"She was just a girl who came out of the night," Lon said suddenly. "A girl none of us had ever seen before, who seemed to know everybody. Jones -- old Hirsch -- thought of himself as quite a sharpster, but I don't think he would have let her through the door if he'd known he was looking at the future."

It was a Monday afternoon, Valenciennes was supposed to be dark, but Lon and Mary and I were there, giving the place its weekly beating. There were the seats that needed to be cleaned, aisles that needed to be vacuumed; while up on the stage Mary had a backdrop that was showing some wear. Of Jones there was no sign. Yet none of us asked "Where is Jones?", whether out of self control or lack of interest or in my case because nobody else was asking (was it a point of honor not to show any curiosity?), until I couldn't hold it back any longer and it popped out of me somewhere in the middle of the third row.

Lon didn't answer for a time, didn't even give me a look or a shrug as if to say "How the hell would I know?" Instead, he continued along the maroon aisle with his face downturned, his hands in constant motion against the seat backs. At first I thought he was forming a reply; then, that he might be punishing me for some unknown reason with his silence. It didn't occur to me that he might not have wanted Mary to hear, that he might simply have been waiting until we worked our way a little farther back from the stage. Whatever the reason, it was more than half an hour before he finally spoke, still without turning or looking up from his work, about the girl.

"Hirsch?" I said. "I don't understand."

"He was the Jones before Jones," Lon said. "And he wasn't the first. He'd swindled this place or blackmailed it or anyway taken it from a man named Jones who built it and owned it up until around 1924. Or so it goes. All I know is, he kept the name, wore it as a kind of joke trophy." Now Lon dipped his cloth, wrung it out, and scrubbed the red wood until the whole seat rattled and pitched against its moorings. "That was just one of the things I didn't like about him."

Lon said that when Hirsch hired him to watch the stage door three nights a week, he didn't think it would cost him his day jobs. But there were actresses back there in bright colors who knew just how to tease him along, and a man called MacTeagle, who acted under the name of Harry Shelby and made of Lon "a much better drinking companion than old Hirsch"; given that, it wasn't long before his day bosses found out and asked him to make up his mind where he wanted to work.

And so nearly every day now from two in the afternoon until almost midnight Lon sat alone by the stage door, turning away men with the names of dancers on their lips, or drifting in the anesthetic effect of boredom mixed with the sad, distant echo of the melodrama playing on the other side of the scenery. He was allowed half an hour off during the early part of the evening; instead of leaving the building he would unwrap a chicken sandwich that he had made himself the night before, and wander away into the back of the theater, chewing carelessly, drinking in the mysteries of the wings, the traps and marks, the whisperings of the girls as they came and went through the gaudy shadows.

Then on a crisp November night, just on the edge of winter, the girl came to the door for the first time. Lon was leaning back in his usual spot, half asleep, half wondering if the act was about to end, when he heard the distant crunch of boots on gravel. It was too early for a Johnny, too late for a bill collector; it wasn't even the same kind of sound, an assured stride not quite like a man's but very much unlike the clipped, posed walk of the actresses. Lon had to drag himself hard out of the thick haze of almost-sleep. It was still gripping at him when the footsteps ended on the other side of the door.

There was no knock. For what seemed like a long time Lon stood with the door between him and whatever it was, fighting back a terrible feeling that he should warn the company, clear the building, get everyone out the front entrance. "If I had," Lon said to me across the intervening years, "it would have saved her a lot of trouble."

At last he got his nerves up and opened the door just a crack. She was standing with her face half under the yellow light, quite calm, her hands buried in the pockets of a battered old aviator's jacket. Her eyes lifted to his. She could not have been more than about twenty one or two, but already there was the edge of something inhumanly patient about her, in her face and the set of her shoulders. She looked like a cross between the madonna and a particularly ragged, well-traveled gypsy. They studied each other for a moment, Lon still standing with his body blocking the way, as if she were a drunk or a cop, as if she might get violent. "Nice night," she said, in a voice that held every possible variance of frost and thaw. "What's your name?"

