Reign

ACT I: INTERPRETER

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

– C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Scene 1

Six months after Dennis Hamilton's farewell performance of A Private Empire, on a October night whose chill pushed thin ribbons of cold between the cracks in the casements of the old farmhouse windows, Ann Deems, newly widowed, sat in the large family room and watched Entertainment Tonight on the projection TV. She had been working on the details of the estate all day, and a thick sheaf of papers still lay, awaiting her attention, on the teak coffee table.

She ignored them now, her feet tucked comfortably under her, her gaze fixed loosely on the images that blurringly danced across the giant screen. She made a mental note that one of the first things she would do would be to get rid of the damned thing and buy another regular TV. She hated the way colors bled into each other, the lack of sharp detail that phosphor dots provided. She had complained to Eddie about it time and again, but all he had said was, "You'll get used to it, Annie. I mean, look at the size of it. It's like being in a goddamned theatre, isn't it?"

Yes, she had told him. Yes, I suppose so, thinking all the while that it was like a theatre in which the projectionist was drunk and the lens was smeared with Vaseline. Still, Eddie had loved it. It was his toy, just like all the other toys he had bought and played with and gotten bored with through their twenty-odd years of married life.

She didn't begrudge him the things. After all, he had worked hard for them, had always worked hard since the day he had gotten out of law school and gone into practice with his father's firm. And even if he hadn't worked hard, they still would have had the money. Henry Deems always saw to that. The only son of the senior partner in one of the oldest law firms in Philadelphia would want for nothing, and neither, Ann thought with an odd mixture of satisfaction and distaste, would his widow or his daughter.

She shrugged off the thoughts and tried to turn her attention back to the TV. This kind of empty-headed pseudo-journalism was exactly what she needed now. Mind candy, popcorn for the brain. It seemed as though she had been thinking about Eddie every minute since his death three weeks before. She was afraid she would always think about it.

It left a tremendous void in her life, as though someone had come and pulled up their house in one piece, so that only a pit remained where the basement used to be. If they had been older, it might have been easier to take, even though the ties would have been still deeper with years. But you just don't expect someone to die of a heart attack at forty-four. Cancer maybe, or a car crash, but not a heart attack, not for someone who never smoked, got a lot of exercise, ate right, was a walking public service spot. Not Eddie. And not the way it happened. She wondered if, after everything was over, the estate settled, Eddie's things stored away or distributed among the many charities that Ann did volunteer work for, she could forget that night. She wondered, if she met another man and fell in love with him, if she could ever make love again.

A commercial came on the huge screen, and Ann looked away, closed her eyes, and remembered once more. There was nothing to see, for it had been in darkness. No, there was only the sound and the feeling of him, of Eddie over her, filling her, the two of them pressed together, moving as one toward a climax, and her coming first, the warmth moving up from groin to stomach to breasts, and feeling the spasmodic heat inside her, knowing that Eddie was with her, part of her. And then the horror began.

It was as if someone had struck him with a sledgehammer. He died on top of her, inside her, in an instant. A sharp intake of breath, and the weight of him pressing her down, smothering her, not the weight of passion spent, but the terrible, awesome weight of life fled. Dead weight. Dead.

She blinked back tears and looked at Eddie's goddamned, mammoth screen again. It was the stuff of stupid, dirty jokes, dying like that, and she felt furious at him for doing it, knowing full well that it had not been his fault, that he did not choose where and when to have his fatal attack. Still, his death had savaged her above and beyond the already harrowing experience of losing a husband, a friend, a man to whom you had given all your love for nearly a quarter of a century. Despite her friends, her family, despite Terri, she felt terribly alone.

“… Dennis Hamilton…”

The words from the stereo speakers on either side of the screen sent a shot of adrenalin through her, and her head snapped back to the glowing, watery images. One of the show's vapid correspondents, golden-haired and red-lipped, was holding a mike and talking at the camera. Behind her, some twenty yards away, was a wall of gray stone decorated with bas-reliefs. Ann listened.

“… who purchased the Venetian Theatre with the intention of making it a showcase for new American musical comedy. Though we were unable to talk to Hamilton himself, we were able to visit with his business manager, John Steinberg."

There was a cut to an interior, and Ann saw a round-faced, balding man in his sixties smile benignly toward where the unseen correspondent stood. "There's a need for it," the man said in a voice that was deep but held effeminate tones. "I mean, just look at the musicals on Broadway – Les Miz, Cats, Phantom, that new one, Rinky-Tink – all of them British.”

"What about Sondheim?" the woman asked.

Steinberg shrugged. "Well, his shows are always interesting, but I haven't found the last few very… involving. And, it seems, neither have the critics nor the audiences. Let's face it, American musical theatre just isn't that healthy."

"And Dennis Hamilton wants to change that," the woman said.

"Yes he does. All of us involved with the project do. Dennis believes that there are new Rodgers and Hammersteins and Lerner and Loewes out there."

"What about new Davis and Ensleys?" the woman asked, referring to the long-retired writers of A Private Empire.

Hamilton's manager smiled. "That goes without saying. He would be absolutely delighted to find a team like that. After all, he owes his fame to them."

The camera went back to the woman in front of the building. "So, tonight will see the re-opening party of the Venetian Theatre here in Kirkland, Pennsylvania, and Entertainment Tonight wishes Dennis Hamilton well in his effort to restore the status of American musical theatre to the grand old days of Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Back to you, Bob…"

Ann picked up the remote and clicked the switch. The picture and sound faded away, leaving the room darker, quieter, an incubator for her thoughts. After a minute, she got up and crossed the room to the cherry-wood shelves, ran her fiver over the black-cased rows of videocassettes, and removed one. She uncased it, put it in the machine (a Panasonic Super-VHS – one more of Eddie's toys), and turned everything on. Then she sat down and watched as the anti-copying message and the Paramount Home Video logo ran their course.

When the overture began over the opening credits, she held her breath, releasing it when his name came up on the screen. She watched the film for fifteen minutes before Terri came into the room.

"Mother?" the girl said, and Ann looked around guiltily. Terri's smile was a bit sad, a bit bitter. "Don't tell me. You were watching ET, right?" Ann nodded, and Terri sat down next to her. Though Ann was tall, Terri was taller still. It was daunting, Ann thought, to try and mother a person taller than you, and nearly an adult in years as well. Maybe that was just one reason she hadn't done a very good job of it lately.

"I just thought it would be… fun to look at this again. I haven't seen it for a couple of years." It was a lie. One morning several months before, Ann had watched the film of A Private Empire when the house was empty. She had cried at the end, as she always did, telling herself that it wasn't because of Dennis and what might have been, but because of the sadness and the romance of the plot. "I'll turn it off," Ann said, reaching for the remote.

"You don't have to feel guilty," Terri told her, the tone belying the words.

"I don't feel guilty," Ann said, pressing a button and making the image vanish. "I've never done anything to feel guilty about. Not that way."

Terri raised her eyebrows, as though such an accusation had been the farthest thing from her mind. "You don't have to be defensive about it either. I'm not one to judge. For all I care, you can go visit him at his new theatre. Kirkland's only forty miles away."

"Don't be smart."

"I'm not. I'm serious. Maybe you could use your… influence to get me a job with him."

"I don't have any influence with Dennis Hamilton. It's been over twenty years since I've seen him."

"There's no reason you can't pick up where you left off. I hear he's very rich, so you'd have something in common already."

Ann struggled to keep her anger under control. "I've never noticed you complaining about having too much money," she said dryly, and, she hoped, with a trace of humor. She hated to argue with Terri, because even if she was right, she never won. And since Eddie's death, arguing with Terri consisted of talking to her.

" ' Visi d' arte,' " Terri replied. "I live for art."

"I know what it means, thank you."

"But I also live to eat. Are we having dinner tonight?"

"You'd better ask Mary that. She's in charge of the kitchen."

"Mary's in charge of cuisine boring," Terri said with a French accent with a sneer in it.

"Does anything meet with your approval around here?" Ann finally asked. She knew that her irritation was precisely what Terri had hoped to draw out, but she couldn't help herself.

"No, not really. Everything seems weary, stale, flat…”

“… and unprofitable," Ann finished for her. "I'm not totally illiterate."

"Oh, brav- o," Terri said, getting up and walking to the door. "I'll see you over chow."

What a little bitch, Ann thought as she watched the girl walk out the door. How had Terri turned out like that? What had she or Eddie done wrong? Too much money? Too many privileges? Terri had never had to do an honest day's labor in her life. She had never waited on tables, never washed dishes for money, never peddled anything door to door, had never done any of the hundreds of thankless tasks that kids did growing up that earned them a little money and a lot of humility.

Being a waitress during her college summers had been, Ann thought in retrospect, one of her best learning experiences. She had moaned about it continually at first, because there was no need. Her grandfather, the president of a bank, was paying her tuition, and her father, a doctor, could more than afford her room, board, and expenses. But he had insisted, over the protests of Ann's mother, that she work during the summers. "It might be the only physical labor the girl ever does in her life," he had said.

"Oh, John," her mother had argued, "it's just not necessary. Look at me – I've never worked like that."

"I know," her father replied. "And that's exactly why Ann should." Ann hadn't laughed at the comment then, but did later, many times.

Her father had been right, as usual. Though she had hated that Holiday Inn coffee shop the first few days, she grew to like the job in a grudging way. There was only one other college girl working there, an art major from Penn State who needed the money badly. Of the other women, a few were older married types who wanted the additional luxuries two incomes would provide, while the rest were single girls, most of them high school dropouts. It was a good cross section, and Ann, unfailingly pleasant and a little afraid, got along well with all of them.

The other thing that waiting on tables had done for her was introduce her to Dennis Hamilton, who, with the rest of the company of A Private Empire, was staying at the Holiday Inn in Kirkland, Pennsylvania, and would be opening the fledgling production in Kirkland's Venetian Theatre.

Scene 2

The original intention of the producers was to take the show to New Haven, Connecticut for its out-of-town tryout, but no theatre was available at the time. Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, which housed its share of hopefuls, was also booked. But then one of the producers remembered the Venetian Theatre in Kirkland. It had been the home of many touring shows after the death of Vaudeville, but had for some years been only a movie theatre, its former glories masked by dust. Still, it had the necessary facilities, and was close enough to Philadelphia to insure decent audiences, particularly for a new Ensley-Davis show, the same team that had brought the theatre-going public blockbuster musicals ever since the mid-forties.

The Venetian Theatre was over fifty years old in that summer of 1966. Although it was shabby, and the seats were threadbare, there was still much that was majestic about it. But it had never, not even on the night it had opened, looked as sumptuous as it did on the evening of Dennis Hamilton's party, and had certainly never seen such a contingent of the wealthy and famous standing within its marbled grand lobby, flanking its wide, carpeted staircases, chattering on its palatial mezzanine lobby.

The party had begun at nine, and by ten-thirty nearly all two hundred and fifty guests were there. Many had flown from New York and Los Angeles into Philadelphia, and there hired cars to take them the remaining thirty miles to Kirkland. There were actors, directors, musicians, writers, and a smattering of technical people, nearly all of whom knew or had worked with Dennis Hamilton. No one had been invited simply for appearance's sake.

Dennis and Robin stood near the front entrance, greeting the latecomers. Left alone for a rare moment, Robin squeezed his hand gently. "Will the liquor hold out?" she asked him. There were four bars in service, three in the grand lobby, one in the mezzanine lobby, and all were cluttered with humanity.

"So the caterer claims," Dennis said, then grinned. "Of course I don't know if he had this group of alcoholics in mind when he made his plans."

Brian Chaney and Lydia Marks came through the front door, received hugs, compliments on their latest films, and were told where to take their coats. "Lydia looks good," Robin said when the couple were out of earshot.

Dennis nodded. "Amazing what a seventh facelift and a butt-tuck can do, isn't it?"

"Don't knock her. She's still doing nude scenes."

" Last Chance, you mean?" Robin nodded and Dennis shook his head. "Uh-uh. Body double."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Clinton told me. A twenty-two year old porno star."

Robin giggled. "You know, I like this party better than our last one.”

“Closing night? Why? That was a good party."

"I know, but it was sad. It was the end of something, and this is the beginning of something new. Everybody seems happier."

"I don't know, I thought they were pretty happy that they'd never have to see me in Empire again… unless they catch it on the late show."

"You know that's not true," Robin said, but the conversation stopped there as Michael Riley came up, bottled beer in hand, to talk to Dennis, and Robin took the opportunity to wander.

She was immediately grabbed by Cissy Morrison, an actress who had started out in the film version of A Private Empire and who now shared her sitcom with another ex-movie queen of the sixties. "Jesus, Robbie," she gushed, "this place is fantastic. I mean it's like the fucking Roxy or something. Of course I never saw the Roxy, but I saw pictures, you know? This place must have cost a mint, huh?"

Robin smiled. "Only about half of your annual share of the residuals on After She's Gone, Cissy."

"My ass. I couldn't touch this place with a ten-foot dick, honey. But of course I didn't have John Steinberg investing my income for the last twenty years.”

“John's good," Robin said.

"Of course John's good," agreed a voice from behind Robin. She felt a hand around her waist and turned to look into the deep green eyes of Steinberg himself. "Good evening, darling," he said, and kissed Robin on the cheek. "Lovely party. And the omnipresent Ms. Morrison. I loved your most recent show, Cissy. I tell all my friends that no one, not even Lucille Ball in her salad days, falls hind-first onto a cherry pie like you do. Sheer artistry."

Cissy Morrison made a face. "You're a cunt, John."

"I wish, my dear." Steinberg turned his attention back to Robin. "You look glassless, love. May I get you something?"

"No thanks, John. I don't want to get too sloshed to be a good hostess.”

“Never happen. You're the perfect hostess, drunk or sober. How's Dennis?”

“He's wonderful. He's just so excited about this."

"Aren't we all."

"About what?" Cissy asked.

"About this theatre, my sitcom queen," Steinberg said. "About the workshop, about the whole project."

"You have any shows yet?"

"It's just been announced," Robin said, "but a few submissions have trickled in already."

Steinberg took a sip of his drink and nodded. "Trunk work, no doubt. But there may be something good in them. If there is, we'll find it." He grinned, showing white, even teeth. "And we'll produce it."

"With whose money?"

"Oh, we have our ways, dear. We have backers in abundance, and expect a multitude more. You, for one."

Cissy squinted her eyes. "Me?"

"Why do you think you were invited here tonight, love?"

"God, John…" Robin said, shaking her head.

"Why do you think we paid to fly you across this great, musical-theatre-loving country of ours to wine and dine you and tell you how marvelous your still young-looking hindquarters look encrusted with cherry pie filling?"

Cissy gaped, and Robin giggled. "John, stop it."

"Oh, Robin, it's all right, Cissy knows I have no interest in her hindquarters save from a purely aesthetic point of view, don't you, Cissy?"

"Well sure, I mean I know it's a fund raiser, but…"

"Not a fund raiser, Cissy," Robin said. "John's looking for investors, not contributors." She turned a mockingly cold eye on Steinberg. "But I thought the pitch was going to come later."

"I'm sorry, I apologize," John said. " Mea maxima culpa. It's just that, when faced with this woman's residuals, my thoughts turn from her backside to her money."

"Well, honey," Cissy drawled, "if you ever want to see the one, you're gonna have to kiss the other."

Steinberg exploded in sincere laughter. "I love you, Cissy," he said, wiping tears from his eyes. "I really do. I only dish it out to you because I know you'll reciprocate."

"Bet your ass, John. Now why don't you go get me a drink."

Steinberg obediently wandered over to the bar. "Is he living down here with you?" Cissy asked Robin.

"Yes. He and Donna Franklin, his secretary, have apartments on the third floor. Dennis and I are there, and Sid, of course. He has a small apartment right next to ours."

"What, you're all on one floor?"

Robin nodded. "Curt's here too."

"Jesus, they must be tiny. How do you stand it?"

"Oh no, our apartment's huge. Twice as big as any of the suites we used to stay in on the road."

"What about the one at the Ritz-Carlton-Boston?"

"By far. And we've got more apartments on the fourth floor for Dex and Quentin when they come down to work a show. Not to mention twenty smaller rooms on the fifth floor."

"What did they use all this space for before?" Cissy asked.

"It wasn't just a theatre," Robin explained. "The theatre only takes up a little more than a third of the floor plan. This was a whole community building that David Kirk built for the town of Kirkland. He was quite the philanthropist – really a very generous man. The third and fourth floors were a school for orphan children. The third was classrooms, the fourth was the dormitory, and on the fifth floor there was a hospital for the people of the town."

"Speaking of hospitals, here's the perfect medicine," Steinberg interrupted, returning with Cissy's drink. "Explaining the history of the estate, Robin?" He handed the cocktail to Cissy.

"Who was this Kirk guy anyway?" Cissy asked.

