Страница 121 из 135
So don't give me any crap about love versus lust, okay? And keep your amateur psych opinions about my childhood rendering me incapable of long-term commitment to yourself as well. For my first thirty years my father demanded all the love I had to give. Since then, it would never have been fair to ask anyone to share more than a few months of my life. A cop, a private detective, or an Isambard Comfort would always show up and I'd have to move along.
I did love Je
And the opening night came.
And by the second act intermission everyone knew we had something special. Our spies in the lobby reported an astonishingly good buzz. People were actually hurrying back to their seats before the houselights flashed.
And the third act came and went. And the fourth act. We moved into the fifth act and I knew I'd never been better.
God, I was glorious. I was Lear.
Actually, only one thing happened to put a bit of a damper on the evening, though I swear to you, had you been there it wouldn't have affected your enjoyment of the play at all, Mrs. Lincoln.
Midway through the third act, Isambard Comfort showed up in my dressing room....
He was seated in the big, comfortable easy chair I had requested for relaxing between scenes when Lear wasn't onstage.
He had Toby in his lap. There was no one else in the room.
"Where's Tom?" I asked. Tom was my dresser. Oh, yes, I had once more come up in the world. This was not the closet aboard the Brita
"Tom is indisposed," he said, and gestured toward a pile of costumes in one corner. I saw one shoe that looked like part of the pair Tom had been wearing. I couldn't tell if Tom's foot was in it.
"Don't worry; he's not dead. He'll wake up in a few hours with nothing worse than a bad headache."
I had been leaning against the door, which I had closed behind me before I saw him. I was dripping wet, my gray hair in untidy ropes that reached my shoulders.
I had prepared a few automatic surprises for him, but none of them could be used without harming Toby. They had been a forlorn hope, anyway. There were weapons here and there, some concealed, some not looking much like weapons, but I doubted my ability to use any of them against his reptilian reactions and hideous strength.
"I've had a little time," he told me. "I've located a few electronic traps and disabled them." He made a gesture toward the Pantechnicon. "I left the life support ru
I sighed, pushed myself off the wall, and walked to my dressing table.
"Then go get that costume on the rack over there," I told him. "The one labeled 'Act Three, scene four.' And hurry. We don't have much time to get me changed and back out there."
He looked at me for only a moment, then stood and put Toby in a hip pocket and zipped it closed. He was dressed in the costume of one of the King's knights, his helmet on the floor beside the chair. I assumed that was how he got backstage. He took the costume off the rack and came up behind me as I stood at the big mirror. I was already unbuttoning my costume. Tom would have done that for me, but I only wanted as much help from Izzy as I absolutely needed.
"You keep surprising me," he said. "I don't like that. Not many people surprise me."
"Get used to it."
"I think I have. But since we have some time together, would you explain how you knew I was going to let you finish the performance?"
"I didn't know," I said, shrugging out of the kingly robes of Lear. "But I thought it was worth a try. The worst you could do was coldcock me and shove me in my suitcase, and you're going to do that sooner or later, anyway."
"You don't think killing you is the worst I might do?" He held up the new robe—outwardly, exactly like the one I had just taken off—and I slipped my arms into it.
"If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it as soon as I got here. When you didn't do it, I knew you had other plans. I don't think I'll like those plans."
"I can guarantee it. Why the costume change, Sparky? It looks like a waste of time to me." I'd seen him feeling the seams, quickly going over it for concealed weapons. There were none. I gestured toward the television screen, the one he had been watching as I entered, and had made me hope he might be content to hold Toby hostage and give me a little more time.
"Watch and you'll learn something," I said. On the screen, Gloucester and Edmund were finishing their scene.
"That's my cue," I said, and hurried out the door.
"In such a night, to shut me out! Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. No more of that."
Pure poetry. Not just the lines, but my situation. As Lear, I was going mad. Soon I would be tearing my hair and rending my raiment (the reason for the costume change; this one was strategically weakened so it would tear properly). I was more than good. I was brilliant.
And as Ke
"Prithee go in thyself; seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more."
The edge of the stage seemed to me an abyss; the wings, dark chances. What was to stop me from leaping the footlights and charging down the aisle, out the lobby, and into the wide world beyond? Or finishing my lines, strolling casually offstage and out the back door.
Well, professionalism, for one thing. Laugh if you must, but I would almost rather die than abandon a performance in the third act. There is that old axiom, the show must go on. Not only do I owe it to my craft to give my best, and give my all, I owe it to the audience. If I lived to tonight's final curtain and somehow could escape from my nemesis... then it's a case of Sorry, Polly. Sorry, cast members. I'm outta here. But nothing short of death was going to keep me from finishing tonight.
Later I realized I'd had no way of knowing if the exits were covered by Izzy's people. If, in fact, half the audience were Charonese agents. But I swear that, at the time, it never entered my head. Somehow I knew that Izzy was handling this alone. I had come to know something about him in our two brief, bloody encounters, come to know something of his culture in my researches aboard Hal. He would handle this alone. Call it pride, call it honor. Call it lunacy. After what had happened in Oberon, he would not be calling in the national guard.
But there was a more important reason I could not flee and that was, of course, Toby. Did Izzy know me well enough to rely on my sense of loyalty to hold me hostage even if my fear and my sense of duty would not? Bet on it.
When I took Toby as my companion so many years before, we had made a deal. As I said before, I was responsible for food, shelter, and safety, and he was in charge of everything else. Oh, I also handled minor matters, such as career decisions, travel itineraries, and our pathetic financial affairs. There had been no need to write any of this down; I considered it a part of the original agreement between man and dog, struck during the Stone Age. This may have been the first deal, the primordial deal, before either written or verbal agreements, and any human who fails to honor it is a pretty poor human in my estimation. Some have found irony in the fact that dogs have accompanied the human race into space, but I fail to see anything odd about it. A dog was the first earthling in orbit, and the first casualty of space travel.