Pierrot had been working on this peculiar score for years now. It was his magnum opus. He had been working on it since he was a little boy—perhaps he had been playing the same tune since he first put his long fingers on the piano keys. And that night onstage, he finished it.
For the last bar, Pierrot paused for a moment and tapped the keys delicately, as if he were trying to wake someone from a deep sleep. Paper snowflakes came down one by one from the ceiling. It was quite lovely.
When the stage was covered in paper snowflakes, and Pierrot stopped playing the piano, Rose and her bear took a bow. The heavy, heavy curtains tumbled down like lava on the side of a volcano. And the show was over.
? ? ?
THE AUDIENCE WAS QUIET. There was a hush. They were not sure what they had just seen. They did not want to breathe. They did not want to clap, because their applause would mean the show was over and they did not want it to end. Then it came. A wonderful sound. They applauded joyfully.
The audience was filled with a hundred nine-year-olds dressed in furs and fancy pearls.
57
JIMMY’S ONE-POINT PERSPECTIVE
Jimmy wasn’t sure what to think about the clowns. He felt a little bit weirded out by men who had chosen clowning as a profession. He only regarded being a murderer or a politician as sufficiently masculine. He was so cautious of betraying any emotion or sign of weakness that he felt alarmed by these men who just paraded about in front of an audience, weeping and farting and dropping things.
He did, however, like the chorus girls. There was something so odd about them. Some of them weren’t even pretty. A few of them had no chest at all. They weren’t the sorts of girls who he would have working at the Romeo Hotel. He liked the show, though. It started reminding him of his past, when he was a little boy in the whorehouse.
He looked at the faces of different chorus girls to see which one he was supposed to kill. But none of the girls seemed to have the face of someone who had managed to get such a large sum on her head.
He looked at Caspar and raised his hands as if to say he didn’t know who their mark was.
“You’ll know her when you see her,” Caspar said.
They believed in all sorts of omens—anyone who had been around a lot of deaths always did. You came to think of superstition as common sense. They both believed that you could spot right away when someone had a price on their heads. They had a weird aura, like saints in medieval paintings.
Jimmy leaned back into his seat and the last act commenced, wherein right before his eyes, a moon began to be lowered down on cables. This was going too far. He turned to Caspar, whose mouth was open and who seemed stunned by the enormity and reality of this moon. McMahon was out of his mind. Montreal had gone too far this time, Jimmy thought. It must be the cold. Everyone who traveled there said they couldn’t put into words how cold it got and how miserable they had been trudging through the snow. They would often hold up their feet for him to get a look at how their shoes and boots had been destroyed. They seemed a little bit mad when they returned from Montreal. But it was as if they had caught just a touch of madness—like the flu—that passed after three or four days. He could only imagine what living through an entire winter would do to you.
And then someone tiptoed out onto the stage. There was a smattering of little moans in the audience, with people oohing and aahing. It sounded as though they were making love. When the woman stepped out onto the stage, everyone in the audience stiffened their spines and stared. Jimmy felt a small surge of desperation when he looked at her. There she was. That was her. She was the one.
She was different from the other girls. She moved wonderfully. She landed so lightly on her toes. She landed as quietly as a snowflake on a mitten. Her face seemed so interesting. He wanted to look at her forever.
Of course this was the girl he was supposed to kill. Indisputably she was the type of girl who could drive a man so crazy that his only option would be to stick a bullet in her head. He hadn’t even met her yet and she had already driven him quite mad.
? ? ?
JIMMY WOKE UP in the morning feeling hungover: melancholic and lazy and afraid of death. But it was the show, and not drinking, that had caused him to feel this way. He was distracted all day. That evening he kept staring at the outfits in his closet, trying to decide what he should wear. He put on the black suit he only wore on special occasions. Although he had been told a hundred times in his life that he was good-looking, he found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror wondering.
He hurried out of the building, not wanting to tell Caspar that he was going to see the show again. He had always looked down on guys who fell in love with chorus girls. Those women only got into that racket to get married. But she wasn’t a chorus girl anyhow. He didn’t know what she was.