The Teleportation Accident

he saw the novella in Loeser’s hand. ‘Would you mind putting that back, please?’

Thumbing through the book, Loeser discovered that Bailey had even annotated some of the pages in pencil. He’d never seen such tiny knotted handwriting. ‘I should introduce you to …’ He was about to say ‘my friend Blimk’, but stopped himself ruefully. ‘You know the whole story of Lavicini, don’t you?’ he said instead. ‘Not just what Rackenham put in his travesty?’

‘Yes.’

‘The tentacles and the smell and so on. Doesn’t it seem to you sometimes as if Lovecraft could have written the story of the Teleportation Accident?’

‘I can’t say I’ve noticed any commonalities,’ said Bailey. ‘Now, Mr Loeser, I’ve just come from the theatre and of course I shall be rushing back directly, but if you’ll excuse me I do need a short while longer to get this experiment running.’

Loeser put down the book. ‘It’s the first night! Why are you running an experiment now?’

‘I promise it won’t distract me from tonight’s Teleportation Accident. But I think Adele and the others were very anxious to see you. They didn’t seem to know what to do about Lavicini.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I assumed you knew — there’s been some sort of problem with your leading man. I didn’t catch all the details.’

In Berlin, from the beginning of his career, Loeser had observed that even among the most pugnacious of the New Expressionists a degree of nervousness was to be expected before any first night, but the atmosphere he found backstage at the Gorge Auditorium suggested a cast and crew awaiting the audience like sinners an apocalyptic judgement. Then Adele rushed up to him. ‘Egon, you idiot, where have you been? We’ve been calling your house for three hours! And what’s that smell?’

‘I wasn’t at my house. Forget about the smell. Tell me what’s happened.’

‘Dick’s in hospital.’

‘What?’

‘There was an accident. He was just walking along near that bakery on Lake Avenue and a car swerved to avoid a little girl running across the road—’

‘God in heaven, Dick’s been hit by a car?’

‘No, the car hit the bakery and it knocked down that big papier-mache cupcake and the cupcake rolled straight into Dick. He’s got a concussion and they won’t let him leave until tomorrow morning. Who’s going to play Lavicini?’ Loeser thought of the time Hecht had put on a ‘performance’ of The Summoning of Everyman, which had consisted of informing the audience half an hour after the play had been due to start that the lead actor had drowned in a well (false) and that their tickets would not be refunded (true). ‘I thought maybe we could ask Rackenham,’ added Adele.

‘He wouldn’t know any of the script.’

‘But he’s so charming it almost wouldn’t matter.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Loeser straightened up to his full height. ‘I’ll have to play Lavicini.’

‘Oh, Egon, no!’

‘Well, who else? I don’t think we’re about to compromise on Ziesel. I’ll just need a last look through the script. Tell everyone not to worry. By the way, I want to return something you lent me.’ Loeser took from his pocket the pair of pearl-handled nail scissors that he’d brought with him from his house and held them out to Adele with a smug flourish.

‘Those don’t belong to me.’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘I’ve never seen them before.’

And as crucial as it was that Adele should be lying to him about this, it did look as if she were telling the truth. Discouraged, Loeser put down the nail scissors on the prop table and let her hurry away to put on her make- up. Half an hour later, he emerged from a dressing room in a costume that felt a bit dejected by the absence of Dick’s big surfer’s shoulders but was otherwise not too bad a fit. Hunched in a nearby corner, Mrs Jones, who played Montand in male drag, was repeating her three lines to herself over and over again with such heavy emphasis that she seemed to wish to exclude the possibility of any other grammatically valid sentence ever being formulated in English by anyone. Peering around the side of the front curtain at stage right, Loeser observed that the audience were already taking their seats. The Muttons had joined the Millikans for cocktails at the Athenaeum Club before the show, and now all four sat together in the front row — along with Jascha Drabsfarben. As if he stood before a favourite painting after consulting for the first time an essay on its symbolism, Loeser tried to find in the familiar features of Drabsfarben’s face all that he had now learned about his old acquaintance. But the spy still looked, to Loeser, like a composer.

Further back, Gould, Hecht, and Wurtzel passed back and forth a bag of peanuts. And even Plumridge was here with his wife. Loeser couldn’t see Rackenham or Gorge, but he did see Woodkin, who was saying something to a girl next to him who caught Loeser’s attention immediately. She was around twenty-two or twenty-three, with shiny hair the reddish-brown of a rooster’s hackles and dark, narrow eyes, and she wore an expression of such cold, fathomless, authoritative boredom that if you happened to catch sight of it at a public event like this one, you would not just feel stupid for enjoying what she was not enjoying, but also, somehow, ugly and culpable. Loeser couldn’t look away, until he remembered that in only a short while he was actually going to have to go out on stage in front of her.

Loeser didn’t feel nervous, though. He was Lavicini. He always had been. He could already see the lights of the Arsenal reflecting off the lagoon. Perhaps he wouldn’t even let Dick reclaim the role for the remaining four performances. There was still a short while before the curtain went up, so he went looking for Bailey, and soon found him talking to Adele next to the prop table.

‘Is everything ready for the Teleportation Accident, Professor?’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Bailey.

‘You’re sure? We haven’t had a chance to test it.’

‘You must trust the Professor, Egon,’ said Adele.

‘Can you describe it to me, at least?’

‘Well, since there are only four people on stage at the time, but Lavicini kills twenty-five people and a cat, I thought the best way to represent—’

‘ “Kills”?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘You said Lavicini kills twenty-five people. Lavicini doesn’t kill anyone. The Teleportation Device goes wrong and twenty-five people die as a result. That’s why it’s called the Teleportation Accident.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Bailey. ‘I misspoke.’

‘I don’t mean to be pedantic but it’s just that if Lavicini destroyed the Theatre des Encornets deliberately’ — Loeser coughed — ‘it would be … it would be a very different play.’

That cough, rather like a death rattle, was the faint and involuntary laryngeal expression of a vast and imperative internal crisis, because it was just at that moment that Loeser made a deduction about Bailey — making this deduction as a sort of breech birth, upside down, so that somehow he had the conclusions in his forceps before he could count off the premises — realising, all at once, that Bailey really did think Lavicini had destroyed the Theatre des Encornets deliberately; that Bailey planned to do much the same to the Gorge Auditorium; that Bailey must have killed Marsh and Clarendon and Pelton and all those others — and remembering only afterwards so many separate facts that he already knew but had never put together: that the State Department were working with Bailey on new weapons; that Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, thought everything Lovecraft wrote was true; that The Shadow Over Innsmouth was about human sacrifice; that Bailey had always seemed to know a lot more details about Adriano Lavicini than Rackenham had bothered to put in The Sorceror of Venice; that no one knew for certain which mysterious force was supposed to power the Teleportation Device; that Drabsfarben cherished some secret about Bailey too big and dangerous, somehow, to exploit for blackmail; and even that there had been a certain piscine calm to Bailey’s expression when Marsh’s body had tumbled out of the storage cupboard in the basement of the Obediah Laboratories on that day in 1938.

‘Excuse me for a moment, Professor,’ said Loeser. Then he turned and walked as fast as he could to the costume rails, where Ziesel, who had been promoted this year from sound and lighting technician to stage