by Beauman, Ned
‘Professor Bailey? I’m sorry to interrupt, but we really both ought to be at the theatre by now.’
‘Just a minute, Mr Loeser.’ Bailey was already bent over the controls of the ultramarine accomplishment or whatever it was called. Loeser sighed and looked around the room. On a desk nearby was Bailey’s toy steam engine, and beneath it Loeser noticed a slim white book with a familiar yellow illustration of a row of shacks: The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft.
‘I had no idea you were a Lovecraft aficionado, Professor!’ said Loeser.
‘What?’ Bailey looked up from his machine, and then an expression of displeasure passed across his face as he saw the novella in Loeser’s hand. ‘Would you mind putting that back, please?’
Thumbing through the book, Loeser discovered that Bailey had even annotated some of the pages in pencil. He’d never seen such tiny knotted handwriting. ‘I should introduce you to . . .’ He was about to say ‘my friend Blimk’, but stopped himself ruefully. ‘You know the whole story of Lavicini, don’t you?’ he said instead. ‘Not just what Rackenham put in his travesty?’
‘Yes.’
‘The tentacles and the smell and so on. Doesn’t it seem to you sometimes as if Lovecraft could have written the story of the Teleportation Accident?’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed any commonalities,’ said Bailey. ‘Now, Mr Loeser, I’ve just come from the theatre and of course I shall be rushing back directly, but if you’ll excuse me I do need a short while longer to get this experiment running.’
Loeser put down the book. ‘It’s the first night! Why are you running an experiment now?’
‘I promise it won’t distract me from tonight’s Teleportation Accident. But I think Adele and the others were very anxious to see you. They didn’t seem to know what to do about Lavicini.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I assumed you knew – there’s been some sort of problem with your leading man. I didn’t catch all the details.’
In Berlin, from the beginning of his career, Loeser had observed that even among the most pugnacious of the New Expressionists a degree of nervousness was to be expected before any first night, but the atmosphere he found backstage at the Gorge Auditorium suggested a cast and crew awaiting the audience like sinners an apocalyptic judgement. Then Adele rushed up to him. ‘Egon, you idiot, where have you been? We’ve been calling your house for three hours! And what’s that smell?’
‘I wasn’t at my house. Forget about the smell. Tell me what’s happened.’
‘Dick’s in hospital.’
‘What?’
‘There was an accident. He was just walking along near that bakery on Lake Avenue and a car swerved to avoid a little girl running across the road—’
‘God in heaven, Dick’s been hit by a car?’
‘No, the car hit the bakery and it knocked down that big papier-mâché cupcake and the cupcake rolled straight into Dick. He’s got a concussion and they won’t let him leave until tomorrow morning. Who’s going to play Lavicini?’ Loeser thought of the time Hecht had put on a ‘performance’ of The Summoning of Everyman, which had consisted of informing the audience half an hour after the play had been due to start that the lead actor had drowned in a well (false) and that their tickets would not be refunded (true). ‘I thought maybe we could ask Rackenham,’ added Adele.
‘He wouldn’t know any of the script.’
‘But he’s so charming it almost wouldn’t matter.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Loeser straightened up to his full height. ‘I’ll have to play Lavicini.’
‘Oh, Egon, no!’
‘Well, who else? I don’t think we’re about to compromise on Ziesel. I’ll just need a last look through the script. Tell everyone not to worry. By the way, I want to return something you lent me.’ Loeser took from his pocket the pair of pearl-handled nail scissors that he’d brought with him from his house and held them out to Adele with a smug flourish.
‘Those don’t belong to me.’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘I’ve never seen them before.’
