Page 2 of Hero

“Nothing so far, but it’s not even nine o’clock yet. Maybe a scorned lover or two and some angry wives.”

“If I see a couple of those, I’ll try to fix them up with each other.”

“That’s actually a pretty funny idea.”

“Consider it yours,” Justine said. “We’re six minutes out now. I’ll be quiet so you can think.”

Justine drove while Marcia devoted the time to scrutinizing her makeup, making tiny, invisible changes to it, and brushing her hair, but Justine knew her brain was running through what she was going to say.

Justine turned west on Sunset and pulled the car into the narrow driveway that led to the alley behind the Comedy Pit and into the small employee parking area behind the building. She parked in the only empty spot, and Ali the bouncer stepped up and opened the car door for her. “Hi, Ali,” she said. “I’ll leave the key in it.”

“Thanks, Justine.”

She looked to the side and saw Bobby beside the rear door of the building. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. “Hi, Bobby. Are you going in first?”

“Sure. Unless—”

“Perfect,” she said. She looked back into the car at Marcia. “Ready?”

“Eager.” Marcia got out of the passenger seat and came around the front of the car. “Thank you for doing this, guys. I’ll just piss everybody off a little and we’ll be back out before the traffic light changes.”

Justine looked at her watch. “Okay, Bobby. It’s time.”

Bobby waited until Marcia Min was close behind him before he stepped in, and Justine followed a step behind Marcia. Ali shut the door behind Justine and stayed in front of it to be sure nobody else got in. Inside there was only a four-foot landing before the beginning of the stairway down to the “pit.” The walls of the staircase were red brick with the half-readable skins of peeled-off posters. The staircase was a dozen steps in a single flight. Five steps down the left wall ended, replaced by a stretch of open space with a steel railing, so Justine had a view of the crowd.

The thirty tables were packed with people, everyone’s chairs turned toward the little platform that served as a stage. Justine had several thoughts at once. There were too many people, almost certainly a violation of the fire regulations, but she decided that for the moment she should let it go, because her job now was protecting Marcia Min for an appearance that would probably be fifteen minutes. The crowd also made her think that Marcia’s surprise visit was a secret that had gotten out. This was a Monday night on a nothing week in mid-summer.

When she turned her eyes forward again, Bobby was taking the last of the steps down. He paused, standing straight and tall enough to obscure the two women behind him from the view of the audience. About three seconds later, the comedian on the stage gave a bow, said “Thanks for coming,” waved, and handed the cordless microphone to Barry, who was already there to receive it. Barry yelled, “Give it up for Danny Rastow!” There was a roar of applause that Justine suspected wasn’t entirely for Danny Rastow. It lasted a few seconds and grew as Danny Rastow jumped down from the low stage and out of the spotlight into near invisibility.

During the applause Barry stepped into the spotlight, leaving the area at his feet in shadow while a woman seated there got up and Justine slid into her seat. Meanwhile, Bobby the bouncer crossed the room in an aisle between tables, holding the attention of a percentage of the audience.

Barry said, “We have a pleasant surprise tonight. I just noticed that a dear friend of the Comedy Pit is here. Please welcome—Miss. Marcia.” The applause began and intensified, a couple of screams were added, and Barry shouted, “MIN!” The audience roared. Marcia Min took two running steps out of the shadows. Her third step was a leap up onto the stage and into the spotlight, where she accepted the microphone and said,“Thanks, Barry,” words that were simply tossed up against the wave of sound from the audience.

In the previous second, after seeing Marcia make it onto the stage without falling, Justine had already taken her eyes and mind off Marcia Min and turned them onto the audience. Her eyes were busy scanning the people at the tables and the bar, looking for facial expressions that were out of place or out of proportion, or for any physical movement that might reveal a problem was coming.

Justine didn’t listen to Marcia Min’s new anecdotes and observations, because she was making an effort to keep her ears tuned to the sounds that weren’t coming from Marcia Min. Her full attention was aimed outward from her spot in front of the stage, keeping the glare of the spotlight behind her so her pupils would be slightly dilated and sensitive to the shapes and movements in the audience and the periphery around and behind it, where trouble nearly always began.

The sets at the Comedy Pit were fifteen minutes. They might stretch it for somebody like Marcia Min, but not much, because it would take minutes away from somebody else’s fifteen. Justine was aware that Marcia was getting big laughs, bringing the audience with her into the complicated, surprising narratives she liked to tell in these intimate spaces.

Justine had been assigned to protect comedians many times since her first one just after she’d turned twenty-one. That night she had made a mistake and had been glad that Ben Spengler had been there to correct her. There was a heckler in the audience and Justine had stepped away from the wall where she’d been standing and begun to edge closer to him, preparing to distract him and signal for the bouncers. Ben was suddenly beside her and whispering in her ear, “Come back.” They had stepped back to the wall, the act had ended, and nothing bad had happened. Laterhe’d said, “Don’t bother with hecklers. Humiliating them is part of the comic’s trade. They practice it, test new put-downs, and so on. You’re just here so nobody gets hurt—physically, not psychologically.”

Justine saw something that held her attention and the memory was gone. There was a young woman with a black cloth bag between her feet under her table. Nearly every other face in the audience was up and looking at the stage, but hers was looking down. The man sitting beside her had the large-screen version of the latest iPhone, and he was looking at the screen. He must know that comedy clubs didn’t allow anyone to record performances, so what was he doing? Justine scanned the room to locate Bobby, but he seemed to have gone upstairs to the front door. She looked at the young woman and saw her pull both feet back beneath her chair to shift her weight to the balls of her feet. That was bad news. Justine brought her feet back, too, and moved to the edge of her seat.

The young woman made a sudden lurch forward, and now she held something in both hands as she charged the low stage. At the same moment her male companion stood, his phone’s camera following her advance. Justine sprang up, pushing off hard to pick up two steps on the young woman. The young woman had both hands palms-up to hold the object. Justine was only a half-step behind and gaining when she recognized the object as a cream-topped pie in a round foil pan. Justine’s left hand pressed down on the woman’s forearm so the pie tilted downward. The woman compensated by increasing her upward pressure, and Justine instantly lifted with both hands to amplify the woman’s effort. The pie arced upward into the woman’s face. The pan fell, leaving a mess of whipped cream and strawberry covering her hair and eyes, so she was forced to stop and paw at her face because she couldn’t see where she was going. Justine gently sat her down on the floor in front of the stage.

The man took a step toward Justine, but when Justine turned her head to look at him, something about her made him freeze and back up.

Above them, Marcia Min was laughing, so the audience laughed too. “You baked that for me, hon? That was really thoughtful. I’d lick your face, but my time is up and I’m afraid I’ve got to go. Thanks, everyone!” She curtsied and threw a kiss, and then spun, stepped off the stage, and climbed the stairs quickly. Justine stepped up behind her so nobody else could follow.

As they emerged from the back door of the Comedy Pit, Justine said to Ali, “Thank you, Ali.” She handed him two envelopes, one with “Bobby” written on it and the other with “Ali.”

He said, “You don’t have—”

“No, but Spengler-Nash does.”

She and Marcia got into her small gray car, and Justine swung out onto Sunset and drove off. Marcia was laughing. “That was insane. You’re just like a snake.”

“Thank you, I think,” Justine said. “Have you ever seen them before?”

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