The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.
The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision.
He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.
She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.
«You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?» Tony Reseck asked.
The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.
She said nothing.
Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. «You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?» he repeated gently.
«Not to cry over,» the girl said tonelessly.
Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.
«Don’t get me wrong,» the girl said. «Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.»
«Maybe you like Mozart,» Tony said.
«Go on, kid me,» the girl said.
«I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived — and Toscanini is his prophet.»
«I thought you were the house dick.» She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.
«Make me some of that Mozart,» she added.
«It’s too late,» Tony sighed. «You can’t get it now.»
She gave him another long lucid glance. «Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?» She laughed a little, almost under her breath. «What did I do wrong?»
Tony smiled his toy smile. «Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.»
She laughed again. «Make me a story about it. I’m bored.»
«There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?»
The girl eyed him gravely. «She jumped her bill.»
He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. «Unh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.»
The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. «What did you say your name was?»
«Tony Reseck.»
«Sounds like a flunky.»
«Yeah,» Tony said. «Polish.»
«Go on, Tony.»
«All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.» He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. «Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.»
«You’re making it up, Tony.» Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.
He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. «Eve Cressy,» he said musingly. «A name waiting for lights to be in.»
«Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.» The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. «I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place — without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.»
He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.
The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.
«Eve Cressy,» she said. «It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.»
He smiled at her almost mockingly. «It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy … That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest. The Last Laugh. Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.»
«‘Spring, Beautiful Spring,’» she said. «No, I never saw it.»
He walked three steps away from her and turned. «I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.»
The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice. «You really thought something like that — about the balcony?»
He nodded. «I might have,» he said softly. «I don’t any more.»
«No chance, Tony.» Her smile was a dim lost leaf. «Come and talk to me some more. Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on — and wither.»
He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in The Blue Bird.
The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.
«Trouble?» Tony asked wearily.
«There’s a guy outside to see you, Tony. He won’t come in. I’m doing a wipe-off on the plate glass of the doors and he comes up beside me, a tall guy. ‘Get Tony,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth.»
Tony said: «Uh-huh,» and looked at the porter’s pale blue eyes. «Who was it?»
«Al, he said to say he was.»
Tony’s face became as expressionless as dough. «Okey.» He started to move off.
The porter caught his sleeve. «Listen, Tony. You got any enemies?»
Tony laughed politely, his face still like dough.