Passion Play

by Sean Stewart

  I looked again at Daniel Vachon’s elegantly waved and waxed blond hair, at the affected way he held his cigarette, between thumb and middle finger like a Bogart gangster in pantaloons. “Quite a relief, to be allowed to smoke at a cast meeting at last, eh?”

  He laughed. “God, I don’t know how many times I swore I’d never work with that bastard again—” Vachon’s laugh died, and he peered comically from me to his cigarette. “How the hell did you know Jon had forbidden them?”

  The others were staring at me, startled. Celia, almond eyes fleeing, a steel shiver suddenly buried in trembling green, a stab of guilty fear. Tough Tara Allen in her olive-drab NT jumpsuit, eyes narrowing, hostile.

  And from David Delaney the first, faintest flicker of life, a glint of curiosity sparking in his eyes. “Ms. Fletcher is paid to put two and two together, Daniel. Jonathan was a Red saint, remember. In his younger days he crushed Lippman and Reynolds on morals charges, so…”

  “So it wasn’t hard to guess that he’d pause in his godlike way long enough to stomp on my little eccentricities,” Vachon said, nodding.

  “Affectations, you mean.”

  “I love you too, Tara,” Daniel said, blowing his technical director a nasty kiss.

  “It was a minor matter,” Delaney went on. “Nothing for the Morality Amendments.”

  Like a tide that had passed its ebb, the hunt was beginning to run in me again. I could feel it coming in my pulse and the scan of my eyes. It wouldn’t reach full intensity until I was close to the make, but it was starting again, and it was good, quickening the emotions within me like rain on dry roots.

  “Thank you so very much for your co-operation, folks. I know this has been a long day, but as I’m sure you understand, every precaution has to be taken when an unusual death overtakes an individual of Mr. Mask’s stature.”

  “Star billing to the end,” joked Vachon, arching his sandy eyebrows. A couple of actors shifted uncomfortably in their seats and glanced at their director. They were looking to Delaney for guidance, but he remained impassive. Still shocked by Mask’s death? Or was he deliberately trying not to influence them?

  “Mr. Delaney, would you mind telling me what exactly you were doing here?”

  The director nodded courteously. “The commissioners of National Television, after a year of pondering, at length accepted my suggestion that we do a version of Faustus—Marlowe’s, not Goethe’s—agreeing with me that its warning on the perils of intellectual temptation was in tune with the spirit of the Redemption Presidency.” He opened his hands, palms up. “They were more than liberal with their funding, and I determined to get the best. Naturally, for this kind of work, the best meant Jonathan Mask.” Surprisingly, there was no sneer from Daniel Vachon. Apparently Mask’s peers gave him credit for his talent.

  “Why put a great Redemptionist in the demon’s part?”

  A proud lift of the head from Helen of Troy. “The Lord has a way of bringing the Truth to light.”

  “Shut up, Celia,” Tara snapped.

  “I’ll give the orders, Ms. Allen.”

  The tech director gave me a hard stare. “Yeah.”

  Delaney stepped in to cover for his people. “I wanted Jonathan to stretch, Ms. Fletcher; it is only when we stretch that we reach our greatest performances.” Delaney gestured around the room. “I was also fortunate enough to assemble the cast and crew you see around you; not only are these communicators superb, but the technicians assembled to work on this project are the very best we have working at NT—which is to say the nation.”

  “Damn right,” said a small grey-haired man in his vigorous early fifties. “And when Dean or Sarah or me makes a costume it doesn’t blow up all on its own! The ass did something stupid—”

  “Len!” Tara said.

  “Well the damn Reds are going to pin it all on us if we let them!”

  “I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but Red is not one of them,” I said wryly. “I take my directions from the evidence, Len—not from the President. Go on, Mr. Delaney.”

  The director smiled sadly. “The strength of the theatre, Ms. Fletcher, is in its application to life.” Lord. He sounded like he’d written out his sentences and then read them aloud. “Hm. Any director likes to add something original to his work,” he began. “In this case, I was seduced by the devil I was attempting to exorcise…My conceit was that I would make Mephistophilis an electronic evil—if his effects and demonic powers were delivered by obvious electronic wizardry, then the applicability of Marlowe’s message would be more apparent to my contemporary audience. What sorcery was in Marlowe’s time, technology is in this—a tool that brings with it tremendous power, and power’s concomitant: corruption.” Delaney’s blue eyes were luminous and abstract.

