We turned.
There was a big chair nearby.
And an empty desk.
With a white telephone in the middle of the desk.
“Where are we?” said Crumley.
“By the way he’s breathing, the child knows,” said Henry.
Crumley’s flashlight played over the room.
“Holy Mother of God, Caesar, and Christ,” I sighed.
I was looking at—
Manny Leiber’s chair.
Manny Leiber’s desk.
Manny Leiber’s telephone.
Manny Leiber’s office.
I turned to see the mirror that hid the now invisible door.
Half drunk with exhaustion, I stared at myself in that cold glass.
And suddenly it was—
Nineteen twenty-six. The opera singer in her dressing room and a voice behind the mirror urging, teaching, prompting, desiring her to step through the glass, a terrible
Alice … dissolved in images, melting to descend to the underworld, led by the man in the dark cloak and white mask to a gondola that drifted on dark canal waters to a buried palace and a bed shaped like a coffin.
The phantom’s mirror.
The phantom’s passage from the land of the dead.
And now—
His chair, his desk, his office.
But not the phantom. The Beast.
I knocked the chair aside.
The Beast … coming to see Manny Leiber?
I stumbled and backed off.
Manny, I thought. He who never truly gave, but took, orders. A shadow, not a substance. A sideshow, not a main attraction. Run a studio!? No. Be a phone line over which voices passed? Yes. A messenger boy. An errand boy fetching champagne and cigarettes, sure! But sit in that chair? He had never sat there. Because … ?
Crumley shoved Henry.
“Move!”
“What?” I said, numbly.