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"I don't have to answer."
"Let me try a different question. Do you like yourself?"
"What!?"
"Look. I like myself. I'm not perfect, hell no, but I never bedded anyone if I felt they were breakable. Lots of men say hit the hay, live! Not me. Even when it's offered on a plate. So with no sins, I don't often have bad dreams. Oh, sure, there was the time I ran away from my grandma when I was a kid, ran away and left her blocks behind, so she came home weeping. I still can't forgive myself. Or hitting my dog, just once, I hit him. And that still hurts, thirty years later. Not much of a list, right, to make bad dreams?"
Constance stood very still.
"God, God," she said, "how I wish I had your dreams."
"Ask and I'll give you the loan."
"You poor dumb innocent stupid kid. That's why I love you. Somewhere, at heaven's gate, can I trade in my old chimney soot nightmares for fresh clean angel wings?"
"Ask your brother."
"He threw me downstairs to hell long ago."
"You haven't answered my question. Do you like yourself?"
"What I see in the mirror, sure. It's what's inside the glass, deep under, scares me. I wake late nights with all that stuff swimming behind my face. Christ, that's sad. Can you help me?"
"How? I don't know which is which, you or your mirror. What's up front, what's beneath."
Constance shifted her feet.
"Can't you stand still?" I said. "If I say 'red light,' stop. Your feet are stuck in that cement. What then?"
I saw her shoes ache to pull free.
"People are staring at us!"
"The theater's closed. Most of the lights are out. The forecourt is empty."
"You don't understand. I've got to go. Straight on."
I looked up at the front doors of Grauman's, still open, with some workmen carrying equipment inside.
"It's the next step, but God, how do I get there?"
"Just walk."
"You don't understand. It's hopscotch. There must be other footprint paths to the door, if I can find them. Which way do I jump?"
Her head moved. The dark hat fell to the pavement. Constance's close-cropped bronze hair came into view. She still stared ahead, as if afraid to show me her face.
"If I say go, what then?" I asked.
"I'll go."
"And meet me again, where?" "God knows. Quick! Say 'go.' They're catching up." "Who?"
"All those others. They'll kill me if I don't kill first. You wouldn't want me to die right here? Well, would you?" I shook my head. "Ready, set, go?" she asked.
"Ready, set."
And she was gone.
She zigzagged across the forecourt, a dozen fast steps to the right, another dozen to the left, pause, and a final two dozen steps to a third set of prints, where she froze, as if it were a land mine.
A car horn hooted. I turned. When I glanced back, the Grauman's front door swallowed a shadow.
I counted to ten to give her a real start, then I bent down to pick up the tiny shoes she had left behind in her footprints. Then I walked over to the first set of prints where she had paused. Sally Simpson, 1926. The name was just an echo from a lost time.
I moved on to the second set of prints. Gertrude Erhard, 1924. An even fainter ghost of time. And the final footprints nearer the front door. Dolly Dawn, 1923. Peter Pan. Dolly Dawn? A fleeting mist of years touched me. I almost remembered.
"Hell," I whispered. "No way."
And got ready to let Uncle Sid's fake Chinese palace swallow me with one huge dark dragon swallow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I STOPPED just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, "Lamentable!"
Which made me pull out Rattigan's Book of the Dead.
I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman's. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.
Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples's bathtub death. And here was his name-alive?-on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.
And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.
Rattigan— I looked at the dark beyond the red door-
Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: "There's nothing inside to steal!"
A gaunt homeless guy stood to my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.
"Go ahead." I read his lips. "You got nothing to lose."
Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?
The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.
And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into die theater's darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INSIDE the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.
One of the wax figurines blinked. "Yes?"
God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.
Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.
"Yes?" the Chinese wax mannequin said again.
I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.
It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville's whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.
My God, I thought, I'm three years old.
That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how'd he do that?
And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you'd find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.
They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.
"It's not Green Glade Cemetery," said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.
I had spoken aloud.
"When was this theater built?" I murmured.
The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: "1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn't yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino's ruptured appendix in '26. At Grauman's opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That's where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous 'I Don't Care' and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you'll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, '34. You listening?"
"Clyde Rustler," I blurted.
"Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in '29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony."
I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.
My shadow friend said: "No elevator. Two hundred steps!"
A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn't pee three times during your film, you had it made!
I climbed.
I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I REACHED the back wall of Mount Everest and tapped on the old projection-room door.
"Is that who I think it is?" a terrified voice cried.
"No," I said quietly, "just me. Back for one last matinee after forty years."
That was a stroke of genius; upchucking my past.
The terrified voice simmered down.
"What's the password?"
It came right off my tongue, a boy's voice.
"Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. Hoot Gibson. Ken May-nard. Bob Steele. Helen Twelvetrees. Vilma Banky…"
"That'll do."
It was a long while before I heard a giant spider brush the door panel. The door whined. A silver shadow leaned out, a living metaphor of the black-and-white phantoms I had seen flickering across the screen a lifetime ago.
"No one ever comes up here," said this old, old man.
"No one?"
"No one ever knocks on my door," said the man with silver hair and silver face and silver clothes, bleached out by seventy years of living under a rock in a high place and gazing down at unreality ten thousand times. "No one knows I'm here. Not even me."
"You're here. You're Clyde Rustler."
"Am I?" For a moment I thought he might body-search his suspenders and sleeve garters.
"Who are you?" He poked his face like a turtle's from its shell.
I said my name.
"Never heard of you." He glanced down at the empty screen. "You one of them?"
"The dead stars?"
"They sometimes climb up. Fairbanks came last night."
"Zorro, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood? He knocked at your door?"
"Scratched. Being dead has its problems. You coming in or out?"
I stepped in quickly before he could change his mind.
The film projectors stood facing emptiness in a room that looked like a Chung King burial chamber. It smelled of dust and sand and acrid celluloid. There was only one chair between the projectors. As he'd said, no one ever came to visit.
I stared at the crowded walls. There must've been three dozen pictures nailed there, some in cheap Woolworth frames, others in silver, still others mere scraps torn from old Silver Screen magazines, photographs of thirty women, no two alike.
The old, old man let a smile haunt his face.
"My sweetheart dears, from when I was an active volcano."
The most ancient of ancient men looked out at me from behind a maze of wrinkles, the kind you get when you search the icebox at six A.M. and take out last night's pre-mixed martinis.
"I keep the door locked. I thought you were just here, yelling outside."
"Not me."
"Someone was. Outside of that, nobody's been up here since Lowell Sherman died."
"That's two obituaries in ten minutes. Winter 1934. Cancer and pneumonia."
"Nobody knows that!"
"I roller-skated by the Coliseum one Saturday 1934 before a football game. Lowell Sherman came in whooping and barking. I got his autograph and said, 'Take care.' He died two days later."
"Lowell Sherman." The old, old man regarded me with a new luster in his eyes. "As long as you're alive, he is, too."
Clyde Rustler collapsed in the one chair and sized me up again. "Lowell Sherman. Why in hell did you make the long climb up here? People have died climbing. Uncle Sid climbed up once or twice, said to hell with it, built the bigger projection booth a thousand yards downslope in the real world, if there is a real one. Never went down to see. So?"
For he saw that I was casting my gaze around his primeval nest at those walls teeming with dozens of faces, forever young.
"Would you like a rundown on these mountain-lion street cats?" He leaned and pointed.
"Her name was Carlotta or Midge or Diana. She was a Spanish flirt, a Cal Coolidge 'It girl' with a skirt up to her navel, a Roman queen fresh out of DeMille's milk bath. Then she was a vamp named Illysha, a typist called Pearl, an English tennis player-Pamela. Sylvia? Ran a nudist flytrap in Cheyenne. Some called her 'Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah.' Dressed like Dolley Madison, sang 'Tea for Two,' 'Chicago,' popped out of a big clamshell like the pearl of paradise, Flo Ziegfeld's craze. Fired by her father at thirteen for conduct unbecoming a human who ripened fast: Willa-Kate. Worked in a chophouse chink joint: Lila Wong. Got more votes than the president, Coney Island Beauty Pageant, '29: not-so-plain Willa. Got off the night train in Glendale: Barbara Jo, next day, almost, head of Glory Films: Anastasia Alice Grimes-"
He stopped. I looked up. "Which brings us to Rattigan," I said.
Clyde Rustler froze in place.
