This man in the mirror was the man Aristide wanted to be. A man he’d made. A man who would be gone tomorrow, and not to some breezy foreign clime with red sand beaches.
He lifted an ivory comb from the cluttered makeup table and swept his hair down over one shoulder. Glossy curls twined between the teeth, dark as chestnut cases. Avocado oil every night, the careful teasing out of knots … He worked hard to keep it soft. And still, no gray. As he wound each pin curl and fixed it into place, he drew the coils through his fingers and tried to fix the sensation in his memory. It had taken years to grow it out. If it got this long again, he doubted it would be as thick and dark and free of silver.
Once his stocking cap was fixed in place, he opened a tube of white grease paint and slicked it over the contours of his face. Then powder, to set it. Talcum rose in ghostly tendrils from the pouf. Thin, black eyebrows drawn over the angles of his own. Rouge, high on his cheekbones. Red paint in a perfect bow to accentuate thin lips—long practice let him shape his moue with little effort.
As he pressed the corner of his second set of feathered lashes into place, he heard a distant shout. A crash. The thin walls of his dressing room bucked and shuddered. Wiping tacky fingers on a tissue, he stood and took a step toward the door. It flew open just before he touched it, and he staggered back.
“Raid!” Liesl’s knuckles were white on the door frame. “They’re looking for ballast, but they’ll take anyone they want. Go, now.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Liesl peeled away and ran down the corridor, hammering on doors and flinging the chorus from their communal makeup table. As the chaos swelled, Aristide shucked his dressing gown in favor of the sweaty black jersey he wore for dance rehearsals. The straw boater covered his stocking cap and shadowed his painted face. He jabbed a pin through the hat to hold it in place, and to use as a weapon in a pinch.
Cast and crew buffeted him from one side of the corridor to the other until he started throwing elbows. They didn’t have nearly what he did to lose. There’d be hounds at the stage door and the front of the house. That left one option. He took the stairs to the costume loft three at a time, hauling himself up by the bannister. It was dark up here, and stuffy. The ceiling sloped to a row of long, grimy windows below the eaves. They were open onto the alley to catch the sea breeze.
Aristide had cased the Bee long ago for good escape routes—his sideline had never been a safe one, even at the best of times—and these windows were his insurance against capture.
He was halfway out and hanging onto the gutter when the hounds burst into the backstage corridor. He couldn’t see it, but he heard it. As the whistles shrieked and the stagefolk screamed, Aristide bellied onto the scorching tiles of the roof.
*
He came down to the street near the Heyn, jumping the last few yards from the bottom of a fire escape off Waxworks Road. Across the river, he stopped in a rickety teahouse to wash his face and make a few telephone calls.
The proprietress, an Asunan woman with a seamy face, knew Aristide by sight, but it was her nephew with whom he’d made his arrangements. Said nephew was absent, and it took several minutes of frustrated mime to make her understand that he needed the telephone.
After he hung up on his final factotum, he found a steaming cup of honeyed white tea at his elbow. Redolent with ginger, it cleared his head and sinuses.
When the telephone rang with a return call, he snatched it with the speed of a striking viper. “Yes?”
“They’re on the up-and-up,” said the man on the other end. He was a mid-level bureaucrat with connections to the ACPD. “Really looking for ballast; word is the Ospies tried to buy Sailer out but he wouldn’t take the money. So they got him another way.”
“Damnation.”
“They’re not onto you yet,” his contact continued. “Not as far as I know.”
Relief poured down his neck and back, uncoiling knotted muscles. Cordelia was still holding out. “Thank you. Excellent. Good work.”
“Don’t mention it. But listen, if the blackboots have Lehane and she breaks, they might act without me hearing.”
“I understand.” But it wasn’t enough to tense him up, not yet.
Waiting for his second call, Aristide had a leisurely game of mahjong with the old auntie. They used his bobby pins as betting sticks. She trounced him, and he ended the game with his hair springing wildly around his head. They split a second pot of tea. The telephone rang. This time, Aristide’s pace was less frenetic. He levered himself up from the brass-topped table and went behind the beaded kitchen curtain to answer. “Did you get him?”
“Sure did.” The woman sounded pleased with herself. “But his bail was pretty dear.”
“You’ll be reimbursed. Did you take him to mine?”