Curtain for a Jester Read online

  “To all fools,” Wilmot said, holding up his glass, raising his voice. “‘Laugh and the world laughs—’”

  But the world did not laugh. There was the woman’s scream again, rising in agony over the many voices, over the music, and there was nothing funny in the scream. No knowledge that an actress had once mimicked agony to make a record, that the record was on a turntable which pressure on a bell-push actuated, made the anguished cry a cause for laughter. For an instant it seemed to transfix those in the room. The dancers broke step, caught at uneasy balance. Glasses raised to lips were checked there; voices broke off as if speech were brittle.

  This held only a moment, while everyone remembered. By then Wilmot was beaming at all of them, was telling Frank that he would get it, was crossing the living room to the foyer.

  The dancers returned to dancing, but with heads turned toward the foyer. Those not dancing, talked and drank again, but waited too, only half listening to what was said. From the foyer, the scream was cut to silence and the resounding laughter of Mr. Byron Wilmot replaced it. Nothing, Pam North thought—nothing in the world—could be comic enough to match such laughter. As if knowing itself outdone, unheard, the music stopped and those who were dancing stopped with it. For an instant one voice went on against the off-stage laughter. A woman’s voice said, “—would be the best joke of—” and then the speaker heard her lonely voice and the voice died.

  “So you’re at it again,” a man’s voice which was not Wilmot’s said from the foyer. “I might have known you would be.”

  There was anger in the voice; it was as if the voice went naked in bitterness. Speaking so, not knowing how many heard him, the speaker was exposed, defenseless, and Pamela North, to defend him, spoke to Monteath, saying something, anything—that through the wide windows of the penthouse one beautifully saw New York. But Wilmot’s laughter surged again and, when it ended, Wilmot said, “Joke’s on you, eh? Thought you were—” But then a needle clicked on a record somewhere and the high-fidelity system hurled music through the living room, so that what Wilmot said further was lost in the rush of sound. As if that had been a signal, conversation began again in the crowded room.

  But Pam North and Monteath—Jerry was somewhere else; Jerry was talking to the gray-haired woman who had almost screamed when the glasses fell—did not talk again. Monteath, for the moment without diplomacy, had turned toward the door from the foyer, and Pam, after looking up at him for a moment, turned too. Monteath’s eyes were narrowed a little; he openly waited, listened without pretense. Pam listened too, and the man who was not Wilmot said, “Sure I’ll stay. You bet I’ll stay.”

  Then a slight tall man in his twenties—a man with a thin white face and black hair—came out of the foyer with Wilmot behind him. In the doorway, Wilmot put a plump hand on the younger man’s shoulder and the man turned his head momentarily and looked at the hand. Wilmot left it there. Wilmot beamed past him and, seeing them watching, beamed at Pam North and Arthur Monteath. He seemed to propel the black-haired man toward them. The man had not dressed for the party. He wore a gray suit, the jacket open. One end of a narrow blue tie dangled below the other. Wilmot put his other hand on the thin man’s other shoulder and guided him to Pam North.

  “Want you to meet my nephew,” Wilmot said, over the other. “Clyde Parsons, Mrs. North. This is Mrs. North, Clyde. Mrs. Gerald North.” Having said this, Mr. Wilmot chuckled. “Have to get the boy a drink. Quite a shock he’s had. Oh—this is Arthur Monteath, Clyde. Thought I was dying, he says.”

  Wilmot’s plump hands offered Clyde Parsons to Pam North, to Monteath. Mr. Wilmot himself departed.

  “Sorry,” Parsons said. His voice was low, now. “He took me in—again.” He pulled his coat together, buttoned it. His fingers went to his tie. “Not dressed for this,” he said.

  There was little to say to that and Clyde Parsons did not wait.

  “I didn’t know anything about all this,” Parsons said. He was plainly uneasy, anxious to explain. “Got a message he was sick. Wanted to see me. Fix things—” He stopped and shook his head. Black hair fell over his forehead. He pushed it back. “One of his jokes,” he said. “His damn funny jokes.”

