Son of a bitch, she cried. You! Daughter of the Nile! You!
She flung herself against me like a dog, to get all the wetness off on someone else, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow, nose, and mouth, then turned in a circle to show all sides.
Im naked, as usual.
I noticed, Constance.
You havent changed: youre looking at my eyebrows instead of my boobs.
You havent changed. The boobs look firm.
Not bad for a night-swimming fifty-six-year-old former movie queen, huh? Cmon!
She ran up the sand. By the time I reached her outdoor pool she had brought out cheese, crackers, and champagne.
My God. She uncorked the bottle. Its been a hundred years. But I knew someday youd come back. Got marriage out of your blood? Ready for a mistress?
Nope. Thanks. We drank.
You seen Crumley in the last eight hours? Crumley?
Shows in your face. Who died?
Someone twenty years ago, at Maximus Films. Arbuthnot! cried Constance in a burst of intuition.
A shadow crossed her face. She reached for a bathrobe and clothed herself, suddenly very small, a girl child who turned to look down along the coast, as if it were not sand and tide, but the years themselves.
Arbuthnot, she murmured. Christ, what a beauty! What a creator. She paused. Im glad hes dead, she added.
Not quite, I stopped.
For Constance had whirled, as if shot. No! she cried.
No, a thing like him. A thing propped up on a wall to scare me, and
now, you!
Tears of relief burst from her eyes. She gasped as if struck in the stomach.
Damn you! Go inside, she said. Get the vodka.
I brought the vodka and a glass. I watched her throw back two slugs. I was suddenly sober forever, tired of seeing people drink, tired of being afraid when night came.
I could think of nothing to say so I went to the edge of her pool, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and soaked my feet in the water, looking down, waiting.
At last Constance came and sat beside me. Youre back, I said.
Sorry, she said. Old memories die hard.
They sure as hell do, I said, looking along the coastline now myself. At the studio this week, panic attacks. Why would everyone fly apart at a wax dummy in the rain that looked like Arbuthnot?
Is that what happened?
I told her the rest, as I had told it to Crumley, ending with the Brown Derby and my need for her to go there with me. When I finished, Constance, paler, finished one more vodka.
I wish I knew what Im supposed to be scared about! I said. Who wrote that note to get me to the graveyard, so Id introduce a fake Arbuthnot to a waiting world. But I didnt tell the studio I found the dummy, so they found and tried to hide it, almost wild with fear. Is the memory of Arbuthnot that terrible so long after his death?
Yes. Constance put her trembling hand on my wrist. Oh, yes.
Now what? Blackmail? Does someone write Manny Leiber and demand money or more notes will reveal the studios past, Arbuthnots life? Reveal
what? A lost reel of film maybe from twenty years ago, on the night Arbuthnot died. Film at the scene of the accident, maybe, which, if shown, would burn Constantinople, Tokyo, Berlin, and the whole backlot?
Yes! Constances voice was far back in some other year. Get out now. Run. Did you ever dream a big black two-ton bulldog comes in the night and eats you up? A friend of mine had that dream. The big black bulldog ate him. We called it World War II. Hes gone forever. I dont want you gone.
Constance, I cant quit. If Roys alive You dont know that.
and I get him out of there and help him get his job back because its the only right thing to do. I got to. Its all so unfair.
Go out in the water, argue with the sharks, youll get a better deal. You really want to go back to Maximus studios after what you just told me? God. Do you know the last day I was ever there? The afternoon of Arbuthnots funeral.
She let that sink me. Then she threw the anchor after it.
It was the end of the world. I never saw so many sick and dying people in one place. It was like watching the Statue of Liberty crack and fall. Hell. He was Mount Rushmore after an earthquake. Forty times bigger, stronger, greater than Cohn, Zanuck, Warner, and Thalberg rolled in one knish. When they slammed his casket lid in that tomb across the wall, cracks ran all the way uphill to where the Hollywoodland sign fell. It was Roosevelt, dying long before his death.
Constance stopped for she could hear my uneasy breathing. Then she said: Look, is there a brain in my head? Did you know
Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? Think! Its all the redwoods in the world cut so the thunder never stops. Antarctica melts down in tears. Christ gapes his wounds. God holds his breath. Caesars legions, ghosts, ten
million, rise, with bleeding Amazons for eyes. I wrote that when I was sixteen and a sap, when I found out that Juliet and Don Quixote fell dead on the same day, and I cried all night. Youre the only one ever heard those silly lines. Well, thats how it was when Arbuthnot died. I was sixteen again and couldnt stop crying or writing junk.
There went the moon, the planets, Sancho Panza, Rosinante and Ophelia. Half the women at his funeral were old mistresses. A between-the-sheets fan club, plus nieces, girl cousins, and crazy aunts. When we opened our eyes that day it was the second Johnstown flood. Jesus, I do run on. I hear they still got Arbuthnots chair in his old office? Anyone sat in it since with a big enough butt and a brain to fit?
I thought of Manny Leibers behind. Constance said:
God knows how the studio survived. Maybe by Ouija board, with advice from the dead. Dont laugh. Thats Hollywood, reading the Leo-Virgo-Taurus forecasts, not stepping on cracks be-tween 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 maitre 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.
Ill say, she closed her eyes, stop scaring my future-writing dinosaur-loving honorary bastard son.
Yes, I said, please.
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 Constances 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 Christs 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 youre 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. Theres good news and theres 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, its here!
Sopwith! So that was Clarences name.
I was afraid, I said, I hadnt
