As has previously been outlined, the view from the Horsemen's balcony is practically perfect. And if you're the type to look out over the spires and domes and seek the faraway horizon, there is absolutely nothing to mar it. Look a little closer, however, look and see what's right in front of you, and there is a blemish.
Directly across the piazza, so that up on the balcony Dylan has the very best seat in the house, is a building which was once virtually identical to the one he's standing on. That other façade just had the misfortune of being the first to crumble. One of those terrible tragedies you hear about from time to time, like train crashes or forest fires – a busy afternoon, one flaw in a pillar that became a crack and dropped the support out from under a crossbeam, breaking another pillar as it fell, so on and so forth until the paved street below was nothing but rubble and ruin.
Amongst the architectural remains, mortal ones; four people, ultimately, didn't make it out of harm's way.
But there are two kinds of tragedy. You have what might be called the true kind, the horrible accidents, the unforeseeable, the plain bad luck. And then the other kind. Like train crashes, for instance, like forest fires. Like a buckled track that should have been repaired or a cigarette left smouldering on dry leaves. 'Tragedy' is a word that gets used, all too often, to erase the reasons.
Over a year since the collapse, the front of that building is still no more than a ragged hole. Behind a curtain of green industrial net, what used to be a first floor conference room yawns, dark and bedraggled from exposure. Although, if you think the place is a mess now, you should have seen it last week. You should have seen it when Dylan visited here first. He's not too modest to admit, it took real imagination to visualize it as a performance space.
Not too modest and besides, he's got proof; he's got a whole team having trouble visualizing it. He's got Merritt on the phone, just double-checking, not doubting, just making sure, somebody did test the on-stage camera last night, right?
This is the downside, when a left hand can't know what a right hand is doing; the left hand develops perfectly normal, if inconvenient, doubts that the right hand is doing its job. With the work split between five hands, a lot of doubt has built up.
"Everything is exactly as it was for the last rehearsal in Paris," Dylan says, with the practiced calm of a psychiatrist of especially violent patients. "I'm telling you we're ready. And if you can't have faith in me, have it in the other Horsemen." Such a gentle explanation, so patiently and sincerely given, with the extra sting of guilt thrown in for good measure, is so readily accepted that Dylan turns it into a text verbatim. It suffices to answer Lula (wondering if everything is definitely, one-hundred-percent, all good with the sound), and Jack (did somebody take care of the rope rig?), and as a polite response to Danny's voicemail regarding the repairs to a hook on Lula's fourth layer.
He's got one other message. It's from an unrecognized number which, when he tries to check it by calling, claims not to exist. It's with a certain trepidation that Dylan eventually opens it, and with great relief that he reads, Bonne chance.
He looks far too long at the message, and jumps when the phone begins to ring. He answers, patience just beginning to fray, "We're getting a little close to the wire, here, Lula, if you're stil-"
"I just saw Chase McKinney in the crowd."
Oh. Dylan relaxes, leans heavier on the stone balustrade, glances away to check the police scanner crackling softly by his elbow. "Don't worry about it."
"Don't worry about it?! Are you crazy? And this is me, an actual crazy person, one doctor short of a diagnosis-"
"Excuse me?"
"You need three to agree and one of them was kind of a hippy, believes everybody's curable, but my point is-"
"I get your point. And I'm saying don't worry about it."
"Quite apart from my absolute inability to ignore this, have you considered the nuclear event likely to ensue if Merritt sees what…?" She trails away. Dylan waits, glances at his watch. Four seconds, five, and Lula comes back cooler, gentler. "Left-hand-right-hand?"
"Yeah."
"I don't like left-hand-right-hand."
It won't happen again. Dylan doesn't like it either. But there's no time to tell her that now, and no point in it either; he'll get them all together afterward, tell them then. In fact, he'll make a promise, so that there's no going back. But right now, he says, "Hang up and put your earpiece in; it's almost eight."
The church bells, played from a recording these days instead of rung, get shut off at dusk. But on the stroke of eight, as if they were about to chime, there's a hum in the speakers around the piazza. A rushing fountain slows to a burble. The very astute share a puzzled glance, but no more than this.
When the streetlights flash out, well, then there's a little more of a reaction.
Behind the green net over the building site, floodlights flare.
