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“Poor Clarence.”
“Why ‘poor’?” said Roy.
“He’s in this, too. Otherwise, why was he outside the Brown Derby? Coincidence? Hell, no. Someone told him to come. God, now he’s lost all those great portraits. Roy, we got to go back and save them.”
“We,” said Roy, “got to go straight on ahead.”
“I wonder,” I said, “what kind of note Clarence got? What did it say to him?”
“What did what say?” said Roy.
Roy ran another red light at Sunset in order to catch up with the taxi, which was halfway to Santa Monica Boulevard.
“They’re headed for the studio!” said Roy. “No.”
For the taxicab, when at Santa Monica, had turned left past the graveyard.
Until we reached St. Sebastian’s, just about the least-significant Catholic church in L.A. Suddenly, the taxi swung left down a side street just beyond the church.
The taxicab stopped about a hundred yards down the side street. Roy braked and curbed. We saw the Beast take the woman in toward a small white building obscured by night. He was gone only a moment. A door opened and closed somewhere, and the Beast returned to the taxi, which then glided to the next corner, made a swift U-turn and came back at us. Luckily, our lights were out. The taxi flashed by. Roy cursed, banged the ignition, revved the car, made a calamitous U-turn of his own, with me yelling, and we were back at Santa Monica Boulevard, in time to see the taxi pull up in front of St. Sebastian’s and dislodge its passenger, who then fled up the walk into the lit entry of the church, not looking back. The taxi drove away.
Roy glided our car, lights out, into another dark place under a tree. “Roy, what’re you—?”
“Silence!” hissed Roy. “Hunch. Hunch is everything. That guy no more belongs in a church at midnight than I belong in the burlesque chorus—”
Minutes passed. The church lights did not go out.
“Go see,” suggested Roy.
“Go what?”
“Okay, I’ll go!”
Roy was out of the car, shucking his shoes.
“Come back!” I yelled.
But Roy was gone, in his stocking feet. I jumped out, got rid of my shoes, and followed. Roy made it to the church door in ten seconds, me after, to flatten ourselves against an outside wall. We listened. We heard a voice, rising, falling, rising.
The Beast’s voice! Urgently spelling calamities, terrible commitments, dreadful errors, sins darker than the marble sky above and below.
The priest’s voice gave brief and just as urgent answers of forgiveness, predictions of some better life, where Beast, if not reborn as Beauty, might find some small sweet joys through penance.
Whisper, whisper, in the deeps of the night.
I shut my eyes and ached to hear.
Whisper, whisper. Then—I stiffened in disbelief.
Weeping. A wailing that went on and on and might never stop.
The lonely man inside the church, the man with the dreadful face and the lost soul behind it, let his terrible sadness free to shake the confessional, the church, and me. Weeping, sighing, but to weep again.
My eyelids burst with the sound. Then, silence, and—a stir. Footsteps.
We broke and ran.
We reached the car, jumped in.