"You said no one's been up here for years. But-she came up here today, right? Maybe to look at these pictures? Did she or didn't she?"
The old, old man stared at his dusty hands, then slowly rose to face a brass whistle tube in the wall, one of those submarine devices that you blew so it shrieked and you yelled orders.
"Leo? Wine! A two-dollar tip!"
A tiny voice squealed from the brass nozzle, "You don't drink!"
"I do now, Leo. And hot dogs!"
The brass nozzle squealed and died.
The old, old man grunted and stared at the wall. A long, terribly long five minutes passed. While we waited I opened my notepad and took down the names scrawled on the pictures. Then we heard the hot dogs and wine rattling up the dumbwaiter. Clyde Rustler stared as if he had forgotten that tiny elevator. He took forever opening the wine with a corkscrew, sent by Leo, from down below. There was only one glass.
"One," he apologized. "You first. I'm not afraid of catching anything."
"I got nothing for you to catch." I drank and handed the glass over. He drank and I could see the relaxation move his body.
"And now?" he said. "Let me show you some clips I glued together. Why? Last week a stranger called from down below. That voice on the phone. Was once Harry Cohn's live-in nurse, never said yes, but yes, yes, Harry, yes! Said she was looking for Robin Locksley. Robin Hood. Searching for Robin of Locksley. An actress took that name, a flash in the pan. She disappeared in Hearst's castle or his backside kitchen. But now this voice, years later, asks for Locksley. Spooked me. I ran through my cans and found the one film she made in 1929, when sound really took over. Watch."
He fitted the film into the projector and switched on the lamp. The image shot down to flood the big screen.
On the screen a circus butterfly spun, flirting her gossamer wings, dropping, to pull the bit from her smile, laugh, then run, pursued by white knights and black villains. "Recognize her?"
“Nope.”
"Try this." He spun the film. The screen filled with a smoldering bank of snow fires, a Russian noblewoman, smoking long languid cigarettes, wringing her handkerchief, someone had died or was going to die.
"Well?" said Clyde Rustler hopefully.
"Nope."
"Try again!"
The projector lit the darkness with 1923; a tomboy climbing a tree to shake down fruit, laughing, but you could see small crab apples under her shirtfront.
" Tomboy Sawyer. A girl! Who? Damn!"
The old man filled the screen with a dozen more images, starting with 1925, ending with 1952, open, shut, mysterious, obvious, light, dark, wild, composed, beautiful, plain, willful, innocent.
"You don't know any of those? My God, I've racked my brain. There must be some reason why I've saved these damned clips. Look at me, dammit! Know how old I am?"
"Around ninety, ninety-five?"
"Ten thousand years! Jesus. They found me floating in a basket on the Nile! I fell downhill with the Tablets. I doused the fire in the burning bush. Mark Antony said, 'Loose the dogs of war'; I loosed the lot. Did I know all these wonders? I wake nights hitting my head to make the jelly beans shake in place. Every time I've almost got the answer, I move my head and the damned beans fall. You sure you don't remember these clips or the faces on the wall? Good grief, we've got a mystery!"
"I was about to say the same. I came up here because someone else came. Maybe that voice that called from down below."
"What voice?"
"Constance Rattigan," I said.
I let the fog settle behind his eyes.
"What's she got to do with this?" he wondered.
"Maybe she knows. Last time I saw her she was standing in her own footprints."
"And you think she might know who all these faces belong to, what all the names mean? Hold on. Outside the door… I guess it was today. Can't be yesterday. Today she said, 'Hand 'em over!'"
"Hand what over?"
"Hell, what do you see in this damn empty place worth handing over?"
I looked at the pictures on the wall. Clyde Rustler saw my look.
"Why would anyone want those?" he said. "Not worth nothing. Even I don't know why in hell I nailed them there. Are they wives or some old girlfriends?"
"How many of each did you have?"
"I don't have the fingers to count."
"One thing for sure, Constance wanted you to hand 'em over. Was she jealous?"
"Constance? You got road rage in the streets, she had bed rage. Wanted to grab all my lovelies, whoever in hell they were, and stomp, tear, and burn them. Go on. Finish the wine. I got things to do."
"Like what?"
But he was rethreading the film clips in the projector, fascinated by a thousand and one nights past.
I moved along the wall and scribbled furiously, writing down the names under all of the pictures, and then said:
"If Constance comes back, will you let me know?"
"For the pictures? I'll throw her downstairs."
"Someone else said that. Only it was to hell instead of the second balcony. Why would you throw her?"
"There's gotta be a reason, right? Don't recollect! And why did you say you climbed up here? And what was it you called me?"
"Clyde Rustler."
"Oh, yeah. Him. It just came to me. Did you know I am Constance's father?"
"What!?"
"Constance's father. I thought I told you before. Now you can leave. Good night."
I went out and shut the door on whoever that was and the pictures on the wall, whoever they were.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DOWNSTAIRS, I edged to the front of the theater and stared down. Then I stepped into the orchestra pit, and edged to the back wall and peered though a door into a long hall that diminished into complete night and a night inside that night, where all the old abandoned dressing rooms were.
I was tempted to call a name.
But what if she answered?
Far off down that black corridor, I thought I heard the sound of a hidden sea, or a river flowing somewhere in the dark.
I put one foot forward and pulled back.
I heard that dark ocean heave on an endless shore again.
Then I turned, and went away up through the great darkness, out of the pit into the aisles with everyone gone, rushing toward the doors leading out to an evening sky most dearly welcome.
I carried Rattigan's incredibly small shoes over to her footprints and placed them neatly down to fit.
At which instant I felt my guardian angel touching my shoulder.
"You're back from the dead," said Crumley.
"You can say that again," I said, staring at the wide red doorway of Grauman's Chinese with all those film creatures swimming in the dark.
"She's in there," I murmured. "I wish I knew a way to get her out."
"Dynamite tied to a bundle of cash might do it."
"Crumley!"
"Sorry, I forgot we were talking about Florence Nightingale."
I stepped back. Crumley regarded Rattigan's tiny shoes lodged in prints put down a long, long time ago. "Not exactly ruby slippers," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
we rode across town in a warm silence. I tried to describe the great black sea of Grauman's.
"There's this big dressing-room cellar, maybe full of stuff from 1925, 1930. I have a feeling she might be there."
"Save your breath," said Crumley.
"Someone's got to go down there to see."
"You afraid to go there alone?"
"Not exactly."
"That means damn right! Shut up and ride shotgun."
We were soon at Crumley's. He put a cold beer against my brow.
"Hold it there until you feel it cure your thinking."
I held it there. Crumley switched on the TV and began switching through the channels.
"I don't know which is worse," he said, "your gab or the local TV news."
"Father Seamus Rattigan," the TV said.
"Hold it!" I cried.
Crumley switched back.
"… Vibiana's Cathedral."
And a blizzard of static and snow.
Crumley hit the damned TV with his fist.
"… Natural causes. Rumored to be future cardinal…"
Another snowstorm. And the TV went dead.
"I been meaning to have it fixed," said Crumley.
We both stared at his telephone, telling it to ring.
We both jumped.
Because it did!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT was a woman, Father Rattigan's assistant, Betty Kelly, inarticulate, going down for the third time, begging for mercy.
I offered what small mercy I had, to come visit.
"Don't wait, or I'm dead myself," she wailed.
Betty Kelly was out in front of St. Vibiana's when Crumley and I arrived. We stood for a long moment before she saw us, gave a quick, half-realized wave, and dropped her gaze. We came to stand by her. I introduced Crumley.
"I'm sorry," I said. She raised her head.
"Then you are the one was talking to Father!" she said. "Oh, Lord, let's get inside."
The big doors were locked for the night. We went in through a door at the side. Inside she swayed and almost fell. I caught and led her to one of the pews, where she sat breathless.
"We came as quick as we could," I said.
"You knew him?" She gasped. "It's so confusing. You knew someone in common, an acquaintance, a friend?"
"A relative," said Crumley. "The same name."
"Rattigan! She killed him. Wait!" She grabbed my sleeve.
For I was on my feet.
"Sit," she gasped. "I don't mean murder. But she killed him."
I sat back down, gone cold. Crumley backed off. She clutched my elbow and lowered her voice.
