After a long silence, Fritz said, “Maggie Botwin will be quiet now for a year!”
“No.” Maggie Botwin fixed me with her gaze. “You got any last notes on the rushes we’ve seen the last few days? You never know, tomorrow we may all be rehired at one-third the salary.”
“No,” I said lamely.
“To hell with that,” said Fritz. “I’m packing!”
My taxi still waited, ticking off astronomical sums. Fritz stared at it with contempt. “Why don’t you learn to drive, idiot?”
“And massacre people in the streets, Fritz Wong style? Is this goodbye, Rommel?”
“Only till the Allies take Normandy.”
I got into the cab, then probed my coat pocket. “What about this monocle?”
“Flash it at the next Academy Awards. It’ll get you a seat in the balcony. What’re you waiting for, a hug? There!” He wrestled me, angrily. “Outen zee ass!”
As I drove away, Fritz yelled: “I keep forgetting to tell you how much I hate you!”
“Liar,” I called.
“Yes,” Fritz nodded and lifted his hand in a slow, tired salute, “—I lie.”
66
“I’ve been thinking about Hollyhock House,” said Crumley, “and your friend Emily Sloane.”
“Not my friend, but go on.”
“Insane people give me hope.”
“What!!!!” I almost dropped my beer.
“The insane have decided to stay on,” Crumley said. “They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but they do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle’s prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.”
“Give me that beer!” I grabbed it. “How many of these you had?”
“Only eight.”
“Christ.” I shoved it back at him. “Is all this going to be part of your novel when it comes out?”
“Could be.” Crumley gave a nice, easy, self-satisfied burp and went on. “If you got to choose between a billion years of darkness, no sun ever again, wouldn’t you choose catatonia? You could still enjoy green grass and air that smells like cut watermelons. Still touch your knee, when no one was looking. And all the while you pretend not to care. But you care so much you build a crystal coffin and seal it on yourself.”
“My God! Go on!”
“I ask, why choose madness? So as not to die, I say. Love is the answer. All of our senses are loves. We love life but fear what it does to us. So? Why not give madness a try?”
After a long silence, I said: “Where the hell is all this talk leading us?”
“To the madhouse,” Crumley said.
“To talk to a catatonic?”
“It worked once, didn’t it, a couple years ago, when I hypnotized you, so you finally almost recalled a killer?”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t nuts!”
“Who says?”
I shut my mouth, Crumley opened his.
“Well,” he said, “what if we took Emily Sloane to church?”
“Hell!”
“Don’t ‘hell’ me. We all heard about her charities every year for Our Lady’s on Sunset. How she gave away two hundred silver crucifixes two Easters running. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
“Even if she’s mad?”
“But she’d be aware. Inside, behind her wall, she’d sense she was at mass and—talk.”
“Rant, rave, maybe …”
“Maybe. But she knows everything. That’s why she went mad, so she couldn’t think or talk about it. She’s the only one left, the others are dead, or hidden right in front of us, with their mouths shut for pay.”
“And you think she’d feel enough, sense enough, know and remember? What if we drive her even more mad?”
“God, I don’t know. It’s the last lead we have. No one else will own up. You get half a story from Constance, another fourth from Fritz, and then there’s the priest. A jigsaw, and Emily Sloane’s the frame. Light the candles and incense. Sound the altar bell. Maybe she’ll wake after seven thousand days and talk.”
Crumley sat for a full minute, drinking slowly and heavily. Then he leaned forward and said:
“Now, do we get her out?”
67
We did not take Emily Sloane to church.
We brought the church to Emily Sloane.
Constance arranged it all.
Crumley and I brought candles, incense, and a brass bell made in India. We placed and lighted the candles in a shadowed room of the Hollyhock House Elysian Fields Sanitarium. I pinned some cotton cloths about my knees.
“What the hell’s that for?” griped Crumley.
“Sound effects. It rustles. Like the priest’s skirt.”
“Jesus!” said Crumley.
“Well, yeah.”
Then, with the candles lit, and Crumley and me standing well out of the way in an alcove, we fanned the incense and tested the bell. It made a fine, clear sound.
Crumley called quietly. “Constance? Now.”
And Emily Sloane arrived.
She did not move of her own volition, she did not walk, nor did her head turn or her eyes flex or motion in the carved marble face. The profile came first out of darkness above a rigid body and hands folded in gravestone serenity upon a lap made virgin by time. She was pushed, from behind, in her wheelchair, by an almost invisible stage manager, Constance Rattigan, dressed in black as for the rehearsal of an old funeral. As Emily Sloane’s white face and terribly quiet body emerged from the hall, there was a motion as of birds taking off; we fanned the incense smokes and tapped the bell.
I cleared my throat.
“Shh, she’s listening!” whispered Crumley.
And it was true.
As Emily Sloane came into the soft light, there was the faintest motion, the tiniest twitch of her eyes under the lids, as the imperceptible beat of the candle flames beckoned silence and leaned shadows.
