I thought of Manny Leiber’s behind. Constance said:
“God knows how the studio survived. Maybe by Ouija board, with advice from the dead. Don’t laugh. That’s Hollywood, reading the Leo-Virgo-Taurus forecasts, not stepping on cracks between takes. The studio? Give me the grand tour. Let grandma smell the four winds in the fifty-five cities, take the temperature of the maniacs in charge, then on to the Brown Derby maître d’. I slept with him once, ninety years back. Will he remember the old witch of the Venice shore and let us sit at tea with your Beast?”
“And say what?”
A long wave came in, a short wave rustled on the shore.
“I’ll say,” she closed her eyes, “stop scaring my future-writing dinosaur-loving honorary bastard son.”
“Yes,” I said, “please.”
35
In the beginning was the fog.
Like the Great Wall of China, it moved over the shore and the land and the mountains at 6 A.M.
My morning voices spoke.
I crept around Constance’s parlor, groping to find my glasses somewhere under an elephant herd of pillows, but gave up and staggered about to find a portable typewriter. I sat blindly stabbing out the words to put an end to Antipas and the Messiah.
And it was indeed A Miracle of Fish.
And Simon called Peter pulled in to the shore to find the Ghost by the charcoal bed and the baked fish to be given as gifts, with the word as deliverance to a final good, and the disciples there in a gentle mob and the last hour upon them and the Ascension near and the farewells that would linger beyond two thousand years to be remembered on Mars and shipped on to Alpha Centauri.
And when the Words came from my machine I could not see them, and held them close to my blind wet eyes as Constance dolphined out of a wave, another miracle clothed in rare flesh, to read over my shoulder and give a sad-happy cry and shake me like a pup, glad of my triumph.
I called Fritz.
“Where the hell are you!” he cried.
“Shut up,” I said, gently.
And I read aloud.
And the fish were laid to bake on the charcoals that blew in the wind as fireflies of spark were borne across the sands and Christ spoke and the disciples listened and as dawn rose Christ’s footprints, like the bright sparks, were blown away off the sands and he was departed and the disciples walked to all points away and their paths were lifted by the winds and their footprints were no more and a New Day truly began as the film ended.
Far off, Fritz was very still.
At last he whispered, “You … son … of … a … bitch.”
And then: “When do you bring that in?”
“In three hours.”
“Get here in two,” cried Fritz, “and I will kiss your four cheeks. I go now to un-man Manny and out-Herod Herod!”
I hung up and the phone rang.
It was Crumley.
“Is your Balzac still Honoré?” he said. “Or are you the great Hemingway fish dead by the pierside, bones picked meatless?”
“Crum,” I sighed.
“I made more calls. But what if we get all the data you’re looking for, find Clarence, identify the awful-looking guy in the Brown Derby, how do we let your goony-bird friend Roy, who seems to be running around the studio in hand-me-down togas, how do we let him know and yank him the hell out? Do I use a giant butterfly net?”
“Crum,” I said.
“Okay, okay. There’s good news and there’s bad. I got to thinking about that portfolio you told me your old pal Clarence dropped outside the Brown Derby. I called the Derby, said I had lost a portfolio. Of course, Mr. Sopwith, the lady said, it’s here!”
Sopwith! So that was Clarence’s name.
“I was afraid, I said, I hadn’t put my address in the portfolio.”
“It’s here, said the lady, 1788 Beachwood? Yeah, I said. I’ll be right over to get it.”
“Crumley! You’re a genius!”
“Not quite. I’m talking from the Brown Derby phone booth now.”
“And?” I felt my heart jump.
“The portfolio’s gone. Someone else got the same bright idea. Someone else got here ahead of me. The lady gave a description. It wasn’t Clarence, the way you said. When the lady asked for identification, the guy just walked out with the portfolio. The lady was upset, but no big deal.”
“Ohmigod,” I said. “That means they know Clarence’s address.”
“You want me to go and tell him all this?”
“No, no. He’d have a heart attack. He’s scared of me, but I’ll go. Warn him to hide. Christ, anything could happen. 1788 Beachwood?”
“You got it.”
“Crum, you’re the cat’s pajamas.”
“Always was,” he said, “always was. Strange to report the folks down at the Venice station expect me back to work an hour ago. The coroner phoned to say a customer won’t keep. While I’m working, you help. Who else in the studio might know what we need to know? I mean, someone you might trust? Someone who’s lived the studios’ history?”
“Botwin,” I said instantly, and blinked, amazed at my response.
Maggie and her miniature whirring camera, trapping the world day after day, year after year, as it reeled by.
“Botwin?” said Crumley. “Go ask. Meanwhile, Buster—?”
“Yeah?”
“Guard your ass.”
“It’s guarded.”
I hung up and said, “Rattigan?”
“I’ve started the car,” she said. “It’s waiting at the curb.”
36
We rioted toward the studio late in the afternoon. With three bottles of champagne stashed in her roadster, Constance swore happily at every intersection, leaning over the steering wheel like those dogs that love the wind.
