A Graveyard for Lunatics (17 page)

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 naive. 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.

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.

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 disbelieve 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.

Lying there waiting for someone to steal it, find Clarence’s address and—

My God, I thought, no!

“Child,” said Constance, “let’s get you a drink!”

The maitre d’ was presenting a bill to his last customers. The eye in the back of his head read us and he turned. His face exploded with delight when he saw Constance. But almost instantly, when he saw me, the light went out. After all, I was bad news. I had been there outside on the night when the Beast had been accosted by Clarence.

The maitre d’ smiled again and charged across the room to dislocate me, and kissed each one of Constance’s fingers, hungrily. Constance threw her head back and laughed.

“It’s no use, Ricardo. I sold my rings, years ago!”

“You remember me?” he asked, astonished.

“Ricardo Lopez, also known as Sam Kahn?”

“But then,
who
was Constance Rattigan?”

“I burned my birth certificate with my underpants.” Constance pointed at me. “This is—”

“I know, I know,” Lopez ignored me.

Constance laughed again, for he was still holding her hand. “Ricardo here was an MGM swim-pool lifeguard. Ten dozen girls a day drowned so he could pump them back to life. Ricardo, lead on.”

We were seated. I could not take my eyes off the rear wall of the restaurant. Lopez caught this and gave the corkscrew on the wine bottle a vicious twist.

“I was only an audience,” I said, quietly.

“Yes, yes,” he muttered, as he poured for Constance to taste. “It was that stupid other one.”

“The wine is beautiful,” Constance sipped, “like you.” Ricardo Lopez collapsed. A wild laugh almost escaped him.

“And who was that other stupid one?” Constance put in, seeing her advantage.

“It was nothing.” Lopez sought to regain his old dyspepsia. “Shouts and almost blows. My best customer and some street beggar.”

Ah, God, I thought. Poor Clarence, begging for limelight and fame all his life.

“Your
best
customer, my dear Ricardo?” said Constance, blinking.

Ricardo gazed off at the rear wall where the Oriental screen stood, folded.

“I am destroyed. Tears do not come easily. We were so careful. For years. Always he came late. He waited in the kitchen until I checked to see if there was anyone here he knew. Hard to do, yes? After all, I do not know everyone he knows, eh? But now because of a stupid blunder, the merest passing idiot, my Great One will probably never return. He will find another restaurant, later, emptier.”

“This Great One…” Constance shoved an extra wine glass at Ricardo and indicated he fill it for himself, “has a name?”

“None.” Ricardo poured, still leaving my glass empty. “And I
never
asked. Many years he came, at least one night a month, paying cash for the finest food, the best wines. But, in all those years, we exchanged no more than three dozen words a night.

“He read the menu in silence, pointed to what he wanted, behind the screen. Then he and his lady talked and drank and laughed. That is, if a lady was with him. Strange ladies. Lonely ladies…”

“Blind,” I said.

Lopez shot me a glance.

“Perhaps. Or worse.”

“What could be worse?”

Lopez looked at his wine and at the empty chair nearby.

“Sit,” said Constance.

Lopez glanced nervously around at the empty restaurant. At last, he sat, took a slow tasting of the wine, and nodded.

“Afflicted, would be more like it,” he said. “His women. Strange. Sad.
Wounded
? Yes, wounded people who could not laugh. He
made
them. It was as if to cure his silent, terrible life he must cheer others into some kind of peculiar joy. He proved that life was a joke! Imagine! To
prove
such a thing. And then the laughter and him going out into the night with his woman with no eyes or no mouth or no mind—still imagined they knew joy—to get in taxis one night, limousines, always a different limousine company, everything paid for in cash, no credits, no identification, and off they would drive to silence. I never heard anything that they said. If he looked out and saw me within fifteen feet of the screen:
disaster
! My tip? A single silver dime! The next time, I would stand thirty feet away. Tip? Two hundred dollars. Ah, well, here’s to the sad one.”

A sudden gust of wind shook the outer doors of the restaurant. We froze. The doors gaped wide, fluttered back, settled.

Ricardo’s spine stiffened. He glanced from the door to me, as if I were responsible for the emptiness and only the night wind.

“Oh, damn, damn, damn it to hell,” he said, softly. “He has gone to ground.”

“The Beast?”

Ricardo stared at me. “Is
that
what you call him? Well…” Constance nodded at my glass. Ricardo shrugged and poured me about an inch. “Why is that one so important that you drag in here to ruin my life? Until this week, I was rich.”

Constance instantly probed the purse in her lap. Her hand, mouselike, crept across the seat on her right side and left something there. Ricardo sensed it and shook his head.

“Ah, no, not from you, dear Constance. Yes,
he
made me rich. But once, years ago, you made me the happiest man in the world.”

Constance’s hand patted his and her eyes glistened. Lopez got up and walked back to the kitchen for about two minutes. We drank our wine and waited, watching the front door gape with wind and whisper shut on the night. When Lopez came back he looked around at the empty tables and chairs, as if they might criticize his bad manners as he sat. Carefully, he placed a small photograph in front of us. While we looked at it, he finished his wine.

“That was taken with a Land camera last year. One of our stupid kitchen help wanted to amuse his friends, eh? Two pictures taken in three seconds. They fell on the floor. The Beast, as you call him, destroyed the camera, tore one picture, thinking there was only one, and struck our waiter, whom I fired instantly. We offered no bill and the last bottle of our greatest wine. All was rebalanced. Later I found the second picture under a table, where it had been kicked when the man roared and struck. Is it not a great pity?”

Constance was in tears.

“Is
that
what he looks like?”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Yes.”

Ricardo nodded: “I often wanted to say: Sir,
why
do you live? Do you have nightmares of being beautiful? Who is your woman? What do you do for a living, and is it living? I never said. I stared only at his hands, gave him bread, poured wine. But some nights he forced me to look at his face. When he tipped he waited for me to lift my eyes. Then he would smile that smile like a razor cut. Have you seen fights when one man slashes another and the flesh opens like a red mouth? His mouth, poor monster, thanking me for the wine and lifting my tip high so I had to see his eyes trapped in that abattoir of a face, aching to be free, drowning in despair.”

Ricardo blinked rapidly and jammed the photo into his pocket.

Constance stared at the place on the tablecloth where the picture had been. “I came to see if I knew the man. Thank God, I did not. But his voice? Perhaps some other night…?”

Ricardo snorted. “No, no. It is ruined. That stupid fan out front the other night. The only time, in years, such an encounter. Usually, that late, the street, empty. Now, I am sure he will not return. And I will go back to living in a smaller apartment. Forgive this selfishness. It’s hard to give up two-hundred-dollar tips.”