Jury was glad he'd seen the theater empty before he saw it packed. The crowd that had flowed from the Underground tunnel and jumped the iron railings in the slanting rain, diamond-splinters in the reflection of the bright marquee, were jammed in the lobby and packed upstairs where the bar was open.
Jostled by the line in front of the poster and T-shirt concession, Jury looked up at the huge oval, peopleless yesterday, tonight thronged with faces peering over the railing and above them the flashy chandelier that tossed tiny squares of light across some of the faces and hands. He wished he were here just for the show. It was wonderful, this climate of expectancy; the ring of faces looked down as if from a height where they breathed headier air. And from the boozy appearance of some of them, the air up there was decidedly winey. They talked, laughed, giggled, yelled down at their mates below, for it seemed in that magical way that certain occasions afforded, they were all mates.
Mary Lee was in her element down here and secured behind her window, where she could, given the line of hopefuls waiting for no-shows, dispense with infinite largesse what tickets there were to be had. For the begging, Jury imagined. Mary Lee was dressed in purple silky stuff, blue shadow with gold glitter on her eyelids.
Wiggins had asked Jury why her shoe was sitting behind the window on the ticket counter.
It had always been a wonder to Jury and Carole-anne-no matter how packed the crowd, how large the room-that Carole-anne could always be seen across or through it, as if people instinctively moved back a little to allow a clearer view of Miss Palutski, this evening wearing her Chinese stop-light-red dress over which she'd tossed a short little silver-sequined coat that gave off fire and glitter like the domed chandelier. To give off fire and glitter though, Carole-anne only needed that flaming red-gold hair, those blue eyes.
"Super!" She threw up her hand, jumped up a bit, and seemed oblivious to the synchronized turn of male heads. Carole-anne, oddly enough, was not really vain. If you look like that (thought Jury, pushing his way through the crowd), vanity is redundant.
He searched the people crushed against her for Andrew Starr or one of the dozen or so males Jury would sometimes pass on the steps of his digs.
A couple of feet away he heard his name. It was a breathless Mrs. Wassermann, who had just, apparently, beat her way from the concession line. Mrs. Wassermann held up a T-shirt. Sirocco was scrawled across the front in silver, and a picture of the members of the band was outlined in a square on the back. "I do not know if it will fit, Mr. Jury. It seems small." She held it up to him.
Mrs. Wassermann also looked once again almost like Mrs. Wassermann. It had been impossible to get the scrunch completely out, but the hair had been combed back, frizz only round the face; she was dressed in one of 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."
Mary Lee frowned; she didn't look as if she were about to fall in love with this contraption. "Well, I dunno-"
Macalvie said, "Just do it, right? Juke Blues is doing a big feature on this concert, big, and we're gonna want to include some behind-the-scenes people." He winked and tapped her shoulder.
Mary Lee's eyes widened.
Jury went on. "First of all, I want you to get up to the dress circle, and tell the lady in silver and red-she'll be sitting in the middle of the second, third row-"
"Oh, I seen 'er, all right." Mary Lee adjusted her own decolletage as if competing with the Chinese neckline. "What about 'er?"
"Tell her I want my own personal cheering section if something happens. Applaud, yell, jump up and down-"
"Won't work, Jury," said Macalvie. "For five seconds, maybe. No more."
"All I need is five seconds."
"All I need is an explanation," said Melrose.
That the swell beside her apparently wasn't in on this operation galvanized Mary Lee into action. "Right, luv." And she left to churn up the stairs.
"Come on," said Macalvie, "let's get up there."
The Odeon might as well have sold Standing Room Only because no one was sitting down. The rows of seats were superfluous. Jury bet they'd stand all the way through the concert, given their enthusiasm for the next two numbers.
Then, keyboard-led by Caton Rivers, John Swann gave himself over to a solo called "Sunday's Gone Again." Swann had enough available attitude to spread around a dozen bands, but he also had a nightingale's voice and an incredible range. The top notes he hit were as silvery as the jacket he wore. No wonder Jiminez (who kept his own attitude under subtle wraps) wanted him in the band.
Jury was holding his breath for Charlie Raine's solo. Charlie didn't move like the others; he didn't wheel round like Jiminez, who was graceful as a dancer; he wasn't all over the stage like Swann, marking out each section of the clamoring audience as his provenance. Charlie was both shy and cool; he stayed still.
As he was doing now, swamped in light by the doubled-spot playing on him, standing with his amplified acoustic singing "Yesterday's Rain" into the hush of the theater. He ended with a return to the last verse, stopped, and there was a silence as heavy as the applause, foot-stomping, and yelling that followed.
Jury breathed again and looked over to Macalvie near the stairwell, then to Plant, who was sweeping the balcony with his opera glasses.
The band had been at it now for nearly an hour… another forty, fifty minutes to go. They didn't break.
