Harmony (56 page)

He gazed at me tearfully. “But it never would have been. That’s what’s unfair!”

“Maybe you should go home and tell your parents that.”

He looked scared. Like me, when it came time to tell my parents I was going to Harmony. “It’s not so hard to stand up to your parents if you really believe a thing,” I said.

“That’s what Mali would say, isn’t it! That’s what he’d want.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Songh shoved his prop notes into his back pocket and slipped away, grave and thoughtful. I hunted up Cris to deliver a few set notes, mainly so he could look busy while he kept an eye on the trap.

Peter and Margaret were in the shop, finishing up the final details on the tracking units. Margaret shook her head sadly when she saw me. Peter followed me about dog-like, with run-on condolences in the awestruck manner of one who can’t believe he’s had the good fortune to know someone who was actually murdered. He pressed for details. I wanted nothing more than to be away from him, but Sam would expect me to perform my assigned role properly. I assured Peter I knew nothing but what the news services had provided, then got out of there as fast as I could. But not before I’d noticed the faxpix of Jane pinned to the shop call-board, with the e-mail threat right beside it. Some asshole had drawn a red bull’s-eye around her head. How could Sean allow this in his shop? The suspicion that Sam might be right about him penetrated a little deeper.

Onstage, our show carpenter Jilly had kicked the painters out of the trap area to work on the closure mechanism. She fiddled above and fiddled below, then ran it a few times. Sam had said the plastique would not explode unless triggered, but what if Peter had rearmed it already? I found an excuse to draw Micah upstage. I watched Jilly’s slight, muscular body bob in and out of that hole, her mouth set in earnest determination to make the damn thing work. I could not believe we had walked away last night leaving death hiding in the basement. I marveled at the Eye’s power to convince, to draw the uninvolved into their machinations. I should warn her, I told myself, even with Jane lying in the town morgue. I should conveniently discover the mysterious added parts. Surely Jilly was innocent and didn’t deserve to die in a trap meant for someone else.

I approached cautiously. “Sean in yet?”

“Not as far as I know.” She signaled the booth and watched the floor seal itself perfectly. “Looking good. By the way, you seen the remote for this thing around anywhere?”

My decision was unmade in an instant. “Uh, no, I haven’t.”

And then, of course, it was too late. Because I understood that Jane’s murder had forever altered my moral landscape. Now I too longed for this confrontation, now that my planned and ordered life had turned into something I didn’t recognize or understand.

People, too, were less familiar by the minute. Hickey, for instance, who was clearly avoiding me, slinking about with Songh, taking care of my notes but never catching my eye. Until later, when one of his passes across stage brought him close by. He whispered, “I’ll be there for you guys tonight, don’t worry,” and moved away immediately.

I stared after him. Hickey was scared even to be seen talking to me. Now the premature end to his romance with Lucienne was explained. I wondered what he heard in the shop these days when there were no apprentices around. Avoiding the hostile territory of the crew room, I went to the greenroom for coffee. Cris was there keying up the monitor that carried the news services.

“What’s up?”

He made sure we were alone. “Want a look at Brigham’s press conference?” He tapped in the file request. The clip came up quickly, and there was the fat man, smiling and joking, toasting the press with his breakfast champagne. I felt nauseous just looking at him but watched it through anyway. Know your enemy, Sam would say.

The clip ended. “Yuck,” I said. “Well, back to work.”

“Gwinn, wait…”

“Not now, huh?” How could I explain to him how little he mattered anymore?

“Just don’t be mad at me. It’s a temporary thing, for both of us.”

I turned away, and there was Sean in the doorway, eyes fixed on the monitor with an expression I could not quantify. Dismay, or just as easily, guilt. Disgust, or perhaps agreement. Whatever it was, its intensity frightened me. Scared of Sean? Oh no. Then his eyes slid toward me.
Oh yes
.

“Excuse me,” I murmured by the door, feeling my throat tighten. His work clothes were filthy. He looked like he’d forgotten to shave that morning.

“I’m so sorry,” he croaked, “about Jane.”

