The Old Silent

her well-tailored, comfortably familiar dark dresses, with her silver brooch.

Jury thanked her for the T-shirt, looked at Carole-anne, and bent down and kissed her. This drew an appreciative little round of applause from a few itinerant musicians (perhaps hoping some Sirocco magic would rub off on their gig bags).

'Wait outside the front door when this is over; there's someone I want you to meet.'

'Meet? Who?'

'It's a man… musician-type.'

Carole-anne tried not to seem pleased by either the kiss or the mystery and pulled Mrs. Wassermann along.

In the bun at the nape of her neck were two hot pink, sequined Spanish combs.

With the crowd shoving round him toward the sets of double doors, Jury felt a tap on his shoulder.

'If you must send me on another mission, make it Lourdes,' said Melrose Plant, who had his cosher under his arm and was peeling off leather gloves supple enough for a surgeon. 'First of all, Trueblood blackmailed me into going on one of his London shopping sprees, and I can only thank God it was Upper Sloane Street and not Harrods; he insisted I buy this.' Melrose shook out the lapels of a new overcoat.

'You look like Armani himself. Did you get our man?'

As Melrose wedged himself between a girl with rainbow hair and a leather-jacketed one who ogled his coat and reminded him a little of Ellen, he said, 'Yes, but I had to leave my Rolex behind.'

Over his shoulder, Jury said, 'You don't wear a Rolex.'

'I bought one for the occasion. Traded it off for this on the way out.' He held up a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses. 'I think she's running a pawnshop.'

Jury pulled him over to one side of the stalls and let the crowd stream by, making for their seats.

'Where's Sergeant Wiggins?' asked Plant.

'Up there.' He nodded toward the balcony. 'Projection room.'

'You've been seeing too many reruns-uh!' His stomach was prodded by the elbow of a boozy fan. '-of The Manchurian Candidate. God!' The heel of a boot had just crunched down on his shoe.

'Probably,' said Jury, checking the Exit signs and the double doors at the rear. Five men, that was all he could muster, one at the stage door, one in front, one operating as a scalper, the other two inside. It was hardly mounting a battalion. The two huge spotlights on each end of the circle suddenly switched on and started crisscrossing the stage, which sent up cheers from the audience.

Plant had raised his voice at the next onslaught from a couple of punches on the shoulder. 'For God's sakes, you could get killed in here just from standing about.'

'So you're both down here waiting for some shooter to stand up on a front-row seat, for chrissakes.' The owner of the elbow sounded disgusted.

'Macalvie?' Jury couldn't believe it.

'Well, you wanted help, didn't you? Lord knows you could use it.' He shoved a couple back who were blowing smoke in his face. 'I don't know anyone at headquarters who likes rock music. So here I am. How many men have you got here? Not that it'd make much difference, judging from the crowd.'

'Five,' said Jury, raising his eyes to the balcony where he was blinded momentarily by the spotlights. The crisscrossing of the spots on the stage made him think of the air raids. He remembered that this theater was the meeting place for Operation Overlord. The audience, hundreds of people, all of them still standing, might have been waiting for the last briefing before D-Day.

The stage was empty except for the amplifying equipment, a deep, double-tiered black platform, and, at the rear of the stage, a long black backdrop of a curtain with SIROCCO spelled out in silver letters. Behind or offstage must have been a wind machine, for the curtain rippled and swayed, moving the cursive letters.

All five of them walked on stage together to an explosion of applause. They were dressed in basic black, shirts and cords. John Swann was bare-chested except for a glittery silver jacket, sleeveless and short, that gave the audience a good look at his biceps and pectorals. Jiminez's loose black jacket had a red satin lining, and Wes Whelan wore a red satin shirt and a cap made of the same silvery stuff as Swann's waistcoat. Whelan quickly took his place behind the drums on the second tier and Caton Rivers was half-surrounded by keyboards on the first.

While the spotlights up in the dress circle dropped huge coins on the stage, a switch thrown somewhere flooded the stage with a rainbowlike iridescence from the lighting truss. It was the sign to begin.

This band didn't wind up its audience, didn't grandstand, didn't preen. As soon as those lights hit them, Wes Whelan hit the drums for his sizzling solo introduction to the band's signature song, 'Windfall.' And the crowd, simultaneously, went crazy. Jiminez kicked in with that one-note riff building his bass line, and Charlie Raine stepped a few feet forward and started one of his arpeggio runs. The huge hall reverberated with the lightning of the music and the thunder of the crowd echoing it.

'I think I see,' said Plant, picking some foreign object from his new coat, 'what you mean.'

He looked up, momentarily blinded by the spotlight.

The dress circle was an amorphous mass of moving bodies… except for Carole-anne's, whose glittery jacket was just caught by the spotlight's edge in the middle of the second or third row of the circle.

Height, he thought.

Obviously, the killer would need height. 'Lobby,' he said to Plant and Macalvie.

Mary Lee was holding sway behind her window over an intrepid group still trying to get in. When the wave of music issuing out through the doors thwacked shut behind Jury and Plant, she snatched her shoe off the counter and shouted, 'That's it, luv!' to a leathery-skinned couple and secured the little window. The leftover Sirocco disciples were flapping their arms in gestures signaling distress.

'You got another one of those?' asked Macalvie, when Jury yanked up the antennae on his radio. He shook his head as Wiggins's voice crackled over the receiver.

'Fine, sir, so far. There're two projectionists up here, there's no way anyone could get in without being seen. I even checked out the old spotlight that looks like it must've been here when the place opened. Big enough to hide a body in.' He paused to chuckle at his own inventiveness. 'It's a warren of rooms and stairways; we checked out what we could.'

'How much can you see of the theater? The circle?'

A pause as Wiggins apparently looked round. 'Nothing much.'

'Get down to the dress circle and try to cover the rear.'

'Yes, sir.'

Music hit them in a wave as the double door slapped open and shut after Macalvie, who came through talking: 'Great band. One thing that worries me-'

'May I see your ticket, if you pul-eez,' said Mary Lee, her tone clearly suggesting he'd sneaked in.

'It's all right dear. I'm from Juke Blues.'

Her eyebrows shot up. 'The mag?'

Macalvie handed her a card that seemed to impress her.

'Well, all right. But they should let us know.'

The lobby was not empty. The two fellows who worked the T-shirt concession were standing at the other set of doors, listening; the squatters were sitting in surliness near the ticket booth as if extra tickets might miraculously walk out of Mary Lee's window; a few fans were wandering toward the open air, stoned.

'Mary Lee-' He looked at her, wondered if she'd have the nerve to walk out on the stage if he needed her. 'Mary Lee. There's something I might want you to do.' He handed her a two-way radio.

'What's this, then?'

'Take this, go backstage.'

'Backstage. Whatever for?'

'I'll tell you when, the time comes.' He showed her how to work the radio. 'You'll love it.'