The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  “You succeeded,” Ian smiled.

  I had to turn away to keep from laughing. Most of Ian’s time with me had been quiet, recuperative—and I’d somehow lost sight of that single defining trait of every stage performer: the actor’s ego. If there was anything that could get Ian functioning again, it wouldn’t be the passing of time, or the dulling of pain, or heroic endurance, or me—it would be his actor’s ego.

  Before long Ian wanted to leave. All the way to the restaurant, he talked about acting. He talked all through supper and for an hour at the bar where we stopped for a nightcap. He talked all the way home, up the stairs, in the shower, and into bed. When I fell asleep around four o’clock, he was still talking.

  The next day he called his agent.

  Leo Gunn was working again. It was kind of harrowing for him, testing his claw in one backstage situation after another. He was managing a show in the Village, something that advertised itself as a “post-mod fulfillment.”

  “You should see the stage equipment in that theater,” Leo said. “Junk! Nothing but junk! Podunk Corners Elementary School has a better-equipped stage. The lighting instruments ought to be in a museum—I know they’ve got historical value. I figure if I can manage there, I can manage anywhere.”

  Ian listened to this with open admiration. “You deliberately took a show that’s hard to work?”

  “The hardest I could find.” Good stage managers, unlike actors, can pick and choose. “It was time to take the plunge. Come watch me do my stuff.”

  Leo slipped us backstage after the first act one night, and we watched him. Thank God for the Leo Gunns of the world: they adapt, they control their lives, they make things work. The only mishap Leo suffered backstage that night was the dropping of a pencil.

  I was back to working on The New Play again (still no title). Gene Ramsay had called and nudged me a little, so vacation was over. Then one day Ian said, “Abby, I know you don’t like to talk about your work until it’s finished and I swore I’d never ask you this—but do you have a part for me in your play?”

  I smiled and handed him Act I.

  There was a part in it for him, all right. Especially for him. I’d never written a part for an individual performer before, and it was a challenge—tailoring the role to take advantage of Ian’s particular talents. I’d not said anything to him about it because I didn’t want to push him. But once he asked me, we were halfway home.

  Ian read the script and jumped out of his chair when he realized the lead was being written for him. We talked over what I’d written so far. Then Ian began reading the dialogue aloud, experimenting with interpretation, testing cadences. The way he read some of the speeches suggested certain things to me, and I began doing the kind of rewriting that usually doesn’t get done until the rehearsal-and-tryout stage. We were making a new play come to life and we were both excited about it.

  Ian’s agent called; he’d gotten Ian a role in a TV movie to be shot in California.

  “Another villain,” said Ian, grinning as he hung up the phone. “This time I mastermind a caper that … that’s … you …” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t finish.

  “What? What?”

  He finally calmed down enough to tell me. “You know how the past few years we’ve been swamped with stories about a group of people who capture something—an airplane, a bridge, an institution of some sort—and hold it for ransom?”

  “Um.”

  “Well, each time it’s done, whatever it is that’s captured has to be a little bigger and a little more dramatic than the last time. Remember the one about the group of terrorists who held the entire U. N. General Assembly for ransom?”

  “Didn’t see it.”

  “You’re lucky. This time, I play the leader of a group that captures and holds—are you ready?—an entire city. A city, for Christ’s sake! Is that what’s meant by municipal bonds?” He waited for my groan. “Right now they’re arguing about whether to make it a fictional city or a real place. Denver is under consideration—‘the mile-high city in the grip of a band of criminals who’ll stop at nothing!’” Ian snorted. “Liver in my ear.”

  I shook my head in amazement.

  “But I suspect it won’t be Denver,” he went on. “That’d mean location shots in Colorado as well as the main shooting in studios in California, and it’s not that big-budget a project. It’ll probably be a California city. Don’t you get sick of looking at southern California every time you turn on the TV?”

  Just then the phone rang again.

  It was Hugh Odell. “Turn on your television, Abby—don’t stop to talk, go turn it on.”

  I dropped the receiver into its cradle and turned on the set. Ian and I stood there and listened to a newscaster say that Jake Steiner, husband of actress Sylvia Markey, had been found with his throat cut.

  So it wasn’t over.

  The threat of maiming and death, the fear that shrivels up the insides and paralyzes the mind, the despoiling of human life—it was all still happening. All our precarious rebuilding of livable lives was just so much wasted effort, pitiful attempts at picking up the pieces that could be wiped out by one cold-blooded stroke. One stroke by one invisible, invulnerable, invincible madman, and we’d be finished. Erased. Never even there.

  Ian and I couldn’t talk about it right away. We lay in bed like two zombies, waiting away the long night. Toward morning we turned to each other, but couldn’t make love. The day finally came, with its lying promise of hope and resolution.

  “You realize, don’t you,” Ian said over coffee, “that he’s going around again? He’s not satisfied with what he did the first time—he’ll hit all of us again. All of us.”

  I nodded. “Poor Sylvia. First her career and then the one person she depended on to keep her safe. Poor Jake. Poor innocent, warped, unknowing Jake. At any rate, Sylvia’s safe now. He’ll never be able to touch her again. She hasn’t anything left to lose.”

