Passion Play Read online

  I pause. The match throws my shadow, tall and weirdly wavering, against the front wall. Softly, I toss the burning cinder into the closest stack of barrels and brace myself for fiery death. Nothing happens. “I’m just going to keep on tossing these into one stack after another, Joey,” I say conversationally, lighting another match and pitching it to my right…“until something happens.” I feel drunk, drunk and reckless. We’ll see who can last out. “You see, Joey, I don’t really give a fuck whether I live or die right now. And what happens to you matters even less.” I take out another match, strike it, hold it, contemplating the leaping halo of fire around its head. “I hope you appreciate being taken into my confidence like this, Joseph.”

  “Put it out! Christ are you crazy? Put it out!” He screams as I start to fling the match into another stack of barrels. He is running at me from behind a pillar on the left. Just a couple more seconds. I blank out the terror. Calmly, I study him running, knife outstretched, a moving geometry. I hold the match as it begins to burn my thumbtip, hold it looking only at him until the pain is like a needle, until he is within steps of me. A pinch of the fingers drops us into darkness and I fall with the light, squatting, driving forward. The shock of my shoulder in his stomach has the purity of a gunshot. Our fears mingle, out of control, but his muscles panic and mine do not. Mine is the body of a hunter. As he flips to the pavement I am turning. The air bursts out of him. He flails backwards with the knife (I cannot see it but I know it must come, we are so much part of one shape now). I block the cut with enough force to send the switchblade flying from his grasp, turn and crouch on his chest with one knee at his throat.

  He twitches and slumps, and I white out his frenzy, letting calmness seep into me again like embalming fluid.

  His body shudders under me. I strike one more match, just in front of his eyes. The dilated pupils wince in pain and he sobs as he finally sucks in a lungful of precious air. A flicker of fire, and terror in my victim’s eyes: how many times have I played this scene? “Vengeance is mine, Joseph. You’re under arrest.”

  Six

  I woke up aching, and grumpy with the knowledge that I was missing something. Something small, that once perceived would change the course of the investigation. Something insignificant, pointing towards an unseen pattern.

  The shrapnel cut was an angry needle threaded across my cheek. I crabbed at Queen E as I made my morning tea and composed my schedule. First, a preliminary set of interviews: the gopher, a couple of extras, Len and Sarah. Then the reading of the will; it would be interesting to see who turned up, and who got the goods.

  I wanted to see Mask’s final statement. The complexity of his personality was rapidly increasing, spinning out from the remarks of David Delaney and the stifled reactions of Celia Wu. The method, the victim, the motives. These should be enough. Like God, the murderer’s nature is immanent in his works. Study them enough, and you will come to know their author.

  I winced, remembering how I must have seemed to Jim and his friends as I yelled and ran into the night.

  My spoon uncoiled slowly as I stirred; crimping my flatware was a bad habit I had picked up from Rolly. Straightening up, reforming: time to get back to work.

  The offices of Radcliffe and Brown aimed at an old-fashioned effect of stately legal privilege. From the beige shag carpet to the elegant acrylic portraits of the firm’s founders, the office was appointed with impeccably conservative taste. Those of us there for the reading of the will were arranged around a sleekly oiled walnut table, seated in exquisite walnut chairs which ground expensively into my shoulders. I shifted restlessly, quite aware that tipping my chair back on its hind legs was a decided faux pas.

  Predictably we could hear Vachon long before we saw him. “It’s a terrible bore / But try to ignore / the awful decor,” he drawled. Then quietly, “…stay calm, little Argive.”

  Celia entered on his arm, shaky but breathtaking in a coppersilk flare fired with glints of gold at the collar and cuffs. Seeing Rolly and me she caught her breath, and her fingers tightened on Vachon’s arm. Small wonder; I looked even meaner than I felt, and Rolly, resplendent in a cinnamon suit and purple paisley tie, was something from her beautician’s Apocalypse.

  She couldn’t be surprised to see us. So why the startled, furtive impulse I felt from her, as clearly as a gust of wind on a calm day? “God bless,” she stammered.