Lon answered her without even stopping to think. Then he remembered having a job to do, and said, "I'm sorry, but you can't --"

"Margaret Darwin," the girl said. She slipped a hand out of one of the zipper-edged pockets, and held it straight out under the light. "I'm not here to sell anything, and I'm not here to audition."

Lon could not even be sure that he was awake. He took her hand -- warm where he had expected it to be cold, a bit calloused where he had expected only softness -- and stepped aside. He didn't have to ask himself why he did it; the answer was there in the way she drew herself up into the entryhall, the jacket creaking against her, and stood just inside looking around with her profile sharp against the night light and that curious smile around her eyes. "Can I see Mr. Hirsch?" she said.

Lon didn't know where she got the name. It wasn't listed on any program or sign; as far as the public knew, the place was still owned and managed by a man named Jones. He told her to wait, then went and left her there alone, thinking all the while about something Pud had once said about vampires, and that he had been the one who invited her in.

Hirsch kept his office up on the second floor. Lon said that it might have been a nice room once, but by that time, with its broken paint and broken plaster, it suited its owner pretty well. He said that he didn't like to go up there, even at the best of times, because he was never quite sure what he would find: back then the measure of an actress was how well could she swoon, and Hirsch liked it best if they did their swooning on his lap. But this time Lon found Hirsch alone at his desk, posed in a circle of lamplight, copying something out into the margin of a yellow legal pad. There was a mess of scrap paper spread out across the blotter, a shotglass half filled with amber liquid sitting close by his wrist. "Jones," Lon said. "There's a woman downstairs. But I don't think you want to see her."

When Hirsch looked up Lon could tell from his expression that the only word he'd caught was "woman." A stocky, well-groomed man, he was wearing a grass-green suit that fit him too tightly around the middle and a bow tie the color of mud. His mouth turned up at the corners. Without haste, he lifted the edge of the blotter and slid the papers under. "Nonsense," he said. "Where is she?"

They found her in a twilit corner of the wings, looking as if she belonged there, her arms folded, her eyes fixed on the actors passing close under the light. She was whispering something into the stagehand's ear; Lon said he wondered about that for months after. "Hsst," he said to her. "Miss Darwin."

She turned so that her face fell half in shadow. "Mr. Hirsch," she said, and gave Lon a look that made him feel uncomfortably like a conspirator. Her hand came out of the pocket again, pointed straight at Hirsch's gut. "My name is Margaret Darwin. I'm a Natural History major down from Miskatonic University. I'm an admirer of yours"

"Jones," Hirsch said. "You call me Jones. Just like Mr. Wimpy -- a heh -- I'm one of the Jones boys."

Lon watched as he shook the girl's hand. "Poor bastard," he said to me. "Poor sap. He didn't have the slightest idea"

Then it was back to his chair by the door. He supposed that he could have stayed and listened in, but it wasn't any of his business and after all he supposed he would hear about it anyway. Show folk sometimes tried to have secrets, but they never managed to keep them very long. This time Hirsch couldn't even manage it for ten minutes. Because it wasn't that long before he and the Darwin girl passed Lon on their way out, walking side by side and close together. Hirsch pretended not to notice Lon sitting there, but Lon noticed how they hushed themselves up. The Darwin girl nodded goodnight; Lon couldn't say what he saw in her eyes. He touched his forehead, and they were gone.

Then Lon thought: What the hell. He opened the stage door very carefully, and stuck his nose out into the cold. There, halfway up the blue alley, he saw the two of them walking almost in step, not too slow, not too fast. The Darwin woman laughed. As he watched, she reached down and patted Hirsch on the ass.

