“She doesn’t sound like you.”
“If she ever did, she’d die. And you? Well, disillusionment takes time. You’ll be seventy before you find you’ve crossed minefields yelling to an idiot troop, ‘This way!’ Your films will be forgotten.”
“No,” I said.
Groc glanced over at my set chin and stubborn upper lip.
“No,” he admitted. “You have the look of the true sainted fool. Not your films.”
We rounded another corner and I nodded to the carpenters, the cleaners, and painters: “Who ordered all this work?”
“Manny, of course.”
“Who ordered Manny? Who really gives orders here? Someone behind a mirror? Someone inside a wall?”
Groc braked the car swiftly and looked ahead. I could see the stitch marks around his ears, nice and clear.
“It can’t be answered.”
“No?” I said. “I look around, what do I see? A studio, in the midst of production on eight films. One a huge one, our Jesus epic, with two more days of shooting to go. And suddenly, on a whim, someone says: Slam the doors. And the crazed painting and cleaning happens. It’s madness to shut a studio with a budget that runs at least ninety to a hundred thousand dollars a day. What gives?”
“What?” said Groc, quietly.
“Well, I see Doc and he’s a jellyfish, poisonous, but no spine. I look at Manny and his behind is just right for highchairs. You? There’s a mask behind your mask and another under that. None of you have the dynamite kegs or the electric pump plunger to knock the whole damn studio down. Yet down it goes. I see a studio as big as a white whale. Harpoons fly. So there’s got to be a real maniac captain.”
“Tell me, then,” Groc said, “who is Ahab?”
“A dead man standing on a ladder in the graveyard, looking over, giving orders. And you all run,” I said.
Groc blinked three slow iguana-lizard blinks of his great dark eyes.
“Not me,” he said, smiling.
“No? Why not?”
“Because, you damned fool.” Groc beamed, looking at the sky. “Think! There are only two geniuses smart enough to have manufactured that dead man of yours on that ladder in the rain to look over the wall and stop people’s hearts!” And here Groc was taken with a paroxysm of laughter that almost killed. “Who could model a face like that!”
“Roy Holdstrom!”
“Yes! And?!”
“Lenin’s—” I stammered—“Lenin’s makeup man?”
Stanislau Groc turned the full light of his smile on me.
“Stanislau Groc,” I said, numbly. “. . . You.”
He bowed his head modestly.
You! I thought. Not the Beast hiding in the tombs, climbing the ladder to position the scarecrow Arbuthnot and stop the studio dead, no! But Groc, the man who laughs, the tiny Conrad Veidt with the eternal grin sewn to his face!
“Why?” I said.
“Why?” Groc smirked. “My God, to stir things up! Jesus, it’s been boring here for years! Doc sick with needles. Manny ripping himself in two. Myself, not getting enough laughs on this ship of fools. So raise the dead! But you spoiled it, found the body but told no one. I hoped you’d run yelling through the streets. Instead, the next day, you clammed up. I had to make a few anonymous calls to get the studio into the graveyard. Then, riots! Pandemonium.”
“Did you send the other note to coax me and Roy to the Brown Derby to see the Beast?”
“I did.”