Poor Butterfly (21 page)

“I’ve been in brawls with photographers, critics, the police, and musicians around the world. No baritone is a match for me,” Stokowski said triumphantly, glancing back to be sure the audience had caught his performance. They had and were applauding.

I had my arms around Vera, watching. Sunset reached the platform and got a hand on Lundeen’s pants’ leg. Fighting off Stokowski with one hand, Lundeen kicked with his foot. The already torn pants came off in Sunset’s hand.

Letting out the bellow of a wild ape, Lundeen, in what was left of his Pinkerton uniform, leaped back into the orchestra pit and through the door under the stage through which most of the musicians had beat a retreat.

The cops went after him. Preston was the last one through the door. He paused a beat to look up at me and shake his head.

It should have been the end, but it wasn’t. The end is never really the end. The end is just where you decide to stop telling the story.

They didn’t catch Lundeen, which, considering his physical condition, said little for the efficiency of the wartime San Francisco Police.

“Lot of places to hide,” Preston said, coming back to Vera’s dressing room, where I was taking off my makeup. “We’ve got the place surrounded, exits covered. We’ll make a room-by-room search in the morning. You can pick up your wallet, gun, and car at the station.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Come after ten,” he suggested. “Sunset gets off at eight, and I don’t think you want to run into him again.”

“After ten,” I agreed.

“Lot of things we can shut you up for,” said Preston. “Moving Griffith’s corpse, pulling the sword out of him, escaping from legal custody. Long list, but my chief doesn’t want to see that Flores lawyer again. He’s filed a defamation suit against the police department.”

“I’ll give Lundeen that,” I said. “He got me a good lawyer when I needed one.”

“Yeah,” sighed Preston. “We’ll be happy if you’re out of town by noon tomorrow and you don’t visit us again. It’s a big country. I’ll take San Francisco. You can have the rest.”

“Sounds like a good deal.”

“It is,” he said. “We’re clearing out the building. Twenty minutes. Out the front. No costumes. Single file.”

He left us alone. Ten minutes later we met Shelly, Jeremy, Gunther, and Gwen in the front lobby. They were talking to Stokowski, who greeted Vera and me with a sad shake of his head.

“You would have been fine,” he told her, taking her right hand in both of his. “I hope you were paid in advance.”

“No,” Vera said.

“I was. Always get paid in advance,” Stokowski said.

“Maybe we can still …” Vera began.

“I’m afraid,” Stokowski said with a sigh, “I must get back to New York. A crisis. Rumblings over my choice of music. Toscanini is doing battle for me, but I fear his heart is not in defending modern composers. Mr. Peters, I’m afraid a check will not be forthcoming for your services.”

“Let’s call my services a donation to art and culture,” I said.

“I admire the gesture,” he said with a bow. “I’ll absorb the loss of Charles’ uniform.”

And he was gone.

“The man has good teeth,” said Shelly.

“You should have told him, Shel,” I said.

We agreed to meet in the late morning for breakfast at a place near Vera’s hotel. Gunther, Jeremy, Shelly, and Gwen left single file through the main door.

Outside on the steps the Reverend Adam Souvaine was bullhoming to a crowd of about twenty, claiming victory for God, America, and the Church of the Enlightened Patriots. There were “Hallelujahs” and “Amens” and even a few cries of “Past the ammunition.”

“See them emerge,” Souvaine said, pointing up at us. His eyes, blazing with triumph, met mine. I looked at him steadily and smiled. He turned away and continued, “Like rats. The rotting edifice will crumble like the walls of Jericho, the temples of Babylon. God and his instruments, the Enlightened, will be ever alert whenever the Nazi snake or the yellow godless horde dare stick their heads above ground into the clean sunshine of America.”

More shouts. The ancients danced and Vera bent her head to my ear.

“I’ll call my agent tonight,” she whispered, taking my hand. “Maybe I’ll have a few weeks or even more. I’ve never really seen Los Angeles.”

“I’ll show it to you,” I offered.

