The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  ◆◆◆

  Act Three, Scene One, is played out on several levels of the castle set simultaneously. It is the evening of the following day; the sky background is sunset. Manfred sits alone in the dining hall, wearing his crown and sword and looking wearily resigned to whatever destiny this night brings.

  [This required no acting whatsoever.]

  Downstairs, Diego tells Jacquez that the haunted armor was last seen in Astarte’s bedchamber. Father Jerome arrives with a letter from the Carbonari, escorted by Theo wearing a sword. Bel-Imperia directs Diego to take the Abbot directly up to Manfred, while she shows Theo the hospitality of the castle. In fact, she just draws him into the next room and an embrace.

  Father Jerome presents the letter, which offers Manfred the crown of a constitutional monarchy; Manfred reads it.

  [Staring at the blank paper, I tried to imagine Van Damm getting clearance to lift off at the spaceport. What would I do—what was the appropriate sleight-of-hand? Monitor the radio, wait for another ship to receive take-off authorization, then immediately cut in on the same frequency, cancel the clearance in the name of the Doge, and use the flight window myself. Was Van Damm that bright? I didn’t know. And I suddenly realized that if I’d sent Foyle with the skeleton-coder to sabotage the ship, I could have simplified my sneak intermission by simply shooting Van Damm dead. Hadn’t occurred to me. But how long could I live like this before expedient murder did come naturally to me?]

  While Manfred reads the letter, Theo tells Bel-Imperia what it says. With the revolution defused, he can only ascend the throne as Manfred. An exultant Bel-Imperia exits to get the magic balm, saying that no one will see her on the back staircase to Astarte’s room; the servants shun it since the Emperor fell there.

  In the dining hall, Manfred’s only reaction to the offer Father Jerome bears is, “This evening ends my earthly ills.”

  Father Jerome suggests that Manfred’s magical researches may have put his soul in peril. But the church remains ready to receive him. Manfred replies that “Whatever I have been will rest between / Myself and Heaven.” He leaves the Abbot for his study above, where the outside walls are bathed in orange light, and for the next several minutes we see him looking out the window at his last sunset. Father Jerome shakes his head and says:

  This should have been a noble creature, a man

  Of glorious elements, if wisely mingled;

  Instead he is a chaos—light and darkness,

  Pure thoughts and passions, mind and dust, all mixed

  And warring, endlessly. He will perish,

  And yet he must not; I will try once more.

  But now he is drawn downstairs by the hue and cry there.

  For Bel-Imperia has reappeared, in dire condition. One great black armored glove, detached from any visible body, is clutching her around the throat. As she falls into Theo’s arms, he removes the vial of magic balm from her hand and shouts for the servants. Diego and Jacquez enter, soon followed by Father Jerome. When Bel-Imperia chokes out a request that the Abbot hear her confession, the metal fingers tighten their grip, and she dies unshriven.

  [Without the main lights in my eyes, I could dimly make out the highest tiers of the audience. It was not easy to keep the contemplative look on my face when I saw the Pretender saying something in the ear of one of his bodyguards, and all four Hard Men leaving his box a moment later. What the hell was that about?]

  Theo flees the scene of supernatural murder, muttering

  This was some demon sent by Manfred’s craft

  Against his enemies. I am next, unless⁠…

  And he sneaks out the front entrance, already rubbing the magic balm into his face.

  In the dining hall above, the suit of armor—minus one hand—enters via a side door and ponderously clangs toward the staircase. Blue fire burns within the helmet.

  And in the tower above that, against a black sky, Manfred says:

  Goodbye, Sun. I must go and count the stars.

  Perhaps tonight I’ll reach the end of them.

  He begins to climb to the tower’s top. Blackout.

  [I held on tight against the turntable’s rotation, able to see the entire backstage area from my perch. Two Hard Men in the wings to my right. Two more to the left. Maybe it was over, maybe they had Van Damm and he had talked and I had an escort to the gallows from either exit, but the show must go on—I made my descent—and an actor must use his fear—I took my place—and Manfred must die with a sword in his hands.]

