Corpse de Ballet (6 page)

Ruth, meanwhile, had been assailed again by the fiercely groomed publicist (her name was Gretchen Manning, Juliet later learned), who had clicked in on her pristine high heels with a freshly revised draft of the press release for the choreographer to look over. Ruth turned helplessly to Juliet, shook her head apologetically and allowed herself to be corraled.

“I'll get this out of the way and shower and we can go have lunch,” she said, as Manning waited impatiently in the open doorway. “Stay here; I won't be ten minutes. Anton, you won't mind if Juliet stays and watches you work on your solo,” she rather informed than asked that splendid young man.

Juliet had not even noticed it, but Mohr had remained in the studio as the others left, stationing himself by a barre, where he was practicing something jumpy. He now favored her with a languid glance of consent in which she read a world of sensual awareness.

“Patrick,” Ruth instructed finally, leaving in Manning's wake, “look after Juliet.”

Ruth's assistant dutifully gave Juliet a smile, made a gesture of welcome, then turned his attention to Anton. They were by now the only three people in the room. The pianist had left, but Patrick had a boom box on a small table and half a dozen tape cassettes of various bits of music. He was looking through them, frowning at the labels, when Mohr began an experimental series of turning glides into the middle of the studio floor. He jolted to a stop.

“Please, you must have the floor mopped,” he said. It was the first time Juliet had heard him speak. He had a slow, reedy voice and a thick German accent. His tone was severe.

“Oh, hell!” Patrick shook himself as if he had been criminally remiss and darted out the door.

Left suddenly alone with the unfamiliar, thoroughly physical Mohr, Juliet experienced an unsettling flash of girlish awkwardness and had to force herself not to stare at her knees. The dancer came nearer to her. His green, heavily lidded eyes flickered over her face. At the same time as his easy self-assurance irritated her, she was amused to notice her own breath quicken. Really, she thought, how on earth could such people work professionally with each other? How could anyone maintain a businesslike demeanor around a creature such as this?

“You like ballet?” asked Anton Mohr.

“Very much,” she answered.

“I also like ballet, but not so much. I prefer dance, modern, contemporary. Ballet is very tedious for a man.”

“Is it?”

He smiled, revealing strong, perfect, gleaming teeth. “Pick her up, put her down. Go here. Pick her up, put her down. Go there. And always noble.” He struck a pose, a parody of nobility that made Juliet laugh. “But with Ruth, this is better. She gives me the opportunity to make something.” He put his hand, which was long and slender, on his heart. “I move how
I
move.”

He said
moof,
not
move,
Juliet noticed, as he took a few steps closer to her.

“You dance?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“But—what would you say, socially, you dance?”

“Oh, of course.”

“So.” He put his hand out as if to invite her onto a dance floor, a gesture so unexpected and charming in the deserted studio that Juliet exploded into laughter. It was clearly no more than the reflex of a man who enjoyed flirting, enjoyed playing with the notion of seduction. This was a trait that both attracted and repelled Juliet, no doubt (the mere thought made her sigh inwardly) because her father was that way. And, in quite a different style (yet not so very different, of course) her ex-husband, Rob, had also been easily, playfully, meaninglessly seductive.

Well, usually meaninglessly.

She turned at the sound of the door opening and was relieved to see Patrick returning with a portly man in overalls, who set to work at once on the floor, swabbing it with a long mop and a lot of elbow grease. The man's expertise was such that, within a few minutes, all but the farthest reaches of the room were finished and darkly glossy. As Patrick thanked and excused him, Mohr once again went to the low wooden box. Juliet had realized by now it had something to do with traction, and she watched without surprise as the German dipped in first one strong, graceful foot, then the other.

Then he spread his powerful arms, raised himself on one leg and began the same, swift little leap and spin Juliet had noticed before. But this time, the instant he shifted his weight, he seemed to become abruptly diagonal, a blaze of muscle hurtling down a disastrous slant toward the gleaming linoleum. There was a long, sickening moment in which he tried but failed to recover his balance. Then, like an animal felled by a bullet, he crashed to the floor.

