Bullets for Macbeth

by Marvin Kaye

  It was the beginning of the end for Macbeth. Even though he’d already killed the old king, it wouldn’t be until he murdered Banquo that his control would slip away. The second assassination is the turning point. After it, Macbeth wades so deep in blood there is no going back. ...

  Sirrha, a word with you: Attend those men

  Our pleasure?

  Mills pitched his voice low, and Evans, as Macbeth’s servant, Seyton, also spoke sotto voce:

  They are, my Lord, without the Pallace Gate.

  A moment later, and the two “Murtherers” stood before their king.

  Both of you know Banquo was your Enemie.

  Murtherers. True, my Lord.

  Macbeth. So is he mine ...

  And so the Scottish ruler set his hirelings onto the bloody business of eradicating Banquo and Fleance, the sole threat, as he saw it, to the building of the dynasty of Macbeth.

  The lights began their slow fade as Scene 31 drew to a close.

  Scene 32.

  Lady Macbeth, already heavy with the accreting burden of guilty remorse, wearily asked her husband what dreadful deed must still be done, and he replied with the sour mockery of dying affection.

  Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest Chuck,

  Till thou applaud the deed. Come, sealing Night,

  Scarf up the tender Eye of pittifull Day,

  And with thy bloodie and invisible Hand

  Cancell and teare to pieces that great Bond,

  Which keepes me pale.

  Mills’ richly sinister voice, rising and falling, was an incantation, a conjuration to the Dark Powers. And, as if in answer, the lights dwindled to one sickly pool of illumination.

  Good things of Day begin to droope, and drowse,

  Whiles Night’s black Agents to their Prey’s doe rowse.

  The lights faded and Scene 32 ended. The stage was in total darkness; even the exit signs and aisle lights in the theater were turned off.

  Silence.

  Then, faint bars of crimson, glowing from off left, sliced into the darkness and barely illuminated the forestage and the town-house unit, whose curtain was closed.

  A murmuring sound: stridulation of cicadas and night beetles.

  A long pause; then, through the right-hand portal, creeping, two cowled individuals emerged. With a sudden gesture, the first stopped, and the second halted close behind.

  There, in the dim scarlet glare, framed in the left doorway, was a motionless figure, shrouded from top to toe. Even the hands were gloved. Slowly, it glided forward, quiet as a specter, and the others joined the interloper. Heads close together, the three held inaudible colloquy. But after a moment, Blake Peters, dropping the garment that hid his face, spoke aloud.

  But who did bid thee join with us?

  The Third Murderer, through the folds of the cloak, replied: “Macbeth,” and E. K. Chambers, also revealing his face, spoke the Second Murderer’s line, vouchsafing the Third Murderer’s right to be there. The First Murderer, nodding, addressed the Third.

  Then stand with us:

  The West yet glimmers with some streakes of Day.

  But even as he spoke, the feeble glare of the sunset grew fainter. Soon the three deployed to different parts of the stage, the first two standing to the right of the left-hand door; the Third Murderer, still concealed by the cloak, to the left of it.

  Silence, broken only by the susurration of insects. Suddenly, the Third Murderer, in an aspirate whisper:

  Hearke, I hear Horses.

  —and a few seconds later, the sound of horses’ hooves could be discerned, as if coming from far off. I smiled, imagining the bawling-out Godwin would give the sound-effects man for the tardy cue. But no sooner did I think of the director than I heard his voice from offstage.

  The assassins tensed in expectation. The clipclop of the horses died.

  1. His Horses goe about

  3. Almost a mile: but he does usually,

  So all men do, from hence to th’Pallace Gate

  Make it their Walke.

  It was the first time I really had an opportunity to hear much of the Third Murderer’s voice. It was dead, devoid of inflection. Yet there was something vaguely, tantalizingly familiar about it.

  There was no time to reflect on it. Events suddenly ran wildly out of control.

