Smart Moves

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Don’t worry. Just stick with me. I’ll give you some pig-stickers to hold in your hand. And you,” he said, pointing at Shelly and coughing, “those glasses come off when you go onstage. They didn’t have glasses five hundred years ago in Venice. Even if they did, they didn’t look like that and soldiers didn’t have them. You don’t look much like a soldier anyway.”

  I was undressing as fast as I could. Shelly stood there baffled.

  “Get dressed, Shell,” I said. “We’re going to be in Shakespeare.”

  “No,” shouted Shelly.

  “Yes,” I said. “Think of all the lies you can tell Mildred. I’ll back you up on every one of them. Hurry up, Shell, we’ve got lives to save.”

  “I’m not forgiving you for this, Toby,” Shelly said, unbuttoning his pants.

  “Hurry up,” said Jake.

  We hurried. With Jake guiding us through and Shelly stuffing himself painfully in a pair of tights, we made it in about five minutes.

  “We’re late,” I said.

  “Naw,” said Jake. “Dress rehearsal like this for backers always runs late, maybe ten, fifteen minutes. You look perfect.”

  There was a mirror in one corner with a huge cardboard box in front of it. I kicked the box away and looked at myself. I didn’t look like a soldier. I looked like a fool in tights and a tin helmet. Shelly looked like a fugitive from a Wheeler and Woolsey movie. He was good for at least one prolonged laugh at Othello’s expense.

  “The glasses,” said Jake, reaching out for them.

  “Nooooo,” moaned Shelly as I took off his glasses and handed them to Jake, who folded them neatly and put them on the stack of Shelly’s clothes on the table. My clothes lay next to his, with holster on top. The .38 was tucked into my belt under my grey tunic. Jake led me and the blind dentist down the hall. We were ready for war.

  Act I went fine. We followed Jake onto the small stage a couple of times and watched Robeson and the cast go along with no problems. No one laughed at me or Shelly. The stage is a wondrous place. I had trouble looking out into the audience, because of the overhead lights, but the audience was small and I thought I could see enough. Shelly couldn’t see anything. When we looked at the entering messenger, Shelly squinted back in the general direction of the curtain.

  Robeson was too busy between acts to talk to us, though he did give Shelly an approving pat on the shoulder as he eased past us.

  “What was that?” asked the myopic dentist.

  “Paul Robeson letting you know you were doing a great job,” I said, looking through the curtain onto the audience.

  “He did?” Shelly beamed, looking everywhere but the right direction.

  “He did.”

  We got well into the second act before trouble came. Robeson had just announced, “Come, let us to the castle. News, friends! Our wars are done …” when I spotted a head of white hair in the audience. Povey was seated behind a smiling woman. He peeked out and our eyes met. I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes.

  “Povey’s here,” I whispered to Shelly.

  Shelly panicked, turned, and tried to head for the exit, but he didn’t know where it was. When Robeson said, “Once more well met at Cyprus,” Jake led us out through the curtain.

  I grabbed Robeson’s sleeve in the small space offstage. “Povey’s out there.”

  “I know,” sighed Robeson. “I saw him. What now?”

  “How long before you have to get back on stage?” I said.

  Shelly squinted, strained toward us.

  “Iago and Roderigo conspire for about four minutes. Then the Herald comes on. I’d say five minutes at most.”

  Holding Shelly’s hand, I pushed past the actors hovering in the small corridor waiting for their return.

  “What’s going on?” Shelly cried.

  I pushed into the prop room, grabbed Shelly’s glasses, handed them to him and said, “No time to change.”

  Shelly put on his glasses and blinked.

  “I thought we were still on stage,” he said.

  “All the world’s a stage,” I answered, throwing my tin helmet in the corner. “Let’s go.”

  With Shelly crabbing and scrambling behind me in full uniform, I worked my way to a window in the corner. The only way to Povey through the theater would put us in view of the audience. I hoped for surprise and didn’t have much time, not if he planned to kill Robeson the next time he came on stage. I had the feeling that he wanted not only Robeson but me too. Povey was not an easy man to discourage.