  Daniel stepped in to cover for her, pulling out a chair between Rolly and Radcliffe. “My, everyone seems so…elect,” he remarked. “I feel like a lion in a den of Daniels.”

  With his hard, white brow and handsomely tooled features the elder Mr. Radcliffe might have been chosen by the same decorator who had furnished the rest of the office. His gaze drifted across me and found me wanting. My jacket was mud-stained and my face freshly scarred from last night’s chase. When I first arrived I had made a fuss about keeping strictly off the statutory corder present at such affairs. As the lawyer’s eyes flicked around the table I tilted my chair back another fraction. Legals make me truculent.

  Crisp, white and bony. Chalk: hard but not strong. That for me was Radcliffe. What the lawyer thought of us as we gathered around his expensive table he certainly wasn’t telling. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began in his high, chalky voice, “As we are gathered here by the grace of the Almighty, I am honoured by your presence, and I thank you all for attending.” Though he actually felt nothing for us, he did not mean to lie: a man like Radcliffe is completely sincere and yet utterly without feeling. Hard, but not strong.

  “My name is Edward Radcliffe; I had the honour to be Mr. Mask’s attorney and, as such, the executor of his will. Mr. French and Ms. Fletcher I had the pleasure of meeting earlier this morning…” He looked at Celia with a studied lack of expression.

  “This is Ms. Celia Wu, a friend of Mr. Mask’s. My name is Daniel Vachon; I’m Miss Wu’s official Bad Influence.”

  Celia laughed nervously. “You’re not so bad as you pretend,” she protested.

  “There, see? It’s working already.”

  Sitting next to me, Tara Allen grunted. “Don’t lower yourself, Daniel. You’re just a sinner; she’s a fool to boot.”

  “You’re the fool,” Celia snapped. “You’re the one who sold her soul to that Devil.”

  “And a bitch,” Tara added.

  “Please!” Radcliffe was shocked. “This is a law office!”

  Baffled by this stroke, the rest of us fell silent. Decorum restored, Radcliffe rose from his seat, gaunt, white and stately as a stork, and paced across the room to insert a tape into the feeder slot for a wall-screen TV.

  “This is the last will and testament of Jonathan Mask.” Mr. Radcliffe frowned. “It is unhappily irregular to submit a will on videotape, but rest assured we have drawn up transcriptions in the correct manner should you wish to peruse them later. For now,” he said, dimming the lights, “I obey Mr. Mask’s wishes.”

  The screen flickered into life, and a dim room opened up before us, the figure of Jonathan Mask so hidden in shadow as to be invisible at first. His deep sinister voice rose slowly from the darkness. “I am Our Father’s spirit,” he whispered. “Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purg’d away.”

  And so great was the power of that voice, speaking from beyond the grave of his endless torment, that I felt in myself a sudden horror of damnation. It was an omen, this warning from a man whose life I now knew had been tainted with corruption. If the Reds were right, every word he said was true, and this tape of his came before us as a ghost, to detail the damnation of a soul in Hell.

  Mask flipped on the lights and laughed. “Hamlet, act one, scene four.” He shrugged and smiled, a cold, mocking smile. “Well—on to the formalities.

  “I Jonathan Mask, being of sound mind and body, do hereby authorize this will to be in full accordance with my wishes, superseding any and all previously documented w
ills.

  “I have played through yet another series of scenes, and it is time to assess my overall performance. In so doing, of course, one has to consider the finale, as I do now. Presumably, this will not be the last such speculation.—But it might be; and so I consider my alternatives.

  “They are, as you will understand, limited. I have no children, nor surviving relatives with whom I am on decent terms. My good will be interred with my bones.”

  Mask smiled his cold sardonic smile again. “But not my goods. There are, of course, people in my life—first and foremost among them Tara Allen, my present ‘companion.’” (I felt her sitting next to me, fierce loyalty and sorrow and a sharp red twist of anger.) “Ah, the rhetoric of these upstanding times! What they must think about you, dear! Even the Press Secretary has discreetly dropped me from the lecture circuit, I suppose for indiscretions—alas—never committed. What an age!