  “Your uncle likes jokes,” Pam said. This is really too embarrassing, Pam thought. Clyde Parsons looked at her as if she had not spoken what she thought.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s funny. Anyway, it’s not your worry, is it? I—”

  But Wilmot was back. He had a drink in his hand and held it out to Parsons; told Parsons to drink up, said it would do Parsons good. Parsons looked at the glass, for a long moment looked over it at Wilmot. Then with a movement oddly abrupt, Parsons took the glass and drank from it, thirstily. Almost at once, color came to his pale face.

  “Take you around,” Wilmot said, and put a hand again on his nephew’s shoulder. Parsons seemed to hesitate. Then he drank from the glass again and said, “Why not, Uncle Byron?” in a different voice. “Have fun,” Wilmot told Pam North and Monteath, and pushed Parsons from them.

  “Well,” Monteath said. “Wilmot hasn’t—” He stopped. He looked down at Pam North and smiled, faintly, “—hasn’t changed much,” he said. “Tough on the kid.”

  “You know him?” Pam said.

  “Of him,” Monteath said. “Wouldn’t you like to dance?” The change of subject was final. They danced.

  It was not for some time, then, more than a moderately odd party. It was true that Frank, the comic butler, was at intervals unbridled, but as time passed his production of curious food and drink, his gay insults, his employment of a succession of improbable dialects, became, through repetition, almost commonplace. The music continued to pour from the concealed speaker; Frank, however impishly, continued to provide whatever was desired that had alcohol in it. It occurred to Pam, after an hour or so, that she was drinking more than she commonly did—which after dinner was commonly nothing at all—but this was partly because, as the evening progressed, it was Wilmot’s whim to serve all drinks in glasses with rounded bottoms. It is difficult to mislay a drink in a round-bottomed glass.

  There were, as Pam had anticipated, rubber spiders from time to time. Mr. Wilmot, while dancing with her—rather bouncingly—abruptly acquired a green lizard (of which he seemed unaware) and the lizard ran up and down his arm. It was true that, while ostensibly making a note of something, Mr. Wilmot produced a fountain pen which, apparently by accident, squirted a substantial stream of black fluid on Jerry North’s white shirt front. But it was also true that, not long after Jerry’s sharp yelp of unhappiness, the black stain faded gradually until it was hardly perceptible. (It was further true that, some weeks later, a faint brown stain remained where black had been, as a memento of a somewhat strange evening—and of Mr. Byron Wilmot.)

  But after the arrival of Clyde Parsons, nothing really out of the way occurred for rather more than an hour. Then the scream of anguish came again from the foyer.

  It was little noticed, this time. By some, indeed, it apparently was not heard. (Loquacity had become advanced; the scream had competition.) Pam and Jerry, who were dancing together for the first time, were only half conscious of the sound, although, as they circled, Pam saw Wilmot—he was really very pink now, particularly at the back of the neck—go toward the foyer. A moment later, his laughter roared and then, almost at once, he followed two people into the room.

  Inside the door the two stopped and the hag put two slim hands up to a hideously unsightly face. But Wilmot was behind them, a hand between the shoulder blades of each, and the young man in rompers and short white socks, lollipop in hand, and the woman with a great hooked nose, coarse white hair streaming in disorder from beneath conical cap, were propelled into the room. The music did stop, then, and Wilmot raised his voice.

  “Want everybody to meet these two,” Wilmot shouted, and shouted through laughter. “Baker the boy wonder. The bewitching Miss Evitts.” He stepped from behind them, and struck himself on the chest with both fists, and
his laughter roared. “Seems they got the idea they were supposed to come as something,” he told everyone, and was helpless with mirth.

  Baker (the boy wonder) was not. He had a pleasant, rounded face and, as he stood before the party, ridiculous as a chubby small boy, his face was very red—very red and, possibly, very furious. The hand holding the lollipop seemed about to rise as if, absurdly, the lollipop might be a weapon. But then his free hand went out and around the shoulders of the woman.

  She was a young woman, not the crone she seemed. The black witch’s gown could not hide completely the youthful roundness of her body, although the enormous false nose and the lined grease paint burlesqued her face. And even at a distance, even with the man’s arm on her shoulders, it seemed to Pam North that the woman’s slender body trembled. Among those who looked at the two, someone laughed, a little hysterically.