Jiminez and the keyboardist, Rivers, traded a few improvisational, intuitive licks that gave the audience some breathing space and Charlie time to towel off his head. The two spots separated now, one following Jiminez and one Raine as they broke into a trade-off of technical wizardry, Alvaro on a funky blues line that backed off into a classical progression-Bach, it sounded like. Jury smiled in spite of the tension that made his arms, his back ache. The old "back-porch blues man"; it was an ear-bending mix of perfectly amplified acoustic and heavy slide distortion on Jiminez's electric.
Jury felt the crush of people behind him, people before him, people standing in the aisle, backs against the wall, cheering. He edged forward to stand beneath the Exit sign, couldn't see because of the reflection from the spot. Both of the lighting technicians were following their targets with the light-
From his position by the stairwell, Macalvie frowned, squinted at the stage. The spotlights were out of sync. The one light was following the black guy, Jiminez, who was moving all over. The other was fixed; it wasn't on Raine, wasn't following him, though his movements were sparse. He stepped into it and stepped out. Hunched down, Macalvie started moving along the aisle, toward Jury.
Plant whipped the opera glasses quickly from the stage back to the spotlight. It was in a pool of darkness, and all he could see of the operator was a chap in a leather jacket and a cap who seemed to be adjusting something near the bottom of the huge spot. Beside it was a gig bag.
The noise as Macalvie tried to muscle his way through the knots of devotees turned the Odeon into a compression chamber. For chrissakes-
Jury saw both of them coming, had his hand on the revolver in his shoulder holster, moved slowly along the wall.
He should have realized it: of course it wouldn't be Charlie's solo, where the audience was as hushed as a sleeping baby; it would be like this, a trade-off of technique between Charlie and Alvaro that whipped the house up into a frenzy. They were playing together but they stood absolutely apart.
Charlie was sending fiery arpeggio runs across the long stage; Jiminez was addressing them with those heavily distorted power chords. It was a complex, killer duet that kept the audience in a state of controlled havoc with little spills of applause all along the way for Charlie's shot, for Alvaro's return.
Plant couldn't move all the way up to the rear, cross it, and go down again. There wasn't time. He jumped up on the empty seat and used the whole row as a clattering path to the other side, followed by outraged shouts to get the fuck down and the bloody hell out of the way. Along the way he sent at least one illegal tape recorder, a couple of beer cans, and a waving Sirocco T-shirt flying into the air with his cosher and might (given the crack) have broken the wrist that tried to pull him down.
It wasn't a gig bag.
The folding stock of the rifle clicked into place and she raised it so that the barrel jutted through the bars of the circle. It was the perfect hiding place, with herself in a pool of darkness, the light huge and blinding. And who would pay much attention to whoever was operating the Super Trooper? She was between it and the wall anyway.
Jury was crouched, holding the Wembley with both hands. "Rena." The word cut through the noise just like the snick of a safety.
"Hold it right there," said Macalvie, who'd drawn out a.38.
Rena fired a half second before the commands, out into the theater, toward the stage.
Wes Whelan did a total turn, and yet still came down on the one, hitting all the punches, not missing a lick.
The others hesitated, looked at him, and hit their instruments again, following his lead.
As she swung the rifle, catching Jury in the sight, Melrose tossed his coat at the gun. Macalvie threw himself at her legs and raised the butt of his pistol. The spotlight fell across Rena Citrine and hit the floor with a hideous crash.
And now, thought Jury, comes the hard part.
Panic in a theater filled with over a thousand people.
In the second row, Carole-anne and Mrs. Wassermann were yelling, jumping, applauding the drummer and Jiminez, who had picked up on this improvisational mix. The people round them were distracted momentarily. But those nearest were staring in frozen silence for what Jury knew would last only seconds before the panic started. The audience in the stalls hadn't picked it up yet, but bad news travels fast. He pressed the radio button, spoke into it.
Melrose Plant, seeing Macalvie and Jury throw themselves at Rena Citrine, calmly lit a cigarette and turned to the several dozen people nearest and said, "That's show biz, ladies and gentlemen."
A woman screamed. It was one of the shrillest noises Jury had ever heard.
He got off his knees, looked down at the stage, and as soon as he thought it-for God's sakes, Mary Lee!-here she came…
Nervous, hobbling on the stiltlike heels of her glass slippers. The people in the stalls were looking from her up to the dress circle, where there seemed to be something rather nasty going on.
Wes Whelan was hugging his arm; the rest of the band was momentarily stunned at the appearance of this girl.
Come on, Mary Lee, do it!
She did it. Grabbed at a mike and shouted, "Ladies and gentlemen! Staaaan KEELER!"
When Stan Keeler moved, he moved. He came out of the wings at such speed he covered the last several feet on his knees, sliding to a stop, and playing on his way up from the floor.
Near him, the ones in the worst state were now moving between fear and astonished delight.
All Keeler had to play was that famous chord progression to "Main Line Lady" and he had them cold.
People had stopped moving for the exits, stopped crushing against each other, and when the woman screamed again, Jury saw a hand flash out and slap her down in her chair.
In the meantime, the band was backing up Stan.
Stan Keeler in person, in concert, and with Sirocco?
What sort of competition was a crazy killer with that?