  Using the prop pike, I got the window open. I crawled through and helped Shelly grunt after me.

  “Our clothes,” he moaned.

  “We’ll come back for them,” I assured him.

  We were on a fire escape, a fire escape that swayed with our weight and probably hadn’t been used since it was built after the Civil War. I held the rusty railing and made my way down, not worrying about Shelly anymore but hearing him slip and slide, moan and groan behind me. I hit the alley, figured out where I was, and ran out to the street. The entrance to the theater was to my right. A cold breeze shot through my tight tights and I was afraid they were going to split. They didn’t. I hurried to the door, opened it, and ran up the wooden steps. In the lobby, the young man who had led us to Robeson looked up at me from his folding chair near the theater entrance. I hurried past him, making a sign with my finger to my lips that he should be quiet. The .38 in my other hand helped convince him. I could hear Shelly galumphing and panting up the stairs behind me. Povey was staring straight ahead at the stage, where the Herald was proclaiming, “Heaven bless the isle of Cyprus, and our noble general, Othello.”

  Robeson and most of the cast then came back on stage, Robeson’s eyes finding Povey. I moved as quietly as I could behind the chairs, but even in the semi-darkness, with my gun behind my back, people looked up at the sight of one of Othello’s guards in the audience. Somehow I managed to get behind Povey as Shelly burst through the entrance door. Almost everyone in the audience looked at him, everyone but Povey, whose eyes were fixed on the stage.

  Povey was in the back row. I was right behind him, my gun out.

  “Surprise,” I whispered in his ear as I jammed the pistol into his back, but the surprise was mine. The touch of the barrel was enough to send Povey slumping forward. I reached out to grab him as his head hit the woman in the row in front of him.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. She turned back to the show.

  The man to Povey’s left tried to ignore us. Maybe he did. It was hard to ignore a man with a knife sticking out of his back.

  13

  I pulled Povey into a sitting position, his blank eyes aimed in the general direction of the stage, where Robeson was looking in our direction and saying, “What is the matter here?”

  I almost answered, “Someone just put a knife in Gurko Povey’s back,” when I realized the question was addressed to one of the characters on stage. I hurried to where Shelly stood, panting in his torn tights, and hustled him into the lobby.

  “You left him there,” Shelly cried.

  I put my finger to my lips and pointed to the closed door to let him know there was a performance happening onstage almost as good as the one in the audience and the lobby. Shelly didn’t care.

  “He’ll kill somebody,” Shelly said. “Maybe me. Maybe he’ll come out here and kill me. I don’t want to die in a pair of tights and a silver jacket.”

  The lobby attendant who was standing next to us and looking back at the door said, “Please” and “They can hear you.”

  “Did someone go in there without a pass during the last act or just at the start of this one?” I asked the attendant.

  “I’ve got a wooden pike,” Shelly said to himself. “You can’t defend yourself with a wooden pike.”

  “He’s dead, Shell,” I said. “Povey is dead. A knife this big in his back.”

  I spread my hands to show how big the knife was. Maybe I exaggerated a little, but both Shelly and the attendan
t were impressed. Then the attendant remembered.

  “A man in a coat and hat,” he said, looking at the door as if he could see the man or his ghost coming or going through the door. “Said he had an urgent business message for Mr. St. Carle, would give it to him and be right out. Naturally …”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Tallish, not too heavy. Raspy voice like he had a cold. Didn’t get a good look at his face. He coughed, held a handkerchief to his mouth.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Nothing,” said the attendant. “He went in and came out about a minute later, maybe less. Came out and went down the stairs and out.”

  “The guy you said was following us,” Shelly chirped. “I thought you said he … Toby, you lied to me.”

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “At dinner,” Shelly said.

  “No, you.” I pointed at the attendant. “How long ago did the guy in the coat and hat leave?”

  “Just before you came running in here,” he said. “You probably passed him on the stairs.”

