“Vividly,” she said. “Do have a seat.”
My former place was now in the middle of one of the campfires, so I sat on the other side, near the door to the offices, facing the opposite direction from before. I’d used up all the ancient Varietys and Billboards in here, and in any event I now had Tom Lacroix’s comments to brood on, so I did; particularly his assumption that Sam Holt was guilty of murder.
Just how prevalent was that assumption, in the great world? If this was the common belief, would I ever live it down? To have trouble getting on with my career because I’d been typecast in a single role was one thing; to be unemployable because I was considered an unindicted murderer was something very different and far worse. I’d never seen myself as the Fatty Arbuckle of my generation.
In my new position in this room the offices were all behind me, and now I gradually became aware that the mutedly paneled wall ahead of me, beyond Miss Colinville and the chatterers, contained a modest and barely noticeable door. It wasn’t hidden, exactly, but its lack of ornament and the placement of the pictures and furniture around it made it virtually disappear.
I had nothing much else to think about, beyond the unsolvable problem of Tom Lacroix’s beliefs, so I spent a while looking at that door, wondering what was beyond it. All the offices were the other way, leading back to Kay Henry’s room, with its view toward the rear of buildings on the next block. This waiting room was windowless, so beyond that door must be a front room of some sort, overlooking the street. Not more offices. Storage? A small screening room, maybe, except he’d be unlikely to pick one of the few rooms with windows for such a purpose.
I was rather fuzzily staring at that door, trying to guess what lay beyond it, when it opened, and Rita Colby came out, in dark wool skirt and linen blouse. Our eyes met, and she looked startled; probably because she hadn’t expected to open the door into somebody’s distracted stare. I was too surprised myself to politely and immediately break contact, so she looked away first, sketching a quick smile onto her face as she said a word to the gathered regulars. Her manner of noblesse oblige was perfectly matched by their gushed greetings, the peasants hallooing the lady of the manor. She accepted their obeisances, crossed the room, nodded briskly to Miss Colinville, and went through the other door toward the offices, without glancing my way again.
It was ten minutes more before I was called; then Miss Colinville turned to me with almost a hint of thaw in her expression as she said, “You can go on in now. You remember the way, don’t you?”
“Sure do, beautiful,” I said, getting to my feet. I winked at her. “I’ll miss you.”
Her lips curled with scorn, and she turned back to her duties. Still grinning, I went through the doorway and down the hall to Kay Henry’s room, where Henry was pacing back and forth and Rita Colby was seated on one of the gray sofas, legs crossed, top leg fretfully moving.
At first, I was too interested in my own performance to really pay much attention to anybody else in the room. How would Ed Dante — this Ed Dante — react to the presence of Rita Colby? I decided he’d be awed, but that he’d try to cover it by clumsy joking mixed with overelaborate compliments. So, upon seeing the woman seated there, I immediately crossed to her, went down on one knee like a medieval knight, pressed both hands to my heart, and said, “Miss Colby, I’m your biggest fan. It’s an honor to breathe the air in the same room with you.”
She gave me a look of amused disbelief. “Well, that’s baroque,” she said.
“And I want you to know,” I went on, twinkling Ed Dante’s personality at her like mad, “when I dream of you, I’m always respectful.”
Laughing, but at the same time making a graceful brushing-away gesture in my direction, she looked up at Henry and said, “Make him stand up. I want a look at him.”
Immediately, I popped to my feet, swept off an imaginary musketeer’s cap, and performed a broad low bow, saying, “Ed Dante at your service, Madame.”
“Yes, fine, just stand there,” she said, sounding a bit impatient with me.
So I just stood there. I never wanted to take this character so far as to get him — and me with him — thrown out of anywhere. I stood, and Rita Colby looked me up and down, critically, studying me as though I were a piece of furniture she might add to the guest room. She made a waggly circling gesture with one down-pointing finger, so I turned in a slow circle, ploddingly, putting it on a little too broadly so she’d have to know this was another tiresome joke. When I faced her again, she said (to Henry, not to me), “Well, the moustache will have to go.”
“Oh!” I said, in pain, and put one hand up to touch three protective fingertips to that narrow line of hair above my lip. (An impish desire came over me to yank the thing off and hand it to her, saying, “Well, if you don’t like it, we’ll get rid of it.” Which would have been very foolish and very dangerous, so I didn’t do it.)
Meanwhile, Kay Henry was saying, “I know what you mean. But let’s not redesign the man until we know what we’re doing.”
“And whether or not,” she commented, “we want to do it at all.” Then, more irritably, she said, “You know, we don’t have to cast that part this early. The circumstances aren’t the same any more.”
I listened intently, frozen there with my fingers against my moustache, feeling myself invisible inside this other personality, listening to them, waiting for them to say more, and thinking that Rita Colby didn’t sound like a person referring to a part that had been given to a lover.
“I know, dear, I know,” Henry said, soothing her, sounding well practiced at soothing her. “But Ed’s here, and Julie Kaplan told him about the role, so why not look him over.”
“Fine,” she said, brisk and impatient. “We’ll look him over.” And she looked at me, making a business of it (more subtly than my bits), and said, “Well, he’s tall enough. How tall are you?”
“Six foot six, Mum,” I said, and released my moustache to tug a forelock. “Up a half.”
She ignored that. “Have you ever played Nazis?” she asked me.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nazi soldiers,” she explained. “Gestapo men, that sort of thing. They usually cast big boys like you in that kind of part.”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I said. And it was true; before PACKARD, the occasional one-shot small television roles I’d landed had included a couple of German soldiers in World War II stories.
“Good,” she said, and pointed at Henry. “Go arrest him.”
Very clever. It was a simple little exercise, a two-dimensional character I already knew, a scene I should have no trouble improvising. If awkward, jokey, pushy Ed Dante showed through the character, that would be the end of it; she’d have no further use for me.
So now what? It seemed to me I’d better play the part as well as I knew how, that being the only way I could prolong this conversation. So I stepped back, lowered my head to think about it and to get all this other extraneous stuff out of the way, smoothed my jacket and tie to a better semblance of neatness, lifted my head, and looked over at Henry. I was aware of Rita Colby, of course, out of the corner of my eye, but I paid no attention to her. “Herr Henry,” I said. I was doing just the faintest hint of an accent, no music hall stuff.
Henry played along fairly well, though with a distracting little grin: “Yes, officer?”
I stepped toward him, arms bent, hands out in front of me, turning palms up to indicate my helplessness as I said, with a touch of sympathy, “I am afraid, Herr Henry, they have sent me to bring you in.”