Passion Play Read online

  The elevator came up in a lobby next to a darkened room; I flashed my ID to the duty officer and stepped in while he reported my arrival.

  Soundstage #329 took up the whole floor: lines of pews stretched down to the stage. Obviously they shot a lot of their religious programming here—come to think of it, the place looked familiar from the panning shots on Bible Hour. (Sure it’s boring, but it’s good for you. Anyway, what else is there to watch on Sunday mornings?) The ceiling was a good ten yards from the floor—more room for crane shots. On my left was the control booth, empty now, its windows dark.

  And empty too the soundstage itself; the confused noises from behind the set seemed remote, distant echoes that magnified the present silence. The lights were low, as if in respect for the dead. Stepping into that dim, vaulted chamber, with the pews facing some unknown mystery on the stage, was like entering an empty cathedral by chance, feeling its grandeur and solemnity made tangible by death. And then, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the TV cameras were here too, crowding the stage, peering, spying: clustered glass eyes, unblinking and remorseless as the gaze of the Omniscient.

  The stage was dressed as a study. Books lined every wall: large books and small, leather-bound black and crimson, with gilt edges and gleaming Latinate titles. At the back, a massive oak desk, littered with parchments. The feather of a single quill pen, fabulously long and orange and arrogant, streamed from a skull-shaped inkpot. With the guywires and light-fixtures hidden in shadow, you could almost believe you had entered the inner sanctum of some medieval mystic or scholar, who had stepped out to buy a sheet of vellum or a flask of precious mercury for his alchemical researches.

  A short, pudgy figure trotted briskly out from the stage left wings. “Hey, Fletcher—get a haircut!” Rolly French was wearing a brown pin-striped suit and wide navy tie, extra loose.

  “You’re a disappointing Paracelsus, Rolly. You look like the accountant for a hard-luck Bible College in the northwest.”

  Rolly smiled thinly; I had tagged him a little too close to home. He frowned at the open notebook in his pudgy hand. “God bless. The wolves are out in force today, Fletcher. Every network and most of the papers. Thanks for the hand. I shouldn’t even be here. I’m supposed to be running the investigation on Secretary Dobin’s suicide, but they needed someone in a hurry so they stuck me with it.”

  “Gosh, lucky you! Why do you get all the celebrities? Central must think you look good on camera.” Proving that Central had no taste in ties either. “Isn’t suicide the sin against the Holy Ghost? The rot’s setting in, Rolly.”

  I followed him backstage. “It looks like an accident, but Mr. Mask is such a major figure the media wants to see an investigation anyway.” Rolly’s voice held no anger; the Press had become more responsive to police needs over the years—especially at NT. “National gets the first interviews, of course.”

  Behind the wings we stepped into a brightly lit corridor of red and white chequerboard tile, punctuated with doors. The first few of these were storage closets for cameras and other technical equipment. The sound of voices was getting louder. A harried young man in an NT blazer slipped past us and scampered off towards the elevators. Straight ahead was a closed door. “The action’s in there,” Rolly murmured. “Preliminary questioning.” The corridor turned again to the right, running behind the stage. More NT blazers and a thicket of microphones, studded here and there with familiar faces from the other networks. As Rolly and I came into view an army of lenses tracked us, like ’scopes hiding the eyes of two dozen hitmen.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Rolly began, holding up his hands for quiet. “As I told you before, our preliminary investigations tend to support the supposition that Mr. Mask’s death was accidental. However, in order to ensure that no possible angle has been overlooked, we have also engaged the services of one of the state’s most successful hunters, Ms. Diane Fletcher.” I smiled for the nice people, putting minimal effort into it; I was paid to be a hunter, not a media darling. They weren’t permitted to put me on film anyway, so my smile was hardly required.

  “Captain French, does the hiring of Ms. Fletcher mean that new leads have come up that demand special expertise?”

  “No it doesn’t, Zack.”

  “Then why the para-legal?” said Gering, the NBC man. “Don’t our tax dollars pay the police to do this kind of job?” Ever the sensationalist.

