‘And what’s your speciality, Simpkins?’ asked Donnell.
‘I suppose you’d classify me as a telepath.’ Simpkins folded his arms, thoughtful. ‘Though it never seemed I was pickin’ up real thoughts, more like dreams behind thoughts…’
‘Simpkins once had a rather exotic vision which he said derived from my thoughts,’ said a musical voice. A diminutive, black-haired woman swept into the room, Papa and a heavy-set black man at her heels. ‘It was a pretty vision,’ she said. ‘I incorporated it into my decorating scheme. But his talent failed him shortly thereafter, and we never did learn what it meant.’ She walked over to Donnell; she was wearing a cocktail dress of a silky red material that seemed to touch every part of her body when she moved. ‘I’m Otille Rigaud.’ She gave her name the full French treatment, as if it were a rare vintage. ‘I see you’ve been getting to know my pets.’ Then she frowned. ‘Baron!’ she snapped. ‘Where’s Dularde?’
‘Beats me,’ said the black man.
‘Find him,’ she said, shooing them off with flicks of her fingers. ‘All of you. Go on!’
She gestured for Donnell to sit beside Jocundra, and after he had taken a chair, she perched on the desk in front of him. Her dress slid up over her knees, and he found that if he did not meet her stare or turn his head at a drastic angle, he would be looking directly at the shadowy division between her thighs. She was a remarkably beautiful woman, and though according to Papa’s story she must be nearly forty, Donnell would have guessed her age at a decade less. Her hair fell to her shoulders in serpentine curls; her upper lip was shorter and fuller than the lower, giving her a permanently dissatisfied expression; her skin was pale, translucent, a tracery of blue veins showing at the throat. Delicate bones, black eyes aswim with lights that did not appear to be reflections. A cameo face, one which bespoke subtle understandings and passions. But her overall delicacy, not any single feature of it, was Otille’s most striking aspect. Against the backdrop of her pets, she had seemed fashioned by a more skillful hand, and when she had entered the office, Donnell had felt that an invisible finger had nudged her from the ranks of pawns into an attacking position: the tiny ivory queen of a priceless chess set.
‘You have a wonderful presence, Donnell,’ she said after a long silence.’Wonderful.’
‘Compared to what?’ he said, annoyed at being judged. ‘The rest of your remaindered freaks?’
‘Oh, no. You’re quite incomparable. Don’t you think so, Ms Verret? Jocundra.’ She smiled chummily at Jocundra. ‘What an awful name to saddle a child with! So large and cumbersome. But you have grown into it.’
Jocundra registered surprise on being addressed, but she was not caught without a reply. ‘I’m really not interested in trading insults,’ she said. She opened her purse and pulled out a manila folder. ‘These are our cost estimates. Shouldn’t we get down to business?’
Otille laughed, but took the folder. She carried it back to the desk, sat, and began to examine it.
A tap on the door, and Papa leaned in. ‘Otille? They spotted Dularde in the ballroom, but there’s so damn many people, we can’t catch up with him.’
‘All right. Don’t do anything. I’ll be down in a minute.’ She waved him away. ‘These don’t seem out of line,’ she said, closing the folder. ‘And I’m quite impressed with you, Donnell. But I think we should both sleep on it and see how we feel in the morning. Then we can talk. Agreed?’
‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Jocundra?’
She nodded.
‘I apologize for getting off on the wrong foot,’ said Otille, scraping back her chair and standing. ‘I have to deal with so much falsity, I end up being false myself. And I suppose my theatrical background has affected me badly.’ She tipped her head to one side, considering an idea. ‘Would you like to hear something from my play? Danse Calinda?’
Donnell shrugged; Jocundra said nothing.
Otille adopted a distracted pose behind her chair. ‘I’ll do a brief passage,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll find Dularde.’ As she spoke the lines, she darted about the room, her hands fidgeting with her dress, papers on the desk, straightening furniture, and all her movements had the electrified inconsistency of someone prone to flashes of otherworldly vision.
’”… And then coming back from Brooklyn Heights, the cabbie was talking, looking at me in the rear view mirror, winking. He was very friendly, you know how they are when they think you’re from out of town. But anyway as he was talking, the skin started dissolving around his eye, melting, rotting away, until there was just this huge globe surrounded by shreds of green flesh staring at me in the mirror. And I was afraid! Anyone in their right mind would have been, but all down Broadway I was mostly afraid that if he didn’t keep his eye on the road we were going to crash. Isn’t that peculiar? I’m terribly hot. Are you hot?’” She walked over to the wall and pretended to open a window. ‘“There. That’s better.’” She fanned herself. ‘“I know you must think I’m foolish running on like this, but I talk to so few people and I have… I was going to say I have so many thoughts to express, so many tragic thoughts. So many tragic things have happened. But my thoughts aren’t really tragic, or maybe they are, they’re just not nobly tragic. The only thing noble I ever saw was a golden anvil shining up in the clouds over Bayou Goula, and that was the day before I came down with chicken pox. No, my thoughts are like the radio playing in the background, pumping out jingles and hit tunes and commercials and the news bulletins. Flash. A tragic thing occurred today, ten thousand people lost their lives, then nervous music, typewriters clicking, and moving right along, on the last leg of her European tour the First Lady presided over a combined luncheon and fashion show for the wives of the foreign press. Ten thousand people! Corpses, agony, death. All that breath and energy flying out of the world. You’d think there’d be a change in the air or something, a sign, maybe a special dark cloud passing overhead. You’d think you would feel something…”’
Donnell had been absorbed by the performance, and when Otille relaxed from the manic intensity she had conjured up, he felt cut off from a source of energy. ‘That was pretty good,’ he said grudgingly.
‘Pretty good!’ Otille scoffed. ‘It was a hell of a play, but the trouble was I tended to lose myself in the part.’
Otille’s pets and the black man she had called Baron were waiting by the doors of the ballroom. Though the doors were shut, the music was deafening and she had to raise her voice to be heard. ‘I really hate to interrupt things on account of Dularde,’ she said, looking aggrieved.
Downey and Clea and Papa put on expressions of concern, displaying their sympathetic understanding of Otille’s position, but Simpkins’ smile never wavered, apparently feeling no need to cozy up. The black man stared at Jocundra, who hung back from the group, ducking her eyes, lines of strain bracketing her mouth.
‘Is this important?’ asked Donnell. ‘We’re tired. We can meet him in the morning.’
‘I won’t be awake in the morning,’ said Otille angrily; she turned to the others. ‘Please try to find him once more. I’ll wait here.’ She gestured to the Baron, and he flung open the doors.
Music, smoky air and flashing nights gusted out, and Donnell’s immediate impression was that they had pierced the hollow of a black carcass and stumbled onto an infestation of beetles halfway through a transformation into the human. Hundreds of people were dancing, shoving and mauling each other, and they were dressed in what appeared to be the overflow of a flea market: feathered boas, ripped dinner jackets, sequined gowns, high school band uniforms. Orange spotlights swept across them, coils of smoke writhing in the beams. As his eyes adjusted to the alternating brilliance and dimness, he saw that the ceiling had been knocked out and ragged peninsulas of planking left jutting from the walls at the height of about twenty feet; these served as makeshift balconies, each holding half a dozen or more people, and as mounts for the spotlights and speakers, which were angled down beneath them. Ropes trailed off their sides, and at the far end of the room someone was swinging back and forth over the heads of the crowd.