And a voice, very definitely of the Horsemen's preferred McKinney, is projected out over the crowd, clicking his tongue with distaste, "Who lights up an eyesore like that?" Those around Merritt in the evening throng hear the real voice close by and gather, and the first mutter of excitement starts to run through them, like static, like the tension before lightning. Just briefly, he sets a tender hand on the shoulder of an elderly woman standing nearby, before he starts towards the stage.
Ten yards away, Jack slips down his hood and passes between a young boy and his mother, a smile and a friendly wink. "Doesn't look like anybody's home."
"Well," and Lula stands up from the edge of the fountain, waving to the family of tourists she's been sitting unnoticed next to, "let's check." A little hop from the wall to the centre keeps her feet dry. The fountain's lights come back on to present her to the audience, to make them all watch when she snaps her fingers, and the screen drops.
That's the first gasp. There's always one. It comes right before the first wild cheer, but any of our performers will tell you, the gasp is more important. The gasp means a thousand times more to them. That moment of wonder, of how – whatever reason they might have for performing these days, that gasp is why they all got into this in the first place. That gasp brought them here and it buoys them up now, carries them drifting away from any doubts and into the script. By both hands, left and right, they use that gasp to seize control.
"Oh," Lula says, of their makeshift stage, "no, there… there really is no one home. Um..."
Jack and Merritt mutter amongst themselves – 'running late', 'turbulence', 'air traffic control'. They're cut off abruptly when, fast as falling, Danny drops down from the floor above. The wires that drop him are too thin to be seen.
He hits the stage already walking toward the front. "Give me a break, it's a long walk from Paris. Buena notte, signore e signori."
Now the applause. Now the real first cheer. In fact, since Danny is the only one in a position to stop it, this is probably allowed to continue a little longer than it ought to. Lula pauses, covering her stage mic to mutter to an onlooker, "Showboating, that's all it is." The man shrugs, whether because he disagrees or because his English is minimal, Lula couldn't say.
Already in position, Jack glares up, tapping his watch.
Danny ignores all of this. After all, he didn't get to stick around for his bows in Paris. He'll take what he can get now. Really, he's surprised he gets away with it as long as he does before Dylan sighs down his ear, "This overgrown teenager…"
At that he claps his hands, mumbles those bashful thank-yous he keeps having to practice so they still sound genuine, tries to bring down a hush, "But really, if you know who we are at all, you know this is more than just a show. There's a reason we're here. And by here, I mean here. There'd have to be a reason. If we really wanted to perform in a ruin, Rome has some better-looking options on offer. No, we chose this one because… well, because it should never have existed in the first place. There are four groups of people here among you tonight who know this better than anyone. And we'll explain why in just a second but first I have to help this idiot actually get on stage –" Danny points, finally giving a little attention over to Jack.
For most of this introduction, Jack has been standing on a crate at ground level, stage right. He's made the odd jump, gotten hold of the edge above them, but so far been unsuccessful in climbing on up. Now he puts up one hand for Danny to take hold at the wrist. The extra lift does the trick. "There's a ladder," Danny bites. "There's a ladder at the other end."
"Well, I was at this end."
"You might have climbed up yourself if there wasn't a deck of cards in your hand." Still holding Jack's wrist, Danny raises the offending hand for anybody to see, shaking his head, "Unbelievable. You know we're stuck up here tonight? There's no up-close?"
"You want to bet? Give me a name, man."
Danny tries to refuse. He's got an explanation to get on with, after all. But Jack insists and, back and forth, the spat continues, timed to a fraction of a second, down to Merritt's poorly disguised voice calling out of the audience for a name, nome, until Danny finally snaps. "Giovanni." Between laughter and groaning, the audience amplifies Jack's unimpressed silence until, finally, "Alright, what about Doctor Giovanni, hm?"
"It's a little better, I guess." Jack turns to the audience, walks back to the edge which eluded him before. "C'è un dottore in sala, per favore?"
"Right here!" Lula calls. Still holding court at the fountain, she's on the side nearest the performance now, pointing down from the wall on a balding, liver-spotted head. "I've got a Doctor John." She raises the cheer for the bemused, barely-willing doctor, starts the applause, so the noise covers her. With the crowd doing the work she can get down from the fountain, position herself in front, waving to pretend she's still signalling the stage. At the wrist of her hanging hand, ignored by her side, you can just see the ace of hearts starting to slip up out of her glove. The distances and angles are all wrong for Jack to really pitch this one from the stage. He'll be disappointed, but there's nothing they can do about it.