  “Gering, you know as well as I do that this is standard practice in important cases. Mr. Mask’s death was unusual enough, although apparently accidental, that we thought it worthwhile to try every possible avenue. Ms. Fletcher has an excellent record with our Department. For one thing, when she hasn’t got a lead she doesn’t stretch out an investigation.” There was a general chuckle. Hurrah for the free enterprise system.

  Gering held out his pencil microphone, thin and vicious as a wasp’s sting. “How about a love interest, Captain French? Mr. Mask hasn’t been used as a Presidency spokesman recently. There were rumours that his private life was hotter than the President cared for…”

  “Did Mask leave a will?”

  “Could it have been radical sabotage?”

  “Ms. Fletcher, have you formed any ideas about the case?”

  The roar and buzz of them was irritating me; there was no emotion here except an aggressive excitement, pushing, swarming, demanding to be fed. I needed to get away. I was still too sensitive from the last hunt to enjoy working in crowds. I concentrated on a white light, a clean protective circle, shutting out the reporters, letting the feel of them recede, muffled, pushed back behind the curtain of light. Calming down, I said, “Afraid not, Ms. Hart. Like Sherlock Holmes I find it a capital error to theorize in advance of the facts.” Another general laugh. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to cut the chatter short and get briefed by Captain French.”

  Rolly twitched and swallowed. “Thanks very much, people. Godspeed to you all, and may we all go home bored. Remember, keep Ms. Fletcher strictly off the cameras, please.” Turning to me he muttered, “I’ve commandeered the costume room for us—I’ll fill you in there and then we can take a look at the scene of death.”

  An NT staffer with the earnest, balding look of a trigonometry professor bobbed anxiously before us. “Captain French—we’re going to be going live remote from the stage in a few minutes and we’d sure appreciate it if you could spare us the time…”

  French nodded absently as various reporters began speaking into their corders, pairing up so that one could do the talking while the other did the shoot. With a grimace Rolly picked his way over to a door marked WARDROBE and let us in. A series of tables lined one mirrored wall. Behind them rack after rack of old costumes hung like discarded lives. The front row featured choristers’ uniforms (for Bible Hour no doubt) and medieval robes; a miter and cap hung next to the chair Rolly pulled out for me. Next to that nestled a Greek chiton (my father hated anyone calling them togas) and a burlap tunic. Over in the far corner an open chest gaped with hairpieces, like the lost and found box at a scalp-taking depot. Beside it another chest bristled with a jumble of shoes, plastic dishware, fake weapons, cheap hats, masks, and even one old-fashioned prosthetic leg I vaguely remembered as a murder weapon from some high-rated soap.

  An industrious lieutenant was tending a kettle one table down while making notes on his pocket computer. On Rolly’s signal he brought us over a couple of cups of tea—assam, by the smell of it. The raw, husky scent and the anticipation of work were invigorating. The day was looking up.

  Rolly sighed as I slid into a non-regulation slouch. “It wouldn’t hurt if you were a little more gracious with the media.”

  “I’m a hunter, not a celebrity,” I sulked, knowing I was in the wrong.

  “Not this time, thank God.”

  “For sure? No chance of honest work?”

  “It’s peculiar, to say the least.” He bobbed his head in a quick grace: “—For what we are about to receive…!” He took a sip of tea
and savoured it, flipping back a few pages in his notebook. “These guys finished filming yesterday. They were only in to do publicity shots today, and maybe retake one last scene. Doctor Faustus. Know it?”

  “Faust is a scholar, proud of his intellect, who sells his soul to a devil named Mephistophilis. He puts his power to various questionable ends—like raising the ghost of Helen of Troy for, um, immoral uses. Eventually the devils come and drag him off to hell.” I smiled politely at Rolly. “My father was very keen on giving me an education in the classics.”

  Roily grunted. “Mr. Mask was cast as Mephistophilis—the demon.”

  “Hunh. That’s a twist.” Counter-casting a Red mouthpiece; my interest in the director picked up a notch. Rolly shrugged. I liked the way he always said “Mr.” even when the victim was dead and there were no reporters around. It showed some nicety of feeling. He took his spoon from the teacup and absent-mindedly bent it at right angles. He dipped it into his tea, watching the mnemometal spring back into its original shape. A bad habit to get into; eventually the metal would fatigue and snap off, and that would be another spoon for the Department to replace. Oh well. Rolly French was probably worth the price of some crumpled flatware.

  He retrieved the spoon and began working it between pudgy fingers. “This was an NT production, of course, so the director wanted to get a nice Redemption angle on the play. He wanted the demon to have a lot of flare and dazzle value, hi-tech. Sort of a ‘seductive/repulsive thing.’ This is what he tells me, anyway. So the Mephistophilis costume was rigged up with a lot of electronic whiz-bang stuff: shooting flames, flashing lights, you get the idea…Supposed to look great on film.” Rolly’s distaste for such gimmickry was obvious.

  “Why not just use special effects?”

  “Cheaper, believe it or not. And you can take it to promotions. Great idea—except a circuit gave, and this wonderful costume fried Mr. Mask in his dressing room this morning.”

  “No-one saw it happen?”

  Rolly shook his head. “No. Due to his celebrity billing, Mr. Mask demanded, and got, certain privileges. He refused to see anyone for fifteen minutes before any performance. Said he needed the time to ‘construct the character.’ His dressing room was strictly off-limits.”

  “Nobody heard anything?”

  “Oh, sure—there was a crackle and a thump, but such noises aren’t exactly unusual on a soundstage. The actors thought it was something the techs were doing, and the techs didn’t hear anything. The ones who placed the noise as coming from Mask’s dressing room assumed he was fooling around with one of the gadgets on the costume.”

  “Doesn’t it seem strange that no-one would even check it out?”

  “I told you—Mr. Mask’s word was law, and he had everyone under strict orders that he was not to be disturbed for fifteen minutes before show time.”

  “So how was he found?”

  “About five minutes after the noise they sent a runner to give him his last call. When he didn’t answer the boy looked inside. He called the actors from the green room down the hall: one of them got the director. He sent someone to call us.”

  I nodded. “Could I see the body?” I wasn’t eager to look at the corpse. Still, it had to be done, and the image of the demon costume in its shattered glory had a sinister allure.

  Roily nodded, fat eyebrows bunching together on his forehead as he downed the last of his tea. “We’ve done a pretty thorough search on it already. A little bit of skin on a chrome flange. Not much else.” I trusted Rolly’s diligence; if he said that was all there was, I believed him. “I guess I should get this interview over with,” he added with a sigh. As we stood up he caught my eye. “Listen, Fletcher, the media are going to be all over this one. I want it quiet, and I want it fast, credit?”

  I shrugged. “Gosh, I sure hope he wasn’t murdered, Rolly. I’d hate to screw up your time-table.”

  He grunted. “See that you don’t.”

  We muscled our way through the hordes cluttering the hallway until we came to a small door neatly labelled “STAR.” Rolly knocked and told the duty officer to let me have a look. The room inside was small but comfortable. It had a half-size refrigerator, and next to it a sofa, long enough for a big man to stretch out his full length. The chequerboard tile had been left bare. Against the far wall a large, brightly lit mirror hung over a make-up table littered with sticks of greasepaint, pads for base and jars of powder, eyebrow pencils and lipstick, rouge and tissues and a dazzle of smaller hand-mirrors. So many mirrors: reflections splintered over them, light glancing through the room as if off a sheet of fractured ice.

  Jonathan Mask lay on the floor like Lucifer hurled from heaven, a broken devil’s body in a blasphemous cross. The air smelled of ozone and burnt plastic. The tangled wreckage of glass wires and skin and blackened plastic, peeking through at Mask’s hands, feet, and side, had the horror of exposed bone. His head was bare, emerging from the crimson costume with the terrible expression of a man looking into Hell.