  And then with a blink he returned to the concrete world. He fluttered a hand diffidently. “This was not, I realize, a conception of great subtlety. But television is not a subtle medium: we do what we can to get the point across in a way that is accessible, interesting, and artistically satisfying.” The other members of the cast were listening closely even though they must have heard some variation of this speech several times during the day: Celia Wu was watching her director as if some jewel of wisdom might drop from his lips at any instant. Clearly Delaney commanded the respect of his people.

  Maybe it was his abstraction, or the measured quality of his thought, but even though the numbness that had muted him at first was fading, something else lay over him like a plastic gloss. When I tried to spread out and listen into him, shape myself around his pattern, I felt myself slipping from his surfaces. I didn’t like that much.

  Delaney shifted in his chair. “Unfortunately, if one wishes to have a dazzling display of the powers of technology, one requires a certain amount of dazzling technology to carry it off. I asked Len and his crew if they could build me a costume that would do what I wanted,”—there was a bristle from the little technical expert—“and they succeeded admirably. Their creation surpassed even my hopes. Tara tested it herself.” He paused again. The atmosphere in the Green Room twisted out, becoming spiky and defensive as we approached the sensitive matter of the costume. “Ironically, it also proved to be our undoing.”

  “But it wasn’t the suit’s fault!” spluttered Len.

  “Nobody’s saying it was,” murmured Tara Allen. “At least, I don’t think so?” She raised a quizzical glance to meet my eyes. Her hair was mahogany brown and swept simply back. She was not beautiful, but the four merit badges on the shoulder of her NT jumpsuit made it clear that she was an expert at her job.

  “You tell me. What went wrong?”

  “We put the costume on a jack-ass,” muttered Len.

  “The costume for Mephistophilis was laced with copper microfilaments.” Tara Allen shrugged. “There shouldn’t have been a problem. We’re careful when we design things. Safety is a big word at NT.”

  “Did the costume carry enough current to kill someone?” A stupid question with Mask’s scorched body lying in the morgue, but it never hurt to double-check the obvious.

  Allen bridled, but her answer, when it came a moment later, was calm enough. “Conceivably—but the lines were all insulated. Some of them allowed Jon to create his own effects: puffs of flame, belches of smoke, that kind of thing. Another set were radio-controlled from the booth; they made him glow, or light up in various patterns or frequencies. We chromed a lot of surface to catch the flash. We wanted the whole suit to be usable for live promotions, so we designed it to go without cables. We put in a micro-plane battery system—you know what that is?” I nodded again. “Then you know how much power they carry. The battery and capacitor were inside the costume, held away from Jon’s body in a mnemometal cage. It was all safety-tested many times before we ever let Jon get near it.”

  “So what happened?”

  She spread her hands helplessly. “Who knows? Something screwed up and the capacitor blew. A micro-plane stores a hell of a lot of current; when th
e capacitor went, it took the suit with it.”

  (Mask, lying convulsed in a web of chrome and red plastic on the charred floor of his dressing room. Red blood, red fire.) “What made the capacitor discharge? Could there have been a weak point in the battery somewhere?”

  “Would you build an airplane with a weak point in the wings?” There was a tiny liquid flash in Tara Allen’s eyes; an eddy of grief washed over me, sad as October rain. Tara had cared about Mask. But wails and lamentations weren’t in her nature, and she felt it her duty as technical director to keep herself in control. Stupidly I had almost missed her genuine feeling, well-hidden as it was under the hum and buzz of the others in the Green Room. Idiot.

  She was the only one, I realized. The only one grieved by Mask’s death. “If the accident hadn’t happened I would have said it was impossible. Maybe Jon was fooling around looking for a new effect…crossed some wires, or managed to jam some conductive part of the suit into one of the power switches in the dressing room.”

