“That—” murmured Constance Rattigan, in another year, “almost does it.”
“And did you lead Emily Sloane out of the church an hour later, and, good as dead, did you lead her across an empty lot full of sunflowers and FOR SALE signs—”
“Everything was so close, so convenient, it was a laugh,” remembered Constance, not laughing, her face gray. “The graveyard, the undertaking parlor, the church for some quick funerals, the empty lot, the path, and Emily? Hell. She had gone ahead, in her mind, anyway. All I had to do was steer.”
“And, Constance,” Crumley said, “is Emily Sloane alive today?”
Constance turned her face a frame at a time, like a stop-motion doll, taking about ten seconds to move frame by frame until she was looking right through me, with eyes adjusted to the wrong focus.
“When,” I said, “was the last time you took a gift of flowers to a marble sculpture? To a statue that never saw flowers, never saw you, but lived inside the marble, inside all that silence, when was the last time?”
A single tear dropped from Constance Rattigan’s right eye.
“I used to go every week. I was always hoping she’d just come up out of the water like an iceberg and melt. But finally I couldn’t stand the silence and not being thanked. She made me feel I was dead.”
Her head moved frame by frame back in the other direction toward a memory of last year or some year before.
“I think,”Crumley said,“it’s time for some more flowers. Yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. How about …. Hollyhock House?”
Quickly, Constance Rattigan jumped up, glanced at the sea, sprinted for the surf, and dived in.
“Don’t!” I yelled.
For I was suddenly afraid. Even for fine swimmers the sea could take and not give back.
I ran to the surf-line and started to shuck off my shoes, when Constance, spraying water like a seal and shaking like a dog, exploded from the waves and trudged in. When she hit the hard, wet sand she stopped and threw up. It popped out of her mouth like a cork. She stood, hands on hips, looking down at the stuff on the surf-line as the tide drifted it away.
“I’ll be damned,” she said, curiously. “That hairball must’ve been in there all those years!”
She turned to look me up and down, the color coming back into her cheeks. She flicked her fingers at me, tossing sea-rain on my face, as if to freshen me.
“Does swimming,” I pointed at the ocean, “always make you well?”
“The day it doesn’t I’ll never come out again,” she said quietly. “A quick swim, a quick lay works. I can’t help Arbuthnot or Sloane, they’re rotten dead. Or Emily Wickes—”
She froze, then changed the name, “Emily Sloane.”
“Is Wickes her new name, for twenty years, at Hollyhock House?” Crumley asked.
“With my hairball out, I need some champagne in. C’mon.”
She opened a bottle by her blue-tiled pool and poured our glasses full.
“You going to be fool enough to try to save Emily Wickes Sloane, alive or dead, this late in time?”
“Who’ll stop us?” said Crumley.
“The whole studio! No, maybe three people who know she’s there. You’ll need introductions.No one gets in Hollyhock House without Constance Rattigan. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll help.”
Crumley drank his champagne and said: “One last thing. Who took charge that night, twenty years ago. It must have been bad. Who—”
“Directed it? It had to be directed, sure. People were running over each other, screaming. It was Crime and Punishment, War and Peace. Someone had to yell: Not this way, that! In the middle of the night with all the screams and blood, thank God, he saved the scene, the actors, the studio, all with no film in his camera. The greatest living German director.”
“Fritz Wong!?” I exploded.
“Fritz,” said Constance Rattigan, “Wong.”
65
Fritz’s eyrie, halfway up from the Beverly Hills Hotel toward Mulholland, had a view of some ten million lights on the vast floor of Los Angeles. From a long elegant marble porch fronting his villa, you could watch the jets fifteen miles away coming in to land, bright torches, slow meteors in the sky, one every minute.
Fritz Wong yanked his house door wide and blinked out, pretending not to see me.
I handed over his monocle from my pocket. He seized and slotted it.
“Arrogant son of a bitch.” The monocle flashed from his right eye like a guillotine blade. “So! It’s you! The coming-great arrives to bug the soon-vanishing. The ascendant king knocks up the has-been prince. The writer who tells the lions what to say to Daniel visits the tamer who tells them what to do. What are you doing here? The film is kaput!”
“Here are the pages.” I walked in. “Maggie? you okay?”