"A philanthropist, a humanitarian, and a supreme quack," Steinberg said. "He made his first money at the turn of the century when he found a mineral spring on his parents' farm near here. Instead of remaining a starving farmer, he became a master marketer. Began to bottle the water, added some herbs to it, printed a bunch of labels, and purveyed the stuff as 'Dr. Kirk's Medicinal Tonic.' People were suckers for patent medicines back then, so he expanded his line, wrote a book called Physical Culture: Wellspring of a Healthy Society, and did very well indeed. Well enough to build Kirkland Springs Sanitorium near his spring, become a multi-millionaire, and turn the little village of Farmers' Corners into the company town of Kirkland."

"You're making him sound like a rotten man, John," Robin said. "He did a lot for the people of this town. Like this community center. There was no profit involved there."

"No," Steinberg agreed. "Just an attempt to make himself more godlike. The Great White Father dispensing blessings on his children, just like he dispensed his little pills and nostrums that would cure everything from hernias to cancer. He was a fraud, pure and simple."

"But he built this place for the people of the town – and the school, and the hospital," Cissy said.

"Showing off, that's all. You think the people who worked in his factories cared whether or not he used Carrara marble here in the lobby? You think they cared that those murals are by Winter? As long as they had a place to see their vaudeville – and later to watch movies – you think they cared? Kirk did it for his rich friends from Philadelphia and environs, to show them how goddamned rich he was. As for the school and hospital, maybe it was his way of buying off his guilt for all the harm he did with his useless potions."

"You know, John," Cissy said, "I like you, but the thing I don't like about you is that you think that anytime anybody does something nice they've got an ulterior motive."

"I believe in the innate selfishness of man, darling. It's that simple."

"What about Gandhi?" Cissy said. "Or someone like that guy in A Tale of Two Cities? Or Jesus, for crissake?"

"To take them in order, I'm sure that Gandhi got a great deal of inner pleasure from the sacrifices he made; Sidney Carton is a fictional character, but I suspect that his real-life counterpart would have been suicidal; and as for Jesus… well, I'm afraid that my own socio-religious background precludes serious consideration of him. However, I'd hazard a guess that a death by crucifixion was precisely what he wanted. It seems to have worked out for all concerned, doesn't it?"

Cissy cast a dry look at Robin. "And Dennis has put up with this guy for twenty years?"

Steinberg leaned forward and kissed Cissy on the cheek. "He pays for my economic savvy, dear, not my spiritual philosophies."

"Thank God," said Robin.

Any further conversation was halted by the little black girl who pushed herself between Steinberg and Robin. "Hello, Aunt Robin. Hi, Uncle John." She looked up at them with bright eyes. Her hair was corn-rowed to perfection, and she wore a spotless yellow dress with red stitching.

"Hey, sweet pea," Steinberg said, hoisting her aloft. "My God, Whitney, you're getting heavier every day. Why aren't you in bed?"

"I was, but I wanted to come to the party so much that Sid brought me down. Just for a while, he said. I haven't seen Grandma yet." The girl looked around cautiously. "Is she here?"

"She's somewhere," Robin said. "And you'd better hope you spot her first, young lady."

Cissy cleared her throat. "I don't think we've been introduced, John."

"Sorry. Cissy, this is Whitney Johnson, Marvella's granddaughter, and Whitney -"

"I know who you are," the girl interrupted. "You're Mona, and you're on Mona and Me. I watch it every week. My grandma made costumes for you once, didn't she?"

Cissy laughed, and shook the girl's hand. "She sure did. A long time ago. But Mona is just a character I play. My real name's Cissy."

Whitney nodded sagely. "I knew that, but I forgot. It says it at the start of the show. In the credits." She seemed proud to know the term.

"So are you visiting with your grandma down here?"

"I'm living with her for a while. My mom and dad are breaking up."

"Well now," Steinberg said gently, "you don't know that for sure. They might get back together."

"Grandma says fat chance." The girl gave an exaggerated sigh. "Grandma's nearly always right."

"What are you doing up?" came a voice from behind Steinberg. They all turned to see Marvella Johnson, all one hundred and sixty pounds of her, glowering in pretended ferocity at her granddaughter. "Didn't I say no party?"

"Sid brought me down," said Whitney, still in Steinberg's arms.

"Maybe I'll have to whup Sid and you both then."

The girl smiled. "You won't whup me, Grandma."

Marvella's huge chuckle sounded like tin cans rattling in a silo. "No, I guess I won't. C'mere, you stinker." She took the girl easily from Steinberg's arms and hugged her. "All right, a half hour. And at eleven o'clock I take your little bones back upstairs." She stifled a yawn. "And maybe I'll go with you. I'm not used to these late nights."

"You still a morning person, Marvella?" Cissy asked. "God, I remember those eight o'clock costume calls. I honestly believe you meant to kill us."

"Lazy show people." Marvella shook her massive head. "Get them up before noon and they're nothing but a pain in the…” She glanced at her granddaughter. “… in the posterior." She gave the little girl a squeeze. "Come on, honey, let's meet some more stars, what do you say? Excuse us?" She sashayed off into the crowd, bearing her granddaughter in one arm as lightly as a purse.

"She's part of your entourage too?" Cissy asked Robin.

"Mmm-hmm. Sort of a permanent wardrobe mistress."

"I thought she retired."

"She did," Steinberg said, "but when Dennis came up with this whole idea and asked her to work with us, she jumped at the chance. Her husband died last year, and I think she realized she would have been bored out of her skull just sitting around the city."

"And she's living here too?"

Robin nodded. "On the fourth floor. We wanted her on the third with the rest of us, but she wanted to be right next to the wardrobe room. Pretty lonely up there, though."

"Oh, she's not all alone," Steinberg said. "She does have Whitney."

"Just until Janice – that's Marvella's daughter – can find a place of her own," said Robin.

"And of course there's always Kitty," Steinberg said dryly.

“Kitty?”

"Our resident pussycat. Or the little bitch, as I like to call her, although her name's Cristina."

"A theatre cat?" Cissy said. "Oh, that's cute."

"You haven't seen her," said Robin. "She likes Abe Kipp, the head custodian, and that's about it. She tolerates me and absolutely hates Dennis."

"The poor man tried to pet her the first time he saw her," Steinberg said. "Bit him right to the bone."

Cissy gave a little snort. "Well, now that I know who all is down here, my next question is what do you do all day. Watch Kirkland Springs flow to the sea?"

"Kirkland Springs," Steinberg said, "dried up back in the late thirties, along with David Kirk's fortune, right around the time the FDA started getting serious about the patent medicine business. But there's plenty to do nevertheless. This was, after all, a community building. In the basement, we have a lovely pool, a small gymnasium -"

"Don't tell me, John," Cissy said. " Show me. If you want my investment, I have to observe the kind of lifestyle that I'll be supporting."

Robin bristled. "The backers will be supporting production costs alone, Cissy, that's all. Dennis bought this building, and he'll donate the space. And his own time." She smiled. "That said, I'd be glad to show you our underground pleasure palace. Shall we?"

"Why not?" said Cissy, mildly drunk. "But could the toady here get me another drink first?"

"The toady," Steinberg said, bowing, "would be honored. Would your highness prefer the usual Ripple on the rocks?"

~* ~

Dennis Hamilton was bored. He had lost count of how many times he had discussed acting styles with Sybil Creed, but knew that the number guaranteed that neither one of them would at this point proselytize the other. Still, he nodded politely at her as they stood together on the mezzanine lobby, looking down through the marble arches at the guests below. He let her words bounce off him, and concentrated instead on the vista behind her.

The paintings and bas-reliefs clinging to the canvas of the lobby's curved and segmented ceiling were a hodge-podge of mythological and historical themes. Here a Babylonian war chariot raced toward a covey of cherubim, their piggish little mouths open in some hymn to… was it Apollo floating there? Yes, Dennis thought. It must be – there was the lyre…

“… liar, that's all you are, all anyone is who thinks that way."

He drew his attention back to the gray-haired woman whose black, shining dress seemed to be sprayed on her whip-thin body. "I'm sorry, Sybil? Think what way?"

"There! Concentration! Or the lack of it – that's the problem with all of you technical actors. Staring at the goddamned ceiling when you should be listening and martialing your resources."

"But it's a beautiful ceiling."

"Oh God, Dennis, how like you. It's the coward's way out, changing the subject like that."

"Now I'm a coward instead of a liar?"

"You've been both in your performances throughout your whole life."

"The critics seem to have liked my performances. And I won't mention the public."

"Why not?" Sybil said. "They're one and the same, aren't they? Both easily fooled. But not me, Dennis. You have always been an outward actor, never inward. And it is only the inward actor, the one who creates his performance from within, who gives a true performance."

"Using your own past experiences isn't creating, Sybil, it's interpreting. To me, real creativity is forming a character out of whole cloth." He shrugged. "And anyway, it doesn't matter whether a performance is true or not, as you put it. What matters is the impact it has on the audience."

"That's fraudulent."

"It's not fraudulent. You're an elitist, Sybil – you think that the only valid style of acting is when you use your own memories and responses. But how can you call any actor who touches an audience – who makes them laugh or cry or just, for Christ's sake, feel – fraudulent?"

"What else can you call someone who wears a mask? Honest?"

"What do you mean, a mask? That's a character, Sybil. The character takes over. That's where the creative act comes in."

"But in letting the character take over, you deny the reality of yourself.”

“Oh Christ…”

"Are you denying that, Dennis? You've done it all your life, you know, protected yourself from the truth about yourself. You're the most consistent mask-wearer I know."

"And what is the truth about myself, Sybil?"

"I don't know. Because you're so damned good at protecting it."

"Bullshit."

"Why are you so afraid to allow your real emotions to show through – your emotions, not the emotions of a character?"

"Sybil, you've baited me like this ever since I walked out of your acting class twenty years ago because I didn't want to be a tree."

Sybil's nostrils flared, and her mouth became a thin line as she bit off each word. "You would have learned a hell of a lot about acting from trying to be a tree, to use what was inside you to do it -"

"And blow in the wind like the rest of those pretentious little twits? 'Oooh, I feel the birds nesting in my branches…' Wonderful," he finished dryly.

"Jesus, what's this?" said Sidney Harper, coming up to the squabbling pair and placing a hand on Dennis's shoulder. "Our traditional battle royal?"

"Oh, go to hell, Sid," Dennis snapped, then grinned at the man.

"There," Sybil said. The words spilled out, not giving Dennis a chance to interrupt. "There you are, that's precisely what I mean, that grin. You really are angry at Sid. You really mean to tell him to go to hell, and you do, but then you cover up your anger with a false smile."

"It's a real smile," Dennis said, putting his arm around Sid. "I love Sid.”

“Yassah," Sid said, nodding crookedly. "Massah Dennis love this po' ol' white boy, cuz Sid, he wuk so hand fo' Massah Dennis."

"Can the crap, Sid." Sybil lit a cigarette, and blew a shaft of smoke in Sid's direction. "You're just as bad as Dennis. You hide what you feel with bullshit. But you were never as good at bullshitting as Dennis, and that's why you got out of acting."

"Whoo." Sid shook his head. "Isn't it awfully early in the evening to get so viperous, Sybil?"

"Excuse me," Dennis said, still smiling, "but this conversation's made me dry as hell. I need another drink." He walked away, toward the bar.

~* ~

Sid set his drink on the wide balcony rail and crossed his well-muscled arms. He had to look up at Sybil, but the disparity in height didn't bother him. Sid could hold his own. "Why do you do that, Sybil?" he asked with a sigh.

"Do what?"

"You know – try and bust his hump like that."

"I couldn't have a few years ago. He would have argued with me for hours, or, more likely, called me a silly bitch. What's wrong with him?"

"Wrong?"

"He's not the same man, Sid. There's a weakness in him. He was always so imperial before, you couldn't tell the difference between him and the Emperor. But now…" She trailed off with a shrug.

"Yeah, he's changed, but I don't necessarily think it's for the worst," Sid said, leaning on the railing. "I like to think he's just mellowing. Easing out. The show's had a lot to do with it. I think he's been bored the last few years."

"His performances would indicate that."

"Come on, Sybil -"

"You know I'm right, Sid. Most people didn't notice it. The great unwashed who make up his audience, and of course the critics. But there's been a flatness to it.”

“Except…" Sid paused.

"What?"

"Well, basically I think you're right. And I think that Dennis realizes it too. But I saw almost every damn performance, and every once in a while, in the past year or so, he gave one that was just electric. A real killer, better than I'd ever seen him, even when it was all fresh and new in the sixties. And afterwards he would be just drained, totally exhausted." Sid's face grew thoughtful. "Sometimes he said…"

"What? What did he say?"

He looked at Sybil and found her too interested, too expectant, found himself on the verge of divulging things that Dennis would consider secret. "Nothing. Nothing important. Excuse me, Sybil."

Sid Harper took his glass from the balcony rail and walked into the oak-paneled men's lounge, where he sat alone on one of the renaissance-styled chairs and finished his drink. He thought about Dennis Hamilton, the man who had been his employer and friend for over twenty years, and thought about how glad he was that Dennis had left A Private Empire behind him. The show had made Dennis a fortune, it was true, but it had also cost him much.

There had been, first and foremost, the problem of identity. To the world at large, Dennis Hamilton was the Emperor Frederick, and vice versa, from the time he was nineteen years old, the star of A Private Empire and the newest enfant terrible of Broadway. The show had run on the street for five years, and Dennis had been with it for every performance, except for a five-month hiatus in 1968 in which he went to Hollywood to star in the film version. After the show closed, he accepted a number of movie offers, but the films, unlike the cinematic A Private Empire, were less than huge successes, both critically and at the box offices.

Dennis Hamilton was Emperor Frederick as surely as George Reeves had been Superman and Bela Lugosi Dracula, and neither his private detective in The Crystal. 45, his beleaguered deputy in The Battle for Tombstone, nor his baffled college student in Up Against It won him attention. Only the rock musical, Sparks, made any money, and that was because Dennis's co-star was Bette Barton, whose rock album went platinum just before the film's release. Most of the critics observed rightly that Dennis's trained lyric baritone wasn't right for the role, and his vocal coach's attempts to turn him into an R amp;B belter were strained at best, laughable at worst.

After Sparks, the only offers of movie roles his agent was able to get were leads in low-budget films, which Dennis turned down. Instead he recorded albums of standards which sold slowly but steadily, appeared on TV variety shows, and performed in solo concerts around the country and occasionally in Vegas. Although films would have been more lucrative, Dennis had no need of money. Back in 1968, when he received a large amount from both his contract renewal and his film performance of Emperor Frederick, he had been lucky enough to fall into the hands of John Steinberg, an experienced financial manager who took the young man and his investments under his wing.

Steinberg guided Dennis through both his career and his private life, which included a marriage in 1969 to Natalie Pierce, a well-known stage actress a few years older than Dennis, the birth of their son Evan in 1970, and their divorce in 1971. Natalie got custody of the baby, which was, in retrospect, a mistake of the court, considering her suicide less than a year after the divorce was final. Evan then came to live with his father, whose career was scudding along more lethargically than the one that had driven Natalie Pierce to wash down fifty-seven sleeping pills with a bottle of Drambuie.

But because of John Steinberg's expertise with a dollar, Dennis Hamilton was able to bide his time and still live like the emperor he had created on the stage. Steinberg bought penny stocks that quickly grew to dollar ones. He invested in real estate like a wizard, purchasing apparently worthless lots that in a few years grew to be ideal places to build shopping malls, housing developments, and industrial parks. With those profits he bought song catalogues and invested in well-chosen films and theatrical productions, a dangerous game, but one which Steinberg loved to play, and played properly. Of seventeen such investments made from 1975 to 1978, only one failed to show a profit, and by 1978, Dennis Hamilton was worth in excess of fifty million dollars.

That year, Dennis was offered a lead in a TV series, a sitcom about a teacher at a military academy, and he accepted it against Steinberg's advice. Twelve episodes of Up in Arms were made, but critical response was so negative and viewer disinterest so high that only seven were aired.

Three more years of gradually declining album sales and less well attended concerts followed. Television variety shows were dead, and from 1978 to 1981 Dennis's television exposure consisted of eight appearances with Mery Griffin, and his annual appearance on the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, which had begun in 1972. Then, in 1981, Irwin Richards decided to stage a revival of A Private Empire, and asked Dennis if he would repeat his role of Emperor Frederick.

At first, Dennis was hesitant. "I've done it, John," he told Steinberg. "I mean, it's a part of my career that's behind me now."

"And what's ahead is so wonderful?" Steinberg asked. "You're only thirty-four years old, Dennis. You're a rich man, and your being rich has made me rich too, but except for A Private Empire, your life is notable only for the remarkable string of failures you've been able to pack into such an abbreviated career. No offense."

"Do I ever take any from you? If I did, we wouldn't have lasted a month together."

"My point is," Steinberg went on, "that like it or not, that show was the high point of your career. You are still a young man, and since you look far younger than you really are, you could still play the role to perfection. There has never been a better male part written in American musical theatre, as far as I'm concerned, and if you're still unconvinced, let me just whisper two little words to you."

