Puzzle for Players

by Patrick Quentin

  ‘Thank you.” Wessler’s voice was cold, unappeased. Then, suddenly, it changed; it lost all its aggressiveness. He sounded like a frightened little boy. “What then is mit dem Dagonet Theater los? Why must it always with mirrors be?”

  That was a question I wished I could answer. I was just about to wheedle him off the wire when Dr. Lenz rose from his seat and took the receiver away from me. For the next five minutes he was pouring grave German polysyllables into the mouthpiece. My German was extremely rusty. I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  Finally Lenz abandoned the telephone. “Mr. Duluth, I have promised Herr Wessler to go around to his apartment before the rehearsal. Will you accompany me?”

  I was due at my office for a conference with my publicity agent but I decided to let publicity go hang. This was a crisis.

  Lenz explained what I had never thought to ask him, that his main object in coming to New York last night had been to discuss with Wessler the condition of his half-brother, Wolfgang von Brandt. Although I had known nothing about it, Lenz had obtained Wessler’s permission to have Von Brandt transferred from the Thespian Hospital to his own private sanitorium.

  It had been at my request that Lenz had interested himself in Wolfgang von Brandt and I was glad to hear he was following it up. The doctors at the Thespian Hospital had more or less given up hope of restoring Wessler’s half-brother to sanity, but I’d had a hunch that Lenz, if anyone, might be able to help him.

  The story of Wessler and Von Brandt was one of the most tragic in the history of the stage. For years they had been the leading figures in the Viennese theater. Wessler, of course, had been universally accepted as Austria’s most celebrated actor. Von Brandt had been business manager, secretary, understudy and general factotum to the Great Wessler. He had even written several vehicles for him. The two of them had been inseparable, a twentieth-century Castor and Pollux.

  Some people claimed that Von Brandt had always wanted to act, that he had as much genius as his brother. They said that Wessler had deliberately held him back, had dominated him by the force of his own aggressive personality. I didn’t know about that. I only knew what the world knew, that Wessler had been ready to give up his entire career for Von Brandt’s sake.

  On that most notorious day in current history when Hitler decided to give himself Austria for a birthday present, Wessler had been playing to enormous business in one of his brother’s shows in Vienna. Overnight, when ardent Nazis were springing up like toadstools and Hitler was wondering if he dared drive across the border, an hysterical wave of anti-Semitism urged through the Theater and the news spread like wildfire that Von Brandt’s father had been a Jew.

  He was through, just like that. He was hounded out of the theater by people who, a few hours before, had been applauding his dialogue. His home was despoiled; he was just one of a hundred thousand refugees.

  If Wessler had wanted to, he could have denied his half-brother and retained his enormous prestige. He could probably have received a crown of bay leaves from Der Fuehrer himself, for his own heredity was more Nordic than the dramatic personae of Die Walkiire. But Wessler wasn’t that sort of man. In one of the last broadcasts before the radio was stifled, he told millions of listeners-in exactly what he thought of the rape of Austria and what it would mean to the theater, art and culture generally. He then smuggled his brother across the border into Switzerland. The two of them had come triumphantly to the States only to meet with the tragic airplane accident.

  That had been some time ago and every bulletin from the Thespian Hospital on Von Brandt’s condition had been bad. It had been a shattering blow to Wessler. That

  was why, apart from anything else, I was so desperately hopeful that Lenz might be able to help.

  As a taxi threaded us through the tangled cross-town traffic toward the Austrian’s hotel, I ventured to ask Lenz if he had an opinion on Von Brandt’s chances.

  Lenz smiled his serene, Godlike smile. “It is still early, Mr. Duluth, but I am not unhopeful. It is an extremely interesting case and I have a feeling that the trouble is possibly far more psychological than it is pathological. If I am right and if my proposed treatment brings results, Herr Von Brandt may well be a cured man in the fairly near future.”

  That was the best news I had heard in a long time.

