“Cusimano had a clean little barbershop in Chicago. One day he read in a magazine that Sam Wood was making the life of Rudolph Valentino. He sold his shop, gave most of the proceeds to his wife, bought himself a pin-striped suit, and came west to Hollywood. By a miserable stroke of bad luck, he ended up in this very house. He was fat and fifty. Ivan found out soon enough that this idiot had it in his mind to play the leading role, Valentino himself. Ivan suggested to him that in Hollywood you don’t merely arrive and announce your intention—no, you have to do something splendid, extraordinary, to attract notice. The poor dumb sonuvabitch listened to Ivan like it was Moses talking. Ivan said Cusimano would have to get a horse, dress up like a sheik, and ride out to the studio at five o’clock in the morning—”

An enormous man wearing nothing but shiny black trousers and felt slippers marched into the room, kissed Ivan on the cheek and, groaning with the effort, lowered himself to the floor. “Ah, God! It’s been a black day!” he said.

“Shut up!” exclaimed Ivan.

“Pinochle?” asked the man plaintively.

“So Ivan,” the Sheriff resumed, “undertook to provide Cusimano with horse and costume. On the morning agreed upon, Ivan arrived here with a horse he had stolen from a milkman. Ivan knows nothing about horses, fears them in fact, but he was so intent on destroying Cusimano that he was able to undo the animal’s traces and lead it by its reins—”

“Oh, Christ!” exploded the fat man. “I’ve heard that goddamned story a thousand times. Who’s that girl?”

“Almost up the stairs and into the room,” continued the Sheriff imperturbably. “Ivan had already stolen a few dollars from the landlady’s cookie box while she was out cold on the kitchen floor, and with it he had purchased several lengths of white cloth and a yard or so of green braid. Ivan, aided by myself, dressed Cusimano and escorted him to his steed, which was trying to lie down on the sidewalk.”

“That horse wasn’t in such bad shape,” observed Ivan mildly.

“The horse looked abnormal, like a camel with an inverted hump. That horse was abnormal like Ivan and the Beast—”

“Don’t call me abnormal, you gonif!” shouted the Beast, scratching the black curling hair of his chest.

“But Cusimano was so unhinged by the thought of the glory that lay ahead, he didn’t notice the animal’s condition. At the very last minute, after he was astride the horse, I saw that he was wearing Al Capone shoes, black, so we removed them—”

“Wait!” cried Ivan, darting to a closet from which he took, handing them to Annie, a pair of tiny black pointed shoes.

“We gave the horse a kick or two. We were only an hour over schedule. It was six in the morning.”