"She was here, sometimes three times a day, in confession, whispering, then raving. Poor Father looked like he'd been shot when she left, but she hardly left, just stayed until he fell out starving, couldn't eat, and the liquor cabinet low. He let her rave. Later I'd check the confessional: empty. But the air smelled like it had been hit by lightning. She kept shouting the same thing."
"What?"
'"I'm killing them, killing them!' she yelled. And I'll keep on killing them until I've killed them all. Help me to kill them, bless their souls! Then I'll kill the rest. Kill them all! Get them off my back, out of my life! Then, Father,' she cried, Til be free, clean! But help me bury them so they won't come back! Help me!'
'"Off! Away!' Father yelled. 'My God, what are you asking me to do?'
'"Help me put them away, pray over them so they won't come back, stay dead! Say yes!'
"'Get out!' Father cried, and then she said worse."
"What?"
"She said, 'Then damn you, damn, damn, damn you to hell!' Her voice was so loud, people left. I could hear her weeping. The Father must have been in a state of shock. Then I heard footsteps running in the dark. I waited for Father Rattigan to speak, say anything. Then I dared open the door. He was there. And silent because… he was dead."
And here the secretary let the tears shed themselves down her cheeks.
"Poor man," she said. "Those dreadful words stopped his heart, as they almost stopped mine. We must find that awful woman. Make her take back the words so he can live again. God, what am I saying? Him slumped there as if she had drained his blood. You know her? Tell her she's done her worst. There, I've said it. Now I've thrown up, and where do you go to be clean? It's yours, and sorry I did it to you."
I looked down at my suit as if expecting to find her vile upchuck.
Crumley walked over to the confessional and opened both doors and stared in at the darkness. I came to stand next to him and take a deep breath.
"Smell it?" said Betty Kelly. "It's there and ruined. I've told the cardinal to tear it down and burn it."
I took a final breath. A touch of charcoal and St. Elmo's fires.
Crumley closed the doors.
"It won't help," Betty Kelly said. "She's still there. So is he, poor soul, dead tired and dead. Two coffins, side by side. God help us. I've used you all up. You have the same look the poor father had."
"Don't tell me that," I said weakly.
"I won't," she said.
And led by Crumley, I beggared my way to the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I COULDN'T nap, I couldn't stay awake, I couldn't write, I couldn't think. At last, confused and maddened, very late I called St. Vibiana's again.
When at last Betty Kelly answered she sounded like she was in a cave of torments.
"I can't talk!"
"Quickly!" I begged. "You remember all she said in the confessional? Anything else important, consequential, different?"
"Dear God," said Betty Kelly. "Words and words and words. But wait. She kept saying you must forgive all of us! All of us, every one! There was no one in the booth but her. All of us, she said. You still there?"
At last I said, "I'm here."
"Is there more you want?"
"Not now."
I hung up.
"All of us," I whispered. "Forgive all of us!"
I called Crumley.
"Don't say it." He guessed. "No sleep tonight? And you want me to meet you at Rattigan's in an hour. You going to search the place?"
"Just a friendly rummage."
"Rummage! What is it, theory or hunch?"
"Pure reason."
"Sell that in a sack for night soil!" Crumley was gone.
"He hang up on you?" I asked my mirror. "Hung up on you," my mirror said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE phone rang. I picked it up as if it were red-hot.
"Is that the Martian?" a voice said.
"Henry!" I cried.
"That's me," the voice said. "It's crazy, but I miss you, son. Kinda dumb, a colored saying that to an ethnic flying-saucer pilot."
"I've never heard better," I said, choking up.
"Hell," said Henry, "if you start crying, I'm gone."
"Don't," I sniffled. "Oh God, Henry, how fine it is to hear your voice!"
"Which means you've milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won't-say. You want me polite or impolite?"
"Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie's back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but-"
"Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie." He blew his nose. "How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?"
"Yesterday."
"I'm there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash."
"You know Grauman's Chinese?"
"Hell, yes!"
"How quickly can you meet me there?"
"As quick as you want, son. I'll be standing in Bill Robinson's tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?"
"Almost."
I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan's, but that I'd be bringing Henry with me.
"The blind leading the blind," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
he was standing exactly where he said he would be: in Bill Robinson's "copasetic" dancing footprints, not banished to that long-gone nigger heaven but out front where thousands of passing whites could see.
His body was erect and quiet, but his shoes were itching around in Bill Robinson's marks, ever so serenely. His eyes were shut, like his mouth, turned in on a pleased imagination.
I stood in front of him and exhaled.
Henry's mouth burst.
"Wrigley's Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, with Wrigley's Doublemint, Doublemint Gum! Don't get it on me!" He laughed, seized my elbows. "Lord, boy, you look fine! I don't have to see to know. You've always sounded like some of those people up on the screen!"
"That comes from sneaking into too many movies."
"Let me feel you, boy. Hey, you been drinking lotsa malts!"
"You look swell, Henry."
"I always wondered what I looked like."
"The way Bill Robinson sounds is how you shape, Henry."
"Am I in his shoes here? Say yes."
"A perfect fit. Thanks for coming, Henry."
"Had to. It's one helluva time since we ransacked graveyards! I go to sleep nights running those graves ahead or behind. What kind of graveyard's here?"
I glanced at Grauman's Oriental facade.
"Ghosts. That's what I said when I snuck backstage when I was six and stared up at all those black-and-white things leering on the screen. The Phantom playing the organ has his mask yanked off and jumps thirty feet tall to kill you with one stare. Pictures tall and wide and pale and the actors mostly dead. Ghosts."
"Did your folks hear you talk like that?"
"With them? Mum's the word."
"That's a nice son. I smell incense. Got to be Grauman's. Real class. No chop-suey name."
"Here goes, Henry. Let me hold the door."
"Hey, it's dark in there. You bring a flashlight? Always feels good to wave a flashlight and look like we know what we're doing."
"Here's the flashlight, Henry."
"Ghosts, you said?"
"Seances four times a day for thirty years."
"Don't hold my elbow, makes me feel useless. If I fall, shoot me!"
And he was off, hardly ricocheting down the aisle toward the orchestra pit and the great spaces beyond and below.
"It getting darker?" he said. "Let me turn on the flash-light."
He switched it on.
"There." He smiled. "That's better!"
CHAPTER THIRTY
in the dark unlit basement, there were rooms and rooms and rooms, all with mirrors lining their walls, the reflections reflecting and re-reflecting, emptiness facing emptiness, corridors of lifeless sea.
We went into the first, biggest one. Henry circled the flashlight like a lighthouse beam.
"Plenty of ghosts down here."
The light hit and sank in the ocean deeps.
"Not the same as the ghosts upstairs. Spookier. I always wondered about mirrors and that thing called reflection. Another you, right? Four or five feet off, sunk under ice?" Henry reached out to touch the glass. "Someone under there?"
"You, Henry, and me."
"Hot damn. I sure wish I could know that."
We moved on along the cold line of mirrors.
And there they were. More than ghosts. Graffiti on glass. I must have sucked in my breath, for Henry swung his flashlight to my face.
"You see something I don't?"
"My God, yes!"
I reached out to the first cold Window on Time.
My finger came away smudged with a faint trace of ancient lipstick.
"Well?" Henry bent as if to squint at my discovery. "What?"
"Margot Lawrence. R.I.P. October 1923."
"Someone stash her here under glass?"
"Not quite. And over about three feet, another mirror: Juanita Lopez. Summer '24."
"Don't ring no bell."
"Next mirror: Carla Moore. Christmas, 1925."
"Hey," said Henry. "Silent film but a sighted friend spoke her to me one matinee. Carla Moore! She was something!"
I guided the flashlight.
"Eleanor Twelvetrees. April '26," I read.
"Helen Twelvetrees was in The Cat and the Canary?
"This might've been her sister, but so many names were fake, you never know. Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford. Lily Chauchoin was reborn as Claudette Colbert. Gladys Smith: Carole Lombard. Gary Grant was Archibald Leach."
"You could run a quiz show." Henry extended his fingers. "What's this?"
"Jennifer Long: '29."
"Didn't she die?"
"Disappeared, about the time Sister Aimee sank in the sea and arose, reborn, on the Hallelujah shore."
"How many more names?"
"As many as" there are mirrors."
Henry tasted one finger. "Yum! It's been a long time but-lipstick. What color?"
"Tangee Orange. Summer Heat Coty. Lanvier Cherry."
