“I was glad to see you, son. Sorry I haven’t phoned. Once I forgot funerals in a few hours. Now, it takes days.”
She touched a switch. The lights dimmed and the sixteen-millimeter projector flashed on. Two cowboys knocked each other down on the white wall.
“How can you watch films at a time like this?” I said.
“To rev me up so I can go out and knock Mr. Naked’s block off if he shows again tomorrow night.”
“Don’t even joke about it.” I looked out the French windows at the empty shore where only white waves sounded on the edge of night. “Do you think he telephoned you to tell you where I was, with Annie, and then walked up the beach to stand out there?”
“No. His voice wasn’t right. It’s got to be two different guys. Christ, I can’t figure it, but the one guy, the one with no clothes, he’s got to be some sort of exhibitionist, a flasher, right?
Or why doesn’t he just run up in here and ruin the old lady or kill her or both? It’s the other one, the guy on the phone, that gives me the willies.”
I know, I thought, I’ve heard his breathing.
“He sounds like a real monster,” said Constance.
Yes, I thought. A long way off I heard the big red trolley shriek around an iron curve in the rain, with the voice behind me, chanting the words of a title for Crumley’s book.
“Constance,” I said, and stopped. I was going to tell her I had seen the stranger on the shore many nights ago.
“I’ve got some real estate south of here,” said Constance. “I’m going to go check it tomorrow. Call me, late, yes? And meantime, you want to look into something for me?”
“Anything. Well, almost anything.”
Constance watched William Farnum knock his brother Dustin down, pick him up, knock him down again.
“I think I know who Mr. Naked on the Shore is.”
“Who?”
She searched down along the surf as if his ghost was still there.
“A son-of-a-bitch from my past with a head like a mean German general,” she said, “and a body like all the boys of summer who ever lived.”
The small motorbike pulled up outside the carousel building with a young man in swimshorts astride, his body bronzed and oiled and beautiful. He was wearing a heavy helmet with a dark visor down over his face to his chin, so I couldn’t see his face.
But the body was the most amazing I think I have ever seen. It made me think of a day years before when I had seen a beautiful Apollo walking along the shore with a surf of young boys walking after him, drawn for they knew not what reasons, but they walked in beauty with him, loving but not knowing it was love, never daring to name and trying not to think of this moment later in life.
There are beauties like that in this world, and all men and all women and all children are pulled in their wake, and it is all pure and wondrous and clean and there is no residue of guilt, because nothing happened. You just saw and followed and when the time on the shore was over, he went away and you went off, smiling the kind of smile that is such a surprise you put your hand up an hour later and find it still attached.
On a whole beach in an entire summer you only see bodies like that, on some young man, or some young woman, once. Twice, if the gods are snoozing and not jealous.
Here was Apollo, astride the motorbike, gazing through his dark, featureless visor at me.
“You come to see the old man?” The laugh behind the glass was rich and throaty. “Good! Come on.”
He propped the bike and was in and up the stairs ahead of me. Like a gazelle, he took the steps three at a time and vanished into an upstairs room.
I followed, one step at a time, feeling old.
When I got to his room I heard the shower running. A moment later he came out, stripped and glistening with water, the helmet still over his head. He stood in the bathroom door, looking into me as he might into a mirror, and liking what he saw.
“Well,” he said, inside his helmet, “how do you like the most beautiful boy, the young man that I love?”
I blushed furiously.
He laughed and shucked off his helmet.
“My God,” I said, “it really is you!”
“The old man,” said John Wilkes Hopwood. He glanced down at his body and smiled. “Or the young. Which of us do you prefer?”
I swallowed hard. I had to force myself to speak quickly, for I wanted to run back down the stairs before he closed and locked me in the room.
“That all depends,” I said, “on which one of you has been standing on the beach, late nights, outside Constance Rattigan’s home.”
