“Look,” he said. “Someone sends you a note. You go to a graveyard, find a body, but don’t report it, spoiling whatever game is up. Phone calls are made, the studio sends for the body, and goes into a panic when they actually have a viewing. How else can I act except out of wild curiosity. What kind of game is this? I ask. I can only find out by countermoving the chesspiece, yes? We saw and heard how Manny and his pals reacted an hour ago. How would they react, I wondered, let’s study it, if, after finding a body, they lost it again, and went crazy wondering who had it? Me!”
We stopped outside the commissary door.
“You’re not going in there with that!” I exclaimed.
“Safest place in the world. Nobody would suspect a box I carry right into the middle of the studio. But be careful, mate, we’re being watched, right now.”
“Where?!” I cried, and turned swiftly.
“If I knew that, it would all be over. C’mon.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Strange,” said Roy, “why do I feel I could eat a horse?”
14
On our way back into the commissary I saw that Manny’s table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place.
“Damn fool,” I whispered.
Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled.
“Sure am,” he said gladly. “Move.”
I moved to my place.
Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect.
Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult.
“Pay attention!” Fritz snapped his fingers. “The introductions continue!” He pointed along the table. “Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenin’s very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenin’s body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!”
“Lenin’s makeup man?” I said.
“Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.
He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
“Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!”
“Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!”
An empty place.
“For who?” I asked.
Someone coughed. Heads turned.
I held my breath.
And the Arrival took place.
15
This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths. After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldn’t imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet.
There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen.