And it was around this time that his friend Villayer disappeared. Lavicini guessed straight away that Louis had ordered the assassination, but it wasn’t until a few weeks afterwards that he discovered it was his own employer who had actually paid the assassin. There was often business in Paris with which Louis didn’t wish to dirty his soft hands even from the safe distance of Versailles, so de Gorge was sometimes called upon to make arrangements on his behalf, and in return Louis kept on attending the Theatre des Encornets, ensuring that it would remain the most fashionable venue in the capital. Lavicini wanted to avenge his friend, but much more formidable men than he had gone against de Gorge and ended up dining on their own noses and ears. Also, he had no appetite for violence. Instead, he decided that he would have to find a way of staging his own death that would not just utterly dupe de Gorge, but also utterly destroy de Gorge’s livelihood. And some months later, when Nicolas Sauvage died in the same circumstances as Villayer, it redoubled his determination.
On the night of the premiere of
Towards the end of the second act, Lavicini poked his head hastily into every room backstage to make sure they were empty, and then slipped out of the theatre by a side door. Some superstitious instinct prevented him from turning back to watch as an apocalyptic rumble rose within the building behind him. Instead, he hurried on towards the convent of the Filles du Calvaire, opposite which there was a cold vacant room above a butcher’s shop where he intended to spend his last night in Paris.
So it wasn’t until the next morning, when he returned in disguise to the ruins of the Theatre des Encornets, that he heard about the dead ballerina. He moved through the crowd of onlookers, listening to conversations, needing to be certain that the truth was not suspected. And indeed no one knew that Lavicini was still alive. But everyone knew that a dancer called Marguerite was dead. He had to wander a long time before he could complete the story: she had fainted at her first sight of the Extraordinary Mechanism, and had then been carried backstage and deposited on a couch, where she was still lying when the opera house collapsed. Lavicini remembered then that the couch faced away from the door to that dressing room. That was why he hadn’t noticed her on his final backstage inspection. He’d never spoken to Marguerite, but he remembered her face, because Montand always seemed to pay special attention to her during the rehearsals.
Lavicini knew then that he could never see his Wormwood again. He’d planned to live with her in Venice under a false name until her husband died, and then they’d run away to some exotic place where no one had ever heard the name Lavicini. But now, if he returned to her, he would have to confess that a girl had died to help bring them back together, as if sacrificed to their love, a proxy for the suicide that Lavicini himself hadn’t had the conviction to commit. Adultery was one thing, but the guilt of being party to a murder would drive his Wormwood out of her senses. She couldn’t ever find out. But he couldn’t keep back the truth if he was with her. He decided it was better if, like the rest of the world, she never found out that he’d survived the destruction of the Theatre des Encornets.
Nevertheless, he went back to Venice. If he couldn’t have his Wormwood, he would at least have his home. Out on Vignole, he could live out his penance in a sort of exile, while still in sight of the Arsenal, where he’d worked as a younger, happier man. And during the months of Carnival he could wander the city, like Hephaestus returned to Olympus, in the masks he built and painted like tiny stage sets the rest of the year. Even if he jostled past his Wormwood a dozen times in a day, it wouldn’t matter, because he would never have to know it was her.
‘All the way to Paris, and all the way back, because of a woman?’ said Sauvage when Lavicini had finished his story.
‘Because of two women, really.’ Lavicini coughed again for a long time. ‘Why have you come here?’
Sauvage gathered his resolve. ‘I’ve written a play,’ he said, ‘and I want you to design the set. I had to find you because no one else can do it.’
‘I have many talented successors in Paris.’
‘No. The play is set two and a half centuries in the future. I don’t believe there is another man alive who could make that seem real. It’s about a young man whose friends are about to be murdered by a tyrant just like the Sun King. But instead of trying to save them, he runs away to a colony in the New World.’
‘What happens to him?’
‘He meets a man who has become very wealthy from the sale of currycombs, who sends him to find an inventor who is trying to build an Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place. But not a stage device like yours — a real one. A sort of reproducible miracle. The hero does find the inventor, but he also encounters an agent of the Ottoman Empire who wants to take the inventor back to Constantinople.’
‘Does this agent succeed?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. The important thing is that the hero comes to realise his cowardice and he returns to the land of his birth to overthrow the tyrant. But he is too late to save his friends.’
‘De Gorge always used to tell me that the hero of a successful play must be a man the audience would be happy to invite into their homes for supper. Otherwise no one will want to sit through the whole thing. Your “hero” who abandons his friends to their deaths — he doesn’t sound like that sort of man.’
‘De Gorge knows no more than a low pimp.’
‘A very astute low pimp.’
‘The point is that the hero has a change of heart. He redeems himself by his rebellion. Without that, the story is meaningless.’
‘And I assume you hope to encourage the same sort of thinking in your audience?’
‘Louis killed my father. I don’t know how else to take my revenge. I’m no Cromwell. I’m a playwright.’
Lavicini shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, but I can’t design your set. I’m much too ill. Before more than a few more moons have risen, I’m going to die here, inside the Theatre des Encornets, just as I was supposed to in the first place. You were lucky to find me still warm. I’m grateful for your visit, but I’m afraid you’ll leave empty- handed. Swap masks with Melchiorre before you go. If you were followed, that will cause some confusion.’
‘I certainly will not leave empty-handed.’
‘If you want to keep the clockwork bat you are welcome to it.’
‘No,’ said Sauvage. ‘I’ll leave with your story. You’ve told me a part, but I want the rest, the entirety, from the very beginning. I’ll write it down and then after you’re dead I’ll publish it and it won’t be lost. You know, my father wanted to write the story of his life. But he never had a chance before he died.’
‘I won’t pretend I have no pride left here in my languor, but are you quite certain?’ said Lavicini, amused. ‘There is a lot to tell.’
‘Of course.’
‘Very well. I hope you won’t come to rue the idea as the hours drag on. Melchiorre, would you be kind enough to bring our guest some paper and ink and a quill, and myself a little water?’ The gondolier did so. Lavicini drank and then sat back against his pillow. ‘Ready, Bernard?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then: I was born in Paris in the year of grace 1648…’
9. WASHINGTON, DC, 1947
The Chairman: The Committee will come to order. The next witness will be Egon
