Puzzle for Players

by Patrick Quentin

  The night before opening, I had the first and last full dress-rehearsal. Things were chaotic and tense as they always are at dress-rehearsal time, but there was that indefinable atmosphere of gaiety which only comes when a cast know they have a smash hit on their hands. Mira-belle, looking magnificent in her Floradora gown, was swirling around, stepping over electric wires, skirting packing cases, kissing anyone in sight. Theo, completely transformed into the embittered farmwife of the play, chatted with a handsome, bewhiskered Gerald and a rather keyed-up Iris. I reacted to it all like a two-year-old hitting the stretch again. I was back in my element.

  We had quite an audience in the house. Lenz was there with that Junoesque and almost mythical personage, Mrs. Lenz. In incongruous proximity sat Louise, my colored help, with one of the pantry boys from the Belmont. All the office force with friends and guinea pigs swelled the

  first balcony. There was, reassuringly, no sign of Inspector Clarke.

  I was just handing out a last-minute word of good cheer on stage when Wessler hurried in late from his dressing-room. My Austrian star looked superb and exciting with his heroic body and his tattered farm clothes— like some pagan god fresh from battle. There was an intense, pent-up expression on his face.

  I was giving the boys and girls a pep talk. As soon as I had delivered my spiel, he came up to me, putting a great hand on my arm and drawing me out into the wings.

  “Mr. Duluth,” he whispered eagerly, “for days now I have been thinking. It worries me because I am so near the truth, but I do not understand. Now at last I see it all. I am a fool not so long ago to have realized.”

  “Realized what?”

  “About my brother, Wolfgang. Why he thinks he hates me—everything. It is so plain. I know.” He threw a quick glance over his shoulder as some of the others strolled toward us. “You understand German, Mr. Duluth?”

  “A little,” I said. “If you keep it simple.”

  He leaned even closer, whispering in German. “After the rehearsal come please to my dressing-room. I wait for you there. I tell you just what is wrong—why these things have been happening at your theater. I know. And you are no more to worry because it will be all right.”

  I stared at him blankly. But the others were right up to us. Wessler just squeezed my arm and swung back onto the stage.

  With that remarkable speech echoing in my ears, I picked up the jittery Henry and slipped down into the audience. I parked the author with my business manager and found a place away from everyone where I could watch the prologue to my come-back alone.

  It was amazing how the Dagonet had been metamorphosed now that the heavy plush curtains were in place and an audience broke up the dreary monotony of the house. Until then, that theater had been for me just a gloomy setting for continuous disasters. But now it seemed to have shaken off its jinx and to have remembered its dignity as one of Broadway’s oldest and most tradition-proud houses.

  I shall never forget that dress-rehearsal. As soon as the curtain rose, I knew it was going to hit tops. There’s nothing in this world harder to impress than that odd jumble of people who get roped in for a pre-view. But, within five minutes, I could tell we had them on tenterhooks—Dr. Lenz, Mrs. Lenz, Louise and all. Wessler had even more of a punch than I had anticipated. And from the moment of Mirabelle’s entrance, the play flashed and flamed around the two of them. They made the surest-fire team I’d ever seen. It seemed incredible that this new incandescent Mirabelle was the same woman whom Broadway had known so long as the sleek sophisticate of the Rue-Gates drawing-room comedies. It seemed incredible too that such a dynamic relationship could be founded on nothing but extreme mutual antagonism.

  As soon as the final curtain fell on Mirabelle and Wessler moving hand in hand toward the farmhouse door, I dashed back-stage. I didn’t have to wait to hear what anyone had to say. And I was choking with hyperboles of my own.

  I ran into Eddie, Iris and Gerald, all talking and laughing excitedly. I kissed Iris; then in a burst of enthusiasm, I kissed Eddie and Gerald too. I pushed past them to congratulate Theo who was standing behind in the wings, looking away from me onto the stage.

  “Theo…” I began.

  I broke off when I saw her face. It was very pale and pinched. Her eyes were fixed on something beyond us on stage. Curiously I moved to her side and looked over her shoulder.

  I saw what she had been seeing; and I understood the tight constriction of her mouth. Standing at the back of the set, close to the rear door, were Mirabelle and Wessler. They were unconscious of everything except each other, as if still caught up in the spell of the play. Wessler’s great, rough arms were around her waist, his lips were moving tenderly over her hair.

  At any other time the sight of Mirabelle and Wessler in that rapturous pose would have seemed fantastic. Now it seemed perfectly natural, the inevitable climax to the tornado of emotion which had been let loose on the stage. I wasn’t surprised. I just felt even gayer and more exhilarated. This added the last drop to my cup of happiness. The only outstanding problem in my production, the

  Wessler-Mirabelle feud, was petering out into moonlight and roses.

  For a second I stood there next to Theo watching them, just as a few minutes before the audience had been watching them on stage. This scene had something of the same stature, the same theatrical magnificence of the play itself.

  I heard Wessler’s voice whispering: “So have we been blind. We have not known what was happening to us and we have been fighting and hating because we did not understand. Once you ask me if I have not seen you before. Now I may say yes, for I know. Always I have seen you. But it has been in my heart.”

  There was an odd little sound from Theo, something that wasn’t quite a laugh. I know just how tough this must be for her. Poor Theo, who had been ready to shoot Kramer for Wessler’s sake, who had put all she had into her adoration for him—this was her only reward, this very swift kick in the pants.

  I put my hand on her arm. I whispered: “Don’t forget the red-haired waiter at the Waldorf, darling.”

  Then I left her, moving toward Wessler and Mirabelle. I touched Wessler’s arm and the two of them started, breaking away from each other, staring at me. I took both their hands.

  I said: “I never thought you’d spring this on me. But it’s swell. You’re both swell and the play’s swell. And everything’s very, very dandy.”

  Mirabelle was still looking at me. Then slowly her eyes moved to Wessler, scrutinizing his face with a sort of breathless astonishment.

  “Peter,” she said, “it’s mad; it’s crazy; it’s absolutely cockeyed. But I’m in love with this man. Why the hell didn’t I realize it before?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I HAD NO time to be mellow and paternal over this eccentric romance. Suddenly the stage was besieged by excited, gesticulating people. Miss Pink, forgetting her role as the perfect secretary, clutched my hand and pumped it up and down. Mirabelle was swept away in an admiring throng headed by Louise and Mrs. Lenz. Henry Prince hovered at one elbow, saying: “It’s going to go over, isn’t it, Mr. Duluth?” Iris hovered at the other, saying: “Darling, this was nothing. We’re going to wow them tomorrow night.”

  I tried to cope with them both at once.

  Then Dr. Lenz appeared, quelled all conversation with a glance and invited the whole company to a supper of celebration at Sardot’s. While I was still trying to disentangle myself from Miss Pink, Iris grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the stairs after the bandwagon. As we passed the doorman’s room, Mirabelle sprang impulsively at Mac, kissed his wizened cheek and yanked him out to join the party too.

  He brought Lillian with him. We must have made a pretty crazy procession, headed by Mirabelle and her bustle and flanked by a Siamese cat.

  The party at Sardot’s began on a very exuberant note. Gerald Gwynne, with charm full on, tried to persuade Mrs. Lenz, a one-time German prima donna, to give us Brunhild’s war-cry. He had almost succeeded when Mirabelle
swirled round the table and clutched my arm, her face rather anxious.

  “Peter, where is he? I’m so happy, so indecently happy. I can’t bear for him not to be here. And I’m worried. I’m sure he’s had something on his mind, not just me, something else.”

  It took me some seconds to realize whom she meant.

  Then, as I glanced around the table, from Eddie past Theo to Henry and Gerald, I understood.

  Conrad Wessler was not with us.

  Mirabelle was saying: “Darling, will you go back to the theater to look for him?”

  “Sure,” I drawled, “anything for love’s young dream.”

  It was not until I had left the table and was strolling toward the door that I remembered the odd conversation I’d had with the Austrian just before the show started. Wessler had told me he had the mystery of the Dagonet all figured out. I had made a date with him in his dressing-room. Here I had been giddily celebrating a success which was still in the future instead of following up the one really vital development of the day.

