“How else was I supposed to feel? Jesus, Holly, I loved you. How could you do it to me?”
“It wasn’t about you, Gene.”
“Not about me? All that time we were together, and you’re fucking these guys you don’t even know- making these porn flicks- how is that not about me?”
“It’s my project- my work. It has nothing to do with anyone but me.”
Werner shook his head, eyes wide. “Nothing to do with…And you wonder why I was angry. You’re un- fucking-believable.”
“I wonder less about the anger than I do about the theft,” Holly said.
A sheepish grin ran across Werner’s face. “What are you talking about?” he said. He tried for puzzled and irritated, but neither worked.
Holly was relaxed, almost amused. “Come on, baby, we know each other too long for games.”
“It turned out I didn’t know shit about you,” he said.
“You knew me,” Holly said. “You still do.” Her voice was lazy and insinuating, and Werner reacted to it like a dog to a whistleattentive and hungry.
“I thought I did,” he said slowly.
“Was it just money, baby, or was it something else? Say it wasn’t just about the money.”
He made a pouting face. “I was angry, Holly- fucking heartbroken.”
A clash of blades and another fall brought me back to the theater and to the action onstage. Laertes was rubbing his wrist, and Hamlet was dusting himself off. Claudius was laughing.
“The hell with you,” Hamlet said. “I don’t need a gig so bad I’m going to be a punching bag for anyone.”
Werner laughed some more and swept a hand through his shiny hair. “Your choice, Greggers. I’ll have ten guys here in an hour to audition for your part, and not one of them will be too lazy or delicate to learn stage combat. But, as I said, it’s your call. So what’ll it bestay or go?” He crossed his arms on his chest and smiled down on Hamlet.
The actor looked at him. “Screw you,” he said softly, but he picked up his foil and took his position for another run-through.
They stumbled through the fifth-act fight scene many times during the next hour, with no joy and no appreciable improvement in technique. Only Werner seemed to take pleasure in the process, full as it was of occasions for him to berate and abuse his colleagues. I was surprised that when the actors left for the day, exiting stage right, they left him still alive. When their voices faded, and a heavy door opened and closed somewhere backstage, I took a deep breath, and stood.
Werner was collecting the foils, and he heard me coming. He shielded his eyes from the stage lights and looked up the aisle. He took a step back when he recognized me.
“What are you doing here?” he said. No haughtiness now.
“I’m here to see you.” My heart was pounding, and I took some easy breaths, to slow things down.
“Technically, the theater is closed.”
“There was no one around to stop me.”
“Yeah, well- I’ve got someplace to be, so I have to lock up.”
I reached the stage, and jumped up. Werner took another step back. “This won’t take long.”
“What won’t take long?” he said. His jaw was grim and jutting.
“I came to talk, Gene. About the video.”
“We talked about Holly’s videos already, and I told you what I knew. I have nothing else to say about those things; I don’t even like thinking about them.”
“I’m not talking about the videos of her and those men.”
Werner swallowed hard and shrugged. He managed a casual stride to the little table, where he put the foils down, all but his own. “Then what the hell are you talking about?”
“Come on, Gene, we can be grown-ups, right? We can at least not waste each other’s time.”
Werner forced a smile. He smoothed his shiny hair and tugged on his little ponytail. Then he sent his blade through a series of blurring, humming arcs, and finished with his arm extended and the sword pointed at me. Somewhere along the line, the plastic button had come off the end, and the bare, wicked tip was motionless and level with my eye. Werner smiled wider and chuckled. He whipped the foil down.
“There’s nothing like the feel of a blade,” he said. He walked toward me, stopping when he was two arm’s lengths away. He pointed with his foil at my splints, and smiled.
“Fucked up your hands, huh?”
“A run-in with your pal Jamie Coyle,” I said. Color drained from Werner’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t. “I saw the video, Gene.”
Werner frowned. He backed away two steps and began practicing lunges at half speed. He coiled and uncoiled himself- precise, flowing, and graceful each time. Each time, the tip of his foil came to a quivering halt twelve inches from my chest. “What video is this?”
“You never answered her question- whether or not it was just about money.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” He took the lunges up to three-quarter speed. The blade became a blur again.
“Holly made a backup, Gene. I have you on disk, confessing to her that you lifted unedited copies of her videos from her apartment, and that you tried to blackmail Mitchell Fenn with them.”
Werner stopped lunging and stood very still. His head was tilted as if he were straining to hear something. After a minute, he smiled in a way he might have thought was ingratiating. “Backup,” he said quietly. He tapped the sword against his leg and paced in a slow circle at center stage.
“It was a prank,” he said. “The whole thing with the videos and Fenn- the blackmail- it was just a prank.” I raised an eyebrow, and Werner chuckled ruefully. “It was stupid, I admit, but I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. I was…” He looked down at the stage and then up at me, his lower lip all but quivering. “I was heartbroken over her, for chrissakes. Can you understand that? I went a little nuts then, and I wanted to get even somehow.”
“And blackmailing Fenn seemed like just the thing?”
“That wasn’t serious- I would never have taken his money. I just…” Again his gaze dipped to the floor and back up. “Look, I’m not proud of this, but…I wanted it to come back at Holly. I wanted her to see what she was doing was crazy. That it had consequences.”
Consequences. I nodded, as if it made any sense. “And, what- you counted on Fenn tracing it back to her?”
Werner was eager. “Yes, exactly. And when he did, it scared the hell out of her.”
“And then Holly figured out that you were behind it- that you’d kept a set of her house keys, and you’d stolen her disks.”
More nodding. “And I was glad she figured it out. I wanted her to know what she’d done to me. And I wanted her to know the risk she was taking. She thought she was immune somehow. She thought she could control everything- but she couldn’t.”
“Apparently not,” I said. “So you weren’t surprised when Holly called you- when she wanted to see you?”
“Not surprised,” Werner said. He stopped pacing and assumed a splay-footed stance. He bent his legs and raised the foil, and his face was a picture of concentration as he carved long shapes in the air.
“The reason I ask is that, on the video, you seemed surprised when she told you what she wanted to talk about.”
Werner frowned. “I wasn’t surprised.”
I shook my head. “Definitely surprised, Gene, and nervous toosweating, pale. There were times I thought you might puke.”
Werner’s brow wrinkled. “I wasn’t sweating.”
I shook my head some more. “And you say that you wanted her to know what you’d done, but that isn’t true, is it? I mean, you didn’t own up to anything at all; you made Holly work to get it out of you.”
“I was nervous. It was a stupid prank, and I knew it. I was embarrassed at first- flustered. But then I told her all of it.”
“You certainly did,” I said, and Werner’s eyes narrowed. “When did Holly tell you she’d recorded it?” I asked.
