“So would I,” thought Lombard, eyeing his neck truculently.
The sweet pea smeller sat down again. Then he stood up again, with every appearance of vibrating impatiently down around the knees. “It’s leaving me,” he warned. “I am losing it. Once it goes, I will have to go back to the old way again!” The maid fled inside with these dire tidings.
Lombard murmured half audibly, “You should have gone back to the old way long ago.”
It worked, at any rate. The maid came out again, beckoned with suppressed urgency, and he was in. Lombard swung at the sweet pea he had dropped, caught it neatly with the toe of his shoe, and kited it upward with grim zest, as though doing that made him feel a lot better.
The maid came out and bent over him confidentially, to salve his impatience. “She will positively squeeze you in between him and her costume fitter. He’s hard to handle, you know.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lombard demurred, twitching his extended foot slightly and eyeing it longingly.
There was a good long lull after that. At least, comparatively. The maid only came out once or twice and the telephone only rang once or twice. Even the machine-gun Spanish only came in disconnected salvos now. The private chef who had been going back on the next ship appeared, more rotund than ever in beret, muffler, and fuzzy overcoat, but only to inquire with injured mien, “Ask if she is dining in tonight. I cannot do it myself, I am not speaking with her.”
Lombard’s predecessor emerged finally, small kit in hand, and departed. Not without detouring first and hijacking another one of the sweet peas. Lombard’s foot crept toward the receptacle that held the rest of them, as though he were aching to let him have all of them at once, but he conscientiously curbed the impulse.
The maid reappeared outside the holy of holies, announced, “The senorita will see you now.” He found, when he tried to stand up, that his legs had gone to sleep. He slapped at them fore and aft a couple of times, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs, and stepped through.
He had no more than glimpsed a figure stretched out Cleopatra-like on a chaise-longue, when a soft furry projectile of some sort shot through the air at him and landed on his shoulder with a squeaking sound. One of those same nail-on-glass squeaks that had reached him outside every now and then. He shied nervously at the impact. Something that felt like a long velvet snake coiled itself affectionately around his throat.
The figure on the chaise beamed at him, like a fond parent watching its offspring cut up. “Don’t be alarmed, señor. Is unly little Bibi.”
Giving it a pet name was only partial reassurance as far as Lombard was concerned. He kept trying to turn his head to get a look at it, but it was too close in. He managed a grin of strained geniality, for the sake of furthering his own cause.
“I go by Bibi,” his hostess confided. “Bibi is, how you say it, my welcoam committee. If Bibi don’t like, he duck under sofa; I get rid of them queek. If Bibi like, he jomp to their neck; then is all right they stay.” She shrugged disarmingly. “You he must like. Bibi, come down off the man’s neck,” she coaxed insincerely.
“No, let him stay, I don’t mind him in the least,” he drawled tolerantly. It would have been a faux pas of the first water, he realized, to have taken her reproach at face value. His nose had identified the encumbrance as a small monkey by now, in spite of the cologne it had been saturated with. The tail reversed, to rewind itself the other way around. He had evidently made a hit. He could feel strands of his hair being painstakingly separated and examined, as if in search of something.
The actress crowed delightedly. If anything could put her in a receptive mood, this simian seemed able to, so Lombard felt he couldn’t afford to resent the way it was getting personal with him. “Sit down,” she urged cordially. He walked rather stiffly to a chair and sank into it, careful not to disturb his head balance. He got his first good look at her. She had on a shoulder-cape of pink marabou over black velvet pajamas, each trouser leg of which was the width of a full skirt. A somewhat horrifying arrangement that looked like molten lava had been deposited on top of her head by the sweet pea fiend who had been in here before him. The maid was standing behind her fanning at it with a palm leaf as if to cool it off. “I have a minute while this sets,” the wearer explained graciously. He saw her surreptitiously consult the card he had sent up with the flowers a while ago, to remind herself of his name.
“How nice it was to get my flowers in Spanish for a change, Senor Lombard. You say you have just come up from mi tierra. We met down there?”
She had, fortunately, glided past this point before it was necessary for him to commit himself outright. Her large dark eyes took on a soulful expression, went searchingly upward toward the ceiling; she made a cushion of her hands and pressed one cheek against them. “Ah, my Buenos Aires,” she breathed, “my Buenos Aires. How I miss it! The lights of the Calle Florida shining in the even-ning—”
Not for nothing had he spent several hours poring over travel folders before coming up here. “The beach at La Plata, down by the shore,” he supplied softly, “the races at Palermo Park—”
“Don’t,” she winced. “Don’t, you make me cry.” She wasn’t just acting. Or at least she wasn’t entirely acting, he could tell. She was simply dramatizing emotions that were already there, that were basically sincere, as is the way with the theatrical temperament. “Why did I leave it, why am I opp here so far away?”
Seven thousand dollars a week and ten per cent of the show might have had something to do with it, it occurred to him, but he wisely kept that to himself.
Bibi, meanwhile, having failed to find anything that required exterminating on his scalp, lost interest, ran down his arm, and took a flying leap off on to the floor. It made conversation a lot easier, even though his thatch was left looking like a haystack that had been hit by a high wind. He refrained from smoothing it down lest this give offense to the pest’s mercurial mistress. She was now in as soft a mood as he could ever hope to get her into, on such short acquaintance, so he took the plunge.
“I have come to you because you are known to be as intelligent as you are talented and beautiful,” he said, laying it on with a shovel.
“It is true, nobody has ever said I am a dunce.” the celebrity admitted with refreshing unselfconsciousness, studying her fingernails.
He hitched his chair slightly forward. “You recall a number you did in last season’s show, in which you threw nosegays, little flowers, to the ladies in your audiences?”
She poised a warning finger toward the ceiling. Her eyes sparkled. “Ah, Chica Chica Boom! Si, si! You like? Wasn’t it good?” she agreed warmly.
“Perfect,” he assented, with a concealed fluctuation of his Adam’s apple. “Now one night a friend of mine—”
That was as far as he got on that try. The maid, who had just quit fanning a moment before, stepped in again. “William would like his orders for the day, señorita.”
“Excuse me a minute.” She turned her head toward the doorway. A stalwart individual in chauffeur’s uniform stepped forward, stood at attention. “I won’t nidd you until twelve. I go to the Coq Bleu for launch, so you be downstairs at ten to.” Then she added without any change of inflection, “And you better take that with you while you here, you left it behind.”
He stepped over to the vanity table she had indicated, removed a hammered silver cigarette case, spaded it into his pocket and stepped outside again, all with perfect nonchalance.
“It didn’t come from the five and ten, you know,” she called after him, with, it seemed to Lombard, a slight touch of asperity. Judging by the snap in her eyes, he didn’t give William much longer.