"Why do you figure these ladies wrote their names and dates?"
"Because, Henry, it wasn't a lot of ladies. One woman signed the names, all different."
"One woman who wasn't a lady? Hold my cane while I think."
"You don't have a cane, Henry."
"Funny how your hand feels things not there. You want me to guess?"
I nodded even though Henry couldn't see; I knew he'd feel the rush of my bobbing head. I wanted him to say it, needed to hear him speak that name. Henry smiled at the mirrors, and his smile beamed one hundredfold.
"Constance."
His fingers touched the glass.
"The Rattigan," he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
AGAIN, Henry leaned to brush a reddish signature and then touch it to his lips.
He moved to the next glass, repeated the gesture, and let his tongue figure.
"Different flavors," he noted.
"Like different women?"
"It all comes back." His eyes squeezed tight. "Lord, Lord. Lots of women passed through my hands, through my heart, came and went unseen; all those flavors. Why do I feel stopped up?"
"Because I feel the same way."
"Crumley says when you turn on the faucets, stand back. You're a good boy."
"I'm no boy."
"You sound like you're fourteen, when your voice changed and you tried to grow a mustache."
He moved and touched, then looked with his sightless eyes at the ancient residue on his fingers.
"All these have to do with Constance?"
"A hunch."
"You got a powerful stomach; I know from having your stuff read to me. My mama once said a powerful midsection is better than two brains. Most folks use their brains too much when they should be listening to that thing under their ribs. The gang-ganglion? My mama never called it that. House spider, she said. When she met some damn-fool politician, she always felt right above her stomach. If the spider was twitching, she'd smile: yes. But if the spider tightened into a ball, she shut her eyes: no. That's you.
"My mama read you. She said you don't write them weary stories (she meant eerie) with gray matter. You pull the spider legs under your ribs. My mania said, 'That boy will never be sick, never get poisoned by people, he knows how to upchuck, teasing that balled-up spider to let go.' She said, 'He don't stay up nights in a bad life, getting old while he's young. He'd make a great doctor, cut right to the pain and toss it out.'"
"Your mama said all that?" I blushed.
"Woman who got twelve kids, buried six, raised the rest. One bad husband, one good. She got fine ideas which side to use in bed so you untie, let your gut free."
"I wish I had met her."
"She's still around." Henry put his palm on his chest.
Henry surveyed the unseen mirrors, pulled his black glasses from his pocket, wiped and put them on.
"That's better. Rattigan, these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?"
"Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul."
"Maybe she should have stayed out there."
"Herman Melville," I muttered.
"Say again?"
"Took me years to finish Moby-Dick. Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead."
"Poor son of a bitch," whispered Henry.
"Poor son of a bitch," I echoed quietly.
"And Rattigan? You think she should've stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?"
"It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons."
"Poor son of a bitch," murmured Henry.
"Poor bitch," I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
"LET'S see some more," said Henry. "Switch on the lights so I won't need my cane."
"Can you feel if lights are on or off?"
"Silly child. Read me the names!"
I took his arm and we moved along the mirrors as I read the names.
"The dates under the names," Henry commanded. "They getting closer to now?"
1935. 1937. 1939. 1950. 1955.
And with names, names, names to go with them, all different.
"One too many," said Henry. "We done?"
"One last mirror and date. October thirty-first. Last year.”
"How come everything happens to you on Halloween?"
"Fate and providence love wimps like me."
"You say the date, but…" Henry touched the cold glass. "No name?"
"None."
"She going to come add a name? Going to show up making noises just a dog hears, and no light down here. She-"
"Shut up, Henry." I stared along the mirrors in the cellar night where shadow-phantoms ran.
"Son." Henry took my arm. "Let's git."
"One last thing." I took a dozen steps and stopped.
"Don't tell me." Henry inhaled. "You're fresh out of floor."
I looked down at a round manhole. The darkness sank deep with no end.
"Sounds empty." Henry inhaled. "A freshwater storm drain!"
"Beneath the back of the theater, yes."
"Damn!"
For suddenly a flood of water gushed below, a clean tide smelling of green hills and cool air.
"It rained a few hours ago. Takes an hour for the runoff to get here. Most of the year the storm drain's dry. Now it'll run a foot deep, all the way to the ocean."
I bent to feel the inside of the hole. Rungs.
Henry guessed. "You're not climbing down?"
"It's dark and cold and a long way to the sea, and if you're careless, drowning."
Henry sniffed.
"You figure she came up this way to check those names?"
"Or came in through the theater and climbed down."
"Hey! More water!"
A gust of wind, very cold, sighed up out of the hole.
"Jesus Christ!" I yelled.
"What?"
I stared. "I saw something!"
"If you didn't, I did!" The flashlight beam arced crazily around the mirrored room as Henry grabbed my elbow and lurched away from the hole.
"We going the right way?"
"Christ," I said. "I hope so!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
OUR taxi dropped us at the curb behind Rattigan's big white Arabian fortress.
"Lordy," said Henry, and added, "That meter ran overtime. From now on, I'm driving."
Crumley was not out front by the shoreline but farther up by the pool with half a dozen full martini glasses, two already empty. He gazed at these fondly and explained.
"I'm ready now for your numbskull routines. I am fortified. Hello, Henry. Henry, aren't you sorry you left New Orleans for this can-o'-worms factory?"
"One of those drinks smells like vodka, right? That will make me not sorry."
I handed a glass to Henry and took one for myself in haste while Crumley scowled at my silence.
"Okay, spill it," he said.
I told him about Grauman's and the basement dressing-room mirrors. "Plus," I said, "I been making lists."
"Hold it. You've sobered me up," said Crumley. "Let me kill another." He lifted a glass in mock salute. "Okay, read your lists."
"The grocery boy on Mount Lowe. The neighbors of Queen Califia in Bunker Hill. Father Rattigan's secretary. The film projectionist on high in Grauman's Chinese."
Henry cut in. "That gent in Grauman's…?"
I described Rustler, stashed among stacks of old film with the pictures on the walls of all the sad women with all the lost names.
Henry mused. "Hey now. Did you make a list of those ladies in the pictures up on high?"
I read off my pad: "Mabel. Helen. Marilee. Annabel. Hazel. Betty Lou. Clara. Pollyanna…"
Crumley sat up straight.
"You got a list of those names on the cellar mirrors?"
I shook my head. "It was dark down there."
"Easy as pie." Henry tapped his head. "Hazel. Annabel. Grace. Pollyanna. Helen. Marilee. Betty Lou. Detect the similarities?"
As the names rolled from Henry's mouth, I ticked them off my penciled list. A perfect match.
At which point there was a lightning strike. The lights failed. We could hear the surf roar in to salt Rattigan's beach as pale moonlight silvered the shore. Thunder clamored. It gave me time to think and say, "Rattigan's got a complete run of Academy annuals with all the pictures, ages, roles.
Her competition is in every one. It ties in with all those upstairs pictures, downstairs mirrors, right?"
Thunder echoed, the lights blinked back on.
We went inside and got out the Academy books.
"Look for the mirror names," Henry advised.
"I know, I know," Crumley growled.
In half an hour we had thirty years of Academy annuals paper-clipped.
"Ethel, Carlotta, Suzanne, Clara, Helen," I read.
"Constance can't hate them all."
"Chances are," said Henry. "What else she got in her bookshelves?"
An hour later we found some actors' reference albums, crammed with pictures, going way back. One with a legend up front giving the name J. Wallington Bradford. I read, "A.k.a. Tallullah Two, a.k.a. Swanson, Gloria in Excelsius, a.k.a. Funny Face."
A quiet bell sounded in the back of my head.
I opened another album and read: "Alberto Quickly. Fast flimflammery. Plays all parts Great Expectations. Acts A Christinas Carol, Christmas Carol's Scrooge, Marley, Three Christmases, Fezziwig. Saint Joan, unburned. Alberto Quickly. Quick Change. Born: 1895. At liberty." The quiet bell sounded again.
"Hold on," I said. I felt myself murmuring. "Pictures, mirrors, and now here's a guy, Bradford, who is all women. And then here's another guy, Quickly, who is all men, every man." The bell faded. "Did Constance know them?"
Like a sleepwalker I moved to pick up Constance's Book of the Dead.
There it was.
Bradford on one page, near the beginning of the book.