  Act Three, Scene Two. The final set appears in a blaze of lightning that subsides to moonlight: the bone-white tower top where the play began.

  Manfred ascends through a trap door and bars it behind him. He makes a speech that compares the height of the moon with the hellish depth of the gorge that protects one side of the castle, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Theo, who has scaled the tower like a mountain. Manfred is astounded, but courteous, and notes that Theo’s exertions have made him…pale.

  Theo takes off his wig, tosses it into the gorge, and declaims:

  Thus I return my mother to the earth,

  Henceforth to be like you, a prince of air.

  He reveals his bastardy and his hatred for Manfred, but before he can say more, there is an immense metallic crash against the trap door, and an inhuman and hollow voice announces:

  It’s time. O stain on Manfred’s blood, cut off

  From mother Earth, you’ll rise no higher now.

  Theo draws his sword, shouting, “Your demon knows I’m here—too late for you!”

  Manfred disdains to correct Theo’s mistake, but meets him sword to sword. A spirited and elaborate duel follows, while the suit of armor continues to crash against the barred door like thunder. Manfred has the best of it until wounded in the leg. He fights on, limping badly but defending himself brilliantly, spattering stage blood and poetry in every direction. At last he suffers a thrust to the chest. He slumps against the wall of the tower and Theo, exhausted, must stop for breath on the opposite side of the stone circle.

  The trap door’s wooden bar bends and breaks.

  The mortally wounded Manfred laughs. “You’ve won my place. I give it to you freely.” And he tosses Theo his crown and cape.

  Theo puts them on as the trap door bursts upward and the armored ghost issues from below, groaning like a steam organ:

  And now you’ll know how hard it is to die,

  To fall as I did, from the highest step.

  But the ghost hesitates between the two of them. Manfred hangs his head, his face unseen. Theo adjusts his crown, and shouts, “There is your peasant, demon, I’m the prince!”

  Manfred chimes in: “I won’t deny the truth—he is your son.”

  Whereupon the ghost marches forward and, despite flailing resistance, wraps Theo in his arms and carries him to the edge of the tower—and over, the two of them plunging into the gorge below.

  Manfred struggles to his feet, and a moment later Father Jerome comes up through the trap.

  He offers Manfred last rites, but is interrupted by the arrival of a troop of spirits, headed by the most powerful, the Birth Star, who commands Manfred to come with them. “Away!” Manfred shouts contemptuously, “I’ll die as I have lived—alone!” The Abbot tries to exorcise the Birth Star, but it scoffs:

  Old man!

  We know ourselves, our mission, and your order.

  You speak in vain: this man is forfeited.

  [Many actors have played to the gallery, but at that moment I played to the wings. The Pretender might have written the scene, but it was a mere translation of a dead man’s lines; it took me to give it life, the real man he pretended to be and the real doom I found myself facing, Larkspur and Manfred one and the same, but without a trace of Christopher Sly, shouting from an undivided heart and not from memory:]

  I do defy you—though I feel my soul

  Is ebbing from me, yet I do defy you;

  Nor will I go, while I have earthly strengt
h

  To wrestle, though with spirits; what you take

  You shall take limb by limb.

  BIRTH STAR SPIRIT:

  Reluctant mortal!

  And are you then so much in love with life?

  MANFRED:

  What life? I know this is my final hour.

  I do not fight against my death but you

  And your surrounding angels; my past power

  Was purchased by no compact with your crew,

  But by superior science—daring, skill,

  And knowledge from our fathers—when the earth

  Saw men and spirits walking side by side,

  With no supremacy between. I stand

  Upon my strength—I do defy—deny⁠—

  Spurn back, and scorn you!

  BIRTH STAR SPIRIT:

  But your many crimes

  Have made you⁠—

  MANFRED:

  What are they to such as you?

