The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit Read Online Free PDF Page B

peering hard at me.
    “Seen anythin’?” he said.
    “About what?”
    Without taking his eyes off mine he lit up a cigarette for himself. He inhaled deeply and then blew out a long thin blue plume of smoke. “Anythin’.”
    I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. “No.”
    He held his cigarette in his left hand and I noticed that his right fist was bunched. He nodded slowly. Then he held a single finger up to his face and gave a slight tug on the skin under his eye. “Keep these open for me, will ya?”
    “Sure.”
    “How you fixed?”
    “What?”
    “They paid you yet?”
    “No.” He knew that we all worked a week in hand and I wouldn’t get paid until the end of the second week. It discouraged quitting without notice.
    “Here.” He put a banknote in my top pocket.
    “What’s that for?”
    “Help you out, son. Tide you over.”
    It was a lot of money. After deductions for food and palatial lodgings I was only being paid twenty-five pounds per week. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep it. “I can’t take that off you.”
    “Leave it out,” he said.
    “I’ll pay you back when I get my wages,” I said.
    He turned very slowly and fixed me with a glare. “It ain’t a loan.”
    After that he melted into the darkness. I was left alone with a cigarette I didn’t want burning between my fingers andwondering what, exactly, I’d agreed to keep a lookout for. I tossed my cigarette to the ground and stamped on it. Then I made my way to the Golden Wheel.
    THE ENTERTAINMENTS BUSINESS is hierarchical. As Greencoats we were at the bottom of the well. Then there were the dancers and the assistant stage manager and the DJ. Moving on up came the stage acts, and their place in the pecking order was measured strictly by the font size of their name on the billboards. Near the crest were the musicians who accompanied the acts and Abdul-Shazam. But topping the bill, highest paid and commanding the best dressing room, was the Italian tenor.
    I’d never even seen an Italian tenor before I worked at the holiday resort. Mine was an era of rock music, with punk just around the corner and within spitting distance. Yet in the holiday resort theater they were still serving up the old-style variety formula: comedy duos, dancing girls, lady singers in glamorous gowns, magic acts. Beyond that, and somehow connecting low music-hall traditions and operatic high culture, stood the Italian tenor. Tony told me that every holiday resort theater had one at the time. Not all of them were from Italy, even though they might have Italian names. Quite often they were from the Italian coast of Liverpool.
    Our Italian tenor was the real deal. His name was Luca Valletti. I did the lights for him in the Golden Wheel that evening. Before the show, while I was still shaking off mystrange encounter with Colin, he introduced himself to me, very politely, and asked if I would do something different.
    “Doesn’t Perry do the lights?” Perry was the assistant stage manager.
    “I would like you to do it.”
    Luca wanted to finish on a song called “Autumn Leaves.” He showed me how to mix the gels on the lighting so that we could get green and gold at the outset, move through some appropriate variations, and finish on red and gold. It didn’t involve much more than gently moving a lever, but Luca wanted it done sensitively and at certain places in the song. Perry was a bit grumpy but cheered up when Luca bought him a drink and explained that it also meant that Perry could quit early. I was impressed with Luca Valletti. I mean, with how he managed people.
    Luca entered wearing an immaculate pressed tuxedo with bow tie. His dark hair was slicked back with hair oil and he’d accentuated the sharp line of his pencil mustache. The brilliant white light of the spots flashed along his high cheekbones and quickened the sheen in his eyes. A previously quite boisterous audience dropped into complete silence as the first few chords struck