You didnt?!
Wouldnt you like to have seen? Or the fires in London in 1940. Every time mankind behaves abominably, I know happiness!
Dont good things make you happy? Artistic people, creative men and women?
No, no. Groc sped on. That depresses. A lull between stupidities. Just because there are a few naive fools mucking up the landscape with their cut roses and still-life arts only shows in greater relief the troglodytes, midget worms and sidewinding vipers that oil the underground machineries and run the world to ruin. I decided years ago, since the continents are vast sludge works, I would buy the best-size boots and wallow in it like a babe. But this is ridiculous, us locked inside a stupid factory. I want to laugh at, not be destroyed by, it. Hold on! We swerved past Calvary.
I almost yelled.
For Calvary was gone.
Beyond, the incinerator lifted great plumes of black smoke. That must be the three crosses, I said.
Good! Groc snorted. I wonderwill J. C. sleep at the Midnight Mission tonight?
I swiveled my head to look at him. You know J. C. well?
The muscatel Messiah? I made him! As I made others eyebrows and bosoms, why not Christs hands! So I pared the extra flesh to make his fingers seem delicate: the hands of a Saviour. Why not? Is not religion a joke? People think they are saved. We know theyre not. But the crown-of-thorns touch, the stigmata! Groc shut his eyes as he almost drove into a telephone pole, swerved and stopped.
I guessed you had done that, I said, at last.
If you act Christ, be Him! I told J. C. I will make you spike marks to show at Renaissance exhibitions! I will sew you the stigmata of Masaccio, da Vinci, Michelangelo! From the Pietas marble flesh! And, as youve seen, on special nights
the stigmata bleed.
I knocked the car door wide. I think Ill walk the rest of the way.
No, no, Groc apologized, laughing shrilly. I need you. What an irony! To get me out the front gate, later. Go talk to Botwin, then we run like hell.
I held the door half open, undecided. Groc seemed in such a joyful panic, hilarious to the point of hysteria, I could only shut the door. Groc drove on.
Ask, ask, said Groc.
Okay, I tried. What about all those faces you made beautiful? Groc pedaled the gas.
Theyll last forever, I told them, and the fools believed. Anyway, I am retiring, if I can get out the front gate. I have bought passage on a round-the-world cruise tomorrow. After thirty years my laughs have turned to snake spit. Manny Leiber? Will die any day. Doc? Did you know? Hes gone.
Where?
Who knows? But Grocs eyes slid north toward the studio graveyard wall. Excommunicated?
We drove. Groc nodded ahead. Now Maggie Botwin I like. Shes a perfectionist surgeon, like me.
She doesnt sound like you.
If she ever did, shed die. And you? Well, disillusionment takes time. Youll be seventy before you find youve crossed minefields yelling to an idiot troop, this way! Your films will be forgotten.
No, I said.
Groc glanced over at my set chin and stubborn upper lip.
No, he admitted. You have the look of the true sainted fool. Not your films.
We rounded another corner and I nodded to the carpenters, the cleaners, and painters: Who ordered all this work?
Manny, of course.
Who ordered Manny? Who really gives orders here? Someone behind a mirror? Someone inside a wall?
Groc braked the car swiftly and looked ahead. I could see the stitch marks around his ears, nice and clear.
It cant be answered.
No? I said. I look around, what do I see? A studio, in the midst of production on eight films. One a huge one, our Jesus epic, with two more days of shooting to go. And suddenly, on a whim, someone says: Slam the doors. And the crazed painting and cleaning happens. Its madness to shut a studio with a budget that runs at least ninety to a hundred thousand dollars a day. What gives?
What? said Groc, quietly.
Well, I see Doc and hes a jellyfish, poisonous, but no spine. I look at Manny and his behind is just right for highchairs. You? Theres a mask behind your mask and another under that. None of you have the dynamite kegs or the electric pump plunger to knock the whole damn studio down. Yet down it goes. I see a studio as big as a white whale. Harpoons fly. So theres got to be a real maniac captain.
Tell me, then, Groc said, Who is Ahab?
A dead man standing on a ladder in the graveyard, looking over, giving orders. And you all run, I said.
Groc blinked three slow iguana-lizard blinks of his great dark eyes. Not me, he said, smiling.
No? Why not?
