They weren’t supposed to go in through the front, but Malcolm held Tory pretty dear and let all sorts of his mischief slide. Cordelia didn’t feature him giving a pass for ducking under her skirt, but what he didn’t clock wouldn’t bruise him.
She waited a moment longer, picking absently at the soggy edge of the garment bag. The rain slacked off, but a sudden wind off the harbor shook droplets from the budding plum trees, spattering the restaurant awning. Gathering up her purse and Malcolm’s swags, she waited for the street to clear, then dashed across between the puddles and slipped down the alley that ran along one side of the Bee.
The stage door was propped open with a chair to let a breeze into the stuffy backstage corridors. Stella, one half of the twin acrobat and contortion act, sat in the chair smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Cordelia caught a sweet whiff of hash. Stella got bad butterflies—her sister Garlande was the showy one.
“Sorry,” mumbled the acrobat, and stood aside to let Cordelia through. The corridor was mostly bare beams, a bit of plaster here and there, stairs leading up to the costume loft. A stagehand sat on the edge of the staircase, retaping Garlande’s trapeze and flirting with a seamstress making last-minute repairs. Someone was listening to a record; the shoddy walls muffled and distorted the strains of a smooth-voiced crooner. Sawdust and greasepaint musk hung in the air.
She had to pass Malcolm’s office to get to her dressing room, and as she neared the open door, she braced herself for a hiding. But he was already shouting at somebody, and it wasn’t her. The new tit singer, Thea Marlow, stood in front of Malcolm’s great scarred slab of a desk, hunched up like a naughty schoolchild waiting for the switch. So, Malcolm must have talked to Liesl, and the conductor had put the blame for the shoddy number on Thea. All things fair, she did have awful trouble with the key changes. Tit singer was a hard sort of job if you had half an interest in naked girls, and judging from Thea’s saucer-eyes whenever Cordelia went up onstage, she wasn’t cut out for the task.
Cordelia hooked Malcolm’s swags onto the doorknob and tried to slip away, but he caught her. Instead of scolding her, he just said, “Delia, Antinou’s tonight? Tory’s treat—he owes me.”
She didn’t want to think of all the dirty jokes the dwarf comedian would make of that. Instead she nodded, and blew Mal a kiss.
*
As Cyril was getting ready to leave for the day, his telephone brayed, startling him from his latest report out of the train yards.
It was one of the switchboard kids, a girl with a little bit of a lisp. “Mr. DePaul? The skull wants to see you.”
“Thanks, Switcher.” By tradition, all the kids crammed in the exchange room were called Switcher. Cyril tipped the pages of the report into his briefcase and locked it up, then put his coat over his arm and went down the hall.
Culpepper’s personal secretary, Vasily Memmediv, was in his late forties or early fifties, but his thick, dark hair was only barely touched with gray. The lines that marked his hawkish face cut hard and full of character at the edge of his nose and beneath his deeply set eyes. Cyril had briefly nursed a terrible passion for Memmediv, but rumors put him firmly loyal to Culpepper, in more ways than one.
Cyril rested an elbow on the edge of Memmediv’s desk. “Switcher said the Skull wants to see me.”
“Director Culpepper,” he said, “asked to see you, yes, before you left.” His Tatien accent had faded with time in the south, but still colored his speech with overemphasized vowels and swallowed, liquid consonants.
As if speaking her name had summoned her, Culpepper’s voice rang out from the half-open door to her office. “Is that DePaul?”
Before Memmediv could answer, Cyril cut in with, “Last time I checked.” He skirted the scowling secretary and crossed into Culpepper’s lair.
She didn’t look up when he entered. “Don’t be flippant, DePaul. It’s unbecoming.”
“Really?” He flung himself into the chair opposite hers. The vast, cluttered expanse of her desk stretched between them. “Usually people are charmed. Maybe you should get your head checked.”
The Foxhole folk called her “the Skull” because she kept her hair shaved close. Bones and muscles showed sharply under the dark skin of her scalp. When she ground her teeth, as she was doing now, the grim movement of her jaw rippled beneath the faint shadow of razored curls. That was what they called her type, in the city: razors. Women in well-cut suits with their hair shorn close, posing and snarling at one another like big cats, their sparks tucked snug under their arms. He didn’t envy Vasily—razors tended to be as sharp in temperament as their namesake was in function.
“You’ll need your head checked if you don’t shut up and pay attention,” said Culpepper. “I’ll put the dents in it personally.”
Case in point. “Oh, Ada. I love it when you’re cruel.”
She crossed her arms. “Less carrot, more stick? Is that the secret I’ve been missing all these years?”