“No one is here. Cast and crew arrive at four o’clock. Tickets at five. Come back when the box office is open.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you—”
“Well, you have a funny way. I was fast asleep.”
“It’s just that she didn’t come home last night after the performance.” He held up his phone. “And she’s not answering my texts. I even tried to call, but no luck.”
The doorman gave him a jagged grin. “Well, she wasn’t with me, whoever she is.”
“Pardon?” Theo looked over the little man’s head into the cavernous room.
“I meant nothing by it. Just a bit of a fat morning, and you’ve caught me out of sorts.”
“An acrobat with the show,” he said. “Kay. Kay Harper. I’m her husband, Theo. I thought she might have spent the night here, with the other performers.”
“Egon Picard,” the little man said. “Assistant to the stage manager, and major domo of this empty building. Look, bub, if you want to come in and wait?” Egon widened the entryway, and then without a backward glance, he turned and led Theo through the dark passageway to a ramshackle office tucked into a far corner. A rumpled blanket covered the bottom of a small cot, and the room also held a tiny sink and a counter with a hot plate and an electric kettle. He produced a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet beneath the sink and two highball glasses, indicating with a gesture his offer of a drink. Theo nodded and inspected the room with a casual air.
Taped to the walls was a gallery of sepia pictures, nineteenth-century postcards of women in various stages of undress. In the one above the pillow, a fully clad gentleman reached beneath the skirts of a maid seeming to enjoy the experience. Another showed a woman with a riding crop resting against her bare bottom. Swinging on a trapeze, a third woman leaned back in all her glory above a trio of circus clowns just out of reach.
“That’s quite a collection,” Theo said. Ambling around the room, he paused to inspect the more provocative poses.
Handing one glass to Theo, Egon downed his own drink in a single swig. “My spécialité,” he said. “I won my first beauty playing poker with a man from Fargo, North Dakota. Full house. Knaves over deuces to his hearts flush. And he had no money, so. Out of such chance comes obsession. Do they offend you, Mr. Harper? Do they scandalize you?” The little man was goading him, waggling his hairy eyebrows and leering.
Theo took a sip of his whiskey, the liquid burning pleasantly in the back of his throat. “Heavens, no. I just was admiring your eclectic tastes.”
“Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that these women are all gone now, yet they live on in these pictures, captured in the flower of their youth and beauty?”
“The power and art of the photograph,” Theo said. “To stop time. Do you know the work of Eadweard Muybridge? Stop-motion? He often used nudes to study the mechanics of how the body moves.”
Egon poured another two fingers of Bushmills in his glass. “I don’t know any Muybridge. I know nothing about art. I speak of beauty, man. Youth and how it fades, even though a picture lasts forever.”
The notion hung in the air between them, coaxing both to silent contemplation. Egon tilted back another dram of liquor, and Theo took the phone from his pocket to check for a missing message. He swiped and thumbed in his password, and his wife’s image filled his screen. Dressed in a costume and wearing a wig from a now-forgotten show, Kay looked over her shoulder at him, caught in a moment between surprise and happiness. He showed the photograph to Egon. “Are you sure you don’t remember her? She’s in the balancing act with the contortionist, one of the flower girls. And she’s in the tableaux, the tumbling finale.” He thrust the phone closer.
Egon leaned in to take a good look. “Kay, Kay, Kay, Kay? Yes, I know that girl. Seems to me, yes, now that you showed me her picture, of course, I know her. Supporting cast. A voice in the chorus.” With a wave, he dismissed the phone.
“So do you have any idea where she might be? Friends in the show? She texted me last night that some of the cast were going out after the performance. Not to wait up. But she never came home.”
Wiping his eyes with the heels of his palms, Egon bore down on his clouded memories. “They all run together, these nights, but thinking it over, she may have been with a bunch of the actors. Sarant and some of the others, now I recall. She may be the girl arm in arm with Reance. You know him, the master of ceremonies? Old fart in a pair of goggles?” He caught the expression on Theo’s face. “You mustn’t be alarmed. There were a bunch of them going out together. Actors, you know. Toujours gai, toujours jolie. So he makes a play for each of them in time, but often as not, pfft, nothing comes of it.”
“Where can I find this Reance?”
“Patience, monsieur, they have a call for tonight’s performance at four o’clock. He’ll show up.”