  “Mr. Wilmot,” Jerry North said, in Pam’s ear, “is a first grade bastard.”

  Pam said, “The poor things,” and moved out of Jerry’s arms toward them, but after she had taken a step Jerry held her. “It’ll only make it worse,” Jerry said. Perhaps he was right, she thought, and let herself be stopped.

  The man in boy’s clothing managed to laugh, then. He managed to say, “Guess the joke’s on us, Mr. Wilmot,” in a tolerably controlled voice. “You took us in, all right.”

  Wilmot laughed again at this, and slapped Baker on the shoulder. “That a boy,” Wilmot said. “Get yourselves something to drink. Get Frank to fix you up.”

  The woman shook her grotesque head at first, but Baker’s arm tightened on her shoulders. He bent and whispered to her and after a time she nodded. She went, then, apparently knowing her way, to a corridor at the end of the room—a corridor, Pam had by then discovered, which led to bathrooms. Baker stood for a moment watching her, and then Pam did cross the few feet to him—moved to him impulsively and got at first a blank look and then a slow, rueful smile.

  “I think it was mean,” Pam North said.

  “Well,” Baker said. “It’s Mr. Wilmot. He told us it was a costume party, of course. Told us what to wear.” He smiled again. “We both work for him, you see,” he told her. “It’s—” He stopped. Frank had appeared with a drink. Baker thanked the comic butler, took the glass with some apparent suspicion, sipped from it, started to put it down and looked at it again. “Oh,” he said. “One of those.” He sipped, his eyes on the far end of the room. Anger hardened his face again.

  Jerry came up, wearing the expression of a man who thinks it time to go home, and began, “Don’t you think, Pam—” and stopped because Pam touched his arm. Miss Evitts came out of the distant corridor and toward them up the long room. She wore the witch’s dress still, but conical cap, gray hair, hooked nose were gone. Baker’s face changed; anger went out of it and a kind of warm pleasure came into it and, as she approached them, Miss Evitts smiled too. It was a gentle smile; it was also, Pam North thought, a hurt smile.

  She could be hurt, Pam thought—she could easily be hurt. There was gentleness in her face and sensitivity. Her hair, with the wig gone, was brown—a kind of gentle brown, Pam thought. Her eyes seemed very large. She flushed when she was introduced to the Norths. Her slender hands were busy with the stuff of the shapeless black dress. She was Martha Evitts. She was Mr. Wilmot’s secretary. “He told us to wear—these things.” She was not beautiful; perhaps she was not even pretty. She must, Pam thought, be in her quite late twenties; she might, at a guess, be two or three years older than Baker, who looked at her and seemed to see a beauty others did not see.

  They’re sweet, Pam thought, and Mr. Wilmot is all Jerry called him. In her own mind, which she did not pretend was especially innocent, Pam North thought of several adjectives which Jerry might have used to qualify a noun.

  But at the same time, she qualified her earlier opinion of Byron Wilmot. She had thought him merely—well, underdone; thought him merely the doughy enlargement of a small boy who, on some long ago April Fool’s Day, had persuaded other small boys to nibble at caramels made of laundry soap. But it appeared he was more formidable than that, and more possessed of malice. If Martha Evitts was in any danger of forgetting that she was a few years older than the man who so unguardedly loved her, Mr. Wilmot would see that the danger was lessened. She was aged crone; Baker was rompered child. It makes me a little sick, Pam thought, and turned to Jerry and said, “I think maybe we’d better be—”

  But then a woman cried out. It was not this time the recorded scream from the phonograph in the foyer. It was at once less agonizing and more real. The pretty, dark girl in the white dress stood in the center of the dance floor, and pointed toward a french door leading to the terrace and said a long “Oh-h-h-h!” as if she were scared out of her pretty wits.

  Beyond the door there was a man. His hat was pulled down to hide his face. He held an automatic in his right hand. The gun was a black finger, pointing death.

  II

  Wednesday, 11:46 P.M. to Thursday, 2:40 A.M.