I was at the point of asking Lon to please shut up, but he wouldn't give me the chance, wouldn't even look up from the last of the chairs. "I'd just gotten settled again when MacTeagle came around," he said. "We were pretty well into the comedy portion of the show, so he had his coat on with the red candy-stripes running down it. He was all hot and bothered. 'Who was that?' he said. 'That beautiful woman.' I told him everything I knew and everything I thought, and he just stood there for a while with his jaw slack. I was afraid he would miss his cue. Then he said, 'Well by God. This calls for a drink.'"

Lon laughed softly to himself on his hands and knees in the row above. He sank his rag into the brown water, looking down into the pail the way an oracle might look into a glass ball. "Oh," he said. "This was the winter of '28."

In that season, sometimes two or three nights a week, Lon and MacTeagle would wait until the actors and the stagehands had all gone their various ways ("Out there," Mac said, "into the night"); then, meeting as if by chance in one of the storage rooms beneath the stage, they would build a little speakeasy out of a cluster of unused and half-forgotten props. It was nothing more than a miniature table cast off from an ice cream parlor, a metal lamp with a metal shade, and two mismatched chairs; while Lon set them up, Mac would pick out a scene from the rows of dusty, peeling flats, and then with a Paris sidestreet for a background, or a forest or a crypt, they would sit and drink from a fresh bottle of bootleg that Mac had concealed in an inside pocket of his comedian's jacket.

"Listen," Mac would say when they had reduced the level of the whiskey, dark powerful stuff, by about half. "I think she's made another move"

And he would whisper the latest of the secret news, lowering his face across the table like a spy whose job it was to track the sightings of the Darwin woman's progress, the ripples she made as she passed through the company. Lon already knew the bulk of it: when he walked through the wings with his chicken sandwich half unwrapped, there weren't the crowds of whispering actresses, or of stagehands standing around doing nothing; in any case, it would have been hard for anyone watching the door not to notice the number of people who left and never came back. But that didn't matter. Mac wasn't telling it just for the sake of being informative. He was telling it so that he could share his disbelief, and his wonder.

Three days after Miss Darwin came out of the alley, Hirsch had fired the stage manager and installed her in the job. For a short time there were no further signs of motion; the shows went on in their usual manner, though perhaps more efficiently than before. But Lon didn't dare believe that that was all she had wanted.

"No," Mac agreed. "No, she's only getting her steam up." His voice rose into a lyrical, shivery singsong as if he were reciting sonnets to a house full of maiden aunts. "You should see her at work; she's charming, but alert to every little thing. She never turns on the lamp over her stand -- doesn't need to. She has the book memorized to the smallest detail. Never has to look away from the stage. It's something, to be playing and to feel her eyes on you, to know that she's there where you can't see her, watching, and waiting, and putting on steam."

"That much waiting, that much steam," Lon said.

Mac filled both the glasses and knocked his back. "Nothing less."

"She has a way of making her wants belong to you," Mac said on the night of the first big firing. She had replaced the magician, a man named Henry Arnaud, with one of her own choosing, and though Henry had been liked and the new man was what Mac called "a certain prick," everyone agreed when they saw him perform that the right choice had been made.

"You aren't afraid?" Lon asked him three weeks later, after seven more dismissals.

"I thought I would be," Mac said. "But this is too interesting. D'you know what she's up to now?"

Lon thought he did, but he said no anyway.

"She's incorporated that magician of hers into the melodrama. He's the hero now. Instead of getting run off to the hoosegow, I'm vanished in a circle of flame!"

"That could be dangerous," Lon said, "with all the alcohol on your breath."

Mac let that one slide by. He had white showing all around his eyes. His face and hands were wet. He told Lon about all the changes creeping into the show, peculiar shifts of emphasis, sudden flights of fancy, including a new sketch about a drunk whose best friend was a thing called a hippogriff. "Never heard of a thing like that," Mac said. "But she made it sound wonderfully funny. All these additions she wants to make, and there she is jettisoning people right and left."

Lon said, "What does Mr. Jones-boy Hirsch think of all that?"