Because, you damned fool. Groc beamed, looking at the sky. Think! There are only two geniuses smart enough to have manufactured that dead man of yours on that ladder in the rain to look over the wall and stop peoples hearts! And here Groc was taken with a paroxysm of laughter that almost killed. Who could model a face like that!
Roy Holdstrom! Yes! And?!
Lenins I stammeredLenins makeup man?
Stanislau Groc turned the full light of his smile on me. -Stanislau Groc, I said, numbly. You.
He bowed his head modestly.
You! I thought. Not the Beast hiding in the tombs, climbing the ladder to position the scarecrow Arbuthnot and stop the studio dead, no! But Groc, the man who laughs, the tiny Conrad Veidt with the eternal grin sewn to his face!
Why? I said.
Why? Groc smirked. My God, to stir things up! Jesus, its been boring here for years! Doc sick with needles. Manny ripping himself in two. Myself, not getting enough laughs on this ship of fools. So raise the dead! But you spoiled it, found the body but told no one. I hoped youd run yelling through the streets.
Instead, the next day, you clammed up. I had to make a few anonymous calls to get the studio into the graveyard. Then, riots! Pandemonium.
Did you send the other note to coax me and Roy to the Brown Derby to see the Beast?
I did.
And all, I said, numbly, for a joke?
Not quite. The studio, as you have noticed, sits astride that ravenous crack known as the San Andreas fault, ripe for quakes. I felt them months ago. So I propped the ladder and raised the dead. And raised my pay so you might say.
Blackmail, Crumley whispered in the back of my mind.
Groc squirmed with joy at his own telling: Scare Manny, Doc, J. C., everyone, including the Beast!
The Beast? You wanted to scare him?!
Why not? The mob! The bunch! Get them all to pay, as long as they didnt find out I was behind it. Run a riot, take the payola, head for the exit!
Which means, good God, I said, you must have known everything about Arbuthnots past, his death. Was he poisoned? Was that it?
Ah, said Groc, theories, speculations.
How many people know youve bought that round-the-world ticket? Only you, poor sad lovely doomed boy. But I think someones guessed.
Why else is the front gate shut and me trapped?
Yes, I said. They just threw Christs tomb out with the lumber. They need a body to go with it.
Me, Groc said, suddenly bleak.
A studio police car had pulled up beside us. A guard leaned out.
Manny Leiber wants you.
Groc sank down, his flesh into his blood, his blood into his soul, his soul into nothingness.
This is it, whispered Groc.
I thought of Mannys office and the mirror behind the desk and the catacombs beyond the mirror.
Break and run, I said.
Fool, said Groc. How far would I get? Groc patted my hand with trembling fingers. Youre a jerk, but a good jerk. No, from here on, anyone seen with me goes down the maelstrom when they pull the chain. Here.
He shoved his briefcase over on the seat, opened it and shut it again. I saw a flash of bundled one-hundred-dollar bills.
Grab, said Groc. Its no use to me now. Hide it fast. High-on-the-hog money for the rest of your life.
No, thanks.
He gave it another shove against my leg. I pulled away, as if a dagger of ice had stabbed my knee.
Jerk, he said. But a good jerk. I got out.
The police car, creeping ahead, its motor puttering, honked its horn quietly, once. Groc stared at it and then at me, looking at my ears, my eyelids, my chin.
Your skin wont need work for, oh, thirty years, give or take a year. His mouth was thick with phlegm. He swiveled his eyes, grasped the wheel with snatching, grappling fingers, and drove away.
The police car turned the corner, his car followed, a small funeral cortege moving toward the back studio wall.
I climbed the stairs to Maggie Botwins palace of reptiles. So called because of all the dropped scenes, the sidewinder film coils in the bin or slithering across the floor.
The small room was empty. The old ghosts had fled. The snakes had gone to ground somewhere else.
I stood in the middle of empty shelves, looking around until I found a note pasted to the top of her silent Moviola.
DEAR GENIUS. TRIED CALLING YOU DURING THE PAST TWO HOURS. WE HAVE QUIT THE BATTLE OF JERICHO AND FLED. WE WILL FIGHT THE FINAL BATTLE AT MY HILLSIDE BUNKER. CALL. COME! SIEG HEIL, FRITZ AND JACQUELINE THE RIPPER.
I folded the note to stash in my diary and read in my old age. I walked down the steps and out of the studio. There were no storm troopers in sight.
Walking along the shore,