"Let me try a different question. Do you like yourself?"
"What!?"
"Look. I like myself. I'm not perfect, hell no, but I never bedded anyone if I felt they were breakable. Lots of men say hit the hay, live! Not me. Even when it's offered on a plate. So with no sins, I don't often have bad dreams. Oh, sure, there was the time I ran away from my grandma when I was a kid, ran away and left her blocks behind, so she came home weeping. I still can't forgive myself. Or hitting my dog, just once, I hit him. And that still hurts, thirty years later. Not much of a list, right, to make bad dreams?"
Constance stood very still.
"God, God," she said, "how I wish I had your dreams."
"Ask and I'll give you the loan."
"You poor dumb innocent stupid kid. That's why I love you. Somewhere, at heaven's gate, can I trade in my old chimney soot nightmares for fresh clean angel wings?"
"Ask your brother."
"He threw me downstairs to hell long ago."
"You haven't answered my question. Do you like yourself?"
"What I see in the mirror, sure. It's what's inside the glass, deep under, scares me. I wake late nights with all that stuff swimming behind my face. Christ, that's sad. Can you help me?"
"How? I don't know which is which, you or your mirror. What's up front, what's beneath."
Constance shifted her feet.
"Can't you stand still?" I said. "If I say 'red light,' stop. Your feet are stuck in that cement. What then?"
I saw her shoes ache to pull free.
"People are staring at us!"
"The theater's closed. Most of the lights are out. The forecourt is empty."
"You don't understand. I've got to go. Straight on."
I looked up at the front doors of Grauman's, still open, with some workmen carrying equipment inside.
"It's the next step, but God, how do I get there?"
"Just walk."
"You don't understand. It's hopscotch. There must be other footprint paths to the door, if I can find them. Which way do I jump?"
Her head moved. The dark hat fell to the pavement. Constance's close-cropped bronze hair came into view. She still stared ahead, as if afraid to show me her face.
"If I say go, what then?" I asked.
"I'll go."
"And meet me again, where?" "God knows. Quick! Say 'go.' They're catching up." "Who?"
"All those others. They'll kill me if I don't kill first. You wouldn't want me to die right here? Well, would you?" I shook my head. "Ready, set, go?" she asked.
"Ready, set."
And she was gone.
She zigzagged across the forecourt, a dozen fast steps to the right, another dozen to the left, pause, and a final two dozen steps to a third set of prints, where she froze, as if it were a land mine.
A car horn hooted. I turned. When I glanced back, the Grauman's front door swallowed a shadow.
I counted to ten to give her a real start, then I bent down to pick up the tiny shoes she had left behind in her footprints. Then I walked over to the first set of prints where she had paused. Sally Simpson, 1926. The name was just an echo from a lost time.
I moved on to the second set of prints. Gertrude Erhard, 1924. An even fainter ghost of time. And the final footprints nearer the front door. Dolly Dawn, 1923. Peter Pan. Dolly Dawn? A fleeting mist of years touched me. I almost remembered.
"Hell," I whispered. "No way."
And got ready to let Uncle Sid's fake Chinese palace swallow me with one huge dark dragon swallow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I STOPPED just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, "Lamentable!"
Which made me pull out Rattigan's Book of the Dead.
I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman's. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.
Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples's bathtub death. And here was his name-alive?-on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.
And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.
Rattigan— I looked at the dark beyond the red door-
Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: "There's nothing inside to steal!"
A gaunt homeless guy stood to my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.
"Go ahead." I read his lips. "You got nothing to lose."
Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?
The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.
And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into die theater's darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INSIDE the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.
One of the wax figurines blinked. "Yes?"
God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.
Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.
"Yes?" the Chinese wax mannequin said again.
I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.
It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville's whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.
My God, I thought, I'm three years old.
That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how'd he do that?
And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you'd find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.
They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.
"It's not Green Glade Cemetery," said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.
I had spoken aloud.
"When was this theater built?" I murmured.
The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: "1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn't yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino's ruptured appendix in '26. At Grauman's opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That's where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous 'I Don't Care' and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you'll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, '34. You listening?"
"Clyde Rustler," I blurted.
"Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in '29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony."
I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.
My shadow friend said: "No elevator. Two hundred steps!"
A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn't pee three times during your film, you had it made!
I climbed.
I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I REACHED the back wall of Mount Everest and tapped on the old projection-room door.
"Is that who I think it is?" a terrified voice cried.
"No," I said quietly, "just me. Back for one last matinee after forty years."
That was a stroke of genius; upchucking my past.
The terrified voice simmered down.
"What's the password?"
It came right off my tongue, a boy's voice.
"Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. Hoot Gibson. Ken May-nard. Bob Steele. Helen Twelvetrees. Vilma Banky…"
"That'll do."
It was a long while before I heard a giant spider brush the door panel. The door whined. A silver shadow leaned out, a living metaphor of the black-and-white phantoms I had seen flickering across the screen a lifetime ago.
"No one ever comes up here," said this old, old man.
"No one?"
"No one ever knocks on my door," said the man with silver hair and silver face and silver clothes, bleached out by seventy years of living under a rock in a high place and gazing down at unreality ten thousand times. "No one knows I'm here. Not even me."
"You're here. You're Clyde Rustler."
"Am I?" For a moment I thought he might body-search his suspenders and sleeve garters.
"Who are you?" He poked his face like a turtle's from its shell.
I said my name.
"Never heard of you." He glanced down at the empty screen. "You one of them?"
"The dead stars?"
"They sometimes climb up. Fairbanks came last night."
"Zorro, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood? He knocked at your door?"
"Scratched. Being dead has its problems. You coming in or out?"
I stepped in quickly before he could change his mind.
The film projectors stood facing emptiness in a room that looked like a Chung King burial chamber. It smelled of dust and sand and acrid celluloid. There was only one chair between the projectors. As he'd said, no one ever came to visit.
I stared at the crowded walls. There must've been three dozen pictures nailed there, some in cheap Woolworth frames, others in silver, still others mere scraps torn from old Silver Screen magazines, photographs of thirty women, no two alike.
The old, old man let a smile haunt his face.
"My sweetheart dears, from when I was an active volcano."
The most ancient of ancient men looked out at me from behind a maze of wrinkles, the kind you get when you search the icebox at six A.M. and take out last night's pre-mixed martinis.
"I keep the door locked. I thought you were just here, yelling outside."
"Not me."
"Someone was. Outside of that, nobody's been up here since Lowell Sherman died."
"That's two obituaries in ten minutes. Winter 1934. Cancer and pneumonia."
"Nobody knows that!"
"I roller-skated by the Coliseum one Saturday 1934 before a football game. Lowell Sherman came in whooping and barking. I got his autograph and said, 'Take care.' He died two days later."
"Lowell Sherman." The old, old man regarded me with a new luster in his eyes. "As long as you're alive, he is, too."
Clyde Rustler collapsed in the one chair and sized me up again. "Lowell Sherman. Why in hell did you make the long climb up here? People have died climbing. Uncle Sid climbed up once or twice, said to hell with it, built the bigger projection booth a thousand yards downslope in the real world, if there is a real one. Never went down to see. So?"
For he saw that I was casting my gaze around his primeval nest at those walls teeming with dozens of faces, forever young.
"Would you like a rundown on these mountain-lion street cats?" He leaned and pointed.
"Her name was Carlotta or Midge or Diana. She was a Spanish flirt, a Cal Coolidge 'It girl' with a skirt up to her navel, a Roman queen fresh out of DeMille's milk bath. Then she was a vamp named Illysha, a typist called Pearl, an English tennis player-Pamela. Sylvia? Ran a nudist flytrap in Cheyenne. Some called her 'Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah.' Dressed like Dolley Madison, sang 'Tea for Two,' 'Chicago,' popped out of a big clamshell like the pearl of paradise, Flo Ziegfeld's craze. Fired by her father at thirteen for conduct unbecoming a human who ripened fast: Willa-Kate. Worked in a chophouse chink joint: Lila Wong. Got more votes than the president, Coney Island Beauty Pageant, '29: not-so-plain Willa. Got off the night train in Glendale: Barbara Jo, next day, almost, head of Glory Films: Anastasia Alice Grimes-"
He stopped. I looked up. "Which brings us to Rattigan," I said.
Clyde Rustler froze in place.