“Gangway!” she cried.
We roared down the middle of Larchmont Boulevard, straddling the dividing line.
“What,” I yelled, “are you doing?!”
“Once there were trolley tracks on each side of the street. Down the middle was a long line of power poles. Harold Lloyd drove in and out, cat-cradling the poles, like this!”
Constance swerved the car left.
“And this! and this!”
We swerved around half a dozen ghosts of long-gone poles, as if pursued by a phantom trolley car.
“Rattigan,” I said.
She saw my solemn face.
“Beachwood Avenue?” she said.
It was four in the afternoon. The last mail of the day was heading north on the avenue. I nodded to Constance. She parked just ahead of the mailman, who trudged along in the still warm sun. He greeted me like a fellow Iowa tourist, plenty cheerful considering the junk mail he unloaded at every door.
All I wanted was to check Clarence’s name and address before I knocked at his door. But the postman couldn’t stop babbling. He told how Clarence walked and ran, what he looked like around the mouth: quivering. Nervous ears that itched up and down on his skull. Eyes mostly white.
The mailman punched my elbow with the mail, laughing. “A Christmas fruitcake, ten years stale! Comes to his bungalow door in a big wrap-around camel’s-hair coat like Adolphe Menjou wore in 1927, when we boys ran up the aisles to pee, away from the ‘mush’ scenes. Sure. Old Clarence. I said ‘Boo!’ once and he slammed the door. I bet he showers in that coat, afraid to see himself naked. Scaredy Clarence? Don’t knock too loud—”
But I was gone. I turned in quickly at the Villa Vista Courts and walked up to number 1788.
I did not knock on the door. I scratched with my fingernail on the small glass panes. There were nine of them. I did not try them all. The shade was pulled down behind so I couldn’t see in. When there was no answer I tapped my forefinger, a bit louder.
I imagined I heard Clarence’s rabbit heart pounding inside, behind the glass.
“Clarence!” I called. And waited. “I know you’re in there!”
Again, I thought I heard his pulse racing.
“Call me, dammit!” I cried, at last, “before it’s too late! You know who this is. The studio, dammit! Clarence, if I can find you, they can, too!”
They? Who did I mean by “they”?
I pounded the door with both fists. One of the glass panes cracked.
“Clarence! Your portfolio! It was at the Brown Derby!”
That did it. I stopped pounding for I heard a sound that might have been a bleat or a muffled cry. The lock rattled. Another lock rattled after that, and a third.
At last the door cracked open, held by an inside brass chain.
Clarence’s haunted face looked down a long tunnel of years at me, close by but so far away I almost thought his voice echoed. “Where?” he pleaded. “Where?”
“The Brown Derby,” I said, ashamed. “And someone stole it.”
“Stole?” Tears burst from his eyes. “My portfolio!? Oh God,” he mourned. “You’ve done this to me.”
“No, no, listen—”
“If they try to break in, I’ll kill myself. They can’t have them!”
And he glanced tearfully over his shoulder at all the files I could see crowded beyond, and the bookcases, and the walls full of signed portraits.
My Beasts, Roy had said at his own funeral, my lovelies, my dears.
My beauties, Clarence was saying, my soul, my life!
“I don’t want to die,” mourned Clarence, and shut the door.
“Clarence!” I tried a last time. “Who’s they? If I knew, I might save you! Clarence!”
A shade banged up across the court.
A door half opened in another bungalow.
All I could say then, exhausted, was, in a half whisper: “Goodbye …”
I went back to the roadster. Constance was sitting there looking at the Hollywood Hills, trying to enjoy the weather.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“One nut, Clarence. Another one, Roy.” I slumped into the seat beside her. “Okay, take me to the nut factory.”
Constance gunned us to the studio gate.
“God,” gasped Constance, staring up, “I hate hospitals.”
“Hospitals?!”
“Those rooms are full of undiagnosed cases. A thousand babies have been conceived, or born, in that joint. It’s a snug home where the bloodless get transfusions of greed. That coat of arms above the gate? A lion rampant with a broken back. Next: a blind goat with no balls. Then: Solomon chopping a live baby in half. Welcome to Green Glades mortuary!”
Which sent a stream of icewater down my neck.
My pass motored us through the front gate. No confetti. No brass bands.
“You should have told that cop who you were!”
“You see his face? Born the day I fled the studio for my nunnery. Say ‘Rattigan’ and the sound track dies. Look!”
She pointed at the film vaults as we swerved by. “My tomb! Twenty cans in one crypt! Films that died in Pasadena, shipped back with tags on their toes. So!”
We braked in the middle of Green Town, Illinois.
I jumped up the front steps and put out my hand. “My grandparents’ place. Welcome!”
Constance let me pull her up the steps to sit in the porch swing, feeling the motion.
“My God,” she breathed, “I haven’t ridden one of these in years! You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “what are you doing to the old lady?”
“Heck. I didn’t know crocodiles cried.”
She looked at me steadily. “You’re a real case. You believe all this crap you write? Mars in 2001. Illinois in ’28?”