  Sylvia Markey had made the ultimate retreat. She was catatonic. The newscaster had said she was under the care of an unnamed doctor in an unnamed clinic. Location permanently unknown. Where is Sylvia, what is she.

  “What price safety,” Ian muttered. “He’s mad, whoever he is. Madder than Sylvia.”

  “Ian, remember Vendice?”

  “Who? Vendice—oh. Revenger’s Tragedy?”

  “That’s the one. Remember he started out to avenge the death of someone he loved but ended up turning into a bloody, unthinking executioner.”

  “Yes,” Ian mused. “He fell in love with vengeance, instead of keeping it a tool to help balance things out. You think that’s what’s happening now?”

  I spread my hands. “He can no longer be claiming to balance the scales of justice—he’s getting pleasure out of it now.”

  “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this is happening,” said Ian. “What does he want? How much do we have to pay? This is insane, totally insane. How do you deal with a madman? How?”

  I didn’t know. I did know what lay ahead of us as surely as if I were writing the script myself. Ian still had his looks; a splash of acid would take care of that. Leo Gunn had another hand that could be hacked off.

  “Ian,” I said, “you’re in more danger than the rest of us.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “First, you’re a target in your own right. Second, you’re now a way of hurting me.”

  He hadn’t thought of that. But after a moment he said, “That works two ways. You’re now a way of hurting me.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “So we’re both prime targets. Will he come after us first or will he—good God!” I jumped up.

  “What is it?”

  “Our minds have stopped working. I just thought of something we should have thought of last night.” I went looking for my address book. I dialed the Encino number and a few moments later I was talking to Loren Keith.

  “It’s five in the morning out here, Abby,” he complained.

  “List
en, Loren, and listen carefully. Dorothy’s life is in danger. Jake—”

  “What?”

  “Jake Steiner was murdered last night. You see what this means? Destroying Sylvia’s face and her career wasn’t enough. That maniac wanted to hurt her even more. That means he wants to hurt all of us more. He is going to hit us again. And that includes you, Loren—you’re on the list.”

  “Holy Mother of God.” The shock made his voice tremble.

  “He’s already killed two women to punish their husbands. Couldn’t your wife be next? I’m deliberately being alarmist because you may not have much time. Loren, he could be on a plane heading for California right now. I doubt that he’s moving that fast, but you can’t afford to take the chance.”

  He said something I couldn’t understand.

  “Get Dorothy to drive you both to some place where you’re not known,” I said. “Go now. Throw something in a suitcase and get in that station wagon and go. Don’t stop to close the house or have the water shut off or the phone disconnected. Don’t tell anybody where you are—not the police, not me, not anybody. Go now, Loren. Right now.”

  “I … now.” His voice was shaky. “Right. We’ll go now.” He hung up.

  Ian was shaking his head. “Of course he wouldn’t know about it yet—who’d tell him? Do you think the New York police notified the Los Angeles police? About Keith’s connection with us, I mean.”

  “Lieutenant Goodlow would have, if he were still on the case. This man in charge now, I just don’t know.”

  “So now Keith and his wife are on the run, just like Reddick. Is that the only answer? Run and hide? I don’t want to run. We’re not as vulnerable as Keith.” He started to pace around the room. “But what about you, Abby? Would you feel safer if we went into hiding? What do you think?”

  “Depends on whether you put your faith in metal doors and bars on the windows or in concealment. Frankly, I don’t see that concealment has all that much to offer.”

  “We can’t stay locked in here forever. But we can’t hide for the rest of our lives either. Hell, what a choice.”

  “There may be another way,” I said tentatively.

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe we can figure out who this lunatic is ourselves.”

  “When the police couldn’t? Not a chance.”

  “The police didn’t know the people involved. They were faced with a bunch of strangers with names and pasts—case histories. The police brought the impersonal, disinterested eye to the problem—and it saw nothing. The objective investigation, the right way, simply didn’t work. So maybe we should go at it the wrong way—subjectively, personally.”

  “I can’t believe you’re serious.”

  “Ian, there are things we know that the police couldn’t possibly know. It’s going to be up to us to ferret out what’s significant.”

  “But don’t you think every one of us has thought and thought and thought about this? We’ve all tried to figure out who he might be—”

  “But we haven’t tried together. Not really. You and Leo and Hugh and I—we’re the only ones left. Maybe four of us together can come up with something one of us alone couldn’t.”

  Ian looked at me oddly. “You think you know who it is.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. But I just don’t want to sit around waiting for that ghoul to strike whenever he feels like it. I think we ought to try.”

  He thought about it a while, wandering around the room, abstracted. He came over to me and touched my earlobe. “All right, say we make a series of inspired guesses that convince us we know who the killer is. That’s not evidence—nothing to take to the police. So we know who he is. What then?”

  “Then we stop him,” I said.

  4

  “We’re going to have to do it ourselves, Leo,” I said.

  “Let’s see if I got this straight.” He took a swallow of his whiskey. “The gifted amateurs succeed where the plodding, unimaginative police fail, is that the way it goes? I think I read that one. About a hundred times.”

