by Sean Stewart
“Oh, not yet,” I lied quickly, smiling my friendliest smile to put her at ease.
Celia extracted a stick of gum from a handsome snakeskin purse. “Keeps me from wanting to eat all the time,” she explained. “Want some? Sure? Well, if you do…” She slit the wrapper with a practiced thumbnail. “So—what do you want to know?”
For the first time, I actually saw something to like in Celia Wu. I had pegged her as a preacher’s daughter with a sinner’s body, but of course there was more to her than that. She was tremulous, but not weak. A first leaf in spring, pale green, breeze-blown, but firmly attached to the tree. Her perfume was delicate and faintly herbal, not too flowery. She chewed gum like a schoolgirl. I approved. Never trust anyone who keeps their mouth closed for a whole stick.
Irregularly shaped; organic but not full grown. Who knew how she would end up? Apparently she had real talent as an actress, though she was more in demand for her looks. By the time her firm breasts were sagging and her smile had worn through, what would she have grown into?
Well, she wouldn’t starve, that was for sure. She had just inherited security for many years to come. I shrugged and smiled again. “So how did you come to be involved with Faustus?”
“Easy. I was working with Mr. Delaney on a TV movie called Tyger Tyger. It’s going to hit air in April.” She smiled, showing small white teeth webbed with green gum. “Anyway, David said he might have another role for me if I was interested, and I said yes.”
“Before you even knew the part?”
She stopped chewing and nodded seriously. “He’s a great director. And when I heard that Jonathan Mask would be working on it too…He was always a big hero of mine,” she finished quietly. The words were barbed, and stuck in her throat.
“You don’t sound happy.”
She stared me right in the eye. “Why should I? He’s dead.”
Uh, sure. There was something straight and forthright about the way she delivered her lines, but she wasn’t a straight and forthright person. She was an actress, and she knew how to sound like a sincere young woman.—But she didn’t sound like a sincere Celia Wu. Celia Wu would have trembled more; there would have been a flutter, an abruptness lacking in what she’d said. A shaper would say that most people glitter when they are behaving spontaneously; when they pretend, it covers them with an even gloss, like a layer of varnish. “Come on, Celia. That doesn’t wash coming from the woman who set the Press Secretary’s spies on Mr. Mask.”
She looked at me speculatively. I was surprised to see no hint of shame in her squared shoulders and hardening face. “So you found out about that.” She flicked her hair back with a decisive hand. “Whatever my feelings about Jonathan Mask, he was certainly not a fit example to hold up before the children of the country. I did what I thought was right.”
Vengeance is mine…
“Worked out well, didn’t it? I mean, that’s a lot of money you just came into.”
Celia’s calm was slipping badly now; a hunted look crept into her eyes. “As God is my witness, I don’t know why he did it. It’s crazy. Maybe he wanted it to look like I killed him.”
I looked at her incredulously. “So he made out a will a month ago and then hoped he would get murdered?”
“I don’t know why that monster did anything!” Celia shouted. “He was a hypocrite, and a disgrace to the President. He didn’t believe in anything. He took me to his home just to make fun of my beliefs—beliefs I learned from him. His house is a devil’s workshop, full of technology as bad and worse as the stuff in his costume. He never cared for anything or anyone. If you really want to know what I think, I think he left me the estate as a cruel joke.”
And then she wavered, and I could feel the thin worm of doubt sliding between her thoughts. Her eyes were wide. Nervous, and a little scared. And, yes, excited. Tasting the possibility that she might have pushed him over the edge. Celia spent a lot of time thinking about sin; its glamour held a dark fascination for her, as for so many of the children of the Redemption era. Angela Johnson. Rutger White. Me. “You—you don’t think he—took his own life, do you? Because of…?”
I shrugged without answering. “According to the other actors, you stepped out of the Green Room just before it was time to shoot…” I paused a minute for her to react, and then finished, “Did you see anything of interest?”
She frowned and then looked back at me. “Sorry. The ladies’ room is only a few doors down, and I was in a hurry.—Wait a minute, there was one thing. Just as I came out I saw Tara running down the hall.”
