Page 91 of If Looks Could Kill

Brian Bailey, the ballyman (“Baileyman,” his wife calls him) at the Curiosity Musée, had a few too many last night.

His head throbs. He is in no mood to be the dime museum’s “outside talker” today, luring customers through the door with his gift of gab and his rapid patter, but selling tickets is a good racket.

Just by giving short change to customers all day, he can make a nice living.

But right now he’d trade his kingdom for half an hour’s sleep.

He’s got the shade drawn to rest his tired eyes when someone raps on the window of his ticket booth. He raises the shade and gives the young squirt peering up at him a bleary-eyed look.

“Already told you, sonny,” Brian tells the boy, “you’re too young. Can’t come in here.”

“?’Snot for me,” says the brat. “?’Sfer her.”

He indicates a young woman behind him. She’s old enough, but Brian is wary.

“Afternoon, miss,” he tells her.

“She don’t speak English,” her young squire explains. “She speaks Frenchie.”

A likely story. But the girl points toward the poster of the snake-haired woman and lets loose a string of gabble that, if it isn’t genuine foreign lingo, puts on a good show.

“She wants to see Giselle the Gorgon of Gotham,” explains her translator.

Brian frowns. “Look here, kid,” he said. “What’s going on, really? This joint’s for men.”

“Her dime’s not as good as a dude’s?” demands the little Spawn of Satan.

But for the wall between them, Brian would give this grubby-faced kid a smack to the head.

“What I want to know,” Brian says, as though the kid could answer, “is why so many females keep coming around here all of a sudden asking to see Giselle.” He waggles his finger at the seductively posed figure in the gaudy painting. “Hers is a gentlemen’s show.”

The unlikely Galahad guffaws. “ Gentlemen’s. That’s a good one.”

The French girl jabbers again at the Giselle poster. Insistent. One of those pushy females. Which reminds him…

“She’s not a Salvation Army dame, is she?” he asks the little bruiser.

For a second, the kid is surprised. “No, she ain’t,” he says, “but what’s it to you if she was?”

Brian smells Salvation Army trouble. “Look, you little runt,” he says. “Giselle’s not buying Jesus today. Take your Miss Frenchie and skedaddle.”

The girl elbows past the kid and fixes Brian Bailey with a look that makes his joints go loose and his bladder looser. It must be the whiskey talking, but he’d swear her hair has started moving, and her eyes burning, in a way the Musée’s fake snake girl’s never did.

The last thing he hears is more foreign babble that ends like a whip-crack on the word “Giselle!” Then Brian Bailey gets his nap. And a smack to his own head as it hits a wall.

If he weren’t unconscious, he’d have seen the newspaper boy reach a grimy hand under the gap in the window glass and retrieve a fistful of quarters, half-dollars, nickels, and dimes. He shows his booty to the girl and says in triumph, “?‘Poor boy.’ That means ‘a drink.’?”

“Pourboire,” she tells him. The kid, who doesn’t seem to mind her crown of snakes, scampers off to put his pourboire to use.

“Poor boy,” she says in slow, experimental English.

Then the door to the Curiosity Musée opens and Giselle appears, clad in a red silk kimono. She takes one wide-eyed look at the French girl, and pulls her inside.