“You’re a terrible liar,” said Fannie. “Where have you been? I am exhausted, waiting for you to come visit. Are you ever tired, just worn out, with waiting? I’ve waited, dear young man, fearful for you. Have you been sad?”
“Very sad, Fannie.”
“There. I knew it. It was that dreadful old man in the lion cage, wasn’t it? How dare he make you sad?”
“He couldn’t help it, Fannie.” I sighed. “I imagine he would much rather have been down at the Pacific Electric ticket office counting the punch-confetti on his vest.”
“Well, Fannie will cheer you up. Would you put the needle on the record there, my dear? Yes, that’s it. Mozart to dance and sing to. We must invite Pietro Massinello up, mustn’t we, some day soon. The Magic Flute is just his cup of tea, and let him bring his pets.”
“Yes, Fannie,” I said.
I put the needle on a record which hissed with promise.
“Poor boy,” said Fannie. “You do look sad.”
There was a faint scratching on the door.
“That’s Henry,” said Fannie. “He never knocks.”
I went to the door but before I could open it, Henry’s voice behind it said, “Only me.”
I opened the door and Henry sniffed. “Spearmint gum. That’s how I know you. You ever chew anything else?”
“Not even tobacco.”
“Your cab’s here,” said Henry.
“My what?”
“Since when can you afford a taxi?” asked Fannie, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. We had had a glorious two hours with Mozart and the very air was luminous around the big lady. “So?”
“Yeah, since when can I afford…” I said, but stopped, for Henry, outside the door, was shaking his head once: no. His finger went to his lips with caution.
“It’s your friend,” he said. “Taxi driver knows you, from Venice. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, frowning. “If you say so.”
“Oh, and here. This is for Fannie. Pietro said give it over. He’s so crammed full downstairs, no room for this.”
He handed over a plump purring calico cat.
I took and carried the sweet burden back to Fannie, who began to purr herself when she held the beast.
“Oh, my dear!” she cried, happy with Mozart and calico. “What a dream cat, what a dream!”
Henry nodded to her, nodded to me, and went away down the hall.
I went to give Fannie a big hug.
“Listen, oh listen to his motor,” she cried, holding the pillow cat up for a kiss.
“Lock your door, Fannie,” I said.
“What?” she said. “What?”
Coming back downstairs, I found Henry still waiting in the dark, half-hidden against the wall.
“Henry, for God’s sake, what’re you doing?”
“Listening,” he said.
“For what?”
“This house, this place. Shh. Careful. Now.”
His cane came up and pointed like an antenna along the hall.
“There. You hear?”
Far away a wind stirred. Far away a breeze wandered the dark. The beams settled. Someone breathed. A door creaked.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s ’cause you trying. Don’t try. Just be. Just listen. Now.”
I listened and my spine chilled.
“Someone in this house,” whispered Henry. “Don’t belong here. I got this sense. I’m no fool. Someone up there, wandering around, up to no good.”
“Can’t be, Henry.”
“Is,” he whispered. “A blind man tells you. Stranger underfoot. Henry has the word. You don’t hear me, you fall downstairs or…”
Drown in a bathtub, I thought. But what I said was, “You going to stay here all night?”
“Someone’s got to stand guard.”
A blind man? I thought.
He read my mind. He nodded. “Old Henry, sure. Now run along. It’s a big fancy-smelling Duesenberg out front. No taxi. I lied. Who would be picking you up this late, know anyone with a fancy car?”
“No one.”
“Get on out. I’ll mind Fannie for us. But who’ll mind Jimmy now, not even Jim. Not even Sam…”
I started out from one night into another.
“Oh, one last thing.”
I paused. Henry said:
“What was the bad news you brought tonight and didn’t tell? Not to me. Not to Fannie.”
I gasped.
“How did you know?”
I thought of the old woman sinking in the riverbed, silent, in her sheets, out of sight. I thought of Cal, the piano lid slammed on his maple leaf hands.
“Even though,” explained Henry with good reason, “you chew spearmint gum, your breath was sour tonight, young sir. Which means you’re not digesting your food proper. Which means a bad day for writers come inland with no roots.”
