Corpse de Ballet (13 page)

The buzzing creative team, meanwhile, had reached that moment in a gathering when uneasiness wears off and unfeigned pleasure begins to set in. There was authentic laughter and a certain amount of friendly elbowing, and the champagne flowed as fast as Gretchen Manning's minions could open the bottles. Juliet saw Victorine detach herself from a pair of costume apprentices to move around on the floor among the dancers. She bent over Lily and stroked her cheek as she murmured some few words. She glided on to Teri Malone, to whom she showed her foot slightly askew, then perfectly straight, askew then straight, while Teri copied her, earnestly nodding. As Victorine moved on to Anton, Teri felt Juliet's eyes on her and smiled at her shyly.

Victorine, meanwhile, stooped with difficulty to speak to Anton. He rose respectfully to his feet, then gave her a broad smile. As they talked, Juliet was surprised by the affection she seemed to see in Anton's face. Not that he'd ever been unaffectionate to Victorine that she had noticed—only he'd never struck her as particularly demonstrative before.

Victorine glanced around, then gestured to Elektra Andreades, who had put away her needle and thread, to come over. Elektra obeyed. The dance mistress turned to her and tucked her own head down submissively, as Estella did in the pas de trois with Miss Havisham and Pip. Elektra did likewise and stood holding the pose while Victorine, dancing Miss Havisham, used Elektra to show Anton what she thought the pas de trois needed here. She wanted him to try to kneel and look up into Estella's face. But the idea did not seem to work out, and after a few minutes, Victorine threw up her hands, laughed briefly, and walked away. Behind her, Anton chugged from his Coke, then sat again on the floor and drew Elektra down beside him. Eyeing Mademoiselle as she crossed to the front of the room, Juliet had the curious thought that there was something malign in the expression on her tightly controlled, still beautiful, Gallic features. A moment later, however, glimpsing her as she slowly, carefully lowered herself into a chair, Juliet revised her opinion and decided that what she had seen in that handsome, haughty face was pain.

The sociable interval dragged on. Only the more prominent dancers dared to look irritated at being kept waiting. Finally, after some half an hour of playing hostess, Ruth withdrew from among her guests and summoned Luis Fortunato to the piano. Sitting beside him on the bench, she spoke to him forcefully about tempo (judging by her gestures), then waved at Patrick and brought him into the discussion as well. Greg Fleetwood, meanwhile, stole onto the studio floor and stooped briefly to have a word with the production's brightest star. Anton was slowly massaging his left foot. He looked up and greeted Fleetwood with a grin, murmured something to the older man as the latter knelt to examine his ankle, then shook his hand warmly. By now, Ruth, Luis, and Patrick had finally reached the point of nodding in unison. Ruth clapped for the attention of the dancers, at the same time alerting the audience that it was time to sit down. Slowly, regretfully, the knots of visitors resolved themselves into three neat rows of spectators seated expectantly on three rows of folding chairs. Fleetwood joined them, perching in the front row between Max Devijian and the woman in red leather.

Meanwhile, the dancers hastily thrust their bottles of water and soda into their bags, hitched their leotards down where it counted and assembled themselves facing front, individuality wiped from their expressions and replaced with the cool dancer's hauteur Juliet disliked so much.

Ruth Renswick faced them.

“From Act One, Scene One,” she announced. “Anton? Ryder?”

The dancers thus summoned went to their opening positions. Luis Fortunato raised his hands over the keys. Ruth turned to her guests.

“We have about nineteen minutes of Act One, with a couple of transitions missing,” she told them, “so we'll move through it with a few brief interruptions.” She walked toward the side of the room so that she could address everyone more easily. “Luis is kindly going to play a piano arrangement of the overture,” she went on more loudly, then continued by naming the leading dancers, both for the watchers' benefit and so that the performers could make their last preparations. Finally, like an acrophobe boarding a plane, she waved despairingly at Luis. He began to play. The run-through was out of Ruth's control, thought Juliet, as she watched her old friend reluctantly sit down, and out-of-control was not a feeling Ruth enjoyed.