“Yep.”
“Christ. How lucky to be inside your skin, so goddamned naïve. Don’t ever change.” Constance gripped my hand. “We stupid damn doomsayers, cynics, monsters laugh, but we need you. Otherwise, Merlin dies, or a carpenter fixing the Round Table saws it crooked, or the guy who oils the armor substitutes cat pee. Live forever. Promise?”
Inside, the phone rang.
Constance and I jumped. I ran in to grab the receiver. “Yes?” I waited. “Hello?!”
But there was only a sound of wind blowing from what seemed like a high place. The flesh on the back of my neck, like a caterpillar, crawled up and then down.
“Roy?”
Inside the phone, wind blew and, somewhere, timbers creaked.
My gaze lifted by instinct to the sky.
One hundred yards away. Notre Dame. With its twin towers, its statue saints, its gargoyles.
There was wind up on the cathedral towers. Dust blowing high, and a red workmen’s flag.
“Is this a studio line?” I said. “Are you where I think you are?”
Way up at the very top, I thought I saw one of the gargoyles … move.
Oh, Roy, I thought, if that is you, forget revenge. Come away.
But the wind stopped and the breathing stopped and the line went dead.
I dropped the phone and stared out and up at the towers. Constance glanced and searched those same towers, where a new wind sifted flurries of dust devils down and away.
“Okay, no more bull!”
Constance strode back out on the porch and lifted her face toward Notre Dame.
“What the hell goes on here!” she yelled.
“Shh!” I said.
37
Fritz was way out in the midst of a turmoil of extras, yelling, pointing, stomping the dust. He actually had a riding crop under his arm, but I never saw him use it. The cameras, there were three of them, were just about ready, and the assistant directors were rearranging the extras along the narrow street leading into a square where Christ might appear sometime between now and dawn. In the middle of the uproar Fritz saw me and Constance, just arrived, and gestured to his secretary. He came running, I handed over the five script pages, and the secretary scuttled back through the crowd.
I watched as Fritz leafed through my scene, his back to me. I saw his head suddenly hunch down on his neck. There was a long moment before Fritz turned and, without catching my eye, picked up a bullhorn. He shouted. There was instant silence.
“You will all settle. Those who can sit, sit. Others, stand at ease. By tomorrow, Christ will have come and gone. And this is the way we will see him when we are finished and go home. Listen.”
And he read the pages of my last scene, word for word, page for page, in a quiet yet clear voice and not a head turned nor did one foot stir. I could not believe it was happening. All my words about the dawn sea and the miracle of the fish and the strange pale ghost of Christ on the shore and the bed of fish baking on the charcoals, which blew up in warm sparks on the wind, and the disciples there in silence, listening, eyes shut, and the blood of the Saviour, as he murmured his farewells, falling from the wounds in his wrists and onto the charcoals that baked the Supper after the Last Supper.
And at last Fritz Wong said my final words.
And there was the merest whisper from the mob, the crowd, the phalanx, and in the midst of that silence, Fritz at last walked through the people until he reached my side, by which time I was half-blind with emotion.
Fritz looked with surprise at Constance, jerked a nod at her, and then stood for a moment and at last reached up, pulled the monocle from his eye, took my right hand, and deposited the lens, like an award, a medal, on my palm. He closed my fingers over it.
“After tonight,” he said quietly, “you will see for me.”
It was an order, a command, a benediction.
Then he stalked away. I stood watching him, his monocle clenched in my trembling fist. When he got to the center of the silent crowd, he snatched the bullhorn and shouted, “All right, do something!”
He did not look at me again.
Constance took my arm and led me away.
38
On the way to the Brown Derby, Constance, driving slowly, looked at the twilight streets ahead and said: “My God, you believe in everything, don’t you? How? Why?”
“Simple,” I said. “By not doing anything I hate or disbel
ieve in. If you offered me a job writing, say, a film on prostitution or alcoholism, I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t pay for a prostitute and don’t understand drunks. I do what I love. Right now, thank God, it’s Christ at Galilee during his going-away dawn and his footprints along the shore. I’m a ramshackle Christian, but when I found that scene in John, or J. C. found it for me, I was lost. How could I not write it?”
“Yeah.” Constance was staring at me so I had to duck my head and remind her, by pointing, that she was still driving.
“Hell, Constance, it’s not money I’m after. If you offered me War and Peace, I’d refuse. Is Tolstoy bad? No. I just don’t understand him. I am the poor one. But at least I know I can’t do the screenplay, for I’m not in love. You’d waste your money hiring me. End of lecture. And here,” I said, as we sailed past it and had to turn around, “is the Brown Derby!”
It was an off evening. The Brown Derby was almost empty and there was no Oriental screen set up way in the back.
“Damn,” I muttered.
For my eyes had wandered over to an alcove on my left. In the alcove was a smaller telephone cubby where the reservation calls came in. There was a small reading lamp lit over a podium desk, on which just a few hours ago Clarence Sopwith’s picture album had probably lain.