Stuart Kaminsky - Poor Butterfly

Ortiz was about to clobber Jeremy with the speaker when Raymond hit him on the neck with his fiddle. The fiddle shattered; a piece of it came twanging past my head as I got to one knee. It didn’t really stop Ortiz, who was humming again, but it did distract him for a heartbeat. The heartbeat was enough for Jeremy to bring his head up sharply into Ortiz’s nose.

Ortiz dropped the Victrola speaker and stepped back. His hand moved up to his nose. Blood streamed from between his fingers, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t still humming. He took his hand down and looked at each of us, his face a bloody mask, his grinning teeth smeared red. Jeremy stepped forward on pieces of crushed furniture. He staggered slightly. Ortiz lunged forward again, arms out. Jeremy went down on one knee and caught the flying barrel of flesh on his shoulder.

“No point asking you not to break anything more, is there?” asked Raymond.

Jeremy had Ortiz on his shoulders now. Ortiz, who couldn’t have weighed less than 240 pounds, was grasping at his opponent’s bald head in search of a forgotten hair. He threw a fist at Jeremy’s back, but Jeremy slowly stood erect. Ortiz’s head went down and his teeth dug into Jeremy’s shoulder. A tic crossed Jeremy’s mouth but he didn’t pause. He hoisted Ortiz over his head and began to spin, slowly at first and then faster.

As he spun, Ortiz stopped biting and began to growl. I couldn’t tell where Ortiz’s blood stopped and Jeremy’s began, and as they spun I couldn’t tell where one man began and the other ended. They were a dizzying blur. My stomach heaved, did more than threaten. I looked around for a vase, a bucket. Nothing. The two men spun and Raymond reached down to help me up, saying, “I’m gonna take this real philosophical. New company’s moving in. New company’ll clean it up. Always be new shows. New sets.”

Suddenly Jeremy stopped. Ortiz flew toward me and Raymond. I pulled Raymond down. Ortiz landed upside down on Raymond’s sofa. The legs crunched and Ortiz lay silent.

“Jeremy,” I said. “You all right?”

“I endure,” Jeremy said softly, catching his breath. “Is he alive?”

I made my way to Ortiz, whose feet were dangling over the top of the sofa, his head tilted downward. His lips were moving and a humming sound was coming out. I touched him. He smiled through red teeth.

“I think his shoulder’s broken,” I said.

Jeremy moved forward and looked down at Ortiz.

“An irony,” he said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. His clothes and cheek were covered with blood.

“Paddy wagon, funny farm cart, or ambulance?” asked Raymond, moving toward the door.

“Ambulance,” I said.

“I have decided to move to quieter climes,” Raymond said. And he was gone.

“Lucky you came,” I said as Jeremy and I turned Ortiz so that he was in something close to a lying-down position.

“I had a message for you,” he said. “You are …” and then he paused and stared at the wall.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“A breeze just touched the fine hairs on the back of my hand and a voice whispered ‘mortality,’” he said, softly.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It was both frightening and restful,” he said.

I looked at his bloody face and bulldog neck. Jeremy Butler didn’t always make a hell of a lot of sense to me.

“The message for me?” I asked.

He sighed, opened Ortiz’s right eye with his thumb, examined him for further signs of life, and replied, “Miss Bartholomew asked that you come to her apartment. She says she has information you should have. She gave me her address and number.”

Jeremy reached a hand into his shirt pocket. One of his fingers had been bitten by Ortiz. I could see the indentations from the deacon’s teeth. I took the piece of paper.

“I think you’d best go before the police arrive,” Jeremy said.

“You want to know what this was all about?” I asked, rubbing my sore neck.

“Perhaps later,” he said, moving to the window. “If you think it essential that I know.”

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said. “Sure you’re okay?”

He turned to look at me and smiled sadly.

“Every time I have wrestled or been engaged in combat,” he said, “I have been lost within the space and time of the encounter. I have been within and outside of myself. My concentration has always been complete with no sense of ego, but in this roorn I did not merge with my movements. I was aware that I would soon be a father. It was then that mortality touched me. I felt very much alive.”

“Great,” I said with enthusiasm, hoping that was the right comment.

“Go,” he said. And I went.

On the way out, I found Gunther waiting for Stokowski in the lobby.

“You are injured?” he asked with concern.

“I’m all right,” I said, and gave him directions up to Raymond’s tower in case Raymond didn’t get back. He said that the rehearsal had been cut short by Stokowski and that everyone had left except for Stokowski and Vera Tenatti. Shelly, he said, was watching outside Vera’s door.

I thanked him and hurried for Vera’s dressing room. Shelly was nowhere in sight. I knocked and Vera called, “Come in.”

I came in and Shelly came hurtling at me from a corner, one hand holding his glasses on, the other out like a stiff-arming half-back. He missed me by a good two feet and tumbled into an open closet filled with Vera’s costumes.

Vera gasped.

“Shelly,” I said, helping him up. “What the hell are you doing?”

“We heard a voice,” Vera said. She was standing next to her dressing table.

“A voice,” Shelly agreed. “Man. Right out of the wall.”

“He said,” Vera began, and then shuddered. “He said, ‘She will die before she sings for the Lion. I will strike within the hour.’”

“I’ve been hiding behind the door,” said Shelly, on his feet now.

“He plans to kill me,” said Vera, her eyes wide.

I moved to comfort her. She felt warm and smelled great.

“I don’t think he meant you,” I said. “I think he meant Lorna. I think he meant he would get her before she sings to me.”

“You?” There was disbelief in her voice.

“You’re no lion,” said Shelly. “Besides, he’s nuts. Why would he tell us he was going to kill Lorna what’s-her-name? What lion?”

“My middle name is Leo,” I said.

“Pretty flimsy,” said Shelly, finding a piece of cigar in his pocket and lighting it.

I gave the note from Lorna to Vera.

“Call the police. Those two cops who were here, Preston and Nighttime …”

“… Sunset,” she corrected.

“Call them and send them to Lorna’s. I’ll meet them there.”

I didn’t think about it. I just gave Vera a kiss. It seemed the right thing to do and the right time to do it. She kissed back. Middle of Act Two. Knight off to war-Wish me luck, babe. And I was off.

Gunther wasn’t in the lobby. I ran out into the street, not knowing where I was going. The ancient pickets, about a dozen of them, were there, and in their midst, in a white suit that outdid the sunshine, was the Reverend Adam Souvaine. He looked up at me as I came down the steps and barely flinched. He kept talking. I skipped past a woman in overalls who was plastering a top step and went down two by two, heading for my Crosley.

Souvaine popped out of the crowd and beat me to my car.

“Did you see Deacon Ortiz within?” he asked softly.

“We had a nice chat,” I said. “Step out of the way.”

“We have decided to forgive you for your un-Christian behavior of last night” Souvaine said, brushing back his stately white mane and waving to his seniors a few dozen yards away.

“Deacon Ortiz was very forgiving,” I said, “but he was so elated at my sudden conversion that he fell over a lion.”