With wondrous timing, the calliope downstairs in the rotunda started up, running the carousel. It sounded like a dragon that had swallowed a corps of bagpipers and was now trying to throw them back up, in no particular order to no particular tune.
Like a cat that wants time to consider its next move, old-young Hopwood turned his tanned backside toward me, a signal that was supposed to fascinate.
I shut my eyes to the golden sight.
That gave Hopwood a moment to decide what he wanted to say.
“What makes you think I would bother with an old horse like Constance Rattigan?” he said, as he reached into the bathroom and dragged out a towel which he now used to swab his shoulders and chest.
“You were the great love of her life, she was yours. That was the summer all America loved the lovers, yes?”
He turned to check on how much irony might show in my face to match my voice.
“Have you come here because she sent you, to warn me off?”
“Perhaps.”
“How many pushups can you do, can you do sixty laps of a pool, or bike forty miles in a day without sweating, what weights can you lift, and how many people,” I noticed he did not say women, “can you bed in one afternoon?” he asked.
“No, no, no, no, and maybe two,” I said, “to answer all those questions.”
“Then,” said Helmut the Hun, turning to show me Antinous’ magnificent facade, something to match the golden hind, “you are in no position to threaten me, ja?”
His mouth was a razor slit from which bursts of bright shark teeth hissed and chewed.
“I will come and go on the beach,” he said.
With the Gestapo ahead and the summer boys soon after, I thought.
“I admit nothing. Perhaps I was there some nights.” He nodded up the coast. “Perhaps not.”
You could have cut your wrists with his smile.
He hurled the towel at me. I caught it.
“Get my back for me, will you?”
I hurled the towel away. It fell and hung over his head, masking his face. The Horrible Hun was, for a moment, gone. Only Sun King Apollo, his rump as bright as the apples of the gods, remained.
From under the towel his voice said quietly:
“The interview is over.”
“Did it ever really begin?” I said.
I went downstairs as the dragon’s sick calliope music was coming up.
There were no words at all on the Venice Cinema marquee. All the letters were gone.
I read the emptiness half a dozen times, feeling something roll over and die in my chest.
I went around trying all the doors, which were locked, and looked into the box office, which was deserted, and glanced at the big poster frames where Barrymore and Chancy and Norma Shearer had smiled just a few nights ago. Now, nothing.
I backed off and read the emptiness a last time to myself, quietly.
“How do you like the double bill?” asked a voice from behind me.
I turned. Mr. Shapeshade was there, beaming. He handed over a big roll of theater posters. I knew what it was. My diplomas from Nosferatu Institute, Graduate School of Quasimodo, Postgraduate in d’Artagnan and Robin Hood.
“Mr. Shapeshade, you can’t give these to me.”
“You’re a romantic sap, aren’t you?”
“Sure, but…”
“Take, take. Farewell, goodbye. But another farewell, goodbye, out beyond. Kummensei pier oudt!”
He left the diplomas in my hands and trotted off.
I found him at the end of the pier, pointing down and watching my face to see me crumple and seize the pier rail, staring over.
The rifles were down there, silent for the first time in years. They lay on the sea bottom about fifteen feet under, but the water was clear because the sun was coming out.
I counted maybe a dozen long, cold, blue metal weapons down there where the fish swam by.
“Some farewell, huh?” Shapeshade glanced where I was looking. “One by one. One by one. Early this morning. I came running up, yelled, what’re you doing!? What does it look like? she said. And one by one, over and down. They’re closing your place, they’re closing mine this afternoon, so what the hell, she said. And one by one.”
“She didn’t,” I said, and stopped. I searched the waters under the pier and far out. “She didn’t?”
“Was she the last one in? No, no. Just stood here a long time, with me, watching the ocean. They won’t be here long, she said. Week from now, gone. A bunch of stupid guys will dive and bring them up, yes? What could I say. Yes.”
“She leave any word when she went?”
I could not take my eyes off the long rifles that shone in the flowing tide.
“Said she was going somewhere to milk cows. But no bulls,
