Passion Play Read online

  A strangeness about Delaney: smooth and distanced. Not unfeeling, though—definitely not. But hard to read. I had the sum of his actions, the nervous motion of his fingers, the flow of his sentences; but I couldn’t make them come together. He was—opaque. It happened, of course; some people have a natural reserve that makes them hard to read. Delaney seemed pleasant, however, and (apart from his sinister scenery) quite unthreatening. He cared about the people he was discussing, and he was trying to be as helpful as he knew how.

  “Like many intellectuals, Jonathan was something of a skeptic—”

  “Except in his religion,” I said.

  Delaney frowned. “Perhaps—but I am hard-pressed to believe it. That was certainly his image, but he…hinted to me on several occasions that an image was all it was.” Delaney paused, and looked at me with a curious expression. “‘Was not that Lucifer an angel once?’…‘Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God.’”

  Yes! Oh, how right, how right Delaney was. The great Communicator of the Redemption Era—a hypocrite, hurled into damnation in his dressing room, eyes fixed on hell. Was not that Lucifer an angel once?

  Delaney stopped by the desk and let his hand rest on the skull. “Jonathan was fascinated by images…what actor isn’t? He liked to manipulate his own. This could be…distressing to people who knew him.”

  “Like Celia Wu.”

  “Like Celia Wu,” Delaney agreed. “A bad business. Jonathan was a hard man, Ms. Fletcher—one of the by-products of his relentless approach to the world. I’m afraid that Celia was fated to be bruised by any contact with him.” There was sympathy in the director’s voice, almost a personal hurt. Surprising. Was it something in his nature, or had he dreamt of being her lover? Somehow the idea of her exotically beautiful face caressed by his long, white, sensitive fingers seemed almost obscene.

  “Jon was a skeptic. I think in time he came to see everything as a series of systems, all equally arbitrary and subject to manipulation by whomever had the brains to do it. He would have made a magnificent Hamlet, for that reason: the Prince is unique in his ability to see beyond the surfaces of things, and manipulate them—think of poor doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern! The most pitiful would-be spies in literature. This quality of Jonathan’s, at once penetrating and distanced, forceful yet elusive, was what I sought when I cast him as Mephistophilis.”

  “But you weren’t satisfied with the performance.”

  Delaney frowned, and resumed his pacing. “I was frustrated. Being around Jonathan was very hard, and I wasn’t always as patient as I should have been.” Delaney fell silent, and stood, musing, for so long I thought he had forgotten me entirely, absorbed with his own thoughts. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m trying to find a way to say something not easily put into words.”

  “Keep trying.”

  He took a deep breath. “This may not be meaningful to you—but to me, Jonathan seemed a sort of crystal. Understand, this is not what he looked like, or what his hobbies were, or anything so directly related as that, but rather an attempt to image him as he appeared to me.”

  My God. I nodded.

  “Hard, multi-faceted, and translucent. Not quite clear, you understand; he had some passions, of course. Like ice, or perhaps a very pale blue gem, and in its heart a bright star, formed from shifting patterns of light, changing slightly with each different facet through which it is observed. The stone is beautiful, but hard and cold, almost unliving. And the star is formed from its flaws. I was trying to bring out the light trapped inside without smashing the crystal. I succeeded to a degree—but by no means completely.” Delaney shrugged and rubbed his brow. “Probably this is just babble to you,” he said, hopping suddenly from the desk and pacing away from me.

  “On the contrary,” I answered. “Nothing could make more sense.” There was a pause then, and a moment of shared understanding. I thought I now knew the whys for a lot of things about David Delaney.

  He was a shaper, or at least an empath. His strengths as a director, his solitary childhood, his automatic defenses against being read, his remarkable concern for his actors and the tell-tale use of the oblique image all grew from that single dominant fact. Strange the choices that we make! I chased my wolves and Mary Ward watched her flock. Of course directing would be another perfect profession for a shaper, if you could stand a job whose essence was emotion, without letting it drain you to the very dregs.

