fluid bow.
Clancy, snorting like a bull, eyes bulging with his fury, barreled toward him, running on an engine of vengeance. Benny saw him coming just in time, spun in a circle to avoid his outstretched hands, and whacked Clancy in the back of the head with the plucked, frozen chicken—it wasn’t made of rubber anymore. The impact dropped Clancy to the ground, where he began to spasm and seize.
Benny lifted the chicken by its legs, examining it in full view of the audience. From their seats, they couldn’t have seen the blood on the chicken, would presume his horror just a part of the act. He turned and looked at them, a wide-eyed clown mugging for the paying customers, and they ate it up. The stands were shaking with laughter.
Stunned, a dead, frozen chicken dangling from one clenched fist, Benny remembered the midget car. He turned, saw the blood dripping from the door seam, and started to run toward it. A scream filled the air and Benny spun to see Tiny standing in the window of the Hotshots building façade, his striped dress and blond wig both in flames that spread quickly to his arms and the baby doll bundled in his arms.
But from the way Tiny stared at the swaddled infant—and from the high, shrieking noise that could really be nothing else—Benny had the terrible idea that maybe it wasn’t a doll in Tiny’s arms. Not anymore. Not thanks to Polichinelle.
Burning alive, screaming baby in his arms, Tiny jumped from the façade, which was now engulfed in flames, and plummeted toward Oscar, who stood knee-deep in the water barrel below. Too late, Oscar realized his situation. He tried to climb out of the barrel but tripped on the rim and fell half in, half out of the water, where he lay when Tiny and his baby struck Earth in a comet-like blaze. The trapdoor opened and all three of them crashed through, water barrel and all. Steam and smoke rose with a hiss and the stink of burning hair and flesh began to fill the big top.
The applause was deafening. The laughter rolled through the tent like a hurricane.
Bobo shot Zerbo through the head during the Shoot-out. The guns were supposed to be made of rubber. When Zerbo’s only bullet went astray and killed a young father, passing through his popcorn tub on the way and spraying butter and popcorn onto a dozen people, the laughter turned to breathless, teary-eyed hysteria that reminded Benny of his mother.
Numb with shock, Benny staggered over to the midget car—what the public called a clown car—and vomited across the hood. Crimson leaked from every crevice in the miniature vehicle, pooling on the floor and running across the ground. The stink of blood and offal wafted off the midget car, and he felt as if he stood in an abattoir.
The driver’s door popped open. A colorfully cl
ad leg slipped out, and then Polichinelle climbed from the car. He wore a red and black jester costume, complete with ruffles at the shirt cuffs and bells atop his pronged hat and at the toes of his shoes. His alabaster skin did not appear to be makeup, nor did the bright red circles like burn scars on his cheeks.
Benny caught a glimpse of the carnage inside the midget car. The trapdoor meant to be beneath it no longer existed. Eight clowns had been broken and twisted and jammed together to make sure they could all fit in a space that would’ve been cramped for two, and somehow Polichinelle had fit into the driver’s seat.
Bobo stood in shock above the corpse of Zerbo, shaking and weeping. As Polichinelle pirouetted toward him, Bobo could only stare, but as he looked into the demon’s eyes, he screamed.
Polichinelle plucked a trick flower from Zerbo’s corpse and held it as if offering it to Bobo for a sniff. When he squeezed the rubber bulb dangling from the flower, an acrid-smelling liquid jetted out of it, coating Bobo’s head. His scream rose to a shriek as his face began to melt and his eyes sank into his skull. When he crumpled to his knees and then toppled sideways to land beside Zerbo, his scream died.
Benny had never heard laughter so uproarious. The audience cheered. Some stood and others doubled over, clutching their bellies. Some slapped hands across their chests as their hearts burst and they slid into the aisles, gasping into cardiac arrest. Throats went hoarse, faces turned red, hands blistered from applause, but they couldn’t stop. Their faces were stretched into grins that split the corners of their mouths and they wept tears of terror and pain and amusement, but they simply could not stop. It was, after all, the funniest thing they had ever seen.
God, how they laughed, Benny thought, and then, at last, he began to laugh as well.
Polichinelle performed a mad, capering little dance, part ballet and part mincing, mocking swagger, and then mimed a curtsy to the audience.
Through his laughter and his tears, Benny managed to choke out a single word.
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