  “You know, of course, Mr. Duluth, that Von Brandt’s chief delusion lies in the fact that he has lost his own identity and believes himself to be his own brother. The intimacy between the two of them and the circumstances of their removal from Austria makes such a confusion of identities perfectly understandable. At the moment I am fostering his belief that he is in fact the Great Wessler. He is even learning Wessler’s role in Troubled Waters. He finds the English difficult and it is a good mental exercise.”

  That didn’t make sense to me. But it wasn’t meant to. It was Lenz’s pigeon.

  The taxi eased to the curb outside Wessler’s old-fashioned hotel and the elevator took us up to his suite where an Austrian valet let us into a large living-room whose ponderous luxury was reminiscent of the days before the gilt had been knocked off the gingerbread of interior decoration. Wessler was sitting at a table, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and working with nervous concentration on a new clay statuette.

  As soon as he saw us, he fumbled the spectacles hastily into his pocket and moved to join us, his beard and his striking shock of blond hair gleaming in the light from the window.

  He gripped Dr. Lenz’s hand. I shall never forget that titanic moment when beard met beard. It was like Jupiter and Wotan getting together at some celestial convention.

  Apart from their brief encounter at the Dagonet, they had never met before. Wessler was peering into Lenz’s face.

  “I am right, yes,” he said excitedly. “Last night I feel I have seen you before. Now I remember. On the train to Salzburg in 1935. We share the same compartment.”

  I had meant to warn Lenz of Wessler’s extraordinary memory for faces. But it wasn’t necessary. He took that remark in his stride.

  “Indeed, my friend. I remember it well. You were good enough to recommend to me the excellent cuisine at the Patzenhof. But at that time I did not realize I was traveling with the great Wessler. You were, I believe, employing another name?”

  Wessler seemed a trifle taken aback to find himself confronted with a memory that rivaled his own. Then he beamed: “Jah! Always I use incognito when I journeys make. When one is well-known to the peoples it can be tiresome with the autographs. But tell me of my beloved Wolfgang. He is with you. You make him again in the head well, yes? Those doctors who say he is always to be sick. Fools! And I see him soon. You let me, yes?”

  “I do not think it would be wise at the moment,” said Lenz gravely. “But later—perhaps.”

  “You tell me all, no?” Wessler pulled him across the room to a Recamier couch where they sat very close together, shaking their beards at each other and talking in rapid, enthusiastic German.

  In a chair discreetly apart, I glanced around that long, over-stuffed room. I had been there several times before it suddenly dawned on me that something was different— something seemed to be missing. I couldn’t pin it down until I noticed that the two side walls were bare. In the center of each was a large square patch where the brocade wall-paper was several shades less faded. I remembered then.

  When I had been there last, a couple of days previously, there had been two full-length mirrors hanging over those patches. Wessler had had them both removed.

  It was only too pathetically clear that he’d gotten rid of them on account of what had happened the night before at the Dagonet.

  To some people, that might have seemed ludicrous— a man of Wessler’s stature getting so scared of mirrors that he couldn’t endure having one in his apartment. But I understood. For a long time after the conflagration which killed my wife, I’d been the same way about fire. Even now, occasionally, the very thought of flames could get me in a cold sweat. I k
new how it was having to fight against a blind, irrational phobia like that.

  And it started me worrying about the Dagonet all over again.

  The German duologue was still going full steam when the buzzer rang and the valet let in Gerald Gwynne. My juvenile was looking very young and blase in a deliberately clumsy tweed suit which some expensive tailor had built around his personality and his Pennsylvania Dutch side-whiskers. If there’d been any women along, he would have brought out their worst instincts.

  He grinned at me, gave Wessler an ironical Nazi salue and I introduced him to Lenz.

  “A remarkably hirsute bunch, Peter,” he murmured. “You ought to grow Dundrearies and be in the swim.”

  Wessler was staring suspiciously. “What is it you wish?”

  “I’ve come to retrieve Mirabelle’s brandy.” Gerald’s long lashes drooped with a diffidence which was slightly derisive. “She was tactless enough to leave it here when she came home with you last night. Knowing that you look upon liquor as a snare of the Devil, she sent me around to remove the temptation.”

  Wessler’s lips tightened but he didn’t say anything.

