They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [163]
‘Not a bit of it. La Pantera has a confidante, half-secretary, half-procuress. She is older than the dancer and goes everywhere with her. Everyone calls her “Contessa”, probably because it sounds well. Anyhow you strike your bargain with her, and you wait in her room, which is next to La Pantera’s, until the coast is clear!’
‘And how do you know all this?’ asked his brother angrily.
‘How do I know it? How? Everyone in Vienna knows it!’
‘Everybody is … everybody is nobody.’
‘Well, if you really want to know,’ chuckled Niki, ‘it’s because I did it only yesterday. It wasn’t even very expensive, only five hundred crowns. It was worth it just for the fun of it all. I rather like making a fool of that good old Kristof!’
Abady felt slightly nauseated.
He got up to leave, but it was too late. Just at that moment the door opened and Zalamery entered with the dancer upon his arm.
The man was built like a Hercules, though slightly balding and beginning to run to fat. He was a heavy man and though his dinner-jacket had been made by one of London’s most famous tailors and was a perfect fit, on Zalamery it looked as if it had been rented from a stage costume shop. It was like this with everything he did. He owned a large stable of racehorses … but never won a race. His forests in Marmaros were endless … but he never shot a stag himself, though it was true that his guests had some good sport. He was a good-hearted man, but vain. He liked to be admired, and he liked to show off the splendour of his possessions. This was why he felt impelled to bring his mistress for his friends to see.
The woman was truly beautiful. She was tall and slim. Under a helmet of raven-black hair her face was one of classical beauty and her eyes sparkled under the thickest of black lashes. Her hands, feet and legs were perfectly formed, but her glory was her walk. She moved like one of the great cats, a puma or a jaguar, who seemed always ready to pounce. It was presumably from this quality that she had been named La Pantera, the leopard. Her look was cold as ice, like that of a wild beast.
She wore a dress of dark blue silk with wide sleeves. It was tied at the waist by a sash of the same material and seemed to be half evening dress and half tea-gown. She wore only one piece of jewellery, the diamond collar that Kristof had given her. This was just to please the donor: the rest she only wore when she danced.
Introductions were made and she offered her hands for the men to kiss.
There was nothing to show that she even noticed Niki, and it is possible that she did not even remember him for it was obvious to Balint at least that she was not really interested in other people. To her everything was reduced to business, her dancing, her diamonds, her beauty and her fixed icy smile.
She talked coolly about all sorts of bland cosmopolitan subjects. Her manners were impeccable.
Saying that she was tired after the performance, she asked only for a glass of champagne and a little cold fish, nothing more.
‘We won’t be staying long, will we?’ she asked Zalamery humbly, as if to underline to the other men that she regarded Kristof as her lord and master. She then told how she had a rehearsal at midday because she was preparing a new number, a Russian dance which was very difficult but which would be very beautiful. She would have to work hard at it, she said, because she was going to do it at St Petersburg in three weeks’ time. It would be just right for a Russian audience, and she was sure they were going to love it.
And so she rattled on. Everything she said was impersonal, even mechanical, and Balint was sure that this was how she talked in every city she visited, with hundreds and hundreds of adoring men whose names she may never have learned and whose faces she forgot at once. Then she would move on to another capital and to other men. If she had not been so beautiful she would have been essentially boring. As it was