I fanned the air.
I chimed the bell.
At this, Emily Sloane’s body itself—wafted. Like a weightless kite, borne in an unseen wind, she shifted as if her flesh had melted away.
The bell rang again, and the smoke of the incense made her nostrils quiver.
Constance backed away into shadows.
Emily Sloane’s head turned into the light.
“Ohmigod,” I whispered.
It’s her, I thought.
The blind woman who had come into the Brown Derby and left with the Beast on that night, it seemed a thousand nights ago.
And she was not blind.
Only catatonic.
But no ordinary catatonic.
Out of the grave and across the room in the smell and the smoke of incense and the sounding of the bell.
Emily Sloane.
Emily sat for ten minutes saying nothing. We counted our heartbeats. We watched the flames burn down the candles as the incense smoke sifted off.
And then at last the beautiful moment when her head tilted and her eyes dilated.
She must have sat another ten minutes, drinking in things remembered from long before the collision that had left her wrecked along the California coast.
I saw her mouth stir as her tongue moved behind her lips.
She wrote things on the inside of her eyelids, then gave them translation:
“No one …” she murmured, “under … stands …”
And then …
“No one … ever did.”
Silence.
“He was …” she said at last, and stopped.
The incense smoked. The bell gave a small sound.
“. . . the … studio … he ??
? loved …”
I bit the back of my hand, waiting.
“. . . place … to … play. Sets …”
Quietness. Her eyes twitched, remembering.
“Sets … toys … electric … trains. Boys, yes. Ten …” She took a breath. “Eleven … years … old.”
The candle flames flickered.
“. . . he … always said … Christmas … always … never away. He’d … die … if … it’s not Christmas … silly man. But … twelve … he made … parents take back … socks … ties … sweaters. Christmas day. Buy toys. Or he wouldn’t talk.”
Her voice trailed off.
I glanced at Crumley. His eyes bulged from wanting to hear more, more. The incense blew. I chimed the bell.
“And … ?”he whispered for the first time. “And … ?”
“And …” she echoed. She read her lines off the inside of her eyelids. “That’s … how he … ran … studio.”
The bones had reappeared in her body. She was being structured up in her chair as if her remembrance pulled strings, and the old strengths and the lost life and substance of herself were eased in place. Even the bones in her face seemed to restructure her cheeks and chin. She talked faster now. And, finally, let it all come.
“Played. Yes. No work … played. The studio. When his father … died.”
And as she talked, the words came now in threes and fours and finally in bursts and at long last in runs and thrusts and trills. Color touched her cheeks, and fire her eyes. She began to ascend. Like an elevator coming up a dark shaft into the light, her soul arose, and herself with it, rising to her feet.
It reminded me of those nights in 1925, 1926, when music or voices in far places played or sang in static and you tried to twist and fix seven or eight dials on your super-heterodyne radio to hear way-off Schenectady where some damn fools played music you didn’t want to hear but you kept tuning until one by one you locked the dials and the static melted and the voices shot out of the big disc-shaped speaker and you laughed with triumph even though all you wanted was the sound, not the sense. So it was this night, the place, with the incense and the bell and candle fires summoning Emily Sloane up and up into the light. And she was all remembrance and no flesh, so listen, listen, the bell, the bell, and the voice, the voice, and Constance behind the white statue ready to catch it if it fell, and the statue said:
“The studio. Was brand new, Christmas. Every day. He was always. Here at seven. Morning. Eager. Impatient. If he saw people. With shut mouths. He said open! Laugh. Never understood. Anyone depressed, when there was one life. To live. Much not done …”
She drifted again, lost, as if this one long burst had tired her to exhaustion. She circulated her blood a dozen heartbeats, filled her lungs, and ran on, like one pursued: “I … same year, with him. Twenty-five, just arrived from Illinois. Crazy for films. He saw I was crazy. Kept me … near.”
Silence. Then:
“Wonderful. All first years … The studio grew. He built. Blueprints. Called himself Explorer. Chart maker. By thirty-five. He said. Wanted the world inside … walls. No travel. Hated trains. Cars. Cars killed his father. Great love. So, see, lived in a small world. Grew smaller, the more cities, countries he built on lot. Gaul! His. Then … Mexico. Islands off Africa. Then … Africa! He said. No need travel. Just lock himself inside. Invite people. See Nairobi? Here! London? Paris? There. Built special rooms each set to stay. Overnight: New York. Weekends: Left Bank … wake to Roman Ruins. Put flowers. Cleopatra’s tomb. Behind the fronts of each town put carpets, beds, running water. Studio people laughed at him. Didn’t care. Young, foolish. He went on building. 1929, 1930! ’31, ’32!”
Across the room, Crumley raised his eyebrows at me. Lord! I thought I had hit on something new, living and writing in my grandparents’ Green Town house!!
