The Showman

Ever since William Tell shot the apple off his son's head with a single well-aimed arrow, showmen the world over have made a risky living by pinning their partners' clothes to the wall with a motley collection of cutlery or by snapping off cigarettes, held aquiver in their partners' lips, with spears, rhino whips, bullets and blowgun darts.

One such sharpshooter is debonair Kurt Bader, 36, an ingenious German whose flair for showmanship unhappily surpasses his marksmanship. With his wife Hildegard, Kurt billed his show as "Aal Cherry & Mac Zero, the World-Famous Sharpshooting Act." His act involved a machine like an egg beater, across which pretty little Mac, arrayed in shorts and bra, could be tastefully spread-eagled and rotated as a "human windmill." Last week, after putting their two daughters to bed in a hotel room nearby, Aal & Mac went into their act at Cologne's Kaiserhof Theater. Their eleven-year-old son Hubert strapped his mother to the "windmill" and gave it a gentle push to start it rotating. Behind the windmill were six pingpong balls balanced on tall pillars, and the idea was that Aal, dressed to kill in cowboy suit and ten-gallon hat, would knock down the targets with his .22-caliber rifle by shooting past his wife's rotating body, like a machine-gun firing through an airplane propeller. To the audience, sitting below stage level, it looked as if Aal were attempting the impossible, but in fact, the angle of fire was so arranged that the bullets would pass well above his wife's body. Besides, Aal had told his friends, it was not really necessary to score a direct hit on the balls; the wind of a near-miss would just as easily bring them down.

The stage lights dimmed, drums rolled and a red spotlight played on Mac as Aal raised his rifle that night last week. Crack --and one ball was down; crack--and nothing happened. Would Aal go on after missing with one shot? He did. The third ball fell, and the audience sighed its relief. When the fourth ball dropped, the audience was roaring applause. Then the fifth shot rang out, and again no ball fell.

But Mac's bare body twitched, then slowly, very slowly, crumpled and fell to the floor. There was a tiny black hole in her temple.

Aal, badly upset, blamed her death on his being momentarily distracted by a smoker in the audience lighting a match.

The cops agreed that the death was accidental, and did not hold him. Knowing no other way to earn a living, Aal decided to go on with the show. Perhaps, he said, he would train young Hubert to take his mother's place on the windmill.

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