Memory (Hard Case Crime) (40 page)

And as for the coincidence, what of it? Condemned men weren’t exactly rare in fiction; they were stock enough for Robin Kirk to have thought of one. So the coincidence didn’t mean a thing. It was a coincidence, and nothing more.

The makeup man was finishing his face as two more men came into the room. He looked at them and said, “One minute. Be with you in one minute, don’t go nowhere.” And then, under his breath, “So I got to work alone? When that son of a bitch gets here, I swear to Christ—” He stepped back, studied Cole critically, and finally nodded. “All right,” he said. “You’re done. They want your hands done, come back. If they don’t say nothing, you don’t say nothing.”

“All right. Thank you.”

But the makeup man was already snapping at one of the others to come sit in the chair.

Cole put his shirt and suitcoat on and went outside and headed toward the group of people still clustered around the big table, and once again Herbie Lang came scurrying toward him, beaming, arms outstretched, shouting, “Comrade! You look perfect! Absolutely beautiful! Come along, come along.” He grabbed Cole’s elbow again, and guided him over to the table and to a woman in a beige tweed suit. “Karen. Karen. One second.”

She turned around, glancing with irritation at Lang and noncommittally at Cole. “Who’s this?”

“Condemned Man. All right? Beautiful makeup job?”

“Gray suit,” she said. “I don’t like the gray suit, that light a gray. Condemned Man, it ought to be darker, more somber.” She turned her head. “Harvey?”

A gaunt tall man came over, carrying a cardboard coffee container. “Something wrong?” He said it in a long-suffering way, as though he’d always known something would go wrong now, at this exact moment in time.

She gestured loosely at Cole. “Condemned Man,” she said. “The gray suit. Is it too light or is it too light?”

The gaunt man studied Cole and nodded. “Too light,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” said the woman. To Cole she said, “Did you bring another suit?”

“Yes, it’s in my—”

“What color?”

“Darker than this.”

“Go try it on.”

Lang had his elbow again. “Come along, comrade,” he said gaily. “I’ll show you the dressing room. Where’s your suit?”

“In my bag, in the makeup room there.”

“Oh. I’d better not go in there, Ralphy’s peeohed at me. You see the stairs over there?”

“Yes.”

“Up them, and first door to your right. Got it?”

Cole nodded.

“Good, kimosabe.” Lang patted him on the back again, and hurried off.

When Cole went into the makeup room the makeup man spun around to glare at him, saying, “The hands? Is that it, the goddamn hands?”

Everyone was nervous, the makeup man and Lang and the woman and the gaunt man, all of them, exuding nervousness from every pore. Cole’s own equilibrium was held only tenuously, and all this nervousness around him was having a bad effect on him. He pointed at his canvas bag, unable to say anything, and his hand was shaking.

“Shit,” said the makeup man, and went back to work.

Cole picked up his bag and carried it upstairs and through the first door on the right. This was a barren room, with pale green walls. A row of wall lockers was stretched across the opposite wall, with a wooden bench in front of them. A middle-aged man was getting laboriously into some sort of police uniform. He nodded to Cole, but didn’t say anything, so Cole only nodded back.

Cole changed quickly, and put his first suit in the canvas bag. Then he looked around, wondering where to leave the bag, and the middle-aged man said, “Just stick it in one of the lockers. Nobody’ll take it.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Cole went back downstairs, and this time it was the woman who caught him first. She stopped him and stood peering at him a minute, and then nodded emphatically. “Much better,” she said. “Much much better. Come along, we need Harvey’s okay.”

He went with her to find the gaunt man, who was now standing broodingly in an office set in the middle of the room, gazing unhappily at the desk. The woman attracted his attention and asked him if Cole’s new suit weren’t much better, and he said deliberately that it was. The woman was pleased, and told Cole, “All right then, you find yourself a seat over there and we’ll call you when we’re ready. Be careful you don’t smudge your makeup now, we’ll be ready to use you very soon.”