“Why would that be unusual?”
Celia looked at me as if it were obvious. “Tara never runs! She’s always so…And she looked odd,” Celia said, frowning with concentration. “Her arms, they were in front of her, rather than at her sides like you’d expect. Almost like…” She trailed off, unable to get it.
Almost as if she were carrying something, I thought to myself. Most, most interesting.
But Celia had shown no startle reaction at all when I asked about her absence from the Green Room, and no trace of a lie. She might be a good enough actress to lie to me once in a way I would catch, so she could lie to me later in a way I wouldn’t, but frankly I didn’t think her capable of so much subtlety.
“Tell me about David Delaney,” I said.
Celia took a moment to compose herself. “What is there to say? He’s the best I’ve ever worked with.”
“Why?” I took the ramp off Magdalene and onto the bridge.
Celia’s eyebrows wrinkled prettily as she stared at the river. She picked through her words slowly and carefully, as if her ideas were small animals, and any sudden pronouncement might scare them off. “David understands people,” she said at last. “I guess that’s it. He has an incredible ability to make you feel the character, live the character. He demands that you care, that you commit completely. It can be draining, but when you do commit, your performance is a lot better, credit?”
“What is Mr. Delaney like as a person?”
“Great. That’s one of the reasons he’s so good at his job. I guess different people have different styles. I don’t like working with women like Jean Mack who always yell and scream and stomp around the stage and bully their communicators.” I bet you don’t, I thought. Celia wasn’t the kind to take bullying well; strong enough to resent it, but too weak to fight it. Probably she’d do terrible work. “I don’t think women should have that kind of responsibility. We’re not really fitted, are we?”
Celia’s face fell as she looked over at the killer hunter lady and realized I wasn’t likely to agree. She hurried on. “David is the exact opposite. He’s always very intelligent, very understanding, very calm. He never rushes you, and he never makes you feel bad—but he asks for your best work, and keeps at you until he gets it. And for all Jean’s stomping and raging, she doesn’t understand people half so well as David does.”
This was sincere: Delaney as Christ. A potential for hero-worship in Celia? She was just growing up, and young enough that she hadn’t learned to make it without the help of others. I envied her.
We reached the NT building and I parked the car. “Tara Allen?”
“She thinks she’s a man,” Celia said venomously.
“Did you know about her relationship with Jonathan Mask?”
“Indirectly. They were very discreet.” Green and sour, bitterness behind the last word. A sore point.
“Uh oh.”
“What?”
“The media,” I growled, as a battery of hungry glass eyes turned towards us.
“Why are they here?”
“Probably found out you got the money, at a guess. And like Mr. Delaney said, I think you might want to spend some of it on a good lawyer.” Celia nodded, biting her lip in comic dismay. As Gering and the NBC crew moved in for the kill, I stepped aside. “I’m not supposed to be on camera, so I’m afraid I’m going to throw you to the wolves.”
Celia grinned at me and started walking
for NT’s front doors. “Hey, I do this for a living, remember?”
A gauntlet of reporters had formed outside the glass doors. “Miss Wu? Miss Wu—did you know that Mr. Mask had willed you his money?”
“Not at all,” she said, smiling in polished bafflement. “It was totally unexpected.”
“Did you know Mr. Mask well?” asked a distinguished looking NT staffer.
A surge of bitterness cut into her, receded. “I spent a lot of time with him, back at the beginning of the shoot. He was a legend, the greatest. I used to dream about meeting him.” She stroked the crucifix at her neck. Hm. Had Mask taken advantage of a schoolgirl crush? It would explain much, including her reaction to Tara. Yes, that or something like it. It wasn’t everything, but it might be a piece. (Not a leaf so much as a spear of grass. Plucked out, with a bit of the root bitten off by Mask, a little boy in a summer backyard.) Celia’s eyes returned to the present. “Jonathan Mask brought God into our homes and to our hearts, and for that he will always be remembered.”
“Oh, Celia,” I whispered.