In plan B, the presentation is all the same. The countdown, the drama, the pretence, that doesn't change. All that changes is that Jack only palms the card. But he throws nothing just as convincingly, and from over her shoulder, Lula flicks its twin so it slams flat against the doctor's forehead.
There's only half a cheer this time. The other half of the audience is laughing at Jack's smile, his eyes fixed wordlessly in the side of Danny's head until, "Cute. Cute trick. Now can we finish telling people why we're here?"
"Don't you think we should tell them why they're here first? I feel sort of bad about that. See, you all think you came here by choice tonight. And some of you don't really know why. Some of you swore you'd never come back here, and certainly never wanted to see this building. But we needed you here. So we cheated, just a little."
That's a cue for Dylan. Back on the balcony, by no more than three keystrokes, he wakes up the screen behind them. In the dark behind the floodlights there wasn't so much as a suggestion of it on shadows. Now it flares bright, showing the blue and yellow set of a late-night talk show. Mercifully this version of the video has been silenced. It remains, however, a video of Chase McKinney giving an interview about his recently overturned conviction. It's a near-perfect replica of several dozen he's already given in English-speaking countries.
Danny steps in front of the video, deliberately turning his back to draw another laugh. "Now, almost all of the people we're referring to, with the exception of one particular family who turn off all their televisions for the entire period of Lent and gave me a little extra work to do this morning, will have seen this already. Chase McKinney here was on your TVs night before last and-"
"And here tonight, in carne ed ossa!"
Danny plays startled, staggering back into Jack from stage left where a ladder comes up from the street and where, it would seem, the less welcome twin is currently ascending. He is perfect in every respect, except that he is perhaps more sombrely dressed than has previously been known. Maybe prison has its effects, even with the term cut short. But from his hair to his too-neat beard, the smug stretch of his smile and the ooze in his walk, he is perfect.
"Wait," Jack mutters, barely loud enough for the mic to pick up. "Nah, hold on… Wait…"
Chase continues, seemingly oblivious to Jack circling round behind him. "So long as the broadcast is live, it's really not all that difficult, reaching into your living rooms, out of the goggle-box and into the brainbox, doing a little tinkering."
Jack's curious hand hovers a moment before it closes on those orangish curls. When the wig pulls off in his fist he recoils first, as if from some small, ugly animal. He shakes it to test if it's alive or dead, and finds to his shock that it turns into a black pork-pie hat. This he replaces on the now bald head and seems to like what he sees a lot better. He leans around the indeterminate McKinney to give Danny a thumbs up.
Chase doesn't get to finish what he's saying about cadences and the subtle implantation of thought pathways before Danny reaches up and rips the beard off his face.
Merritt hisses and pulls away, biting his tongue to keep from cursing live on stage. But by the time he wheels back, he is himself again, has shaken the mincing hunch out of his shoulders, is working the fixed grin off his face. This done, the applause fading, he turns to walk into the wings. Jack grabs him back by the collar, "Where are you going?"
"Somewhere with a shower."
"C'mon, it's okay. It's over now."
Jack brings him back, with back slaps and mumbles of comfort, while Danny picks up, "Now, we fully understand if there's anybody out there who doesn't like this approach but… But you're here now, and we'd advise you to stick around. What comes next, you might like a little better. For instance – "
"Ahem!"
Throwing his hands up, pretending a rage he has to swallow, Danny winces. "I don't believe this. There is a ladder, Lula."
Between the two of them, they reprise the argument he already had with Jack. It's witty, a cute bit, and covers up what they both already know, which is that the ladder wouldn't work. Unlike the crate, the ladder is not rigged with a magnetic strip to grab the metal weights in the hem of Lula's coat, nor with the rolling device inside to whip it away and make it vanish. Lula stands her ground on that damn crate, not out of sheer stubbornness, but so that when Jack and Merritt take an arm each and lift her up, her first transformation is seamless. She loses a layer of sweeping green and, in the same heartbeat, comes up in gleaming silver.
There's a moment, hidden in a cheer which is all for her, where Lula joins the others. A moment of eye contact and, more than that, faith. From four disparate parts, now united, each accepts at once that there was nothing to doubt. Once you spot it, the reason why is blindingly obvious - right hand, left hand, the hand hidden and the hand with something hidden in it, none of them would ever let the others down.
Introductions done, misgivings set aside, there's only one thing left for them to accomplish; they've got a show to perform, and preferably before the cops get here.