  Must crimes be punished but by other crimes,

  And greater criminals? Back to your hell!

  [And perhaps then, winding down into Manfred only, some tiny part of myself might have wondered at what moment the Pretender had felt this same way, at one with the part. In these lines to come?]

  You have no power upon me, that I feel;

  You never shall possess me, that I know:

  What I have done is done; I bear within

  A torture greater than your master’s worst.

  You did not tempt, nor could have tempted me;

  I have not been your dupe, nor am your prey⁠—

  But was my own destroyer, and will be

  My own hereafter.

  —Back, you baffled fiends!

  The hand of death is on me—but not yours!

  The spirits disappear.

  ABBOT:

  Alas! how pale you are—your lips are white⁠—

  The accents rattle in your throat. But pray⁠—

  If only in your mind. Do not go thus.

  MANFRED:

  Old man…’tis not so difficult to die.

  ABBOT:

  He’s gone. His soul has taken flight—but where,

  If not to Hell or Heaven? What is left?

  A memory within our minds, no more,

  Until forgetfulness of fame shall lend

  Him what he most desired. Oblivion.

  Curtain.

  Applause like a wall caving in. Many encores. Flowers for Julia and Olivia. Speeches from the Pretender and the Doge. Smiles and laughter. Frantic happy voices. Champagne backstage and visitors⁠—

  Held back by Hard Men. Ushers, who separated the cast from the hysterical crowd by main force. Just ushers. The Pretender had sensed the mood of the audience and foreseen the total chaos that would break out.

  Though not, I hoped, how I took advantage of it, getting away from time to time and sweeping my own personal props into Foyle’s canvas shopping bag.

  And not long afterward, I slipped the bag into the Grand Canal, then backed away from the rail of the Bucentaur as it took the whole cast on a leisurely circuit around the palace, amid fireworks and water music.

  I played my part with smiles and waves, but never stopped thinking about Van Damm and all the ways he could still get caught. Assuming he actually got the ship away, took standard cockpit high-gee drugs, and accelerated to the limiting velocity of the drive fields—and even allowing for Venezia’s relative closeness to its dim star—he was five or six hours away from sunplunging, and when he made his approach the hydrogen shunting would light up his fields like a beacon⁠…

  The big gondola pulled up to the Doge’s residential dock, and with waves to the crowd we were finally allowed to enter that part of the palace. It was past midnight. I found myself in a smaller party the Pretender was herding toward a private dining room, where place settings and wineglasses awaited us. I was puzzled at the selection: Julia, her mother, Captain Marius, the Pretender, Foyle, and myself. Why not more of the actors? Why Foyle? Her place was set next to mine, and she nuzzled my ear in order to whisper, “Did you?”

  I nodded.

  “When? Before?”

  I kissed her cheek. “During.”

  The look on her face almost justified my risks and crimes.

  I wondered if anyone had inquired after Malatesta and Gregor yet. The Pretender certainly didn’t seem to have received any troubling news. As he rose to propose a toast, I suddenly thought I knew the reason for the limited gathering—he was going to announce the Scandia raid, unaware that it was off.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, lifting his glass. “To Oblivion.”

  Uneasy laughter from some of us, but the glasses clinked and we answered, “Oblivion!”

  Captain Marius asked the Pretender some very shrewd questions about the play—what it meant, whether it would serve any useful propaganda purpose, and so on. The Pretender smiled wolfishly and responded with enthusiasm, yet somehow his reply seemed to drag on and on without really saying anything. I felt my eyelids drooping, then saw Julia slump suddenly over her plate, and Captain Marius make one heroic attempt to regain his feet. But it was too late. The Pretender watched us all with lively but unsympathetic interest over the only untasted glass of wine. Then something struck my face; all I could see was the linen tablecloth. Curtain.