"What?"

"Yul Brynner."

"Yul Brynner," Dennis repeated.

"Do you know what The King and I revival did for his career? And he'd been working steadily for nearly three decades anyway. You, on the other hand… Well, if you do this show, it should be even more impressive than Brynner's return to the stage, because, unlike him, you have barely been seen for ten years. You would be like a phoenix rising from the conflagration of a, shall we say, less than

splendid career? It would be as though no time has passed since today and 1966."

"You think I should do it."

"No, of course not, I just love to hear myself talk.”

“I don't know, John…"

"My dear boy," Steinberg said without a smile, "may I be blunt?”

“Blunter than usual?"

"Yes. It won't be easy to hear, but it's necessary if you want to do more than merely be a wealthy man."

"All right," Dennis said after a pause. "Shoot."

"I will. You are not a marketable commodity in the eighties, Dennis. You have a spectacular musical comedy voice, your acting is solid if not on the level of Olivier, your dancing is less than splendid, due to those same flat feet that kept you from military service and, you being the klutz you are, no doubt saved your life. You are a creature of the musical theatre. And I have urged you time and again to return to the stage, perhaps in some vehicles that, true, were not worthy of your participation, but you have always refused, feeling that a return to Broadway was a step backwards. But on screen and television, except for the film version of Empire, you have only a string of failures behind you, and as far as recording goes, your once a year albums no longer sell enough to warrant their creation, as you have no doubt been able to tell by RCA's lack of enthusiasm over your latest proposed project. Are you with me so far?"

"I'm listening."

"Don't hold it back, boy. The truth hurts, and I'm sure that you're very pissed off at me for telling it."

"You're fucking right."

"Why? Because I'm blunt, or because I'm right?"

"Both. You prick."

"That's more like it – a little righteous indignation. But now I'll tell you the good part."

"I can hardly wait."

"I love you, Dennis. Like a son. And I've helped to make you very rich. Now it's time to make you a star. Again. And a revival of Empire will do that, I promise you. I swear to you. Have I ever been wrong? Wait, don't answer that, it doesn't matter. Because this time I'm right."

"John, they're offering scale, for God's sake."

"What do you care about money? Do it for nothing if you have to, but do it.”

“But Richards is a two bit producer, he won't be able to stage it on the scale that it was done in '66-"

"The hell with Richards. We back him, become the biggest investor, get 51 percent – you know Richards never has enough investors – then take it over. We'll get the best designer, choreographer, costumer -"

"Now wait, John, I don't want this to be a vanity production."

"It won't be. No one will know we've backed it until much, much later, after all the reviews are in and the tickets sold months in advance. And when it's a hit – note the word when, not if – Richards will sell out the rest to us." Steinberg paused for a moment, then smiled. "There's another reason to do it, Dennis."

"What?"

"Richards will do the show whether you take the role or not. Do you really want someone else to be thought of as the Emperor? Do you really want to be replaced? Or perhaps I should say usurped?" Steinberg chuckled. "Don't bother to answer -I can see the very thought annoys you. Good. That's good. That's what the Emperor should be like. That character was you, you know. It was the best thing you ever did. You can bring him back to life again. And you should. If for no other reason than to prove you can. And I think proving that will prove a great many other things to you as well, things you may have forgotten about yourself."

Dennis Hamilton then left Evan in Sid Harper's capable hands and flew off to Switzerland, where he thought about the offer for three days and nights, both on the slopes and in a Zermatt lodge. He came to realize that Steinberg was right, that there was nothing new awaiting him, that at an age where most performers are beginning to make names for themselves, he had been a has-been for many years. It was time to start again, to become someone again.

The deal went pretty much as Steinberg had planned. Irwin Richards, sensing a coup along the lines of The King and I revival, was more resistant to a friendly takeover than Steinberg had expected, but a five per cent chunk of the show added to the rest of the money finally persuaded him to bow out. He told friends later that it was the best deal he ever made – a two million dollar return on a $75,000 investment. John Steinberg knew the bragging was nothing but sour grapes. Although it was a remarkable return, had Richards successfully fought the takeover, he would have realized ten times that amount over the next decade. Indeed, it made Dennis Hamilton rich all over again. It also made him famous once more.

It made something else too, something that Dennis Hamilton would not become aware of until much later.

Scene 3

In the inner lobby, under the Byzantine vaulting of blue and gold mosaic that had taken three Italian craftsmen two years to create, Dennis Hamilton, having escaped from Sybil Creed's tiresome and guilt-inducing theories of performance, spoke of ghosts. It was a much more welcome topic to him than acting, for he had no personal stake in ghosts.

"I've never seen one, Ally," he said.

Ally Terrazin rolled her eyes upward, toward the gleaming gold leaf a few feet above their heads. "God, Dennis, you've been in the theatre all your life, and you've never even seen one?"

"That doesn't mean I don't believe in them – I've just never been lucky.”

“Ranthu says there are ghosts in every theatre if you know how to look for them.”

“Ranthu?" Dennis asked.

"My channel."

"Aw, Ally…” Dennis smiled and shook his head. "You're into that stuff now? You need to get away from the coast. It's Cloud-Cuckooland out there."

She rolled her big, blue eyes again, and Dennis laughed. She still made him laugh as much as she had when he first met her.

His friend, Ric Terrazin, the comedian, had introduced Dennis to his daughter in 1979, when she was eighteen, and Dennis had had an affair with her shortly afterward, and still had, as Ally well knew, a warm spot for her. She was an actress now, and was always working, mostly in supporting roles in low-budget teen comedies and slasher movies, genres she felt that she was getting too old for. Producers and audiences disagreed, however, and she continued to bare her breasts in a half dozen features a year.

"Ranthu is serious business, Dennis," she said, shaking her head so that her long blonde hair whispered over her bare shoulders. "A lot of these guys are fake, sure, but I check them out pretty good. Ranthu's for real."

"And what's Ranthu say about ghosts?"

"He says that all theatres are haunted."

"By what?"

"By psychic residue."

"Uh-huh. You mean like cosmic dung?"

"It's not funny. I mean like psychic residues of mass emotions. Okay, okay, look. When people come to see a play, it's like the old Greeks, right? Like catharsis? Like your emotions get really out in the open and stretched and exposed and all?”

“With Neil Simon?"

"Don't be a smartass. You know what I mean. Especially in live theatre. There's this psychic link between the performers and the audience? And some of that psychic…” – she searched for the word – " stuff hangs around. And people who are in here, like alone at night or something – or even in the daytime, because it's always dark anyway – their suggestibility is heightened. And they start to see things."

"Wait a minute," Dennis said. "You say suggestibility. So does that mean that they make these things up? That they're hallucinations?"

"Well, maybe sometimes. But sometimes they're real too."

"Ally, you're a flake, but I love you." He smiled and kissed her cheek. "And if there are any ghosts in my theatre, I hope you'll be the first to find them."

She grinned. "I don't. Ghosts scare the shit out of me. You remember that movie I made last year, The Ouija Man?"

"The one where you took the shower?"

She pursed her lips. "That's the part you remembered, huh? Well, when we were fucking around with the Ouija board in rehearsals, I really got freaked out.”

“Why? What did it say?"

"It spoke to me."

"Spoke?"

"Oh, you know, it spelled to me, okay? Spelled my name. And then it said, 'See me die.'"

"See you die?"

"No. 'Me.' It spelled M-E. Like I was supposed to see it die, you know? And we asked it when, and it said soon, and we asked where, and it said, 'Theatre.'“

“Just theatre? Didn't say which one?"

"Uh-uh. I didn't want to ask it anymore. It was just too weird."

"So what's the end of the story?"

"Huh?"

"So did you see someone die in a theatre?"

"Well, no."

"Then doesn't that prove it was bullshit? I mean, it said soon, didn't it?"

"Oh yeah, but what's soon to us may not be soon to the entities. I mean, Ranthu thinks in terms of epochs."

"Great, Ally. So if somebody dies in a theatre you're in within the next epoch, that means the Ouija board's real?"

"You don't believe in anything, do you, Dennis?"

"Nothing that originates on the west coast, no."

Before Ally could reply, Tommy Werton came up to them, a bottle of Budweiser dangling from one hammy fist. His smile was almost lost in the thicket of black beard that climbed nearly to his eyes. "’Scuse me, Dennis. Robin asked me to remind you it's almost eleven. Time to start the show."

"Oh, right. Tommy, you know Ally Terrazin? Ally, this is Tommy Werton, our ASM."

"ASM?" Ally repeated.

"Poor girl's never been in live theatre, Tommy," Dennis said smiling. "Had to start out in movies."

"It's short for assistant stage manager," Tommy said. "I do all the stuff Curt doesn't want to."

"In short," Dennis added, "Tommy does almost everything that requires getting your hands dirty. So. We've got the multitudes all ready?"

Tommy nodded. "Robin and Sid rounded 'em up. Let 'em in?"

"Is Curt in the booth?" Dennis asked.

"Yeah. Spot's warming up."

Dennis turned back to Ally. "Ready to see the show?"

"You mean there's more?"

"Sure. I've only shown you where we keep our ghost, right here in the inner lobby. And only because you asked. I wouldn't have done this for just anyone." She smiled. "Only west coast flakes."

"You got it. Open the doors, Tommy."

Tommy did as he was ordered, then quickly walked down the left-hand aisle toward the stage, avoiding the surge of drink-laden guests pouring through the inner lobby and then into the theatre proper, after having dutifully oooed and ahhhed at the complexity and beauty of the mosaics.

Curt had, Dennis thought, done a marvelous job with the lighting. It was too dim to make out any details of the theatre, just bright enough so that you could find a seat. Above, the flat dome of sky was dark in the center, except for the dozens of stars (really 10 and 25 watt bulbs) that peeked through the scudding clouds provided by two half-century old stereopticon machines. Yet a hazy pinkness bloomed on the right side of the ceiling, as though the artificial sky was on the verge of a burgeoning sunrise. The audible responses ranged from the expected "Gorgeous…” and "Incredible…” to the equally anticipated "I can't see a fucking thing!" from a number of the more tiddly guests.

"It looks terrific," Dennis heard Robin say, and felt her hand slip into his. He turned and kissed her lightly. "Here's Mister Microphone." She handed him a Shure wireless. "Just flick the switch when you're ready. Curt's got the power on."

"Thanks. You're throwing a wonderful party, love." He squinted across the thirty-four rows of seats toward the stage. "Can you see anything up there?”

“No. Just darkness."

"Good," he said. "That's how we want it. When that fire curtain comes down, they are going to love it."

The fire curtain was planned to be the crowning touch to Dennis's spotlight tour of the theatre. The painting that covered it had been done in 1923, and filled nearly the entire proscenium with a scene depicting a ball in the Duke of Venice's palazzo, complete with orchestra, masked dancers and celebrants, and, in the lower stage right section, a wine barrel whose contents poured copiously into the goblet of a laughing, drunken courtier. Decades of lights shining on it had faded it somewhat, and those same years had seen it fall victim to minor staining as well, but it was still a remarkable work.

"Come on, come on, down here." Dennis heard John Steinberg's voice haranguing the guests into sitting down. He and his secretary, Donna Franklin, a tall, bird-like woman in her forties, gathered the guests like mother hens, seating them, as Dennis had requested, in the center of the huge space.

Dennis smiled. John could be a tremendous bitch, but the bitchiness was always leavened with a wry sense of humor, and that was precisely why everyone loved him. Dennis had once met Truman Capote at a party before the writer's death, and had discovered him to be a vicious and far less macho version of Steinberg. While Capote's friends seemed to be cast in the roles of apologists for the man's shortcomings, no one had to apologize for Steinberg.

"For God's sake, Henry, there's a seat here, come on… Alice, Peter, don't sit so close, you're too close, come back here…"

When all two hundred and fifty were seated, Dennis flicked the switch on his mike and walked down the left center aisle, stopping at the first inhabited row, row K. As he turned toward the crowd, a pin spot caught him perfectly, the light white and blazing in his eyes. Years of experience kept him from squinting, and he smiled at the rows of people he could no longer see.

"I'd like to thank you all for making the effort to be here tonight," he said. "I hope that this evening will mark not only the rebirth of the Venetian Theatre, but the birth of a new era of American musical theatre. Now I suppose we've kept you in the dark – both figuratively and literally – long enough. New American musical theatre, both the people who write it and the people who perform in it, have needed a showcase for a long time, a place that does no revivals, but new works exclusively, seeking out excellent shows and producing them, not on a shoestring, but as they deserve to be produced, with adequate budgets, fine casts, and the best production people and facilities available. Tonight you'll have the opportunity to be part of this project.

"But let me make one thing clear. We're not asking for charity. We're asking for investors, for people who spend their money wisely. And I don't think I exaggerate when I say that you stand a far better chance to earn a profit here than you do on Wall Street."

There was polite laughter, and Dennis went on.

I will take the boy when he comes on the stage. The curtain will come down. Yes, the final curtain. I'll call him there, call him out. Drop the curtain. And drop him as well.

The first. He will be the first. What an honor. To die for his Emperor…

"… you've seen the lobbies, and you've seen as much of the theatre itself as we have permitted you. Some of you may remember it from a quarter century ago – if you're willing to admit to it. It was dusty and abused even then, but, as you'll recall, its true beauty shone through nonetheless. Recently, we've given it the cleaning and the tender loving care it deserves. The Venetian Theatre is a revival house only in the sense that it has itself been revived. It's become, we feel, a fitting showcase for the gems we want to display. And we hope that you'll agree."

That was the cue, and Curt, high up in the projection booth, slowly brought up the house lights until the stars and clouds on the ceiling above were invisible, and the interior of the theatre was lit as richly as if by an Italian sun. Balconies, backed by woven tapestries that hid organ pipes and speakers, hung gracefully over the side walls, and castellated towers above glowed warmly. Over the proscenium arched a span of columns reminiscent of an ornate canal bridge, and just below, at the apex of the arch, was mounted a large, golden face of Apollo, whose wide eyes stared out across the auditorium, focused on the top rows of the balcony.

"The Venetian Theatre," Dennis went on, when the appreciative applause finally died down. "Designed by Jonathan Underwood and built by David Kirk. Kirk loved Venice, as you can easily see, and to give you further proof of that, I'd like to draw your attention to the red act curtain…"

The heavy red curtain covered the whole of the proscenium. It was in two pieces, a valance that covered the top third of the opening, and a main curtain that hid the rest, both of them fringed at the bottoms with gold tassels. As Dennis spoke, those curtains slowly lifted, opened by Tommy Werton's mighty hands on the pin rail, showing only darkness behind.

Then something happened to the lights. All over the house, they flickered, dimmed, brightened again, not at all in unison, but seemingly independently. The lanterns of the huge sconces, the painted glass lights of the beamed balcony ceiling, the rows of bulbs hidden by the overhang of roof and walls – all were blinking randomly, crazily.

Dennis started to speak into the microphone, but found that its power was affected as well, so that only every third word boomed over the speakers. "Excuse me!" he shouted to the audience. "You know opening nights!" He gave a shrug, walked quickly back to the inner lobby, and began the long climb up the flights of stairs to the booth. As he turned a corner of the grand staircase, he saw that Robin had preceded him, and was now passing through the door that led to another series of stairs that eventually reached the booth.

Dennis gripped the useless microphone like a club, and followed her.

" Tommy! "

The voice from the speakers was so loud and abrupt that everyone in the audience jerked. Ally Terrazin turned to her date, a film director who had worked as an assistant on Dennis's Up Against It, and had directed Ally in Terror Night, and gripped his arm. "Dennis sounds pissed," she said.

"Tommy Werton?" said the voice again, while the lights continued to flicker. "On stage please!"

Tommy's head appeared from behind the stage right wings. He looked around as if trying to find where Dennis's disembodied voice was coming from. "On stage, Tommy," said the voice.

Tommy came out tentatively. He was a backstage person, not used to being in the spotlight, and he looked nervously vulnerable standing in front of two hundred and fifty of the best-known personalities of stage, screen, and television. "Here, Dennis," he said softly, so that only Ally and the others in the first few rows of people heard him.

"A little further on, Tommy. Go ahead."

Tommy waved and sidestepped so that he was a yard further on stage. He dug his hands into his pockets and looked down at the wooden floor, as if waiting for further instructions. Then something offstage seemed to catch his attention. He turned, lowered his head, and stared into the shadows of the stage right wings.

"Dennis?" he said.

Suddenly the lights all went black, except for the beam of a follow spot that struck Tommy full in the face. He threw his head up and back, away from the blinding light. At that exact moment, the fire curtain fell.

The curtain, with its lushly painted scene, was engineered, in the event of fire, to drop instantly to a height of six feet. It did this. Unfortunately, Tommy Werton stood six feet four inches in the cowboy boots he was wearing. The bottom of the five ton curtain struck him soundly on the top of the head with a crack that echoed through the acoustically perfect theatre, and he slumped to the floor.