  We were in a booth of a Lexington Avenue bar that called itself a lounge but shouldn’t have bothered. The proprietor had recognized Ian and tried to seat us in the one window booth, but Ian had waved him toward the back.

  “Why don’t you want to try?” I asked Leo.

  “It isn’t that I don’t want to try, Abby, it’s just that I think we’re kidding ourselves. We’re not going to figure out who this guy is. What does Odell say?”

  “Haven’t talked to him yet,” said Ian. “Later today, or tonight.”

  Leo shook his head. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “We start with Michael Crown,” I said. “The cause of it all. What do we know about him? Who were his friends? Where did he go when he went out? That kind of thing.”

  “And we’re supposed to know all that?”

  “Somebody might remember something, Leo,” Ian said. “I think Abby’s right. We ought to give it a try.”

  Leo released a sigh that started down around his belt. “Okay, I don’t want to be the sour apple. I think it’s a waste of time, but I’ll go along.”

  I patted his left hand. “Good, Leo.”

  “There’s one thing I want to talk about,” said Ian, “something that’s been bothering me. It seems to me almost every time something has happened, all the on-the-spot suspects were people who’d been members of the governing committee. Do you think that’s possible? That the killer was actually a member of the committee?”

  “No,” said Leo bluntly. “And I don’t buy that story that the killer had to be in the Foxfire company either. He could have been an outsider. I watched the police conduct one of their searches. Somebody hiding in the theater could have eluded them—I could have. Just by keeping on the move. Police don’t really know their way around theaters.”

  “Besides,” I said, “remember how Michael Crown broke down when we told him we knew he didn’t write those plays? Do you honestly think a man could sit in that room and watch his lover of fifteen years go to pieces and not move a muscle? He’d have given himself away, somehow. He couldn’t have helped himself.”

  While I was talking a strange look had come into Leo’s eyes: he seemed to retreat from us for a moment. Ian noticed it; and when Leo came back from wherever he’d been, he seemed uncomfortable.

  We talked of other things for a while, and then Leo said, “I’m going to have some free time. This schlockfest I’m working has posted its closing notice. After Saturday I can play detective as much as you want.”

  It was close to four when we left. Leo went one way and Ian and I another.

  “Well, what do you make of that?” asked Ian.

  “That reaction of Leo’s?”

  “Mm.”

  It was impossible to talk on the streets, so we walked over to the Frick Museum and sat down in the court to watch the fountain.

  “It was while you were talking about Michael Crown’s lover,” Ian said. “In the committee room, watching Crown break down. Something struck a chord there, Abby. It meant something to Leo.”

  “I wonder what.”

  “Leo’s in a bad spot—he’s such an obvious choice for the villain. He’s homosexual, he’s middle-aged, and he was front-and-center with both Manhattan Rep and Foxfire.”

  “Surely you don’t think Leo—”

  “Not for one minute. If Leo’s the killer, that means he hacked off his own right hand, applied a tourniquet with his left hand, and then picked up the ax and knocked himself unconscious. Then he would have had to detonate the bomb from the hospital, where he lay unconscious for two days.” Ian said the last sentence calmly, with only a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. “The whole thing’s preposterous. If there’s one person we can be sure is not the killer, it’s Leo Gunn.”

  I agreed. After a while we left and Ian called Hugh Odell. Hugh’s answering service took the call and no, Mr. Odell didn’t say when he’d b
e in.

  We stopped in a bookstore. I was looking at a copy of Peter Handke’s new play when Ian said “Abby!” so urgently that half the people in the store looked up.

  He was white as a sheet, staring at a book open in his hands.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  He held up the book so I could see the cover. The title was Do-It-Yourself Explosives and Homemade Bombs. “It’s all here,” said Ian. “Everything you need to know about making your own bomb—how to deface the batch number on the gelignite, how to rig the detonator …” He broke off when he became aware that the other customers were staring at him. We bought the book and left before somebody called the police.

  “So he didn’t have to hire a bomber after all,” I said. “He could have built his own bomb. But could he really? How technical is it?”

  “I can understand it,” Ian said, reading as we walked, “and I don’t know the first thing about explosives. It’s very clear. Here, take a look.”

  I read enough to see that Ian was right. Even I could build a bomb following those instructions. If I could hold my hand steady enough.

  Ian’s eyes were glazed and he was shaking his head back and forth like some big wounded animal. “How can it be? How can it be? Some ass writes out these instructions and some other ass publishes them and then one night my family is blown to bits! Abby? How can it be?”

  I didn’t have any answer. It sometimes seemed that responsibility was always something that belonged to the other guy.

  Ian stopped walking, tilted back his head, and without warning roared out his frustration at the sky. People melted away from us as if we were wearing leper bells. I tugged at Ian’s arm until he started walking again.

  By the time we reached home, he had his fury under control. But his mouth was grim and his whole being radiated a hatred so intense it intimidated me. We climbed the stairs and found a note taped to the metal door:

  Don’t say anything to Hugh Odell until I’ve had a chance to talk to you again. It’s important.