THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

HOW TONY MANERO GOT OVER HIS 'SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER' AND LEARNT TO LOVE 'PULP FICTION'

IN THE late Seventies, Tony was a big attraction in Brooklyn discos, and people would come over from Manhattan to see him. He had never believed he could have a career in dancing - he was too shy, he didn't really enjoy being up there in front of people. The thing about dancing that he liked was the precision, the order, the control. The way you could count on it, and count yourself through it, and feel good about yourself. He studied it. He did floor plans for dances - the placing of the feet. He liked to work them out on paper first and then do them. But he always had trouble finding girls who would study. They said they liked to dance the way they felt it at the moment. But Tony knew it could be an art and a science; that you could dance in your head.

Still, he was noticed, and he went along with the offers: he was passive about it in a funny way so that people liked him, but took him for granted. He didn't have a lot of personality. He had a featured spot in Shirley MacLaine's one-woman show that got good notices. Shirley took an interest in him. She'd talk to him, give him notes and lend him books - she was very generous and eager for him, and he felt a little daunted.

"Tony, you have a talent. You really do. But you make it look easy - as if you weren't working."

"Oh, really?" he said. He liked that; that was what he wanted.

"Show them that it's difficult. Sweat a little. They want to see you trying."

He nodded. It was funny: he liked Shirley, but she was consumed in her own effort, and he found that a touch oppressive, or unhealthy even.

"Well, you know," he said. "I'll try." And he giggled in that soft way he had.

He got his own show, Satan's Alley, but it was a terrible piece of crap. "Tony," Shirley warned him, "you have to protect yourself with the right people. You're too polite. You yield. You're grateful to these deadbeats. You should fire them. Tony, you're judged by the company you keep."

He agreed with her, but then he went straight back to the theatre and agreed with the deadbeats. He didn't like to make himself difficult; he'd just as soon not get into conversations.

The show closed after 11 performances, and Tony was at a loose end. He took the first offer, from a Las Vegas hotel. He had never been to Vegas, never really been out of New York State. He wanted to travel a bit. But in Las Vegas, the stage for the floor show was the wrong dimension for the routines he'd worked out.

He needed another seven feet in width, which he explained to the management.

"Tony," said the foreman of the maintenance crew, "that's a hell of a lot of work."

"But, you see, I need the room," said Tony.

"What is it, it's just a few feet - am I right?"

"Yeah. It's not a lot. You put one more section in, that'll do it."

"Tony, I gotta get that made. I don't know about the lumber - this is Japanese maple. Then we got to let it settle, and the varnishing! Tony, do you - "

"Well, OK," said Tony, and he let it go, and the second night he did his knee. The cruciate ligament, they said in the hospital. His leg was never the same again. Not that he minded so ultra much. After all, dancing had never been the most important thing to him. But, as he rested in the hospital, he wondered sometimes what was.

Travel, he supposed. He had liked just being in Vegas seeing the desert, Hoover Dam, the lights on the Strip. He liked the way the city had been put there. The world was amazing. So when he was able to, he took a flight to Europe. There was something very tidy about being in a foreign country. Tony didn't know foreign languages, so that kept what he said very simple. And what he thought. Which was pleasant. He got confused and unhappy a lot less.

In Paris, he met this couple, a girl and her lover, an older man. Her name was Anna, and she acted like someone on smack, but Tony found she was clean - it was just her nature. They could be together for hours at a time and hardly say a word, and it felt very nice. The only thing she liked him to do was give her a foot rub. Tony knew feet, and she had the coldest - cold enough to chill his hands. But he liked the look of bliss in her eyes as much as anything he'd ever liked. Anna's lover never had a name; she called him "Minister", which was like a joke, yet she never laughed. The man was something in the Thatcher government, and insane over Anna. But she took it all very calmly, and Tony wasn't sure that she didn't want his foot rubs most of all.

"Tony," she said one day.

"Yeah." He was always ready to serve her.

"When he comes tomorrow."

"Yeah?"

"When we're in the bedroom, you know?"

"Yeah."

"He'll have a briefcase. There will be a file in it - brown colour. Take it out. Go down to the copy shop, OK?"

"Yeah."

"Copy it. Put it back."

He did as he was told, and she intimated that she had passed the file on to others. She gave him 5,000 francs. Which was all right, because his money from Broadway and Vegas was running out. And it had been very simple: in and out, copy the pages, put them back. He was a deft worker.

Things developed from that. He got an apartment in Paris, and Anna had other jobs for him.

"It's like being a detective?" he said. "Right?"

One day, she introduced him to an Italian, though he talked American. And the man was looking to explore other opportunities. Things with cars, for instance, and then carrying packages to Amsterdam or Rome, or even Casablanca.

"Wow! Casablanca," said Tony.

"You get your passport looking like a stamp album," said the man.

"It's drugs, isn't it?" said Tony.

"As a matter of fact, Tony, yeah. Carrying camembert to Casablanca does not pay in the same way."

"Drugs are bad, right?" Tony had heard that always.

The man studied him and reflected for a while. "Try some," he