  I was tempted to check my father’s watch, but that wouldn’t have told me anything. It was worth a look, though he was probably in a cab on his way to a warm bed by now. I started down the stairs, shouting at Shelly to follow me.

  “Should I call the police?” the attendant horse-whispered behind us.

  “No, we’ll take care of it. I’m a detective. Don’t stop the show. We’ll be back,” I called over the noise of our clomping feet.

  “I’m not coming back here,” Shelly shouted.

  “Then you’ll go through life as a colorful soldier of Venice,” I reminded him. “Your pants are in that costume room upstairs.”

  We were outside the door now and I was looking both ways when I spotted him about half a block away, waiting at the corner. Shelly plowed into me and we made enough noise for the guy to look our way. A car pulled up in front of him as I recovered from the Shelly Minck attack and took off down the street.

  “Hold it right there,” I shouted, holding up my .38. He didn’t stop, didn’t look back. He opened the back door of the dark car and climbed in. The car took off as he was closing the door.

  I looked up and down the street. Cars, not many, were driving both ways. I spotted a cab about a block down and ran for it with Shelly grunting behind me. “My tights are tearing,” he moaned.

  “The sky is falling,” I called back. “Hold onto your pike and follow me.”

  The cabbie was in the front seat, reading a book. We jumped in and I said, “Hurry it up. Straight down the street and catch a black four-door. I’ll let you know when I see it. I’m a detective.”

  Shelly collapsed next to me and the driver and turned to us. I could see he had been reading General Douglas MacAthur: Fighter for Freedom. He could see two winded middle-aged men dressed for the wrong century.

  “You missed Halloween by half a year,” he said with a smile. He was a small guy, with a dark, lined face and a space between his two front teeth almost big enough for another tooth.

  I showed him my gun and as mean a smile as I could muster. He turned around and started the hack.

  “I told you I’m a detective,” I explained as he shot past a Ford coupe.

  “You got a gun and you’re anything you want to be in my cab, pal,” the cabbie said.

  “You’ll get paid,” I assured him.

  “Whatever you say, Sir Walter Raleigh,” he said, eyes forward.

  “We’re … not …,” Shelly grunted as he slumped back in the corner, one hand on his chest to keep in his pounding heart, the other clinging to his wooden pike. “We’re not crazy.”

  “There’s the car,” I shouted, poking the cabbie in the back.

  He saw where my .38 was pointing and made for a space to catch up. We were on Twenty-fifth heading west. I strained to see into the car we were chasing. There were two figures, a driver and the guy with the hat, who looked back and spotted us.

  “Can you make out his face, Shell?” I asked, but Shelly was still slumped back.

  We headed uptown, zagging through traffic, keeping up with the killer’s car. Neither of us was speeding. Speed might attract the police, and the guy who had knifed Povey didn’t want that. I wouldn’t have minded but I couldn’t think of a way to get both him and us stopped at the same time. The killer’s car made a sudden turn around Thirty-second Street. Our cabbie stayed right with him, but when we turned the car was gone. There hadn’t been enough time for him to get to the end of the street. He was still here somewhere. The cabbie pulled over and we watched, waited. There were no cars on the street. No one was walking, and the stores were closed for the night. A few sheltered light bulbs glowed lonely over doorways and delivery docks.

  “Where’d he go?” asked Shelly, squinting forward into the darkness.

  “One of those docks,” said the cabbie. “Probably someone waiting to pull the door down behind them.”

  I opened the door, yanked at the tights, which were death-locked on my crotch, and got out.

  “Come on, Shell,” I said, my eyes on the empty street in front of us.

  “Out?” Shelly said behind me. “Out there?”

  “Come on,” I insisted.

  Leaving the cab, he tripped on the running board and did a neat waltz step, using his pike for balance. The cab door closed with a snap and the driver shot forward like Brick Bradford’s space rocket.

  “No,” moaned Shelly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why?” Shelly cried.

  “Look at us,” I answered.

