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I handed over his monocle from my pocket. He seized and slotted it.
“Arrogant son of a bitch.” The monocle flashed from his right eye like a guillotine blade. “So! It’s you! The coming-great arrives to bug the soon-vanishing. The ascendant king knocks up the has-been prince. The writer who tells the lions what to say to Daniel visits the tamer who tells them what to do. What are you doing here? The film is kaput!”
“Here are the pages.” I walked in. “Maggie? you okay?”
Maggie, in a far corner of the parlor, nodded, pale, but, I could see, recovered.
“Ignore Fritz,” she said. “He’s full of codswallop and liverwurst.”
“Go sit with the Slasher and shut up,” said Fritz, letting his monocle burn holes in my pages.
“Yes—” I looked at Hitler’s picture on the wall and clicked my heels—“sir!”
Fritz glanced up, angrily. “Stupid! That picture of the maniac housepainter is there to remind me of the big bastards I ran from so as to arrive at little ones. Dear God, the facade of Maximus Films is a clone of the Brandenburg Gate! Sitzfleisch, down!”
I downed my Sitzfleisch and gaped.
For just beyond Maggie Botwin was the most incredible religious shrine I had ever seen. It was brighter, bigger, more beauteous than the silver and gold altar at St. Sebastian’s.
“Fritz,” I exclaimed.
For this dazzling shrine was shelved with crème de menthes, brandies, whiskeys, cognacs, ports, Burgundies and Bordeaux, stored in layers of crystal and bright glass tubing. It gleamed like an undersea grotto from which schools of luminous bottles might swarm. Above and around it hung scores and hundreds of fine Swedish cut crystal, Lalique, and Waterford. It was a celebratory throne, the birthing place of Louis the Fourteenth, an Egyptian Sun King’s tomb, Napoleon’s Empiric Coronation dais. It was a toyshop window at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was—
“As you know,” I said, “I rarely drink—”
Fritz’s monocle fell. He caught and replanted it.
“What will you have?” he barked.
I avoided his contempt by remembering a wine I had heard him mention.
“Corton,” I said, “ ’38.”
“Do you really expect me to open my best wine for someone like you?”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
He hauled off and swung his fist toward the ceiling as if to pound me into the floor. Then the fist came down, delicately, and opened a lid on a cabinet to pull out a bottle.
Corton, 1938.
He worked the corkscrew, gritting his teeth and eying me. “I shall watch every sip,” he growled. “If you betray, by the merest expression, that you don’t appreciate—ssst!”
He pulled the cork beautifully and set the bottle down to breathe.
“Now,” he sighed, “though the film is twice dead, let’s see how the boy wonder has done!” He sank into the chair and riffled my new pages. “Let me read your unbearable text. Though why we should pretend we will ever return to the slaughterhouse, God knows!” He shut his left eye and let his right eye, behind the bright glass, shift, and shift again. Finished, he threw the pages to the floor and nodded, angrily, for Maggie to pick them up. He watched her face, meanwhile pouring the wine. “Well!?” he cried, impatiently.
Maggie put the pages in her lap and laid her hands on them, as if they were gospel.
“I could weep. And? I am.”
“Cut the comedy!” Fritz gulped his wine, then stopped, angry at me for making him drink so quickly. “You couldn’t have written that in a few hours!”
“Sorry,” I apologized, sheepishly. “Only
the fast stuff is good. Slow down, you think what you’re doing and it gets bad.”
“Thinking is fatal, is it?” demanded Fritz. “What, do you sit on your brain while you type?”