  I can’t tell it as fast as it happened. Banquo and Fleance entered, the latter carrying a torch. The artificial twilight was gone and the flame was the only source of illumination.

  The Second Murderer uttered his line, “A Light, a Light”—but instead of picking up the cue, the Third Murderer leaped forward and snatched the flare from Fleance, dashing it to the floor and extinguishing it.

  “No!” Godwin shouted.

  A confusion of voices. Then, rising above them, a snarl of pure animal hatred ...

  The first bullet nearly shattered my eardrums. There was a second explosion. A shriek.

  I jumped to my feet, dashed forward in the dark, and nearly brained myself running into the lip of the platform. Not waiting to recover, I vaulted onto the stage floor.

  Somebody was screaming for lights.

  I ran forward to where I’d last seen the Third Murderer, bumped into someone, and threw my arms around whoever it was.

  “Lights! Turn the bleeding lights on!”

  “Get the hell off me!” Fleance bawled. I let him go.

  There was no sense smashing around in the dark, so I cooled it until the electrician finally hit the work lights. Half-blinded by the sudden glare, I stumbled over to the town-house unit, taking in the stage picture as I went.

  Godwin was on his back, hands clutched to his head. Blood streamed over his fingers and onto the floor.

  The Third Murderer was gone.

  Actors stood in the right wings, riveted with shock. Stage left appeared empty, so I hurried off that way and rounded the cyclorama. There was a booth for the electrician set in the back wall, and I ran up to it. A stout, balding man in his fifties sat there reading a copy of Playboy, totally unconcerned with the brouhaha onstage.

  “Did anyone go past here?” I demanded.

  He shrugged indifferently. “Somebody slammed the door. Didn’t see who.” His tone made it clear he didn’t give a damn, either.

  I stepped to the left of his booth and saw two doors, one in the back wall, the other straight ahead. I tried the latter, but it was locked, so I pulled the first open and stepped through.

  My foot snagged on something and I went sprawling on my face. Darkness surrounded me, but above where I’d fallen, larger than life, Bela Lugosi glowered down upon my plight. I picked myself up and saw what made me trip. It was the cloak the Third Murderer had been wearing.

  I was standing at the edge of the front row of a movie theater. The pale reflections of the film—which I immediately recognized as Dracula—flickered on the upturned faces of the patrons. I looked up the aisles but saw no one, so I started to ask the nearest spectators whether they’d seen anyone running by, but all I got for my pains were shushes, so I gave it up.

  As I stepped back through the door onto the Felt Forum stage, I heard Lugosi speak:

  There are far worse things awaiting man than death!”

  When I saw Hilary’s face, I believed it.

  ACT II: Complication

  It chaunced yet, by the benefite of the darke night,

  that though the father were slaine,

  the sonne yet by the helpe of almightie God

  reserving him to better fortune, escaped that daunger. ...

  —RAPHAEL HOLINSHED

  6

  WORD GOT AROUND PRETTY fast to the cast down in the dressing room and a bizarre throng of Elizabethans quickly began to congregate in the stage right wings. The situation was pure chaos, and I knew I’d better take charge right away or the scene of the crime would be trampled out of recognition by the gawkers.

  “Everybody back!” I shouted, then, turning to the small group
onstage, I warned them not to leave the area and not to touch the body. I spied Dana Wynn and Grilis just coming up the aisle and hailed them.

  “For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?!” the producer bawled, then stopped in his tracks, seeing Godwin on the floor. The blood drained from his face. “Who did it?” he asked hoarsely.

  “The Third Murderer.” I pointed to Dana. “Call 911, get an ambulance and the police.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and turned to hurry up the aisle to the front business office.

  I called one of the extras out of the crowd and spoke to him in a low voice. “Right next to the electrician’s booth,” I explained, “you’ll find a door opening onto a movie theater. Go through it carefully. You’ll see a cloak on the floor. Don’t touch it”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just watch it to see nobody comes near it.”

  “For how long?”

  “Till the police arrive.”