  “And to make amends,” continued Gerald, “for having left you exposed to the Devil all night, Mirabelle wants me to tell you that she renounces all claim to the first stage dressing-room. From now on it is officially yours. And she hopes that the mirror will continue to suit you.”

  Behind the thin veil of flippancy, Gerald’s manner was unnecessarily insulting, and his reference to the mirror had most unfortunate undertones. I waited uneasily for the sparks to fly.

  They flew.

  Wessler rose to his full interminable height. “So Miss Rue hopes the rnirror suit me, yes? After what she had done, she sends her—her … she send you to insult me with impertinences?”

  “Not to insult you with impertinences—just to retrieve her brandy.”

  “Brandy!” Wessler’s eyes paled to a light, dangerous gray. “Perhaps you say this to Miss Rue and her brandy. She is an actress—yes. A good actress. Were that not so, I would never permit her to play in the same theater with me. In Austria decent peoples have a name for such a

  woman as this who all the time liquor drinks, who keeps company with boys young enough to be her…”

  “I’d stop that sentence just where it is if I were you.” Gerald had flushed a deep crimson.

  For a moment I thought someone simply had to sock someone.

  Then Gerald said stiffly: “If you’d tell me where to find Mirabelle’s brandy, I will stop darkening your door.”

  Wessler stood absolutely still. “I see no bottle of brandy here.”

  “Mirabelle left it in the hall last night”

  “I see no brandy.”

  “But perhaps you see a hall?”

  Wessler jerked his head toward the door. Gerald disappeared. In a few moments he was back, holding a bottle in his hands.

  He was smiling. “As you observe, you did have the brandy. Thanks. And I’ll make a point of delivering your message to Mirabelle. I think it should amuse her.”

  As he moved to the door, I noticed a rather curious thing. The bottle which he had in his hand was more than half full. Last night when Comstock had died, when I had asked Mirabelle for some brandy, she had told me the bottle was empty.

  “Is that the brandy Mirabelle had at the Dagonet last night, Gerald?” I asked.

  “Yes.” The boy’s smokey eyes were suddenly on guard. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  Gerald stared at me a moment longer, then with a vague smile at Lenz he left.

  I don’t know why, but that whole brandy situation was beginning to worry me. I was worried at the bottle’s ability to empty and fill itself mechanically. I was also worried that Gerald should have been sent all the way cross-town to collect it. But then, I was worried about the whole setup. The three-way Wessler-Mirabelle-Gerald feud seemed to be getting out of control. I’d known motiveless feuds in the theater before and I’d seen just how much havoc they could play with a show.

  I seemed to be getting more than my share of havoc.

  Wessler and Lenz talked for a while longer, but Wessler’s thoughts were obviously straying. He looked glum and exhausted as if his dog fight with Gerald had taken an awful lot out of him. He was still brooding when we left.

  As soon as we were out in the street, I asked anxiously:

  “Well, what do you think of Wessler? I mean, what kind of shape d’you think he’s in?”

  Lenz smiled, a brief comforting smile. “I would say he is as sane and healthy as any man I know,” he said. “If I were his physician there is only one thing that would give me cause to worry.”

  “You mean his mirror phobia?”

  “You may perhaps know, Mr. Duluth, that I have a strong aversion to psychiatric catch-phrases. I believe that all so-called phobias have a pathological explanation, especially when the subject is as sane as Herr Wessler.”

  I tried to look intelligent.

  “You have doubtless noticed how he peers into every face; how he is eager to recognize a person that he may have seen before.”

  I nodded.

  “You may also have noticed his spectacles and how quickly he put them away when we arrived. That, coupled with his dislike of mirrors…”

  “Proves he’s going nuts like his half-brother?” I threw in nervously.

  “It proves nothing of the sort.” Dr. Lenz’s voice was severe. “It proves one thing only. Mr. Wessler is far more short-sighted than he would have us believe. He is worried about it. That is why he is so anxious to assure himself—and incidentally others—that his sight is as good as his memory. And that is why he could be very easily upset if anything he saw—in a mirror for example—was different from what he expected to see.”