She had decided to follow the Government line, now that he was dead. Why smirch the reputation of all communicators, why undo the good that Mask had done? Oh Celia, Celia: Jonathan taught you something after all, didn’t he? Taught you to smile, and frown, and pose, and lie; taught you to act for your God.
“Forgive us our failures, as we forgive those who fail us,” I said softly.
Gering pounced in, thrusting his microphone at Celia. “At first the police claimed that Mask’s death was purely accidental. Now they’re back on the case. Would you care to comment on the implication of foul play?”
“What the police do is their own business. They do it very well, and I’m sure they won’t need any help from me.”
“No doubt. But—forgive me, Miss Wu—if it is foul play, money is an old and honourable motive, isn’t it?”
Ah. Thanks, Mr. Gering, for doing my work for me. The bastard had hit a nerve. I felt a spike of panic in Celia. “You can’t think that I would kill Jonathan Mask!” Celia spoke proudly now, using all her communicator’s skills to draw a mantle of nobility about her slender shoulders. “I am not a traitor to my faith, sir. I am still trying to forgive Mr. Mask’s murderer; someday I will. I would not risk my soul to defy the Lord’s commandment. God will judge me, and Jonathan Mask, and his killer: not you or I.”
Standing on the sidewalk, I had to laugh. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.
And the evening and the morning
were the fourth day.
Seven
The reds weren’t always openly anti-intellectual. At first they had courted my father; he was a respected figure in a university town, after all. And moreover, the Reds were fascinated by things Greek. They loved the Stoics, and the stern tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; in the judgement of Oedipus they read a parable on the implacability of God.
At first my father treated them with benign indifference, but when their influence grew, he became worried. When the Red alumni lobby installed radical fundamentalists on the board of governors the trouble began. They slashed research allowances, especially in the sciences. Professional programs were stabilized, fine arts rolled back. The Religious Studies faculty was retooled into a fundamentalist Divinity degree.
My father was not a vague, bookish man. He saw the rise of civilization as being fundamentally linked to technological progress. “Without the bronze-smithing of the Mycenaeans, there would have been no Athenians with the leisure to be Stoics!” he griped. He argued in committees, he wrote letters to scholarly journals. At last, trying to lighten the tension of the debate, he contributed a gently satirical article to the student paper.
That was when the hate mail began. A few days later a rock smashed the living room window. When I dropped in for one of my infrequent visits, he was still picking the shards off the living room floor.
I was tired and sick. I had just seen my first capital make, Tommy Scott, go kicking and jerking into Hell on TV. I let my father persuade me to leave the stone-throwing alone, let the police handle it.
On my next visit I was out late, restless, prowling the moon-streaked streets for memories. I didn’t get back until almost two, slipping up the alley where I’d ambushed so many obnoxious eleven-year-old boys. I almost walked through the gate before I heard a rustle near the back corner of the house.
My hand lay on the latch like a cloud and I held my breath.—Yes.
A scratch, a spark, a stifled breath. He was crouched by the corner, just below the study window, looking at something in his hand. The breeze was blowing to me, and I could smell gasoline vapour twined with the honeysuckle.
I eased the latch up, swung the gate soundlessly forward, took three silent steps into the yard, keeping the big oak between us as he tried another match. This one caught, and he tossed it at the side of the house. Rage made my hands shake in the darkness: I would show him hell, this moralizing bastard who tried to set my father on fire.
The wood caught with a big-bellied whuff. I waited the last half-second until the gate swung loudly back on its latch. The arsonist whirled around, looking at the back of the yard. His eyes had lost their dark adaption, and I wasn’t where he was looking. By the time he picked me up I was within three strides.
He bolted, but I tackled him at the knees as he tried to jump the fence. His head whipped down into the honeysuckle, slamming into the chain-link beneath. He shrieked and grabbed for his mouth.
“You goddamn son of a bitch!” I yelled, yanking him up by the collar of his leather jacket. He whimpered, dazed.