Maggie, in a far corner of the parlor, nodded, pale, but, I could see, recovered.
“Ignore Fritz,” she said. “He’s full of codswallop and liverwurst.”
“Go sit with the Slasher and shut up,” said Fritz, letting his monocle burn holes in my pages.
“Yes—” I looked at Hitler’s picture on the wall and clicked my heels—“sir!”
Fritz glanced up, angrily. “Stupid! That picture of the maniac housepainter is there to remind me of the big bastards I ran from so as to arrive at little ones. Dear God, the facade of Maximus Films is a clone of the Brandenburg Gate! Sitzfleisch, down!”
I downed my Sitzfleisch and gaped.
For just beyond Maggie Botwin was the most incredible religious shrine I had ever seen. It was brighter, bigger, more beauteous than the silver and gold altar at St. Sebastian’s.
“Fritz,” I exclaimed.
For this dazzling shrine was shelved with crème de menthes, brandies, whiskeys, cognacs, ports, Burgundies and Bordeaux, stored in layers of crystal and bright glass tubing. It gleamed like an undersea grotto from which schools of luminous bottles might swarm. Above and around it hung scores and hundreds of fine Swedish cut crystal, Lalique, and Waterford. It was a celebratory throne, the birthing place of Louis the Fourteenth, an Egyptian Sun King’s tomb, Napoleon’s Empiric Coronation dais. It was a toyshop window at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was—
“As you know,” I said, “I rarely drink—”
Fritz’s monocle fell. He caught and replanted it.
“What will you have?” he barked.
I avoided his contempt by remembering a wine I had heard him mention.
“Corton,” I said, “ ’38.”
“Do you really expect me to open my best wine for someone like you?”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
He hauled off and swung his fist toward the ceiling as if to pound me into the floor. Then the fist came down, delicately, and opened a lid on a cabinet to pull out a bottle.
Corton, 1938.
He worked the corkscrew, gritting his teeth and eying me. “I shall watch every sip,” he growled. “If you betray, by the merest expression, that you don’t appreciate—ssst!”
He pulled the cork beautifully and set the bottle down to breathe.
“Now,” he sighed, “though the film is twice dead, let’s see how the boy wonder has done!” He sank into the chair and riffled my new pages. “Let me read your unbearable text. Though why we should pretend we will ever return to the slaughterhouse, God knows!” He shut his left eye and let his right eye, behind the bright glass, shift, and shift again. Finished, he threw the pages to the floor and nodded, angrily, for Maggie to pick them up. He watched her face, meanwhile pouring the wine. “Well!?” he cried, impatiently.
Maggie put the pages in her lap and laid her hands on them, as if they were gospel.
“I could weep. And? I am.”
“Cut the comedy!” Fritz gulped his wine, then stopped, angry at me for making him drink so quickly. “You couldn’t have written that in a few hours!”
“Sorry,” I apologized, sheepishly. “Only
the fast stuff is good. Slow down, you think what you’re doing and it gets bad.”
“Thinking is fatal, is it?” demanded Fritz. “What, do you sit on your brain while you type?”
“I dunno. Hey, this isn’t bad wine.”
“Not bad!” Fritz raged at the ceiling. “A 1938 Corton and he says not bad! Better than all those damn candy bars I see you chewing around the studio. Better than all the women in the world. Almost.”
“This wine,” I said quickly, “is almost as good as your films.”
“Excellent.” Fritz, shot through his ego, smiled. “You could almost be Hungarian.”
Fritz refilled my glass and gave back my medal of honor, his monocle.
“Young wine expert, why else did you come?”
The time was right. “Fritz,” I said, “on October 31st, 1934, you directed, photographed, and cut a film titled Wild Party.”
Fritz was lying back in his chair, with his legs straight out, the wine glass in his right hand. His left hand crawled up toward the pocket where his monocle should have been.
Fritz’s mouth opened lazily, coolly. “Again?”
“Halloween night, 1934—”
“More.” Fritz, eyes shut, held out his glass.
I poured.
“If you spill I’ll throw you down the stairs.” Fritz’s face was pointed at the ceiling. As he felt the weight of the wine in the glass, he nodded and I pulled away to refill my own.
“Where,” Fritz’s mouth worked as if it were separate from the rest of his impassive face, “did you hear of such a dumb film with a stupid title?”
