“He’s sick.”
Sick, like Roy, I thought. Sick, like me.
“Does anyone know where he lives?”
They all shook their heads.
“I suppose you could follow him and see!” Charlotte stopped and laughed at herself. “I mean—”
Someone else said, “I seen him go down Beachwood, once. One of those bungalow courts—”
“Does he have a last name?”
No. Like everyone else in all the years. No last name.
“Damn,” I whispered.
“Comes to that—” Charlotte’s Ma eyed the card I had signed. “What’s your monicker?”
I spelled it for her.
“Gonna work in films,” sniffed Ma, “oughta get you a new name.”
“Just call me Crazy.” I walked away. “Charlotte. Ma.”
“Crazy,” they said. “Goodbye.”
21
Fritz was waiting for me upstairs, outside Manny Leiber’s office.
“They are in a feeding frenzy inside,” he exclaimed. “What’s wrong with you!?”
“I was talking to the gargoyles.”
“What, are they down off Notre Dame again? Get in here!”
“Why? An hour ago Roy and I were on Everest. Now he’s gone to hell and I’m sunk with you in Galilee. Explain.”
“You and your winning ways,” said Fritz. “Who knows? Manny’s mother died. Or his mistress took a few wrong balls over the plate. Constipation? High colonics? Choose one. Roy’s fired. So you and I do Our Gang comedies for six years. In!”
We stepped into Manny Leiber’s office.
Manny Leiber stood with the back of his neck watching us.
He stood in the middle of a large, all-white room, white walls, white rug, white furniture, and a huge all-white desk with nothing on it but a white telephone. A sheer blizzard of inspiration from the hand of some snow-blind artist over in Set Design.
Behind the desk was a four-by-six mirror so that if you glanced over your shoulder you could see yourself working. There was only one window in the room. It looked down on the back studio wall, not thirty feet off, and a panoramic view of the graveyard. I could not take my eyes away.
But Manny Leiber cleared his throat. With his back still turned he said: “Is he gone?”
I nodded quietly at his stiff shoulders.
Manny sensed my nod and exhaled. “His name will not be mentioned here again. He never was.”
I waited for Manny to turn and circle me, working off a passion he could not explode. His face was a mass of tics. His eyes did not move with his eyebrows or his eyebrows with his mouth or his head twisting on his neck. He looked dangerously off-balance as he paced; at any moment he might fly apart. Then he noticed Fritz Wong watching us both, and went to stand by Fritz as if to provoke him to a rage.
Fritz wisely did the one thing I noticed often when his world became too real. He removed his monocle and slipped it into his breast pocket. It was like a fine dismantling of attention, a subtle rejection. He shoved Manny in his pocket with the monocle.