“My makeup case,” she exclaimed suddenly. “I left my makeup case in my dressing room.”

We hurried back to get it, and that almost got us killed.

W
e were heading down the corridor outside the dressing rooms on our way back to the front of the building when the lights went out. We both stopped. I was carrying Vera’s makeup bag. I shifted it to my left hand.

“Toby,” Vera whispered. I found her hand.

“Power failure,” I said.

“No,” she said. “There’s a light down there.”

I wasn’t sure where down there was, but I looked around and saw a vague glow. We headed for it.

“Straight down the hall,” I said. “Nothing to trip over.”

We moved slowly, the glow getting brighter, but not much. When we hit a door, I opened it and found the source of the glow, a dying bulb dangling from a wire snaking into the darkness above.

“Which way now?” I asked.

“That way, I think,” Vera said, pointing that way.

As I took my first step in the direction she was pointing, two things happened. First, a man’s voice began to sing, an echoing sound full of passion coming from the darkness in front of us. He was singing “Poor Butterfly.” Second, the floor beneath us quivered. Plaster dust sprinkled down from the ceiling.

“What is it?” Vera asked, squeezing my hand.

“A tremor and a baritone,” I said, wiping plaster from her hair.

“Deeper than baritone,” Vera said. “I think I’m frightened.”

“Hold your bag,” I said. “I may need both hands free. And let’s go.”

We moved toward the singing and came to a stairway.

“Let’s go back,” Vera said.

“Let’s just get out,” I answered, and pulled her gently up the dark stairway.

We came to a landing. A small dirty window let in enough moonlight for us to see two doors and more steps going up.

The singing stopped and a deep voice came down the stairs.

“Are you familiar with William Blake, Peters?”

“Stop it,” Vera shouted, putting one foot on the next step up.

“I can’t,” said the voice. “The game is not over. As Blake said, ‘If you play a Game of Chance, know, before you begin, if you are benevolent you will never win.’”

A shot tore through the darkness and crackled the wallpaper near my head. I pushed through one of the doors and pulled Vera in with me. A large room. Another small window and even less moonlight. The vague beam hit a pair of doors across the room.

“‘Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet,’” came the voice. “‘This is not done by Jostling in the Street.’”

Footsteps were coming down the steps.

“You’ve made a wrong decision,” came the voice on the opposite side of the door. “‘The errors of a Wise Man make your Rule Rather than the Perfections of a Fool.’”

“Come on,” I told Vera, and we worked our way across the room toward the pair of doors.

“Another choice,” came the voice beyond the door behind us. “Two doors. Which will be the lady and which the tiger?”

I reached for one of the doors and threw it open. The moonlight fell on the dead white face of John Lundeen.

Vera screamed.

“Wrong choice,” came the voice behind us.

Lundeen, still in his Pinkerton jacket, was hanging by the neck. He wore no pants, just a pair of white boxer shorts. The blue navy cap was perched on his head. I grabbed Vera and moved toward the second door.

The door behind us opened, and a flashlight beam shot over my shoulder as we went through the door next to the closet.

“One suicide and two disappearances,” came the voice as I slammed the door behind us. “Or perhaps, two more murders and a remorseful suicide. I’ll have to consider the many options.”

A shot ripped through the wood and the man behind us launched into something in Italian. I didn’t have time to ask Vera what it was, and she was in no condition to tell me.

We tripped down a narrow hallway and I pushed through the first door my hand touched, hoping it was a way out. It wasn’t. We went through and I closed the door behind us. I could make out a ladder in the center of the room. I went for it, pulling Vera behind, and up we went as another slight tremor shook the building and set the chandelier waving.

And that’s how I got into the situation I started this tale with.

Remember, I’d let go of the chandelier and dropped in the general direction of the Phantom, knowing I was going to miss him. As I jumped, a third tremor hit. Vera screamed above me. The Phantom fell backwards, and I landed on a section of the floor weak enough for one of my legs to go through up to the knee. Dust rose. My eyes were stinging, my leg, in pain.