The same designers who had determined the efficacy of the fire curtain's initial drop then planned for the curtain to fall the rest of the way more slowly, giving people trapped on stage just enough time to run beneath the ever diminishing opening until they were free of the threatening backstage conflagration, and could join in the panic of the audience. They would have been proud of their work this night. The curtain worked precisely as it had been intended to. At the rate of six inches per second, it sank toward the floor, heedless of the people pushing their way over seats, running down the aisles toward the steps to the stage, heedless of Tommy Werton lying unconscious on the floor, his head toward the audience, his heels toward the back wall, his neck at the precise spot where the fire curtain was inexorably descending.

It did its job, falling, falling, until all five tons of it rested firmly against the stage floor, ignoring what had tried to come between it and its goal, crushing the frail interloper of flesh, bone, and muscle. On the painting, the wine barrel soaked up a new, deeper vintage, and the drunken courtier grinned.

Scene 4

Ally Terrazin sat speechless, her mouth open, her eyes fixed on Tommy Werton's own open mouth, round and gaping like a beached fish gasping for air. But Tommy Werton's mouth was no longer connected in any way to his lungs. His mouth was separated, along with the rest of his head, from the torso that lay jerking on the other side of the fire curtain.

"See me die," Ally finally whispered.

Her date, half crouching at his seat, looked at her. She saw the horror in his eyes. "What?" he said harshly.

"Nothing… nothing."

Few people seemed to know what to do. Several men and women had tried to get to the stage in time to pull Tommy's body out of the way before the curtain fell, but only Cissy Morrison and Sid, who had been sitting together on the aisle, had even gotten as far as the marble steps that led to the stage when the fire curtain reached the floor. Sid had frozen for a moment, then twisted his head away, but Cissy, her gown hiked up to her knees, grasped the base of the curtain and vainly tried to pull it up. Immediately she ran behind the curtain, out of sight of the others. Sid shook his head and joined her.

By then, others had come to the stage, and a few ran toward the lobby in search of a telephone. Marvella Johnson sat, her dark complexion turned ashy-gray, and held her granddaughter Whitney's head against her massive breast. "Grandma, what was that? What happened?" the girl asked. Marvella, her throat awash with grief, could not reply. She could only sit and wish that she had sent Whitney upstairs as she had first intended.

No one knew what to do. They sat or stood in the theatre, sweating, mumbling, a few running out to the rest rooms as their stomachs rebelled against what they had seen. Sid found a drop cloth backstage and came onto the stage with it. Cissy, her arms crossed as if holding herself, frowned at him.

"What's that for?"

"I'm going to cover him up."

"The police or the coroner or whoever won't want anything touched," Cissy said.

"The hell with them. We've got two hundred people out there watching.”

“And you're concerned with their sensibilities," she said dryly.

"I'm concerned with Tommy's memory. Okay?" Without another word, Sid covered Tommy's head with the cloth as gingerly as possible, trying not to change the position of the grisly artifact.

"I'm sorry, Sid," Cissy whispered as he returned to her side.

"It's okay." Sid shook his head. "Jesus. Oh Jesus, what happened?" He squinted toward the booth high above. "And where the hell's Dennis?"

~* ~

When Dennis pushed open the door of the booth, he saw both Curt and Robin looking wide-eyed out the narrow slits of windows to the stage far below. "What is it?" he said.

Robin turned her head in slow jerks, as if unwilling to look away from the stage. "Did you…” Her voice was harsh and breathless. "Did you call him?”

“Call… who?"

In reply, Robin gestured toward the window. Dennis came over and looked. Even though the distance to the stage was a hundred and fifty feet, he could easily make out the head and the splash of blood on the fire curtain. His legs trembled, and he would have fallen if Curt had not grabbed his arm. "Tommy… oh my God, Tommy… what happened," he husked out. "Curt, what happened?"

"The fire curtain fell," Curt said, his voice soft but, as always, in control. "Tommy was under it."

"We heard you on the speakers," said Robin. "You called him, didn't you? To the stage?"

"No, no… the mike doesn't work. It stopped down there. Oh Jesus, how could this have happened? Tommy…”

Curt reached out and took the microphone from Dennis. He flicked a switch, and a red light glowed on the object's base. "It's working now," he said, then put the mike down on a table, reached for the wall phone, and dialed 911.

~* ~

Dennis, Robin, and Curt waited by the lobby doors for the police and an ambulance to arrive. The guests were packed in the lobby once more, with only Sid and Cissy remaining in the theatre proper. The police got there first, since the station house was only a few blocks away from the complex that housed the Venetian Theatre.

The local police chief introduced himself as Dan Munro. He was a stocky, pockmarked man in his late forties, with a perpetually frowning mouth under a bushy moustache. His gray suit fit him as well as any suit would that had not been tailor-made to his bulky form. He seemed more gruff than necessary, perhaps in an effort not to be intimidated by celebrity. His companion, a young, uniformed patrolman named Davis, stood a deferential yard behind his boss, looking tense.

"Did anybody leave yet?" Munro asked.

"Just a few," Robin said. "We asked people to stay until the police came, but some were just so sick and upset…”

"That's okay. We'll catch up with them later. Bill," Munro said, turning to the patrolman, "you stay at the front doors. I don't want anybody else leaving."

"I have a complete list of the guests I can give you," Robin said. "That way we don't have to keep them here."

Munro smiled tightly. "I'm afraid we do have to keep them here, Mrs. Hamilton. At least till the state police come and decide whether to let them go or question them first. They're in charge in a case like this."

"A case," Curt said softly. "But it was an accident."

"I'm sure it was. But they have to make sure of that. Now, if you'll take me to the body…"

Dennis led the way through the white-faced mob of celebrities. When he turned to make sure Munro was with him, he noticed that the man's gaze was darting here and there, lighting with recognition on one person, then another. Dennis felt no pleasure in the awe in which Munro involuntarily held his guests and, most likely, himself. He had long since ceased to be titillated by the ardor of fans. Besides, now was hardly the time for vanity.

~* ~

Sid and Cissy, sitting in the fifth row, turned at the footsteps. Dennis made brief introductions, and Sid led Munro to the stage, where Munro knelt and gingerly pulled back the drop cloth. He cleared his throat, then let the cloth fall back over Tommy's severed head. "You put the cloth on?" he asked Sid.

"Yes."

"Move anything? Touch anything?"

"No. Nothing."

Munro pushed himself to his feet with a sigh. "Let's see the other side. You know how things work back here? The curtains and all?"

"A little, but Curt's the real specialist."

Munro looked down at the house. "Mr. Wynn? Would you come up here with us, please?"

The three men went behind the fire curtain and looked at the torso. "Curtain must be pretty heavy," Munro observed.

Curt nodded. "Heavy enough."

"Where's it drop from?"

"The pin rail. Over here." Curt led the way stage right.

"Anybody touch anything here?" Munro asked.

"No," Sid answered.

"This is the one." Curt pointed to a place on a long, heavy beam that ran the depth of the stage. A series of wooden pins the size of policemen's billies were placed vertically in the beam every twelve inches. Ropes were twisted around them, both above and below the rail. "That's the one that held up the fire curtain," Curt told the policeman.

Munro knelt and examined the wooden pin that lay on the floor. "So somebody pulls this pin, the curtain falls down?"

"Yes. With the other pins, you're really not supposed to pull them. You just loosen the rope until you can bring it down easily. But with this fire curtain, you want it to come down as fast as possible." He went on to explain the mechanics of the curtain to Munro, who nodded.

"So all somebody had to do was wait until this gentleman was out on the stage in the right… or the wrong place, and pull the pin."

"That's right," Curt said, "except that there was nobody back here but Tommy.”

“How could it have happened then?"

Curt took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "What could have happened was that he was getting ready to drop it – that's what was supposed to happen next – and maybe he pulled it out partway. Then he heard Dennis, came out onto the stage, and the pressure on the rope yanked it out the rest of the way."

"Wouldn't that have been kind of careless?" Munro asked, and Curt nodded. "You think Mister Werton would've done something like that?"

Curt thought for a second, then shook his head. "No. I don't. Tommy Werton was one of the most efficient techies I ever knew. He wasn't afraid of anything, but that was because he always did everything safely."

"Techies?" Munro asked.

"Technical people. Backstage types."

Munro nodded. "So the only way that curtain would've dropped is if somebody pulled the pin."

"Or," Sid put in, "if it was defective in some way." He looked at Curt. "Couldn't that be? A rope broke or something?"

"Doubtful," said Curt. "If it broke up above there'd still be rope around the pin, and the pin would still be in the rail. But we can check it."

"We'll take care of that," Munro said. "Now, you say the victim came out on stage when he heard Mr. Hamilton?"

Curt nodded. "Through the speakers."

"What did he want?"

"You'll have to ask him that."

"There was something peculiar about that," Sid said. "It was Dennis's voice… I think. But I don't think it was coming from the speakers."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, the speakers are fairly primitive in terms of placement. You can hear the directionality real easy, can point above to where the sound's coming from. It sounds artificial, as though it's not really from the stage. It's so bad Dennis is going to have a new system installed. But when I heard that voice calling Tommy on stage, it sounded… better somehow, like we already had a new system in, and the sound was coming from the front." Sid smiled sheepishly and shrugged. "I don't know what that means, but it just struck me as odd."

"Okay," Munro said. "Fine. Now, where was everybody when this happened?”

“Everybody was sitting down front," Curt said, "except for me and Tommy. He was backstage, and I was up in the projection booth."

"At the time the curtain fell? Everybody was down in the seats?"

Curt frowned. "No… I'm not sure. The power started going crazy, the lights and sound system went on and off – at random, it seemed."

"Why?”

"I have no idea. I couldn't do a damn thing about it up there. I was checking connections as fast as I could, and then everything went off but a follow spot.”

“What's that?"

"A big spotlight up in the booth. It went on by itself. Next thing I knew the curtain had fallen, and when I looked down…” he shook his head. "… I saw Tommy.”

“Then what happened?" Munro asked.

"Robin came into the booth."

"What was she doing there?"

"She came up when the lights started going crazy."

"Anybody else?"

"Yes. Dennis came up too."

"How much later?"

"I don't know. A minute or two? Time seemed to do funny things. I guess it was a minute."

"After Mrs. Hamilton got there?"

"I guess. Maybe. I'm not really sure."

Munro turned to Sid. "Mr. Harper, you were in the audience when Mr. Hamilton left to go upstairs?"

"Yeah."

"How much time passed between the time he left and the time the curtain fell?”

“Oh Jesus… not long. Maybe a minute or two, like Curt says."

"Could've been two minutes?"

Sid frowned in concentration. "After Dennis ran out, the lights kept flashing on and off for maybe another minute. Then we heard the voice calling for Tommy.”

“What did he say exactly?"

"Something like… 'Tommy? Tommy Werton on stage… on stage

… a little further…'"

"He directed him?" Munro said sharply.

"I… that's what he said, I think. You know, you might ask some of the performer types who were in the audience. I mean, a few of them have total recall.”

“Cissy does," Curt said.

Munro crossed his arms. "Would you get her, please?"

A moment later, Cissy Morrison was backstage with the three men. "'Tommy,'" she said to Munro. "'Tommy Werton, on stage please. On stage, Tommy. A little further on, Tommy. Go ahead.' That was it," she concluded.

"All right," Munro said. "Thank you. You've all been helpful." They started to walk back down into the auditorium, but Munro stopped Curt and asked in a low voice, "Is there any way to get from the back of the auditorium to the stage without being seen?"

"Well, around the outside, or through the basement. Other than that, the only way is to go above the ceiling."

"Could any of those be done in two minutes? I mean, there and back again?”

“Not by me," Curt said.

Munro nodded and walked down the stairs to where Dennis and Robin waited, their faces turned away from the stage and what lay there. "Mr. Hamilton," Munro said. "May I speak with you for a moment? And if the rest of you would please go out to the lobby?"

~* ~

Munro led the way to the back of the theatre, where he sat on an aisle seat. Dennis sat in the row ahead of him and turned his head to see the policeman. "Why did you call Mr. Werton onto the stage?" Munro asked.

"I didn't."

"I have two hundred witnesses who'll say you did."

"I don't care if you have two thousand." Dennis felt too weary and full of grief to argue, but tried his best. "I didn't call Tommy on stage."

"Miss Morrison quoted you."

"It wasn't me. When I was going up the stairs to the booth, I heard something through the speakers, but I thought it was Curt."

"All right," Munro said. "I'd like everybody to leave this area now until -"

Munro was interrupted by the entrance through the rear doors of three state policemen, a pair of orderlies with a stretcher, and a man with a black bag. He stood up, went over and talked to them for several minutes. Dennis could not hear the words, but Munro gestured toward the stage, and once toward Dennis. Then two of the policemen and the medical people walked toward the stage, and Munro brought the third trooper over to Dennis.

"Mr. Hamilton, this is Trooper Pierce. He'll want to ask you some questions," he said, and without another word Munro joined the men on the stage.

The trooper, a tall blond man with a surprisingly gentle manner, asked Dennis to tell what he had done that evening, and Dennis did. When the trooper asked him about calling to Tommy over the speakers, Dennis once more denied it, and was permitted to rejoin his friends in the lobby, where another trooper was asking questions of a number of guests. Dennis had just seen Robin on the other side of the lobby and was moving toward her, when he felt a hand on his arm. Turning, he looked into the pale and lovely face of Ally Terrazin. She whispered something to him, but he could not quite make out what it was.

"I'm sorry, Ally. What?"

"There's something here, Dennis," she said louder. "I felt it. Jesus, I can still feel it."

"Something… Ally, I'm in no mood for this sort of thing. Now what are you talking about?"

"A presence. Don't you feel it?"

"Ally dear, all I feel right now is terribly, terribly sick. What happened to Tommy, my God…”

"But that's what it's about."

He gave a shuddering sigh. "Ally, it was an accident, that's all – a terrible accident."

Ally shook her head with a sharp snap. "No accident, Dennis. It wasn't an accident."

"What are you saying, it was murder?"

She looked puzzled for a moment. "No… not murder. Not an accident, and not murder. Something… else."

Dennis put a hand on her shoulder, and she recoiled at the dampness of it. He turned away from her and made his way through the crowd toward where he had seen Robin. His friends looked at him, gave sickly smiles, quick little shakes of the head, tentative pats on the back that were meant to convey sympathy, so it was a surprise when a hand gripped his shoulder firmly enough to cause a twinge of pain.

"Fucking hell," John Steinberg breathed in his ear, "when are these uniformed pharaohs going to let my people go? I've been entertaining the troops for half an hour now, and it's no small feat to keep people amused who have just witnessed a decapitation."

"Have you asked the police?" Dennis said.

"I try to, but they start giving me the third degree, as if I have something to hide. Really, Dennis, I don't think this party is going to go down as one of the most successful we've ever thrown."

For an instant a dark rage rose up in Dennis, a fury that Steinberg would treat Tommy's death no more seriously than a fly in the punch bowl. But the feeling washed over him as quickly as it had come, leaving him sad, weary, and only mildly disgusted with his manager's insensitivity. "We'll have to inform his family."

"Already done. I had Donna pull his file and call his parents. There are going to be enough other problems to take care of."

Most of the time Dennis was astonished at Steinberg's efficiency. Tonight he was appalled by it. So it was with relief that he finally found Robin, who handed him a glass of scotch neat, which he downed in one searing gulp. Then they said nothing, and merely stood with their arms around each other for several minutes. At last the troopers came out the door to the auditorium, and Trooper Pierce announced that everyone was free to go. As the guests filed out, Dan Munro came up to Dennis and Robin, who had been joined by Steinberg.

"They've got just about everything they need, Mr. Hamilton," Munro said. "The boys took the body out the backstage door. The rope didn't break. It was released at the pin somehow. There'll have to be a hearing, but since no one else was back there at the time of the accident, they'll probably call it death by misadventure, which basically means we won't ever know what happened." Munro cleared his throat. "As a formality, I'd like to fingerprint anyone who wasn't in the audience at the time of the accident – that means you, your wife, and Mr. Wynn. The lab may get some latent prints from the wooden pin. Would any of you have had cause to touch it?"

"My wife and I, no. But Curt probably would have at some point. Though when people work the rail, they generally use gloves."

"All right. I'll send Davis over to do the printing tomorrow. I'm sure you folks don't need any more of this tonight. In the morning around ten okay?" Dennis nodded. "Thanks for your cooperation, and I'm very sorry about your friend." Munro started toward the door and turned back. "Oh, by the way – you can go ahead and have the stage.. . cleaned up if you like. We've got our photographs and everything else we need. Goodnight."

"Cleaned up…” Steinberg mused. "Lovely conceit."

Robin whirled on him. "Oh, John, shut up! Just shut the hell up!" She stormed off across the lobby toward the elevator to the suites above.