  The man on the terrace, although he must have heard the cry, did not move. But there was no lack of movement in the big room. Movement was convulsive, jumbled together. Pam found herself in Jerry’s hands, swirling as she was jerked behind him; Baker reached Martha Evitts and pulled her down to the floor; the gray-haired woman, at one moment dignified (and apparently a little sleepy) was the next on the floor, too, clutching at a chair, trying to pull it as a shield between her and the french door. A man shouted and began to run, dragging a woman with him and—

  It was all very confused, Pam thought, looking around Jerry. It was as if someone had suddenly poured hot water on an ant hill.

  The lights, except for two lamps at the far end of the room, went out, but the music continued playing Cole Porter’s “Little Rhumba Numbah.” In the semi-darkness, Jerry was brushed by someone hurrying and the Norths staggered momentarily.

  The man on the terrace was only a shadow now, but he did not seem to have moved.

  Wilmot went past them, running, and he held a revolver in each hand and then he was yelling, “Get down, everybody. Get down.”

  But those who were not already down, merely looked at him, as if they did not understand what he was saying. People were not behaving very well, Pam thought, and spilled what remained in her highball glass on Jerry’s trouser leg. Jerry jumped and said, “For God’s sake, Pam, I—”

  But now Mr. Wilmot, who had not got down himself, was in the center of the area set off for dancing—was a large, but unmistakable shadow there, holding a weapon in either hand. He turned from side to side, looking for something—for someone. Then he reached out, but not toward the man nearest him, and thrust one of the guns toward the man he selected.

  “Here!” he said. “Take it, Artie. Got to get him before—” He made a gesture with the gun, toward the terrace.

  Arthur Monteath seemed to hesitate. Then he took the gun. Wilmot said something to him which Pam could not hear, and then gestured violently toward his right. Monteath said, “I think it’s—” and did not finish, but went in the direction Wilmot had indicated, holding the gun ready.

  “Sit tight!” Wilmot shouted. “Everybody sit tight! We’ll get him!”

  “But Jerry,” Pam said, “it’s all so—”

  “Yes,” Jerry said, his voice low, an odd note in it. “I don’t get it either.”

  The shadow beyond the french door was no longer visible. The man had run for it, of course. He had got away, of course. This was all farce, this was the unbelievable burlesque chase of an early movie, this was Keystone Cops.

  Wilmot was running—although it was more of a trot than a run—toward a french door at his left.

  “Going to get him between them,” Jerry said. “I suppose that’s what they’re up to.”

  “He won’t be there,” Pam said. “Don’t they know he won’t be there? And anyway, if he’s between them and everybody has a gun—don’t they know anything?”

  The music stopped. In the s
ilence, there was the sound of a door opening toward one end of the room. That would be Arthur Monteath. A moment later, another door opened, toward the opposite end of the room. That would be Wilmot, encircling.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “They’re crazy! They—”

  “There he goes!” Wilmot shouted from the terrace. “Get him, Artie! Stop, you, or I’ll—”

  There was a shot, then. It seemed loud enough to be in the room. Through the glass there was a flash, reddish in the semi-darkness. Almost simultaneously, there was a second report and a second instantaneous flash and then Wilmot shouted again—shouted, “Stop, I tell you! You can’t—”

  There was the sound of at least one man running and then the sound stopped. There was a moment of silence and then Wilmot spoke again. He did not shout; the excitement had gone out of his voice, and something else had taken its place. But he spoke loudly. They could hear him through the glass.

  “My God, Artie,” Wilmot said. “You’ve killed the guy!”

  Then the lights came on. Through the glass of the french doors the light flooded onto the terrace.

  Wilmot was standing, his revolver lowered, over a figure lying on the terrace tiles. And, slowly, Monteath walked toward them, another revolver dangling in his hand.

  Those in the room surged toward the terrace doors, then, jostled toward them. Wilmot looked up, as someone wrenched open the doors nearest him.

  “All we wanted to do—” he began, and then Monteath spoke. He did not speak loudly; his voice was low and hard, but it carried.

  “You said they were blank loads, Wilmot,” Monteath said. “You said—”

  Wilmot sat back on his heels and looked up at Monteath. Wilmot did not say anything. He reached down to the figure on the floor and then, for the first time, Pam North realized the figure was masked. Slowly, deliberately, Wilmot pulled off the mask.