  “He stuck his finger into a light socket?” I said incredulously. “I don’t expect a lot of technical savvy from a Red spokesman, but still…”

  “That’s what must have happened,” Tara said doggedly.

  “You’re a terrible liar, Ms. Allen.”

  She flushed and stared at the floor. Grief shining in dark brown eyes, stubborn shoulders hunched and set as if against a cold wind. Grief and something else: elbows out, face set against the world, defiance in a heartbeat…

  Protective?

  “Mask was too perfect to bother with advice, let alone instructions,” Len growled. “I kept offering to come and help him put the suit on, but he wouldn’t have anyone around before curtain call. It took him fifteen minutes to dress himself and it would have taken three with help, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I told the silly bugger he was going to blow himself up some day—”

  “Len!”

  “Ms. Allen!” I snapped. “Let him say what he wants, please.—Go ahead, Len.”

  Len sat red-faced, looking down at the carpet, knowing he had said too much. “You’ll have to excuse me, miss. It’s been a hard day, and a shock for everyone. I got carried away. I don’t want anybody thinking that it was our fault when it wasn’t! I didn’t mean any disrespect for the dead.”

  “I understand. And I realize that being a great ac—, uh, communicator doesn’t guarantee that Mask was always easy to work with.” I looked at Vachon. Poke the beast and see what twitches.

  He stared back for a moment, then dropped his eyes and laughed. “Oh Jon wasn’t so bad. He got on my nerves from time to time, but then almost everybody does.”

  “The same could be said, Daniel…” Tara remarked.

  Celia giggled.

  To my surprise Vachon laughed with her. “Quite right. Actors are essentially irritating people. I suppose I got pissed off with Jon’s pious crap,”—he dwelt on the obscenities to extort full shock value from them—“but he was Jonathan Mask. Very smart and very cold with it, but a damn good actor. I learned a lot from him.”

  Vachon looked around the room at the rest of the cast. One by one they nodded their reluctant agreement. All except for Celia Wu. Vachon frowned, then turned quickly back to me. “He was the kind of guy you might have played a practical joke on…but not killed.”

  “Unless someone played a joke with unexpected consequences,” I pointed out. “Like fooling around with some wires so they wouldn’t flash at the right time?” I looked over at Len. “Would it have been possible for someone to tamper with the suit so as to overload the capacitor?”

  Frowning, Len cleaned out his right ear with a blunt finger. “Well…I suppose so. If you were to work one of the cables loose and feed it straight from the main battery into the capacitor you might do it…”

  “Would it be difficult?”

  Len shrugged. “Well, not easy, but possible. Maybe.”

  “Thanks.” I scribbled a few things down. It didn’t seem likely to me either, but there were things I wasn’t being told, and that always makes me spin out an investigation. I wasn’t convinced Mask’s death had been anything but an accident, but I wanted to cover every angle. I went over my notes again.

  Wait a minute. “How was Mask with time?” I asked. “Under-prepared sometimes? Typically running a little late?”

  Vachon paused in pulling up one stocking and laughed incredulously. “Jon? Good Lord—quite the opposite. He knew the lines on the first day of rehearsal—his, yours, everyone’s. And he didn’t mind letting you know it either, if you missed one. Jon never knew what the behind of a schedule looked like.” Vachon shook his head, fluttering his lace ruff like a chrysanthemum. “I can’t imagine where you got that idea. Of course,” he continued, suddenly dropping into sincerity, “not everyone has the actor’s insight into character. We’re a funny breed that way, and I don’t expect that your line of work emphasizes that sort of…intuition,” he finished cryptically.

  “Some day you’ll find someone stupid enough to believe you, Daniel, and they’ll stomp you for being a shaper,” Tara said contemptuously.

  “You’d just cheer them on, wouldn’t you?” Vachon snapped. “But there it is, the curse of a sensitive nature—misunderstood by my peers et cetera, et cetera. Woe is I.” He pulled a droll face, and a titter went around the room.

  So the great actor was anything but a procrastinator. And yet, by five minutes before the call, he had yet to put on the mask of his costume. Perhaps it was too hot or uncomfortable? But he worked all day in it, and I couldn’t see the man Vachon described letting a moment’s discomfort interfere with his preparation time. Odd, very odd. “Did anyone notice anything unusual in Mr. Mask’s behaviour over the last few days? Did he seem angry, or depressed; mention any problems or concerns?”