"I don't think he knows," Mac said. He waved his hand so that whiskey slopped over the lip of the glass. "Or if he does, then she's found the way to make him like it"

The next time they got together, Lon saw that Mac had drained a quarter of the bottle before they even sat down. "She's done it," Mac said, more as if he were beholding a miracle than announcing the dismissal of a friend. "She's fired old George. Him that played straight man to me for going on six years. And d'you know who she replaced him with? Herself! She herself! Imagine it! She puts on a white wig and an evening gown and sucks in her cheeks and throws back her shoulders (lovely white shoulders she's got), and then d'you know what? She starts ad-libbing on me! And I that never recited a word that wasn't writ for me just has to chase after -- until I realize of a sudden I'm the one playing straight to her"

Lon imagined it as he'd been ordered, and couldn't help but give a soft laugh.

"And that's not the most of it," Mac said. He was going on just like an engine that had finally reached full speed. "She's good! She's bloody marvelous!"

Lon said, "That surprises you?"

It went on like that for some time, well into the night. By the time they had finished the bottle, Lon could feel the world warming and turning to liquid light all around. He could look off down the broad painted avenue towards the Seine, and almost believe in it.

One night, just as they were setting up their bar parlor under the floor, a soft laugh almost like a whisper came at them from the slantwise shadow of the stairs; when they looked around, there was Margaret Darwin, a tall thin shape descending into the light from the gloom above. "Well hello," she said. "The two Opera Ghosts."

Lon stood there with the table still in his hands and didn't say a word. If he had known her better he might have guessed from her words that they weren't in any real trouble, but she was still just The Stranger to him, and there was nothing in her tone to say whether she meant it as a joke or a threat.

Mac's eyebrows had climbed half the distance to his hairline, but when he put the smile on it didn't look so much like surprise. "Miss Darwin!" he said. "It's good of you to come by. Welcome to The Mask and Paint. You'll find it's the most exclusive club in town, I think. Will you join us?"

"Margaret," she said. When her face came into the lamplight she was wearing the same knowing expression that she'd used that first night, in the alley. "I might. If it's my kind of club."

Mac said, "Set it down, man, set it down. Fetch the chairs." From the corner he began leafing through the row of flats, peering into each scene as if they were the pages of an enormous book.

"There's a view of a Viennese garden somewhere in there," she said. "If you could find that"

Mac stopped looking at the pictures. He walked his hand spiderlike over the pencilled notations on the frame edges, and at last gave a low whistle. "So there is," he said; a moment later he had drawn the scene straight out of the row so that it cut off more than half of the room. "Would that be the one you were looking for?"

Margaret Darwin stood half in the light and half out of it, hands in pockets. "The very one," she said.

Lon had set out a third chair for her, a blackpainted thing with curling metal legs that almost matched the table's, but as they were all settling down she lifted it aside and sat crosslegged on the dusty floor. Lon said he had an uncomfortable moment trying to decide if it would be rude not to join her there; Mac didn't seem even to notice. He sat with his palms flat on the table as if he were going to try a magic trick. "Now then," he said. "What's old Jones doing leaving a lady like you all alone on a huge, enormous night like this?"

"Oh come on," Margaret Darwin said, chin on fist. "You know exactly what he's doing."

"Ah," Mac said. He drew out the new bottle, pulled the cork and sniffed it, then raised it to the level of his eyes. "Yes. A toast then to Mr. Jones née Hirsch, without whose tireless efforts we could not gather here this evening. Eh, you wouldn't happen to have brought an extra glass, would you?"

"'fraid not," she said. "Just pass it around."

Lon said that Mac's eyebrows began to climb again, and this time he couldn't raise a smile to cover it. Margaret Darwin took a long pull straight from the bottle, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "Tell me," she said. Her face was such a changing, flickering mask that it tired Lon just to look at her. "What do you two gentlemen think of Shakespeare?"

"That depends," Mac said. He poured out a shot or so into the bottom of the paintstained tumbler he'd been drinking out of ever since the "speakeasy" had opened. "Which play would you be talking about?"