Steinberg blushed, just a bit. "I'm sorry, Dennis, if I seem to be rather callous about all this. I do not like death, and therefore, I try to make fun of it as often as I can. Sometimes, I regret to say, with less than acute timing. Would you extend my apologies to your wife?"

"Sure."

"In the meantime, I'll check with Curt and make certain the storm troops will be here to… rectify the situation on stage. No trace will remain by morning, believe me." Steinberg folded his arms and looked down at the carpet. "And believe me also when I say that I liked that young man very much. As much as I regret his passing. You go up to bed now. Curt and I will see to things down here."

The lobby was almost empty. Only Steinberg, Dennis, and Curt remained. Dennis moved toward the elevator at the far end of the lobby, but instead of pushing the button, he glanced in the direction of the others. Seeing that their attention was occupied, he stepped to the door of the theatre, pushed it open, and entered.

The lights were still on, and Dennis walked gently, as if afraid of being heard, across the inner lobby until he could see the stage. The curtain had been pulled back to its former position high up in the flies, and was no longer visible, but he could see the dark stain on the stage floor, and his lips went tight with the memory of what had caused it.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something move in the shadows of the stage right wing, and felt fear bolt through him, remembering for the first time what Ally Terrazin had told him in the lobby – a presence, she had said. Dennis had never been superstitious, but Tommy's death had shaken him terribly, and he realized that his unease had made him susceptible to those vestiges of irrational fear that remained in the human mind from the dark times before history.

Susceptible.

That was the word, wasn't it? That explained it all, explained why he had seen something move where there was nothing living. He looked again, but all was still.

Just as he was about to turn around and go upstairs to bed, he saw the movement again, felt the fear like a knife, and then was embraced by blessed relief as he saw that it was only the cat, that damned bitch of a cat that hated him all other times, and had terrified him now.

Cristina. He would never forget her name, just as he would never forget the vicious way she had sunk her teeth into the fleshy part of his hand the first time he had tried to pet her. Dennis had kept cats as pets in the past, and they usually liked him, but it seemed as though Cristina had instantly abhorred him. In fact, she loathed everyone but Abe Kipp, the older of the two custodians whose sole domain was the Venetian Theatre and environs, and only because he had raised her from a kitten and fed her every day.

Dennis watched her now as she regally stepped onto the stage like a diva in a curtain call, stretched luxuriously, and padded silently over to the spot where Tommy had died. She sat, curled her tail around her, and gazed down at the damp stain on the wooden stage floor. Then, having come to some feral conclusion, she uncoiled her tail, lowered her head, and began, ever so daintily, to lick the sodden boards.

Dennis turned away, a bitter lump rising in his throat. He swallowed heavily and closed his eyes, trying to erase the sight of the cat.

"Dennis? Are you okay?"

He opened his eyes. Sid was standing inside the door to the inner lobby. "I'm fine. I… just… wanted to see, wanted to think about it, about what could have happened."

"I know. It was danm strange." Sid frowned, as his gaze swept past Dennis up onto the stage. "Jesus, what's that cat doing?" He turned toward the open lobby door. "Abe!" he called. "Get that cat out of here, will you?"

In through the door walked Abe Kipp. The gray coveralls he was dressed in were a shade darker than his hair, which framed a face fissured with wrinkles. He looked at Sid through round, owlish glasses with the kind of superior, appraising look mechanics give you when they tell you a part you've never heard of needs to be replaced. "What's she doin' now?" he drawled.

"See for yourself," Sid said, and took Dennis by the arm. "Come on, Dennis. Let's get some sleep."

~* ~

Abe Kipp walked up to the marble divider that separated the seats from the inner lobby, leaned on it, and looked at the stage. "Goddam," he said softly, a sour smile twisting his mouth. "Fuckin' cat…”

"Yo, Abe!" a voice called from behind him. He turned and saw Harry Ruhl's bushy head poking through the door, slowly and fearfully joined by the rest of him. As usual, Harry wore his Kirkland High jacket, though it had been a dozen years since he had somehow managed to graduate from the school. Harry was borderline-retarded, and had graduated, so the drinkers down at Morrie's had it, only because he was the best fucking guard the football team ever had. In fact, Harry Ruhl had been threatened by his teammates whenever he so much as thought about dropping out and getting the exact kind of janitorial job he now had, even with his diploma.

"Come in here, Harry," Abe called, hiding his smirk from the larger, younger man. "Lookit that." He put his arm around Harry's shoulder and pointed to the stage. "Crissie's lapping up the goddam blood."

"Ohmigosh. Ohmi gosh, Abe! That's that guy's blood? That Tommy guy?”

“That's right. That's what's left over from the accident. And what she don't lick up, we gotta clean up."

"Who? You mean me?" The hefty shoulder trembled under Abe's spidery hand.

"Well, sure, Harry. I mean, you just can't leave a big blood stain right there in the middle of the floor, can you? Hell, the folks in the balcony and the mezzanine would see it sure, and Mr. Hamilton couldn't have that in his theatre, now could he?"

"Nope, I… I guess not."

"You wouldn't want to get Mr. Hamilton mad, would you?"

"Nope. I wouldn't…”

"All right then, let's get backstage and get to work."

Abe had learned that the easiest way to get Harry to do what he wanted was to keep asking him questions, questions whose logic, right or wrong, demanded from Harry the kind of answer that Abe wanted. And if Harry said it himself, well then, he most likely would do what he himself had said.

Abe led the way down the aisle and onto the stage, where he went over to the gray cat and picked her up. Harry stayed near the wings, looking with a mixture of fear and awe at the dark stain on the blond wood.

"Whatsa matter, girl?" Abe said. "Isn't old Abe feedin' you enough? Gotta eat up other people's leavin's?" He rubbed his bulbous nose against her moist black one. She purred.

"Geez, Abe," Harry said. "Geez…"

"Okay, you little cannibal," Abe said, setting the cat back on the floor and pushing her in the direction of the wings, "go catch yourself a mouse or eat your Purina or something. We gotta clean this crap up. Let's get a bucket, Harry."

"Aw, geez, Abe. I mean, couldn't I do something else?"

"What, you're afraid of a little blood? Come on, Harry, be a man. It's a good thing you was never in the service. I fought in Europe when I was a helluva lot younger than you, kid. I seen my share of blood. Guts too." Abe put a fatherly arm around Harry and led him offstage into the scene shop that also housed the janitors' closet. "My buddy – name of Ikey, Jew boy from New York City, but he was okay – he took a bullet right in the head at Anzio – you know where Anzio is?"

"Uh-uh."

"Italy. You know where Italy is?"

"Uh… Europe? Where you fought?"

"That's right. Europe. Anyway, Ikey's head just went ka-pow, like you put a cherry bomb in a melon. Blood? There was blood all over, but that wasn't the worst – there was brains, too, like white-gray oatmeal, stuck all over my uniform, splashed all over my face -"

"Aw, come on, Abe," Harry said, shaking his head and pulling a large bucket and a wet-mop out of the closet, "I don't like to hear talk about -"

"And a eyeball," Abe proudly announced. "This eyeball just popped right out of his head, and it's layin' there on the goddam sand, and you know what, Harry?"

Harry looked up tentatively from his mop and bucket. "What?"

"It winked at me."

"No!" The tone was properly awestruck.

"Hell if it didn't – just layin' there, and it winked." Abe could see from the way Harry's expression was changing from amazement to puzzlement that he was not too far from asking how an eyeball could wink without having an eye lid attached, so he changed the subject. "So you ain't too fond of cleanin' up blood, are you?"

"Well… no. No, Abe."

"Scared of ghosts?"

Harry snorted disgustedly. "Aw, come on now, you said you wouldn't talk about ghosts anymore."

"Well, hell, they can't hurt you, Harry. Now you know we've had them, and you know they've never hurt you, don't you?"

"Well…”

"Come on, you've worked here what, eight years? Have you ever been hurt in here?"

"No, no…"

"Well, then, what are you scared of them for? Get that bucket filled, huh?"

Harry took the bucket over to the large sink, put it in, and turned on the hot water. "I just don't like 'em, that's all. They're creepy."

"Honest to God, Harry, sometimes I think you're a pussy boy, you're so damn afraid of everything."

"I'm not a pussy boy, Abe." Harry stared down glumly at the water filling the dingy gray bucket.

"You sure act like it. And I never see you with girls."

"I like girls fine," Harry said, then added softly, "but not too many of them like me. Hey! " he said, as though he had just thought of something. "What about you, Abe? You're not married. Don't you like girls?"

Harry had brought up that point many times before when Abe had accused him of being a pussy boy, but had, as usual, forgotten that he had and forgotten Abe's response as well. Abe grinned and answered. "I like girls fine, Harry. In fact I screw 'em every chance I get. I like 'em so much I pay for 'em, and then I can get 'em to do just whatever I want."

Harry's eyes widened. "Whatever you want? What kinda things, Abe?”

“Nothin' you'd understand. And I thought we were talkin' about ghosts."

" You were talkin' about ghosts," Harry said, twisting the spigot handle and hauling the full bucket from the sink.

"Ghosts come outta bloodstains, y'know. Did you know that?" Without waiting for an answer, Abe went on. "Y'ever see that stain up in the costume loft?"

"What stain?" Harry asked, pausing with the mop over his shoulder.

"Hell, you know. That dark spot at the top of the stairs to the loft. Back when they were doin' little theatre here one season, this older woman who was doin' costumes had a heart attack or a stroke or somethin' and fell down, hit her head, and died up there in the loft, and some blood came outta her mouth and stained the boards up there. It wouldn't come out no matter how hard we scrubbed. Now you gotta understand that she was a real nasty woman, what you'd call an old bitch. But the one good thing about her was that she loved her son, who was one of the actors in the theatre.

"The first time somebody was up in that costume room alone after this woman died, she heard somethin' up in the loft and thought it was a friend of hers, so she calls and there's no answer. Now she thinks maybe her friend's up there and playin' a joke on her, so she sneaks up the steps to the loft, thinkin' of goin' boo herself. But it ain't her friend up there." Abe paused, knowing that Harry was bound to ask what happened next. He wasn't disappointed.

"Who… who was it?" Harry said in the manner of a patient anxious to hear even a doctor's negative prognosis.

A sharp smile creased Abe's face. "It was the dead woman. She was standin' right where she fell, and right where her son's costumes were hanging. Had on the same dress as on the day she died. A red dress, Harry, dark red – like blood – and she just looked at that other woman, just stood there and looked at her, and the woman said later it was like all the blood in her turned to ice water. But it didn't all freeze, 'cause she wet herself – I know, I cleaned it up afterwards." Abe chuckled.

"What…" Harry cleared his throat. "Did she say what she looked like?"

"Sure did. This old bitch had gray hair before, but now it was white, and her face was white too, and the woman said it was like she didn't have any eyes, just black holes in her white face, but there was red lights back in them holes, and that's what she was lookin' at the woman with, them lights."

"Did it… do anything?"

"I'll say it did – it started comin' toward her, closer and closer, and it reached out its hands for her, like it wanted to take her back to the land of the dead where it came from." Abe paused and shook his head.

"So what happened?" Harry nearly wailed.

"The woman closed her eyes. She couldn't stand to look at it any more. And she waited to feel this thing's cold claws – 'cause that's what they were, she said, claws – reach out and grab her or choke her or something. But nothing touched her, and when she got enough guts back to open her eyes again, the thing was gone."

"My gosh… my gosh," Harry said solemnly. "Anybody ever see it since?"

Abe had told Harry the story at least once a month since they had begun to work together years before, and Harry always forgot it by the next time Abe told it. "They sure did. Lotsa people seen it, and always up in the costume loft. That's why hardly nobody goes up there alone."

Harry's eyes widened in sudden realization. "I been up there alone!"

"And nothin' ever got you, did it? Nothin' ever hurt you." The younger man shook his head slowly. "And nothin's gonna hurt you if you clean up that blood, is it?”

“I really don't want to, Abe."

"All right then, tell you what – you do the johns, and I'll take care of the blood. Fair?"

Harry nodded quickly. "You bet it is. I'll do the restrooms, you take care of the blood."

Abe nodded too, nodded and smiled as he watched Harry scurry up the aisle toward the janitor's closet in the mezzanine. It was what Abe had planned all along. He hated doing the restrooms. He didn't mind the rest of custodial work, but the idea of his cleaning up where somebody had pissed and shit drove him half nuts. He'd had enough of that back in the war when he was assigned to latrine duty. Honeydippin', that's what they had called it, taking buckets and hauling the waste up out of the pit holes. And the stink! Jesus, it had been awful. He had actually fallen in one of the pits when he was put on duty while still drunk on some cheap Italian wine, though he never told Harry that war story. He had never told anybody that one.

The Venetian Theatre latrines, as he still thought of them, had never been that bad. At least people aimed. But sometimes some asshole would miss the urinal, and there would be a goddam puddle he'd have to mop up. And always those fucking yellow stains – somebody else's piss – not to mention the bitches who dropped their used plugs in the waste cans rather than flushing them. If you didn't empty the can that very night, you got a real whiffy surprise in the morning. No, Abe would much rather have risked his life climbing around dusting the goddam ceiling than clean up the johns.

He poured some cleanser into the bucket, then carried the mixture and mop onto the stage, wet the mop, and began to scrub. He felt a little strange about cleaning up a dead man's blood all alone at midnight, but it didn't bother him too much. He'd gotten used to the theatre, and used to death. When he first started working at the Venetian back in the fifties, he had thought that there wasn't anything as eerie as being alone there after dark, especially after the stories that old Billy Potts had poured into his head. The deaths, the ghosts, the weird happenings – Mad Mary, who was supposed to haunt the mezzanine and balcony; the Big Swede, a ghost of a stagehand who had been crushed by a sandbag in the twenties, and showed up in the flies at inopportune moments; the Blue Darling, a little girl's spirit that was supposed to be a harbinger of death.

The tales had scared the hell out of Abe for the first few days he worked there, but as time went by he discovered that Billy Potts was as big a bullshitter about everything else as he was about ghosts, and Abe quickly learned that the stories were just Billy's way of having fun, the same way he had fun telling the old stories to Harry Ruhl. The only difference was that Harry never was able to figure out that Abe was as big a bullshitter as old Billy Potts had been.

Hell, some of the stories were true, in a manner of speaking. The ghost in the costume room had supposedly been seen. The woman who had reported the story said she saw the woman, who turned and looked at her, and then disappeared. That was all. The hollow eye sockets and the claws were nothing but Abe's embellishments, and the "blood stain" was only a darkening of the wood where he had spilled a bit of solvent back in 1967.

But still, someone had reported seeing the woman, just as others had actually believed they had seen Mad Mary, the Big Swede, and the Blue Darling. Abe Kipp, however, having worked at the Venetian Theatre for the past forty years, and having explored every dark nook and cranny at every time of day or night, had never seen a thing even suggestive of the supernatural. No, the Venetian was his second home, more of a home than the three room apartment where he slept and kept the accumulation of a wifeless and childless life. He had a number of cubbyholes with mattresses and cots on long-term loan from the storage area beneath the stage, as well as an assortment of skin mags dating back to the early sixties. Many was the time he would take a little nap or have a little read during working hours, with not a fear of being discovered. There were many places Harry didn't like to go, and those were the places Abe had his havens.

No, he thought as the blood came easily off the floorboards, the Venetian was a pretty good place to work. All except for the latrines .

While Abe Kipp detested cleaning toilets, Harry Ruhl loved it. It gave him a feeling of accomplishment, of seeing a job through to its end. With fabrics and draperies and carpets you couldn't really see where you had cleaned. But you could with tile. You could with porcelain. You could with mirrors and marble and metal. You could wipe them and rub them until they sparkled and shone so brightly you could see your face in them, not blurred and indistinct, but sharp and clear. You grinned and the face in that smooth surface grinned back at you as if to say good job, something that Abe hardly ever said, even though Harry knew he did do a good job, because if he didn't he wouldn't be working there at the Venetian Theatre.

Harry liked the Venetian Theatre just as much as Abe did, but in a different way. The theatre scared Harry sometimes, especially after the stories Abe told. And now this guy getting his head cut off by the fire curtain…

Harry tried to drive the thought out of his mind and think about the good times he had at the theatre when he was a kid, when the theatre was showing movies, and his dad took him on a Saturday night. The theatre, even before it had been refurbished, had always been a magic place to Harry, with its marble walls and rails, the mosaics and bas-reliefs all over the lobby ceilings, and especially the sky ceiling inside the theatre itself. Sometimes when the movie was boring he would lean back and look up at the stars and the clouds rolling by, and pretend that he was outside.

It wasn't hard for Harry to pretend. Even though his mind wasn't quick, he had a vivid imagination, as his 11th grade English teacher, Miss Tyson, had put it. Too vivid. Sometimes he wished he was just dull all around so that he could stop thinking about and believing in ghosts and all. Not that he had ever seen any, but doggone it, this theatre could be plain scary, especially at night. That was another reason he didn't mind cleaning the rest rooms. There was nothing scary about rest rooms, as long as they didn't have showers. Showers were scary because of that Psycho movie he saw on TV. But just rest rooms with stalls and urinals and sinks, well, they were okay.