He was sitting dazed about six feet away from me. The flashlight was on the floor at his side, casting a beam in my direction. Also on the floor between us in the beam lay his fallen pistol.

I tried to pull my leg out of the floor, but I knew it was no go with the first pull. The leg was broken. I stretched for the gun. It was a good six inches out of reach.

“Toby,” screamed Vera. “Are you all right?”

“Are you?” asked the Phantom, coming to his knees. He reached forward and pushed the gun toward me, just an inch or two, still out of my reach. “I would like to know that, too.”

A ball of glass shattered near the flashlight. Then another. A third almost hit me. Vera was pulling glass teardrops from the chandelier and hurling them down.

The Phantom stopped the game and picked up the gun. He was still on his knees.

“Stop that,” he shouted, “or I’ll shoot him between the eyes.”

Vera sobbed and stopped.

“Good,” he whispered. “I keep my word. I’ll shoot you in the heart. But first I’d like to know if you really knew who I was, or if I was simply being paranoid.”

“Arthur Sullivan,” I said, grinding my teeth against the pain, reaching around slowly out of the beam of light in hope of finding a board, a nail, something to use as a weapon. “You played Rance in the now-famous production of
La Fanciulla del West
in Cherokee seven years ago.”

“Right” he said.

“You, Lundeen, and Lorna were involved in the death of the guy in the chorus.”

“An accident,” he said.

“Come on,” I said, stalling while my fingers kept searching. “You’re among enemies now.” My eyes were adjusting to the near darkness.

“Well,” he admitted, “not quite an accident.”

“What are you doing down there?” cried Vera.

I could hear the chandelier swaying, tinkling, as she moved in the hope of seeing what was going on below her.

“Discussing history,” the Phantom said.

“The three of you changed your names and went on to new identities,” I said, holding back a groan of pain. “And then one of you, Lundeen probably, got the idea for duplicating the Texas scam here on a bigger scale.”

“Good,” said the Phantom. “But there were no photographs of me. When did you know?”

“When we went to Lundeen’s office this morning,” I said. “Outside the door.”

“What did you hear?” he asked with interest.

“It’s not what I heard,” I said. “It’s what I didn’t hear. No raised voices. No quarrel. The second we opened the door, you and Lundeen were at it as if you’d been screaming at each other for an hour. Later, when we left the room, I could hear his normal voice on the phone behind the door. It gave me the idea that you and Lundeen had staged the argument.”

“We did,” admitted Adam Souvaine. “It really hadn’t been a good plan, even from the beginning. I had a fair deal going with my flock when Johnny came to me. The money was fine, but his threat of exposure was even more convincing. I exhorted my flock against the opera while Johnny and Lorna worked from within. The irony is that we have ultimately succeeded, but we … or rather I, since I am the sole survivor of this bleak tontine … will collect nothing but my freedom—though my flock and I may receive a bit of credit for keeping the opera from opening. But we digress. Everyone who could have connected me to Texas or this fiasco is now dead, with the exception of you and the soprano.”

“Toby,” screamed Vera from above. “I can’t hold on much longer.”

“Patience,” said Souvaine. “I’ll have you down in a minute.”

“The workman who died, Wyler?” I asked as Souvaine aimed the gun at my chest.

“Accident,” said Souvaine.

“Lorna?” I asked.

“John’s work, unplanned. She wanted out.”

He pulled back the hammer.

“Griffith?”

“Mine,” he said. “And let’s call John a remorseful suicide.”

“Let’s.”

“And we’ll hide your body and that of our buxom young diva, and it will be the great mystery of the Opera,” he said. “I’ll claim that God took you. Better yet, I can write a suicide note from John saying he killed you before he took his own life. So many possibilities for a creative mind.”

A small ball the size of a dog came hurtling out of the darkness from the direction of the door. Souvaine, still on his knees, was turning to the noise when Gunther landed on his neck, knocking him toward me. I reached up and grabbed Souvaine’s arm. Gunther gave him a small-fisted punch in the face and I got the pistol.