I swung him around on a fast pivot, kicking out his feet and throwing him into the wall of the house. The air punched out of him. I leaned in, not bothering to hit him anymore: from the way he clutched at his mouth it was obvious the bastard had steel faith but a glass jaw. The stink of singed leather rose around us; he smelled it about the time he felt the hair on the nape of his neck melt. He shrieked again as he realized I was using him to smother the fire.
Awakened by the fight, my father came out with a flashlight. The arsonist’s face was criss-crossed by chain-welts, and his breathing was fast and shallow. His lip was cut and curled up on one side, and several of his teeth were broken. Blood leaked from his mouth and nose. “Jesus Christ,” my father whispered.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” I said brutally. “He would have roasted you alive.”
The broken man shook his head, then gasped in pain. “No, we were going to warn…It was only—a warning,” he stammered. I decided to give him a shot of Sleepy-Time to knock him out and dull the pain. He cowered against the side of the building as he saw me slip the syringe from my pocket. “How does it feel, this time?” I said, tasting his fright as he cringed away from the needle, sure it was loaded with Chill or something worse. “You people know the power of fear, don’t you?”
“Please Diane.”
It was my father pleading.
Pleading! He laid his thin hand on my forearm. With a shock I felt that he too was afraid of me. “You’re getting more like them all the time,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was an admission of failure.
The memory of his old face, sad and weary, haunts me to this day.
After Celia had managed to fight her way through the barricade of reporters, I went looking for Daniel Vachon. I found him in the dressing room of soundstage #228, a small affair a far cry from the grandiose #329. “God bless,” I said, waving to him from out of his mirror.
“Oh—hi.” He turned around and beckoned me in. “Come in and sit down, if you can find a place.”
I settled on a large trunk filled with hairspray and colourant.
Vachon was back at the mirror, studying the angles of his face. I reminded myself that narcissism was part of his job. “So: with you back in town there must be something funny about Jon’s death. Was he murdered?” Vachon tried a streak of deep-brown eye-liner—disapproved; wiped it off wit
h a piece of tissue.
“Maybe.”
“Tch tch. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,” Vachon hummed. He liked the glamour of being part of an investigation, and I was willing to play along. All the witnesses agreed that he had been in the Green Room, telling a story intended to be funny, when they heard the capacitor discharge. He might not be my favourite person, but he wasn’t a killer.
“Tell me about Mask and Tara Allen,” I said abruptly.
Vachon held one eye closed with a finger and tried a different shade of eye-liner, a metallic orange. It didn’t do much against his tanned skin. “They were an item—I guess you know that or you wouldn’t have asked. A strange pair. You wouldn’t have thought of it before it happened.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, just their personalities, I guess. Jon was very cold and Redemptionist and intellectual—or so we thought. Tara is none of those things. She can be cool, but that’s her manner, not her nature,” said Vachon, making the distinction neatly as he pricked out a thin line over his other eye. He stopped a minute and addressed me in the mirror. “Tara is smart, you understand, but close to the ground. Jon was very…” He waved his hand vaguely upwards. “Of course, they might have been closer together than I had imagined,” he finished slyly, sliding his gaze away as he tinkered with some powder.
“By which you mean…?”
“Oh, not much.” He sat back and studied the effect. “Just that maybe Jon was putting us all on.” Vachon turned and looked at me frankly. “That will didn’t sound exactly pious now, did it? Not very Red. And if I’d been Tara, I would have been not a little displeased. I mean, one assumed that she would be in for a hefty cut.”
He had a point there, no doubt. Money, as Gering had suggested, was an old and honourable motive for murder. So was revenge. I shrugged non-committally. Daniel was…quick. He had an actor’s talent for switching affectations at a moment’s notice. But he was tougher than someone like Celia—hard-hided.
“There. Am I beautiful?” He looked in the mirror and grimaced. “Oh well. What’s good enough for Genetech is good enough for me.” Another affectation. Bio-tech was all but banned—appearing in their last ditch commercial blitz was calculated to cement his iconoclastic image. So much for another line of medical research. Daniel caught my eye again in the glass. “You should talk to Tara about Jon. Or Celia, for that matter.”