Harry made a last swipe with his polishing cloth, and stepped into the men's lounge, where he emptied the ash trays and cleaned the water fountain. Then he took a long drink, and sat in one of the chairs, running his hands across the smooth wood of the arms. The chair was Louie-something, Abe had told him. Harry had never known that furniture had names before he came to work in the Venetian.

The ladies' room was next, so Harry got up, went into the mezzanine lobby, and walked to the ladies' lounge. He paused at the door, knocked on the frame, and called, "Hello?" He had done this ever since 1985, when he had interrupted a woman who was still in a stall. He went through the usual routine of listening for an answer, and, as he expected, received none. But as he listened, he heard something else.

It was music, faint but distinct. For a second he assumed that Abe had brought his radio along and was playing it on the stage, but he quickly realized that it had none of the cramped tinniness of Abe's flea market special. It sounded much fuller, as though there was a real orchestra playing on the Venetian Theatre's stage. It was somehow familiar, and Harry frowned, trying to push back the thick curtains that so often obscured his memory. He had heard that music before, he knew he had, but he just couldn't remember what it was. Maybe something from a movie he had seen.

He followed the sound across the mezzanine lobby, up the steps to the entrance to the mezzanine, where it grew louder. But as he stepped through the doors and started up the ramp, the music suddenly stopped, leaving not even an echo behind.

Harry stopped too. It was strange. Sound just didn't work like that in this theatre. It was as if not only whatever had been making the music, but also the air of the theatre itself, had been smothered under cork. He walked up to where he could see the stage.

It was empty. Abe's scrubbing had removed the blood, leaving only a spot shiny with dampness. Harry heard footsteps, and saw Abe come back onto the stage, a bunch of rags in his hand.

"Abe!" Harry called. "Hey, Abe?"

Abe looked up, squinting until he made out Harry's form among the shadows above. "What?"

"Were you playing your radio just now?"

"Naw. Why?"

"Thought I heard some music."

"Not from me. You're hearin' things, Harry." He knelt and began to sponge up the water from his mopping.

"No, I really heard it – it sounded like, like…” Frustrated by his inability to describe musical styles, he began to sing in an untrained but surprisingly pure and melodious voice a few bars of the theme he had heard. "What the heck is that?" he asked Abe.

"Aw, you musta heard it through the water pipes from the suites upstairs – the boss must be playin' his old tunes."

"Huh?"

"Goddam it," Abe shouted, as if angry at holding the conversation at such long distance, "that's from that show of his… of Hamilton's."

"Show?" It was beginning to come back to Harry now – some king dressed up like a soldier or something.

"You know," Abe called. "That show of his, that, uh… The Private Empire…"

"A" Private Empire. "A," not "The." Stupid fools. The one stupid as an ox, the other stupid as a child. Which dies first?

Dennis awoke. His leg had jerked violently in some dream, although he was unable to remember what the dream had been about. A pill had finally put him to sleep, and now, his breathing still quick and shallow from the activity of the dream he could not recall, he looked at the bedside clock, which read 1:30. Dear God, he had only been sleeping for a half hour.

Careful not to awaken Robin, he slid from between the sheets, stepped into the bathroom, and closed the door before he turned on the light. The sudden flare of brightness made him squeeze his eyes shut, but not before he saw his face in the mirror.

Or was it his face? It seemed, in that split second before the light blinded him, that it was someone different, that the features he knew so well had been remolded into a cruel parody of himself. The feeling terrified him. He blinked in panic, forced open his eyes against the harsh glare, and peered into the glass.

No, it was him all right, only him, Dennis Hamilton, looking into his own eyes, seeing his own face there in the mirror. Despite his fancies, he knew he was all alone in his aching, weary soul.

He splashed his face with water and thought about Tommy Werton again. Then he turned out the light, left the bathroom, slipped on a robe, and went into the library, where he poured himself a glass of sherry and sat in a leather chair. He was still there when morning came.

Scene 5

The following Tuesday one hundred and fifty-three people attended Tommy Werton's funeral in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the majority of them from the New York theatre crowd. The fact that the drive from Manhattan was less than an hour increased the attendance, as did the fact that the funeral was held on a Tuesday afternoon. Had it been held on the day of a matinee, the crowd would have been halved.

There was no viewing, the condition of the body having proven an insurmountable obstacle to The Johnson Funeral Home's finest craftsmen. The service was held in the sanctuary of the First United Presbyterian Church. The casket was closed, and a picture of a smiling Tommy Werton sat on top of the lid. It had been taken ten years before. The gaze was directed upward and to the right, and the Tommy of the picture wore a brown suit coat and a subtly hued tie. As they filed past the casket, those guests who supposed it was a college graduation picture were correct.

Ten minutes before the service was about to begin, two men stood outside the rear of the church waiting for Dennis and Robin Hamilton. The older of the pair, Quentin Margolis, was tall and graying sedately at the temples, a human counterpart to the church itself. He wore an elegantly cut car coat and a fedora against the chill October drizzle that had caused the other man, Dexter Colangelo, to open his black Totes umbrella. Dexter, or Dex, as everyone called him who had known him for longer than two minutes, seemed as nervous as Quentin seemed calm, which seemed only fair, as the two men were the yin and yang of a large number of productions that had graced the stages of the country, including the now vanished Morosco, which had seen the revival of A Private Empire. Quentin had directed and choreographed, and Dex had been the musical director.

The original show in 1966 had been very much a product of its time in terms of production. The orchestrations had been a trendy cross between Man of La Mancha and British rock in an attempt to be all things to all people, while the choreography was rather uncharitably described by one critic as "Hullabaloo out of Agnes de Mille," a strange and anachronistic pedigree indeed for a Ruritanian romance. Still, the strategy had worked. That, and the tremendous presence of Dennis Hamilton as the young emperor. Not since Barbra Streisand had starred in that other less-than-perfect musical, Funny Girl, had a single personality had such a powerful effect on the box office. Still, it was not until 1981 that A Private Empire was seen as its creators, Charles Ensley and Robert Davis, had intended, due in large part to that other team, Margolis and Colangelo.

Dex had completely reorchestrated the score, restoring the style to that of the grand musicals of the fifties while retaining a contemporary sound through the careful use of synthesizers, while Quentin had completely removed the Hullabaloo origins of the original choreography, and come up with a terpsichorean style that blended nineteenth century European court dance with the acrobatic athleticism of the eighties to create something altogether new.

The music and the dancing, along with Michael Klein's epic set designs and Marvella Johnson's flamboyant costumes, provided the perfect embellishments for Dennis Hamilton's extraordinary portrayal that made him the first performer in Broadway history to win two Tony Awards for the same performance, albeit sixteen years apart. It made him not merely a star, but a superstar. The success had rapidly accelerated Quentin's and Dex's already burgeoning careers as well, and, in their gratitude, they remained with the revival when it ended its first Broadway run and went on national tour. Dex actually accompanied it as conductor, and Quentin flew to every new city, every new stage, to make sure the cast and show was as razor sharp as Dennis demanded.

"Every single person in that audience has got to believe that they're seeing opening night on Broadway," Dennis had told Quentin over and over again. "That's how crisp, how clean, how fresh this has to be."

And it was. Not a single critic, either in New York or in any of the major cities A Private Empire toured, accused Dennis or the show of flatness or predictability. At least not until the last year, when a few of the more perceptive reviewers suggested that earlier tours had been somewhat more exciting.

Dex stepped off the curb and looked down the alley behind the church once more. "Not yet," he murmured, stepping back. "Jesus, they better get here soon or they'll miss it."

"They'll be here," Quentin said. "I just hope they'll make it before those brilliant investigative reporters realize that this church has a back door."

There had been five reporters out front when they arrived, one local, three others from the New York City papers, and a fifth from WINS-TV. They were told immediately that no one would have any comments to make, but they stayed nonetheless.

The sound of a car engine induced Dex to step out again. "They're coming," he said. Quentin leaned out and looked. A black BMW sedan was moving slowly down the narrow alley, John Steinberg behind the wheel, Donna Franklin at his side. The two shadowy figures in the back seat, Quentin knew, had to be Dennis and Robin. Steinberg pulled the car to the side just enough so that any others could pass, and parked. When Dennis climbed out, Quentin was astonished at how bad he looked.

AIDS. Even though he knew Dennis was neither gay nor a drug user, it was the first thing to go through Quentin's mind. Dennis's skin was sallow, his cheeks were sunken, he looked as though he had lost weight since Quentin had last seen him. AIDS had claimed a dozen of Quentin's friends since the plague began, and three times as many acquaintances. The most recent had been a dancer with whom Quentin had had a brief affair four years earlier. Though Quentin's AIDS tests continued to come back negative, he still lived in fear.

Dex kissed Robin and hugged Dennis, then did the same to Steinberg and Donna Franklin. Quentin advanced slowly and reached out a hand to Dennis, which was grasped weakly, without fire. "How are you, Dennis?" Quentin asked.

"I've been better." The response was flat, without a trace of humor.

"Hello, Robin," Quentin said in greeting. "Nice to see you again, only not under these circumstances."

"Hello, Quentin," she said, and kissed his cheek.

"We'd better go in," Dex said briskly and with a quick smile, as though a game of tennis and not a funeral was awaiting them. "It's almost time."

"Hey hey!"

They all turned at the voice behind them, and were startled by the brilliance of an electronic flash exploding in their eyes. "Okay, one more," the voice cautioned, and the flash spat again. A heavyset man in a trench coat walked up to Dennis and stuck out a meaty hand. "Larry Peach, Mr. Hamilton. The Probe."

A sick look came over Dennis's face, and he leaned away from Peach. Quentin had seen the latest Weekly Probe with its shrieking headline, "Emperor Calls Subject to Death!" and the subheading, "`Off With His Head!'" He caught a trace of garlic on Peach's breath.

"Wondering if you got any comment on this kid's death -"

John Steinberg pushed his way between Peach and Dennis. "Mr. Hamilton has nothing to say to -"

"Why don't you let him tell me that, pal. Hey, Mr. Hamilton, did you really call the kid out and -"

Once again Steinberg interrupted. "Mr. Hamilton has nothing to say. Now we have a funeral to go to."

"Well, fine, I'll go too," Peach said, a condescending grin on his pouchy face. "Maybe you'll feel like talking inside the church."

"Look," Steinberg said reasonably, "I'll tell you what. I'm John Steinberg -”

“I know who you are. His manager."

"That's right. And his spokesman. And if you just stay out of the church and don't cause a scene, I'll give you an exclusive story when I come out.”

“Oh yeah?"

"Yes. I promise. Just wait here, and we'll come out the back. But there's no point in making this a circus. If I see you try to get inside that church, no story."

"Okay," Peach said. "I'm a professional, all I want is a story. I'll be nice to you, you be nice to me."

"That's right."

"But exclusive. No talking to the Times or the Post or those other guys first.”

“Of course not. For you alone."

Peach backed up and made a mock bow. "Be my guests. I'll be here when you come out."

"Of that I have no doubt," Steinberg said, and guided Dennis toward the church door. Robin and Donna Franklin followed. Quentin and Dex took up the rear, and Dex whispered, "My God, he looks awful," as they went through the door.

Quentin nodded in agreement. In a way, Quentin had always, even when they had become close friends, felt a fearful respect toward Dennis, but the tottering figure going down the narrow hall before him now inspired no fear, only pity. What, he wondered, had become of the Dennis Hamilton he had known, the Dennis who had barked " Scheiskopf! ” at those who earned his displeasure, the Dennis Hamilton who was always so sure of himself and his talent and his decisions? That Dennis Hamilton had enraged him at times, but it was preferable by far to this season's model.

The small party filially made its way to the narthex, took computer-printed programs from the chipper assistants of the funeral director, and entered the sanctuary. It was imposing, Quentin thought. He'd never seen a stage set as ponderously overwhelming. Dark wood and gray stone predominated, but neither wood nor stone were as deeply imbued with puritanical solemnity as the face of the middle-aged man in the first row, who turned as the Hamilton party came in and sat down in pews at the rear. The man watched Dennis's face intently until the woman seated next to him put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned back toward the casket.

Tommy's father, Quentin thought. Poor bastard. Losing an only child was bad enough, but to have it splashed all over the tabloids made it worse. A ten-day wonder, but those ten days could be hell to get through.

The service seemed to go on forever. A dour-faced minister droned tirelessly away, and Quentin shut his ears to it. He had heard it altogether too many times in the past few years, had seen the caskets of too many friends on too many biers. He wondered glumly how many more he would attend before being the guest star himself.

At last the music and the scripture and the message of comfort were over, the minister intoned his last amen, and the congregation stood. As in a wedding, the front row exited first, and as Tommy Werton's father passed the pew that Quentin, Dex, and the Hamilton party sat in, he glared with undisguised hatred at Dennis, who seemed not to notice, lost in his thoughts. When the time came, they stood, and shuffled along with the rest of the crowd into the narthex, where they found Mr. Werton and the woman who had been sitting beside him, and another man the same age.

"Tommy's aunt and uncle," Robin whispered to Quentin and Dex. "His mother's dead."

The murmured sympathies grew louder as they approached the triumvirate of grief. Robin took the offered hands and spoke the words, and then Dennis was nodding to the aunt, the uncle, and finally, Mr. Werton, to whom he put out his hand tentatively, as if afraid of having it grasped and twisted. He need not have worried. Mr. Werton's hand, clenched in a fist, remained at his side. He was a small man, but the way his mouth twisted in a scowl made him look far larger, more menacing.

"I won't take your hand," he said. Quentin could see that the man was actually trembling, and for a moment he was afraid that the fist would come up and strike Dennis.

Dennis stood there, his hand halfway up, his mouth partly open as if he was about to say something, but then thought better of it. The hand fell back to his side, and he turned and moved on. Steinberg was next in line, and he grasped Werton's hand and held on to it. "I was there," he said gently. "And Mr. Hamilton had nothing to do with your son's death."

The little man opened his mouth to speak, but Steinberg plunged on. "He liked Tommy very much, Mr. Werton. We all did, and we share your grief."

Werton jerked his hand away, and when he spoke, his words bit sharply. "Damn theatre. Never wanted him in it. Wouldn't get a real job, always went from show to show. No way to live."

The way the man's face changed terrified Quentin with its suddenness. From vicious anger it went immediately to powerless sorrow. The features melted like hot wax, and tears ran down Werton's cheeks. Steinberg moved away, knowing, as did Quentin, that words could do nothing in the face of such deep and irrational grief. Dex passed the party with a sad smile, and Quentin followed, a sotto voce "very sorry" the best he could muster.

He found the others in a cloakroom off to the side. Dennis was leaning against the wall, and the others were gathered around him. He was paler than before, and droplets of sweat were perched on his high, aristocratic forehead. What in God's name has happened to him, Quentin thought again. Werton had been a fool, a narrow-minded man who probably hated the theatre because of the supposedly loose morals that had been associated with it ever since Shakespeare. Five years before, Dennis would have eaten Werton alive, bereft of a son or not, and spit out the bones.

Quentin recalled one afternoon when the Private Empire revival had been rehearsing at the Broadway Arts Studio. After lunch, Dennis and some of the chorus members had been rehearsing a number when a monster of a man in his forties burst into the room, bellowing, "Where's Danny!"

Danny was a kid from Cleveland, and Empire was his first Broadway show. Everybody liked him, but only a few, Quentin and Dennis among them, knew about the problems he had had with his father that had made him leave home a year before.

The father had beaten the boy severely, a fact attested to by a red, round scar on his forearm, burned there by his father's cigarette.

"Where the hell is he?" the man roared again. The stage manager began to tell him he would have to leave, but an upraised palm changed his mind. "There doesn't have to be no trouble. You just tell me where Danny is."

That was when Dennis left the ensemble, which had by now frozen, and, carrying a thin cane he was using as a prop saber, walked over to the man. "I'm afraid Danny's on his lunch break right now. Would you like to leave a message?"

"I'm not leavin' any fuckin' message – I want my boy!"

"You're his father?" Dennis asked, lightly swinging the cane.

"That's right."

"And what do you want with him?"

"Take him home. He goes off here to New York to be a dancer," – the word dripped contempt – "and now he's queerin' around."

"How old is Danny?"

The man had to think for a moment before he answered. "He's just nineteen.”

“Well, in that case, whether he uses his anus for withdrawals or deposits is up to him, isn't it?"

The air in the studio had grown so thick Quentin could barely breathe as he watched Danny's father seem to grow another foot in height and another yard in girth. The man threw a fist the size of a paint can, but Dennis dodged easily and whipped the cane upward so that it slashed Danny's father between his treelike legs. He let out one sharp scream, fell to the floor, and instantly vomited food and beer all over the worn boards of the studio.