The overture Ken Parisi had written was full of the cannons and gunshots that advertised Magwitch's escape, and the piano arrangement denoted these with heavy chords that crashed low on the keyboard. For fifteen or twenty seconds, the studio echoed with this clamor; then the guns gave way to a muscular, staccato tune in a minor key which Juliet recognized as Pip's theme. Gradually, this became intertwined with a haunting, sinuous melody evoking Miss Havisham and Estella. An all-purpose, Victorian bit of pomp-and-whalebone followed, then was pierced by a return of the guns. Suddenly, Ryder Kensington rushed to the center of the room, at first almost colliding with Anton, then snatching him up in his powerful arms.

For some ten minutes, the music bore the dancers swiftly along. In the first scene, Pip was repeatedly upended and tipped dizzily backward by the convict—as in the book. But he recovered from his fear to nuzzle timidly against Magwitch, winning the convict with the comfort of human warmth rather than (as in the book) the bringing of food. There were no chains and no question of a file. It interested Juliet to see how Kensington could soften in response to Pip's warmth. For the first time, she understood why Elektra would have married him: he was very lovely and moving when tender, as surly men unfortunately can be. Then the scene of Pip at home began, with a soloist named Maria Flor as the harsh (but no longer comic) Mrs. Joe. The oranges flew, Pip missed them, the soldiers arrived, and off they all went to hunt down the unfortunate convict.

Then everything came to a stop.

“No transition here,” said Ruth, popping up and smiling in a way that was meant to be apologetic, though on her it looked pretty fierce. She raised one finger in the air and murmured, “Anton?”

Anton Mohr came forward to her. As he did, he could be seen for a moment almost to stagger. He was, however, grinning. Ruth looked up at him and stood on tiptoe to whisper furiously in his ear, while Anton, for whatever reason, slowly stroked her upper arm with a gentle hand.

Juliet guessed Ruth was asking if his injury had worsened again. He had been spellbinding in the opening scene, but even Juliet had noticed he lost momentum during the Christmas dinner. The choreography called for him to hop up on a chair to grab at the oranges, but he missed the mark and, stepping too close to the edge of the chair, almost brought it toppling down. He had recovered and finished, but with none of the brio he had shown earlier in the day. Could he have stage fright, Juliet wondered? It seemed unlikely. Now he was shaking his head at Ruth, smiling broadly, as if to say his ankle was fine. But Juliet could see his huge green eyes. They were shiny, and curiously unfocused.

The little conference finished, Ruth retired to her chair, nodded curtly at Luis and muttered to her guests, “We'll go on.”

Luis began the “Peeping Pip” pas de trois.

Lily Bediant started bent over a crouching Kirsten, her arms encircling the younger woman, then slowly rising, as if she were conjuring an apparition. The two women moved together sensuously at first, then with increasing angularity and agitation. As Miss Havisham began to exert open control over her pupil, Anton stole onto the scene, creeping to a wooden frame that represented the French doors.

But there was something wrong. Instead of looking afraid of discovery—adolescent, awkward, timid—Anton Mohr wore the delighted grin of a child sitting ringside at a circus. What's more, he was moving around in ways Ruth had never told him to. He raised his arms and stretched them. He let his head roll back and forth. He pirouetted twice. When the steps called for him to echo at a distance those of the women, he instead went forward to them and danced as closely as if they were all at a wedding reception. Juliet, glancing questioningly at Ruth, saw her trying to catch the pianist's eye; but it was impossible. Luis rolled right on into the next bit, the “Approach–Avoidance” pas de deux for Pip and Estella, without a break.

Now Mohr's dancing became downright wild. Breaking entirely from the choreography, he caressed an astonished Kirsten Ahlswede, kissed her, carried her in a sailing sort of lift Juliet did not recall from rehearsal, then set her down and burst into a passionate cadenza entirely his own. The whole studio watched in amazement as he flew around it, now throwing himself down on the floor, now leaping and turning in giant circles. It was splendid, but it was terribly frightening for those who knew the piece. Ruth stood in her place with her mouth half open, torn between wanting to stop him and not daring to speak.

Anton Mohr seemed to be in a trance of some kind, like a sleepwalker who might fall if wakened. The music ended, but he danced on. It was no longer a performance. Evidently unaware of his surroundings, he moved like a child alone, without self-consciousness, in a joyful frenzy. Juliet thought suddenly of a documentary she had seen showing people who spoke in tongues, the glad, wholehearted way they gave themselves over to an alien force. Anton was ecstatic, she realized with a shiver of horror. She had never been near a man in this state before.