Cole went over where she’d pointed, to the side wall, where he found some folding chairs set up against the wall. The middle-aged man was there, in his police uniform, and another man in a police uniform, and two others in business suits. Cole sat down near them, but not with them, and waited. To his right, the other four men chatted together; out on the floor, men in shirt sleeves wrestled the television cameras around and shouted to one another and pointed up at the ceiling and spoke into headsets and hurried this way and that. Other men, in work shirts, carried pieces of furniture around, or stood in small groups talking together and smoking cigarettes.

The waiting began to bother him after a while. He’d gotten over his first shock at hearing the part he was supposed to play, and he had stopped being bothered as much by the nervous motion going on all around, but as the time went by the very fact of waiting began to prey on him. There was hustle and bustle everywhere, and the woman had told him they would be ready to use him very soon, so he was expecting to be called any second, but the time went by and went by and went by, and nothing happened.

From his position here, on the side wall, he could see the control room, a concrete block affair built up on the balcony, with broad soundproof windows overlooking the whole work area. Through the windows he could get dim glimpses of men in white shirts, their heads bobbing back and forth; they were in semi-darkness up there, with faint red and green lights playing on them, reminding him of aquariums.

An hour went by, and a second hour, and no one had come near him, and then all of a sudden Herbie Lang came trotting over, smiling as broadly as ever. Lang spoke to them as a group, to Cole and the other four men, saying, “Well, comrades, it won’t be long now. We’ve had our little problems, you know how it is, but we’re all squared away now and we’ll be ready to use you right after lunch. Take a lunch break now, be back at one-thirty. Check? Check.” He hurried away again.

The other men got to their feet, grumbling together, and started off in a body toward the doors. Cole trailed after them, not knowing what else to do, but then he realized they weren’t paying any attention to him and didn’t consider him a part of their group, and he hung back, embarrassed at having tried to attach himself to them like a fifth wheel. He moved with deliberate slowness, letting them get farther and farther ahead, so that they’d already gone out the street door when he pushed through one of the doors into the lobby. They went off to the right; when he reached the street, he turned left.

He had to go all the way back to the subway entrance before he found a luncheonette, and then he stood for a second on the sidewalk, gazing at the concrete steps down to the subway, feeling in himself a desire to keep on going, to go down those steps and into a subway car and ride all the way back home. Everything was depressing him today, everything. The name of the character he was to play, and the tension crackling around the big shots in the studio, and his complete isolation from the other actors with minor roles, all of it surrounding him with premonitions of danger and trouble, of the presence of threats to himself that he could neither anticipate nor understand.

He told himself angrily that it was just the cycle affecting him, just one of his normal depressions coming over him, and what a hell of a time it had picked to come back. This was the most important event since his accident; the day on which he was starting again to live his old life. What he had been doing so far was not living his old life, it was living a kind of interregnum in the
area
of his old life, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. Today was a new beginning, the first real step in the return to normalcy; he couldn’t let any depression or any gloomy premonitions ruin this for him.

He went into the luncheonette and sat down at the counter. There were middle-aged women, shoppers surrounded by brown paper bags, eating lunch in two of the booths, and a few men in work clothing were sitting at the counter. A youngster in his late teens, pale and thin, came over to serve him, and Cole asked for hamburger and coffee. The counterman looked at him somewhat oddly, but didn’t say anything. He went away and put the hamburger on, and Cole watched him, wondering why he’d been given such a funny look. But there wasn’t any explanation.

He got his food and started to eat, and after he took his first sip of coffee he saw a dark red smear on the cup, the kind women leave with their lipstick. He stared at it, and suddenly remembered the makeup. He was in full makeup; his whole face covered with an orange-like grease, black and white and gray lines streaked this way and that across his forehead and cheeks, dark red on his lips.

No wonder the counterman had stared at him. He remembered now that the other actors had gone off to the right; there must be a lunch counter nearby in that direction, where the actors from that studio always took their lunches, and where the sight of a face covered by makeup wouldn’t be uncommon. But no one came here from the studio; in here he was only some kind of insane freak.