  He nodded and went off through the left door.

  Fleance and the two assassins were huddled together near the left wings, whispering, as far away from the body as possible. Hilary knelt beside the director’s supine form. I bent down beside her and asked her if he showed any sign of life. She shook her head.

  “No pulse,” she said mechanically, “no breath.” She still held a mirror in her hand. There were no tears in Hilary’s eyes, no anything.

  Just then, Harry emerged from the wings and approached her. I should have ordered him back with the rest of the crowd, but he put his hand on Hilary’s shoulder and I kept my mouth shut. It was no time to take chances with her temperament.

  For a long time, no one moved. From the front of the house, I imagine those on stage looked like a tableau from some old Sturm und Drang melodrama. The silence was finally broken by Dana Wynn, who came up the aisle and told us that both police and ambulance were on the way.

  Grilis, sitting in the front row, beckoned to her and she sat down next to him. They conferred quietly. I ambled to the front of the platform to see whether I could pick up on anything they were saying, and heard part of a phrase.

  “—for this week’s issue?” Grilis asked. Dana nodded. The rest was in mumbles.

  A shrill, terrified sound, almost a shriek, rose from off right. Actors turned their heads, and a hubbub of concerned whispers ensued.

  “Let me through!” a woman wailed.

  It snapped Hilary out of her own shocked depression. She ran to the wings where Melanie was shoving her way past Caren Wykoffe-Davis, who was attempting to restrain her from seeing Godwin’s body.

  “Don’t look,” Hilary urged gently, but Melanie pushed her aside, took another step, and saw her husband’s corpse. Her face was ashen. I thought she was going to faint, and it would have been merciful if she had, but instead she stood there, riveted, wringing her hands. Hilary circled her shoulders with one arm and tried to turn her around, but Melanie didn’t budge. She stared and stared, saying nothing, not uttering a sound.

  “Melanie!” Hilary said in a low voice, worried. “Melanie, can you hear me?”

  No reply.

  The police arrived, measured, made chalk marks, and photographed the place where Godwin lay. Through it all, Melanie remained in the same mute attitude until, at last, they started loading the body on a stretcher. Only then did the tears come; wrenching herself out of Hilary’s grasp, she tried to prevent them from taking away her husband.

  Hilary said a few words to the physician in charge, and he nodded. She gestured to me, and I helped control Melanie while the doctor gave her a shot of tranquilizer.

  Hilary took me aside. “Melanie can’t be left alone,” she murmured.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay here and talk to Lou Betterman. I’ll ride with her in the ambulance.”

  The attendants returned with the stretcher, now empty, and helped Melanie into it, despite her protests. I followed them out and had to strong-arm a few reporters to keep them away from the widow.

  “My God,” Hilary swore, “how did the vultures hear so fast?”

  “Somebody must’ve called,” I said. “Ten bucks it was Dana Wynn.”

  Louis Betterman, inspector, NYPD, had put on about thirty pounds since the last time I’d seen him, when he was already pretty fat. He was in his fifties, with bland, boiled-fish eyes and a straggly iron-gray growth that could only be called a mustache by a conscious act of charity. Betterman was no ball of energy. His usual method of working on a case was to dole out assignments, then sit down with a steak sandwich and wait for the reports to roll in.

  The first thing he did was to station guards at all the available exits. Then he explained to the cast and crew that the evening was liable to be a long one. “We’re probably going to want to talk to every one of you”—A groan from the assembled multitude—“so stick around and make yourselves comfortable, since you don’t have a choice about it, anyway. If you want to get your costumes and makeup off, that’s okay. Just come on out in the auditorium when you’re finished and sit down—and please, stay out of my men’s hair!”

  The various members of the cast went in several directions, some to the dressing rooms, some backstage to smoke and talk things over with one another, while a few—Harry Whelan was one of them—came directly out front and sat down without removing their greasepaint or thespic garb.

