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“Never heard of you.” He glanced down at the empty screen. “You one of them?”
“The dead stars?”
“They sometimes climb up. Fairbanks came last night.”
“Zorro, D’Artagnan, Robin Hood? He knocked at your door?”
“Scratched. Being dead has its problems. You coming in or out?”
I stepped in quickly before he could change his mind.
The film projectors stood facing emptiness in a room that looked like a Chung King burial chamber. It smelled of dust and sand and acrid celluloid. There was only one chair between the projectors. As he’d said, no one ever came to visit.
I stared at the crowded walls. There must’ve been three dozen pictures nailed there, some in cheap Woolworth frames, others in silver, still others mere scraps torn from old Silver Screen magazines, photographs of thirty women, no two alike.
The old, old man let a smile haunt his face.
“My sweetheart dears, from when I was an active volcano.”
The most ancient of ancient men looked out at me from behind a maze of wrinkles, the kind you get when you search the icebox at six A.M. and take out last night’s premixed martinis.
“I keep the door locked. I thought you were just here, yelling outside.”
“Not me.”
“Someone was. Outside of that, nobody’s been up here since Lowell Sherman died.”
“That’s two obituaries in ten minutes. Winter 1934. Cancer and pneumonia.”
“Nobody knows that!”
“I roller-skated by the Coliseum one Saturday 1934 before a football game. Lowell Sherman came in whooping and barking. I got his autograph and said, ‘Take care.’ He died two days later.”
“Lowell Sherman.” The old, old man regarded me with a new luster in his eyes. “As long as you’re alive, he is, too.”
Clyde Rustler collapsed in the one chair and sized me up again. “Lowell Sherman. Why in hell did you make the long climb up here? People have died climbing. Uncle Sid climbed up once or twice, said to hell with it, built the bigger projection booth a thousand yards downslope in the real world, if there is a real one. Never went down to see. So?”
For he saw that I was casting my gaze around his primeval nest at those walls teeming with dozens of faces, forever young.
“Would you like a rundown on these mountai
n-lion street cats?” He leaned and pointed.
“Her name was Carlotta or Midge or Diana. She was a Spanish flirt, a Cal Coolidge ‘It girl’ with a skirt up to her navel, a Roman queen fresh out of DeMille’s milk bath. Then she was a vamp named Illysha, a typist called Pearl, an English tennis player—Pamela. Sylvia? Ran a nudist flytrap in Cheyenne. Some called her ‘Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah.’ Dressed like Dolley Madison, sang ‘Tea for Two,’ ‘Chicago,’ popped out of a big clamshell like the pearl of paradise, Flo Ziegfeld’s craze. Fired by her father at thirteen for conduct unbecoming a human who ripened fast: Willa-Kate. Worked in a chophouse chink joint: Lila Wong. Got more votes than the president, Coney Island Beauty Pageant, ’29: not-so-plain Willa. Got off the night train in Glendale: Barbara Jo, next day, almost, head of Glory Films: Anastasia Alice Grimes—”
He stopped. I looked up. “Which brings us to Rattigan,” I said.
Clyde Rustler froze in place.
“You said no one’s been up here for years. But—she came up here today, right? Maybe to look at these pictures? Did she or didn’t she?”
The old, old man stared at his dusty hands, then slowly rose to face a brass whistle tube in the wall, one of those submarine devices that you blew so it shrieked and you yelled orders.
“Leo? Wine! A two-dollar tip!”
A tiny voice squealed from the brass nozzle, “You don’t drink!”
“I do now, Leo. And hot dogs!”