“It was shot with no film in the camera. You directed it for maybe two hours. Shall I tell you the actors that night?”
Fritz opened one eye and tried to focus across the room without his monocle.
“Constance Rattigan,” I recited, “J. C., Doc Phillips, Manny Leiber, Stanislau Groc, and Arbuthnot, Sloane, and his wife, Emily Sloane.”
“God damn, that’s quite a cast,” said Fritz.
“Want to tell me why?”
Fritz sat up slowly, cursed, drank his wine, then sat hunched over the glass, looking in it for a long while. Then he blinked and said:
“So at last I get to tell. I’ve been waiting to vomit all these years. Well … someone had to direct. There was no script. Total madness. I was brought in at the last moment.”
“How much,” I said, “did you improvise?”
“Most, no, all of it,” said Fritz. “There were bodies all over. Well, not bodies. People and lots of blood. I had my camera along for the night, you know, a party like that and you like to catch people offguard, at least I did. The first part of the evening was fine. People screaming and running back and forth through the studio and through the tunnel and dancing in the graveyard with a jazz band. It was wild, all right, and terrific. Until it got out of hand. The accident, that is. By then, you’re right, there was no film in my 16-millimeter camera. So I gave orders. Run here. Run there. Don’t call the police. Get the cars. Stuff the poorbox.”
“I guessed at that.”
“Shut up! The poor bastard priest, like the lady, was going nuts. The studio always kept lots of cash on hand for emergencies. We loaded the baptismal font like a Thanksgiving feast, right in front of the priest. I never knew, that night, if he even saw what we did, he was in such shock. I ordered the Sloane woman out of there. An extra took her.”
“No,” I said. “A star.”
“Yes!? She went. While we picked up the pieces and covered our tracks. It was easier to do, back then. The studios, after all, ran the town. We had one body, Sloane’s, to show and another, Arbuthnot’s, in the mortuary, we said, and Doc signing the death certificates. Nobody ever asked to see all the bodies. We paid off the coroner to take a year’s sick leave. That’s how it was done.”
Fritz drew in his legs, cradled his drink over his groin, and searched the air for the sight of my face.
“Luckily, because of the studio party, J. C., Doc Phillips, Groc, Manny, and all the yes-men were there. I yelled: Bring guards. Bring cars. Cordon off the crash. People come out of houses? Shout them back with bullhorns! Again, on that street, few houses, and the gas station shut. The rest? Law offices, all dark. By the time a real crowd came from blocks away, in their pajamas, I had parted the Red Sea, reburied Lazarus, got new jobs for the Doubting Thomases in far places! Delicious, wondrous, superb! Another drink?”
“What’s that stuff ?”
“Napoleon brandy. One hundred years old. You’ll hate it!”
He poured. “If you make a face, I’ll kill you.”
“What about the bodies?” I asked.
“There was only one dead to start. Sloane. Arbuthnot was smashed, Christ, to a pulp, but still alive. I did what I could, got him across the street to the undertaking rooms; and left. Arbuthnot died later. Both Doc Phillips and Groc worked to save him, in that place where they embalm bodies, but now an emergency hospital. Ironic, yes? Two days later, I directed the funeral. Again, superb!”
“And Emily Sloane? Hollyhock House?”
“The last I saw of her, she was being led off across that empty lot full of wild flowers, to that private sanitarium. Dead next day. That’s all I know. I was merely a director called in to lifeboat the Hindenburg as it burned, or be traffic manager to the San Francisco earthquake. Those are my credits. Now, why, why, why do you ask?”
I took a deep breath, glugged down some Napoleon brandy, felt my eyes faucet with hot water, and said: “Arbuthnot is back.”
Fritz sat straight up and shouted, “Are you mad!?”
“Or his image,” I said, almost squeaking. “Groc did it. For a lark, he said. Or for money. Made a papier-mâché and wax dummy. Set it up to scare Manny and the others, maybe with the same facts you know but have never said.”
Fritz Wong arose to stalk in a circle, clubbing the carpet with his boots. Then he stood rocking back and forth, shaking his great head, in front of Maggie.
“Did you know about this!?”