When he had finished, he opened his eyes to find the point of Dennis's cane prodding the hollow of his throat, and Dennis standing over him. "Now listen to me, you scheiskopf," he said. "If you want to see your son, you do it at his place or on the street, not in my re hear sal." He stressed each syllable with a poke of the cane that made the man gag. "Now you go out to the front desk, and you ask the lady there where you might find a mop and bucket. Then you come back, and without making a sound you clean up this mess you just made. And when you're done, don't you ever come in this studio again. Do you understand me? "

Danny's father nodded, undoubtedly fearful that a negative response would cause Dennis to send the wooden point of the cane as far into his throat as possible. To the amazement of Quentin and everyone else in the studio, the man came back to clean up his vomit. Dennis, seemingly intent on his rehearsal, did not look at the man once. When Danny returned from lunch and was told that his father had been there, he asked to be dismissed for the day. He was at rehearsal the next day, however, and never mentioned his father again.

Quentin thought that although Dennis was concerned with the way Danny's father had treated the boy, what had angered him more was that his rehearsal had been interrupted and he had been treated rudely by a boor, and those were things that he would not suffer. How unlike the Dennis Hamilton who today, scarcely a decade later, turned pale at a harsh word, an ignorant snub.

They were moving now, down the halls, down the stairs, through the basement to the back door. When they walked outside, Larry Peach was waiting for them, smiling. "Nice service?" he said.

"Very nice," John Steinberg answered, then turned to the others. "Please, get in the car, everyone. I won't be long."

Quentin and Dex opened the doors for Robin, Dennis, and Donna, then watched while Steinberg conspiratorially drew Peach aside. They could just overhear what the two men said.

"An exclusive," Steinberg told Peach. "For your ears and those of your readers alone."

"Yeah, yeah, fine. So what is it?"

"This past weekend," Steinberg said, an arm around Peach's shoulder, "I received substantiated proof that…” Here he looked around, as if to make certain no unwelcome listeners were present. “. .. that your mother has been lasciviously fornicating with all the indigent Haitian boat people she can wrap her labia around."

He patted an unbelieving Peach on the shoulder and hopped into the car astonishingly fast. "Have a nice day!" he called as he started the engine and drove down the alley.

"You fuck…" Larry Peach said softly, while Dex and Quentin started to giggle. "You fuck!" Peach yelled, throwing his note pad after the fleeing BMW.

It was the first time Quentin had laughed in a week. It was the first time he had forgotten about death.

Scene 6

Donna Franklin's day had been grim until the woman came in applying for the new job. At that point it seemed to lighten somehow. God knew it had started out badly enough. Although two weeks had passed since the accident, it was still on everyone's mind, and long faces were the order of the day. As if that weren't enough, she had had a scene with Abe Kipp again. Abe Creep was what she called him, but only in front of Sid.

Donna, after her customary post-breakfast walk, had come in through the stage door that morning. She usually reentered the building through the lobby doors, but today she had to check the date of inspection on the backstage elevator. The door had been unlocked and the work lights on. Abe and Harry were down in the rows of seats, giving them their biweekly dusting, and she paused to listen to what Abe was saying.

"Halloween, Harry. That's the time, y'know."

"Time for what?" Harry asked.

"Mad Mary, what else? Scare the shit right out of you if you see her. Dressed all in white up there in the balcony, her arms a-wavin', her long white hair blowin' out behind her even when there ain't a breath of wind…”

"She's… she's worse at Halloween?"

Abe nodded solemnly. "I seen her once years ago. The afternoon of Halloween day. I was dustin' the front rail of the mezzanine, and I hear this moanin' sound and turn around and there she is!" Abe jabbed a finger toward the balcony and Harry jerked his head around to look.

"Where!"

"I mean there she was, dummy. She was standin' right at the top of the balcony steps, her long white gown and hair flutterin', her arms reachin' toward me, and before I knew what was happenin' she was swoopin' down on me fast as hell, comin' right at me. I started to jump back, but I was right on the edge of the rail, and then…"

"What? What? "

Abe thrust out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. "She went right through me."

" Through you?"

"Her face came right up to mine, and I was starin' into her yellow eyes, and she went through me and disappeared. She was tryin' to scare me into fallin' off the mezzanine, Harry. They say she can actually scare ya to death, so I guess I'm lucky to be alive." A slow smile settled on Abe's wrinkled face. "You be careful this afternoon."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"When you're cleanin' up there alone."

"Me? Up there alone? On Halloween? Aw, Abe!"

"Harry, don't you be no pussy boy now."

"I ain't, Abe, but dammit -"

"I gotta clean the pool this afternoon, Steinberg told me to."

"But why can't I help you?"

"'Cause you gotta do the balcony, boy. You just be brave, and -"

" Abe," Donna said. Harry, already spooked, jumped at the sound, while Abe turned slowly, regarding her with the eyes of a recalcitrant boy caught cheating but not caring. Donna's voice had been angrier than she had meant it to be, and for a moment she thought she would call his name again, soften it. But no, she decided. The son of a bitch deserved that kind of harshness. "I'd like to speak to you alone, please."

She walked down the stage steps and up the aisle, not looking back to see if Abe would follow her. When she got to the inner lobby she stopped and turned. He was right behind her. "Why do you keep doing that?" she asked him.

"What?"

"Teasing Harry that way. It's very cruel. Mr. Steinberg's spoken to you about this before, hasn't he?"

"Yes ma'am, he has. And I'll tell you the same thing I told him. I like Harry a lot. He's dumb as a post and he's real lucky to have this job, but he's a good boy and does what he's told. Now I admit I tease him a little bit now and then, but Jesus Christ, what have I got to talk to him about? I mean you try workin' with a retard all day and see what happens."

"Abe, I don't think that -"

"It's like a cat, Miss Franklin. You tease 'em. You dangle a string or give their tail a little tug, it doesn't do 'em no harm, it's fun for you and it gets their juices flowin' a little, so where's the harm? Sure I tease Harry, just like I tease Crissie sometimes, but it doesn't mean I still don't love the old cat." Abe crossed his arms and gave an impatient puff. "Now if you got any complaints about my work…” He left it unfinished.

"No, Abe," Donna said. "No complaints. I'd just like to see you treat Harry a little more kindly, that's all."

Abe shrugged. "Okay then. You don't want me to tease him so much, I won't tease him so much. That make you happy?"

"Yes. It would."

Donna had seen no point in further discussion, and had walked to her office, imagining Abe muttering imprecations behind her. He was a bastard. There was, she thought, no "teasing" in him, only cruelty, pure and simple. One day he would go too far when Dennis was around, and then…

And then what? What would Dennis do?

The man had changed. It had been so slow and gradual that no one had noticed at first. But now more and more decisions were being made by John Steinberg. Oh, it wasn't as if John hadn't always plotted Dennis's career and finances, but Dennis had always wanted to be kept aware of what was going on. He had used to be omnipresent in their New York or Los Angeles offices, or wherever John and Donna established their temporary offices on the road, but now, in spite of his enthusiasm for the New American Musical Theatre Project, a long held dream of his, he seemed to show only a mild interest in the details of his life and his millions, and it bothered Donna, just as it bothered John.

He had been shorter with her than usual lately, and it was unlike John Steinberg. Donna had been with Steinberg since she was a twenty-year-old business school graduate who landed a minor secretarial position with his investment firm. Though not distinguishing herself by her brilliance, she proved to be an extremely hard worker, and soon her reputation drifted even as high as Steinberg's ethereal office. He had her promoted to his personal staff, and, when he gave up his firm to become Dennis Hamilton's manager, chose Donna to be his assistant.

The work had taken over her life, and her devotion to Steinberg was boundless. She had never known her father, who died when she was two, and so welcomed Steinberg's avuncular manner. He had always treated her in the most gentlemanly way, and it was not until she worked for him for four years that she learned he was gay. His relationships were few, however, and grew more infrequent as the years passed. Now there were no partners at all that she knew of, and she would know.

But this morning John had been unusually bitchy, indeed had actually barked at her when she came into the office on the second floor. He apologized immediately, but still his uncustomary sharpness had startled her, and only added to the sense of disquiet that her showdown with Abe Kipp had caused.

The woman who applied for the production assistant's job was like a breath of fresh air in contrast to Donna's previous confrontations of the morning. Perhaps it was because she was a woman, or perhaps her ebullient enthusiasm for theatre and, Donna thought, life in general was so evident. Whatever the reason, her presence was sufficiently disarming for Donna to stow her usual Cerberus-like attitude when it came to interviewing prospective employees. Even before she examined the woman's resume, Donna had decided that she would take her in to see John, the next step toward the ultimate goal of employment.

Fortunately the resume was adequate if not outstanding, and, after all, what was there for the production assistant to do? A lot of paperwork – filling out the multitudinous forms that Actors' Equity required for the performers and stage managers who were members, state and federal tax forms, form letters to everyone involved in the productions, and more. It wouldn't take a genius, just someone who had some clerical background and could work well with people, and this applicant seemed to fill the bill.

"You know," Donna said, "there's just one thing that puzzles me. You've done so much volunteer work, I'm curious as to why you suddenly want a fulltime job, especially one that pays just a little above the minimum wage."

The woman smiled and looked down at her lap, then up again. "The volunteer work alone isn't enough to fill my time anymore, and this theatre project seems like a worthwhile thing. The money really isn't a factor. It's not that I need it, so it really doesn't matter what I make. Actually, minimum wage would be fine. I'll probably contribute it anyway."

The statement, Donna thought, was sincere in its artlessness. She heard no pride or self-infatuation in it. "That's very generous of you."

The woman shrugged, making her honey-blonde hair bounce healthily. "It's not generosity, I just don't need it… you see," she finished rather lamely, a bit embarrassed, Donna supposed, by her wealth.

"Still…” Donna aligned the resume and references with a sharp rap on the desk top. "I don't see any reason why you couldn't handle the position. Frankly, I think you'd be excellent. So what I'll do now is introduce you to Mr. Steinberg, Mr. Hamilton's manager."

The woman licked her lips nervously. "You mean you, uh, haven't had any other applicants?"

"Actually, we had three in yesterday. Two of them balked at the salary, and the third didn't have the… how shall I put it?" Donna laughed. "She was tastelessly dressed, huge as a cow and reeked of curry."

"Well," said the woman with a wry smile, "I'm glad I used my Scope this morning."

"Come on," Donna said, rising. "Let's go see John. I'm sure he'll love you."

She led the way into Steinberg's office. John was sitting, as usual, behind his desk. His habitual frown vanished as he saw the woman come in behind Donna. So, Donna thought, he's not invulnerable to feminine charms after all. "John," she said, "I'd like you to meet a very qualified applicant for production assistant."

Steinberg rose and came around the side of the desk. "Delighted to meet you, Miss…"

"Mrs." Donna corrected. "Mrs. Deems. Ann Deems."

~* ~

It was unlike Ann Deems to think about money, but earlier that morning, as she stood in the parking lot of the Kirkland Community Building and looked at the massive edifice before her, she had found it impossible not to. She had always felt comfortably well-off, indeed at times even wealthy. Her husband had earned well over a quarter of a million dollars a year from his law practice, and his insurance policies had left her with well over a million dollars, even after Terri's trust fund was established and the taxes and attorneys had supped their fill. Adding to it the money previously inherited from her father, Ann knew she would never have to work a day in her life to live in what most people would consider luxury.

Yet here she stood, ready to go inside this palatial building that Dennis Hamilton had purchased and apply for a no doubt poorly paying job. Her resume, such as it was, was tucked inside a three hundred dollar leather portfolio, as were recommendations from the presidents of the charities and hospitals for which she had done volunteer work for the past two decades.

Ironically, she had Terri to thank for showing her the advertisement. It had been in Backstage, and read:

WANTED: Clerical production assistant for New American Musical Theatre Project. Secretarial skills required. Apply Venetian Theatre, Kirkland Community Building, Kirkland, PA 17571.

"A little something to do in your copious free time," Terri had said offhandedly. "If you think you can keep from attacking the mogul who runs the joint."

Ann had ignored the sarcasm, and had tossed the Backstage onto the coffee table of the den, trying to forget both the ad and Dennis Hamilton. But the sparse words in the tabloid haunted her for the rest of the day, and the following morning she called her colleagues in philanthropy and asked for references, which they were happy to provide, for Ann was unlike most of the society women who offered one or two hours a week to the local hospital or library or children's home. Her interest was heartfelt, and she gave not only of her money but her time. She had never worked less than twenty hours a week at her different charities, and her involvement was deep and often emotionally searing.

For three years she had been a lay counselor at a juvenile hospice, working with dying children for several hours three days a week, playing with them, listening to their fears and concerns, and comforting them as best she could. It was harrowing and rewarding work, and in no time she had earned the respect of both administrators and nurses by not only her emotional involvement, but by her willingness to do even such menial chores as cleaning up the younger children's toilet mishaps.

Besides the hospice, Ann had also volunteered her time to the YWCA, the local Blind Association, and several retirement communities, and had done secretarial work for a farmland conversation group, an act that did nothing to endear her to several of her friends, some of whose husbands happened to be developers.

When she asked herself why, after so many years of volunteer work, she should be considering taking a paying job, she told herself that it was not because the New American Musical Theatre Project had anything to do with Dennis Hamilton. Rather it was because she believed that the goals of the project were worthy. She and Eddie had made innumerable trips into Manhattan to see shows (she preferred plays, while Eddie had liked musicals), and she knew full well that American musical theatre was in the doldrums, if not in its death throes. The good musicals all seemed to be British, and although Ann thought most of the classic American works such as Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe were often sloppily sentimental, she knew too that they had produced great songs and lasting stories, and she was damned if she could think of a single tune from, say, Sundays in the Park With George, as innovative as it was.

Too, Ann was interested in theatre from backstage. She had worked with her local little theatre group as assistant stage manager, props person, and costume assistant over the years, and had even directed a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1982, which was well reviewed in the local paper. The experience, however, had left her shaken, and she had never wanted to direct again. The clash of personalities, as well as the backbiting and pettiness that seemed to be part and parcel of even an amateur group, strengthened her resolve to remain backstage rather than onstage, as far away from the actors as possible.

So, she felt, with her own interest and involvement in theatre and the worthiness of Dennis Hamilton's project, it made sense for her to pursue this new possibility. After all, Kirkland was only forty miles away – an hour's drive at most.

Ann looked at the building again, at the classical fa c ade of light gray limestone. Higher, beneath the roof lines, were ornate moldings of grapevines from which peered faces of mythological deities, and above, the red Roman tiles of the multi-leveled roof on whose corners perched occasional gargoyles, carved in unexpectedly benign and reflective poses. There was money, she thought, and there was money. She had the former, while Dennis Hamilton had the latter. Not for a minute did she begrudge it of him. He had worked hard – that much she had known years before when they had first met – and over those years he had entertained millions, brought a story of love and fidelity and honor into lives that often knew those things in no other way.

No, she thought, Dennis Hamilton deserved his money, his theatre, deserved everything he had. And Ann Deems would have felt that way even if she had not still loved him.

She had taken a deep breath then and started across the parking lot, and now here she was, sitting in the office of John Steinberg, the same man she had seen on Entertainment Tonight only a few weeks before. Donna Franklin had excused herself and left. Steinberg had been, for the last five minutes, looking over her file of papers. At last he glanced up, and Ann was relieved to see that he was smiling.

"This looks very good," he told her, aligning the papers in the same way that Donna Franklin had done before. "Your secretarial skills are certainly up to what we'd need – at least for this job. And you do have some experience in theatre."

" Little theatre," Ann reminded him.

Steinberg waved a hand airily. "The only difference is that the egos are larger here."

Heaven help you, Ann thought.

"Why do you want a job like this, though? You certainly don't need it, do you? I don't mean to pry, but I consider myself an excellent judge of wardrobe and jewelry, as well as character, and you don't appear to me to be a woman used to working for five dollars an hour."

"As I told Miss Franklin, the money's of little consequence. I'm recently widowed, and I'd simply like a full time job to help fill the days."

"Why not do what other bored, wealthy women, widowed or not, do? Open a shop and sell something that interests you."

"Selling things doesn't interest me at all."

"But filling out pension and welfare forms does?"

"I believe it might. I won't know unless I try."

"And if it doesn't, then you leave us in the lurch."

"No, Mr. Steinberg. I finish what I start. This job is scheduled to last through next summer. If you hire me, I promise you I'll be here until the end.”

“Barring acts of God and, the same gentleman forbid, death."

Ann smiled. "Of course."

Steinberg leaned back and crossed his arms. He sat that way for a moment, and then, in a movement whose quickness startled Ann, he leaned forward across his desk, his arm out, hand extended toward her. "We'll take a chance on you," he said.

She nodded, took the offered hand, and shook it. "Thank you."

"And now," said Steinberg, standing up, "let's go meet Dennis."