“Even a place,” murmured Emily Sloane, “like Notre Dame. Sleeping bag. So high up over Paris. Wake early to sun. Crazy? No. He laughed. Let you laugh. Not crazy … it was only later …”
She sank under.
For a long while we thought she had drowned for good.
But then I chimed the bell again and she gathered her invisible knitting to stitch with her fingers, looking down at the pattern she wove on her breast.
“Later on … it … truly … mad.
“I married Sloane. Stopped being secretary. Never forgave. He kept playing with great toys … he said he still loved me. And then that night … accident. It. It. It happened.
“And so … I died.”
Crumley and I waited for a long minute. One of the candles went dark.
“He comes to visit, you know,” she said at last to the fading sound of more candles flickering out.
“He?” I dared to whisper.
“Yes. Oh, two … three … times … a year.”
Do you know how many years have passed? I wondered.
“Takes me out, takes me out,” she sighed.
“Do you talk?” I whispered.
“He does. I only laugh. He says … He says.”
“What?”
“After all this time, he loves me.”
“You say?”
“Nothing. Not right. I made … trouble.”
“You see him clearly?”
“Oh, no. He sits out in no light. Or stands behind my chair, says love. Nice voice. The same. Even though he died and I’m dead.”
“And whose voice is it, Emily?”
“Why …” She hesitated. Then her face lit. “Arby, of course.”
“Arby … ?”
“Arby,” she said, and swayed, staring at the last lit candle. “Arby. Made it through. Or guess so. So much to live for. The studio. The toys. No matter me gone. He lived to come back to only place he loved. So he made it even after the graveyard. The hammer. The blood. Ah, God! I’m killed. Me!” She shrieked and sank down in her chair.
Her eyes and lips sealed tight. She was done and still and back to being a statue forever. No bells, no incense would stir that mask. I called her name, softly.
But now she built a new glass coffin and shut the lid.
“God,” said Crumley. “What have we done?”
“Proved two murders, maybe three,” I said.
Crumley said, “Let’s go home.”
But Emily didn’t hear. She liked it right where she was.
68
And at long last the two cities were the same.
If there was more light in the city of darkness, then there was more darkness in the city of light.
The fog and mist poured over the high mortuary walls. The tombstones shifted like continental plates. The drywash catacomb tunnels funneled cold winds. Memory itself invaded the territorial film vaults. Worms and termites that had prevailed in the stone orchards now undermined the apple yards of Illinois, the cherry trees of Washington, and the mathematically trimmed shrubs of French châteaus. One by one the great stages, vacuumed, slammed shut. The clapboard houses, log cabins, and Louisiana mansions dropped their shingles, gaped their doors, shivered with plagues and fell.
In the night, two hundred antique cars on the backlot gunned their engines, smoked their exhausts, and gravel-dusted off on some blind path to motherlode Detroit.
Building by building, floor by floor, lights were extinguished, air conditionings stifled, the last togas trucked like Roman ghosts back to Western Costume, one block off this Appian Way, as the captains and the kings departed with the last gate guards.
We were being pushed into the sea.
The parameters, day by day, I imagined, were shutting in.
More things, we heard, melted and vanished. After the miniature cities and prehistoric animals, then the brownstones and skyscrapers, and with Calvary’s cross long gone, the dawn tomb of the Messiah followed it into the furnace.
At any moment the graveyard itself might rupture. Its disheveled inhabitants, evicted, homeless at midnight, seeking new real estates across town at Forest Lawn, would board 2 A.M. buses to te
rrify drivers as the last gates banged shut and the whiskey-film vault-catacomb tunnel brimmed with arctic slush reddened in its flow even as the church across the street nailed its doors and the drunken priest fled to join the maître d’ from the Brown Derby up by the Hollywood sign in the dark hills, while the invisible war and the unseen army pushed us farther and farther west, out of my house, out of Crumley’s jungle clearing, until at last, here in the Arabian compound with food in short supply but champagne in large, we would make our last stand as the Beast and his skeleton army shrieked down the sands to toss us as lunch to Constance Rattigan’s seals, and shock the ghost of Aimee Semple McPherson trudging up the surf the other way, astonished but reborn in the Christian dawn.
That was it.
Give or take a metaphor.
69
Crumley arrived at noon and saw me sitting by the telephone.
“I’m calling for an appointment at the studio,” I said.
“With who?”
“Anyone who happens to be in Manny Leiber’s office when that white telephone on the big desk rings.”
“And then?”
“Go turn myself in.”
Crumley looked at the cold surf outside.
“Go soak your head,” he said.
“What’re we going to do?” I exclaimed. “Sit and wait for them to crash the door or come out of the sea? I can’t stand the waiting. I’d rather be dead.”
“Gimme that!”
Crumley grabbed the phone and dialed.
When answered, he had to control his yell: “I’m all well. Cancel my sick leave. I’ll be in tonight!”
“Just when I need you,” I said. “Coward.”