Life Expectancy

with a scarlet robe over his arm. He went to Vivacemente and held this garment while the star slipped his arms into the sleeves.
        The carrier of the robe had a brutal, scarred face. Even at a distance, his eyes seemed as menacing as those of a viper.
        Although he departed, leaving us alone with his boss, I was glad we were carrying pistols. I wished we'd thought to bring attack dogs.
        The heavy yet beautifully draped robe was of a luxurious fabric, perhaps cashmere, with padded shoulders and wide lapels. In it, the aerialist had the air of a 1930s movie star, when Hollywood still had glamor instead of glitz.
        Smiling, he approached us, and the closer he drew, the clearer it became that he had taken measures to stave off the effects of time.
        The glossy black shade of his hair was too inky to be real; it had come from a bottle. Perhaps he had earned his physique with vigorous and relentless exercise-and with steroids for lunch every day-but age had been trimmed from his face by battalions of scalpels.
        We have all seen unfortunate women who began having extensive face-lifts much too young and who submitted to subsequent surgeries too frequently, until by their sixties-sometimes even sooner-their faces have been stretched tight to the point of snapping. Their Botoxed brows look like plastic. They cannot completely close their eyes even to sleep. Their nostrils have a permanent flare, as though they are perpetually testing the air for an offensive odor, and their enhanced lips are pulled and puckered into a permanent pouty half-smile that inevitably reminds us of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker in Batman.
        But for the fact that he was a man, Virgilio Vivacemente looked like one of those unfortunate women.
        He came so close that Jimmy and I involuntarily backed up a step or two, which elicited a sharky smile from our host. Apparently, part of his manipulative style was to invade the space of others.
        When he spoke, he had a baritone voice closer in register to bass than to tenor. "Of course you know who I am."
        "We've got a pretty good idea," Jimmy said.
        Because the ten-year-old boy who delivered the box of money had been terrified of having the crap beat out of him by this man, and because of the offensive implications of the money itself, we refused to extend to him courtesy that he had not earned. He'd chosen to play a game called Who's the Big Dog?and we could bark as loud as he could.
        "In every corner of the world," said the patriarch, "everyone knows who I am."
        "At first we thought you were Benito Mussolini," I said, "but then we realized he'd never been an aerialist."
        "Besides," Jimmy said, "Mussolini's been dead since the end of World War II."
        I said, "And you don't look like you've been dead nearly that long."
        Virgilio Vivacemente smiled more broadly, and his smile even less resembled a smile than it did a knife wound.
        Although the tightness of his face made the nuanced meaning of his various smiles impossible to read, I recognized the glaze that came over his eyes as he listened to Jimmy and me. He was a man who possessed no sense of humor whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
        He didn't realize that we were joking between ourselves, and because he didn't grasp our tone and intent, he also didn't realize that we were insulting him. To his ear, we were talking gibberish, and he was wondering if we might be mentally retarded.
        "Many years ago, the Flying Vivacementes became stars of such worldwide renown," he said with sonorous self-importance, "that I was able to buy the circus of which I had once been an employee. And now today there are three Vivacemente circuses playing at all times in every significant venue in the world!"
        Pretending suspicion, Jimmy said, "Real circuses. You even have elephants?"
        "Of course we have elephants!" Vivacemente declared.
        "One? Two?"
        "Many elephants!"
        "Do you have lions?" I asked.
        "Prides of lions!"
        "Tigers?" Jimmy asked.
        "Snarling hordes of tigers!"
        "Kangaroos?"
        "What kangaroos? No circus has kangaroos."
        "No circus is a circus without kangaroos," Jimmy insisted.
        "Absurdity! You know nothing of circuses."
        I said, "Do you have clowns?"
        Vivacemente's stiff face froze entirely. When he spoke, his baritone voice