I couldn’t help it. I glanced at him accusingly as I ducked past him through the door. He grabbed my arm.

“Gwinn, what… ?”

I jerked away. His face went slack with surprise as I bolted down the corridor.

“Gwinn!” he yelled. But I kept running. All the way to the theatre. I could avoid him there as long as I stuck close to Micah.

I dived back to work on a request from Moussa to make his hill a little more comfortable. A small price to pay to keep the music going, said Micah. Jilly assigned me one of the older crew, a rough-voiced fellow who sighed a lot to show how patient he was, taking orders from a mere apprentice. When I made him pull up two square meters of neatly laid surfacing to add padding underneath, he muttered crossly, “He’s just got some damn rock to sit on where he comes from, right?” Even then he wouldn’t let me help him. “If the job needs two, let Sean put another man on it.”

But I wasn’t going to be able to face Sean again real soon.

I sat and gave directions, whole paragraphs of inadequate description, when my hands could have showed him in seconds. I hated him. Maybe it was you, I thought. So much easier to imagine this man’s beefy, work-scabbed hands around Jane’s neck rather than Sean’s.

The Eye drifted in one by one instead of swooping down all at once at noon with their customary flourish. First there was Te-Cucularit grilling a nodding, openmouthed Songh about the prop revisions. Then I noticed Sam talking with Cris in that touchy, aggressive way they related to each other. They headed for the shop together. Soon after, Moussa sauntered over to test his spot. He sniffed out the situation right off and stuck out a hand to my bluff crewman, thanking him for this fine work that was going to add so much to his performance. The man seemed more impressed by Moussa’s size than anything else but found himself kneeling side by side with this cheerful giant, detailing the mysteries of the surfacing material with a willingness he couldn’t quite explain.

I wanted to kiss the top of Moussa’s curly head, but that might break the spell. I left him to work his gentle miracles.

Mali was standing alone in front of the trap, watching the painters touch up the scrapes and scars left by Jilly’s repairs.

“Did you hear about the audience this afternoon?” I murmured.

He did not reply. He was gone somewhere inside his head. Something fierce and angry in the set of his back compelled me, instead of moving on and leaving him to his musings, to take his hand and lean against his arm. It was only when his fingers tightened around mine that I recalled standing like that with my father, on evenings when he came home from work silent with mysterious unease.

“Stay with him, if it happens,” he said.

“If what?… Mali, nothing’s going to—”

“He’d never ask it.”

“Mali…” I shook his arm gently. “You’re scaring me.”

He looked down at me, as if from miles away. “Night terrors, child.”

“All ready below, Mal,” said Sam from behind us.

Mali nodded soberly, then grabbed Sam’s hand as he came alongside and folded it around mine, pressed between his own. He held us like that for a moment, then turned and walked away.

Sam frowned after him. “What’s with him?”

“I don’t know.”

We let our hands drop, awkward with Mali’s gesture and with each other. I searched the floor for places the painters should take care of. Sam studied me.

“This has,” he said quietly, “become something I did not quite expect.” His even tone would not admit if he thought this good or bad. “What do you think they’d do if I made love to you right here in front of them?”

“Cheer us on, I guess.” Laughter was the only way to keep from saying what I shouldn’t.

“Get back to work.” He pushed me gently away.

Downstage, Mali had invited Micah to step aside with him into the house. They strolled side by side up one long aisle and along the curved rear wall, heads bowed at matching angles, their hands clasped behind their backs like two professors debating an arcane point of logic.

Peter wandered in from the shop as the last of the tracking units was being wheeled up a long ramp onto the deck. Sam immediately drew him into some jocular exchange I couldn’t hear. Nothing in Peter’s manner suggested he was aware of being subtly interrogated, but then, nothing in Sam’s manner suggested that he was extracting any useful information.

* * *

Howie returned at noon. “Liz, we’ll start with a curtain call and here’s how we’ll do it.” His elaborate staging not too subtly isolated Mali as the star of the evening.

Mali said, “We always do company calls.”

“In our blacks,” Omea added more gently. She meant the anonymous black robes they’d worn for their first entrance into Harmony. “Always. It’s our signature.”

