Marvel Classic Novels--Spider-Man, page 25
Lou whispered, “Thank you, Yoda.” Valerie giggled.
Dmitri stopped pacing and stared at Valerie—an effect diluted by the sunglasses that the playwright always wore, along with a battered old Brooklyn Dodgers cap. With all that, and his full beard, only the presence of his nose made it possible to be sure he actually had a face. “Oh, this is funny, you think? My play is going to open with leading lady who stares at the back of the wall with mouth hanging open, and you are laughing?”
“Sorry, Dmitri,” Valerie said, “I was—I was thinking of something else, honest. I wasn’t laughing at you. Really, I wasn’t, okay? Can we take it again?”
“Okay.” Dmitri retook his seat and adjusted his cap. “From Jane Mary’s line.”
Having long since abandoned any hope of getting Dmitri to stop mangling her name—she was half-convinced that he did it on purpose to annoy her anyhow—Mary Jane simply turned to Valerie and said once again, “All right, but I think you’re crazy.”
“You want me to think that, don’t you?”
Valerie must have noticed the look Mary Jane was now giving her, because she then said, “Oh no, that’s not the line, is it?”
“No!” Dmitri said. “That is line from next act. Okay?” Mary Jane was about to say something, when Valerie started waving her arms back and forth. “I got it this time, really, I got it. Honest. I got the line down pat this time, you watch. Let me try again.”
“Hang on a sec,” said Heidi. She was congregated around the soundboard with several other members of the tech crew. “These levels are wrong. Give me two seconds.”
“I will give you five seconds, but no more!” Dmitri said.
Mary Jane knew that was a lost cause. Heidi had been complaining about the wonky sound system from the get-go.
They were standing on the second floor of Village Playhouse Central, a small theatre on MacDougal Street in the heart of Manhattan’s famous Greenwich Village neighborhood. Downstairs was the lobby and box office, as well as the VPC offices. Within an hour or two, people would start milling about on the first floor to see tonight’s performance of Up the Creek Without a Fiddle, a show by a different playwright. It would be running for one more week, at which point The Z-Axis would debut. Up the Creek had a minimal set—just a leather couch and a wooden rocking chair—which had been moved upstage and out of the way so Dmitri could run The Z-Axis without his actors tripping over the other play’s set.
Although the place seated only fifty, most of the shows didn’t sell out. Mary Jane was playing the supporting role of Irina, and she was also Valerie’s understudy for the lead female role of Olga.
If she keeps up like this, I’ll get that lead. In truth, Mary Jane was starting to truly worry about Valerie. She’d blown lines before, but she usually just cursed and got it right. She didn’t babble a mile a minute the way she had been doing today.
Ever since she and Peter Parker had ended their thankfully brief separation and she moved back to New York, Mary Jane had been doing more theatre work, mainly in the hopes of improving her acting chops. As good as she was at modeling, she found acting to be much more fulfilling— and to offer more long-term possibilities once she got too old to represent products targeted to women or to stand next to products targeted to men. However, her acting experience to date consisted of a wretched soap opera and low-rent action movies, so she had recently decided to take advantage of the city’s tremendous theatrical opportunities.
Despite the playwright’s abrasive manner, she had found The Z-Axis to be a challenging piece—her smaller part of Irina was actually a stronger one than Valerie’s lead. Olga was too reactive for Mary Jane’s tastes; she just let things happen to her and didn’t really appear to grow. Irina was more proactive, and actually went through changes as the play went on. It was a role that, despite the comparative paucity of dialogue, required nuance.
She looked closely at her costar, and noticed beads of sweat forming on Valerie’s face. The lights weren’t all that bright, and it wasn’t all that hot in the room.
“Okay,” Heidi said half a minute after Dmitri gave her five seconds, “we’re ready to go.”
Before Mary Jane could say anything, Valerie looked up and said, “All right, but I think you’re crazy.”
Dmitri uttered a stream of words in Russian, none of which Mary Jane knew, though she suspected that their equivalents in English were mostly spelled with four letters. Then Linnea, the costuming director, walked over to him, holding three swatches in her hand. Mary Jane figured that they were about to get into yet another fight over the color of the dress that Olga was supposed to wear in the opening scene. That’ll distract Dmitri for a few seconds at least.