  With a queer feeling, half shame, half uneasiness, 1 dodged across Forty-fourth Street back to the Dagonet.

  Since Mirabelle had kidnapped Mac for the party, there was no one on guard at the stage door. As I stepped into the bleak hall, with its faint aroma of stale grease-paint, the Dagonet seemed somehow to have slipped back into its old mood of passive hostility. It was completely silent, in violent contrast to the noisy jangle that had filled it a short time before. I climbed the stairs to stage level, losing most of my frivolity, feeling my irrational anxiety grow and spread inside me. I went down the passage to Wessler’s dressing-room. The door was closed. When I knocked there was no reply. I tried the handle.

  For a second it did not strike me as particularly odd that the door was locked. Wessler must have grown tired of waiting. He had locked the room and gone over to Sardot’s to join the others. I shook the handle to make sure the door wasn’t jammed. It was while I was doing this that I saw it.

  I took a step backward, watching the keyhold in hypnotized fascination. Slowly, indolently, there curled out from it a gray trail of smoke.

  As I stared, that spiral of smoke thickened; it seeped out with ever-increasing volume; smoke was coming from under the door, too, rippling upward like a horde of little serpents. I could smell its smell, the close, pungent smell of burning, and I could hear the faint, ominous crackle of invisible fire.

  It’s hard to describe what effect the sight of that smoke had on me. My mind really stopped working before there was time to take in anything but the bare, horrible fact that Wessler’s dressing-room, behind that locked door, was on fire.

  I never wondered in that first period of panic whether or not Wessler himself might be inside. Memories rushing back from the past, took complete control of me. Five years ago I had seen smoke, thin and insidious, just like this; smelt that acrid smell; heard the ominous crackling of flames which, before there could be any help, had burst into a raging, roaring bedlam. That had happened to me five years ago.

  I had drunk myself into a nuthouse trying to forget it. Even now, it haunted my sleep, a brutal, seering nightmare. I had that back of me, burned deep into my subconscious. I was frightened of fire as crazily and un-reasoningly as a wild animal.

  And now I was faced with fire again. I was alone in that huge, bleak theater confronted with the monster of my dreams.

  Every impulse in me screamed out for flight. I wanted nothing in the world except to rush away, to get into the street where there was fresh air, where I would be able to cleanse that stinging, coarse smell from my nostrils. And yet I didn’t run away. Although there was no logical sequence to my thoughts, I knew that this had always had to happen to me sometime. That was the way things worked. Life built up some ghastly bogey-man for you and then it confronted you with it. When you least expected it, there it was. You had to fight yourself and win out—or you were sunk.

  This was the acid test of Peter Duluth.

  All those sensations had swept through me in a split second. I still had no definite thoughts or fears for Wessler. I just knew, although the knowledge slashed brutally across my most basic instincts, that I had to get into the room and stop that fire.

  While the smoke wreathed its tentacles stiflingly around me, I threw myself at the door, bashing against it with my shoulder. There was a groan of hinges, nothing more. Once, twice, three times I slung myself against the woodwork. At last the groan broadened into a splitting, screeching sound. A panel cracked inward. For one second the door teetered back and forth; then the lock went; smoke bellied out at me as the door lurched forward and down and I stumbled through into the dressing-room.

  For the first few seconds I could not see; I could hardly breathe. There seemed nothing in the world but that choking fog of smoke and behind it the dull red glow that at any moment might blaze into riotous flames. Stray thoughts started registering at last. The fire was concentrated in the corner where the wardrobe stood. How could a fire have started there? How—unless it had not been accidental?

  I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Now, as I whipped out a handkerchief, pressing it against my nose, I saw one blinding, horrible explanation for it all. Wessler had the solution to the mystery. Wessler had stayed behind in his dressing-room to pass that news on to me. Now his dressing-room was on fire. And he, my star, the very foundation of my show, was missing.

  Where was Wessler?

