From the Personal Reels of
Percival Alfred Unck
[PERCIVAL UNCK films his daughter playing on the slopes of Mount Ampère. Blue alpine cassias twist up all around her, gnarled and stumped and prickly with translucent needles. They prefer the relative warmth of the valleys. The heights turn the endless forests of the Moon to hunched, baleful, contorted creatures. A thin scrim of snow crunches under SEVERIN UNCK’S small feet. She is dressed in her father’s idea of a mountain climber’s costume: lederhosen, stockings, buckled shoes, a ruffled shirt. Her long hair is ribboned into thick pigtails. Severin tries to entice her father into playing hide and seek, but though he is happy to seek her, he will not perform his part by hiding. He might miss something. Finally, the child gives up.]
SEVERIN
Daddy, you have to chase me! Don’t you know anything?
PERCIVAL
Oh, I’ll chase you, Rinny. I’ll chase you anywhere you run! And when I find you I will chomp you to bits like a bad old wolf!
[Shrieks and giggles. SEVERIN runs behind a malevolently torsioned cassia. She peeks out again, brushing needles out of her hair.]
SEVERIN
But when you catch me and chomp me, after that you have to hide and I’ll chase you! That’s how you play, silly! And when I find you I’ll roar like a TIGER and scare you to DEATH.
PERCIVAL
[Laughing.] Shan’t! I have the camera, and whoever has the camera is King and gets to make the rules.
SEVERIN
[Leaps up, grasping at air. The image shakes as he yanks Clara up and out of reach.] Gimme! Give it to me! I want it!
The Ingénue’s Handbook
January 16, 1930, Definitely Three in the Morning
The Butterfly Room, Aboard the Achelois, Sea of Tranquillity
Place your bets, ladies and gentleman. We have a murderer on the ship and I intend to flush them out.
The band finished playing at the stroke of midnight. Union musicians are just awful sticklers. The heaving mass of us tottered out of the ballroom and onto the decks of the Achelois, a glitter-mob of prodigious proportions. The night was warm; the wind blew toward Tithonus and not from, so the scents were pleasant instead of foul: the tang of salt-silver water, the sharp whips of pine forests on shore, spilled grenadine, and a hundred kinds of perfume, from Ye Olde No. 5 to Shalimar to that just-shagged musk that has no brand name, yet could never be mistaken for anything else. Nobody had the slightest inclination toward bed, so the bash went on outside while—this is important—the stewards shut up the ballroom for cleaning. We all hung off the railings, rainbow-tinsel-barnacle people, and all was right with the world so long as the world was nothing more than that beautiful boat sailing through the beautiful dark. Then the old dance began: people paired off and vanished two by two, sometimes three by three, and the decks grew more peaceful, emptier, sleepier. I was occupied with Nigel—oh, I know, it’s too dreadful, all those gorgeous glitterati and I end up sitting on the staircase talking to my ex! I felt really and truly forty for the first time. I didn’t want to sneak off behind the smokestack to canoodle with one of the pretty girls from contracts or even take a stab at snaring Wilhelmina Wildheart at long last. I just wanted to talk to someone who’s seen me with a runny nose and a bad cough and still thought I was all right. Nigel was always aces when I was sick. He’d pratfall by the bed and make my slippers talk like dolphins ’til I laughed, even though it made the cough worse.
Digression! No! Mary! The reason I must make a note of the fact that I was talking to Nigel on the staircase is to establish that:
I did not see Percy or Thad at all between the closing of the ballroom at midnight and twenty past one in the morning.
N. and I were sitting in the aft stairwell, which adjoins the south wall of the ballroom, thus…
We heard the gunshot immediately and bolted toward the grand entrance, which the stewards had opened
up with a quickness, however…
A small number of people had already trampled all over the crime scene by the time I arrived.
We heard a great deal of screaming and dropping one’s drinks and weeping. I ran pell-mell; the heel of my left shoe broke off, but I kept hobbling on until I swung wide round the great carved ballroom door—Thad had it brought over from Mars only last year. And I saw it all. I saw the whole ugly thing like a set dressed for shooting. Poor Thaddeus lying face down on his own ebony floor, bleeding like mad. It was ever so much more blood than in the movies. When you shoot someone on film it’s just a pinprick, really, and then a little trickle of red. They slump to the floor and it’s over ’til the next take. But Thad’s blood gushed out all over the place. People had stepped in it. Yolanda Brun was trying to wipe some off of her green silk slingback.
I’ve said wrap parties obey no natural law. I’d been Madame Mortimer, at full tilt, only the week before. She roared up inside me, all pearl-handled soul and acid heart. Without a word, I walked up to one of the stewards (who’d gone about as pale as arsenic), took the key off his belt, shut and locked those grand Russian doors, and shoved a brass hat-rack through the handles for good measure.
“If I may have your attention?” I put on my biggest, most booming voice, the one that had slapped the back row in the face at the Blue Elephant Theatre back in London. I locked down my tears—I’ll cry for you later, Thaddy baby. I promise. “Thank you. I’m afraid I can’t allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this awful mess is right here at our fingertips. There’s not a moment to be lost if we’re to uncover the truth.”
You’d think I’d put them all in a cage and dangled the last rump roast in the universe outside the bars, the way they behaved. Shameful. But I stood my ground, and the stewards stood with me—whether because they knew who sliced their bread or because they appreciated the need to secure the scene of a crime before all the evidence gets simply fucked away by cretins, I’ve no idea. It would take a day to sail back to Grasshopper City, and by that time there wouldn’t be so much as a sip of evidence left for the police. I had to work quickly. For Thaddeus. He didn’t need my tears just then, he needed his heroine.
I knew everyone I locked into the ballroom that night, some better, some worse: Yolanda Brun, Hartford Crane, Nigel Lapine, Freddy and Penelope Edison, Percival Unck, Algernon Bogatryov, Himura Makoto, Dante de Vere, and Maud Locksley. (I’d only met Makoto, Capricorn’s newest golden boy, that night, but we’d already made plans to shoot pheasant together on the weekend.) I don’t quite know what came over me in that moment, facing those people—people I had known most of my life, worked with, slept with, admired, loathed, envied, the whole handbag of human push-me-pull-you—but suddenly, watching Yolanda whine and pour club soda on her bloodstained shoe, I was positively sick to death of them all. I could have gaily tossed them all into the drink and poured myself a grapefruit juice without a wink of pity in my heart. I don’t know what got into me, except Maxine Mortimer and her damnable need to solve the puzzle.