"'Twelfth Night,'" Margaret Darwin said from the floor. "I'll be taking Viola. I've talked to a handful of people in the company, and some others I know of have agreed to take part, but I still need a Toby Belch."

Lon sat with his knees together, watching the two of them and saying nothing. He said for a moment it felt as if he and the bottle, the table and lamp, the painted Vienna, had all turned invisible.

"I see," Mac said at last. "Typecasting. Still"

Margaret Darwin flashed a smile like a lighthouse beacon cutting through solid banks of fog. It hit Mac full in the face, puffed him up and set him aglow; Lon thought it was pretty funny until she turned and aimed the same look at him. "And you," she said. "I've seen how you spend your lunches. You must know the works by now."

"More than that," Lon said. "I know how it doesn't work."

"Then you can't really want to sit by the door all summer. Or can you?"

"There doesn't seem to be much point. You've fired all the girls who used to bring them around."

Margaret Darwin laughed. "They were coming around for the wrong reasons," she said; Mac handed her the bottle, and she raised it in a toast. "We start rehearsals next week. In the meantime, can I trust you boys to keep it under your hat?"

Oh yes, Mac and Lon said together. Absolutely. The bottle went around one more time. Then in one smooth motion as if that magician of hers had been standing behind the scenery, levitating her, she rose to her feet and started over to the edge of the dark. With her head half bowed, half turned, she regarded the fading backdrop. "The Mask and Paint," she said. "Yes. It's my kind of club exactly."

And she vanished outside the circle of light. A moment later, Lon and Mac heard her climbing the stairs, then a few soft footfalls over their heads, then nothing more. That was when Mac turned back to Lon, blew out a gust of stringent, whiskey-soaked air, and poured himself out a good tall one. "Any time now," he said.

But it didn't happen in the next week, or the week after; it didn't happen until Spring, and by then Lon and Mac had grown so complacent from waiting that it came as a surprise even to them. The rehearsals for Twelfth Night began in secret, with a cast of fourteen players, strangers and friends, crowding themselves into the little room under the stage, so that The Mask and Paint had to fold up and save its business for another night. Mac said he had never been involved with anything that moved so painfully slow; once a week was too little rehearsal time for anything, he said, and Lon had to agree: Miss Darwin allowed the readings to drag on for what seemed like months, and nothing at all was done in the way of blocking until the winter was more than half gone. But Lon could not help but think that he had the worst of it. "Just watch," Miss Darwin told him. "There'll be much more for you to do as we near the opening, but for now all I want you to do is listen, and watch." Which was all fine and dandy, Lon thought, even as he tried to keep awake through endless dronings of nays and doths and fertile tears. But what did she want him to see?

By the end of April the topic had come up at The Mask and Paint that perhaps this Miss Darwin was not perfect after all. Here at last, Lon and Mac decided, was something that she did not do with complete assurance. Even if she grew into the job -- and they knew that she would -- how did she expect to mount a play without props, without costumes, without scenery? And how to make Hirsch swallow it if she did?

They had just decided that her Twelfth Night was doomed never to open, and had made up their minds to withdraw from any part in it, when the posters announcing its premiere appeared, yellow and gold and black on the lobby walls and across the rainy facade of the theater, in such quantities that they overlapped, bearing her name and Mac's and the twelve others in fancy letters so fine and bright, and dates, actual dates so close at hand that it chilled them to think it would happen so soon.

At first Lon and Mac did not even notice. They came to work through the side entrance as usual, taking their usual places, Lon in the swaybacked chair by the door and Mac in his dressing room, fussing with collar and make-up for the first show, sipping now and then from the bottle he kept in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Mac said he would never have found out if a stagehand hadn't gone by making an awful racket just outside his door. "What is it, blast you," Mac shouted, and the fellow burst in with a scrap of curled poster paper and a look on his face like a mackerel in the claws of a black bear. Mac said he took one look at the thing and grabbed it and pushed the boy out of the way. He went charging out to the stage door, his collar undone, shirttails flying straight out behind, crying for Lon to "Look! By God, look!" and at that exact moment Hirsch came in from the street.