  I stumbled forward, my eyes smarting, my breathing, behind the handkerchief, coarse and gasping. The room had lost all individuality. My groping hand struck wood, the back of a chair, the edge of a table. I veered right, away from the dull red glow in the corner. My foot tripped over something soft I dropped to my knees, pushing my fingers forward.

  They touched rough wool, the tweed of a jacket. They slid along it. They found a hand. My eyes, peering down, could just make out the dark figure of a man, sprawled across the carpet.

  From then on I acted mechanically with the insane efficiency that comes in an emergency. I let the handkerchief drop from my mouth. With both hands I grabbed at that heavy, unresponsive body. Somehow I dragged it through the pall of smoke, toward the broken door and through it along the passage to the comparative saftey of the stage.

  I had guessed whose that body would be. There was only one possible solution. But for a minute or two, as I stood there on the stage, panting and sweating, my powers of vision entirely deserted me. Even here, although the atmosphere was clear and a bright working light was burning, there seemed to be nothing but smoke, an impenetrable pall of it between me and the body on the boards.

  Then, gradually, those imaginary mists dispersed. I

  fell to my knees by the body. I could see again, see with a sharp, hurting vividness. I saw the short blond beard, the huge shoulders thrusting out of the tattered farmer clothes.

  Conrad Wessler had been locked in that windowless, smoke-saturated room.

  Feverishly I worked over him, trying to do something and not knowing what to do. His eyes were closed, his face was waxy and stiff like a dummy’s. Then, as I stared, I saw something else, something that jerked me up to the highest peak of panic.

  Trickling from Wessler’s matted hair, slowly dripping onto the boards of the stage, was a steady stream of blood.

  The moments which came next are merged in my mind now in a blurred kaleidoscope. I suppose I must have rushed off the stage, down the stairs and along the alley to the street. But I have no recollection of doing so. All I remember is the cold night air on my forehead; the startled face of a complete stranger in a derby hat; and my own voice shouting:

  “Over the way. Sardot’s. Get there. Find Dr. Lenz. Dr. Lenz. Make him come here at once. Man with a beard. Big party. Bring him here at once. Make them call the fire department.”

  Then the stranger’s face vanished from my ken forever. I was back in the theater again. In my hand was a scarlet fire extinguisher. I was in Wessler’s dressing-room, back in the sickening
geyser of smoke. At that stage, I wasn’t just fighting fire. I was fighting ten thousand demons, exorcizing them with that extinguisher.

  I have dim memories of the red glow in the corner paling, quivering and then fading into nothingness. I have even dimmer memories of staggering out into the passage and back along it to the stage, wrenching fresh air into my lungs, gazing down foolishly at the body of Wessler, thinking and not thinking, feeling triumph and despair at the same time, triumph because I had fought the fire and myself, despair because I knew with blank, heart-breaking certainty that Wessler was dead.

  He had to be dead. From the very beginning Troubled Waters had been hounded by some superhuman, sadistic force. This was the only fitting climax, this savage finale, snatching everything from us on the very threshold of success.

  Vaguely I heard hurrying footsteps somewhere behind me, offstage. I turned dizzily to face the door. It swung open at me; people started pouring through. I saw Lenz, Eddie, and behind them Mirabelle and Theo, together, with white faces and blank, staring eyes.

  I remembered Mirabelle giving a stifled cry. I saw her dash toward Wessler; heard her tormented voice: “It can’t be. Oh, God, it can’t be now. Conrad…”

  Theo’s voice broke in quietly: “No, Mirabelle. Don’t go to him. Please, stay with me. Let Dr. Lenz see him. Let Dr. Lenz have room.”

  She had put her arm around Mirabelle’s waist, holding her back. Dr. Lenz had dropped to his knees. He was bending over Wessler. Eddie, his voice thick and low, was gripping my arm, pouring out questions. I suppose I answered them. I had my breath back then; I could talk; I could remember more than just the suffocating smoke.

  But I wasn’t listening to my own voice. I was just waiting, conserving all my faculties for what Dr. Lenz would say.

  There was a long, throbbing silence. Eddie had slipped away to make sure the fire was extinguished. Only Mirabelle, Theo and I were there, waiting for Lenz to speak.