  After a long wait I said, “Do you think any of the people involved with the production could have killed Mr. Mask?”

  “No,” he answered quickly. “And yes. For different reasons than Jonathan I share one of his failings; I know about people, but I don’t know people. I wouldn’t have thought any of them capable of murder—but people can change, terribly suddenly. Something is revealed that never showed up before, and then is gone again.” He shrugged. “If it was murder, I pray to God it wasn’t one of us. But I do not know.”

  I didn’t either, but I had an appointment to keep with Tara Allen the next day, and I did not intend to miss it. “A terrible setback for your show,” I said, disengaging.

  “Do you think so? I think it regrettably likely that Jonathan’s death will make this my highest-rated production. Should it hit air, of course.” He shook his head wearily. “The Redemption Era has made a terrible mistake in canonizing its Communicators, Ms. Fletcher. In truth we are such parasites in this business. Like the bacteria in your gut we have made ourselves indispensable, but our interactions with the public don’t bear scrutiny.” He paused. “I’ve been watching you these last couple of days,” he began, turning away to scan the bookshelf. “I…I imagine your job would be so much more fulfilling. One could feel a satisfaction, at the end of the day, at having done something both useful and right.”

  “If only you knew!” It was strange to hear David reading from the same script as FRIEND.

  His fingers tapped on a rich leather spine. “Yes,” he sighed. “If only.”

  I left Delaney with a great gift: the image of Jon Mask, a star trapped in crystal or walled behind glass.

  The morning star (most dearly loved of God).

  Lucifer.

  This is the hard part. This is the thing I try not to think about. Another kind of play, on a different kind of stage.

  Inside my apartment, the television is another cage of glass, another cell.

  And inside this cell, another. A cell in our local jail.

  It is the policy of this government for NT to broadcast each and every execution. The Red laws are hard, but brittle and easily broken; executions slide before your eyes, one or more each night, always after midnight so as not to take up valuable commercial time.

  I always watch my hangings.

  Delaney was right about me; I don’t believe in averting my eyes. The kill is a part of the hunt, its last inevitable moment of passion. I have a duty: a duty to my dead.

  And so I sat, while the television’s white-blue glare flickered over my skin, watching as they led Rutger White into a tiny grey room and put a noose around his neck.

  Most of them are dead before they feel the hemp; fear breaks them, and they stare stupidly at the ground, their dull eyes already fixed on hell.

  Not Rutger White. He was more than calm, he was ready. A light was blazing in him, reaching up as a small flame reaches to be consumed in a greater fire above. His soul strode heavenward, leaving his body standing on the X they had marked with masking tape. The bailiff stepped aside and White alone was on the screen. Somewhere off-camera a hangman’s hand reached for a button. And then, terribly, White looked at me.

  He was not looking merely to the camera, not smiling bravely for his family and friends. He sought his murderer. His God that moment was a God of love, and our eyes met, and that terrible love burned through me like white fire.

  With a sudden jerk he dropped into darkness.

  Six times before I had killed in silence, watching my TV. This time I screamed. Startled, Queen E ran fr
om the room, leaving behind a silence harder than the one I had broken.

  The camera followed White, gently swinging, swinging, twisting until his back was to me.

  How stupid a camera is. It can’t show you a man’s soul. The body moves and then is still; that is all the camera knows. No flash of light when someone dies, no twist of vapour.

  But I knew. I felt the shock in my blood, like a death in the family. White was dead, and I had murdered him.

  I turned off the TV and went into my bathroom. I took out a pair of scissors and stood before the mirror. Then, slowly and methodically, I hacked off my hair, cutting it back almost to my skull, dropping lock after lock to lie dead in the cold white sink beneath my gaunt reflection.

  Mea culpa, Lord. I repent.

  Eight

  The walls of Mask’s house were made of one-way glass; lightless without its master, the blank dark front looked like a dead TV screen.