  “Tara, I have left instructions with Mr. Radcliffe to get in touch with you in the event of my demise. I haven’t left you much, my dear, and I think you know why—we’ve discussed it.” I felt not a flicker of resentment from the technical director, though I was waiting for it.

  “I have left you something,” Mask drawled. “I wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful in the eyes of the world. I leave in your capable hands the greatest bauble I have left: my reputation.

  “You have seen my Memoirs evolving within the electric brain of the Beast. You are familiar with their contents. I here unequivocally grant you any and all rights pertaining to that manuscript.” He paused, and held out his hands.

  “If you choose to destroy it, God be wi’ you.

  “If, on the other hand, you want to play the game out to the end (with, naturally, the attendant difficulties) you may have it published—I should think there would be little trouble finding a buyer—and collect all the royalties. Perhaps you can find a spot on the lecture circuit, talking about the talking of a man whose life was talking.

  “Best of luck, my dear—find yourself a nice dependable Redemption sort of fellow and settle down. You’ll be the better for it.”

  Mask paused again. “I assume, if my instructions have been followed, that Celia will be listening as well. If so, she must be mortified by now.” He waggled a finger at her like a schoolteacher. “Celie!—no glazing over girl, look at me and listen up.”

  He stopped, shrugged, started again, speaking more quickly and looking away from the camera as if irritated. “I understood your pain, more than you can know. To you I leave my entire unsquandered estate, to do with as you will, in sickness or in health, amen. I do this for you. In turn I want you to remember me as…” A strange hesitation. “As the true-hearted Redemptionist I was.

  “It means much to me.”

  From Celia I felt shock, numbing shock, followed at last by anger as her soul twisted and turned, trying to shake off this gesture of unwanted magnanimity.

  Mask spoke on, more smoothly now, polished and urbane. “To all my co-workers, past and present, and to the world at large I leave my work: thirty-nine plays, seventeen films, two critical Communications and, possibly, the Memoirs.

  “Or, as the clever will have figured out, nothing at all.

  “I am, in all good health, yours,

  Jonathan Mask.”

  The TV flickered and went dark. A moment later Radcliffe had turned on the lights, leaving us staring at one another in shock or anger or confusion.

  Mask’s mind was quick; he caught you in the play of his thought. He enraged me, that smug, cynical bastard, elusive behind his periods.

  There was evil in Jonathan Mask.

  Something had turned his heart to stone, a disease of the soul. Like the Medusa: look, and feel yourself paralyzed, trapped in marble like the blind statues in my father’s study. Mask scared me; I knew I would have hated him in person.

  All shapers wonder if madness is catching.

  Tears started from Celia’s eyes. Vachon, misreading, put an arm around her shoulders as if to comfort her. “There there, little Argive.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Celia hissed, voice thick with baffled rage.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Daniel yelped, recoiling. Surprisingly, I could feel his sympathy was genuine.

  “Oh Jon,” Tara said, in a gruff, weary voice, not even bothering to look at Celia Wu. “O Jon, she wasn’t worth it.”

  Mask was not a poor man when he died. As a result, there was a lot of document explaining for Radcliffe and a lot of paper-signing for Celia and a lot of hanging around the coffee table for me and Rolly French. “Got the statements you asked for,” he murmured, nodding me over to a coffee pot out of earshot of the others.

  “And?”

  He shrugged, squeezing a little more neck against his tie. “It cuts down our list considerably. Mr. Delaney and Ms. Allen still potentially unaccounted for. But Vachon and the rest of the actors were in the Green Room when it happened. They all give alibis for one another.” He dumped two heaping teaspoons of creamer into his coffee, turning it the colour of Radcliffe’s carpeting. “All except one.”

  “And the winner is?”

  He turned and took a sip of his coffee, nodding imperceptibly at Celia Wu, lost in a tangle of paperwork. “A quick trip to the ladies’ room, apparently. Wagner and the Pope are both sure the thump sounded while she was gone.”

