The arm unfurled, the hand at the end twisting and turning in a sensual dance all its own. It teased its way around the black sack, exposing, briefly, a girlish shoulder, a curve of belly, a flash of painted lips, firefly bright. Then it moved to tug off the other glove and throw it into the crowd. Now there were two glowing arms, exposed from the elbow down, sensually contorting, beckoning the audience: Come closer. They obeyed, like children, clustering around the stage, jostling for the best view and tossing the glove up into the air, passing it hand-to-hand, like a party favor. It landed near Harper’s feet – a wrinkled thing, with radium paint streaks showing like innards.
‘Hey, now, no souvenirs,’ the huge doorman said, snatching it out of his hands. ‘Give it here. That’s Miss Klara’s property.’
On stage, the hands crept up to the veiled hood and unclasped it, letting loose a tumble of curls and revealing a sharp little face with a bow mouth and giant blue eyes under fluttering lashes, tipped with paint so they glowed too. A pretty decapitated head floating eerily above the stage.
Miss Klara rolled her hips, twisting her arms above her head, waiting for the suspense of a dip in the melody and the sharp clang of the cymbals she held between her fingers before she removed another piece of clothing, like a butterfly shrugging out of the folds of a black cocoon. But the movement reminded him more of a snake wriggling out of its skin.
She wore dainty wings underneath, and a costume beaded with insect-like segments. She fluttered her fingers and winked her big eyes, dropping into a contorted pose among the coils of fabric like a dying moth. When she re-emerged, she had slipped her arms into sleeves in the gauze and was swirling it around her. Above the bar, a projector flickered to life, casting the blurry silhouettes of butterflies on the gauzy cloth. Jeanette transformed into a swooping, diving creature among a whirlwind of illusory insects. It made him think of plague and infestation. He fingered the folding knife in his pocket.
‘Zank you! Zank you!’ she said at the end of it, in her little girl voice, standing on stage wearing only the paint and a pair of high heels, her arms crossed over her breasts, as if they hadn’t already seen all there was to see. She blew the audience a grateful kiss, in the process revealing her pink nipples to roaring approval. She widened her eyes and gave a coquettish giggle. She quickly covered up again, playing at modesty, and skipped off stage, kicking up her heels. She returned a moment later and wheeled round the stage, her arms held up high and wide in triumph, chin raised, eyes glittering, demanding that they look at her, take their fill.
All it cost him was a penny’s worth of caramels, the box slightly battered from being under his coat all night. The doorman was distracted, dealing with a society lady who was vomiting copiously on the front steps, while her husband and his friends jeered.
He was waiting for her when she emerged from the back door of the club, dragging her suitcase of props. She was hunched against the cold in a thick coat buttoned up over the spangled costume, her face streaked with sweat through the glow paint which she had only made a cursory attempt to wipe off. The light of it cast her features into sharp relief, hollowing out her cheekbones. She looked fraught and exhausted, with none of the verve she’d had on stage, and for a moment Harper doubted himself. But then she saw the treat he’d brought her and a brittle hungriness lit her up. She’d never been more naked, Harper thought.
‘For me?’ she said, so charmed that she forgot the French accent. She recovered quickly, glossing over the broad Boston vowels. ‘Iz zat not so sweet? Did you zee ze show? Did you like eet?’
‘It wasn’t to my taste,’ he replied, just to see the disappointment flicker before the pain and surprise took over.
It was no great thing to break her. And if she screamed – he wasn’t sure because the world had narrowed to this, like looking through the lens of a peepshow – no one came running to see.
Afterwards, when he bent to wipe his knife on her coat, his hands shaking with excitement, he noticed that tiny blisters had already formed on the soft skin under her eyes and around her mouth, her wrists and thighs. Remember this, he told himself through the buzzing in his head. All the details. Everything.
He left the money, the pathetic ream of her takings, all in one- and two-dollar bills, but he took the butterfly wings, wrapped in a chemise, before limping away to retrieve his crutch where he had stashed it behind the trash cans.
Back at the House, he showered upstairs for a long time, washing his hands again and again until they were pink and raw, afraid of the contamination. He left the coat soaking in the bathtub, grateful that it was dark enough for the blood not to show.
Then he went to hang the wings on the bedpost. Where the wings were already hanging on the bedpost.
Signs and symbols. Like the flashing green man that gives you permission to cross the street.
No time but the present.
Kirby
2 March 1992
The axles of corruption are greased with donut glaze. Or that’s what it costs Kirby to get access to files she really doesn’t have any good excuse to be looking at.
She’s already exhausted the microfiche at the Chicago Library, ratcheting the machine’s whirring shutter through twenty years’ worth of newspapers, all the spools individually boxed and cataloged in drawers.
But the Sun-Times archive library goes back deeper and is staffed by people with lateral skills for finding information that borders on the arcane. Marissa, with her cat’s-eye glasses and swishy skirts and secret fondness for the Grateful Dead, Donna, who avoids eye contact at all cost, and Anwar Chetty, also known as Chet, who has stringy dark hair flopping over his face, a silver bird’s-skull ring that covers half his hand, a wardrobe built on shades of black and a comic book always close at hand.
They’re all misfits, but she gets on best with Chet, because he is so utterly unsuited to his aspirations. He is short and slightly tubby and his Indian complexion is never going to be the fishbelly white of his chosen pop-culture tribe. She can’t help wondering how tough the gay goth scene must be.
‘This isn’t sports.’ Chet points out the obvious, lolling with both elbows on the counter.
‘Yeah, but donuts …’ Kirby says, flipping the box and turning it to face him. ‘And Dan said I could.’
‘Whatever,’ he says, picking one out. ‘I’m doing it for the challenge. Don’t tell Marissa I took the chocolate.’
He goes into the back and returns a few minutes later with clippings in brown envelopes. ‘As requested. All of Dan’s stories. The every-single-femicide-that-involved-a-stabbing-in-the-last-thirty-years is gonna take me a little longer.’
‘I’ll wait,’ Kirby says.
‘As in it’s going to take me a few days. It’s a big ask. But I pulled the most obvious stuff. Here.’
‘Thanks, Chet.’ She shoves the donut box towards him and he helps himself to another. Due tribute. She takes the envelopes and disappears into one of the meeting-rooms. There’s nothing scheduled on the whiteboard by the door, so she should have some privacy to go through her haul. And she does for half an hour, until Harrison walks in and finds her perched cross-legged in the middle of the desk, the clippings spread out around her in all directions.
‘Hey there,’ the editor says, unfazed. ‘Feet off the table, intern. Hate to break it to you, but your man Dan’s not in today.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘He asked me to come in and look something up for him.’
‘He’s