John Varley - The Golden Globe

Or a chance to carry a gold-painted wooden spear onto the stage and shout "Caesar approaches!" to an audience of bored schoolchildren.

I am an absolute sucker for somebody who says those magic words: "You've got the part." It has got me into more hot water than yearly flows through Phlegethon, the famous River of Fire in Pandemonium Park, not three miles from where I sat. It has made a shambles of my life, this puppy-dog-like eagerness to perform.

So I was a tenth of a second from taking the part, when I looked up and saw that Elwood had silently opened the door behind Uncle Roy just enough to stick his narrow, dour physiognomy through the crack. He was looking at me, pursing his lips in that pensive way of his, and shaking his head.

"I'm not a singer," I managed to cough.

"You're not primarily a singer, granted," Roy said. "However, we're not talking grand opera soprano here. We're talking Broadway , Sparky, we're talking musical comedy , and I don't know anybody in the system can handle that kind of part any better than you. Believe me, you're ten times the singer Drury is. I saw you—what was it, ten years ago? Fifteen?—as Mrs. Lovett. Best I ever saw, and that music is lots tougher than Work . Then there was... what was it... The Three Masks . I've never heard Mabel Parsons sung better. Swear to god, Sparky, you had me thinking Streisand."

Well. How bad could it be? I'd already done the male lead for several hundred performances; I could swot up Anna Livia's lines in a few hours' intense cramming. I'm a very quick study. I looked up to say yes...

...and Elwood was still shaking his head, no. There were frown lines on his forehead now.

"...I'm pretty much sticking to male roles these days." This was partially true. The memory of my recent painful Juliet was still fresh enough in my mind that I didn't regard a radical body shift in a short time with a lot of enthusiasm.

"Please, Sparky," he said, leaning across his desk with his hands folded. If he came across and grabbed my lapels I'd have no choice but to run like a scared rabbit. There was no other resistance I could offer.

"Please, please, please !" he groveled.

"All right," I said. "I accept." Or that's what I opened my mouth to say, but what came out was more like "Awwwrrrgh," followed by a strangling sound I can't transliterate, as Elwood was now drawing a finger across his throat—

—and the full depth of my folly was revealed to me in a blinding burst of temporary sanity. I'd been on Pluto three, four weeks? Already I'd committed at least two felonies—ones I was aware of, though the place had so many new laws now it was likely I'd committed a handful more simply by getting up and going about my daily business. So what did I now propose to do? Nothing but get put down on the shit list of one of the most powerful men on Pluto, in letters ten meters tall and written in fire: The Man Who Wrecked My Daughter's Life.

No thank you! No, I thank you! And again, I thank you!

"I'm really sorry, Roy," I said. "I have a previous engagement on... on the, er... the Titanic ."

"Dinner theater? You're giving up Anna Livia for dinner theater?"

"At least I won't get trampled by elephants."

"And between shows you can bus tables. I never heard of—"

I slapped the bag of swag onto the desk between us, possibly the only action I could have taken at that moment that would get his attention. He looked at it suspiciously, then took it and zipped it open. He hauled out the wad of crisp, new banknotes and then looked at me.

"Any trouble at all?"

"No trouble. She was just like you said."

He nodded. He'd met her before, having been the original bank examiner in our little true-life sketch. He moistened a thumb and started shuffling through the bills, sorting them into two piles: nine for him, one for me. Hey, I'm not complaining. Ten percent is not bad for coming in so late in the sting. They'd done all the groundwork.

"All right, Sparky. Here's your share."

I pocketed the loot, and placed a small object on the desk in front of him. He frowned at it, picked it up.

"What is this? A chessman?"

"It's called 'Dutchman.' It's netsuke, nineteenth century, dating from a few years after the opening of Japan. This is how the Japanese saw the Western invaders. Notice how his little eyes are slanted?"

"You got this from Mayard-Tate?"

"No, I found it lying in the street. Jesus, Roy."

He frowned at the tiny mannequin while his thumb absently caressed it.

"Reason I asked," he said, "we talked about it before you went in. The Charonese Mafia."

"We sure as hell did talk about it. You said it wouldn't be a problem."

"It ain't. Only I didn't figure on you pinching any sukiyaki."

"Netsuke. What's the difference?"

He rolled his shoulders, nervously rubbed the back of his neck.

"Come on, Roy. Don't do this to me. You said the Mayard-Tates wouldn't bother to tell the Mafia."

"Normally, no, they wouldn't. They'd be embarrassed, for one thing. And it's a small enough amount of money—to them—it's easier just to let it go. In fact, I was gonna ask you if you'd like to be in on stage three of the sting. We're planning to—"

"Not for all the netsuke in Pluto."

"Okay. Just a thought. They didn't do anything after the first sting, and I don't see why they'd do it now, 'cause it's even more embarrassing to fall for it twice. Still, I didn't count on you lifting the furniture."

"Get real, Roy. I walk into a house like that, you think I'm walking out with my pockets empty? Would you?"

He grinned. "There's that," he admitted. "What do you want for it?"

"What'll you give?"

He named a ridiculous price. I just shook my head. But instead of making a counteroffer, he shook his head, too.

"I'm out of my element here," he said. "I never dealt in Nipponiana. Let me talk to a few people." He swiveled his chair to the side and started typing on his keyboard, studying the results on a clear glass pane whose angle made the returning answers invisible to me.

"What do you hear these days?" I asked him, more to be making conversation than anything else. "Anything interesting going on?"

"My show's just about it," he said. "A few other revivals here and there. I don't think there's been three new plays debuted on Pluto this year. Things are pretty dead." He glanced at me, smiled. "Unless you count Polichinelli coming out of retirement to direct King Lear ."

Sure. I returned his smirk. "And I heard Hitchcock's come back from the dead to direct John Wilkes Booth in Our American Cousin , too." Both events were about equally likely. If there was something good coming up, Roy wouldn't tell me. He wanted me for Work in Progress .

His attention had returned to his screen.

"I hope those questions aren't going out over the public cables."

"Don't teach grandpa how to get under a skirt, little boy," he said. "This is encoded nine different ways. The police could never trace it. Of course, if the Charonese are looking for you, nothing's gonna help."

Did he have to bring that up? I expected Elwood to stick his nosy phiz back through the door again and croon, Don't say I didn't warn you .

He had warned me, not that I'd really needed it. The hardest part of the Mayard-Tate sting had been knocking on that front door with the red handprints on each jamb, like the fresh lamb's blood beside the doors of the Israelites. Those prints meant, to anyone who had spent any time on Pluto, "This residence protected by the Red Hand." I read them in a more colorful way: Burglar, pass by this place . Had a more Biblical sound, and the Charonese Mafia was nothing if not Biblical.