Boo strode onto the stage with a toss of her frizzy mane which would not toss nicely but only lumped to one side.
"Where's the lighting tech?" She called into the dark of the theater, shading her eyes with one hand and lifting her face to the second-tier balcony above Mallory's head. "It's getting late!"
And where was Gaynor, Mallory wondered. Another two minutes had passed. She'd give him two more to come out from backstage, and then she would go hunting.
Boo strutted back and forth, ordering more light cues, one through twenty this time. The lights went on and off, up and down. She screamed, "Jonathan! Where the hell are you?"
Yes, where, Mallory wondered, going on nineteen minutes, where are you, you son of a -?
Gaynor ran onto the stage. He was wearing a wide-brim hat. His tie was loose, and he had garters on the sleeves of his shirt. And something else was radically changed. There were no jerky thrusts to his elbows, and his feet agreed to carry him in the same direction without the usual starts and stops. He made a low bow and kissed Boo's hand, neatly pulling off that gesture without looking the fool. He suddenly had style, thought Mallory. This must be what they called acting.
With the easy grace of dance steps, Gaynor quickly climbed the platform's rickety stairs, which were begging for an accident, so poor was their knocked-together construction. He sat down in a straight-back chair before a desk. At the center of the desk was an old-time microphone with radio call letters crowning the top. The platform had a built-in sag toward stage right.
Boo screamed for the next cue and the house lights went down. "Where the hell is the Shadow?"
The lobby doors flew open, banging against the walls to either side. The actors on stage turned to stare as a young man strode into the theater and stood for a moment in the semi-darkness. He had wild curls of dark hair, darker eyes and full lips. Just as Mallory was deciding that this was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, he keeled over dead-drunk, making a perfect three-point landing on the back of his head, his ass and one elbow. And this, she reasoned, must be the Shadow. The look of horror on Boo's face confirmed it.
Gaynor descended the platform stairs, stepped lightly to the edge of the stage and jumped down to floor level to call the unconscious boy by name, to prod his body, checking for signs of life, and finally to lug the dead weight of him through the side door by grasping the boy under the limp arms which dragged along the floor.
Mallory was wondering what had possessed Boo to cast that striking boy, sexual even when passed out cold, as the Shadow. He was definitely a poor choice for the part of a character who had the power to cloud minds and render himself invisible. Certainly no woman had a libido so dulled that even blindfolded and three days dead she could fail to notice him in any crowd.
Gaynor returned to the stage and climbed back to his mark behind the desk. The platform was so tentative, so screwy-looking, Mallory waited for it to crumble and tumble Gaynor, desk and chair to the stage. It never did, but she continued to wait, believing that it would.
It was another hour of radio plays, an old Jack Benny routine and a sketch from Stella Dallas, an hour of Boo terrorizing a good-natured cast and crew before Mallory heard the line she had been waiting for.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows.
Mallory's mouth moved, silently accompanying the lines of the script. When she closed her eyes, she was back in the cellar of the old house in Brooklyn, sitting with Markowitz on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sipping cocoa in the smaller audience of two dedicated make-believers.
There was a long pause in the dialogue where a pause shouldn't be. The Shadow had missed his first cue.
She opened her eyes. The star had made his entrance. With his first lines, Mallory realized that he was stone-cold sober. No hasty cup of coffee had done that for him. So the deadfall drunk routine had been an act to torture Boo. Now the boy moved to center stage and launched into a stunning soliloquy.
Of course, the lines belonged to another character who had escaped from an entirely different play, A Streetcar Named Desire, and had nothing at all to do with the Shadow script. But the heroine gamely responded to the riveting, animalistic screams, and she came running in from the wings and bounded across the stage to leap into his arms. The boy carried her off the stage to wild applause from cast, crew and Mallory.
Boo's shouted obscenities were lost in the fray.
The house lights were coming up as Mallory made her way down from the balcony. Outside the building, she waited on the steps with her face in a book. The actors passed by, one by one, in street clothes. A boy strolled by, playing a flute which was impossibly long. Boo sailed by, still frothing. Finally after fifteen minutes, Gaynor exited the building in his own clothes, the jeans, open-necked shirt and sportcoat.
As he walked across the campus, Mallory watched the awkward gait return to his lanky legs. His elbows pointed out at sharp angles, his feet found a raised paving stone to trip over, and he was his normal self again.
The remainder of Gaynor's schedule was less spectacular. He remained on campus into the evening hours. She only cared about his time in the light, the killing hours.
Tired, and back in the subway in the middle of day's-end rush hour, she was pressed against one wall of the car. Unable to reach back to her book bag, she was reduced to reading the advertising spaces above the heads of other passengers. One sign said 'Kiss warts and bunions goodbye'. Another ad was for Right to Life proponents. If you knew an unwed mother-to-be, there was a number where you could turn her in.
A passenger turned his face up to glare at her and opened his mouth to give her a ration of grief for stepping on his foot. When he looked into her eyes, he suddenly thought better of it, and he too found something to read on the walls.
Charles had a few pressing questions for Mallory when she walked in the door. However, by the set of her jaw and the hardness of her eyes in wordless passing, he decided it might be worth his life to annoy her just now. He gave her a few minutes' lead time before he followed her into the back room she had taken over as her private office. This room contained none but the most disturbing clues to her personality.
The three stacked units of computer terminals and printers were in precise alignment with the mobile console housing more sophisticated equipment, all robotic ducks in a row. Charles thought the bulletin board at the rear of the room lacked Markowitz's homy style of clutter; each paper was pinned at four corners and was straight to within an eighth of an inch. The equipment shelved along the side wall gathered no dust, and the manuals and reference books sat solidly in the bookcase, all bindings perfectly aligned.
Though he had offered her a selection of good pieces, she had furnished the room herself with standard office issue: one ersatz metal desk, one chair that swiveled and one that did not. A large metal filing cabinet stood behind her desk, and without needing to pull out a drawer, he knew each paper therein would be matching corners with each other paper. There were no family photographs, and no wall hangings that did not convey charted information, and her desk was bare of any personal items. It was the room of an obsessively well-ordered human with inhuman precision of thought and deed.
Somehow, the compulsively tidy environs would not square with the young woman who took wrong turns at every opportunity, and raided other people's computers with the gusto of a Hun.