  And yet inside I felt from the first moment there were three of us present. Tara was there with me, of course, wearing a pair of cotton pants and a man’s white shirt. But the hunt was rising high within me now, and I could feel Jonathan Mask too, like a conjured devil trapped behind those walls of glass.

  The cool hexagonal tiles, the mirrors and the cold white carpet, the expensive, minimalist furniture: each spare line and shape conducted Mask like electricity, so that even dead he glimmered around us, like the last seconds of light that linger on a television after the power has been turned off. “I am Our Father’s ghost,” he had said, but the figure that rose within his house was of an angel fallen: a shifting play of light, a noble brow and wicked eyes, hard as diamonds and flickering cold fire.

  “Sorry about the temperature; he liked to keep it down during the day, and of course nobody’s been here to turn it up.” Tara brushed back a lock of brown hair that had escaped her red ribbon; her fingers were tanned, strong and steady. If Tara set out to kill somebody she would get the job done right.

  She studied me. “Good thing you’re not allowed on camera. If I were you, I’d change hairdressers.”

  My long bangs were gone and my pony tail too. I’d spent the morning dodging mirrors. “Handsome is as handsome does,” I growled, knowing I looked like a convict in a woman’s prison. “Mind if I take a look around?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The front room was spacious and clean. In its centre, doubling as a glass table, was a large abstract holograph of intersecting lines that formed impossible shapes, reminding me of Escher. A chess set sat on top of it, mid-way through a game. A flat-screen TV hung on the east wall. Underneath was a CD player; eight speakers were mounted top and bottom in each corner of the room. At the far end was a cedar-paneled bar, complete with refrigerator and microwave. The carpet was white, much of the furniture charcoal grey. A room like a line drawing, scrupulously executed. The only trace of humanity, Tara’s shoes, kicked off in front of the couch like a deliberate provocation; messiness as an act of principle. “Very nice,” I said.

  What am I showing you? Jon Mask whispered like a devil at my shoulder. Can you see my fingerprints, or have I wiped every surface clean? Am I serious or joking to live in such elegant desolation?

  Tara shrugged. “Too clean for me; I told him it looked like a set. But that’s the way he liked it. Over there, the kitchen and pantry; through there, the showing room and the extra bedroom.”

  She started towards the kitchen. “I’m going to see if there’s anything left to eat here. No sense letting it go to waste.”

  Jesus. Don’t let me interrupt your grief, lady.

  The kitchen was a white-tiled extravagance of modern devices, guaranteed to turn a cook into a gourmet, an electrician, or both. She rummaged around in the refrigerator. “You probably think I’m being heartless.” She poked her head out of the fridge and looked at me over her shoulder. “Believe me, I’m sorry that Jon died.” She turned back to the fridge. “There’s a couple of Cokes. Want one?”

  “No thanks.” She was tough, this technical director. And pragmatic; everyone who had talked about her had said that much. Blues and browns—dark colours, but serviceable. I reminded myself that she was the only person who had really grieved over Mask’s death. He lingered in her yet, hard and cold as ice (like a devil too in this, possessing the unprotected regions of her soul). “Can you tell me what you were doing just before the body was discovered?”

  “Checking equipment, fiddling with the lights, kicking Len’s ass for being late.”

  “So you have no way of proving you didn’t go into the Star dressing room?”

  She shrugged, brown eyes clear and defiant. “Nope.” She decided against having a Coke. “Jon wrote a lot of criticism; I guess you know that.” She stepped out of the kitchen. “That’s why he had the showing room. So he said. He liked to watch himself a lot, if you want to know the truth. He had an ego—what do you expect? I’m not telling you anything I didn’t tell him to his face, credit. I don’t talk behind people’s backs.”

  “Unlike…?”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “Actors!”

  The room she led me into was a dim crypt walled with black drapes. “This is where he shot the will, isn’t it?” Tara nodded. The overhead lights were off, and the room was lit by a series of faint glows. As I stepped in, I realized each glow was a different holograph of Jonathan Mask, still lit with frozen life: Iago, Jackson, Dallas Godwin, Tallahassee, Job…a dozen others I couldn’t name.

