«Is McAn as good as you?»
«Infinitely better, since I don't do it at all now. Thanks for the beer—and now I really should try to show that damn fool drummer what I want.» He got to his feet.
«Wait a minute,» Montecruz said quickly, holding up a pudgy hand and beginning to look a little less confident. «You're the only guy that ever performed eight redemptions—»
«Six. Two got to the Holy City before I could catch them.»
«Okay, six. You've still got the record. The girl's father wants the best, and listen, this won't be as difficult as the others. All you've got to do is locate her, her family will do the kidnap and breaking—»
«Her family can do the whole thing,» said Rivas, straightening up. «I'm not kidding about being out of that game. Hire me as a pelicanist or songwriter anytime—they're my only occupations nowadays.»
He turned and started back toward the stage, but Montecruz, agile for a fat man, scrambled around the table and caught Rivas's elbow when he'd taken only four paces.
«We'll go ten thousand! » the man hissed.
Exasperated, Rivas turned back to face him. «I told you my answer.»
For a couple of seconds Montecruz's face was expressionless, and looked oddly childlike; then, «To sing? » he demanded, his voice shrill with incredulous scorn. «You'd stop saving lives—souls!—to sit in a bar and sing? Oh, but you only did it while you needed the money, isn't that right? And now that you can fiddle for it, everybody else can . . . can be gutted and skinned, and it won't disturb your self-satisfaction even as much as a wrinkle in your precious costume would, huh? It must be nice to be the only person worthy of your concern.»
A crooked, unmirthful grin had appeared on the pelicanist's face during Montecruz's speech, and when the man had finished, Rivas said, «Why don't you go home and just deal with things you know something about, sport.»
He'd spoken quietly, but Mojo and Fandango heard him and looked up in alarm.
The insult, especially deadly in view of Montecruz's hairlessness, hung in the air for several seconds and hardened jaw muscles made Montecruz's suddenly pale face seem even wider.
Rivas yanked his arm free and took two steps back, the skin over his cheekbones taut and his left hand near his knife sheath.
Finally Montecruz, whose hand had darted for his own knife, took a deep breath, let it out, and then whispered, «I don't take that, Rivas—I'll just hold it for a while.» He turned and stalked out of the building.
When the swinging doors had creakily flapped shut after him Rivas looked at the ceiling and exhaled a long, descending whistle. That, he told himself, was loss of control. Better slow down on the beer, old buddy—you've had enough already, at home and here, to keep you oiled for the rest of the evening.
«God, Greg,» said Fandango in some awe as the peli-canist walked back to the stage, «you were mad, weren't you? I just realized, I never seen you mad before—just, you know, grouchy about something not being done right. What'd he say to make you call him out that way? That stuff about singing, and your clothes? And whose life did he want you to—»
«Oh, shut up. Tommy,» said Rivas wearily. Mojo had got the bright lamps lit at the front of the stage, so he put on a look of only mild annoyance as he climbed back up onto it. «He didn't make me mad, all right? I'm tired of everybody thinking they've got a right to my time, that's all. And I didn't mean to call him out.» He picked up his instrument and the horsehair bow, and was embarrassed to notice that his hands were trembling; he lowered them quickly and shot a freezing look at the drummer, but Fandango was shaking his head and tapping out a quick burst on one of his drums and clearly hadn't noticed.
«But you called him a sport ,» the drummer said. «I mean, sure, you call me that when I screw up sometimes, but that guy was one—I could see from here he was a baldy.»
«I'm going to think you're a mental one if you still can't grasp the tempo of this,» said Rivas. «From the beginning now, and make it rattle.» He tapped his foot three times while Fandango frowned attentively, then began playing.
They had to stop a few minutes later when Mojo began turning the noisy, ratcheted wall cranks that hoisted the lit chandeliers up to the ceiling, and in spite of his earlier resolve Rivas put down his pelican and went to the bar for another refill. He came back and perched cross-legged on his stool and then just stared absently into the still dim corners of the ceiling, where long, dusty festoons of paper dolls were draped like huge cobwebs around three of the walls.
Only a few customers had wandered in and sat down by the time Mojo finished his tour of the wall cranks, and Fandango glanced inquiringly toward Rivas, but the pelicanist seemed to have forgotten his dissatisfaction with the drummer's playing. More people drifted in, and the chandeliers slowly stopped swinging as the ripple of conversation grew louder and the laughter and clinking of glasses more frequent; but Rivas remained oblivious, and when the pair of typically mute Chino twins who were the steel guitarist and chimes-banger arrived and climbed onto the stage, Rivas's hand-jive greeting was as unconsciously automatic as the twitch of a horse's flank when a fly lands on it.
Finally Fandango had to nudge him and hiss, «Heads up, Greg!» when the owner appeared and began threading his way around the tables toward the stage.
Steve Spink and Rivas were of about the same age and build—thirty or so and rangy but tending a little toward plumpness over the belt—but Spink with his ready smile and undisciplined tumble of blond hair fairly radiated boyish cheer, while Rivas's dark hair and beard and deeply lined cheeks gave his face in repose an almost theatrical look of disdain.
Spink leaned toward the stage as Rivas, looking only startled at the moment, hastily hopped off his stool and picked up his instrument and blinked around in some surprise at the filled room.
«You okay, Rivas?» Spink asked pleasantly.
«Uh, what?» Rivas stepped to the edge of the stage, inadvertently kicking over his forgotten beer glass. The glass broke, and beer spattered Spink's expensive leather coat.
«Damn it, I asked if you were all right. You don't act like you are. Can you still perform?»
Rivas scowled and straightened to his full height. «Of course I can perform! What do you mean still? My God, just because I kick over one cheap beer glass—»
«Since when is glass cheap? There was an old guy in here at lunch talking to me. Said you were a Jaybird once. Any truth to that?»
«Yes,» Rivas said haughtily. «I don't make any secret of it. I've been a lot of things in my life.»
«You talk about all the other things, though. Did you take the sacrament very often?»
For the second time that evening Rivas felt real anger kindle in him. «Just what are you trying to say, Steve?»
Spink let his habitual eye-narrowing smile relax into a frown. «I'm sorry, Greg. But you can understand my concern, can't you? I can't have any of the people I rely on going birdy.»
«Start worrying about it when I can't fill your damn place to overflowing for you anymore.»
«You're right, Greg. Sorry. I shouldn't have listened to the old guy.» He turned to the audience, and Rivas glimpsed the smile flashing back on. «Ladies and gentlemen,» Spink said loudly, «tonight once again we're privileged to have with us Gregorio Rivas, of Venice.»
The applause came right on cue and was satisfactory in volume and duration, and Rivas grinned as arrogantly as ever as he bowed in acknowledgement—but under it he was uneasy. How would the applause sound, he wondered, if I didn't have a few paid prompters in the crowd to lead it? And-how much longer can the dangerous glamor of Venice plausibly cling to me? I've been out of Venice for five years, after all, and while it's true that Steve's standard intro still gets raised eyebrows and shocked whispers from strangers, old Mojo the other day was actually surprised when I mentioned having worked at the Bom Sheltr Bar in Venice—he said he thought that story was just flash for the tourists, like the fake hooter skulls on spikes on the roof.