Boris Akunin - All the World's a Stage

Fandorin was surprised – it was quite impossible to mishear the name.

The person whom the foxy schemer had addressed, a man with dark hair, a large nose and kinked, bushy eyebrows, grinned sardonically.

‘If popularity was determined by talent and not appearance,’ he said, darting a baleful glance at Emeraldov, ‘they would be lying in wait to ambush me at the entrance. But no matter how brilliantly you play Iago or Claudius, they’ll never shower you with flowers for it. Pleasures like that are for talentless trash with pretty-pretty faces.’

Listening to the shouts with a smile on his face, the leading man drawled lazily:

‘Anton Ivanich, I know you start working your way into the role of a fiendish villain first thing in the morning, but there is no show today, so come back to the world of decent people. Or is that impossible already?’

‘I implore you, please don’t argue!’ Vulpinova exclaimed in exaggerated consternation. ‘It’s my fault! I misheard, and then Anton took offence…’

‘You misheard? With your ears?’ Emeraldov quipped derisively.

The villainess blushed. So she does suffer because she is so plain , Erast Petrovich noted.

‘Comrades! Friends!’ said a round-faced man in a short, tight jacket, getting up off his chair. ‘Come on, really, stop it! We’re constantly quarrelling, lashing at each other with barbed remarks, but what for? After all, the theatre is such a fine, great-hearted, beautiful thing. If we don’t love each other, if we all keep trying to hog the blanket, we’ll rip it to pieces!’

‘There we have the judgement of a man who should never direct actors,’ Stern responded, putting his hand on the round-faced man’s shoulder. ‘Sit down, Vasya. And all of you settle down. You see what a madhouse I work in, Andrei Gordeevich? Right, who do we have left? Well this, as you have already guessed, is our villain, Anton Ivanovich Mephistov,’ he said, with a rather casual gesture in the direction of the dark-haired man. He jabbed his finger at the man with the round face. ‘This is Vasenka, our simpleton, that’s why his pseudonym is Gullibin. His particular range includes the roles of devoted brothers-in-arms and likeable birdbrains. In The Three Sisters he was Tuzenbach, in Hamlet he was Horatio… So that’s the entire company.’

‘What about Zoya?’ Altairsky’s voice asked reproachfully. It was only a few minutes since Erast Petrovich had heard that voice, but he was already missing it.

‘Everyone always forgets about me. Like some insignificant detail.’

The freckle-faced young lady who had kissed the hero Nonarikin and squeezed his injured hand in the intensity of her feelings pronounced these words in a theatrically cheerful voice. She was very short – her legs were dangling in the air because they didn’t reach the floor.

‘Sorry, Zoya. Mea culpa !’ said Stern, striking himself on the chest with his fist. ‘This is our wonderful Zoya Comedina. Her character is the fool, that is, a female jester. A magnificent talent for the grotesque, parody and general tomfoolery,’ he said, really laying himself out, evidently in an effort to make up for his oversight. ‘And she’s a quite incomparable principal boy as well – she can play boys or girls. And believe it or not, I abducted her from a midgets’ circus, where she was playing a monkey most comically.’

Shustrov glanced listlessly at the little woman and started looking at Fandorin.

‘The midgets thought I was overgrown, but here they think I’m stunted.’ Comedina took hold of the millionaire’s sleeve, to make him turn back towards her. ‘That’s my fate – there’s always either too much of me or too little.’ She twisted her face into a pitiful grimace. ‘But I can do something that no one else can. I’m exceptionally gifted where tears are concerned. I can cry, not only with both eyes, but with just one, whichever I choose. Of course, for my character tears are nothing more than a way of making people laugh.’ She suddenly started coughing with surprising hoarseness. ‘Pardon me, I smoke too much… It helps with playing juveniles.’

‘So that’s the entire company,’ Noah Noaevich repeated, gesturing round at his assembled troops. ‘The “dwellers in the ark”, so to speak. You can ignore Mr Fandorin. He’s a contender for the position of repertoire manager, but hasn’t been enlisted into the company as yet. For the present we’re still taking stock of each other.’

But for his part, Erast Petrovich had already taken stock. His initial hypotheses had already taken shape and he thought that the circle of suspects had been defined.

He had already clarified everything about the deadly basket of flowers. It had been ordered from the ‘Flora’ shop, paid for by fifty roubles attached to a note. The note had not survived, but in any case it had not contained anything unusual, merely the instruction to attach to the basket a card that read ‘To the divine E. A.-L.’. The basket had been delivered to the theatre by an errand-boy, and there it had stood backstage, in the ushers’ room. In principle, anybody could have gained access to the room, even someone from outside. However, Erast Petrovich was almost certain that the previous day’s vile trick had been perpetrated by one of the people presently in the room In any case, he considered it expeditious at this stage not to squander his efforts on any other theories.

The climate in the company was sultry, with an abundance of all sorts of antagonisms, but not everyone fitted the role of the ‘snake catcher’.

It was hard, for instance, to imagine the regal Vasilisa Prokofievna engaging in that kind of activity. And despite his sardonic manner, the ‘philosopher’ would hardly be likely to soil his hands – he was altogether too dignified for that. Fandorin could exclude Gullibin without any qualms. The flirtatious coquette Aphrodisina would never have picked up the reptile with her pink fingers. And Truffaldino-Shiftsky? Pouring glue into the director’s galoshes – that kind of hooliganism might, perhaps, be his style, but the dastardly trick with a poisonous snake required an especially malicious nature. There was a feeling of rabid, pathological hatred here. Or of equally incandescent jealousy.

Now Madam Vulpinova, with her crooked mouth and bat’s ears, could easily be pictured as a snake charmer. Or Mr Mephistov, with his animus towards ‘pretty-pretty’ faces…

Suddenly Fandorin realised that he had unwittingly been caught on the cunning Noah Noaevich’s hook: he had confused real, live people with the character types that they acted. So it was no wonder that the prime suspects had turned out to be the ‘villain’ and the ‘villainess’.

No, he must not allow himself to be guided by first impressions. In general, at this stage it was best to wait a while before drawing conclusions. Not everything was as it seemed in this world. It was all make-believe and pretence.

He had to take a closer look than this. Actors were not like ordinary people. That is, they certainly looked like them, but it was quite possible that they were, in fact, some special sub-species of Homo sapiens , with specific behaviours of its own.

The opportunity to continue observing was provided then and there, as Andrei Gordeevich Shustrov began making a speech.

Shustrov’s speech matched his appearance very closely. Dry and precise, completely devoid of extravagance, as if the entrepreneur were reading out a memorandum or an official communiqué. This feeling was reinforced by his manner of enunciating his considerations in the form of numbered points. Erast Petrovich himself often had recourse to a similar method for the sake of greater clarity in his reasoning, but on the lips of this patron of the arts the enumeration sounded rather odd.