BioShock: Rapture

Yeah. If he figured out where to stand, it’d be raining money—and all he needed was a bucket.

* * *

“It’s not generally known that I sometimes back Broadway musicals,” said Andrew Ryan, as the limousine pulled up in front of the theater. “I prefer to do it quietly. I have a rather old-fashioned taste in music, they tell me—George M. Cohan or Jolson, they’re more my style. Or Rudy Vallee. I don’t care much for this jitterbug business. Don’t understand it.” He waved a hand at the marquee. “You know the work of Sander Cohen? Some say he is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I think he’s every bit the musical genius he ever was… a Renaissance man of the arts, really.”

Bill read the marquee: SANDER COHEN IN “YOUNG DANDIES.”

“Cor!” he burst out. “Me ma took a liking to Sander Cohen, a few years back. Fair wore out his ‘Kissing the Tulip’ on her old Victrola!”

“Ah yes. I was a fan of his ‘No One Understands Me.’ You shall meet him tonight, my boy! We’re just in time to catch his final number—I’ve seen the show many times of course—and we’ll have a word backstage. Karlosky—this is fine here!”

The chauffeur, Ivan Karlosky, was a pale-haired man, scarred and impassive, with a distinctively Russian bone structure. He gave a small salute with his gloved hand and nodded. Bill had heard that Karlosky was not only one of the finest auto mechanics around but also pretty much invincible. No one messed with Karlosky.

Bill got out of the limo, instinctively holding the door for Ryan and closing it behind him. A group of swells spilled out of the theater, laughing—though the music of the show could be heard through the open theater door. The show was still going on. A bored-looking man in spats and tuxedo was escorting a platinum-haired girl in a white mink; two other young men followed with elaborately coifed girls on their arms, all of them tipsy from intermission cocktails.

Bill hesitated as Ryan paused, glowering at the swells, seeming to disapprove of them leaving the theater early.

“Say,” laughed one in a top hat, “that Sander Cohen is a funny old character!”

“I heard some young men go into his dressing room never come out again!” said a sleepy-eyed swell in a bowler hat more seriously, voice low.

“Well, you won’t get me to one of his shows again,” said the top hat, as they strolled wobblingly off. “Mincing about like that! Constantly in the spotlight! All that makeup! Looked like a clown!”

Ryan growled audibly to himself as he glared after them. “Drunks!” He shook his head, stalking toward the alley between the theaters that led to the stage door. Bill followed, feeling a bit squiffy himself though he hadn’t had a drop today. He felt socially out of his depth with Ryan—but the whole experience exhilarated him too.

“This way, Bill,” Ryan muttered. “… Those decadent young poltroons… but it’s ever that way. Inconsequential people know only mockery—only the great understand the great…”

He rapped on the stage door, which was opened by a cigar-chewing bulldog of a man. “Well? Who is it now?”—and then his cigar dropped from his slack mouth. “Oh! Sorry, Mr. Ryan, I didn’t realize it was you, please come in sir, right this way sir, nice night ain’t it?”

What an arse kisser, Bill thought, as the man, practically curtseying, let them in. An echoing passage, and then they were backstage, standing in the wings, watching Sander Cohen. He was just finishing off his climactic number, “Hop Away to Heaven.”

Strange to see a stage show from this angle, everything looking oddly overlit, the clack of heels on the wooden stage audible, the extreme angle not showing the dancers to best effect. They seemed almost to lumber around.

And Sander Cohen was stranger still. The fading Broadway star was wearing a silvery jacket that might have seemed more natural on a Busby Berkeley dancing girl. He had matching silvery trousers with a red stripe down the side; his boots, with heels like a flamenco dancer’s, glittered too. He had a rather bulbous head, with thinning hair emphasized by a great pale swath of forehead not much helped by a spit curl, and a puckish little mustache, upturned at the ends. He did wear a surprising amount of pancake—and what seemed to be eyeliner.

Cohen was sashaying rhythmically about, singing in a jaunty tenor, spinning a silvery walking stick in his fingers. Two rows of very handsome young men and pretty girls danced in chorus patterns behind him. Cohen sang:

“If you want to hop hop hop with me
We’ll multiply like crazy
Like a couple of bunnies
Oh hop to Heaven, just hop to
Heaven—with meeeeeeee!”