Dark Maze Read Online Free PDF Page B

hopefully in one piece.”
    There was a five-piece band in Princess Pamela’s Little Kitchen, which is a lot of music for a place with only an eight-foot bar and a dozen tables for dinner. But this did not overpower our conversation. The musicians were five old fellows with five old instruments and no one had much wind. The band played a soft set of Bix Beiderbecke tunes—“Fidgety Feet,“ “Flock o’ Blues,” and “Prince of Wails” among them. Behind the band was a curtained doorway, behind which would be the Princess herself, tending the fried chicken you can smell all over the Lower East Side.
    But neither the music nor Ruby’s pretty face and voice nor the aroma from Princess Pamela’s stove drove away my thoughts of Celia and Charlie Furman and the many questions their lives had raised all of a sudden. What had Picasso meant by saying to me, "I been watching you for months in case you didn’t know"? What had he meant by saying, “I will take you into my confidence ’’? And why had he steered me to the Ebb Tide, where his painting hung in obscurity, where life had imitated art, until it died?
    “... I remember being scared by all the sweet, loving lies the family told me about New York,” Ruby was saying. “But I was so much more frightened by the thought of staying home and marrying young and growing old fast, and having to make up lies of my own to keep young people from leaving me.
    “Besides, I wasn’t right in the head. I wanted to go into the theatre.”
    Artists, they’re mostly nuts.
    Ruby laughed. “Well, I got on stage my very first year here, how about that? This was a theatre down on Bond
    Street, in a cellar. In my first role, I played a cannibal in an unfunny comedy about Amway distributors who open new sales territories in the African bush.”
    “In my time I have been trapped into witnessing plays like that,” I told her.
    And I thought, If Celia had sat at the Ebb Tide all day making telephone calls, she was obviously waiting for someone to come meet her; she could make calls from anywhere. Did her familiar killer finally stop by, knowing the bar would be crowded at five o’clock? Was it Picasso—! Charlie Furman—who stopped by? But wouldn’t Angelo^ have noticed him?
    Ruby laughed again. “So when the offers for bigger and; better parts did not rain down upon me, I did some more plays like the one at Bond Street. Which, as you know, does! not pay the rent. And which, if you keep up this glorious art,; will make you poor, which happened.”
    “And then?”
    “Then I decided I didn’t like poor. So, through a friend of mine, I wound up with a job on Madison Avenue with a pretty good agency that thought it was hip to advance me up the executive ladder—me being female and black, but not too black to their minds.”
    “You’re speaking here of minds that are easily read?” She smiled at me. “And so for more years than I want to confess, Detective Hockaday, I was your regulation advertising hotshot. I wore all the correct female business suits and I spent many hours lunching at Table 89 in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons so that every other advertising hotshot in town could get a load of me in my executive splendor.”
    “Well, you made money at least.”
    “I made loads. I won’t say ‘earned.’ Enough money so I could buy a place up on East Seventy-fourth off Fifth Avenue, with a big wrap-around terrace overlooking Central
    Park. I would hire a piano player for parties on summer nights and he’d play Gershwin and Porter, and I would try to believe I loved my career and that I was successful in New York and that all the people drinking my liquor were my dear, close friends.
    “But I didn’t and I wasn’t and they weren’t. I didn’t have anything truly important..
    Princess Pamela joined us. She carried big plates full of smothered chicken in her ample arms, and smaller plates laden with Creole potato salad and combread and string beans. She set these down