“Someday I’ll remind you you said that,” Fran promised.
Rabinowitz looked the group over and couldn’t help but smile. For a totally amateur group, they were some of the finest actors she’d worked with—though she had a feeling that her lead actor, Kwame Massala, would not be an amateur much longer. In the old days when stage actors had to play in person, the stockbroker from Capetown would have been trapped playing Othello forever; in a VR theater he could portray anyone from Romeo to Lear convincingly. Right now he was a burly Scotsman with ginger hair and mustache, and piercing brown eyes glinting with ambition. It was just a matter of time before he got the recognition he needed to make the jump as a pro.
“Well, regardless of how glad you are to see me,” she said, “the fact is I’ve cheated you out of some precious rehearsal time, and we’ll all have to be brilliant to make up for it. How far have you gotten?”
“Run through on Act I, a complete read-through on Act II,” Fran said.
“Then I guess we’re ready to try a run-through. Places, people—Ban-quo, Fleance, Macbeth and the silent servant. Let’s see what we can do.”
Rabinowitz momentarily put aside her personal concerns, all the dead bodies that were piling up in the real world, to concentrate on the regicide about to occur in this theater. She listened, but was not transported. The words were all there, punctilious and precise. Just the spirit was missing. Banquo wasn’t supposed to be dead until Act III, and Macbeth might as well have been considering his options on different stock deals.
How could she make this play come to life? Part of the problem was that she much preferred the comedies; she dealt with heavy enough matters in real life. But the troupe had outvoted her on this one. They wanted to try the Scottish play. And now it was her job to make it live. Everyone was looking at her. She had to say something.
“Fine-o, here’s my tilt on it. Ban-quo, you’re in a whiz. You heard what the sisters said as well as Mac did. He’ll be king, but you’ll beget kings. Does that mean your pimply-faced little Fleance gets a crown? Glamis and Cawdor both came true. And here everyone is—Mac, Duncan, Fleance—all within one set of thick stone walls for the night. Is it any wonder ‘A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,/And yet I would not sleep; merciful powers/Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature/Gives way to in repose.’ Mac’s an old friend, but can you suddenly trust him in the dark with a dirk?
“Fran, I think we should do a little more with the dagger of the mind. You’re projecting it straight in front of Mac. ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.’ Sure holographic projections weren’t that common in eleventh-century Scotland, but we have to play to the audience, who’s seen a lot of them. The dagger isn’t just a visual effect to Mac, it’s a symbol, a key—yes, his key to heaven, to everything he wants, if only he dares grasp it. Yes, it’s the key to heaven, so it comes from heaven. Fran, we’ll float the key down from the sky. It’ll even start coming down before the servant leaves, only he can’t see it. Only Mac can see it. He’ll look up and there’s this dagger floating down, the handle towards his—”
She stopped suddenly and her eyes focused on some indefinable point light-years away. “He’ll look up and see it come down,” she whispered, her voice barely audible to the others. She stood transfixed for nearly a minute. The rest of the troupe waited, not knowing whether to disturb her.
She shook herself out of it and looked around, as though for the first time. “Oh my God,” she said. “You’re all going to hate me, but I have to leave now. Fran, I owe you a big, big favor, but please take over one more time. This is the last time, I swear it.”
“Where are you going in such a rush?” her assistant asked.
“I have to catch a plane to New York,” Rabinowitz said as she vanished from the virtual stage.
The big brownstone house was dark, which surprised her; she’d phoned ahead to let Fredericksen know she was coming. She climbed the front stairs and knocked. No answer. She tried the buzzer. Again, no answer. She tried calling in on her handphone. Just the message machine.
“Did he jump out on me?” she muttered.
She tried the heavy front door and found to her amazement it wasn’t locked. Something was not right. Fredericksen had the normal urbanite’s finely honed sense of paranoia. Even if he’d left, he’d have locked up behind himself.
Standing to the side of the sill she pushed the door inward. “Nils?” she called. Silence answered.
She stood for a moment beside the doorway, thinking, then slipped quickly inside. Inside the house was as dark as it had looked from the outside. The house system must have been off, because the motion detectors didn’t activate the lights as she moved around. Nor was there a manual switchplate beside the door. It had been years since Rabinowitz had last visited. She couldn’t even remember where the switchplates might be.
“Nils,” she called again, but this time her voice was much softer. Even if Fredericksen had been in the next room he might not have heard her.
She left the door wide open to let in a faint beam of light from the street outside. Searching her memory for clues to the house’s layout, she moved to her right and bumped into the sliding double doors that led to the study. The wooden doors were closed. Why?
Feeling the surface of the doors with her fingertips, she found the crack where the two doors met. Again standing slightly to one side of center, she pulled the doors apart. The doors slid into the walls with just the faintest squeaking. There was more darkness and silence in the den beyond.
Wishing she’d thought to bring her MagLite, she took a step into the room, then a second. Her third step was interrupted by a large lump on the floor. She tripped and went flying forward, putting out her hands to break the fall. Somehow, by sheer dumb luck, her head missed bumping on the edge of the heavy desk by just a few centimeters, and she lay on the carpet panting.
Now there was the sound of movement. Someone had been standing, waiting on the far side of the room, and now he was rushing toward her. Rabinowitz scrambled to get to her hands and knees, but suddenly the other person kicked her in the stomach and she fell back onto the floor. Looking up she saw standing over her a body silhouetted against the meager light from the hallway. In its hand was the silhouette of a gun.
A gunshot echoed in the room, and Rabinowitz’s body jerked in anticipation of a bullet that never came. Instead, the person standing over her fell hard against the desk and then crumpled to the floor beside her.
A bright light shone suddenly in her eyes. She shut them tight and turned her head to the left, where the body had fallen.
“I’ve been finding you on the floor a lot lately,” Detective Hoy said. “Is that one of your preferred positions?”
Rabinowitz squinted her eyes open again after Hoy pointed the light away from her. She rolled over and once more started getting to her hands and knees. “What took you so long?”
“Well, if you want prompter service, stop making spur-of-the-moment plane flights,” he replied. “I had to improvise like a loono to stay this close behind you. What exactly’s happening here?”
There were several shapes moving around behind Hoy. “Have one of your people find a switchplate,” Rabinowitz said as she got to her feet, “and we’ll both know.”
The lights came on just as she finished speaking and she had to shut her eyes for another few seconds until she could adjust. She opened them slowly to stare down at the still figure of her attacker, a man dressed all in black.
“Know him?” Hoy asked.
“Never saw him before.”