And as crucial as it was that Adele should be lying to him about this, it did look as if she were telling the truth. Discouraged, Loeser put down the nail scissors on the prop table and let her hurry away to put on her make-up. Half an hour later, he emerged from a dressing room in a costume that felt a bit dejected by the absence of Dick’s big surfer’s shoulders but was otherwise not too bad a fit. Hunched in a nearby corner, Mrs Jones, who played Montand in male drag, was repeating her three lines to herself over and over again with such heavy emphasis that she seemed to wish to exclude the possibility of any other grammatically valid sentence ever being formulated in English by anyone. Peering around the side of the front curtain at stage right, Loeser observed that the audience were already taking their seats. The Muttons had joined the Millikans for cocktails at the Athenaeum Club before the show, and now all four sat together in the front row – along with Jascha Drabsfarben. As if he stood before a favourite painting after consulting for the first time an essay on its symbolism, Loeser tried to find in the familiar features of Drabsfarben’s face all that he had now learned about his old acquaintance. But the spy still looked, to Loeser, like a composer.
Further back, Gould, Hecht, and Wurtzel passed back and forth a bag of peanuts. And even Plumridge was here with his wife. Loeser couldn’t see Rackenham or Gorge, but he did see Woodkin, who was saying something to a girl next to him who caught Loeser’s attention immediately. She was around twenty-two or twenty-three, with shiny hair the reddish-brown of a rooster’s hackles and dark, narrow eyes, and she wore an expression of such cold, fathomless, authoritative boredom that if you happened to catch sight of it at a public event like this one, you would not just feel stupid for enjoying what she was not enjoying, but also, somehow, ugly and culpable. Loeser couldn’t look away, until he remembered that in only a short while he was actually going to have to go out on stage in front of her.
Loeser didn’t feel nervous, though. He was Lavicini. He always had been. He could already see the lights of the Arsenal reflecting off the lagoon. Perhaps he wouldn’t even let Dick reclaim the role for the remaining four performances. There was still a short while before the curtain went up, so he went looking for Bailey, and soon found him talking to Adele next to the prop table.
‘Is everything ready for the Teleportation Accident, Professor?’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Bailey.
‘You’re sure? We haven’t had a chance to test it.’
‘You must trust the Professor, Egon,’ said Adele.
‘Can you describe it to me, at least?’
‘Well, since there are only four people on stage at the time, but Lavicini kills twenty-five people and a cat, I thought the best way to represent—’
‘ “Kills”?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You said Lavicini kills twenty-five people. Lavicini doesn’t kill anyone. The Teleportation Device goes wrong and twenty-five people die as a result. That’s why it’s called the Teleportation Accident.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Bailey. ‘I misspoke.’
‘I don’t mean to be pedantic but it’s just that if Lavicini destroyed the Théâtre des Encornets deliberately’ – Loeser coughed – ‘it would be . . . it would be a very different play.’
That cough, rather like a death rattle, was the faint and involuntary laryngeal expression of a vast and imperative internal crisis, because it was just at that moment that Loeser made a deduction about Bailey – making this deduction as a sort of breech birth, upside down, so that somehow he had the conclusions in his forceps before he could count off the premises – realising, all at once, that Bailey really did think Lavicini had destroyed the Théâtre des Encornets deliberately; that Bailey planned to do much the same to the Gorge Auditorium; that Bailey must have killed Marsh and Clarendon and Pelton and all those others – and remembering only afterwards so many separate facts
that he already knew but had never put together: that the State Department were working with Bailey on new weapons; that Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, thought everything Lovecraft wrote was true; that The Shadow Over Innsmouth was about human sacrifice; that Bailey had always seemed to know a lot more details about Adriano Lavicini than Rackenham had bothered to put in The Sorceror of Venice; that no one knew for certain which mysterious force was supposed to power the Teleportation Device; that Drabsfarben cherished some secret about Bailey too big and dangerous, somehow, to exploit for blackmail; and even that there had been a certain piscine calm to Bailey’s expression when Marsh’s body had tumbled out of the storage cupboard in the basement of the Obediah Laboratories on that day in 1938.
‘Excuse me for a moment, Professor,’ said Loeser. Then he turned and walked as fast as he could to the costume rails, where Ziesel, who had been promoted this year from sound and lighting technician to stage manager, stood with a clipboard. Loeser didn’t know if he could apprehend Bailey on his own, but Ziesel had bulk. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
‘I think we might have lost one of the carnival masks,’ said Ziesel.
