I got many calls from her. After her third, and most emphatic, message, I called her back, sitting in a window seat in Darraugh’s Hancock Center apartment.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Advertising the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance?”
“Olympia! How are you? How are repairs to Club Gouge coming along?”
“Never mind the club. What the hell is the meaning of this announcement I saw?”
“I don’t know what you see or where you look,” I said, “so you’d better give me a hint.”
I thought I could hear her teeth grinding on the other side of the ether.
“I’ve seen the advertisements that the Body Artist is going to be at Sal Barthele’s joint on Sunday. What is the meaning of this?”
“Gosh, let me look at some tea leaves. Yep, here it is. It means that the Body Artist is going to be at the Golden Glow on Sunday.”
“Buckley is under contract with me,” she said, “and any bookings she makes—”
“Talk to the Artist or her agent. Don’t talk to me. If she has to wait for you to fix up Club Gouge before she can perform in public again, it seems like a mighty poor contract, but, not my business.”
“It’s your business if you put Sal Barthele up to it. I’ve been asking around, and everybody who knows Sal says you two are really tight.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you and I need to talk about it,” I said.
Olympia was silent. A field of gray-white clouds floated around Darraugh’s sixty-seventh-story apartment so that the city, with all its art and music and corruption and gang wars, seemed as silent and distant as if it existed only in a child’s pop-up book. Open the cover, and the characters and their world spring to life. Shut it, and you float off into your own private space.
When Olympia still didn’t say anything, I added, “By the way, I drove by the club last night, and it didn’t look to me as though anyone was doing any work. Did you know that? Or has Kystarnik cut off all your cash until you jump through some big hoops for him?”
“Where is Karen Buckley hiding, Vic?”
“Don’t you think she’d be in touch if she wanted you to know, Olympia?”
Some swallows had ventured up as high as our windows, looking for the insects sucked toward the building by the wind currents. Funny how much of nature there is to see, even from a skyscraper.
I said, “What did Anton offer you in exchange for getting her location from me? To cancel all your debts? To repair the club?”
She hung up with a bang. I laughed to myself, but not for long. I had too much work to do.
I had called Trish Walsh, the Raving Renaissance Raven, to see if she would play music as a warm-up for the show. It was her performance back in November that had brought me to Club Gouge the first time, and it seemed fitting, somehow, for her to open for the Body Artist on Sunday. I knew Trish was flying over to London to join Jake’s early-music group, but she wasn’t leaving for almost a week.
Trish readily agreed, but I had to warn her that I didn’t know what to expect—there might be a hundred people or five, the crowd could turn violent, but I hoped not.
“Vic! You’re making this sound like a Buffy melodrama. I’ll play for this event—I can’t wait to tell the rest of the group that I’ve been close to bloodshed—but you’ll have to write in a guarantee for my instruments.”
Her lute and hurdy-gurdy were valued at twenty thousand, for insurance purposes. I gulped, but told her to add the guarantee to the contract.
Tim Radke and Sanford Rieff from Cheviot labs were creating high-quality images for the slide show that the Body Artist had always run on big screens during her performances. Tim called in sick to his day job to help us out, and he wasn’t letting me pay him for his time. He insisted he was doing it for Chad, that I shouldn’t worry. Still, I felt a bit guilty.
Rivka was creating stencils for use in the show, although it took Vesta’s and my combined efforts to keep her working on something the Artist had never authorized. “She won’t be happy when she sees these,” Rivka grumbled every time I asked her to prepare a new figure.
She was working in the basement of the Golden Glow, where Sal stored her overstock. Marty Jepson and Mr. Contreras had moved all