“You okay, Val?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. Honest, let’s do this and do it right.”
Dmitri waved his hand in front of Linnea’s face and yelled at Valerie. “Do it right? Oh, this is your brilliant plan now, to do it right?”
“I got it, Dmitri, really, I just . . .” Valerie put her head down and trailed off. “I’m fine, really, I—oh, shit.”
Mary Jane moved closer, and saw that Valerie was starting to look a little green. “Dmitri, I think she’s sick.”
“She is sick?” Dmitri got up and started pacing again, ignoring the daggers that Linnea was staring at him. “No, it is I who am sick! We are opening in a week, and . . .”
Ignoring Dmitri’s rant, Mary Jane put her hand on Valerie’s shoulder. The other woman’s head was down, her blond hair covering her face. “Val, you okay? Val?”
Lou had also moved closer. “Yo, Valerie, c’mon, get with the—”
Then Valerie raised her head.
The face Mary Jane saw was mostly recognizable as belonging to Valerie McManus. It had her hazel eyes, her prominent cheekbones, her button nose. There were, however, two major differences. One, her mouth was twisted into a snarl, revealing sharp, pointed teeth.
And two, her skin was now emerald green.
“Val?” Mary Jane said in a small voice.
Then Valerie let loose with a scream that Mary Jane felt in her spine. As she screamed, she struck out at Mary Jane and Lou. Crying out in pain as Valerie’s fist collided with her stomach, Mary Jane stumbled backward, falling off the stage—which, thankfully, was less than a foot higher than the floor—and landing awkwardly on her shoulder, wrenching it.
She looked up at the stage to see that Lou had been knocked back to the wings at stage right, where he’d stumbled into two of the tech crew who’d been adjusting one of the lights.
As for Valerie, she was now green all over. What appeared to be bat wings had ripped through the back of her costume.
Several people behind Mary Jane screamed, including Linnea, who dropped her swatches on the floor next to Mary Jane.
Valerie started flapping her new wings and slowly rose toward the rafters. Then, with a burst of speed, she went through the rafters and to the ceiling beyond it. With a resounding crunch of shattered concrete, she then flew through the ceiling.
Several chunks of debris and insulation and plaster fell down onto the stage, which was now occupied only by the couch and rocker from the other play and Lou, who shouted several expletives when a piece of concrete landed on his leg.
“Lou!” Mary Jane awkwardly got to her feet and, holding her wrenched shoulder, hopped onto the stage. Right behind her was the stage manager, Anne Grace, who joined her and the tech guys as they crowded around the injured actor.
“Oh my God!” That was from the audience: Michael—the high-strung guy playing Sasha—whose eyes had gone wide. Next to him, his boyfriend, Joseph, was just staring with his mouth open, drool hanging off his lip-ring.
As for Lou, he was bleeding profusely from the leg. Mary Jane shook her head. “Looks like you broke a bone there, Lou.”
One of the lighting guys looked at her with surprise. “You can tell that just by looking?”
Mary Jane had spent a significant chunk of her adult life being very close to a full-time super hero, including a fair amount of time recently being married to him. The sad reality was that she knew a broken leg when she saw one. However, she couldn’t very well say that out loud. “OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod!”
Mary Jane looked over to see Heidi screaming and waving her arms. Some of the other tech crew were trying to hold her still. One of the tech guys was hiding under the soundboard asking if it was safe to come out.
Jumping down off the stage, still holding her shoulder, Mary Jane went to her purse, took out her cell phone, and turned it on.
“Who you call, Jane Mary?” Dmitri was staring at Mary Jane. He had removed his glasses and was cleaning plaster dust off them with his shirt.
“An ambulance—Lou’s hurt, and everybody’s freaking out.”
“No, there is no need. We can bring him to St. Vincent’s, okay? Do not need to bring ambulance. Ambulance bring police, police close theatre, no show tonight, then Alfredo angry. Alfredo angry, maybe he decide The Z-Axis no good.”
