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I hesitated and looked down into a face that was a crosshatch of emotions. All the parts of Groc’s usually brave and arrogant front were melting. It was like a test pattern on a TV screen, blurred, clearing up, then dissolving. I climbed in and slammed the door, which banged the car off on a maniac path.
“Hey, what’s the rush!?”
We gunned by the sound stages. Each one was wide open and airing. The exteriors of at least six of them were being repainted. Old sets were being wrecked and carried out into the sunlight.
“On any other day, lovely!” Groc shouted above his engine. “I would have loved this. Chaos is my meat. Stockmarkets crashed? Ferryboats capsized? Superb! I went back to Dresden in 1946 just to see the destroyed buildings and shell-shocked people.”
“You didn’t?!”
“Wouldn’t you like to have seen? Or the fires in London in 1940. Every time mankind behaves abominably, I know happiness!”
“Don’t good things make you happy? Artistic people, creative men and women?”
“No, no.” Groc sped on. “That depresses. A lull between stupidities. Just because there are a few naïve fools mucking up the landscape with their cut roses and still-life arts only shows in greater relief the troglodytes, midget worms and sidewinding vipers that oil the underground machineries and run the world to ruin. I decided years ago, since the continents are vast sludge works, I would buy the best-size boots and wallow in it like a babe. But this is ridiculous, us locked inside a stupid factory. I want to laugh at, not be destroyed by, it. Hold on!” We swerved past Calvary.
I almost yelled.
For Calvary was gone.
Beyond, the incinerator lifted great plumes of black smoke.
“That must be the three crosses,” I said.
“Good!” Groc snorted. “I wonder—will J. C. sleep at the Midnight Mission tonight?”
I swiveled my head to look at him.
“You know J. C. well?”
“The muscatel Messiah? I made him! As I made others’ eyebrows and bosoms, why not Christ’s hands! So I pared the extra flesh to make his fingers seem delicate: the hands of a Saviour. Why not? Is not religion a joke? People think they are saved. We know they’re not. But the crown-of-thorns touch, the stigmata!” Groc shut his eyes as he almost drove into a telephone pole, swerved and stopped.
“I guessed you had done that,” I said, at last.
“If you act Christ, be Him! I told J. C. I will make you spike marks to show at Renaissance exhibitions! I will sew you the stigmata of Masaccio, da Vinci, Michelangelo! From the Pietà’s marble flesh! And, as you’ve seen, on special nights—”
“—the stigmata bleed.”
I knocked the car door wide. “I think I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“No, no,” Groc apologized, laughing shrilly. “I need you. What an irony! To get me out the front gate, later. Go talk to Botwin, then we run like hell.”
I held the door half open, undecided. Groc seemed in such a joyful panic, hilarious to the point of hysteria, I could only shut the door. Groc drove on.
“Ask, ask,” said Groc.
“Okay,” I tried. “What about all those faces you made beautiful?”
Groc pedaled the gas.
“They’ll last forever, I told them, and the fools believed. Anyway, I am retiring, if I can get out the front gate. I have bought passage on a round-the-world cruise tomorrow. After thirty years my laughs have turned to snake spit. Manny Leiber? Will die any day. Doc? Did you know? He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Who knows?” But Groc’s eyes slid north toward the stud
io graveyard wall. “Excommunicated?”
We drove. Groc nodded ahead. “Now Maggie Botwin I like. She’s a perfectionist surgeon, like me.”