  My cathedral, he murmured, lingering in blasphemy. Those characters like saints in their niches:

  Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,

  Conspired against our God with Lucifer,

  And are forever damned with Lucifer.

  “Publicity holos,” Tara said, drowning out the evil whisper in my ear. “He had one from every major production he was in except two, the first and the third. And Faustus, of course.”

  We left quietly, as if retreating from a shrine.

  The spare bedroom was soothingly normal; it could have been mine, if it had been messier. A black and white painting of Don Quixote in a clear glass frame hung on one wall.

  Beware his foe, the Knight of Mirrors…

  The master bedroom was on the second floor; a print of Magritte’s “This is not a Pipe” hung above the dresser, its vivid blues and whites mirrored by the sky visible through the translucent outer wall. The bed was unmade, one uncharacteristic trace of sloppiness. “Tell me about Mr. Mask and Celia Wu,” I said.

  “It was stupid on Jon’s part. I told him that. We fought about it. She was very young and idealistic. A devout Redemptionist—did you know that?” I nodded. “Or she used to be. She thought Jon was God, or at least His spokesman on earth. She had seen him on TV since she was a girl, preaching the Red gospel. The first time I met her on the set she was burbling with happiness. She told Jon it was his example that convinced her she could have a career as a ‘communicator’ and still hold righteous beliefs.”

  Tara Allen looked at me sadly. “Ms. Fletcher, Jon was not always a kind man. You know what he did to actors who opposed him. And even if he wasn’t being deliberately hurtful, he didn’t always anticipate the damage his actions might do to other people. You had to be tough to spend time around him.”

  Tara led the way across the hall and into the study, a room littered with computers, CD viewers, tape machines, printers and peripherals. “He liked her. She wasn’t brilliant, but she was honest, and Jon was fascinated by honest people. One day he invited her over. He chatted with her about her home and family, made her feel at ease, and then they came in here.” She looked meaningfully at the mirrored walls, the computers, the laser printer…“You can imagine the effect of all this on a good Red girl.”

  Oh yes, I could imagine. A terrible shock indeed, for someone like Celia. Like finding out that your father was a drug dealer. And perhaps by then she’d slept with him.

  “Stupidly, Jon got into his Bertrand Russell mode—clever and skeptical,
trying to keep her amused. She sat there, quiet as a china doll. It wasn’t until she excused herself and went to the bathroom crying that he realized what was happening.

  “Celia was crushed. Her greatest hero was a hypocrite from top to bottom. She didn’t show up for rehearsal the next day. David had to go over to her apartment and talk to her for six hours to convince her to come back and do the show. A week later the Inquisition showed up, and Jon stopped getting government appearances. No loss, if you ask me.—Bathroom and storage area over there,” she added, pointing. The sadness hadn’t left her.

  “The way you tell it, Mask wasn’t a very lovable guy. Why did you stay with him?”

  “What?” She seemed confused. “Oh—we weren’t lovers. I was smarter than that. Jon suggested it once or twice, but I think he knew that would be a mistake. I knew it, anyway.”

  For sins—alas!—never committed.

  “Everyone else tells me that you were an item.”

  Tara grimaced. “Sure—we spent a lot of time together, and what else could an actor imagine? I doubt David told you that, or any of the stage crew, for that matter. They know me better.”

  “I stand corrected. Why were you friends?”

  “Haven’t you learned anything?” she said angrily. “He was the smartest, most fascinating man I ever met. He was fun to be with, if he trusted you. Sure, he was skeptical—but in this world there’s a lot to be skeptical about. You couldn’t spend too much time with him. He wore you out. But he was on for as long as you could stand it, and always in good form. Jonathan Mask was an extraordinary man, even if nothing like the image he projected. We won’t see one like him again.” Shocked, I saw she was crying. Tears rolled down her cheeks, unacknowledged.