“I dunno. Hey, this isn’t bad wine.”
“Not bad!” Fritz raged at the ceiling. “A 1938 Corton and he says not bad! Better than all those damn candy bars I see you chewing around the studio. Better than all the women in the world. Almost.”
“This wine,” I said quickly, “is almost as good as your films.”
“Excellent.” Fritz, shot through his ego, smiled. “You could almost be Hungarian.”
Fritz refilled my glass and gave back my medal of honor, his monocle.
“Young wine expert, why else did you come?”
The time was right. “Fritz,” I said, “on October 31st, 1934, you directed, photographed, and cut a film titled Wild Party.”
Fritz was lying back in his chair, with his legs straight out, the wine glass in his right hand. His left hand crawled up toward the pocket where his monocle should have been.
Fritz’s mouth opened lazily, coolly. “Again?”
“Halloween night, 1934—”
“More.” Fritz, eyes shut, held out his glass.
I poured.
“If you spill I’ll throw you down the stairs.” Fritz’s face was pointed at the ceiling. As he felt the weight of the wine in the glass, he nodded and I pulled away to refill my own.
“Where,” Fritz’s mouth worked as if it were separate from the rest of his impassive face, “did you hear of such a dumb film with a stupid title?”
“It was shot with no film in the camera. You directed it for maybe two hours. Shall I tell you the actors that night?”
Fritz opened one eye and tried to focus across the room without his monocle.
“Constance Rattigan,” I recited, “J. C., Doc Phillips, Manny Leiber, Stanislau Groc, and Arbuthnot, Sloane, and his wife, Emily Sloane.”
“God damn, that’s quite a cast,” said Fritz.
“Want to tell me why?”
Fritz sat up slowly, cursed, drank his wine, then sat hunched over the glass, looking in it for a long while. Then he blinked and said:
“So at last I get to tell. I’ve been waiting to vomit all these years. Well … someone had to direct. There was no script. Total madness. I was brought in at the last moment.”
“How much,” I said, “did you improvise?”
“Most, no, all of it,” said Fritz. “There were bodies all over. Well, not bodies. People and lots of blood. I had my camera along for the night, you know, a party like that and you like to catch people offguard, at least I did. The first part of the evening was fine. People screaming and running back and forth through the studio and through the tunnel and dancing in the graveyard with a jazz band. It was wild, all right, and terrific. Until it got out of hand. The accident, that is. By then, you’re right, there was no film in my 16-millimeter camera. So I gave orders. Run here. Run there. Don’t call the police. Get the cars. Stuff the poorbox.”
“I guessed at that.”
“Shut up! The poor bastard priest, like the lady, was going nuts. The studio always kept lots of cash on hand for emergencies. We loaded the baptismal font like a Thanksgiving feast, right in front of the priest. I never knew, that night, if he even saw what we did, he was in such shock. I ordered the Sloane woman out of there. An extra took her.”
“No,” I said. “A star.”
“Yes!? She went. While we picked up the pieces and covered our tracks. It was easier to do, back then. The studios, after all, ran the town. We had one body, Sloane’s, to show and another, Arbuthnot’s, in the mortuary, we said, and Doc signing the death certificates. Nobody ever asked to see all the bodies. We paid off the coroner to take a year’s sick leave. That’s how it was done.”
Fritz drew in his legs, cradled his drink over his groin, and searched the air for the sight of my face.
“Luckily, because of the studio party, J. C., Doc Phillips, Groc, Manny, and all the yes-men were there. I yelled: Bring guards. Bring cars. Cordon off the crash. People come out of houses? Shout them back with bullhorns! Again, on that street, few houses, and the gas station shut. The rest? Law offices, all dark. By the time a real crowd came from blocks away, in their pajamas, I had parted the Red Sea, reburied Lazarus, got new jobs for the Doubting Thomases in far places! Delicious, wondrous, superb! Another drink?”
“What’s that stuff ?”