“Not too much fun for your audiences.” Howie always said staging the curtain call was his favorite part of being a director.

Omea smiled. “You mean, not allowing them to play favorites?”

“You could put it that way.”

“That’s the way we see it,” said Ule.

Howie sighed and slumped in his seat.

Omea sat down next to him. “Dear Howie, we’ve had to work very hard to maintain our unified public voice. Audiences always want to divide and conquer. By making one performer a star, they take power over that life. They have made it and can unmake it whenever it pleases them.”

The canny producer in Howie was locked in battle with the more empathetic director. “But it gives you equal power over them. They’ll offer themselves body and soul to a star they’ve created.”

“For a time.”

“A short one,” said Ule.

Omea squeezed Howie’s arm. “We’d prefer long and fruitful lives in the theatre. There’s so much work to be done!”

“All right. As long as it’s as spectacular as you can make it. We’ll have been serious with them all evening. You gotta give them a chance to love you.”

“But of course,” she replied, and that was the end of it. Or so we thought.

* * *

The house was full by two o’clock.

“Like being at a wake,” Micah remarked.

In Chicago, I’d heard wakes described as a barbarous custom but Micah made them sound quite civilized, and indeed there was something soothing about the steady flow of condolences past the production table, cast members from
Crossroads
, musicians and backstage staff, apprentices we knew and many we didn’t, all offering sympathy as if Jane had been our relative. And it wasn’t just Jane. It was what she stood for. With one masterful stroke the Eye had turned a messy death into a noble symbol of apprentice resistance. I hoped they’d be able to do the same with their play.

It was not your usual lively apprentice audience, with chatter and row-hopping until the lights went down. Too worried about the evening’s Town Meeting and whether it would decide our fate. I was glad for the
Crossroads
folk, even though they’d probably come just to check out all the nasty rumors they’d heard next door. No matter. They were a cheerful lot, and devoted enough to the art to be willing to spend their first afternoon off inside another theatre.

Micah sent Songh and me to Moussa’s side of the house to check sight lines. He’d said nothing of his conversation with Mali, but as I was leaving, he remarked, “If anything happens, you’ll be by the pass door and can get backstage as quickly as possible.”

So Mali had talked him into it. We exchanged a look and I nodded gravely, wondering what use he thought I could be. Poor Micah. Matters had gotten so out of his control that even a futile gesture seemed better than none at all. But just as well. As Liz was calling places, Reede Chamberlaine oozed in with his retinue and filled up all the empty seats around the production table. I’d have been asked to move anyway.

From where we were sitting, the curved backdrop towered in profile to our left, shadows of moss and stone. When the lights went down, the audience settled immediately into the rapt waiting that thrills the heart of a theatre practitioner. Bird shapes flitted past, winging out into the house above our heads. Odors of jungle and sea tinged the stirring air. Songh shivered delightedly. He’d been too busy with props and petitions to see any rehearsal. He leaned forward in his seat as if expecting miracles, and by halfway through the first act, I was convinced that’s what we were seeing.

The show was working. I mean, really working. Not just technically, with everyone remembering their lines and blocking and all the effects going right. For the first time since that rough run-through five weeks earlier, the characters and story came to life.

Mostly it was Mali, with his performance at last fully unleashed. He started wooing the audience on his very first entrance. Once he’d hooked them, he played them like an expert angler. He shared with every eye the same intimate contact: only you understood, only you were his ally. You must therefore love his wife and children as he did, worship his gods with his same devotion, and suffer his pain and confusion as together you sought to reconcile clan tradition with his innovative vision of the future. And with those anguished eyes and radiant smile, Mali drew his fellow actors into the spiral of his energy. They bloomed in his light as if he were the sun they’d been waiting for all along.

Applause broke like thunder at the first act curtain, long and enthusiastic. I pushed across the crowded house to congratulate Micah. Howie looked as shaky as I’d ever seen him, so painfully hopeful in the face of real evidence that the long, hard weeks and all his struggles and political maneuvering might actually have been worth it.