“Can it be?” I said. “Can it be, Sue Ellen? He looks just like you and me. How’d I get into this?”
“We’ve got to do something,” Sue Ellen said. “Tony, we’ve got to stop him!”
We packed them in that night. They sat, and they stood, and they climbed all over the rafters; they were everywhere. And right down front, I sat with the big shots, and they all watched my small, unimportant show until it was time for the Fallen Angel to go on.
I got up and smiled weakly and said, “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to introduce the next act.”
They all smiled back knowingly, and nodded their heads, and their gold stickpins and pinky rings winked at me, and they blew out expensive cigar smoke, and I was thinking, Mullins, you can blow out expensive cigar smoke, too, but you don’t have any soul left.
I introduced the act, and I was surprised to see all my aerial artists run out onto the sawdust: Sue Ellen, Farnings, Edward and the Fallen Angel. I watched Angeli as he crossed one of the spotlights, and if I’d had any doubts they all vanished right then. Angeli cast no shadow on the sawdust.
I watched in amazement as the entire troupe went up the ladder to the trapezes. There was a smile on Angeli’s face, but Sue Ellen and the rest had tight, set mouths.
They did a few stunts, and I watched the big shots, and it was plain they were not impressed at all by these routine aerial acrobatics. I signaled the band, according to schedule, and I shouted, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Fallen Angel in a death-defying, spine-tingling, bloodcurdling triple somersault at one hundred and fifty feet above the ground, without a net!”
Sue Ellen swung her trapeze out, and Angeli swung his, and then Sue Ellen dropped head downward and extended her hands, and Angeli swung back and forth, and the crowd held its breath, waiting for him to take his fall, and the big shots held their breaths, waiting for the same thing. Only I knew what would happen if he did take that fall. Only I knew about our agreement. Only I — and Sue Ellen, waiting up there for Angeli to jump.
Charlie started the roll on his snare, and then the roll stopped abruptly, and Angeli released his grip on the bar and he swung out into space, and over he went, once, twice, three times — and slap. Sue Ellen’s hands clamped around his wrists, and she held on for dear life. I couldn’t see Angeli’s face from so far below, but he seemed to be struggling to get away. Sue Ellen held him for just an instant, just long enough for Edward to swing his trapeze into position.
She flipped Angeli out then, and over he went — and wham. Edward grabbed his ankles. Angeli flapped his arms and kicked his legs, trying to get free, but Edward — Edward the Great! — wouldn’t drop him. Instead, he swung his trapeze back, and then gave Angeli a flip and
Farnings grabbed Angeli’s wrists.
Farnings flipped Angeli up, and Sue Ellen caught him, and then Sue Ellen swung her trapeze all the way back and tossed Angeli to Edward, and I began to get the idea of what was going on up there.
Edward tossed Angeli, and Farnings caught him, and then Farnings tossed him to Sue Ellen, and Sue Ellen tossed him right back again. Then Farnings climbed onto Sue Ellen’s trapeze, and they both swung back to the platform.
Edward took a long swing, and then he tossed Angeli head over heels, right back to the platform, where Sue Ellen and Farnings grabbed him with four eager arms.
I was grinning all over by this time, and the crowd was booing at the top of its lungs. Who cared? The big shots were stirring restlessly, but they’d probably heard that Angeli sometimes fell coming down the ladder, and so they didn’t leave their seats.
Only tonight, Angeli wasn’t doing any falling coming down any ladder. Because Sue Ellen had one of his wrists and Farnings had one of his ankles, and one was behind him, and the other was ahead of him; and even if he pitched himself off into space, he wouldn’t have gone far, not with the grips they had on both him and the ladder. I saw the big shots get up and throw away their cigars, and then everybody began booing as if they wanted to tear down the top with their voices. Angeli came over to me, and his face didn’t hold a pleasant smile this time. His face was in rage, and it turned red, as if he would explode.
“You tricked me!” he screamed. “You tricked me!”
“Oh, go to hell,” I told him, and all at once he wasn’t there any more.
Well, I’m not John Ringling North, and I don’t run the greatest show on earth. I’ve just got a small, unimportant circus, and it gives me a regular small income, but it’s also a lot of trouble sometimes.
I still have my soul, though; and, what’s more, I now have a soulmate, and she answers to the name of Sue Ellen Mullins, which is in a way most euphonic, you will agree.
The Prisoner
They were telling the same tired jokes in the squadroom when Randolph came in with his prisoner.
Outside the grilled windows, October lay like a copper coin, and the sun struck only glancing blows at the pavement. The season had changed, but the jokes had not, and the climate inside the squadroom was one of stale cigarette smoke and male perspiration. For a tired moment, Randolph had the feeling that the room was suspended in time, unchanging, unmoving and that he would see the same faces and hear the same jokes until he was an old, old man.
He had led the girl up the precinct steps, past the hanging green globes, past the desk in the entrance corridor, nodding perfunctorily at the desk sergeant. He had walked beneath the white sign with its black-lettered DETECTIVE DIVISION and its pointing hand, and then had climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, never once looking back at the girl, knowing that in her terror and uncertainty she was following him. When he reached the slatted rail divider, which separated the corridor from the detective squadroom, he heard Burroughs telling his old joke, and perhaps it was the joke which caused him to turn harshly to the girl.
“Sit down,” he said. “On that bench!”
The girl winced at the sound of his voice. She was a thin girl wearing a straight skirt and a faded green cardigan. Her hair was a bleached blonde, the roots growing in brown. She had wide blue eyes, and they served as the focal point of an otherwise uninteresting face. She had slashed lipstick across her mouth in a wide, garish red smear. She flinched when Randolph spoke, and then she backed away from him and went to sit on the wooden bench in the corridor, opposite the men’s room.
Randolph glanced at her briefly, the way he would look at a bulletin board notice about the Policeman’s Ball. Then he pushed through the rail divider and walked directly to Burroughs’ desk.
“Any calls?” he asked.
“Oh, hi, Frank,” Burroughs said. “No calls. You’re interrupting a joke.”
“I’m sure it’s hilarious.”
“Well, I think it’s pretty funny,” Burroughs said defensively.
“I thought it was pretty funny, too,” Randolph said, “For the first hundred times.”
He stood over Burroughs’ desk, a tall man with close-cropped brown hair and lustreless brown eyes. His nose had been broken once in a street fight, and together with the hard, unyielding line of his mouth, it gave his face an over-all look of meanness. He knew he was intimidating Burroughs, but he didn’t much give a damn. He almost wished that Burroughs would really take offence and come out of the chair fighting. There was nothing he’d have liked better than to knock Burroughs on his ass.
“You don’t like the jokes, you don’t have to listen,” Burroughs said, but his voice lacked conviction.