Free Sherlock Holmes In America by Martin H. Greenberg Page B

coal, only I see it’s smeared all over your filthy faces already!”).
    â€œHe’s the lowest utility player, consorting with rabble . . . yet he still thinks himself superior to us all,” Sasanoff mused darkly. “I should have sent him packing weeks ago.”
    â€œYes,” I said. “You should have.”
    Sasanoff glowered at me—and a fine glower it was, too. The man may have been little taller than an overgrown squirrel, but he was undoubtedly one of the great Richard IIIs of his time.
    Of course, Richard would have shown an impudent knave like the Whelp considerably less mercy than Sasanoff had, and why our otherwise irascible manager tolerated the stripling’s cheek was a matter of much conjecture in the company. It had to do with an incident early in the tour, some whispered—a predicament the Whelp freed Sasanoff from with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. Whatever the reason, even I, Sasanoff’s closest confidante in the troupe, had not been made privy to the truth.
    â€œYes, well . . . you’d all better be on your guard,” Sasanoff snarled at me now. “I’m in a foul enough temper to dismiss the whole company—myself included!”
    I soothed his savage breast with the sweet music of gentle (feigned) laughter, then changed the subject to something more mutually amusing: the latest broadside in Catherine P_________ and Thomas B____________’s ongoing battle for the affections of Louis H_____________.
    [ A short passage has been excised here by request of the B_____________ estate.—S.B.H. ]
    My rendering of these inanities d’amour lightened Sasanoff’s spirits considerably. And just in time, too. Horace Tabor and his wife were hosting a reception for the company in the hotel’s paltry ballroom. It was time to kiss the backer’s backside.
    Tabor himself I found to be the epitome of the American ideal: a “selfmade man.” Alas, what he’d made of himself was vulgar in the extreme, and the making of him seemed to involve little more than a layer of dumb luck slapped over a foundation of slavering avarice. But, for all that, selfmade he was. God certainly would want none of the credit.
    The other town notables who turned out to greet us (and drink Tabor’s flat champagne) I have even less to say about, except that they were “notable” only for their wretched clothing and abominable manners.
    Still, let it never be said I couldn’t play to the groundlings, and I was, as always, the darling of all. Sasanoff, as was his way at soirees, stuck close to the hosts (and the money), and I swooped in from time to time when it looked as though the conversation could use a little enlivening. Which was frequently. Tabor was the sort of man who grew forlorn and bewildered if the talk strayed far from commerce, while his wife . . . well, she made such a faint impression I can’t, at this late date, recall her at all. In fact, I could barely remember she was present even when she was speaking to me.
    I was giving the Tabors a comical foretaste of my performance as Sir Toby Belch, alternately huzzahing and haranguing as only the great old reprobate can, when I noticed Sasanoff scowling at something behind me. I glanced back to find the Whelp sauntering in a full hour late.
    Usually, one might expect a sense of decorum—or, at the very least, self interest—to discourage public sniping between a leading man/ manager and his supporting players. Yet (as exhaustively chronicled in previous chapters), Sasanoff and the Whelp had clashed at one gathering after another, and always on the same tiresome subject.
    To wit, acting. That, so far as any of the troupe knew, the Whelp was a nobody from nowhere hadn’t stopped him from airing his foolish views on proper dramatics. Sometime after leaving London, it seemed, he’d been infected by that always-fatal (to good acting) disease known as