Before Mary Jane could say anything, Anne stepped down from the stage. “Dmitri, shut up. There’s a big hole in the ceiling, Heidi’s having a nutty, Lou’s leg is broken, and I’m about two steps away from a heart attack. The theatre is gonna be closed.”
Dmitri was too smart a director to argue with his stage manager, and so he said nothing. As soon as she got a signal, Mary Jane dialed 911.
Waiting for an answer, she wondered what happened to Valerie to cause that kind of transformation. Unfortunately, being married to a super hero meant she had some pretty reliable theories on that score as well.
* * *
THE ambulance and the police arrived almost simultaneously, the former from the very same St. Vincent’s Hospital that Dmitri wanted to take Lou to—And what were we supposed to do, Mary Jane wondered, call him a cab?—and the latter from the 6th Precinct. The EMT who checked her over was a fan, as it turned out, with fond memories of Mary Jane’s brief role on the soap opera Secret Hospital, and not only pronounced Mary Jane fine, but even gave her a small packet of painkillers. They had also managed to calm Heidi down, get both Linnea and Joseph to come out of their stupors, and help Anne when she started hyperventilating.
As for the cops, what surprised Mary Jane was that once they learned what happened to Valerie, one of them immediately contacted their dispatcher and asked for someone whose name she didn’t get from “the Two-Four.” She also heard the word “task force.” Mary Jane’s knowledge of police procedure was limited to secondhand information from Peter and watching Law & Order, but she knew that that meant the 24th Precinct, which, if she remembered correctly, was uptown. Certainly nowhere near here. Which means that Valerie isn’t the first person to turn all green and super powered, and the NYPD already have a task force dealing with it. Wonderful.
After the EMT finished with Mary Jane—the ambulance had long since taken Lou to St. Vincent’s—a uniformed cop walked up to her. He was about Mary Jane’s age, with short black hair that had been moussed within an inch of its life, sideburns that were tailored to the height of fashion, and no discernible neck. His nameplate read SPINELLI.
She gave him her best smile, and asked, “What can I do for you, Officer Spinelli?”
He returned the smile and said, “Just gotta ask a few questions, Ms.—?”
“Mary Jane Watson.” She provided her personal information first, and then described what happened to Valerie in as much detail as she could.
When she was done, and had answered a few follow-up questions, Spinelli said, “If you don’t mind my sayin’, Ms. Watson, you’re takin’ this a lot better’n—well, anybody else.”
She shrugged. “It’s New York.”
“Yeah.”
After asking one or two more questions, Spinelli said, “It’s gonna be a little while more. But if you want, we can take you home when we’re done. Or, uh, anywhere else you, uh, you wanna go.” He smiled widely at that.
Oh God. “I’m sure my husband’ll be very glad to know that I’m getting a police escort all the way back to Forest Hills.”
The smile fell. “Well, just let me or Officer Pérez know. ’Scuse me.” He beat a hasty retreat.
Just as he did, two people walked into the theatre area from the door at the rear: a tall, pale, lanky man in a beige trench coat over a brown suit, and a short, stocky, freckled redhead wearing a green pantsuit. Both had badges on their belts. I’m betting these are our task force detectives.
Spinelli and the other officer—Pérez, presumably—talked with them for a few moments, then Spinelli pointed at Mary Jane.
“Excuse me! I wasn’t done talking to you two!” A short, skinny man with jet-black hair cut close to his scalp, a small goatee, and wearing an NYU sweatshirt came in behind the two detectives. This was Alfredo Garber, the owner and operator of VPC, and one of the more excitable people Mary Jane had ever met. “I simply cannot have this! It’s outrageous!”
The male detective spoke in too low a volume for Mary Jane to hear, but whatever he said didn’t placate Alfredo in the least.
“I have a show tonight! Do you know nothing of the theatre? The show must go on!”
After a moment, the male detective left it to his partner, who didn’t seem pleased at being left to deal with Alfredo by herself. She continued to talk to the theatre owner, leading him back out the door and downstairs to the lobby, where Alfredo could continue to shout.
The detective made a beeline for Mary Jane. “Hello, Ms. Watkins, I’m Detective Shapiro.”
“It’s Watson, actually.”