  PART THREE

  DON JUAN IN HELL

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I floated into drugged wakefulness, my fingers clutching the linen tablecloth as wavelets of nausea lapped over me and receded. The chandelier’s light hurt my eyes, the beams too white, with an eerie undertone of green. The room itself was warped by my distorted senses: the walls seemed darker and closer together than they’d been before, and the ceiling and even the table looked curved instead of flat.

  The rest of the tableware had been cleared, but a big round silver dish-cover gleamed just in front of me, like a bombe surprise for one.

  Some time had evidently passed. Domina, Julia, and Captain Marius were no longer present. Foyle was now sitting opposite me instead of at my side, and had acquired a pair of wrist manacles bound to the arm of her chair. The Pretender half stood, half leaned against the table next to her, occasionally sipping from an incongruous mug of hot coffee. Foyle looked nearly as druggy as I felt, but the tail end of her speech sounded clearly thought out:

  “⁠…⁠After what Arturo said before his death, Christopher suspected Malatesta of killing him, and, to be honest, I think he was afraid for his own life. Anyone close to you might be at risk. And the closer we looked, the more secrets he seemed to have.”

  I pulled myself straight and examined my own wrists. Also handcuffed, though not to the chair. The Pretender watched me out of the corner of his eye, but continued conversing with Foyle.

  “So you got drawn in by Chris’s undeniable charm, and—I’m sure—the desire to protect my revolution from loose cannons like Malatesta. I thought it was something like that.” He undid her manacles with a small key, then tossed the key to me.

  “Sorry, Chris,” he said. “I got a nasty surprise at a critical moment—had to shut everything and everyone down until I could sort things out. There are still a few items I have to get straight. Now. There won’t be any time left soon.”

  “Malatesta’s been murdered,” Foyle explained, watching my face narrowly.

  I removed my handcuffs and complained about feeling sick.

  “It will pass,” the Pretender said.

  “So when did it happen? Malatesta, I mean.”

  “Tonight. During the performance.”

  “But then…and Foyle was sitting next to you,” I said. “So why should you suspect⁠—⁠”

  “I’m asking the questions, Chris. Lew was just one floor below us throughout the performance. Renfrew saw Lew go down with one of his special flunkies, Gregor, around 1630. And they had someone with them, looking sort of sick. Maybe the sort of sick you feel now. It was that new manager at the Dutchman, Van Damm.”


  “Blond kid, very professional?”

  “Very professional. His office at the Dutchman has been ransacked, but enough is left to show he was running an intelligence operation, probably for the Tribunal.”

  “So…You don’t think he and Malatesta⁠—⁠” I began.

  “I know for a fact that Malatesta was going to interrogate him under torture, hoping to learn that you and Foyle were his agents. Gregor managed to explain that much before he died.”

  “Him, too?”

  “Yes, Van Damm got loose somehow, killed Lew, and left Gregor for dead. Hijacked a ship at the spaceport and made his escape from the system.”

  “Good God.”

  “Oh, he had help. He used a skeleton coder to bypass the ship’s security. The same sort of coder that caused some false alarms the other night in my entryway of the palace, when someone made an attempt on the Shy Lock. Lew was sure he’d find a coder like that among your effects if I’d ever permit a search. But I searched tonight, and the only odd thing I found was this, in your jacket.”

  And he reached down to lift the huge, gleaming dish-cover from the table. And what was revealed? My gyal-wa’s dish of agar. Always a showman. “What is this, Chris? I’ve seen you drunk and sober, awake and asleep, but I’ve never seen this.”

  “Well…it’s a sort of nutrient gel thing⁠—⁠”

  “I’ve already determined that. What’s it for?”

  I tried not to overdo the embarrassed expression. “My face, of course!” I took a second to gauge his reaction, but he was an actor, too, and gave me nothing. “Like a mud pack. Look, the damn stage makeup does things to my skin, always has, you can make fun if you want, but I need⁠—⁠”

  He laughed too loudly, perhaps relieved. Foyle was quick to join in, though acting wasn’t her forte: “I thought it must be something like that.”