The Old Silent

was charting on her way to Atlantis, he couldn't imagine; he only knew that Carole-anne would skim across seas with total confidence, and God save the sharks.

'She's down-in-the-mouth, Mr. Jury. You should see her, cheer her up. It must be that she didn't get that part she'd been working so hard on.'

Carole-anne had been, he thought, extremely vague about this acting 'part,' except that she was doing a good bit of practicing blindness. White cane, tapping, face held slightly askew, eyes attempting to glaze over.

This (Jury thought, smiling inwardly again) was impossible. The lapis-lazuli eyes attempting to appear expressionless and empty-that would be too much for anyone, much less a part-time actress with a limited repertoire.

Actually, Carole-anne was a full-time actress with a vast repertoire, the result merely of being Carole-anne. It was extremely difficult to get down to some central core of being with the girl. Woman. Young lady. He was never sure; her age kept changing.

'Thanks.' He saluted Mrs. Wassermann with the rolled-up magazine. 'I'll see her.'

Charlie Raine was, apparently, quite well known for his ability to avoid interviews and evade the media.

Jury read the article on Sirocco, went back and read it again. Then he read it a third time. The other members of the band-Alvaro Jiminez, Caton Rivers, a towering John Swann (sex symbol, and he knew it), the drummer, Wes Whelan-all of them had been interviewed, all of them had made comments. Jiminez scored top points for genuineness and intelligence. Swann scored only monosyllabic, self-aggrandizing points, like a man playing tennis with himself. Whelan and Rivers were fairly quiet. But Charlie Raine hadn't even been in the hotel suite, and the reporter-cum-pseudo-critic wasn't at all happy about that.

Thus the only information the reader could get about one of their lead guitarists and vocalists was whatever the others said. It was clear Jiminez was far more reliable than someone like Swann, who was being upstaged all over the place. Not even that double-necked guitar he kept on display could convince anyone that he was the main man in this outfit.

If anyone was, it was Alvaro Jiminez, the original organizer of the band, a black man from the Delta, a master of blues. Whelan was a Dubliner, Rivers from Chicago, and Swann and Raine were British. A strange assortment, the interviewer said (with all the grace of a double-dose of Whicker's World). No one took him up on 'assortment'; no one enlightened him as to how they'd come together. Jiminez said, 'We just done fall into each other's arms.'

Nor could anyone answer the jackpot question: Why was Charlie Raine leaving the band? 'I expect-' (Jury smiled, sure Jiminez would leave off the t) '-Charlie, he just want to.'

And the future of the band?

'Same as the past, mate,' Swann had said (offensively, according to the thin-skinned reporter).

In various poses of self-indulgence or insouciance, they were photographed in their roughed-up clothes and booted feet, lounging in their suite at the Ritz.

It was a soppy, sappy interview. Jury liked the band, even Swann, in some old-fashioned pasteboard-hero sort of way. At least all of them were in concert when it came to this interview.

Jury put aside the magazine and folded his hands behind his head, sitting down low on his sofa. No, they'd said, they didn'tknow why Charlie was quitting. No, again. They hadn't a clue.

Jury thought he might.

28

Jury went through the middle of the set of double doors. The auditorium was empty except for a man to his right in one of the mixing bays. Sound engineer, he supposed, for Sirocco. The fellow barely grazed Jury with a glance, obviously too intent on his equipment to bother with who should or shouldn't be here. More likely, he thought Jury was one of the Odeon's staff. He probably didn't care one way or the other; his interest was the long bank of equipment, with its complex of knobs, levers, buttons, and slightly glowing lights that made Jury think of a starship.

Mary Lee's appraisal of the auditorium was as far off the mark as one could get. Far from resembling an airplane hangar or warehouse, it still held on to the remnants of its old Art Deco splendor. Probably the lighting fixtures weren't the originals, but it was hard to tell.

The distance from the center of the stage to where he was standing at the rear must have been eighty or ninety feet, and the entire stage was probably as much in width. It must have had the largest proscenium arch in all of London, he thought.

A phalanx of lights had been set up on the side and overhead a couple of technicians were working on the huge lighting strut, two or three dozen lights positioned in lines along steel bands. High up as it was, it seemed a precarious perch for the workers, unless they were trapeze artists. The big strut swayed there, twenty feet or so above the stage. They finished what they were doing, climbed down, and disappeared off to the right. Jury could see part of a metal staircase that must lead to private rooms up on the level above.

One of the humpers came in, deposited another amplifier, walked out through the stage door off to the right. It was out there that Jury had seen the vans parked.

The only one of the road crew left on the stage now was trailing some sort of cable along the side of the stage and pulling a microphone-there were five of them-over to center stage and out toward the edge. It was the fellow Mary Lee had warned off the soft-drink machine. He adjusted the mike and gave his attention to a voice that must have issued from the steps on the right. All Jury could hear was something about 'lights.'

The young man's answer was a laugh and a 'What for?' Then he shaded his eyes and looked toward the rear of the theater-Jury thought at first he was about to get thrown out-but the fellow on the stage was apparently directing his attention to the other one in the mixing bay. The sound man raised his hand as a sign.

He picked a guitar from one of the cases, drew the strap across his shoulder, and moved into a classic introduction to a Spanish song that Jury thought he remembered as a Segovia number.

Mary Lee hadn't recognized him and it was her chief object in life to meet him. As he listened to the staccato picking and arpeggiated runs of the song, Jury thought that anonymity was not that hard to come by. Here this lad had come face-to-face with someone who had seen his picture again and again and she hadn't twigged it. Even in the context of the theater he was performing in the next night, still he'd gone unrecognized. It was perhaps not so astonishing, after all. You see what you expect to see, and you don't expect to see the lead guitarist of a famous rock group humping his own equipment or trying to get himself a Coke when a half-dozen minions-not to mention Mary Lee herself-would crawl on their knees for the privilege of suppl-ing him with whatever he needed. And you certainly wouldn't expect to see him without the rest of his band.

And there was nothing about him that said star. Not his appearance (jeans and a washed-out denim shirt), not his stage presence. Rather remarkably (Jury thought) not his stage presence. Charlie Raine didn't seem to have what Wiggins and Macalvie had called 'attitude.' It wasn't attitude that made this classical Spanish piece take wing. The guitar might as well have been playing him rather than the other way round.

It was plain, raw exposure. He had to be more accurate and more precise than if he'd been playing electric; like nerve endings, every note was exposed.

The notes seemed to crystallize in the air, long notes arced out and kicked back and into a lightning riff, like tracer bullets, so that Jury felt he was caught in some sort of crossfire.

The music was fluid and frenetic at the same time. The piece stopped, suddenly, with a thunderous succession of sustained chords.

When the echoes stopped, Jury had the strange sensation of standing in a vacuum, air sucked out of the auditorium, walls about to collapse inward.

Charlie Raine unstrapped the guitar and returned it to its case, unbuttoned his shirt and wiped face and hair down with the shirttails. Then he pulled another guitar from another case and attached the strap to that one. It was white as blanched bone and almost glowed in the semidarkness. He attached the cord from it to one of a trail of black boxes, strummed a few chords, started making adjustments.