  Light exploded from behind me, flashbulbs flaring like shooting stars. A pack of reporters had followed us in to stoop like vultures over Mask’s corpse, shielded from all feeling by the glass walls of their camera lenses. One of them grinned at me and winked. “Hey, Sherlock—the game’s afoot!”

  And the evening and the morning

  were the second day.

  Three

  The cast and crew of David Delaney’s Faust were waiting for me in the Green Room, waiting for the curtain to go up on their scene. The room smelled of nervous sweat and stale cigarette smoke. I perched on a stool next to the door, making notes. Watching them.

  A curious tension filled the room. Of course they were excited by Mask’s death, but there was something more. A group of people working together quickly establishes a certain shape and logic as friendships and antipathies are formed. But the comforting smoothness of familiarity was absent here: though they had been together more than six weeks, the cast and crew members of Faustus were still as jagged, as volatile as a group of strangers.

  “If Jon fried himself, why can’t we get out of here?” Daniel Vachon demanded. He was tense, flashy, entertaining and in bad taste: no “communicator,” that’s for sure: he meant to show he was an actor, in every sense of the word. Elaborate in Elizabethan robes and ruffles, his words left footprints: he gestured each time he spoke, and a cigarette held between his nervous fingers left trails of smoke behind, curling and coiling into accusations, gossip, bad jokes, nervous laughter. (The cigarette another modest vice, of course, to complete his image.) With his good looks and sinner’s eyes it was no surprise Daniel Vachon was playing the damned Faustus. By the mysterious logic of actors, he had assumed a certain off-stage leadership because he had the starring role.

  Vachon bent to murmur in Celia Wu’s ear; she blushed a little too easily and pushed him away. Celia was a hazel-eyed Eurasian beauty, obviously meant to play Helen of Troy. She had a clumsy grace, a constant, unaffected awareness of her body that charged her least motion with sexuality. They whispered together, Vachon dashing and irreverent, Celia surprisingly prim, fluttering from nervous laughter to disapproving frowns.

  “David Delaney,” the director said. He looked out of place in street clothes amidst his Elizabethan cast. He was in his late thirties—young, really, for a man of his standing. Blond hair, blue eyes, a soft, round face. In his lap his steepled fingers quiet as a monk’s; behind his eyes only flatness and a silence. Strange, how death takes some people. I had expected to find the director fiery, temperamental, angry or grieving, but the death of his star had left Delaney eerily numb. “Ill met, I fear, though His will is beyond our comprehension. Anything we can do, Ms. Fletcher…We heard you were ill earlier,” he went on, with just a trace of curiosity in his soft voice. “Of course the shock of seeing Jonathan is reason enough.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Delaney,” I said, in a cold voice I hoped would cut the subject dead. The five minutes I had spent in the ladies’ room retching
, sick from the horror that clotted the Star dressing room, would not enhance my professional image. Besides which, it was a shaper reaction. Stupid to have let a hint get out.

  I fiddled with my pens and notebook, letting my audience get anxious. I tossed my jacket over the corder Rolly’s man had left unhappily prominent on a chair beside me. People don’t talk freely when they know their every word is being packaged for the cops. I make my own notes; I don’t like depending on gadgets.

  There was a shape building from the cast I wanted to force into the open. You could read tension and excitement in Vachon’s exclamatory eyebrows, see it in the restrained energy with which Tara Allen, the technical director, calmed her troops. Mask’s death had hit these people like a whirlwind, scattering their expectations like leaves; without him the pattern that had formed between them all had suddenly lost its shape and meaning. Was this what made them feel so strangely volatile? But I had interviewed groups like this before: shock I expected, and disarray, but not the trembling, unstable energy that flickered between these people. Mask must have been a man of tremendous power for his absence to have left such a gaping chaos behind.

  They had all been interviewed one on one; I would read their statements later. Right now I wanted them together. A group of people has its own form and pattern; you can learn things from a group that an individual would never show. I looked over the cast and crew of Faustus, a strange, seething organic whole whose secrets were as yet hidden from me. Let’s poke it, I thought, and see what twitches.