Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

“I understand,” I yelled back. I’m a quiet man by nature, and I have never liked yelling. Besides, he was about to do a very elementary trapeze routine, so there was nothing to get excited and yelling about.

He pushed out the second trapeze, and it swung away out in a nice clean arc, and then it came back and he shoved it out again and it went out farther and higher this time. He set his own trapeze in motion then, and both trapezes went swinging up there, back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher. He stood up on the bar and watched the second trapeze, timing himself, and then he shouted down, “I’ll do a somersault to make it interesting.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Here I go,” he said.

His trapeze came back and started forward, and the second trapeze reached the end of its arc and started back, and I saw him bend a little from the knees, calculating his timing, and then he leaped off, and his head ducked under, and he went into the somersault.

He did a nice clean roll, and then he stretched out his hands for the bar of the second trapeze, but the bar was nowhere near him. His fingers closed on air, and my eyes popped wide open as he sailed past the trapeze and then started a nose dive for the ground.

I jumped to my feet with my mouth open, remembering there was no net under him, and thinking of the mess he was going to make all over my tent. I watched him falling like a stone, and then I closed my eyes as he came closer to the ground. I clenched my fists and waited for the crash, and then the crash came, and there was a deathly silence in the tent afterward. I sighed and opened my eyes.

Sam Angeli got up and casually brushed the sawdust from his clothes. “How’d you like it?” he asked.

I stood stiff as a board and stared at him.

“How’d you like it?” he repeated.

“Dr. Lipsky!” I shouted. “Doc, come quick!”

“No need for a doctor,” Angeli said, smiling and walking over to me. “How’d you like the fall?”

“The... the fall?”

“The fall,” Angeli said, smiling. “Looked like the real McCoy, didn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you don’t think I missed that bar accidentally, do you? I mean, after all, that’s a kid stunt.”

“You fell on purpose?” I kept staring at him, but all his bones seemed to be in the right places, and there was no blood on him anywhere.

“Sure,” he said. “My specialty. I figured it all out, Mr. Mullins. Do you know why people like to watch trapeze acts? Not because there’s any skill or art attached. Oh, no.” He smiled, and his eyes glowed, and I watched him, still amazed. “They like to watch because they are inherently evil, Mr. Mullins. They watch because they think that fool up there is going to fall and break his neck, and they want to be around when he does it.” Angeli nodded. “So I figured it all out.”

“You did?”

“I did. I figured if the customers wanted to see me fall, then I would fall. So I practiced falling.”

“You did?”

“I did. First I fell out of bed, and then I fell from a first-story window, and then I fell off the roof. And then I took my biggest fall, the fall that... but I’m boring you. The point is, I can fall from anyplace now. In fact, that trapeze of yours is rather low.”

“Rather low,” I repeated softly.

“Yes.”

“What’s up?” Dr. Lipsky shouted, rushing into the tent, his shirttails trailing. “What happened, Moon?”

“Nothing,” I said, wagging my head. “Nothing, Doc.”

“Then why’d you...?”

“I wanted to tell you,” I said slowly, “that I’ve just hired a new trapeze artist.”

“Huh?” Dr. Lipsky said, drunk as usual.

We rolled on to the next town, and I introduced Angeli to my other trapeze artists: Sue Ellen, Farnings, and Edward the Great. I was a younger man at that time, and I have always had an eye for good legs in tights, and Sue Ellen had them all right. She also had blond hair and big blue eyes, and when I introduced her to Angeli those eyes went all over him, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake hiring him. I told them I wanted Angeli to have exclusive use of the tent that afternoon, and all afternoon I sat and watched him while he jumped for trapezes and missed and went flying down on his nose or his head or his back or whatever he landed on. I kept watching him when he landed, but the sawdust always came up around him like a big cloud, and I never could see what he did inside that cloud. All I know is that he got up every time, and he brushed himself off, and each time I went over to him and expected to find a hundred broken bones and maybe a fractured skull, but each time he just stood up with that handsome smile on his face as if he hadn’t just fallen from away up there.

“This is amazing,” I told him. “This is almost supernatural!”

“I know,” he said.

“We’ll start you tonight,” I said, getting excited about it now. “Can you start tonight?”

“I can start any time,” he said.

“Sam Angeli,” I announced, spreading my hand across the air as if I were spelling it out in lights. “Sam An—” I paused and let my hand drop. “That’s terrible,” I said.

“I know,” Angeli answered. “But I figured that out, too.”

“What?”

“A name for me. I figured this all out.”

“And what’s the name?” I asked.

“The Fallen Angel,” he said.

There wasn’t much of a crowd that night. Sue Ellen, Farnings, and Edward the Great went up there and did their routines, but they were playing to cold fish, and you could have put all the applause they got into a sardine can. Except mine. Whenever I saw Sue Ellen, I clapped my heart out, and I never cared what the crowd was doing. I went out after Edward the Great wound up his act, and I said, “Ladeeeees and Gentulmennnn, it gives me great pleasure to introduce at this time, in his American premiere, for the first time in this country, the Fallen Angel!”

I don’t know what I expected, but no one so much as batted an eyelid.

“You will note,” I said, “that the nets are now being removed from beneath the trapezes, and that the trapezes are being raised to the uppermost portion of the tent. The Fallen Angel will perform at a height of one-hundred-and-fifty-feet above the ground, without benefit of a net, performing his death-defying feats of skill for your satisfaction.” The crowd murmured a little, but you could see they still weren’t very excited about it all.

“And now,” I shouted, “the Fallen Angel!”

Angeli came into the ring, long and thin, muscular in his red tights, the sequins shining so that they could almost blind you. He began climbing up to the bars, and everyone watched him, a little bored by now with all these trapeze acts. Angeli hopped aboard and then worked out a little, swinging to and fro, leaping from one trapeze to another, doing a few difficult stunts. He looked down to the band then, and Charlie started a roll on the drums, and I shouted into my megaphone, “And now, a blood-chilling, spine-tingling double somersault from one moving trapeze to another at one hundred and fifty feet above the ground — without a net!”

The crowd leaned forward a little, the way they always will when a snare drum starts rolling, and Angeli set the bars in motion, and then he tensed, with all the spotlights on him. The drum kept going, and then Angeli leaped into space, and he rolled over once, twice, and then his arms came out straight for the bar, and his hands clutched nothing, and he started to fall.

A woman screamed, and then they all were on their feet, a shocked roar leaping from four hundred throats all together. Angeli dropped and dropped and dropped, and women covered their eyes and screamed, and brave men turned away, and then he hit the sawdust, and the cloud rolled up around him, and an Ohhhhhhh went up from the crowd. They kept standing, shocked, silent, like a bunch of pallbearers.