She turned back to him again, let her filaments slowly darken.
“I was saying, a friend of mine attended a performance one night with a certain woman. That is why I have come to you.”
“Ah?”
“I am trying to find her for him.”
She misunderstood. Her eyes coruscated with renewed zest. “Ah, a romance! I loave a romance!”
“I’m afraid not. It’s a matter of life and death.” As with all the rest, he was afraid to give her too many details, lest she shy away from it.
She seemed to like this even better. “Ah, a mees-tirry! I loave a mees-tirry” — she shrugged — “as long as it don’t happen to me.”
Something suddenly stopped her dead. Apparently some calamity, judging by the effect it had. She eyed a tiny diamond studded particle on her wrist. Suddenly she had reared upright, begun snapping her fingers all over the place, like a string of firecrackers going off. The maid came running in on the fly. Lombard thought he was about to be unceremoniously dismissed, in favor of the next comer.
“You know what time is it?” the dancer said accusingly. “I don’t have told you to watch it closely? You are very careless. You nearly let it go past too far. The doctor said once itch hour, on the hour. Get the calomel—”
Before Lombard knew it, another of those seasonal typhoons that seemed to occur regularly in here, was swirling around him full blast. Machine-gun Spanish, nail-head squeaks, and the maid going around and around the room after Bibi, until Lombard felt as though he were the center pole of a carrousel.
He finally raised his own voice and added it to the din. “Why don’t you stop short, and turn back the other way?” he shouted above the racket.
That did it. Bibi ran into the maid — and the calomel ran into Bibi.
When that was over with, and the patient was clinging forlornly to his mistress, both arms about her neck, giving her a momentary resemblance to a bearded lady, he resumed his own job.
“I realize how hopeless it is to expect you to remember any particular individual out of that sea of faces before you each night. I realize you played six nights a week and two matinees, all season long, to packed houses—”
“I have never play to an empty house in my hull career,” she contributed, with more of her characteristic modesty. “Even a fire cannot compete with me. Once in Buenos Aires the theater start to bum. You think they left—?”
He waited until that was out of the way. “My friend and this woman were sitting in the first row, on the aisle.” He consulted something on a scrap of paper taken from his pocket. “That would be on your left, as you faced the audience. Now, the only help I can give you at all is this. She stood up in her seat, oh along about the second or third chorus of the song.”
A speculative glint flickered across her eyes. “She stood opp? While Mendoza was on stage? This interests me very much. I have never known it to happen before.” Her shapely fingers, he noticed, were beginning to claw tentatively at the velvet of her trouser leg, as if whetting themselves for reprisal. “She did not care for my singing, perhaps? She had a train to catch, perhaps?”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand,” he reassured her hastily. “Who could do that to you? No, here’s what it was. It was during the Chica Chica Boom number. You forgot to throw one of the little souvenirs to her, and she stood up to attract your attention. For just a moment or two she stood there right in front of you, and we were hoping—”
She shuttered her eyes rapidly two or three times, trying to recapture the incident. She even poked one long finger just behind her ear, careful not to disturb the hair-do. “I see if I can remember it for you.” She obviously was doing her best. She did all the things likely to be conducive to memory quickening. She even lit a cigarette, although she was not, judging by the stiff way she handled it, an habitual smoker. She simply held it, letting it burn down in her fingers.
“No, I cannot,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I try hard. For me last season is like twenty years ago.” She shook her head morosely, clicked her tongue compassionately a couple of times.
He started to return the futile scrap of paper to his pocket, glanced at it as he did so. “Oh, and here’s another thing — although I suppose it’s no more help than the first. She had on the same hat that you did, my friend tells me. I mean a duplication of it, an exact copy.”
She straightened suddenly, as though she were on the point of getting something from that. He obviously had her whole undivided attention at last, if he hadn’t before. Her eyes narrowed speculatively. Then they glittered behind their threadlike constriction. He was almost afraid to move or breathe. Even Bibi looked at her curiously from a fur huddle on the carpet at her feet.
Suddenly it came. She stabbed her cigarette out with a single vicious lunge. She emitted a strident, macawlike cry, that wouldn’t have been out of place in a jungle. “A-a-ai! Now I remember! Now!” A flash flood of Spanish swept her off his conversational track. Finally, after a lot of eddying around, she got back onto it in English again. “That thing that stood up there! That criatura that stand in front of the hull house, in my hat, to show she is wearing it! She even stop the spotlight, clip some of it off from me! Hanh! Do I recall? You bet I recall! You think I’m going to forget a thing like that in a horry? Hanh! You don’t know Mendoza!” She snorted with such violence that Bibi gave the appearance of being swept across the floor for a distance of several feet like a dried leaf, although it was probably a scuttle for shelter under his own power.
The maid chose this most unpropitious moment to intrude. “The costumer has been waiting for some time now, senorita.”
She semaphored violently, crossing and recrossing her arms over her head. “She should keep on wetting some more! I am listening to something I don’t like to hear!”
She climbed down the chaise-longue toward Lombard, balancing on one bent knee over the lower end of it. She even seemed to regard her own overheated state of mind as a prideful accomplishment. She flung out her arms to show him, then tapped herself like a woodpecker on the chest. “Look how I get! Look how angry it still make me, even sotch a long time after! Look what it do!”
After which she rose to her feet, squeezed herself tightly around the waist with both arms in a belligerent embrace, as if holding herself in, and began to stalk back and forth, turning at the end of each short heat with a great fanning out of her wide trouser bottoms. Bibi crouched in a far corner, head bowed in desolation and his skinny arms flung up over it.
“And what you want her for, you and this friend of yours?” she demanded suddenly. “You haven’t told me yet!”
He could tell by her challenging inflection that if it was anything that had to do with making the style pirate happy, he wasn’t going to get any help from Mendoza, even if she had been in a position to give it. He wisely marshaled the facts in such a way that her purpose would swing over to coincide with his, even though both had not quite the same end in view. “He is in serious trouble, believe me, señiorita. I won’t bore you with the details, but she is the only one who can get him out of it. He has to prove that he was with her that night, and not where they say he was. He only met her that night; we don’t know her name, we don’t know where she lives, we don’t know anything about her. That’s why we’re looking high and low—”
He could see her mulling it over. After a moment she informed him, “I like to help you. I give anything to tell you who she is.” Then her face dropped, she spread her hands helplessly. “But I never see her before. I never see her after. I just see her stand opp like that. That’s all, I can’t tell you no more about her than that.” At least facially, she seemed to be even more disappointed than he was about it.