Chapter Three

Human wickedness feeds upon a splendid rainbow of ills, but its manifestations are not, as a rule, very colorful. Certainly there was nothing specially vivid in the scene that greeted Ruth when she returned to the studio after her shower—no spectacular glare to set it apart from the dozens of injuries bound to occur each season, nothing sensational to flag it as the fruit of an evil deed. An anxious trio huddled around the choreographer's leading Pip: Patrick cradled Anton's shoulders and head while Victorine Vaillancourt carefully experimented with one after another part of his left leg. Juliet stood hovering over them, cell phone at the ready, wincing in sympathy each time the ballet mistress moved to another site.

Yet, though obviously in pain, the patient himself looked serious rather than anguished, as if a certain detachment prevailed between him and his body. He and Victorine kept up a murmured inventory, checking various muscles and tendons to see whether this or that movement hurt and what the pain might mean. It reminded Juliet of an acquaintance who managed a rather large money fund. She had been with him when word came one autumn afternoon of a sudden swoop in the market. She expected him to rush off to a phone in terror, or in anger, at least. Instead, he had been calm, methodical, concerned only to get the facts straight. He was a professional—and so was Anton Mohr. First he had to know what had happened to his body, which was to say, his business. Later there would be time for suffering, rage, or regret.

It was Juliet who had been sent to fetch Victorine, while Patrick stayed behind. Mademoiselle had leapt with surprising speed from behind her desk in a second-floor cubicle, where she had been transcribing notes. Then, like Miss Clavell on the night when something was not quite right, she had flown through the corridors and downstairs to her charge, muttering darkly all the way in French.

Now Ruth let the heavy studio door slam shut behind her and demanded, “What happened?” Her short hair was still wet from her shower and she had changed into stylish street clothes. Neither Victorine nor Anton looked up.

Patrick said quietly, “He slipped.”

These seemed to be fighting words to Anton, who did look up now and corrected, with dignity, “I did not slip. Something slipped me.”

Juliet caught the skeptical glance this provoked between Ruth and her assistant.

“How was the floor?” asked Ruth.

“It was sticky when you left,” said Patrick. “So we had it mopped.”

“But I used the rosin box,” Anton put in hotly. “As always.”

Rosin! That was the weird, turpentiny smell that had been teasing Juliet's nose.

“It wasn't something in the choreography that threw you?” Ruth ventured reluctantly.

The dancer shook his head. “We did not even yet begin. I was making myself ready.”

Ruth sighed her relief. From the beginning of this project, as she had explained to Juliet, she had worried about injuring the JRBT dancers by forcing them to perform modern movements for which they had not been trained. She and Greg had discussed the matter several times, and she had promised to give it special attention. So far, she had heard nothing worse than that the physical therapists who routinely worked on the dancers had noticed an upsurge in sore arms in the women, the result of contemporary dance's greater demands on upper-body strength. Kirsten, Lily, and Elektra, she knew, had all begun strengthening programs for their upper arms.

Another minute or so passed as Victorine continued to probe. Finally she sat back and patted Mohr on the shoulder. “You have twisted your ankle, but I do not think it is serious. Thank God, I believe you have not reinjured your back. We will take you to Dr. Keller.”

The company, Juliet later learned, kept an orthopedist on retainer, with the understanding that when an injured dancer came in, he or she would receive immediate attention.

“I can call a car for him,” offered Juliet, who had an account with a local company. She waved her cell phone. “They'll be here in two minutes.”

Mademoiselle looked offended. “We are able to call a car, thank you. Patrick, if you will be so kind…?”

Juliet held out her phone to Patrick. But it seemed she was not to be allowed to help in any way. Under Mademoiselle's severe gaze, he hurried from the room. Ruth knelt to take his place, and Juliet began to wander around the studio.