‘Come with me right away,’ Loeser repeated. So Ziesel followed him back to the prop table – where Bailey and Adele were no longer waiting.
Loeser looked around. Dismissing an unhelpful recollection of the time Rackenham had taken Adele away from him at the corset factory, he was about to begin a search for the pair. But then he realised what must have happened.
Bailey knew that he knew.
Loeser’s cough alone couldn’t have been enough to betray him, but something in his eyes, or something in his voice, or just something in the psychic torsion of the space between them must have told Bailey that Loeser had finally worked it all out.
‘Fire!’ Loeser shouted. No one noticed. ‘Fire!’ he shouted again, and this time a couple of student stagehands turned to look at him. ‘Fire! There’s a fire! There’s a huge, raging fire!’
‘Egon, what in heaven’s name are you doing?’ said Ziesel.
Loeser ran past the flats to the curtain and pushed through it to the stage. There was some confused applause. ‘Fire!’ he shouted. No one moved. ‘Fire! Fire! Fire! Feuer! Fire! Get out if you value your lives!’ And Stent Mutton was the first one to rise.
Running back into the wings, he almost collided with Slate. ‘Make sure everyone gets out,’ he said to the janitor. ‘Everyone!’
‘Where’s the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just do as I say.’
Backstage, Loeser found Ziesel again. ‘If your stage fright was really that bad, Egon, you could just have—’ began Ziesel before Loeser grabbed his arm and pulled him towards an exit. At a creditable pace they sprinted together across the lawn to the Obediah Laboratories, and then up the stairs to room 11. Loeser pushed open the door.
‘No further, please, Mr Loeser,’ said Bailey. With one hand he covered his assistant’s mouth to stop her screaming, and with the other he held the pearl-handled nail scissors to her carotid artery, the two blades hinged halfway open like a drafting compass ready to plot a small circle on the pale plane of her neck. Behind him, the heavy steel door of the teleportation chamber was wide open, and the ultrasonic accordionist was making a noise like a portable vacuum cleaner. Loeser thought he could feel a static itch in the hairs on his arms.
‘We’ve evacuated the theatre,’ said Loeser. ‘I don’t know what your “novel theatrical effect” really was, but it won’t hurt anyone now.’
‘Then Miss Hister will have to be the sole subject of this experiment,’ said Bailey. ‘There is void in things. Remember that, Mr Loeser, whatever happens. There is void in things. Cross this country in a wheelbarrow and you will see it.’ Unsteadily, as if practising some awkward new dance step with a reluctant partner, he began to pull Adele backwards towards the teleportation chamber. Loeser’s hands were both fists of panic but he didn’t know what else to do except stand there next to Ziesel and watch. He’d known Adele for twelve years, longer than anyone on this continent, and she was going to be made a human sacrifice right in front of him.
Then Bailey, not seeing where he was going, knocked the back of his thigh on the edge of a desk. And he relaxed his grip on Adele for an instant, but it wasn’t quite enough for her to get free – until she lunged sideways, grabbed the toy steam engine from the desk where Loeser had put it down earlier, and jammed it backwards into Bailey’s left eye.
Bailey gave a surprisingly feminine scream and thrust the nail scissors into Adele’s flank. ‘Adele!’ Loeser shouted. Which was when Ziesel bowed his head, charged forward like a rugby player, and propelled Bailey backwards into the teleportation chamber.
‘Dieter, don’t let him close the door,’ cried Adele through tears of pain. ‘There’s a time lock! You’ll be trapped in there with him!’
So Loeser, galvanised at last, made his own dash forward. But just as his fingertips brushed the handle, the door of the teleportation chamber swung shut with a terminal clunk. With one hand, Ziesel had been trying to wrench the nail scissors out of Bailey’s grasp. With the other, he’d locked himself inside.
