The Finns understood that he was also waiting for something to happen. They waited with him, watching him between the bodies of pedestrians marching toward the subway. Except for the large souvenir button on his T-shirt, many of the commuters were dressed in the same casual clothes, but the wooden man could not quite blend in with real life.
He glanced at his watch again, and the tourists nodded to one another. It would not be long now.
The man turned his entire body to face the door in the courtyard fence, and twenty pairs of Finnish eyes were looking over his shoulder.
Beyond the iron bars, a red door flew open. A slender blonde crossed the small courtyard with a fast click of white high heels. Her blouse was also white, and the pale blue skirt matched the garment slung over her arm. The young woman opened the iron gate and hurried to the curb, one hand raking through her long hair, combing it on the run. She lifted a waving arm to fish a cab from the stream of traffic.
The Finns stared at this attractive woman, wondering if they should recognize her from television or the cinema. They wanted her to be an actress, for they had not seen one celebrity in the past two days.
After donning sunglasses, the man moved toward the pretty blonde as a tight group of pedestrians passed between them. The sun glinted off a piece of metal when the man lurched forward through the press of bodies and collided with the young woman.
She yelled, ‘Damn tourist!’ And the twenty Finns were startled, but took no offense.
The man pointed his camera at her. Some reflex made the woman toss her hair and pose for him with a smile. A cab stopped, the blonde stepped in and rode off, never noticing what the wooden man had done to her.
The show was over. The man moved on. And the Finnish tourists looked the other way. In the best tradition of New York City, they had elected not to get involved.
The cab was trapped in midtown traffic, and Stella Small’s anxiety was climbing with every dime on the meter. She banged on the bulletproof glass that separated her from the driver. Of course, he would not turn around. What was the point? He spoke no English, and Stella knew that when she yelled, ‘There won’t be any ransom! I’m dead broke!’
The turbanned cabby nodded to assure her that they would be moving soon. He was very polite, more proof that he was not a native New Yorker.
She looked down at her watch for the third time in as many minutes, and she was still late.
‘Okay, you win!’ She waved money so the man could see it in his rearview mirror. After paying him, she stepped out of the cab two blocks from the hotel. Her pale blue blazer was carefully folded over one arm to protect it from soot and the droppings of low-flying pigeons.
She was swept up in the crowd of pedestrians and moving along the sidewalk at a fast clip. Two women walking toward her were actually slowing down, completely misunderstanding the concept of rush hour. And now they were breaking the prime law of survival in New York City, going beyond dangerous eye contact to overt staring. Stella wondered if they had recognized her from a recent walk-on part in a television soap opera.
Dream on, babe.
An old man stopped to gawk at her, and Stella smiled for him.
Yes, it’s me, the famous actress with no speaking roles.
She was attracting hard looks from everyone she passed. A middle-aged couple stopped to point at her, their mouths working in silence, obviously starstruck. The daytime soaps must be more popular than she had supposed.
Don’t you people have regular jobs?
The actress pushed through the hotel door and walked into an icy wall of machine-made air. Near the entrance, a bored young man never even glanced her way. He plucked a sheet of paper from his stack and waved it in her general direction. A woman near the closed doors to the ballroom was calling out the names that began with R. Stella Small sighed – saved by her rank in the alphabet.
She donned her suit jacket and joined the other actresses in an area roped off for the cattle call. None of these women paid any attention to her. Each pair of heavily made-up eyes was glued to a line of script on the hand-out sheet. Stella looked down at her own sheet. One line, six words. How much study did that require?
She stood near the wall behind a potted fern, away from the press of other bodies, determined that no one would wrinkle her lucky suit or stain it. When her name was called, she entered the ballroom beyond the great doors and stood before a long dais decked with bottles and glassware, paperwork and food trays. On the other side of the linen tablecloth, the casting director and producer were seated in the company of assistants. Before Stella could even say her line, these men and women were all agog, eyes popping. She flashed them with her best smile. They were dazzled, riveted, stunned – though still awaiting her first word.
The actress felt a slick of something wet on her hand and looked down at a long thick line of blood seeping through the sleeve of her blazer. Inside the casing of linen, more blood was rolling down the skin of her arm and dripping off the tips of her fingers.
‘I hate it when this happens.’ Line delivered, though it was the wrong line, Stella Small closed her eyes in a dead faint, and the back of her head met the hardwood floor.
Green curtains formed three walls of the emergency-room cubicle, a thin layer of privacy for the young couple. Stella Small’s legs swung from the edge of the metal examination table, and the physician’s smile was shy as he treated her wounded arm.
The doctor’s head snapped to one side, suddenly distracted by a shadow looming close to the flimsy curtain. Though the silhouette was all wrong, Stella instantly recognized this scene from the movie Psycho. One shadow hand was on the rise, reaching higher, higher, and then – the green curtain was violently ripped to one side. And now the startled young doctor was staring at a stout woman with a pyramid of dark hair and a long black dress that flowed like a nun’s habit.
Stella had always suspected that her agent could smell fresh blood from great distances. Martha Sutton was a formidable woman, a drama queen extraordinaire and scarier than real nuns.
‘Nice entrance.’
‘Oh, Stella, Stella.’ The woman’s gleaming eyes appraised the lacerated arm and the bright red stains on her client’s clothing. ‘You look marvelous!' In agentspeak, this meant publicity worthy.
The young doctor turned back to his chore of irrigating a long thin wound. ‘I think we can get away without stitches.’ He applied a few small bandages shaped like butterflies. ‘It’s a clean cut – very shallow. But I don’t see how a camera could’ve done this. Even if a piece of broken metal was – ’
‘I’m telling you,’ said Stella, ‘this tourist bumped into me with his damn camera. I was standing outside my building, hailing a cab – ’
‘All right, have it your way.’ The doctor walked away from the examination table, saying, ‘But it looks like you’ve been slashed with a razor.’
Martha Sutton’s eyes turned gleeful and sly. She whispered to her client, ‘Great line. We’ll keep it in the act.’
‘But it was a camera.’ Stella was more insistent now.
The agent pointed toward the far wall, where a man was standing behind a glass door. ‘See that guy? He’s a reporter. Now how bad do you want a career, baby doll?’
‘Oh.’ And by this, Stella meant, I’ve got religion – I’ve seen the light. Aloud, she said, ‘I’ve been slashed with a razor.’
‘That’s my girl,’ said Sutton. ‘And play up the idiot who carried you across that hotel lobby. He’s one of my clients. Lucky he didn’t have the brains to stop your bleeding. That trail of blood on the carpet was priceless. Now remember to spell your name for the reporter. He’s another idiot.’ The agent turned to leave, then stopped with an afterthought. ‘I made you an appointment for another audition. Something different – a police station. I just got off the phone with a cop in SoHo. He only wants blond actresses with dry cleaning problems. Do you by any chance have a blouse with a big X drawn on the back?’