“Jack’s right to suggest that there were several contributing factors,” says Perry, who has always been a decent sort. “I should have replaced that pulley as soon as Clive told me there was something wrong with it.”
“I told you about it weeks ago,” says Clive.
“I said I should have replaced it,” says Perry. “What do you want me to do about it now?”
“Roy’s the one who wouldn’t leave the rope alone,” Jack says.
“No one told me what was going on with it,” says Roy, never taking his eyes off the ceiling.
“That’s not true,” says Perry. “I told you.”
“You did not!” Roy says defensively.
“Enough,” says Placide as he rubs at his temples.
Everyone waits for him to say something.
“Who here knew the pulley was busted?”
Around the room, hands go up in the air. Young’s, Burke’s, even Lydia’s.
Placide counts aloud. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—including me. That’s more than half of us.”
He allows them to ruminate on this information.
“There is going to be an inquest,” Placide says solemnly. “And I don’t think I need to remind you that there are few people held in lower esteem than actors.”
The men and women in the room quietly acknowledge that this is true.
“If we go to the public with this story,” says Placide, “I see no reason to believe we will not be immediately dispatched to the gallows.”
The gallows are for criminals. Jack waits for an actor to argue this point with Placide, but when nobody does, he feels like he has no choice but to speak up. “We didn’t intend for any of this to happen. Shouldn’t we admit it was a horrible mistake and apologize?”
Placide laughs, then addresses the room. “Mr. Gibson wants to apologize.”
“Come on, Jack,” Anderson says in a quiet voice. “Everyone in the balconies is dead.”
Placide and Anderson and the rest of the actors keep talking, but Jack can’t hear a word. All he can hear is that phrase,Everyone in the balconies is dead, reverberating in his head like a gong. If he is, at least in part, responsible for the fire’s outbreak, and everyone in the balconies is dead, then it stands to reason that he is responsible for the deaths of everyone in the balconies. Is that a hundred, maybe two hundred people? “That can’t be,” he says finally, but no one is listening to him.
“So, are we in agreement?” Placide says, recapturing Jack’s attention. “That we don’t breathe a word about the pulley to anyone outside this room?”
“I say we also keep this business about Green to ourselves,” Anderson adds. “The poor man’s going through enough.”
Anderson is a giant bootlicker, and Jack wonders how he’s failed to see it before now.
“Here, here,” says Twaits, and several of the men beat on the tables to demonstrate their support of Placide’s proposal.
Jack doesn’t know what to make of any of them anymore. “What will you have us tell people? That I raised the lamp of my own volition?”
Placide cuts in. “Certainly not.”
“So, what shall I say?”
“Something more plausible.”
It takes Jack a second to realize what Placide is telling him. “You want me to lie? You want all of us to lie?”
“It’s not lying, Jack,” says Anderson, his voice as smooth as churned butter.
