for example, who was, a lot like Anita Berman…
That wasn't a useful speculation, either. He wasn't going to resign from the Bureau, for what else would he do with his time? By the time he got to the stop for Theater Aristophanes Two he had managed to bury that line of thought along with imaginings about the aliens and the memory of his conversation with Christo Papathanassiou, and was only looking forward to an evening that was all his own.
The people who got out with him were a mixed lot; Coney Island wasn't the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it wasn't the best either. It was not what you would consider a natural place for a theater, but the old Ukrainian Orthodox church they had converted into Theater Aristophanes Two had one great advantage. It was cheap. It was a sound building, too, because the Ukrainians had done their best to make the area livable-built a church, tore down the worst of the burned-out tenements, turned some of the vacant lots into vegetable gardens. But when the Ukrainians moved out and the immigrating Palestinians, Biafrans and Kurds moved in, the neighborhood went sour again. The new people apparently didn't go in for farming-maybe there weren't any farms in Palestine or Iraq? Anyway, now there was little behind the chain-link fences but burdock and trash, and the church had lost its congregation. The theater group had been able to pick it up for a nominal rental and a lot of sweat equity-it needed the sweat work, because it had been looted twice and flooded three times in Atlantic hurricanes. On warm evenings it still smelled a little like low tide at the beach. It wasn't very big, either. Maximum seating capacity was not quite two hundred. That had its good aspects; it was easier to fill than a bigger house, and most of all it kept the theatrical unions from bothering the group… even though it also meant that Theater Aristophanes Two had no chance at all of ever turning a profit.
But that, of course, wasn't what they were there for. The members of the group were there because theater was in their blood-or because it was what they were trained for and nothing better offered itself.
Dannerman arrived early. The lobby doors were locked; but when he knocked the 'manager,' Timmi Trout, peered out of the ticket window and came out to let him in. 'Dan,' she said, pleased, 'hey, we thought we'd lost you. I should've known you'd be here for the opening, anyway. They're still rehearsing- it's a mess, because we open in an hour, and that idiot Bucky Korngold's out of the cast because he got himself arrested yesterday on some damn drug charge. Can you imagine?'
Dannerman could imagine very easily. Practically everybody in the group had a day job, of course. Bucky Korngold's had been dealing drugs; he was one of the people Dannerman had been investigating in the Carpezzio matter. He said, 'Mind if I go in and watch?'
'Of course not.' She hesitated. 'Anita's going to be real glad to see you, you know. She's been kind of worried about you… hut, hey, you'll talk to her yourself. Go on in.'
He did, and took his seat in a back row as inconspicuously as possible. The cast wasn't so much rehearsing as shouting at each other for missing cues and stepping on each other's lines-normal enough for a final rehearsal at Aristophanes Two-and he saw Anita Berman at once. For one thing, she was the prettiest woman on the stage: slim, tall, red-haired, with a deep, carrying voice that was perfect for unmiked theater (and of no use at all in the heavily enhanced productions on Broadway).
She saw him right away, too. When she caught sight of him at the back of the theater she looked startled, then perplexed, then gave him a tentative, not quite forgiving, see-you-in-a-minute wave. And it wasn't much more than a minute before the director abandoned his attempts to get the performance running like clockwork. 'Go back for makeup, all of you,' he ordered. 'A bad dress rehearsal means a good show, they say. Maybe you can take comfort in that. I know I will.'
And Anita Berman jumped down from the stage and ran up the aisle to meet Dannerman. It was clear she'd made up her mind for forgiveness. 'I'm real glad you're here,' she said, putting up her face to be kissed.
She clung to him for a moment, then pulled back to look at his face. 'I guess we've kind of been playing telephone tag.'
'I'm sorry about that,' he said, meaning it-meaning at least the 'sorry' part. 'I've got this new job and it keeps me really on the jump.'
'I figured it was something like that. I guess you're making a lot more money there-?'
'Maybe soon, anyway,' he said vaguely. 'But it takes all my time. Matter of fact, I'll have to be going out of town pretty soon.'
'Ah,' she said. 'For very long?'
'I don't know that yet.'
She was silent for a moment, then said, 'Dan, dear, listen. I've been thinking about us. I know some men still like to be in control, and maybe-well, if you think I was rushing things, talking about moving in together-'
'That's not it,' he said uncomfortably. 'Look, you need to get ready for the performance and we've got a lot to talk about. How about if I meet you after the play?'
She gave him a sudden smile. 'That'll be fine, Dan. Come backstage and we'll go to the cast party. You can tell me all about the new job and your trip. I'll be waiting for you.'
So Dannerman had the whole duration of the play to decide on a story about where he was going on the trip he had invented on the spur of the moment, and how long he would be away.
There was a funny thing about that, if only he had known it. It was part of Dannerman's tradecraft as an NBI agent to tell selected fragments of truth in order to deceive. For a change, this time it was the other way around. Although he didn't know it yet, the deception was truth. He was indeed going away, in fact very much farther away than he could ever have imagined.
Fidgeting in his seat while waiting for the curtain to go up, Dannerman was trying to decide what to do about Anita Berman. He didn't have to break up with her. Well, not just yet, anyway. Sometime, yes, because a permanent, committed relationship was out of the question for anybody in Dannerman's line of work. The worrisome part was that, he was pretty sure, the longer he waited the worse it would be for her when the break did come; and how bad was he willing to make it for sweet, pretty Anita Berman?
When the play began, he was glad to put that question out of his mind; what was happening on the stage held his interest. Maybe the old adage was right; the blunders of the rehearsal had disappeared and the cast was flawless in the first act of The Subway. Anita was beautiful even in her 1920s bargain-basement flapper costume, and whoever the actor was who had taken over for poor Bucky Korngold, he didn't miss a beat.
Even the play itself was going well with the audience. The Subway was definitely one of Elmer Rice's more squirrelly works, and Dannerman was the one who had first urged it on the group. It was ideal for them. It was short. It used a large cast- always an asset for an Off-Off-Off-Broadway theater, when everybody involved wanted to get on stage where some slumming big-time media critic might just possibly think their performance worth a few seconds' commendation in a review. The play was cheap to produce, since it only required one impressionistic-and therefore inexpensive-set. Most important of all, The Subway was just about totally forgotten. No major company had given it a production in close to a hundred years, and so the troupe didn't have a million library tapes floating around out there to compete with.
He had also vowed to the group that some critics, at least, would be sufficiently intrigued by a long-lost classic of 'modern' American theater to make the long run out to Coney Island to see its revival. He was happy to see that he had been right about that. He was pretty sure that at least six or eight of the audience members were actual critics. None of them were smiling, but he didn't expect that. Critics didn't smile. The important thing was that they weren't walking out, either.
Then, when the first act ended, at least two of them were actually clapping. Well, the whole audience was enthusiastic in its applause-not surprising, since a good half of its members were in some way related to one of the actors-but it was a good sign. In the intermission crowd that packed the lobby-once the vestry, when the place had been a church-Dannerman attached himself, as inconspicuously as possible, to a woman he was nearly sure was a TV talk-show host, trying to overhear what she was saying to her companion. But she was only commenting on the buskers on the sidewalk outside: two Arab kids tap-dancing while a third, in an 'I LOVE Allah' T-shirt, worked the intermission crowd for cash. He started for another potential critic and was annoyed when someone touched his arm. He turned to face a short, plump woman who was placidly gazing up at him. 'Why, Danno,' she said, 'it really is you, isn't it? Nice to run into you like this. Why don't we step outside for a little air?'
'Damn it, Hilda,' he said. 'What the hell are you doing here?'
