All I could say then, exhausted, was, in a half whisper: “Goodbye …”
I went back to the roadster. Constance was sitting there looking at the Hollywood Hills, trying to enjoy the weather.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“One nut, Clarence. Another one, Roy.” I slumped into the seat beside her. “Okay, take me to the nut factory.”
Constance gunned us to the studio gate.
“God,” gasped Constance, staring up, “I hate hospitals.”
“Hospitals?!”
“Those rooms are full of undiagnosed cases. A thousand babies have been conceived, or born, in that joint. It’s a snug home where the bloodless get transfusions of greed. That coat of arms above the gate? A lion rampant with a broken back. Next: a blind goat with no balls. Then: Solomon chopping a live baby in half. Welcome to Green Glades mortuary!”
Which sent a stream of icewater down my neck.
My pass motored us through the front gate. No confetti. No brass bands.
“You should have told that cop who you were!”
“You see his face? Born the day I fled the studio for my nunnery. Say ‘Rattigan’ and the sound track dies. Look!”
She pointed at the film vaults as we swerved by. “My tomb! Twenty cans in one crypt! Films that died in Pasadena, shipped back with tags on their toes. So!”
We braked in the middle of Green Town, Illinois.
I jumped up the front steps and put out my hand. “My grandparents’ place. Welcome!”
Constance let me pull her up the steps to sit in the porch swing, feeling the motion.
“My God,” she breathed, “I haven’t ridden one of these in years! You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “what are you doing to the old lady?”
“Heck. I didn’t know crocodiles cried.”
She looked at me steadily. “You’re a real case. You believe all this crap you write? Mars in 2001. Illinois in ’28?”
“Yep.”
“Christ. How lucky to be inside your skin, so goddamned naïve. Don’t ever change.” Constance gripped my hand. “We stupid damn doomsayers, cynics, monsters laugh, but we need you. Otherwise, Merlin dies, or a carpenter fixing the Round Table saws it crooked, or the guy who oils the armor substitutes cat pee. Live forever. Promise?”
Inside, the phone rang.
Constance and I jumped. I ran in to grab the receiver. “Yes?” I waited. “Hello?!”
But there was only a sound of wind blowing from what seemed like a high place. The flesh on the back of my neck, like a caterpillar, crawled up and then down.
“Roy?”
Inside the phone, wind blew and, somewhere, timbers creaked.
My gaze lifted by instinct to the sky.
One hundred yards away. Notre Dame. With its twin towers, its statue saints, its gargoyles.
There was wind up on the cathedral towers. Dust blowing high, and a red workmen’s flag.
“Is this a studio line?” I said. “Are you where I think you are?”