  “Interesting…The lady responsible for his fall from official grace.”

  “Unh-hunh.” Rolly nodded knowingly. Something in him was pleased to see connections forming around a desirable woman. He wouldn’t let it affect his judgement, but the idea of the Temptress as the root of evil appealed to his Red instincts.

  “Well,” I said lightly. “I’ll shake her down after she finishes inheriting her millions. Give her a lift back to the NT building maybe. I’ve got some interviews there.”

  “Good hunting,” Rolly said, swallowing another mouthful of milky coffee.

  “‘We come of one tribe, you and I.’”

  Another piece of data; the big picture was forming. Predictably, Jonathan Mask had assumed a leading role. For me the dead actor had become more real than many of the actual suspects; everyone was ordered around him, around his talent. He was the DNA; he contained the blue-print for his murder. It was Jonathan Mask whose pattern I would have to discover, his shape I must shape myself around.

  But it was a tricky business, putting him together after he had been so badly broken. Only God can create a man, and I was getting less and less satisfied with my materials: a few pictures, a score of films, the will, the conflicting reports of his peers. And his body, a crumpled crucifix, smoldering on his dressing room floor.

  While waiting for my suspects I watched the will on video several times. There he was, that splendid man with the mocking eyes and rich baritone voice: so different from his corpse. What a presence he had! How strange that he could die so easily.

  And how much I loathed him. That cynical smile. A cold, calculating hypocrite, who had ruined the careers of dozens of actors in the name of a Higher Cause. At least Rutger White believed in his own sanctity; Jonathan Mask had willfully chosen to be wicked.

  Vachon had a commercial shoot he had to make. I told him I would give Celia a lift when she was done and made an appointment to interview him at the NT building later that afternoon.

  After signing the papers that made her a multimillionaire at the age of twenty-two, Celia Wu slid into the front seat of my battered Warzawa with awkward grace and pulled the seatbelt around her slender waist, the shoulder-strap diving between her firm high breasts. I surprised myself with a spasm of envy. It had been a long time since I had disliked another woman for her beauty.

  She smiled and I forgave myself. Celia Wu’s beauty was provokingly great.

  I brushed my bangs back from my eyes, envious and laughing at myself for it. Good God, Diane: next you’ll be gossiping about boys and dreaming over nightwear catalogues. Celia shook her glossy black hair behind her shoulders and smile
d at me.

  Haircut, I thought acidly. Tomorrow I will get a haircut. Raze my crinkly brown tresses right down to the stubble.

  Celia’s coppersilk dress, ebony hair and pale gold jewelry clashed with the Warzawa’s proletarian interior. I shoved an ancient bag of uneaten chips under the front seat and took secret comfort from the grimy upholstery. I was sorry I had cleaned the car so recently; what glee a bottle of beer could have given me, rolling around Celia’s feet, or a piece of chewing gum, discovered on the armrest an instant too late.

  I uncoupled the Warzawa from Radcliffe’s powerbox and pulled into the street, gliding out of the mass-trans lane. “Seeing we have this opportunity, Ms. Wu,” I drawled, “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions. You know—girl talk.”

  She bobbed her head, and her earrings made ripples of nervous gold. A tiny crucifix dangled on the bare skin of her neck, trembling in time with her heartbeat. “I thought the investigation was only going to take one day?”

  She wasn’t stupid; she knew I must suspect foul play, but she didn’t want to say it out loud. Why not? Deliberate caution? Something to hide? Simple nervousness? A young woman, trapped in the middle of a murder investigation, cornered by a Tough Butch with a long scar on one cheek and a fresh cut on the other. God, I would probably be lucky if she didn’t fling herself out of the car at the first red light.

  I slid over into the faster lane. “Well, there are a few loose ends I’d like to tie up; leaving them dangling would be like you not bothering to comb your hair—trivial, but unprofessional.”

  She laughed at the idea, then grew serious. “Should I get a lawyer, like Mr. Delaney said?”