“I didn’t think I was here in my medical capacity, Phil.”
While this conversation was going on, I was mulling over a dilemma. It seemed unlikely that Joy was also under the pile of coats, and so the diplomatic thing for me to do was undoubtedly to tiptoe out of the room as surreptitiously as I’d entered. However, my hand was wedged under the coat directly beneath the lady and I was understandably nervous about the motion required to remove it.
Still, I had to do it. I couldn’t stand there all night. Gingerly, I attempted to extricate the hand.
“COOKAROOKOOTOO!”
The cry echoed behind me as I silently closed the bedroom door. I went back down to the basement, hoping that Joy had rejoined the party and not gone home by herself. She had. She waved to me as I entered. Everybody was sitting around in a sort of very wide semicircle. The room was strangely hushed as I made my way over to her.
“Why did you duck out on me?” I asked.
“Nature called. I meant to go back. But a couple of other people took over our nest. So I came down here. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” My eyes swept the room and I looked at Joy questioningly. “What gives?”
“Sy Lenzio’s going to do a bit. Have you ever seen him?”
“No.”
“He’s a wonderful mime. Really professional.”
“He must be if he could get this bunch of high flyers calmed down enough to watch him.” It was true. Glancing around the room again, I could see the expectation in the faces.
I noticed with surprise that Cass Novak was back. His mousey wife, however, was nowhere in sight and I guessed he must have ditched her at home and returned. He was whispering to Rusty Roundheels, probably apologizing to the hostess for his behavior. Rusty was looking at him, but her hand was surreptitiously stroking Peter Putter’s leg. He looked like he was trying to ignore the caress and stared straight ahead. I followed his gaze to the couch. Will Leigh’s stout frame was squeezed between the teeny-bopper and Wanda Humphrey and the banker was looking smug about the positioning. Tom Humphrey sat on the arm of the couch beside his wife. Roger Roundheels and Nick Taurus stood beside Tom, not talking
I wondered idly if Cass meant to cause any trouble when Sy went into his act. Then I wondered about the possibility of trouble from another quarter. Cleo Taurus and Phil Anders had just slipped into the room. Nicholas Taurus didn’t miss their entrance and his face clouded over.
There was vicuna lint on the bottom of Cleo’s skirt. Phil looked rumpled. The way they avoided sitting near each other was a trifle too obvious. Even more obvious was the smouldering way he looked at her. Nick Taurus didn’t miss that either.
Waiting for the mime to begin, I kept considering each of them in turn. If Senator Hawthorne had steered me onto the right track, then one of them had latched onto fifty Gs of CIA moola. The question was which one? I couldn’t even summon up a suspicion. I stopped trying as Sy Lenzio went into his act.
Joy had been right; Sy was damn good. His pantomime drew genuine giggles and guffaws right from the start. His timing was excellent. He would hold a pose, or an expression just long enough to let the laughter build to its peak, and then pass smoothly into the next phase of his pantomime.
The act was a parody of a guy going to a dance hall and looking for a girl to pick up. Sy began with the subject going over to the bar and having a drink while he sized up the available women. His facial expressions summed up one hilarious judgement after another. All were found lacking. A couple so much so that Sy pantomimed the need to gulp down a couple more drinks to wash them out of consideration. Finally he just leaned against the invisible bar with the look on his face of a man who feels he’s wasted the buck-fifty it cost him to get into the joint.
Then, slowly, Sy’s eyes lit up. He straightened his tie. An on-the-make expression took over his face. He kept it there, the laughter building around him, as he crossed the room and bent over an invisible girl seated at an invisible table. He rubber-faced an introductory pitch to the girl who’d attracted him. Success. He straightened up and pulled back an invisible chair and held out his arms for the girl to dance with him. His face crumpled as his neck craned way back and he parodied dancing with a girl at least a foot taller than he was. His audience broke up as he kept blinking one eye and pulling back to show that the tip of the girl’s breast, presumably at eye level, kept hitting him. Finally he ended the dance, got her back to her table, and mimed the embarrassment of backing away from her.
Two quick elbow-bendings at the nonexistent bar conveyed his disgust. Then he spotted another prospect. Another bit of silent mimicry and he was dancing again. This time his invisible partner was much shorter than he was. He drew a roar of laughter by resting his elbow on lop of her unseen head. Then he was back at the bar again.
Now there were elements of drunkenness in his mimicry. His face lit up as though he’d just spotted Brigitte Bardot in the raw. There was a slightly drunken swagger to his gait as he crossed over to the third invisible girl. This time his mimed pitch was more drunken and more lecherous. He parodied copping a feel as he pulled the girl’s chair out for her and the mimed apology with which he followed the maneuver was cocky. Then he was dancing again.
The illusion he created now was extremely clever. First, by arching his body and moving his hands and letting open lechery fill his face, he got across the impression of dancing with a live one. The erotic pantomime was not only suggestive, it was funny as hell. Then, when this had sunk in, he turned his back to us. His arms and hands turned into the arms and hands of his invisible partner as he wrapped them around himself. They played with the back of his ears and the nape of his neck. Then they slid down to his hips and around to his buttocks. Sy swirled around to show us the expression of a guy scoring on the dance floor. Then, with his back to us again, he let us see how one hand, supposedly egging him on erotically, was actually removing the wallet from his back pocket.
He ended the dance with a bump-and-grind, saw the imaginary girl back to her table and charged back to the bar. This time the way he gulped his invisible drink conveyed his need to cool off after the stimulation of the dance. Then he parodied reaching into his back pocket to get his wallet and pay for the drink. His face conveyed puzzlement at the absence of the wallet. Then suspicion crossed it. He quickly reparodied dancing with the tall girl and shook his head again. He repeated the parody with the short girl and shook his head again. Neither of them had taken it. Then he recapitulated the bit with the last girl and nodded to himself. She was the culprit all right.
Drunkenly, he swaggered across the floor to demand that she return his wallet. He mimed the argument which followed. His mimicry of the girl protesting her innocence had all of us laughing hard. Then he made a grab for the girl’s invisible bosom where the wallet had been tucked away. One of Sy’s hands was behind him and it tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and caught a fist -—presumably belonging to the invisible girl’s boy friend —-smack in the face. He spun around, sinking lower and lower, and finally collapsed face down across Roger Roundheels’s tool bench in one corner of the basement.
A pro to the end, Sy stayed in that position, frozen, while our applause mounted and mounted. It was only when it reached its peak that he started to straighten up and half-turned towards us. He didn’t complete the turn.
The tool-bench Sy had elected to sprawl across was set up with an electric saw, the blade inserted. Now, as he started to turn, the power tool suddenly buzzed into action. The end of his necktie caught in it. We all roared with laughter once again at the expression which filled his face at his predicament. It never occurred to any of us that it wasn’t just a postscript to Sy’s act. We roared as the electric saw seemed to gobble up his tie and pulled his head down towards the blade. What talent! His panic seemed completely unfeigned.