Heart Strings

   The audience roared. They always did. They were all drunk of course, stupendously, gloriously drunk.  Champagne flowed freely at the Rue de Namur, the swanky, hidden night club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  Manette, the female puppet in the act, would ask, “What do they call a paraplegic trying to swim.”
 
   Then the Great Gustave, self-proclaimed world’s greatest marionette artist, would subtly pull on one of Little Billy’s strings so that the puppet would demurely utter, “Bob.” The audience would roar. By the time, Gustave took the stage, the audience was usually well into a drunken reverie where jokes making fun of the handicapped, the poor, the crippled, and the outcast seemed hilarious.
 
   It was quite a macabre scene with all the ladies and gents dressed in all their finery but starting to fray a bit at the edges with a diamond tiara out of kilter here, a strand of gray hair sticking out there, a wet spot or two on a tuxedo vest.  The showroom was dark with only the stage lights and a few wall mounted lamps for illumination.  The red velvet lined walls cast the whole room in eerie, diabolical hellish glow. The alcohol-fueled conversations were far too loud as was the laughter.  These were people who were tired, tired of life, tired of rules, tired of genteel behavior.
 
   From that point on, the jokes got ever more outrageous and risqué, and the act usually ended, as it did this night, with the Great Gustave getting a standing ovation as he exited the stage headed straight to the bar with Fat Mary, his traveling companion who was also the ventriloquist who handled the female puppet Manette. They left their assistant Lillie behind to pack the marionettes and transport them to the van outside.
 
    Lillie, a twenty-five-year-old Honduran immigrant, loved the marionettes and would carefully wipe them off before she placed them back into their cases. They reminded her of the two children Manuela and Jimmy that she had left back home in Honduras.
 
   A young beauty with luminous brown eyes and long black hair, she had made the mistake of walking outside her village just as the local drug kingpin was driving by.  He had her husband Carlos murdered at a local soccer game and then quickly made his intentions known as a suitor.
 
   It was hard decision, a heart wrenching decision, but she left her children with her widowed aunt and her grandmother and made her way North.  The plan was to work and save, buy a house, and then send for the children, but each day made it easier to drown in the oblivion of what her life had become.
 
   She had been working as a dishwasher at the Rio Plato restaurant in Brooklyn when she had made the chance connection with the Great Gustave.  He had stormed into the kitchen complaining about the quality of the food when he locked eyes on Lillie up to her elbows in suds. He offered her a job on the spot. 

  She might have rejected the offer had it not been for the fact that he offered twice what she was making washing dishes. Lillie knew she was taking a risk but acted on the simplest of arithmetic, more money equals less time away from her children.
 
  At night, she would often caress and polish the marionettes and untangle their strings while whispering soft phrases in her broken English as if she were exorcizing away the evil of the words that Gustave and Maria had forced them to speak on the stage.
 
   One time Gustave had overheard her, and he became enraged.  His large brown eyes nearly bugged out of his head and his thick red lips glistened in the light of a single overhead bulb. “Who are you to criticize my act you ungrateful cunt!” he had screamed with flecks of spit spraying Lillie. “It pays your wages, you stupid bitch. If it wasn’t for me you would be still be washing dishes at that cheap restaurant in Brooklyn. From now on, you are forbidden to talk to the marionettes. Do you hear me? Put dem in dere cases and no more talk!”
 
   Trembling, Lillie apologized profusely. She still talked to the marionettes but quietly and only in secret. Sometimes though, when she knew for certain that Gustave would gone for a great while, she would take them out and enact little vignettes about love complete with dancing, singing, and kissing.
 
   The act itself kept getting increasingly vulgar. The more Gustave drank, and he drank quite often, the more it would spur his sinister, depraved creativity. The more cynical and depraved the act became, the more popular and in demand it became. One night in Chicago, the standing patrons of O’Meara’s began to shower the stage with $100 bills. Gustave and Fat Mary drank well into the morning after that show.
 
   It was quite a sight, Gustave with his arms outstretched accepting the worshipping crowd, Fat Mary behind him with tiny line of sweat on upper lip wanting to push him aside but knowing better. Gustave secretly hated them all; he despised the rich.
 
They made him think of all the people his mom had cleaned houses for over the years. He remembered the stories about how the rich men she had worked for tried to take advantage of the young maid. He thought of the hand me down clothing that the matrons had given his mother, and he remembered his mother bent with arthritis dying before her time. It made him happy to think that his act was contributing to their moral ruin and ultimate decay.
 
  Gustave’s real name was Avidis. When he was younger, it was his mother who had sent him to study in a nearby seminary. It was there that he met a crippled young priest named Johan, a wood carver, who had taught Avidis how to carve out marionettes. Every week the priest would go into a village and train young people on how to carve wood, and Avidis would often accompany him.
 
  One day, Avidis saw the young daughter of a local merchant peeking out from the window of her father’s cobblers shop. Her name was Anusha and she was tall and lithe and had thick curly golden hair and large green eyes. Later, Anusha would help Avidis put on puppet shows for the younger village children. 
 