"Meet… Dennis Hamilton?" The muscles in Ann's legs tingled, but she made herself stand on them nonetheless.

"Yes. He's been damned gloomy lately, and I think meeting an attractive new production assistant would do him a world of good. Besides, far better this way than to have him stumble over you in the balcony, yes?" Steinberg opened the door to the outer office. "Donna," he said, "tell Dennis I'm bringing someone up to meet him." He turned back to Ann. "Have you seen the theatre?"

"Just the lobby on my way in. I came to a lot of movies here when I was in school, though. It was quite beautiful."

"It still is. Donna can give you the grand tour later. Now, onward and upward." They walked down the hall side by side. Halfway up the staircase to the third floor, Ann cleared her throat. "I've, uh, met Mr. Hamilton before."

There was, she was afraid, something in her voice that implied secrets, and Steinberg slowed, then stopped and leaned against the railing. "Really. And where was this?"

"Oh, it was a long time ago. Back when his first show played here. I was working in the hotel that housed the cast. In the restaurant."

"I see. Well, in that case, you've known Dennis longer than I have. What am I introducing you for?"

Ann paused before she answered. "I doubt that he'll remember. That was almost twenty-five years ago."

"You'll discover," Steinberg said, smiling gently, "if you don't know it already, that Dennis never forgets a face. And certainly not such a pretty one." He began to walk up the stairs again, and Ann followed. "I'd also introduce you to Robin, Dennis's wife, but she's in New York this week, meeting the playwrights and composers who've written the shows we're considering for production. But you can meet her later. A charming woman, very young, but very… perceptive."

There were dimensions of meaning in the word, and Ann could not help but wonder if Steinberg suspected the nature of her previous relationship with Dennis Hamilton. Well, if he did he did. All that was in the past.

Still, as they reached the top of the stairway and began to walk down the long hall, she could feel her heart pounding, and she began to wonder if she had been lying to herself, if her desire for this job was born of nothing but the desire to see Dennis again. Why else did she feel relieved that his wife was away?

Finally they stopped at a pair of carved double doors. "The sanctum sanctorum," Steinberg said, pushing a button. In a moment the doors were opened by a short, stocky man in a pale blue jogging suit, who Steinberg introduced as Sid Harper. He shook Ann's hand, looking at her with what might have been a trace of recollection.

"It's pretty warm today," he said, leading the way across a living room right out of Architectural Digest. "Dennis is on the terrace." Ann followed through the French doors and saw him.

He was sitting with his back to them at a glass-topped table on which lay a morning newspaper, folded and unread. Next to it was a Limoges cup filled with coffee. Although all she could see of Dennis was the back of his head above the collar of the soft brown leather jacket, she would have recognized him anywhere. The sandy red hair, now touched with highlights of gray, was still swept backward in a leonine manner. It glimmered in the morning sun just the way it had when they had said goodbye to each other so many years before. Although she had seen his face since, it had always been in films or on television, and she could barely keep herself from going up to him, touching his shoulder, seeing him turn and look at her once again.

"Dennis," Steinberg said softly but firmly, "I'd like you to… reacquaint yourself with Ann Deems."

It seemed to Ann that he turned in slow motion, so that the jutting chin, the straight and narrow nose, the blue eyes, once piercing but now soft, came into her view over a period of what seemed like minutes, and after that eternity he was finally looking at her face, and the eyes became sharp and clear again, and she knew that he not only recognized her, but that he had not forgotten her. It was the look of lovers meeting after many years of separation, and the knowledge that he had never stopped loving her nearly drowned her, and she became aware of the most wonderful and terrible knowledge of all, that she had never stopped loving him either.

"Ann…” His lips formed the word, but she did not hear it.

"Hello, Dennis," she said, her throat thick, her hands tingling with the longing to touch him. "It was Ann Warren then."

"Yes…" It was as though he suddenly realized that he was being rude, and he got awkwardly to his feet. "What a surprise," he said, and a smile that held more things than she could imagine formed on his face. He made a delicate motion toward her, then stopped, as though he had intended to give her a kiss of greeting, then changed his mind. "It's been… quite a long time. You're looking very well."

"Thank you. You too. The beard still looks wonderful."

He chuckled. "My chin hasn't seen daylight for ten years now."

"He could grow mushrooms in it," Sid said, then crossed his arms. He looked uncomfortable, Ann thought.

"Well, since you two seem to know each other," Steinberg said, "Sid and I will get back to work. Oh, by the way, Dennis, Mrs. Deems will be our new production assistant, with your approval, of course."

"Oh. Oh. Of course. I'm sure she'll be… wonderful. Ann, would you… like some coffee? Tea?"

"No thank you, Dennis. I'm fine."

"Later," Sid said, following Steinberg through the French doors and out of sight.

"Um… please, sit down." He held out a chair for her and she sat, finally looking at the view. A large courtyard with a fountain was below. Across it and to the right were the vast walls of the building itself, while to the left was the street, an oak-lined boulevard that undoubtedly had looked the same for decades.

"It's a beautiful town," she said, and Dennis, sitting across from her, nodded.

"It always was," he said. "One of the few places that never changed. You could almost imagine that it's the same as it was when we

… when I first came here."

"Except for the fact," said Ann, "that they don't show dirty movies here anymore."

Dennis laughed, and Ann was glad to hear the sound come bubbling out of him. Her silly remark had broken whatever romantic nostalgia had bound them, and she felt easier now, less apt to cry or shout or embrace him or any of the other childish, foolish things she had thought she might do. "God, you look good," Dennis said. "So tell me everything. How you became Ann Deems, whatever became of your parents, if you have children, the works. I mean, we do have a quarter century catching up to do."

"That dates us, doesn't it?" Ann said dryly.

"Me perhaps. Not you. You've hardly changed a bit."

She smiled. "Actors are always such skillful liars."

"Lying is our profession. But in this case I'm as honest as I know how to be. But now tell me – you're married."

"I was. I'm… a widow now. God, that word sounds so quaint, doesn't it?”

“Did it happen recently?"

So prompted, Ann told Dennis what had happened since they had last seen each other. He hung on every word, expressing a child-like delight at her triumphs, dismay at her losses. Never before had anyone listened so intently to her, or responded so sympathetically. She finally told him of Eddie's death, though she did not mention the circumstances, and merely hinted at the gap it had left in her life.

"Well," he said when she had finished, "it sounds as though you'll do a terrific job working with us. But you know, I'm interested in what you said about Terri. She's a good costumer?"

"I think so, but I'm her mother. Why? Do you need someone here?"

"Yes we do. Or we will very shortly. There are tons of costumes that need to be cleaned, repaired, you name it. We're trying to build our own wardrobe here so that we'll have most of what we need for shows, rather than having to rent everything from New York houses. There's no rush for Marvella right now, but once we select a show, which might be very soon, she's going to need help."

"Marvella Johnson?" Dennis nodded. "She's Terri's idol. She did a research paper on her designs."

"You think she'd be interested in working for her?"

"You're joking. She'd be delirious. You mean there's actually a chance?"

"I don't know why not. A degree in costuming from Yale Drama School is nothing to sneeze at, even for Marvella." Dennis laughed. "Of course I think tenth grade was as far as Marvella ever got. Someone with her natural gifts comes along about every fifty years. She calls herself the idiot savant of costume design, but believe me, she's no idiot, she's a damned genius."

"It was Ilona Herrick who discovered her, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Sort of like Lana Turner in the soda shop. Herrick hired her as a seamstress – out of desperation to meet a deadline – and accidentally knocked over a folder full of Marvella's sketches. The rest is history."

Ann nodded. "A happy set of circumstances."

"Mmm. Fate," Dennis said. "Kismet, I suppose, that brings two people together." He paused. "Accidents." Their eyes locked and they looked at each other for a long time. Ann tried to keep the tears from forming, but felt them begin to pool, and looked away, blinking savagely.

"Let's have dinner tonight," Dennis said. "The Kirkland Inn still gets fresh seafood every day." He smiled and touched her hand. "You always liked their seafood."

Ann looked at his hand on hers and thought how natural it seemed, how right, even though so many years had passed since she had last touched him. "I don't know," she said. "I don't know if that would be such a good idea."

"I don't know either," he replied. "All I know is that I'd like to have dinner with you, talk with you some more. Just talk, that's all. It's been so long."

"Maybe too long," she said, still watching their hands together.

"Maybe." He took his hand away. She almost grasped it, but restrained herself. "Let's consider it an employer-employee interview then. Professional down the line. No touching, except a warm and dry handshake. Is it a deal?"

Finally she looked up at him. He was smiling gently, and she realized she could not say no. "All right. It's a deal." Then she smiled. "Boss."

Dennis laughed. "I can pick you up at your home."

She began to agree, then remembered Terri. "No. Thank you, Dennis. I'd really rather drive myself."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure. Shall I meet you here or at the inn?"

"Well, since we're being professional, how about the inn? Say seven-thirty?"

"That's fine." They did not kiss, did not touch when they parted. He called Sid, who took her back to Steinberg's office, where she received Donna Franklin's smiling congratulations, filled out the necessary employment forms, and was told to report for work at nine o'clock on Thursday morning.

As she sat behind the wheel of her car and pulled the door closed, she realized what a terrible mistake she had made, not only in accepting the job, but in coming to Kirkland in the first place. She should not have seen him, should never have seen him again, because, damn it all to hell, she still loved him, and could see in his face that he still loved her, and while one part of her brain reveled in that fact, another part agonized over it, because Dennis was married, wasn't he? He was a married man, with a wife who loved him and who he no doubt loved too. And now Ann had become part of the equation simply by reappearing, or at least she thought enough of herself to imagine she had.

But what if she was kidding herself? What if Dennis's reaction had been due merely to nostalgia for simpler and happier times?

Oh Jesus. Jesus, there was too much to think about, too many possibilities, too great an assortment of emotions on both their parts to come to any conclusion. She didn't know what he felt, what he thought. All she knew for sure was that she still loved him, and she knew that through her twenty-two years of marriage she always had. Through all the years she was loving Eddie – and she had loved Eddie – she was loving Dennis as well, and if that sounded impossible, it was nonetheless true. Who the hell knew what love was anyway?

Oh, goddammit, who the hell knew anything?

She gave into it then and cried. She cried for Eddie and for loving Dennis and for herself, and when she had finished she started the car and began to drive home, remembering the day she had first met Dennis Hamilton in the coffee shop of the Kirkland Holiday Inn. She had spilled a tuna salad sandwich on him.

~* ~

"Oh God… oh God, I am so sorry, there was butter there, and I stepped in it, and… oh God, all over your sweater…”

"It's okay…”

"No, wait, let me get that bread… oh yuck… Look, I'll just go back in the kitchen, get a towel, some cold water -"

"It's okay, really." The young man smiled at her. "There's just one problem," he said, and pointed to a large blob of tuna salad in the vicinity of his stomach. "Didn't I ask you to hold the mayo?"

She laughed, just a little, and as his smile grew broader and he began to laugh as well, she laughed harder, an embarrassed, half-crying laugh, shaking her head at her own clumsiness. "Watch," the young man said. "Magic." He tugged on the sweater at the neck, something her mother had always taught her not to do, pulled it up over his head, and removed it, turning it inside-out in the process. "Voila! All gone."

"I am sorry," she said again. "Please, let me have it cleaned."

"Well, all right," he said. "On one condition, and that's that you return it to me over dinner."

Yes was on her lips, but she bit it back, remembering who the boy was – an actor who was rehearsing for that new musical at the Venetian Theatre, one of those rare and frightening beasts her mother had warned her about, and even her father had viewed with minor alarm. But, on the other hand, he was so darn cute, and that smile was enough to light the main street of Kirkland. "I… I don't know…”

"We don't have to eat tuna salad, you know. And we don't have to eat here either."

"Well…”

"And I'll bring you home safe and sound, I promise. Untouched by human hands."

Once again she gave an embarrassed laugh.

"'You pause, madam,'" he said. "'Do you find me repulsive?'"

She gave him a quizzical look. "What?"

"It's from the show. Now you say, 'Not at all, sir. I shall be happy to accompany you.’”

"Oh, that's what I say, huh?"

"Well… I'd like you to." He leaned toward her and grinned. "And shall I tell you why?"

"Why?”

"Because I've been wanting to get a chance to meet you, and I can't do that if all we're saying is 'Would you like more coffee,' and 'Miss, may I have the check now.' In fact, I have a confession to make."

"What?"

"I put that butter on the floor on purpose so you'd slip and spill something on me.”

“You didn't!"

"No, I didn't. But I would have if I'd thought of it." Ann laughed again, but there was no embarrassment in it this time.

That evening over stuffed flounder at the Kirkland Inn, the young man, whose name, Ann learned, was Dennis Hamilton, told her that he was enjoying the meal more than any other he had had since rehearsals began. "And you know why? I didn't think so, so I'll tell you. It's because you're the first normal person I've met since this whole thing started."

"What do you mean, normal? Dull?"

"No, no, not at all. I mean beautifully, charmingly normal. Have you ever been involved with theatre? Professionally?"

"No."

"Me neither. Not until this show, anyway. Oh, I did a lot of stuff in high school, and I busted my hump working in a summer theatre to get my Equity card, but all did on the stage was serve a drink in Act Two and say, 'Would you care for another, sir?' But anyway, everybody in this business is slightly crazy."

"Present company excluded?" she asked.

"Of course. All the women are so self-centered you can hardly talk to them -that is, if there was anything besides performing that they could talk about – and the men are all gay. Well, most of them anyway. Couple of guys – Sid and Harry – they're straight."

"Gay? You mean homosexual?" Ann was shocked, but hoped she didn't look it. She hoped in vain.

"That surprise you? It did me. Hey, you'd be surprised how many guys in theatre and movies are. I mean, the stories I've heard, some of the names, the guys who are famous for being such big…” He searched for a word. "… studs, pardon my French, well, they're absolute flaming faggots when nobody's looking."

"God, that's amazing. Like who?"

"Aw, I don't want to say, I mean, some of it might be just talk. But whether they're straight or gay, the guys are just as into themselves as the girls are.”

“So what's this show all about?" Ann asked.

"It's a musical about this young emperor who falls in love with this girl who isn't a princess or anything, and he wants to marry her, but his nobles don't want him to, so they have her killed."

"Ooo. That's a little extreme, isn't it?"

"Well, it's all done behind his back, but he finds out about it, and there's a big duel at the end with this imposter the nobles have tried to put in his place, and it turns out that the emperor decides never to get married and let his line die out. See, that's the revenge on the people who wouldn't let him marry the girl he loved."

"Oh, that's kind of a different ending. How did you get in it?"

"There was an open audition, so I took my brand new Equity card and went and sang a song. Then they had me come back to read and sing for Ensley and Davis. You know who they are?"

"Sure." Ann's parents had taken her to New York to see All For the Best when she was in ninth grade, and she had seen the film versions of Wandering Wind and Calahan's Folly and owned both soundtrack albums. "So you really sang for them?"

Dennis nodded. "Danced too, though they didn't think much of my dancing."

"But you got the part."

"Mmm-hmm."

There was a pause while the waiter removed the soiled dishes. Then Ann asked, "So what do you do? Serve drinks again?"

He gave a short, uneasy laugh, and for a moment she was afraid that he had no lines at all, but was just a singer in the chorus. "No, no drinks. I get to do a little more this time."

"Oh, well, that's good. Who do you play?"

"The Emperor."

It took a few seconds for her to realize that he was being serious. "You have the lead?" He looked down and nodded. "My God, that must be… exciting.”

“Try scary."

“Why?”

"Because the people who aren't counting on me to sell their million dollar show are hoping that I'll screw up." He shook his head in frustration. "It usually takes years to get somewhere in this business, and that's what I expected to happen too. I thought my voice would get me through a few years of chorus jobs while I took enough dance so that I didn't stumble around on stage too much, then a few speaking roles, maybe the hero's comic relief friend, and then, if the gods smiled, actual leads by the time I was in my thirties or forties."

Ann was beginning to see. "But it happened a lot faster."

"Did it ever. This is a part every young performer in New York wanted, and I -literally – just stepped right into it." He sighed. "As a result, an awful lot of people don't like me very much."

He sat there quietly for a long time until the waiter brought them coffee and asked if they wanted dessert. They didn't, and the waiter left. "It's a drag," he said finally. "I don't feel as though I'm really into the part. I mean I read fine during the auditions, and I was okay during the first week in New York. But everyone got so… bitchy. They treat me like this incredibly lucky jerk. Hell, I don't feel like an emperor at all."

Ann thought for a bit, took a sip of coffee, then spoke. "Maybe you shouldn't try and feel like the emperor. Maybe… maybe you should just be the emperor."

(At a window high up in the building, THE EMPEROR stands, looking out onto the parking lot from which Ann Deems is driving away.)

THE EMPEROR

I want her. And I will have her. I'll have her crying, screaming, kneeling to me. Kneeling to her emperor. I'll have her bleeding.