“Not too much harm done, though,” he said hopefully.
“The wrong people saw the first act, Thorny. They walked out.”
“Wrong people?”
“Two backers and a critic.”
“Oh!”
He stood stunned. She stopped looking at him then and just stood waiting for the curtain to rise, her face showing nothing but a puzzled sadness. It wasn’t her show, and she had nothing in it but a doll that would bring a royalty check or two, and now herself as a temporary substitute for the doll. The sadness was for him. Contempt he could have understood.
The curtain lifted. A sea of dim faces beyond the foot-lights. And he was Andreyev, chief of a Soviet police garrison, loyalist servant of a dying cause. It was easy to stay in the role this time, to embed his ego firmly in the person of the Russian cop and live a little of the last century. For the ego was more comfortable there than in the skin of Ryan Thornier—a skin that might soon be sent to the tannery, judging the furtive glances that were coming from backstage. It might even be comfortable to remain Andrevev after the performance, but that was a sure way to get Napoleon Bonaparte for a roommate.
There was no change of setting between scenes i and ii, but only a dip of the curtain to indicate a time-lapse and permit a change of cast. He stayed onstage, and it gave him a moment to think. The thoughts weren’t pleasant.
Backers had walked out. Tomorrow the show would close unless the morning teleprint of the Times carried a rave review. Which seemed wildly improbable. Critics were jaded. Jaded tastes were apt to be impatient. They would not be eager to forgive the first act. He had wrecked it, and he couldn’t rescue it.
Revenge wasn’t sweet. It tasted like rot and a sour stomach.
Give them a good third act. There’s nothing more you can do. But even that wouldn’t take away the rotten taste.
Why did you do it, Thorny? Rick’s voice, whispering from the booth and in his earplug prompter.
He glanced up and saw the technician watching him from the small window of the booth. He spread his hands in a wide shrugging gesture, as if to ask: How can I tell you, what can I do?
Go on with it, what else? Rick whispered, and withdrew from the window.
The incident seemed to confirm that Jade intended for him to finish it, anyhow. She could scarcely intend otherwise. She was in it with him, in a sense. If the audience found out the play had a human stand-in, and if the critics didn’t like the show, they might pounce on the producer who “perpetrated such an impossible substitution”—even harder than they’d pounce on him. She had gambled on him, and in spite of his plot to force her into such a gamble, it was her show, and her responsibility, and she’d catch the brunt of it. Critics, owners, backers, and public—they didn’t care about “blame,” didn’t care about excuses or reasons. They cared about the finished product, and if they didn’t like it, the responsibility for it was clear.
As for himself? A cop waiting backstage. Why? He hadn’t studied the criminal code, but he couldn’t think of any neat little felonious label that could be pinned on what he’d done. Fraud? Not without an exchange of money or property, he thought. He’d been after intangibles, and the law was an earthy thing; it became confused when motives carried men beyond assaults on property or person, into assaults on ideas or principles. Then it passed the buck to psychiatry.
Maybe the beefy gent wasn’t a cop at all. Maybe he was a collector of maniacs.
Thorny didn’t much care. The dream had tumbled down, and he’d just have to let the debris keep falling about him until he got a chance to start climbing out of the wreckage. It was the end of something that should have ended years ago, and he couldn’t get out until it finished collapsing.
The curtain lifted. Scene ii was good. Not brilliant, but good enough to make them stop snapping their gum and hold them locked in their seats, absorbed in their identity with Andreyev.
Scene iii was his Gethsemane—when the mob besieged the public offices while he waited for word of Marka and an answer to his offer of a truce with the guerrilla forces. The answer came in one word.
“Nyet.”
His death sentence. The word that bound him over to the jackals in the streets, the word that cast him to the ravening mob. The mob had a way: the mob was collecting officials and mounting them. He could see their collection from the window, looking across the square, and he discussed it with an aide. Nine men impaled on the steel spikes of the heavy grillwork fence in front of the Regional Soviet offices. The mob seized another specimen with its thousand hands and mounted it carefully. It lifted the specimen into a sitting position over a two-foot spike, then dropped him on it. Two specimens still squirmed.
He’d cheat the mob, of course. There were the barricades in the building below, and there would be plenty of time to meet death privately and chastely before the mob tore its way inside. But he delayed. He waited for word from Marka.
Word came. Two guards burst in.
“She’s here, comrade, she’s come!”
Come with the enemy, they said. Come betraying him, betraying the state. Impossible! But the guard insisted.
Berserk fury, and refusal to believe. With a low snarl, he drew the automatic, shot the bearer of bad tidings through the heart.
With the crash of the gunshot; the mannequin crumpled. The explosion startled a sudden memory out of hiding, and he remembered: the second cartridge in the clip—not a blank! He had forgotten to unload the deadly round.
For an instant he debated firing it into the fallen mannequin as a way to get rid of it, then dismissed the notion and obeyed the script. He stared at his victim and wilted, letting the gun slip from his fingers and fall to the floor. He staggered to the window to stare out across the square. He covered his face with his hands, awaited the transition curtain.
The curtain came. He whirled and started for the gun. No, Thorny, no! came Rick’s frantic whisper from the booth. To the ikon… the ikon!
He stopped in mid-stage. No time to retrieve the gun and unload. The curtain had only dipped and was starting up again. Let Mela get rid of the round, he thought. He crossed to the shrine, tearing open his collar, rumpling his hair. He fell to his knees before the ancient ikon, in dereliction before the God of an older Russia, a Russia that survived as firmly in fierce negation as it had survived in fierce affirmation. The cultural soul was a living thing, and it survived as well in downfall as in victory; it could never be excised, but only eaten away or slowly transmuted by time and gentle pressures of rain wearing the rock.
There was a bust of Lenin beneath the ikon. And there was a bust of Harvey Smithfield beneath the Greek players’ masks on the wall of D’Uccia’s office. The signs of the times, and the signs of the timeless, and the cultural heartbeat pulsed to the rhythm of centuries. He had resisted the times as they took a sharp turn in direction, but no man could swim long against the tide as it plodded its zigzag course into timelessness. And the sharp deflections in the course were deceptive—for all of them really wound their way downstream. No man ever added his bit to the flow by spending all his effort to resist the current. The tide would tire him and take him into oblivion while the world flowed on.
Marka, Boris, Piotr had entered, and he had turned to start at them without understanding. The mockery followed and the harsh laughter, as they pushed the once haughty but now broken chieftain about the stage like a dazed animal unable to respond. He rebounded from one to another of them, as they prodded him to dispel the trancelike daze.