  The inspector and I knew one another, partly because he was an old friend of Hilary’s father. She wasn’t on the best of terms with the policeman, but he and I had no grievances, so he invited me to sit down with him in the first row and fill him in on what I knew of the situation.

  I started to outline the mess by telling him what had transpired that night. He interrupted me partway through and called over a plain-clothesman named Katz whom I knew slightly.

  “Go out there,” Betterman ordered, pointing stage left, “and bring the old guy in the booth, if he’s still in it. What’s his name, Gene?”

  “Fassett.”

  Katz started out, but Betterman yelled he wasn’t finished. “There’s a door back there that opens into the Center Cinema. Some kid’s on the other side guarding the shmotte the killer was wearing. Get it.”

  The other nodded and hurried off.

  Betterman shook his head. “What the hell am I supposed to do, put a cordon around the movie audience, too?”

  “Forget it,” I suggested. “The door’s way at the side of the screen. Maybe somebody on the left aisle saw the killer going by, but don’t count on it. I took a belly-whopper, and nobody seemed to notice.”

  “I’ll tell Katz to talk to a couple of people on the aisle, then, but the hell with the rest of the movie. Here he comes.”

  Katz, looking excited, came back onstage with the dark garment draped over his outstretched arms. Behind him was the electrician. Motioning him to wait, the officer let himself down off the platform and handed the cloak to Betterman as several actors crowded near to get a better look.

  “Back off,” the inspector barked. Katz withdrew his hand from beneath the cape, revealing a .32 revolver suspended on a pencil placed through the rear of the trigger aperture.

  “This was stuck inside,” he explained.

  Betterman sniffed at the barrel of the weapon. “Must be it. Run it through and see if you—” He stopped and looked up at Whelan, who had formerly been watching from a seat diagonally behind the inspector. The actor had just come around in front of us and looked rather uncomfortable.

  “Yeah?” the policeman demanded. “Something you want?”

  Whelan nodded, shifted from one foot to the other, but said nothing.

  “Come on, come on, spit it out!”

  Harry mumbled something beneath his breath.

  “What?” Betterman asked, rising. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said I think I know who the gun belongs to.”

  “Who?”

  “Armand Mills.”

  The i
nspector looked at me quizzically.

  “The actor playing Macbeth,” I supplied.

  “Okay, Katz, get this Mills, I want to talk to him.”

  Harry told the plainclothesman how to get backstage, and Katz hurried off to the lobby door to the dressing rooms.

  Betterman sat back down and told me to proceed with my summary of what had happened. It took several minutes to lay it out for him. When he got the picture, he shook his head vehemently.

  “Goddamn!” he swore. “What kind of frogflop have I stepped into? If this whatchamacallim, Third Murderer, did it, the only person who could identify him is dead. And if it was somebody else, then it could’ve been a couple of dozen different people.” He regarded me intently. “You sure you didn’t see the actual shooting?”

  “The lights were out, Lou. But the shots came from where the Third Murderer had been standing.”

  “It still doesn’t narrow it down.”

  “It might. If the killer was the actor Godwin picked, then that eliminates a lot of people right off the bat.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like the other actors onstage. Like anyone waiting for their entrance from the right wings. In fact, from what I understand of this Third Murderer business, there are only a very few characters who’ve ever been seriously considered as possibilities by scholars.”

  The inspector shook his head. “This isn’t happening to me,” he muttered. “I’m investigating a murder, and you’re hocking me like a doctoral candidate. This I don’t need. A beer I could use.”

  “I’m just telling you what I picked up from Godwin.”

  “Okay, okay, so get literary. Which character is supposed to be this Third Murderer?”

  “Beats me.” I shrugged. “Talk to Hilary about it. I know the most likely candidate, though, is generally considered Macbeth.”

  “Mills again,” Betterman grunted. “I’ve got plenty to ask him.”

  But he didn’t get a chance. Katz returned to report that the actor couldn’t be found.

  “Did you check his dressing room?”