"You said no one's been up here for years. But-she came up here today, right? Maybe to look at these pictures? Did she or didn't she?"
The old, old man stared at his dusty hands, then slowly rose to face a brass whistle tube in the wall, one of those submarine devices that you blew so it shrieked and you yelled orders.
"Leo? Wine! A two-dollar tip!"
A tiny voice squealed from the brass nozzle, "You don't drink!"
"I do now, Leo. And hot dogs!"
The brass nozzle squealed and died.
The old, old man grunted and stared at the wall. A long, terribly long five minutes passed. While we waited I opened my notepad and took down the names scrawled on the pictures. Then we heard the hot dogs and wine rattling up the dumbwaiter. Clyde Rustler stared as if he had forgotten that tiny elevator. He took forever opening the wine with a corkscrew, sent by Leo, from down below. There was only one glass.
"One," he apologized. "You first. I'm not afraid of catching anything."
"I got nothing for you to catch." I drank and handed the glass over. He drank and I could see the relaxation move his body.
"And now?" he said. "Let me show you some clips I glued together. Why? Last week a stranger called from down below. That voice on the phone. Was once Harry Cohn's live-in nurse, never said yes, but yes, yes, Harry, yes! Said she was looking for Robin Locksley. Robin Hood. Searching for Robin of Locksley. An actress took that name, a flash in the pan. She disappeared in Hearst's castle or his backside kitchen. But now this voice, years later, asks for Locksley. Spooked me. I ran through my cans and found the one film she made in 1929, when sound really took over. Watch."
He fitted the film into the projector and switched on the lamp. The image shot down to flood the big screen.
On the screen a circus butterfly spun, flirting her gossamer wings, dropping, to pull the bit from her smile, laugh, then run, pursued by white knights and black villains. "Recognize her?"
“Nope.”
"Try this." He spun the film. The screen filled with a smoldering bank of snow fires, a Russian noblewoman, smoking long languid cigarettes, wringing her handkerchief, someone had died or was going to die.
"Well?" said Clyde Rustler hopefully.
"Nope."
"Try again!"
The projector lit the darkness with 1923; a tomboy climbing a tree to shake down fruit, laughing, but you could see small crab apples under her shirtfront.
" Tomboy Sawyer. A girl! Who? Damn!"
The old man filled the screen with a dozen more images, starting with 1925, ending with 1952, open, shut, mysterious, obvious, light, dark, wild, composed, beautiful, plain, willful, innocent.
"You don't know any of those? My God, I've racked my brain. There must be some reason why I've saved these damned clips. Look at me, dammit! Know how old I am?"
"Around ninety, ninety-five?"
"Ten thousand years! Jesus. They found me floating in a basket on the Nile! I fell downhill with the Tablets. I doused the fire in the burning bush. Mark Antony said, 'Loose the dogs of war'; I loosed the lot. Did I know all these wonders? I wake nights hitting my head to make the jelly beans shake in place. Every time I've almost got the answer, I move my head and the damned beans fall. You sure you don't remember these clips or the faces on the wall? Good grief, we've got a mystery!"
"I was about to say the same. I came up here because someone else came. Maybe that voice that called from down below."
"What voice?"
"Constance Rattigan," I said.
I let the fog settle behind his eyes.
"What's she got to do with this?" he wondered.
"Maybe she knows. Last time I saw her she was standing in her own footprints."
"And you think she might know who all these faces belong to, what all the names mean? Hold on. Outside the door… I guess it was today. Can't be yesterday. Today she said, 'Hand 'em over!'"
"Hand what over?"
"Hell, what do you see in this damn empty place worth handing over?"
I looked at the pictures on the wall. Clyde Rustler saw my look.
"Why would anyone want those?" he said. "Not worth nothing. Even I don't know why in hell I nailed them there. Are they wives or some old girlfriends?"
"How many of each did you have?"
"I don't have the fingers to count."
"One thing for sure, Constance wanted you to hand 'em over. Was she jealous?"
"Constance? You got road rage in the streets, she had bed rage. Wanted to grab all my lovelies, whoever in hell they were, and stomp, tear, and burn them. Go on. Finish the wine. I got things to do."
"Like what?"
But he was rethreading the film clips in the projector, fascinated by a thousand and one nights past.
I moved along the wall and scribbled furiously, writing down the names under all of the pictures, and then said:
"If Constance comes back, will you let me know?"
"For the pictures? I'll throw her downstairs."
"Someone else said that. Only it was to hell instead of the second balcony. Why would you throw her?"
"There's gotta be a reason, right? Don't recollect! And why did you say you climbed up here? And what was it you called me?"
"Clyde Rustler."
"Oh, yeah. Him. It just came to me. Did you know I am Constance's father?"
"What!?"
"Constance's father. I thought I told you before. Now you can leave. Good night."
I went out and shut the door on whoever that was and the pictures on the wall, whoever they were.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DOWNSTAIRS, I edged to the front of the theater and stared down. Then I stepped into the orchestra pit, and edged to the back wall and peered though a door into a long hall that diminished into complete night and a night inside that night, where all the old abandoned dressing rooms were.
I was tempted to call a name.
But what if she answered?
Far off down that black corridor, I thought I heard the sound of a hidden sea, or a river flowing somewhere in the dark.
I put one foot forward and pulled back.
I heard that dark ocean heave on an endless shore again.
Then I turned, and went away up through the great darkness, out of the pit into the aisles with everyone gone, rushing toward the doors leading out to an evening sky most dearly welcome.
I carried Rattigan's incredibly small shoes over to her footprints and placed them neatly down to fit.
At which instant I felt my guardian angel touching my shoulder.
"You're back from the dead," said Crumley.
"You can say that again," I said, staring at the wide red doorway of Grauman's Chinese with all those film creatures swimming in the dark.
"She's in there," I murmured. "I wish I knew a way to get her out."
"Dynamite tied to a bundle of cash might do it."
"Crumley!"
"Sorry, I forgot we were talking about Florence Nightingale."
I stepped back. Crumley regarded Rattigan's tiny shoes lodged in prints put down a long, long time ago. "Not exactly ruby slippers," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
we rode across town in a warm silence. I tried to describe the great black sea of Grauman's.
"There's this big dressing-room cellar, maybe full of stuff from 1925, 1930. I have a feeling she might be there."
"Save your breath," said Crumley.
"Someone's got to go down there to see."
"You afraid to go there alone?"
"Not exactly."
"That means damn right! Shut up and ride shotgun."
We were soon at Crumley's. He put a cold beer against my brow.
"Hold it there until you feel it cure your thinking."
I held it there. Crumley switched on the TV and began switching through the channels.
"I don't know which is worse," he said, "your gab or the local TV news."
"Father Seamus Rattigan," the TV said.
"Hold it!" I cried.
Crumley switched back.
"… Vibiana's Cathedral."
And a blizzard of static and snow.
Crumley hit the damned TV with his fist.
"… Natural causes. Rumored to be future cardinal…"
Another snowstorm. And the TV went dead.
"I been meaning to have it fixed," said Crumley.
We both stared at his telephone, telling it to ring.
We both jumped.
Because it did!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT was a woman, Father Rattigan's assistant, Betty Kelly, inarticulate, going down for the third time, begging for mercy.
I offered what small mercy I had, to come visit.
"Don't wait, or I'm dead myself," she wailed.
Betty Kelly was out in front of St. Vibiana's when Crumley and I arrived. We stood for a long moment before she saw us, gave a quick, half-realized wave, and dropped her gaze. We came to stand by her. I introduced Crumley.
"I'm sorry," I said. She raised her head.
"Then you are the one was talking to Father!" she said. "Oh, Lord, let's get inside."
The big doors were locked for the night. We went in through a door at the side. Inside she swayed and almost fell. I caught and led her to one of the pews, where she sat breathless.
"We came as quick as we could," I said.
"You knew him?" She gasped. "It's so confusing. You knew someone in common, an acquaintance, a friend?"
"A relative," said Crumley. "The same name."
"Rattigan! She killed him. Wait!" She grabbed my sleeve.
For I was on my feet.
"Sit," she gasped. "I don't mean murder. But she killed him."
I sat back down, gone cold. Crumley backed off. She clutched my elbow and lowered her voice.