“It was a bad day for everyone, Henry.”
“I’m still huffing and puffing.” Henry stood tall and shook his cane at the darkening halls where the lightbulbs were burning out and the souls were guttering low. “Watchdog Henry. You, now, git!”
I went out the door toward something that not only smelled but looked like a 1928 Duesenberg.
It was Constance Rattigan’s limousine. It was as long and bright and beautiful as a Fifth Avenue shop window somehow arrived on the wrong side of L.A.
The back door of the limo was open. The chauffeur was in the front seat, hat crammed down over his eyes, staring straight ahead. He didn’t look at me. I tried to get his attention, but the limousine was waiting, its motor humming, and I was wasting time.
I had never been in such a vehicle in my life.
It might be my one and only chance.
I leaped in.
No sooner had I hit the back seat than the limousine swerved in one boa-constrictor glide away from the curb. The back door slammed shut on me and we were up to sixty by the time we reached the end of the block. Tearing up Temple Hill we made something like seventy-five.
We managed to make all of the green lights to Vermont where we wheeled over to Wilshire and took it out as far as Westwood for no special reason, maybe because it was scenic.
I sat in the back seat like Robert Armstrong on King Kong’s lap, crowing and babbling to myself, knowing where I was going but wondering why I deserved all this.
Then I remembered the nights when I had come up to call on Fannie and met this very same smell of Chanel and leather and Paris nights in the air outside her door. Constance Rattigan had been there only a few minutes before. We had missed colliding by one or two hairs of mink and an exhalation of Grand Marnier.
As we prepared to turn at Westwood we passed a cemetery which was so placed that if you weren’t careful, you drove into a parking lot. Or was it that some days, looking for a parking lot, you mistakenly motored between tombstones? A confusion.
Before I could give it great mind, the cemetery and the parking lot were left behind and we were halfway to the sea.
At Venice and Windward we wheeled south along the shore. We passed like a slight rainfall, that quiet and swift, not far from my small apartment. I saw my typewriter window lit with a faint light. I wonder if I am in there, dreaming this? I thought. And we left behind my deserted office telephone booth with Peg two thousand miles away at the end of the silent line. Peg, I thought, if you could see me now!
We swerved in behind the big, bone-white Moorish fort at exactly midnight and the limousine stopped as easily as a wave sinks in sand and the limo door banged and the chauffeur, still quiet after the long, silent glide, streaked into the backside of the fort and did not appear again.
I waited a full minute for something to happen. When it did not, I slid out of the back of the limousine, like a shoplifter, guilty for no reason and wondering whether to escape.
I saw a dark figure upstairs in the house. Lights went on as the chauffeur moved about the Moorish fort on the Venice sands.
I stayed quietly, anyway. I looked at my watch. As the minute hand counted off the last second of the last minute, the front portico lights went on.
I walked up to the open front door and stepped into an empty house. At a distance down a hall I saw a small figure darting about the kitchen making drinks. A small girl in a maid’s outfit. She waved at me and ran.
I walked into a living room filled with a menagerie of pillows of every size from Pomeranian to Great Dane. I sat on the biggest one and sank down even as my soul kept sinking in me.
The maid ran in, put down two drinks on a tray, and ran out before I could see her (there was only candlelight in this room). Over her shoulder she threw away “Drink!” in what was or was not a French accent.
It was a cool white wine and a good one and I needed it. My cold was worse. I was sneezing and honking and sneezing all the time.
In the year 2078 they excavated an old tomb or what they thought to be a tomb on the shoreline of California where, it was rumored, queens and kings once ruled, then went away with the tides along the flats.
Some were buried with their chariots, it was said. Some with relics of their arrogance and magnificence. Some left behind only images of themselves in strange canisters which, held to the light and spun on a shuttle, talked in tongues and tossed black-and-white shadow-shows on empty tapestry screens.
One of the tombs found and opened was the tomb of a queen and in that vault was not a speck of dust, nor furniture, just pillows in mid-floor and all around, row on row, rising to the ceiling, and stack on stack, reaching to touch that ceiling, canisters labeled with the