   And what shows they were, stories about heroes and young maidens, mythological monsters, and stories from the Bible. The village children loved them and would beg their mama’s to let them forego their chores and run into the village square where they would sit with their companions and giggle and sing and shout. Avidis and Anusha would come on Saturday mornings regularly as clockwork and find their audience already assembled.
 
  And then one day, he went to collect Anusha, and as he passed under the vine covered trellis that led to her cottage he saw that everyone at her house was crying. Her distant cousin Aram, who was staying with her family for a few weeks, had choked the life from her for refusing his drunken advances. The cousin had just returned from France where he had made a fortune in the import business. Aram had offered to take Anusha back to France and employ her in his business. Her mother had turned the offer down as she regarded her daughter as too young.
 
   That night, he had returned from a night of heavy drinking and gambling with some friends. He quietly crept into Anusha’s room, fell down upon his knees beside her bed, earnestly professed his love and tried to kiss her. As she pushed him away, she laughed. It was the laugh, he said later, that caused him to put her hands around her neck and squeeze.

  Aram had a lot of money and was able to grease a few wheels and beat the charges in court. Three years later, Avidis was standing at a crossroads where one road led into the village and the other road led into another small village.  A car drove by slowly and then stopped. A window was rolled down and Avidis saw the face of Aram looking out at him before the window closed again. 
 
  When Gustave stood before the members of the audience while basking in the glow of their adoration, he always envisioned them as corpses. This was what he was really thinking when he smiled and bowed. It aroused him. Then he would have to satisfy his lust with a visit to Fat Mary’s room. He tried to force his way upon Lillie once, but she had punched him in the nose.  He decided that he would bide her time with her.
 
   When Gustave and Fat Mary returned to their lodgings on the night of the hundred-dollar shower, a huge row broke out over who deserved the greater share of the bills.  Gustave had only given Fat Mary two of the hundred dollar notes and that after he had crawled off of her in her bed. He headed for the bedroom door to escape her wrath, and she jumped out of bed as quickly as a jungle cat and followed, carrying the argument into the front room where Lillie was sleeping on a dusty old sofa.
 
    At the end of the argument, Gustave had thrown a large, leather bound book at Fat Mary, and the book had struck the corner of her eye making a small red mark. Fat Mary picked up a heavy, half filled brandy glass and dumped the contents over Gustave. She then broke the glass by hurling it against the wall.
 
   She ran to a table, picked up the case with Manette, grabbed her coat, and scurried out of the room before the stunned Gustave had a chance to react. Realizing what would happen without her part of the act, he drunkenly lurched out of the room in  pursuit.
 
    Lillie noticed then that Little Billy had been taken from his case and was lying in a jumbled mess in corner of the room. She hurried to pick the puppet up and untangle its strings. She was carefully wiping off its face when the enraged and frustrated Gustave returned. A hideous look of anger distorted his fleshy face.
 
    “Wha I tell you about dat?”
 
    “About what?” she answered confused.
 
   “ About filling my puppets wit dat baby talk.”
 
   “ I was just wiping the brandy from his face.”
 
   “Da brandy?”
 
   “Yes. She must have got some on him when she spilled the drink.”
 
   Gustave didn’t reply immediately but threw himself down into an easy chair and sat there brooding for a while. A tense minute later he finally mumbled, “ She’s gone. I gotta write her out of the act. Just me an Billy from now on.”
 
   He slid back into his thoughts for a while before he noticed that Lilly was still standing there. “ I thought I told you to put that Goddamn puppet away.”
 
  “ I was going to, but I noticed that his face was wet again.” She wiped the puppet’s face again and sat it gently back into the blue velvet of the case.
 
  “You creep me out da way you do dat.”
 
 “Do what?”
 
  “ The way you handle them so gently as if dey are little children.”
 
 “ It’s just respect, signor. As you say, it is how I make my living.”
 
 “ Well, no more. When we get back to New York, I am going to find a new partner. I might as well find a new assistant too.”
 
  Lillie wanted to cry but did not want to give Monsieur Gustave the pleasure of seeing the tears. She silently closed the clasps of the puppet’s carrying case and slowly left the room.
 
  The next morning, a matronly hotel maid with a bad limp unlocked the red door to room 409 and carefully dragged her vacuum cleaner behind her.  She went back into the hallway and got two clean towels and hand towel. She reentered the room and started screaming at the top of her lungs.
 
     Mr. Gustave was lying on the bed in pool of his own blood. A pair of large scissors had been plunged deep into his throat.  His purple tongue filled his mouth hole, and his lifeless eyes bulged in silent terror. Lilly was nowhere to be found having checked out early that morning.

   When the police came to investigate, their thorough search found nothing with which to incriminate a suspect. The pile of hundred dollar bills was on table next to the bed. Gustave's grandfather’s gold watch, the one his mother had smuggled out of Turkey, was clutched in his right hand. There were no fingerprints on the scissors or the puppet.

   There was nothing else out of the ordinary, except for the marionette Little Billy. Strangely, the puppet’s strings had been cut and were lying on the blue velvet lining of the opened case, all except one string.That string had been used to fashion the noose which had been tied around the puppet's neck and from which Little Billy was found hanging from a coat hook on the back of the closet door of the hotel room.