but today I was nervous, perhaps a little too anxious to show how little I cared whether they gave me a job or not in a couple of hours. The combination had made me reckless.
The problem with the green-room games was that they were populated solely by theatre people, mainly actors. Here, the usual bluffs, prevarications, convenient fictions, and barefaced cheating would afford you little, because everyone there knew them of old. Rufus Rams-bottom, for example, was a lousy actor who could barely deliver a line without fumbling or dropping something, and he wasn’t a particularly good cardplayer, but he knew a cheat when he saw one, and he was looking at one right now. He had mean little eyes and a fat pink face, producing the look of a rather slow but pathologically malevolent pig. Those eyes held mine, and he wasn’t giving me an inch.
“Come on, Hawthorne,” he said. “I have to go on.”
“I doubt they’d miss you,” I said. “The show’s better when actors do only their own lines.”
This was a particular talent of Rufus’s. He couldn’t remember his own part if his life depended on it, but he would blurt out other people’s lines constantly. It was taxing for actors and audience alike.
“Just play or fold, boy,” he said, glowering so that the red bristles on his forehead stood on end.
“Blood and sand,” I muttered as I threw my cards down, abandoning the sorry bluff. “Fold.”
He grinned, raked the coins into a pile, and then marched to the stage door.
“I’ve counted them, Hawthorne,” he said warningly before disappearing through the door. He hadn’t, of course. That would have taken him, like, half an hour.
You could always tell when Rufus Ramsbottom went onstage because there wasn’t a sound from the house, except maybe a few groans. Usually actors got a little patter of applause when they went on for the first time in a show, but Rufus was such a giftless swine that even the kids who only came to see the sword fights and pig’s blood started shifting in their seats and muttering darkly about getting their money back.
I put my cards down and tipped my purse out onto the table. I considered the paltry pile of coins left to me, and it was like being punched in the gut by someone wearing (for reasons I can’t begin to guess) very cold gloves. Rufus, however, was positively flush and getting flusher as the game wore on. He had money. I needed money—possibly a lot of it if the post-show meeting went badly. There was a certain inevitability to the whole thing, really.
The green room was momentarily deserted. Barring some clamorous fiasco in the present scene (always a possibility when Rufus trod the boards), I probably had about another thirty seconds before Jack Brundage, who had been sitting on my left, would get offstage and return to the game. I considered the pile of coins where Rufus had been sitting, took a deep breath, helped myself to two silvers, rearranged what was left, and then helped myself to another.
If I’d stopped at two, I might have got away with it. But no. Brundage emerged at the stage door just I was withdrawing my hand. I grinned and blustered and asked him what the crowd was like, but it was no good. He’d seen.
Brundage was a tall, slender man with a sardonic face that made him seem smarter than he was. He was a good minor bad guy, but didn’t have the stage presence to be a real villain, and though he had a loud voice that carried well in a brassy sort of way, he delivered every line at full volume. As a man and as an actor, he had no depth, no richness or complexity. He also didn’t like me very much and was a good friend of Rufus Ramsbottom.
It was thus with some trepidation that I slipped past him, avoiding his eyes as I made for the stage door. He let me go, but he was smiling that slightly twisted smile of his, like he was sucking something very sweet and very sour at the same time. He wasn’t letting me off the hook; he was figuring out how best to twist it.
I listened for the cue and strode out, but my heart wasn’t in it, and even the familiar patter of applause at my appearance didn’t still the wobble of my stomach. This was going to get worse before it got better.