“Of course,” Shapiro said, sounding wholly uninterested in the subject. “Officer Spinelli tells me you saw the whole thing.”
Mary Jane nodded. “Valerie was having trouble holding on to her lines, and then she turned green and grew wings, and flew through the ceiling.” Just another day in the big city.
Shapiro remained expressionless. “I take it that Ms. McManus has never shown any indication of having super powers before?”
She shook her head.
“Does Ms. McManus take drugs?”
That question threw Mary Jane for a loop. From what she knew, both from the news and from Peter, super powers usually came about because of industrial accidents or exposure to radiation or genetic mutation.
“It’s a simple yes-or-no question, Ms. Watson,” Shapiro said after Mary Jane didn’t answer for a moment.
“She’s an actor, Detective. She—” Mary Jane hesitated.
“Do you do drugs, Ms. Watson?”
“I don’t see that that’s any of your business.” He shrugged.
“You’re an actor, Ms. Watson.”
She sighed. “We’ve been to a couple of parties together. She wasn’t always one hundred percent straight. Beyond that, I’m not really prepared to say without an attorney present.”
Shapiro rolled his eyes. “Cool down, Ms. Watson, I’m just trying to paint a picture here.”
“I’d rather my friend wasn’t framed, if that’s okay.” She sighed again. “Look, there were drugs at the parties. There was coke, there was X, there was booze, there were cigarettes.” She hit Shapiro with the same smile she used on Spinelli.
Shapiro did not return the smile. He just made notes and then said, “So she took ecstasy?”
“Probably. I wasn’t really keeping track.”
“Did she look like she was on something this afternoon?”
Mary Jane chose her words carefully. “She was having trouble with her lines. She was a little sweaty. It’s possible she was high. It’s also possible she had a fever or half a dozen other things.” She pursed her lips. “Detective, is anyone out looking for Valerie?”
Shapiro nodded. “We’ve got an APB out, Code: Blue’s looking for them, and we’ve alerted the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, since they tend to pick up on this kinda thing.” Code: Blue, Mary Jane knew, was a special NYPD unit that dealt with paranormal activity.
The detective then asked, “Do you know if Ms. McManus associated with any known super heroes? Spider-Man, Daredevil, anybody like that?”
Shaking her head, Mary Jane said, “Not that I know of. And she would’ve mentioned it. She met Hugh Jackman at a party once and has yet to stop talking about it, so if she knew a super hero, she’d have said. You should probably talk to her boyfriend.”
For the first time, Shapiro looked something other than bored. “She has a boyfriend?”
Mary Jane nodded. “Greg Halprin. They live in an apartment on Avenue C around 10th. I’m not sure of the exact address—Anne, the stage manager, she probably has it. She’s the one breathing into a bag over there.”
After writing that down, Shapiro closed his notebook and got up. “Thank you, Ms. Watson. You’re free to go.” He reached into the pocket of his trench coat and fished out a business card. “If you have any other information about Ms. McManus you’d like to share, please call me. And I may be calling you again as well.”
Mary Jane reached up and took the proffered card. Sure enough, Detective Jeroen Shapiro worked at the 24th Precinct, located on West 100th Street.
Alfredo came back in, the redhead behind him. “Excuse me, but this woman is telling me that we can’t have our show tonight!”
“This room’s a crime scene, Mr. Garber. Until I release it, it stays as is.”
“But the show—”
“Your show is canceled, Mr. Garber. Live with it.” Shapiro then went to talk to one of the uniforms.
Alfredo stormed over to Dmitri. “Can you believe this?”
“The police, they are the same everywhere,” Dmitri said in a more subdued voice than Mary Jane had ever heard him use.
“Oh, people are going to hear about this, let me tell you! I know people, and they will most definitely hear of this. That Detective Shapiro is walking a beat by Friday! You watch!”
Mary Jane got up and joined the two men, as did another actor, Regina Wright, a willowy blonde who had a lead role in the play currently running at VPC and who was serving as Mary Jane’s understudy for The Z-Axis. “Uh, Alfredo?” Regina said. “There’s, like, a hole in the ceiling? We’re supposed to perform here tonight, how, exactly?”