He was wringing wet from his shoes to his bowler hat. His shoulders were bowed up high against the back of his head, as if his neck had retracted itself into his body. His face was hard and blank. In his left hand an open umbrella was hanging upside-down, an inch of rainwater in the bottom, its metal tip scratching up the floor in his wake. In his right hand was another copy of the poster, ragged-edged and mottled with a pattern of glue on the back where he had torn it away from the wall.

"You're fired," he said to Mac.

Then he pushed his way past, and from the back rooms they heard him repeating the same words, over and over, to everyone he met. "Come on," Mac said. "She's struck."

All they had to do was follow the trail of water. It ended in a puddle beside the stage, where Jones sat relaxed but unmoving at her stage manager's post, studying the pages of a well-worn ledger book, her back turned on the big wet man in the big wet coat standing there trying to bore a hole through her with his eyes.

Lon and Mac never heard what he said. But he was holding the soggy poster as if he wanted to beat her with it, as if by the power of thought he could turn it into a baseball bat and knock her brains out. Margaret Darwin did not even look up. She said something back at him, of which Lon only caught the one word, "read."

"Bitch," Hirsch said. "Whore. You're fired."

Margaret Darwin only closed the ledger book and held it up for Hirsch to see. From the look on her face it was obvious that she thought it would end the matter, that by doing it she had already won. "Go home," she said softly. "We'll talk about this later."

Pausing now in the aisle above, and with a hard sort of puzzled look on his face, Lon said, "Then, uh then well, it didn't have to happen this way. But Hirsch made a grab for the ledger book and that started it. He dropped the umbrella and the poster and went after it with both hands; got it, too, or would have if it hadn't been for the other one, the man who came out from behind the curtain."

Lon said he had never seen the man before, and hadn't let him in. But he recognized the gun, an old military surplus revolver that belonged to the company. It was pointed at Hirsch. "You'd have thought that would have been enough," Lon said, "but he had to go and make a speech, too. Got Hirsch's back up even more. Hirsch said he wasn't afraid of any cheap shitfaced hood, and tried to prove it. There was a struggle. I was just heading over there to break it up when the gun swung around at me and went off."

"Christ," I said. "What did you do?"

Lon looked at me with his dark sad eyes and his mouth set in a frown. "What the hell do you think I did? I died."

He said he'd practiced the fall until he was afraid the bruises would give the whole thing away, but it hadn't been enough. He hit the floor hard, knocking the wind out of himself and spraining his wrist in the process. He didn't even need to bite into the gelatin capsule Jones had given him; it broke in the impact and spurted a gooey red froth from the corners of his mouth.

The plan called for Lon to die immediately, but his inability to stop gasping for air put a damper on that, though Lon said it must have added some realism to the scene. Four or five of the company regulars came around and started fussing and shouting for an ambulance. They were supposed to keep it up until Jones, Miss Darwin, gave the signal, but Lon was just readying himself to take the final breath when one of their number gave an unrehearsed yelp and leapt aside. The shouting melted away. Lon was afraid to open his eyes; he felt terribly alone, and knew he was being watched.

Then the toe of a shoe poked him in the chest, about where the bullet was supposed to have hit. "Get up," Hirsch said. "Out of everyone I thought I could trust you. Come on, get up."

Lon said he could feel the words hitting him. He said they packed such a wallop that he couldn't even laugh when he saw the look on Mac's face. "All right," Hirsch said to Jones. His voice was soft and low. In the stillness of the moment he could be heard in every corner, against every brick, on out to the back row. "Fine. You want it so bad, you can have it. It's just a money hole. It's nothing to me"

And Jones said, "That's why I had to take it."