  Blank stares.

  “Well, he had a weak diode in his computer that was messing up his keyboard a couple of days ago,” the man cast as Wagner ventured.

  Hardly a motive for suicide.

  “He’d have fixed that by today.” David Delaney sat up straight and gestured to his troops. “Ms. Fletcher, if we seem short-winded on this question it’s not for lack of trying, I assure you. Jonathan Mask was not a very…emotional person; I doubt any of us has ever seen him upset when he was not on stage. His moments of passion were entirely squandered on the screen; off it he was an extraordinarily rational and dispassionate man.”

  I glanced at Celia in surprise as a quick spasm of bitterness eddied out from her, acid green and unhappy. “O yes indeed,” she snapped. “A lot of people talk about God these days, Miss Fletcher, but they don’t want to admit that God is active in the world. Here you find Mr. Mask dead in the heart of an abomination, but it never occurs to you to see the hand of God in that, does it? But not a sparrow falls, Miss Fletcher. Maybe the accident was, was retribution. Divine retribution.”

  “For what?” I asked, surprised.

  “You shut your mouth, you pious little slut,” Tara shouted. “How dare you talk about him? You have no idea, the things he did for you.” Shocked, I saw tears glinting in Tara’s eyes. “You didn’t know a damn thing about him, Celia. Not one damn thing.”

  “I knew enough,” Celia said mysteriously.

  “Now Tara, Jealousy is still one of the Seven Deadly Sins,” Vachon drawled, waggling his finger warningly. “Play nice.”

  Quietly Delaney said, “Celia, perhaps you should consider getting a lawyer before you say anything more.”

  Celia looked at me, horrified. Daniel put his arm around her, as if to comfort (I felt the shiver that went through him at the press of her flesh against his hand, his flank; felt desire flare in him at the scent of her dark hair). Tara Allen turned away, brown eyes murderous.

  The Green Room strained and twisted under the heat of their emotions. Delaney looked at me; now his blue eyes were sharp and alive. “A great man has died and we sit beneath the cross, gambling for his clothes, wondering if our show will be a hit, carping at his corpse
. He is gone: let us honour his memory.”

  That shamed them into silence, although the arc and crackle of emotion still twisted through the room. “How do you think Mr. Mask died?”

  Once again they looked to their director. “It had to be an accident, a stupid, senseless accident. Actors are careless, and proverbially ignorant when it comes to technical things, Ms. Fletcher. Now surely you’ve caused enough anguish to my people,” he said, rising to protect his family. “We’ve done all we could to help the police, and to help you. Now go, please, and leave us with our loss.”

  There were patterns here, I decided, riding the elevator down. I could feel them, submerged beneath the murk of events. They were still unformed and unlinked, separate pieces in a picture whose composition I did not know. I was trying to put them together, tentatively, like a mosaic artist working without knowing what his picture would be…Fragments of glazed and coloured stone. Time to go home, browse through Doctor Faustus, and wait for the cops to send the individual statements. Time to wait for patterns to emerge.

  Delaney, the director, father to his crew. Celia, the Innocent Betrayed. Daniel Vachon, Man of the World. Tara Allen: the Honest Friend.

  None of it was true.

  I felt that like an itch, nagging at me from every side. People come in three dimensions: rough-edged, surprising, full of contradictions. But in the Green Room I had been given a scene.

  Actors, I thought as I left the NT building. Acting.

  I wanted to punch through their pasteboard walls and their cut-out characters, rip away the costumes and strip them down to their naked selves. But…that wasn’t my business, not for an accidental death. Only if forensics turned up some signs of tampering in the costume, only if Mask’s death was murder would I have the chance to step into the soundstage and smash their play.

  Please God, I thought. Let it be murder.

  FADE IN:

  The camera pans over the horrible spectacle of Mask’s body, lingering as greedily over his noble face in death as it had in life. Nothing too secret, nothing too sacred to be spared from the lens. Nothing you should be ashamed to show your fellow man, not even your death.