Loeser punched the door in frustration and then dropped to his knees to attend to Adele, who lay curled on her side. The twin wounds from the nail scissors, like bite marks from a vampire bat, didn’t look especially deep, and Loeser was grateful that he’d designed Adele’s ballerina costume in tough Neo-Expressionist stingray leather instead of the more traditional silk. Near by lay the toy steam engine, its tinplate pilot slick with optical gore.
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Adele. ‘But we have to save Dieter.’
Loeser pressed his ear to the steel door for a moment, but he could hear nothing from the other side. ‘How can we get into the chamber?’
‘I don’t know. Run. Find someone.’
Loeser kissed her on the lips for the second time in his life and then did as he was told. Outside, a crowd was milling around by the doors of the Gorge Auditorium. Mrs Jones, still in costume, stood hugging a purposeless fire extinguisher. He rushed up to the Muttons.
‘Egon, what in the world is going on?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘We need help. We don’t know what to do.’
When Loeser returned to room 11 with the Muttons, Adele was sitting up against the wall with her hand pressed against her punctures. She explained to the Muttons about Ziesel and the time lock.
‘Can’t we just break the mechanism somehow?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘Even if we could, it’s on the inside of the door,’ said Adele.
‘Disconnect it from Bailey’s device?’ said Loeser.
‘The timer’s already started – that won’t do anything.’
‘Then we need one of those oxya-such-and-such cutting torches,’ said Mutton. ‘Like my bank robbers used in Silent Alarm.’
‘Dr Pelton used to have one of those for taking apart his old rocket prototypes,’ said Adele.
‘Where would it be now?’
‘I don’t know. They cleared out his lab after he . . . After the Professor . . .’
‘We’ll split up and search,’ said Mutton.
So Loeser went down to the basement, but he tried every storage locker that wasn’t locked, even Marsh’s erstwhile tomb, without success. Upstairs, he found Mutton returning from a similarly fruitless search of the nearby laboratories.
‘There must be some other way.’
‘I know how to to to get in.’
Loeser turned: it was Slate.
Hobbling as fast as he could, the janitor led Loeser along the corridor, up a flight of stairs, and along another corridor, where there was a lavatory with a padlock on the door and a sign that said ‘Out of Order’. Loeser realised that they must be directly above room 11. With a key from the loop on his belt, Slate got them into the lavatory, in which Loeser observed an extendable metal ladder leaning against the wall and a n
eat square gap in the floor about two feet on each side. Then Slate got down on his hands and knees, reached down into the hole, and hauled up what Loeser recognised from its grey rubberised panels as a section of the teleportation chamber’s ceiling. Evidently not every inch of the chamber had really been lined with lead.
Frightened, Loeser peered down into the room below. Ziesel lay on his back next to the platform, his head in a halo of blood, his eyes wide open, nail scissors still protruding from his neck. The struggle had probably ended within a few seconds of the door shutting.
Bailey, however, was gone.
With no one to rescue and no one to apprehend, Loeser turned back to Slate. ‘Did you set all this up yourself?’ he said, gesturing at the hole and the ladder.
Slate nodded.
‘Why? Why would you want to go down into there while the time lock is on?’
Slate didn’t reply, but instead turned and went out of the lavatory. Loeser followed him back down two flights of stairs to the basement, where Slate unlocked a storage locker in a far corner with another key from the loop of his belt. Then, with an oddly showmanlike sweep of his hand, he stepped aside.
Here, Loeser saw, was a strange cousin of the antique wooden chest in his own house, except that it less resembled a police evidence box than the collection of holy relics in some decrepit Black Sea chapel. Slate had installed six little wooden shelves inside the storage locker, and arranged carefully on those shelves were the same varieties of private female oddments that Loeser himself had been puzzling over for four years: knickers, stockings, garter belts, brassieres, hairclips, lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, nail files, perfume bottles, handkerchiefs, sleep masks. No jewellery, though.
‘Do these all belong to Adele?’ he said.
Slate nodded.
‘She puts them in the teleportation chamber, and then you climb down the ladder and steal them and bring them back here?’