"She was here, sometimes three times a day, in confession, whispering, then raving. Poor Father looked like he'd been shot when she left, but she hardly left, just stayed until he fell out starving, couldn't eat, and the liquor cabinet low. He let her rave. Later I'd check the confessional: empty. But the air smelled like it had been hit by lightning. She kept shouting the same thing."
"What?"
'"I'm killing them, killing them!' she yelled. And I'll keep on killing them until I've killed them all. Help me to kill them, bless their souls! Then I'll kill the rest. Kill them all! Get them off my back, out of my life! Then, Father,' she cried, Til be free, clean! But help me bury them so they won't come back! Help me!'
'"Off! Away!' Father yelled. 'My God, what are you asking me to do?'
'"Help me put them away, pray over them so they won't come back, stay dead! Say yes!'
"'Get out!' Father cried, and then she said worse."
"What?"
"She said, 'Then damn you, damn, damn, damn you to hell!' Her voice was so loud, people left. I could hear her weeping. The Father must have been in a state of shock. Then I heard footsteps running in the dark. I waited for Father Rattigan to speak, say anything. Then I dared open the door. He was there. And silent because… he was dead."
And here the secretary let the tears shed themselves down her cheeks.
"Poor man," she said. "Those dreadful words stopped his heart, as they almost stopped mine. We must find that awful woman. Make her take back the words so he can live again. God, what am I saying? Him slumped there as if she had drained his blood. You know her? Tell her she's done her worst. There, I've said it. Now I've thrown up, and where do you go to be clean? It's yours, and sorry I did it to you."
I looked down at my suit as if expecting to find her vile upchuck.
Crumley walked over to the confessional and opened both doors and stared in at the darkness. I came to stand next to him and take a deep breath.
"Smell it?" said Betty Kelly. "It's there and ruined. I've told the cardinal to tear it down and burn it."
I took a final breath. A touch of charcoal and St. Elmo's fires.
Crumley closed the doors.
"It won't help," Betty Kelly said. "She's still there. So is he, poor soul, dead tired and dead. Two coffins, side by side. God help us. I've used you all up. You have the same look the poor father had."
"Don't tell me that," I said weakly.
"I won't," she said.
And led by Crumley, I beggared my way to the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I COULDN'T nap, I couldn't stay awake, I couldn't write, I couldn't think. At last, confused and maddened, very late I called St. Vibiana's again.
When at last Betty Kelly answered she sounded like she was in a cave of torments.
"I can't talk!"
"Quickly!" I begged. "You remember all she said in the confessional? Anything else important, consequential, different?"
"Dear God," said Betty Kelly. "Words and words and words. But wait. She kept saying you must forgive all of us! All of us, every one! There was no one in the booth but her. All of us, she said. You still there?"
At last I said, "I'm here."
"Is there more you want?"
"Not now."
I hung up.
"All of us," I whispered. "Forgive all of us!"
I called Crumley.
"Don't say it." He guessed. "No sleep tonight? And you want me to meet you at Rattigan's in an hour. You going to search the place?"
"Just a friendly rummage."
"Rummage! What is it, theory or hunch?"
"Pure reason."
"Sell that in a sack for night soil!" Crumley was gone.
"He hang up on you?" I asked my mirror. "Hung up on you," my mirror said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE phone rang. I picked it up as if it were red-hot.
"Is that the Martian?" a voice said.
"Henry!" I cried.
"That's me," the voice said. "It's crazy, but I miss you, son. Kinda dumb, a colored saying that to an ethnic flying-saucer pilot."
"I've never heard better," I said, choking up.
"Hell," said Henry, "if you start crying, I'm gone."
"Don't," I sniffled. "Oh God, Henry, how fine it is to hear your voice!"
"Which means you've milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won't-say. You want me polite or impolite?"
"Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie's back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but-"
"Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie." He blew his nose. "How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?"
"Yesterday."
"I'm there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash."
"You know Grauman's Chinese?"
"Hell, yes!"
"How quickly can you meet me there?"
"As quick as you want, son. I'll be standing in Bill Robinson's tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?"
"Almost."
I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan's, but that I'd be bringing Henry with me.
"The blind leading the blind," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
he was standing exactly where he said he would be: in Bill Robinson's "copasetic" dancing footprints, not banished to that long-gone nigger heaven but out front where thousands of passing whites could see.
His body was erect and quiet, but his shoes were itching around in Bill Robinson's marks, ever so serenely. His eyes were shut, like his mouth, turned in on a pleased imagination.
I stood in front of him and exhaled.
Henry's mouth burst.
"Wrigley's Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, with Wrigley's Doublemint, Doublemint Gum! Don't get it on me!" He laughed, seized my elbows. "Lord, boy, you look fine! I don't have to see to know. You've always sounded like some of those people up on the screen!"
"That comes from sneaking into too many movies."
"Let me feel you, boy. Hey, you been drinking lotsa malts!"
"You look swell, Henry."
"I always wondered what I looked like."
"The way Bill Robinson sounds is how you shape, Henry."
"Am I in his shoes here? Say yes."
"A perfect fit. Thanks for coming, Henry."
"Had to. It's one helluva time since we ransacked graveyards! I go to sleep nights running those graves ahead or behind. What kind of graveyard's here?"
I glanced at Grauman's Oriental facade.
"Ghosts. That's what I said when I snuck backstage when I was six and stared up at all those black-and-white things leering on the screen. The Phantom playing the organ has his mask yanked off and jumps thirty feet tall to kill you with one stare. Pictures tall and wide and pale and the actors mostly dead. Ghosts."
"Did your folks hear you talk like that?"
"With them? Mum's the word."
"That's a nice son. I smell incense. Got to be Grauman's. Real class. No chop-suey name."
"Here goes, Henry. Let me hold the door."
"Hey, it's dark in there. You bring a flashlight? Always feels good to wave a flashlight and look like we know what we're doing."
"Here's the flashlight, Henry."
"Ghosts, you said?"
"Seances four times a day for thirty years."
"Don't hold my elbow, makes me feel useless. If I fall, shoot me!"
And he was off, hardly ricocheting down the aisle toward the orchestra pit and the great spaces beyond and below.
"It getting darker?" he said. "Let me turn on the flash-light."
He switched it on.
"There." He smiled. "That's better!"
CHAPTER THIRTY
in the dark unlit basement, there were rooms and rooms and rooms, all with mirrors lining their walls, the reflections reflecting and re-reflecting, emptiness facing emptiness, corridors of lifeless sea.
We went into the first, biggest one. Henry circled the flashlight like a lighthouse beam.
"Plenty of ghosts down here."
The light hit and sank in the ocean deeps.
"Not the same as the ghosts upstairs. Spookier. I always wondered about mirrors and that thing called reflection. Another you, right? Four or five feet off, sunk under ice?" Henry reached out to touch the glass. "Someone under there?"
"You, Henry, and me."
"Hot damn. I sure wish I could know that."
We moved on along the cold line of mirrors.
And there they were. More than ghosts. Graffiti on glass. I must have sucked in my breath, for Henry swung his flashlight to my face.
"You see something I don't?"
"My God, yes!"
I reached out to the first cold Window on Time.
My finger came away smudged with a faint trace of ancient lipstick.
"Well?" Henry bent as if to squint at my discovery. "What?"
"Margot Lawrence. R.I.P. October 1923."
"Someone stash her here under glass?"
"Not quite. And over about three feet, another mirror: Juanita Lopez. Summer '24."
"Don't ring no bell."
"Next mirror: Carla Moore. Christmas, 1925."
"Hey," said Henry. "Silent film but a sighted friend spoke her to me one matinee. Carla Moore! She was something!"
I guided the flashlight.
"Eleanor Twelvetrees. April '26," I read.
"Helen Twelvetrees was in The Cat and the Canary?
"This might've been her sister, but so many names were fake, you never know. Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford. Lily Chauchoin was reborn as Claudette Colbert. Gladys Smith: Carole Lombard. Gary Grant was Archibald Leach."
"You could run a quiz show." Henry extended his fingers. "What's this?"
"Jennifer Long: '29."
"Didn't she die?"
"Disappeared, about the time Sister Aimee sank in the sea and arose, reborn, on the Hallelujah shore."
"How many more names?"
"As many as" there are mirrors."
Henry tasted one finger. "Yum! It's been a long time but-lipstick. What color?"
"Tangee Orange. Summer Heat Coty. Lanvier Cherry."