  As he spoke Dr. Lenz waved an unexpectedly frivolous pair of wool mittens at a passing taxi.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked.

  “With your permission I would like to visit the Dagonet before the rehearsal.” Lenz drew the mittens over his fingers. There was a strangely forbidding gleam in his eye. “In the light of what we have learnt this morning, it seems clear to me now what must have happened last night in that dressing-room to cause Mr. Comstock’s death.”

  While I was still gawping, he opened the door of the taxi and bowed.

  “After you, Mr. Duluth.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  AS the taxi took us to the Dagonet Dr. Lenz sat very erect in his seat, large hands on knees, gray eyes fixed with apparent interest on the meter. After a duly dramatic interval he asked: “Perhaps you would be good enough to refresh my memory on exactly what you and Miss Pat-tison noticed in the way of tangible disturbances last night when you searched backstage.”

  I ran through the tangible disturbances, the broken mirror and the crushed statuette we had found in Wessler’s dressing-room, and the shattered panel of glass in the passage.

  Dr. Lenz nodded as if extremely satisfied. “And this morning Herr Wessler reported the loss of his modeling clay.”

  He seemed even more satisfied by the lost modeling clay. I was completely at sea.

  And the sight of the Dagonet itself wasn’t particularly a sedative. By daylight it contrived to look even more evil that it had at night. Several fat pigeons were perched on the bosoms of the caryatids. They were cocking their heads and peering down at the traffic. They annoyed me intensely. And weren’t they omens of disaster? Or was I getting my birds mixed?

  I pushed open the forbidding iron grille for Lenz and preceded him down the cavernous alley to the stage door and past the doorman’s room where Mac was stooped over his table with the Siamese cat squatting at his side.

  I’d forgotten that damn cat and the ominous label which I had removed from its neck and which was still lying crumpled up in my pocket. After a moment’s thought, I decided that the cat qualified as a tangible disturbance. I told Lenz about it and showed him the label.

  That
seemed to faze him as if it did not fit to some pattern he was arranging in his mind. He paused in his majestic ascent of the stone stairs, a furrow wrinkling his forehead.

  “I can only suppose,” he said very gravely, “that this was another manifestation of the malicious influence which I cannot but believe is at work against your production.”

  Which wasn’t a very exhilarating remark.

  When we reached stage level, I saw at once that Eddie Troth had already started one of his regular fixing-up jobs. The fragments of the glass panel which had been broken the night before were swept into a neat pile in a comer and a new panel was propped against the wall, ready to be inserted in the door.

  Lenz seemed interested in the pile of fragments. He stooped over them, examining them. At last he picked one up with extreme caution. He was considering it when my stage manager swung down the passage toward us, grinning one of those healthy prairie grins which take up so much footage in Wild West movies.

  He nodded at Lenz. “Been down under the stage setting traps, Mr. Duluth,” he said cheerfully. “Seems the rats are mostly concentrated down there. With any luck, I’ll clean the place up in a couple of days and save you the expense of having this old barn fumigated.”

  He made no references to the events of the night before, for which I was intensely grateful. He started whistling and fiddling with the new panel just as if he was any stage manager in any theater.

  Lenz glanced up from the splinter of glass in his hand and said suddenly: “Mr. Troth, would you be good enough to loan me that panel for a few moments?”

  Eddie looked surprised but murmured “Sure,” and handed him the sheet of glass.

  “Thank you.” Lenz turned to me. “Now, Mr. Duluth, perhaps you would take me to Herr Wessler’s dressing-room.”

  I moved down the passage followed by Lenz, the new panel and the broken fragment of glass.

  We reached the dressing-room and I shut the door behind us. Although Eddie had been too late to keep Wessler from discovering the broken minor, he had, by some miracle of fixing, now acquired a new glass which hung over the dressing-table. In the far corner, the large wardrobe exhibited its own full length mirror. There was something rather sinister about that wardrobe. It was old enough and dreary enough to be the actual closet in which Lillian Reed had disposed of herself back in 1902.