  Shelly looked, first at me and then at himself. Even he couldn’t avoid the logic of the cabbie’s decision to forgo the fare and get back to a normal night of Manhattan madness.

  “Let’s go,” I said and started down the street, keeping my hands on my .38 under my flapping black tunic, or whatever the hell it was called. I checked two docks before Shelly caught up with me, muttering, adjusting his glasses, holding up his pike to ward off sudden bullets that might spit out of the shadows. Halfway down the block I was ready to give up. We had lost them. Maybe they were in one of the dark windows above us, looking down and laughing. Then I did hear someone laughing. A door across the street from where we were standing opened, and four figures stepped out. They weren’t quite boys but they weren’t men yet either. What they were was big.

  “Look at that,” the one who came out first said, pointing at us in case the guys behind him had any thought of looking somewhere else.

  “Pansies in the garden,” said the second young man, who looked somewhat less human than Bushman, the gorilla back at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

  “I don’t like this,” whispered Shelly. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m having a great time myself, Shell,” I said through my teeth, a ventriloquist’s phony smile on my face as the quartet advanced on us. There was nowhere to run. Shelly was too fat and frightened, and my legs were about ten yards past outrunning what was coming toward us. As they spread out in a line, I got a better look at them. Only one was small. The others, including Bushman, were almost dark triplets. All four wore the same dark zipper jackets, with what looked like a hand-painted picture of a skull over the spot where the normal human heart should be. I guessed that three of them were named Bruno. The little one would be Sal. They spread out to block us from going up or down the street.

  “You girls lost?” one of the Brunos asked.

  The other three members of the iodine-bottle gang laughed.

  “Or are we late for the ballet?” said the little guy.

  They laughed even louder at this.

  As they moved in on us, Shelly stepped forward, lifted his pike, and squealed, “Don’t touch me—I’ve got this and I’ll use it. I’m a dentist.”

  They started to laugh, and one of the Brunos reached into his pocket and magically produced a piece of metal I was sure would open into a knife about as long as Shelly’s pro
p. Shadows from the dock light behind us shuffled on the street. Behind Shelly I opened my tunic and pulled out my .38. I held it up and aimed at the skull on Bushman’s jacket. It was the biggest target around, and if he took one more step forward even I probably wouldn’t miss. Movement stopped. Their eyes were on my gun, but Shelly in his myopic hysteria, and with his back turned to me, got the scene wrong. Convinced that his threat had turned the tide of battle, he took a step forward and brought his weapon up as if he were going to pole-vault over them.

  I could see in their eyes that the group couldn’t decide if the gun were real or not. Then they decided it might be. This was followed by a moment of truth in which they considered rushing us, even with a real gun. It might not be loaded. I might miss. The odds were better against two pansies in the street than against the Japs on some little island.

  “I mean it,” shouted Shelly with a sickly giggle.

  They didn’t even see Shelly.

  “We think you boys should turn around, walk away, and live to piss another day,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Shelly, trembling.

  “Shit,” spat one of the Brunos. “They’re not carrying any cash anyway. There’s no place to carry it in those.”

  “They ain’t worth taking apart,” said Bushman. “Too easy.”

  “We catch you again,” said the little one, “and you both get a spanking you won’t forget.”

  The Brunos laughed, then they turned away and headed up the street, agreeing that they had milked all of the fun they could out of two night-loonies without risking a hole in the belly. I put the gun out of sight as Shelly turned around in triumph.

  “God. It worked. Did you see that, Toby? Four of them.” He held up his pike in one hand and hitched his sagging tights with the other.

  “I’m proud of you, Shell,” I said.

  He beamed and adjusted his glasses, and we headed down the street in the opposite direction of the department night raiders. When we got to a street busy enough to draw traffic, there were no cabs. We started back toward the theater, Shelly in a state of heroic bliss, me in a sullen anger and sore feet. It isn’t easy to walk on a city sidewalk in thin, flat-heeled shoes that curl up at the toe.