“An earthquake?” Malone said hopefully. “We’ve had everything else in Chicago.”
“This isn’t funny, Mr. Malone,” Larry Lee said, in a voice that was entirely too calm. “It means — death.”
The car turned right into Wacker Drive. Larry Lee laughed nervously.
“I don’t believe in superstitions myself,” he said. “No intelligent person does.”
Malone crossed his fingers behind his back and said, “Of course not.”
Larry Lee looked at his watch. “I’d better tell you this fast. I have a new song coming out. Looks like — a hit. Mr. Malone, I don’t need to tell you what that means to me — as far as money is concerned.”
“I’d rather guess,” Malone said, “and I don’t handle income tax matters.”
“The name of the song,” Larry Lee said, “is — Kiss Me Goodbye Again. We’re featuring it in tonight’s show. I worked up a special arrangement, using Tosti’s Goodbye. The boys in the band refused to play it — even to rehearse it. Especially Art Sample. He’s a nervous guy anyhow. All clarinet players are nervous and he’s the best in the business. Both ways. And superstitious —
“I know,” Malone said sympathetically. “He wouldn’t walk under a black cat if a ladder crossed his path.”
Larry Lee said, “Mr. Malone, I’m an even-tempered man. But once in a while I don’t like to be exed up. Crossed, that is. Especially by the boys in my own band.”
The wind from Lake Michigan became frighteningly cool.
“I wrote another arrangement,” Larry Lee said. “It was a last-minute job. On purpose. Too late to rehearse. Art Sample may be the top clarinet player in the country, but me, I’m the top arranger. I worked in those four notes from Tosti’s Goodbye so skillfully that nobody — nobody — would know what he was playing until he’d already played it. And that especially goes for Art Sample.”
Malone started to whistle the four notes, caught himself just in time, and said, “It couldn’t be such a bad arrangement that you had to have a lawyer along.”
His companion managed a nervous laugh. “Understand, Malone. Building a band is like building a house. Every brick, every stone, every timber has got to be in exactly the right place. If one of them should slip, the whole building would fall. See? That’s why I’ve taken out such heavy insurance on all the boys.”
“Anything particular you expect to happen to any one of the boys in the band?” Malone asked as casually as he could.
“No! No, no, no!” Larry Lee buried his face in his slender, beautiful hands. “But if something should happen because of my stubborn insistence about — getting in those four notes of music — I’d be a murderer!” He managed what Malone suspected was a well-rehearsed sob, looked up quickly, and said, “I’m sorry to bother you with all this. But if you don’t mind coming to the broadcast, and watching it from the control room—”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” Malone assured him, “from a flagpole on Mars.” He wondered what kind of a legal fee he should charge for services like these.
Seventeen minute* later, in the steaming glass box of the control room, Malone decided the fee would have to be a large one. A last spasm of rehearsal sent people milling around the studio, loping earnestly in and out of the control room. The ones who had the bewildered look were, Malone suspected, relatives of Larry Lee’s sponsor.
The others joked and laughed, but their eyes weren’t in it. Underneath the chatter and the buzzing Malone sensed a kind of silent terror, rising and trembling like the pointer on a pressure gauge. Now and then words and phrases bounced back from the plate-glass wall. “—I hear they’re picking him up for another twenty-six weeks—” Then a sound engineer began to swear methodically at a telephone, a pencil dropped noiselessly to the floor, a female voice shrilled, “Well, if she hasn’t sense enough to see that—” Always there was the overtone of the control-room engineer quietly swearing at sounds that never came just right.
Then there was silence. The red hand of the clock began its last warning circle. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. A blast of laughter from the preceding program. Ten seconds, and the red hand still moving.
Malone wished lie were anywhere else in the world.
A sweet ruffle of violins, and the program was on the air. For a few moments, Malone didn’t seem to hear anything. Then he began to feel the quietness in the hot little control room. It was quiet, but too uneasy to be that quiet. There was some-thing in the performance coming over the loudspeaker that he didn’t quite like. And then Larry Lee’s band swung into the song he had been waiting for.
Goodbye Forever. A heartbreaking eternal goodbye from beyond the grave...
A cold little hand slipped into his. Malone turned and saw a very frail blonde girl who looked at him from behind terrified eyes.
“Mr. Malone,” she whispered, “please don’t let anything happen to him. He—”
Malone resisted an impulse to put his arm around her. Instead, he patted her hand and said, in his best cell-side manner, “My dear girl, there’s nothing to worry about!”
He didn’t know her from Eve’s other apple, and he didn’t have the faintest idea who he was, but with all his heart he hoped that what he had told her was true. Maybe because of the way she looked. A little like a pale yellow moonbeam. Soft, fair hair that looked as though it would curl endearingly around his finger, wide eyes that promised to turn violet at any moment.
Suddenly he remembered who she was. Mrs. Larry Lee. The wife Larry Lee’s smart little press agent, Betty Castle, kept under wraps. Because five million bobbysoxers would secede from their union if they knew that America’s Number One glamour boy had a kitchen with a wife in it.
All at once the music caught up with them. He watched the band through the plate-glass window.
Two clarinet players rose. They might have been any two clarinet players in any band in the world. One of them was short, squat, oily-haired. The other was tall, blond, and slender. Somehow, the microphone managed to match them up for size.
Those four notes, that had been so skillfully hidden in the orchestration that no one would know what he was playing, until he had played it —
“Goodbye — forever—”
The high, fluting notes were almost a pain in Malone’s ears. For just one moment, he closed his eyes. He heard one of the control-room engineers mutter something that might have been a prayer, but probably wasn’t. Then he looked into the studio.
The black-and-silver clarinet slipped from the hands of Art Sample as though it were a discarded toy. For one instant his eyes were wide with something like surprise. Then slowly, terribly slowly, he crumpled to the floor.
Larry Lee’s frantic signaling to the orchestra for more volume was of no use. The sounds of the instruments died out, one by one. First the bass player, then the brasses, then the woodwinds and strings, and at last the pianist, one hand suspended in the middle of a rolling chord.
Technicians in the control room did frantic things with push buttons and telephones. Music on the network began again, but not from Studio B, where Larry Lee stood as still as though he’d been left overnight in a deep freeze, where the musicians were silent, and where Art Sample lay on the floor, his clarinet six inches away from his hand.
Nobody moved. It was as though everyone had forgotten how to move. Even the pageboy stood still. The flawless mechanism of the network didn’t have any rules or procedures to cover situations like this one.