But Ed Dante wasn’t done yet. There was still hope, I hoped. And so, for now, Ed Dante had to get himself back in gear and get out there and fail an audition.
45
In recent years, the West Village has been undergoing a great deal of gentrification, the old warehouses and factory lofts and garages in the blocks near the Hudson River converting to condominiums, their ground floors filling with new delis and dry cleaners, and here and there, because this is Greenwich Village, new small theaters. The O. Henry Theater was one of these, in a building that had until just a few years ago been the home base of a moving and storage company; now gone to New Jersey, probably. Now the building, also renamed O. Henry, its old bricks freshly cleaned and pointed, its new name on the new canopy in front of its new glass-doored entrance, was nearing the end of its conversion: Occupancy February said the sign by the entrance, which also indicated, with an arrow, the direction to the sales office.
All of that was closed now, at six-thirty in the evening, after dark, and in fact at first it seemed to me that everything was shut down for the night here. But then I saw the worklight down at the far corner of the building closest to the river — visible at the end of the street, white pinpoints of light skipping nervously atop the black water — and I walked down there to find another entrance, closed with a temporary door in a sheet of plywood nailed to the frame, but with the theater sign already fixed in place above: O. Henry Theater, it said, in black letters on a white glass background, and with a black silhouette of head-and-shoulders that I suppose was meant to be William Sydney Porter himself.
I tried the temporary door, but it was locked, with a prominent padlock; nor did I see any light within. Had Kay Henry gotten his audition times confused? I was starting to turn away when a maroon Mercedes pulled to a stop at the curb and Henry himself got out, grinning at me and saying, “Ed! Right on time. Good man.” Then he frowned past me at the entrance and said, “Where’s Cardiff?”
“I have no idea,” I told him. “I just got here myself.”
Looking irritated behind his smooth exterior, Henry went over to the padlocked door, rattled the lock, and knocked briskly on the door. When nothing happened, he said, “Well, we’ll wait for them inside,” and withdrew a bunch of keys from his pocket.
Surprised, I said, “You have a key to this place?”
“The truth is,” he said, grinning in satisfaction as he looked through the keys for the right one, “I’m one of the owners of the building. Rita, and I, and a dozen other people.” Turning his broad happy grin toward me, he said, “I was the one who named the place. Did you think it was a coincidence?”
“Well, that’s pretty good,” I said, with Ed Dante’s gawkishness. “Your own theater, and named after you.”
“Not quite,” he said, though still grinning. “A different first letter. Ah, here it is.” And he bent over the padlock with the right key.
The temporary door opened to an unfinished lobby, its pseudo-marble floor covered with heavy sheets of mover’s paper, its walls Sheetrocked but not yet painted. “Go on in,” Henry told me, holding the door open with his foot as he fiddled the key back out of the padlock.
So I went past him and on inside, looking around. Light-spill from outside gave some illumination to the interior, or at least to this lobby.
From behind me, Henry said, “See the lightswitches over there? By the doorway to the auditorium.”
“I see them,” I said, moving carefully through the semi-darkness toward a row of half a dozen lightswitches without their switchplates.
“Turn on the two on the left.”
“Okay.” I did so, and brought up recessed lighting in bas relief pots on both sides of the lobby. I stood looking around at the place, the simple modern two-window box office to one side, as Henry closed the temporary door, which had another hasp lock on the inside, matching the one without. Moving smoothly, unhurriedly, Henry fixed that hasp into place and closed the padlock over it, saying, “There. Now we’ll have privacy.” Then, turning to me, his smile glinting as he took a small pistol from his pocket, he said, “We’ll want privacy for this discussion, Ed. Should I go on calling you Ed, by the way?” And the pistol pointed unwaveringly at my face.
46
How stupid of me. That was all I could think at first, how stupid I’d been. Evening auditions are fairly common in off-Broadway theater, but in a theater as incomplete as this? And if the building isn’t going to be ready for occupancy until February, how is the theater going to do a production, however limited, over the holidays? And how could I still have believed in the audition when there was no one present at all except the smiling Kay Henry, who just happened to be an owner of the building?
I’d walked right into this spider’s parlor, as big and dumb as life, concentrating on my own performance and paying no attention at all to Henry’s.
“I take it,” he was saying, moving toward me from the relocked door, “Ed Dante isn’t your real name.”
So he didn’t actually know who I was; could that be a help at all? “Sure it is, Mr. Henry,” I said, playing the goofy Ed to the bitter end. “What’s going on?”
“My very question to you,” he said, and the barrel of the pistol angled downward, away from my face. “We’re alone in this building,” he pointed out. “You’re going to tell me who you are and what you’re up to. No question, you will tell me. If you take too long to answer my questions, I’ll start shooting you. Not to kill, not to begin with. Just to hurt and to maim. For instance, my first shot will go into your left knee.”
He extended his arm, sighting along it and along the pistol barrel, and I slapped off the lights I’d just switched on, spun away to the side as the pistol made a nasty crack sound, like a whip being snapped rather than a gun going off, and I leaped through the entrance into the dark auditorium, with no idea whether I’d been hit or not.
I stumbled over seating in the dark — plush, fortunately — and fell between rows as the lights behind me came back on. I scrambled away along the curving row, out of sight from the doorway just in time, because Henry’s voice sounded back there, still calm, amused, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Ed, or whoever you are. I can guarantee you there’s no way out except the door we came in. And I won’t let you near that door, Ed. I’m armed, and you aren’t. All we need is to have a discussion, Ed. Nobody needs to be hurt. You’ll answer questions, I’ll be satisfied, we’ll both go home.”
I crawled like a snake under seats, hoping not to disturb the upraised seats or make any noise that would tell him where I was. Fortunately, he covered any sounds I might make by going on talking: “Ed, your story about the lost luggage never did play, you know that? It was just a way to explain why you didn’t have photos and resumé, isn’t that right? And when I checked into the career you described to me, the whole thing was just a fairy-tale, a pack of fibs from beginning to end. I called Equity, and they don’t have an Ed Dante. Ed, Ed, how did you expect to get away with it?”
I no longer knew. At the extreme right side of the theater, I risked raising my head slightly, looking up across the rows of seats, and saw him there, just inside the lobby doorway, perched casually on a seatback, one foot up on the armrest, hand with the gun dangling over his knee. He continued to smile, calm and confident, as he chatted amiably at the theater and his quick eyes kept scanning, scanning.