The Old Silent

As several of the urchins issued from the little hut called Horror-Scope, Jury said, 'Well, Andrew'd better be good to you because if Selfridge's gets a look at that window, Goodbye, Meg and Joy.'

They looked pained at this implication of possible disloyalty on their part. The Starrdust was home, after all.

The same could be said for Carole-anne Palutski now coming toward them with a plate of cake. Since Madame Zostra had got this plummy job, the universe was her home.

'Tea's up, kids,' she said.

Carole-anne Palutski was dressed in her harem outfit: red pantaloons shot through with gold thread; a short, lapis-lazuli-blue blouse the color of her eyes and bound in gold; and a flowing, filmy sleeveless coat. Had she not been wearing the gold lame turban, Jury imagined the Princess would have put the pattern down to unrestrained Lacroix.

'I have an acquaintance who'd love your color genre.'

Carole-anne's face came up from the heavy slice of Black Forest cake she was scooping into her mouth with far more enthusiasm than she put in the look she gave Jury. 'You finally decided to come back. Well…'Her sigh was heavier than the cake, a scapegoat sigh. 'So who's this woman?'

'The Princess Rosetta Viacinni di Belamante.' Jury shut his little notebook. 'I didn't say it was a woman.'

'Is she on the phone?'

'No idea.'

'I can hardly wait to see you trying to look it up.' With the back of her fork she was pressing up chocolate crumbs.

'The Princess is probably seventy.'

Carole-anne shrugged a filmy gold shoulder. 'So when'd thatever stop you?' Implying Jury had his own private harem of elderly ladies. She'd put down her plate and was putting some more records on the old phonograph. 'And I don't expect S-B-slash-H would much like that.' Susan Bredon-Hunt was still making telephone contact with Jury; her unspeakable name was dropped in a litter of initials like the stars now falling on Alabama in the music coming from the phonograph.

Only terrestrial music was permitted in the Starrdust. Pennies falling down from or stairways leading up to heavens, stars whole or trailing dust, moons of any color. Perry Como had got his foot in the door because if his true love had asked him for the moon he'd 'go and get it.' Suns, moons, stars-the cosmos. If it were unearthly, Andrew and his ensemble team were into it.

Meg and Joy, Andrew's sales assistants, were naturals. They must have come from the Milky Way, W.17, with their pretty, star-crazed faces. Now they were giggling with Wiggins in the Horror-Scope.

Jury took Carole-anne's arm and guided her to the tent where she played her Madame Zostra role. Starr himself was a serious astrologer with a shrewd eye for the commercial, and Carole-anne had caught the fever; her fever, however, was born not of real interest in the signs of the Zodiac or the rings of Saturn; it had more to do with running Jury's life, and the lives of those who crossed her own star-crossed path, such as Mrs. Wassermann. Fortunately, she eschewed Andrew's complicated horoscopes: why should she learn all that, when the Daily Mirror provided quite adequate ones? Vidal Sassoon had probably turned up in the column the past Tuesday.

The tent was a drapery of gauzy stuff hung over several rods protruding from the wall, the material pulled back on the outside like a curtain. Carole-anne and Jury sat opposite one another on huge cushions. On a stool in one corner sat the big stuffed monster-thing Jury had brought back to her last year from Long Piddleton. The black coned hat with the gold quarter moon was not part of its original outfit; it seemed to suit him, though.

After checking her lipstick in a crystal ball that sat on a spidery-legged gold stand-smudging her lips together, drawing them tight to look at her teeth-she picked up her Tarot pack and fanned it out over the black cloth. 'Pick one.'

'Not after the last time.'

'Suit yourself.' She shrugged, cleared a place and upended the Hanged Man and the Hermit, crossing them carefully with Isis. They stood.

'You look a little pale, Carole-anne; something wrong?'

Quickly, she checked her color in the crystal ball and said, 'No. Except I'm overworked.'

'You'd have less to do if you'd stop getting Mrs. Wassermann scrunched. Leave her looks alone. I like them.'

'She needs a bit of a change. You didn't hear her complaining, did you?' Worrisome little lines appeared on her pristine forehead.

Jury smiled. 'No. But give it a rest, will you? One more Sassoon treatment and her hair'll look like Romney Marsh or the Norfolk Broads.'

No wonder Carole-anne looked tired. Building a house of cards from the Tarot deck probably was tiring. 'We thought you were about to take a trip, what with all of those maps and train schedules and so forth. Mrs. Wassermann told me a few days ago you were making for Victoria Station.'

'Oh, that.' She positioned three other cards delicately above the first ones. 'It was just an idea.'

Jury waited while 'Moonlight Serenade' ran through its final bars. How different music was then, he thought, and thought about Elicia Deauville. 'What idea?' he asked finally.

'That band. You wouldn't know about them. Sirocco. See, I thought they might be coming across from Ireland.' As if he had laughed at her, she said defensively, 'They were in Ireland. That's because of their drummer, I expect, Wes Whelan.'

Jury was silent. 'Wouldn't it make more sense they'd flyto Heathrow than take a ferry from Dublin or Cork. Or Belfast?'

What had supplanted the Glenn Miller record was 'Yesterday's Rain.' He turned his head, listened for a few moments to this music she pretended to ignore by humming herself an entirely different tune. 'Or are you talking only about Sirocco's lead guitarist.'

The house of cards wobbled. 'I'm surprised you ever heard of him.'

'That was my magazine you nicked. I read the article. Sometimes he does travel alone. But it was very unlikely. Wouldn't it have made more sense for you to go to Heath--'

'I don't go to airports,' she broke in, hastily.

'You mean you're afraid of flying?'

Impatiently, she shook her red-gold hair, shining in the reflections from the starry ceiling fixtures. 'No. I just don't like things you see there.' She put her hands on her hips and said angrily, 'Didn't you ever notice? You must have done when you were at Heathrow with your machine gun when that bomb went off.'

This seemed to have little relationship to whatever really bothered her. 'Are you afraid of getting caught in crossfire? Anyway, I didn't carry a 'machine gun.' '

'Well.' As if that unraveled the whole mystery, she fixed the last card in place. 'Don't breathe on it, for heaven's sakes.'

Then glumly she said, 'It's like airports are the last stopping place. People leaving. It's like the last… trench. People dying in each other's arms.' She was staring at him through two squares made by the cards. 'Before some of them go to the line of fire.'

What, Jury wondered, was this preoccupation with metaphors of war? Perhaps her talks with Mrs. Wassermann, who had had dreadful experiences in Poland during what she called the Big War (the one she shared with Jury), except Mrs. Wassermann wouldn't have talked about this to Carole-anne. It had been too bleak.

She was telling him a story. '… this little girl, no, boy. His mum was holding him and they were both crying. It was there at the gate, and then other people, probably the gramps, an old man with a lot of medals on his chest, they were standing around looking terrible. The little boy was maybe three or four. And he was crying like it was the end of the world. So was his mum. Well, it must have been his mum.' She ran a finger under the bottom cards and the house tumbled airily down as if resisting the pull of gravity. 'The little boy had his face nearly up against his mum's and what really… what was so awful was he took his hand and even though he was hysterical he was wiping her face, wiping the tears away with his hand. Maybe it was because if she was