He couldn’t eat any more. He dragged a dollar bill from his wallet and dropped it on the counter and hurried back out to the sunlight. He practically ran now, wanting desperately to be back in the studio. He averted his face whenever he passed another pedestrian.

Back in the studio, there was still activity, but only the stagehands were still there. No actors were present, and none of the people in white shirts. He looked up at the control booth, and it was empty, too. He walked back over to the folding chairs and sat down to wait.

After a while, people began to come back into the studio, and the noise built up again, and the tension, and the scurrying. The four other actors came in, strolling across the floor in a casual manner, talking together and smoking cigarettes. They sat down near him, and continued to talk. The middle-aged man Cole had seen up in the dressing room nodded at him in a friendly way, but made no effort to include him in the conversation.

The afternoon dragged on just as the morning had, and finally at three-thirty the woman in the tweed suit came over, bustling, nervous, tense, and said, “All right, we’re ready for your scene now.”

Cole and the others followed her across the room, through and between the various sets. It was like going through a maze, with the black pipes across the ceiling far above, and the feeling of great immensity in the room because in among the sets it was impossible to see the far walls any more.

They stopped at a courtroom set. It was just the front end of a courtroom, and looked thin and fragile. There was a judge’s bench on a paint-stained platform, and a wooden railing, and two long tables backed by wooden armchairs, and just the first two spectator pews behind that. Other people were already there, actors and others. An actor dressed up like a judge was up in his place, and other actors were sitting at the two long tables. Herbie Lang was standing to one side, arms folded across his chest, a strained smile on his face. The gaunt man was walking back and forth, studying the set and actors in a fatalistic way. There were two men with clipboards, just standing around. And there was a stocky gray-haired man with a harried expression on his face, who turned out to be the director.

It was the director who positioned them, taking each actor in turn by both elbows and backing up, as though actors were things that had to be dragged into place. When he came to Cole, he maneuvered him over to one of the long tables and sat him in the chair on the end, next to a tall distinguished-looking actor whose face Cole found vaguely familiar.

Once everyone was in place, the director came around to each one, telling him what he was to do in this scene. One of the young men with clipboards followed him this time, and the director occasionally consulted with him briefly. When they got to Cole, the director said, “You’re who? Condemned Man? Is that right?”

Cole nodded. “Yes. Condemned Man.”

“Very good. Your cue is—” He consulted with the young man carrying the clipboard. “Your cue is, ‘Hanged by the neck till you’re dead.’ No, that isn’t right!” He consulted again, and said, “That’s what I thought. That’s your
speech
cue. First things first. Your
first
cue is, ‘The prisoner will rise.’ Then you stand up and face the judge. He pronounces sentence, blah blah blah, and then your cue is, ‘Hanged by the neck till you’re dead.’ Shouldn’t that be, ‘Hanged by the neck until dead’? Somebody? Somebody?” He was looking around frantically, and three or four people hurried over. They talked together, checking with the clipboard, and finally straightened it out. The director said, “Yes, that’s right. That’s what I thought. ‘Hanged by the neck until dead.’ You got that?” He turned and shouted the last to the actor who was playing the judge.

The actor nodded and repeated the line back to him.

The director said, “Good. If you’re going to do this right, let’s do it right. Now. You, Condemned Man. You’re already standing. The line is, ‘Hanged by the neck until dead.’ Then you, and you—” pointing to the two men in police uniforms “—you take his arms, like so. Got that?” He demonstrated, grabbing Cole’s arm. “You start to exit that way. You go over there, that way.” He started off in the direction indicated, and stopped a few paces away. “And when you get here, you, Condemned Man, you twist out of their grasp and you make a lunge toward the judge’s bench, like so—” He demonstrated, leaping forward. “And you shout out your line. Shout it out, now, really shout it out, don’t worry about volume, that’s the sound man’s job. You got that? You know your line?”

“I haven’t got it yet,” said Cole.

“What? Why not? Herbie?”

“Right here, comrade commissar,” cried Lang. He hurried over and said, “I’ll give it to him right now, right this minute. Paul? It’s, ‘I don’t want to die!’ Simple, comrade?”