Ruth was moving slowly toward the middle of the room, her dark face expressive of a dozen warring impulses, her body radioactive with emotion. She looked several times toward Greg Fleetwood, as if he might know how to explain Anton's conduct, but though he looked more angry than puzzled, he did not offer any help. With the German whirling behind her, the choreographer finally shrugged at her audience, a gesture that eloquently disowned all responsibility for this display. Not far from her, Victorine Vaillancourt also had risen and started to come forward; but she stopped, for once at a loss for what to do. All around the edges of the studio, dancers fell back and stared. A weird, scared silence filled the room, broken only by the frantic squeaking of Mohr's dance shoes on the floor.

Then he began to sing, or rather, to howl, his distorted German syllables interrupted by gasps. His singing was distracted, offhand, as if he were humming to himself. His gaze more and more inward, he skipped and swooped, leapt and minced, until at last—after what seemed hours but was, in fact, only four minutes—he suddenly sank to the floor as if fainting and lay there completely immobile.

In the first startled moments that followed, his collapse evoked more relief than alarm.

Chapter Eight

For a few minutes following Anton's fall, everything seemed to be happening at once. With considerable aplomb, Gregory Fleetwood swiftly evicted both guests and dancers. At the same time, Patrick used Juliet's cell phone to call 911. Amid the evacuating crowd of dancers and civilians, Victorine knelt protectively beside Anton. He lay unconscious, his skin a bizarre red. As the room emptied, Patrick obeyed a paramedic on the other end of the phone, kneeling across from Victorine and checking the patient's vital signs to see whether any life-saving measures should be taken. But since Anton was breathing—albeit barely—and the cause of his collapse was unknown, there was little to do until the ambulance came.

While they waited, Victorine held Anton's inert hand. Patrick and Ruth huddled together on the piano bench. Juliet paced around the room. From the corner of her eye, she saw Greg Fleetwood return from sending the outsiders on their way. He was itching to evict her as well. Deliberately, she avoided his glance.

The medics turned up surprisingly quickly, all heavy boots and health and equipment. Two uniformed police officers (summoned automatically by the same 911 dispatcher who sent the ambulance) lumbered in after them, looking for all the world as if they'd just stepped off the set of
Law and Order.
Momentarily disoriented, they stared around at the mirrored walls, the grimy windows, the sweat-worn barres, the limp figure in leotard and tights on the floor. One held a form on a clipboard on which he took down from Patrick Anton's name, age, and address. As they finished and Patrick rejoined Ruth, Juliet hesitantly came close to where the officer with the clipboard stood near the door. He was tall and young, with wispy brown hair and a sprinkle of freckles on his snub nose. She hesitated a few moments, then gently touched his arm.

“Officer—Officer Peltz,” she murmured, reading the name from his name tag, “I think Mr. Mohr may have been drugged.”

“No kidding,” said Officer Peltz. The medics' ringing series of questions about Anton's behavior before he lost consciousness, coupled with Ruth's quiet, precise answers, had already made it clear the dancer had been in some kind of delirium.

“I mean,” said Juliet evenly, reining in her temper, “drugged against his will.”

“Oh yeah? What's your name?”

Juliet gave it. Peltz wrote it down on his pad, along with a short notation.

“Friend of Mr. Mohr?” asked the officer.

“Not really. Barely an acquaintance. But—will you be at the hospital? Will you make sure the doctors check for drugs?”

“Oh, they'll check for drugs,” said his partner, a thickset man with pale hair and a bull neck, who had now strolled up. He gave a short laugh.

“This lady thinks someone slipped the guy a mickey,” Peltz explained. “Any special reason you think he didn't take whatever he took on purpose?”

Juliet hesitated. It was obvious they were now considering whether she herself had secretly drugged Anton, then regretted it when she saw the catastrophic results.

“You see anything?” put in the partner, whose name was Roarke, as she still failed to answer.

Finally, she shook her head no. “I just don't think he'd do such a foolish thing. It would be like a pilot getting drunk on the runway just before takeoff. If it is a question of drugs, anyway.”