"Why do you figure these ladies wrote their names and dates?"
"Because, Henry, it wasn't a lot of ladies. One woman signed the names, all different."
"One woman who wasn't a lady? Hold my cane while I think."
"You don't have a cane, Henry."
"Funny how your hand feels things not there. You want me to guess?"
I nodded even though Henry couldn't see; I knew he'd feel the rush of my bobbing head. I wanted him to say it, needed to hear him speak that name. Henry smiled at the mirrors, and his smile beamed one hundredfold.
"Constance."
His fingers touched the glass.
"The Rattigan," he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
AGAIN, Henry leaned to brush a reddish signature and then touch it to his lips.
He moved to the next glass, repeated the gesture, and let his tongue figure.
"Different flavors," he noted.
"Like different women?"
"It all comes back." His eyes squeezed tight. "Lord, Lord. Lots of women passed through my hands, through my heart, came and went unseen; all those flavors. Why do I feel stopped up?"
"Because I feel the same way."
"Crumley says when you turn on the faucets, stand back. You're a good boy."
"I'm no boy."
"You sound like you're fourteen, when your voice changed and you tried to grow a mustache."
He moved and touched, then looked with his sightless eyes at the ancient residue on his fingers.
"All these have to do with Constance?"
"A hunch."
"You got a powerful stomach; I know from having your stuff read to me. My mama once said a powerful midsection is better than two brains. Most folks use their brains too much when they should be listening to that thing under their ribs. The gang-ganglion? My mama never called it that. House spider, she said. When she met some damn-fool politician, she always felt right above her stomach. If the spider was twitching, she'd smile: yes. But if the spider tightened into a ball, she shut her eyes: no. That's you.
"My mama read you. She said you don't write them weary stories (she meant eerie) with gray matter. You pull the spider legs under your ribs. My mania said, 'That boy will never be sick, never get poisoned by people, he knows how to upchuck, teasing that balled-up spider to let go.' She said, 'He don't stay up nights in a bad life, getting old while he's young. He'd make a great doctor, cut right to the pain and toss it out.'"
"Your mama said all that?" I blushed.
"Woman who got twelve kids, buried six, raised the rest. One bad husband, one good. She got fine ideas which side to use in bed so you untie, let your gut free."
"I wish I had met her."
"She's still around." Henry put his palm on his chest.
Henry surveyed the unseen mirrors, pulled his black glasses from his pocket, wiped and put them on.
"That's better. Rattigan, these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?"
"Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul."
"Maybe she should have stayed out there."
"Herman Melville," I muttered.
"Say again?"
"Took me years to finish Moby-Dick. Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead."
"Poor son of a bitch," whispered Henry.
"Poor son of a bitch," I echoed quietly.
"And Rattigan? You think she should've stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?"
"It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons."
"Poor son of a bitch," murmured Henry.
"Poor bitch," I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
"LET'S see some more," said Henry. "Switch on the lights so I won't need my cane."
"Can you feel if lights are on or off?"
"Silly child. Read me the names!"
I took his arm and we moved along the mirrors as I read the names.
"The dates under the names," Henry commanded. "They getting closer to now?"
1935. 1937. 1939. 1950. 1955.
And with names, names, names to go with them, all different.
"One too many," said Henry. "We done?"
"One last mirror and date. October thirty-first. Last year.”
"How come everything happens to you on Halloween?"
"Fate and providence love wimps like me."
"You say the date, but…" Henry touched the cold glass. "No name?"
"None."
"She going to come add a name? Going to show up making noises just a dog hears, and no light down here. She-"
"Shut up, Henry." I stared along the mirrors in the cellar night where shadow-phantoms ran.
"Son." Henry took my arm. "Let's git."
"One last thing." I took a dozen steps and stopped.
"Don't tell me." Henry inhaled. "You're fresh out of floor."
I looked down at a round manhole. The darkness sank deep with no end.
"Sounds empty." Henry inhaled. "A freshwater storm drain!"
"Beneath the back of the theater, yes."
"Damn!"
For suddenly a flood of water gushed below, a clean tide smelling of green hills and cool air.
"It rained a few hours ago. Takes an hour for the runoff to get here. Most of the year the storm drain's dry. Now it'll run a foot deep, all the way to the ocean."
I bent to feel the inside of the hole. Rungs.
Henry guessed. "You're not climbing down?"
"It's dark and cold and a long way to the sea, and if you're careless, drowning."
Henry sniffed.
"You figure she came up this way to check those names?"
"Or came in through the theater and climbed down."
"Hey! More water!"
A gust of wind, very cold, sighed up out of the hole.
"Jesus Christ!" I yelled.
"What?"
I stared. "I saw something!"
"If you didn't, I did!" The flashlight beam arced crazily around the mirrored room as Henry grabbed my elbow and lurched away from the hole.
"We going the right way?"
"Christ," I said. "I hope so!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
OUR taxi dropped us at the curb behind Rattigan's big white Arabian fortress.
"Lordy," said Henry, and added, "That meter ran overtime. From now on, I'm driving."
Crumley was not out front by the shoreline but farther up by the pool with half a dozen full martini glasses, two already empty. He gazed at these fondly and explained.
"I'm ready now for your numbskull routines. I am fortified. Hello, Henry. Henry, aren't you sorry you left New Orleans for this can-o'-worms factory?"
"One of those drinks smells like vodka, right? That will make me not sorry."
I handed a glass to Henry and took one for myself in haste while Crumley scowled at my silence.
"Okay, spill it," he said.
I told him about Grauman's and the basement dressing-room mirrors. "Plus," I said, "I been making lists."
"Hold it. You've sobered me up," said Crumley. "Let me kill another." He lifted a glass in mock salute. "Okay, read your lists."
"The grocery boy on Mount Lowe. The neighbors of Queen Califia in Bunker Hill. Father Rattigan's secretary. The film projectionist on high in Grauman's Chinese."
Henry cut in. "That gent in Grauman's…?"
I described Rustler, stashed among stacks of old film with the pictures on the walls of all the sad women with all the lost names.
Henry mused. "Hey now. Did you make a list of those ladies in the pictures up on high?"
I read off my pad: "Mabel. Helen. Marilee. Annabel. Hazel. Betty Lou. Clara. Pollyanna…"
Crumley sat up straight.
"You got a list of those names on the cellar mirrors?"
I shook my head. "It was dark down there."
"Easy as pie." Henry tapped his head. "Hazel. Annabel. Grace. Pollyanna. Helen. Marilee. Betty Lou. Detect the similarities?"
As the names rolled from Henry's mouth, I ticked them off my penciled list. A perfect match.
At which point there was a lightning strike. The lights failed. We could hear the surf roar in to salt Rattigan's beach as pale moonlight silvered the shore. Thunder clamored. It gave me time to think and say, "Rattigan's got a complete run of Academy annuals with all the pictures, ages, roles.
Her competition is in every one. It ties in with all those upstairs pictures, downstairs mirrors, right?"
Thunder echoed, the lights blinked back on.
We went inside and got out the Academy books.
"Look for the mirror names," Henry advised.
"I know, I know," Crumley growled.
In half an hour we had thirty years of Academy annuals paper-clipped.
"Ethel, Carlotta, Suzanne, Clara, Helen," I read.
"Constance can't hate them all."
"Chances are," said Henry. "What else she got in her bookshelves?"
An hour later we found some actors' reference albums, crammed with pictures, going way back. One with a legend up front giving the name J. Wallington Bradford. I read, "A.k.a. Tallullah Two, a.k.a. Swanson, Gloria in Excelsius, a.k.a. Funny Face."
A quiet bell sounded in the back of my head.
I opened another album and read: "Alberto Quickly. Fast flimflammery. Plays all parts Great Expectations. Acts A Christinas Carol, Christmas Carol's Scrooge, Marley, Three Christmases, Fezziwig. Saint Joan, unburned. Alberto Quickly. Quick Change. Born: 1895. At liberty." The quiet bell sounded again.
"Hold on," I said. I felt myself murmuring. "Pictures, mirrors, and now here's a guy, Bradford, who is all women. And then here's another guy, Quickly, who is all men, every man." The bell faded. "Did Constance know them?"
Like a sleepwalker I moved to pick up Constance's Book of the Dead.
There it was.
Bradford on one page, near the beginning of the book.