"We'll find other seats."
"But they may all be taken."
"We'll find other seats," he reassured her so firmly that she didn't want to know how he'd accomplish it.
But fate was merciful. Temple could see Matt's blond head veering right through the crowd.
Max, tickets in hand, steered them left.
"This will be odd," Max noted as if just thinking of it. "To be in the audience for a change."
"Max ... we keep going forward. We're not in the really close-in seats?"
"Of course, we're in the critic's circle. I definitely intend to criticize the show. If you're lucky, it won't be aloud."
"How did you get such close seats?"
Temple jerked her head around. Matt and Molina were set-tling into a banquette on the upper tier.
"Seats are sold by computer. I'm learning. Besides, I want to be close enough to seethe smoke, mirrors and wires. Also, I want to see this Hyacinth fur-person close up. A Siamese cat is pretty small from the back row."
Temple knew this was not the time and place to object to Max's manipulative seating skills.
She would bet that Molina was really steamed that they were so close and she and Matt were so far away.
"Why on earth are they here?" Max asked, mirroring her thoughts in the eerie way he had used to be quite good at.
"I don't know! Probably to bug us."
"Don't be paranoid. There's a reason, and I take it unlikely romance is not it."
"Absolutely not," Temple said emphatically.
"Then calm down, quit covering your ring hand and figure out what it is. You're closer to the couple in question than I am."
"Separately, or together?"
"Either way, I assume. The stage is my job; the gate-crashers have now become yours."
"I'm sure they have tickets."
"I'm sure the tickets were obtained by the police about as highhandedly as ours were by me.
The key is why Devine is here. What does he know, who does he know, that would make him useful as a witness?"
"Effinger."
"But he's dead." Max suddenly settled back in his seat, arms folded across his chest. "Now that might be interesting. A resurrection. I don't believe a stage magician has tried it in forty years."
"If you sit this close up front, you don't get roomy banquette seats around nice tables, but have to put your drink in this dinky hollow attached to the seat arm."
"Aren't we cranky, all of a sudden? Just how many drinks are you planning on having."
"Plenty," Temple threatened.
She hadn't mentioned her real source of irritation: the fact that the pair in the back had a perfect view of them all evening but they could hardly return the favor without looking like rubber-neckers. Rubbernecks! Not neckers. Oh, shoot.
Max was chuckling. "What a farce. I bet Molina's got a bad case of itchy holster. She can't really arrest me, you know. Not enough evidence for probable cause."
"Maybe she's got evidence you don't know about."
"I doubt it. Now, here's the nice lady with the notepad. What will you have?"
Temple was tempted to ask if they served hemlock, but settled for two scotch and sodas instead. One had to order in bulk, because once the house lights dimmed and the show began, the only interruptions for two hours would be the waiters circulating silently with drink orders.
Max chose white wine, one abstemious glass. Temple wondered what Molina and Devine were knocking back: nothing for Molina if she were working, and who-knows-what for Matt, whose habits of any type were no longer any of her business.
But what was he doing with Molina?
She wasn't aware that she was twisting the ring around her finger until Max took her hand to stop her. "Chill out," he whispered in her ear. "Some questions are better answered later than sooner."
Temple sighed. She remembered them sitting like this at theaters around Minneapolis. How fun it was to settle into their seats, alone together but not alone, whispering back and forth.
Max nuzzled her earlobe, his hand moving from her shoulder to her neck.
"Do you suppose this Shangri-La will change the Siamese cat into twins?" he asked. "Why a domestic cat? It's so small for a stage act."
"As big as a rabbit, and bigger than doves."
"I'm glad I never worked with animals." His caressing fingers paused on her neck. "What's this? A souvenir of Effinger?"
Temple froze at his touch, but not from excitement. Confession trembled on the tip of her tongue, but it managed to twist into denial. "No. Louie must have done it."
"A cat gave you a hickey?"
"You know cats." Temple's shrug interrupted his caress. "They'll hook you with a claw here, a fang there and you never even notice it."
"Tooth and nail, huh? Law of the jungle." Max did not sound convinced.
Temple welcomed the nick-of-time arrival of their drinks, and toyed with the evening's program until the waiter left.
"This is clever. Like a Chinese menu."
"With a little Japanese thrown in for good measure. I have a feeling this will be a multicultural evening."
Temple fanned herself with the slick cardboard. It seemed hot in here. She wriggled out of her jacket, Max holding it so she could work her arms out. "Excuse me. Sorry," she murmured as her thrashing impinged on the woman on her right.
"Better?" Max asked as she settled down.
Before she could nod, the Musak that had been barely noticeable swelled into a distinctly Oriental sound, full of crystalline pings and high, yodeling instruments.
"Sounds like the overture to 'Flower Drum Song,' " Max whispered in what was not meant as a compliment.
At once baby-stepping Chinese maidens tripped onto the stage as the opening curtain parted to reveal a set of piled pagodas and distant mountains. A glittering covered rickshaw was being drawn across the stage by a twenty-sandal team of coolies in satin pajamas, pigtails and straw hats.
Temple was about to comment on the politically incorrect cliches when the music grew even higher and shriller. A cloud
CAT ON A HYACINTH HUNT * 297
of shadows crossed the stage, dispersing the coolies and attacking and dissembling the rickshaw with predatory swiftness. Within was a woman in exquisite Chinese robes, which the black-clad attackers rent from her body with flourishes of unraveling fabric.
So many thin, veiled layers flew up into the stage flies that it seemed nothing would be left of the woman, but she suddenly burst upward like the clothes, swinging out of the shadow figures' earthbound grasps on an invisible wire, a tattered kite of a figure, her bare legs and arms flashing through the provocative tatters of her robes.
"Hmm," Max commented, aiming a Clint Eastwood-squint at the stage.
But he was watching the wings, not the central figure of the woman careening above the stage.
The dark cloud was dispersing to the stage's far reaches, separating into a swarm of furies, into black-Spandex-clad ninjas.
"Aren't ninjas Japanese?" Temple whispered to Max.
He nodded, still watching the stage. "This setup blends everything exotic and Eastern into a kind of chow mein. Purist it ain't, but it's perfect for Las Vegas."
By now Shangri-La had come to rest atop a huge elephant figure that had materialized from behind a sheer length of chiffon that the Chinese maidens had lifted from a trembling "river" on the stage floor into a wavering wall of color and softness.
As the show progressed, Shangri-La, while her henchmen the ninja and the maidens disappeared and reappeared, wore less and less and played peekaboo with the almost-living lengths of exotic fabrics that made the stage a fluid space, a kind of cloud kingdom.
Temple was struck by the arch peep-show nature of Las Vegas magic shows. For this later
"adult" show, bare breasts were obligatory, though Shangri-La, being the magician star, only revealed glimpses of her acrobatic body.
Her agile movements were even more impressive because of the six-inch platform shoes she wore, which changed in elaboration and grew taller with each of her reappearances in yet another delicately glittering robe. And as the act progressed, Shangri-La's robes intensified in color from the palest pastels to the more lurid and inflamed shades.