“Junior, here, said something—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because, Fritz,” Maggie reasoned, “when you’re directing you never want to hear any news, bad or good, from anyone!”
“So that’s what’s been going on?” said Fritz. “Doc Phillips drunk at lunch three days running. Manny Leiber’s voice sounding like a slow L.P. played double speed. Christ, I thought it was me doing things right, which always upsets him! No! Holy Jesus, God, oh dammit to hell, that bastard Groc.” He stopped to fix on me. “Bringers of bad news to the king are executed!” he cried. “But before you die, tell us more!”
“Arbuthnot’s tomb is empty.”
“His body—? Stolen?”
“He was never in his tomb, ever.”
“Who says?” he cried.
“A blind man.”
“Blind!” Fritz made fists again. I wondered if all these years he had driven his actors like numbed beasts with those fists. “A blind man!?” The Hindenburg sank in him with a final terrible fire. After that … ashes.
“A blind man—” Fritz wandered slowly around the room, ignoring us both, sipping his brandy. “Tell.”
I told everything I had so far told Crumley.
When I finished, Fritz picked up the phone and, holding it two inches from his eyes, squinting, dialed a number.
“Hello, Grace? Fritz Wong. Get me flights to New York, Paris, Berlin. When? Tonight! I’ll wait on the line!”
He turned to look out the window, across the miles toward Hollywood.
“Christ, I felt the earthquake all week and thought it was Jesus dying from a lousy script. Now it’s all dead. We’ll never go back. They’ll recycle our film into celluloid collars for Irish priests. Tell Constance to run. Then buy yourself a ticket.”
“To where?” I asked.
“You must have somewhere to go!” bellowed Fritz.
In the middle of this great bomb burst, a valve somewhere
in Fritz popped. Not hot but cold air rushed out of his body. His bad eye developed a tic that grew outsize.
“Grace,” he cried into the telephone, “don’t listen to that idiot who just called. Cancel New York. Get me Laguna! What? Down the coast, dimwit. A house facing the Pacific so I can wade in like Norman Maine at sunset, should Doom itself knock down the door. What? To hide. What good is Paris; the maniacs here would know. But they’d never expect a stupid Unterseeboot Kapitän who hates sunlight to wind up in Sol City, South Laguna, with all those mindless naked bums. Get a limo here now! I expect you to have a house waiting when I reach Victor Hugo’s restaurant at nine. Go!” Fritz slammed down the phone to glare at Maggie. “You coming?”
Maggie Botwin was a nice dish of nonmelting vanilla ice cream. “Dear Fritz,” she said. “I was born in Glendale in 1900. I could go back there and die of boredom or I could hide in Laguna, but all those ‘bums,’ as you call them, make my girdle creep. Anyway, Fritz, and you, my dear young man, I was here every night at three A.M. that year, pedaling my Singer sewing machine, sewing up nightmares to make them look like halfway not so disreputable dreams, wiping the smirk off dirty little girls’ mouths and dropping it in the trash bins behind the badly dented cots in the men’s gym. I have never liked parties, either Sunday-afternoon cocktails or Saturday-night sumo wrestling. Whatever happened that Halloween night, I was waiting for someone, anyone, to deliver me film. It never came. If a car crash happened beyond the wall I never heard. If there was one or a thousand funerals the next week I refused all invitations and cut the stale flowers, here. I didn’t go downstairs to see Arbuthnot when he lived, why should I go see him dead? He used to climb up and stand outside the screen door. I’d look out at him, tall in the sunlight, and say, You need a little editing! And he’d laugh and never come in, just tell the dressmaker tailor lady how he wanted so-and-so’s face, near or far, in or out, and leave. How did I get away with being alone at the studio? It was a new business and there was only one tailor in town, me. The rest were pants pressers, job seekers, gypsies, fortunetelling screenwriters who couldn’t read tea leaves. One Christmas Arby sent up to me a spinning wheel with a sharp spindle and a brass plate on the treadle: “GUARD THIS SO SLEEPING BEAUTY PRICKS NO FINGERS AND GETS NO SLEEP,” it said. I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in. I saw only the mobs at his memorial trip out of here and around the block to cold comfort farm. Like everything else in life, including this sermon, it needed cutting.” She looked down at her bosom, to hold some invisible beads, hung there for her restless fingers.