That night, as Lon was walking home, he became aware of a grey truck that paced him for more than a block along the broken sidewalk. It had no markings other than a patch or two of rust; inside, someone was trying to drive and roll down the side window at the same time. Lon turned onto an empty sidestreet, and a moment later the truck came lumbering around after. When it passed under the lamplight he saw Margaret Darwin at the wheel, aiming the front bumper in his general direction, making signs at him with her free hand.

She pulled up beside him at the curb, opened the passenger door and lowered her face out of the gloom. "There's life in you yet," she said. "How about a drink?"

When he had climbed in under the dashboard's green eyes, into the spartan, unheated cab, she spun the wheel around and headed back the way they had come. "You were quite wonderful," she said. "All that wheezing and heaving."

"Sorry it didn't work."

"Nonsense. It worked perfectly."

Margaret Darwin shifted up, crunching the gears. They rode through the empty streets for what seemed like a long time, and at last Lon said, "How do you figure that? He saw right through me."

In the blue night Jones shot him a look from the far side of the cab. "True. We never thought he was stupid. But it saved me from having to carry out a threat."

Lon sat back and watched the dark storefronts crawling by. He didn't know where she was taking him. He thought of the green ledger book and what Hirsch had given up for it, then pushed it back out of his mind. "I won't ask you about that."

Jones looked at the street ahead. "I liked you from the start," she said.

Now Lon came around the back row. He straightened and tried to stretch the kinks out of his back. "That was her first big production. D'you know, of all the people who saw it, the only one fooled was Mac. It wasn't that he believed my performance. But he wouldn't have put anything past her."

He gathered up our dirty rags, dropped them in the bucket, wiped his hands on his knees. "You hungry?" he said.

We went rattling up onto the stage where Mary was repairing the trick painting for act two of A Prophet of Yearning, the one from which Jones emerged every Wednesday and Friday night, and twice on Saturdays, bloated, paint-smeared, dripping with color, as the ghost image of Rebecca. "Winston and I are going to hunt up some chow," Lon said as we came over her. "D'you want anything?"

"No thanks," Mary said. She dipped her brush into a jar of clean water and splashed it around until a purple cloud rose to the surface. "I'm almost done here. I've got to get back home and feed Max."

"Suit yourself," Lon said.

He went off into the back to get his coat, and I remained looking over Mary's shoulder. The painting was Sallis to the letter, just as I had imagined him in the extreme edge of his Cubism, all layers of blocklike figures, slashes of blue and black. "That's beautiful," I said, and meant it.

Mary said thanks. She looked up at me, and her smile vanished. "Are you all right?"

I made a face. "It's just Lon airing the laundry again. Some stuff I didn't particularly want to know."

"Like what?"

She was capping up the jars. There were fresh droplets and smudges of paint on the stage floor, even though she had set down newspaper; we scrubbed at them with rags soaked in turpentine, but it was no use, they were just new additions, another series of marks that the stage would carry forever. "Well, you were there," I said. "What was Jones like when you first met her?"

Mary wrinkled her nose. "She had a lot to prove. I barely knew her; I heard it said that she was like a chess player moving pieces around on a board, but I never saw that myself." As she was speaking, Lon came out of the wings zipping himself into a light jacket. He came over to where Mary and I were kneeling and poked me with the toe of his boot.

"What happened to Mac?" I said as we crossed through the lobby.

Lon's footsteps made no sound on the tiled floor, but the keys rattling against his hip echoed as loudly as if he had dropped them into an empty water tank. He broke through the speckled windowlight, unlocked the center door and let in a flood of cold air. "She fired him about three years later," he said. "He'd finally learned how to ad-lib, and was an important player in those early days, but after prohibition was repealed he was drunk all the time. She put up with him longer than I would have."

We went out under the marquee. On both sides of us the facing rows of yellowing, old-time photographs, the forgotten actors that guarded Valenciennes, lined our way to the street. I looked straight at them, into their fading eyes, and knew them for the first time.