Mohr's turn of phrase, “something slipped me,” had joggled a dim awareness of something she had noticed in the last little while, some condition in the studio. The shiny floor was the obvious candidate, but since it didn't seem to worry the others, she supposed it couldn't have caused the accident. She ambled toward the east wall, her sneakers making irritating squeaks and thuds, her softly rounded body suddenly feeling like a stuffed animal's as she moved into the dancers' territory. Her blue eyes squinted now and then, and she wrinkled her small, unimpressive nose like a hamster uncertain of his surroundings. Something, something.…

Along with her abnormal sense of smell, Juliet Bodine had an eye for the odd detail, a habit of taking note of what most people regarded as marginal and making it the central focus of her attention. It was a trick that had served her well as a novelist, and once or twice in the past, it had even proved to have a practical value in the world. Not always. Not usually. Most of the time, in fact, her tendency to set aside what others found most striking (a person's clothes, or age, or the fact that he was missing an ear) and focus instead on some minor trait was a source of embarrassment or worse.

“Did you meet that man who kept saying, ‘Righty-right' instead of, ‘Uh-huh'?” she was apt to ask when leaving a party with a friend.

This would initiate a series of puzzled rejoinders that finally ended along the lines of: “You mean the guy in the wheelchair?”

Yet just occasionally, this same peculiarity had helped to turn up a missing set of keys or track down the source of a misremembered quotation, or even provide a landmark that pointed the right way back to the road.

Now she was sure that some inconsistency, some incongruity she had half observed, was tapping at the door of her consciousness. She circled the room, peering questioningly at the floor, the mirrors, the lights, the windows, the piano. At last, by the rosin box, the elusive detail rocketed to the top of her brain, where she could get at it.

That smell.

She dropped to her knees (instantly regretting it as they banged against the vinyl-covered floor) and stared into the box. It contained a sort of bulky gravel made up of translucent brown lumps. Juliet was vaguely aware of movement behind her—the door opening and closing, a stir of activity as Anton, no doubt, was helped from the room—while she scrutinized this, but she was too interested in the rosin to turn and look. Tentatively, she reached a hand into the box and rubbed a pinch between her fingers. She held some to her nose and sniffed. Then, after a little hesitation, she took a handful and, standing awkwardly, stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans.

Only Ruth was left in the room, she found upon turning away from the box. Her friend had slumped down on to the floor and was leaning exhaustedly against the front mirror, looking more like
Bleak House
than
Great Expectations.
In the studio next door, a pianist was playing a tragic phrase from
Giselle
over and over. The music, swollen and distorted by its passage through the wall, seemed an apt sound track for Ruth's dejection.

“If I lose Anton, I'll lose my mind,” she said.

Juliet ignored this burst of self-pity. “Ruth, I think you'd better see something.” Her soft, childish voice robbed the statement of any drama. Ruth looked up morosely. Juliet dug into her pocket and held out the handful of rosin.

“Smell it,” she said.

“What?”

“Smell it.” She squatted down and held her palm under Ruth's nose.

“It's rosin. The dancers use it to keep from slipping.”

“Rosin and—?”

“And what?”

“Look at it. Touch it. It's rosin and talcum powder,” said Juliet.

“Jesus!” Ruth rubbed a pinch between her fingers. “But how could that possibly be?”

“You tell me.”

Ruth sniffed at the sample. “It isn't white.”

“No, somebody went to the trouble of darkening it,” said Juliet, straightening. “Mixed it with powdered pigment or pulverized eye shadow or something, I'd guess.”

“Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Ruth. “No wonder Anton slipped.”

The piano music penetrating the wall changed to a new, brighter phrase, almost antic. Ruth dropped her head into her hands.

“I'd better go tell Greg,” she said, without moving. “That rosin box has got to be cleaned immediately.”

Juliet looked thoughtfully at the top of her friend's head. “Does this kind of thing happen often?”

Ruth raised her head. “Certainly not. In fact, I've never—well, no, I can't say I
never
heard of such a thing happening. Dance is hard. Most dancers never make it into a major company, and once they do, there's tremendous pressure to excel. Their performing lives are short. When they're finished, they're unprepared for anything else. They're always up against each other for parts. They get injured and no one cares as long as they keep dancing. Everyone assumes the men are gay. Whether they are or not, they have to cope with raging prejudice outside the dance world. The money isn't great. They have to take class every day. They have to keep their mouths shut and do as they're told. And all for what? Most of them never get out of the corps.”