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“Let me think.”
“Goddammit. Don’t think! Drink with your nose! Exhale through your ears!”
He showed me how, eyes shut.
I did the same. “Excellent.”
“Now sit down and shut up.”
“This is my place, Fritz.”
“Not now it isn’t.”
I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and he stood over me like Caesar astride an ant farm.
“Now,” he said, “spill the beans.”
I lined them up and spilled them.
When I finished, Fritz refilled my jelly glass reluctantly.
“You don’t deserve this,” he muttered, “but yours was a fair performance drinking the vintage. Shut up. Sip.”
“If anyone can solve Rattigan,” he said, sipping, “it’s me. Or should I say, I? Quiet.”
He opened the front door on the lovely endless rain. “You like this?”
“Love it.”
“Sap!” Fritz screwed his monocle in for a long glance upshore.
“Rattigan’s place up there, eh? Not home for seven days? Maybe dead? Empress of the killing ground, yes, but she will never be caught dead. One day she will simply disappear and no one will know what happened. Now, shall I spill my beans?”
He poured the last of the Le Corton, hating the jelly glass, loving the wine.
He was at liberty, he said, unemployed. No films for two years. Too old, they said.
“I’m the youngest acrobat in any bed on three continents!” he protested. “Now I have got my hands on Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan. But how do you cast that incredible play? So, meanwhile I have a Jules Verne novel in the public domain, free and clear, with a dumb-cluck fly-by-night producer who says nothing and steals much, so I need a second-rate science-fiction writer—you—to work for scale on this half-ass masterwork. Say yes.”
Before I could speak …
There was a huge deluge of rain and a crack of fire and thunder, during which Fritz barked: “You’re hired! Now. Do you have more to show and tell?”
I showed and told.
The photos clipped from the ancient newspapers and Scotch-taped on the wall over my bed. Fritz had to half lie down, cursing, to look at the damned things.
“With one eye, the other destroyed in a duel—”
“A duel?” I exclaimed. “You never said—”
“Shut up and read the names under the pictures to the Cyclops German director.”
I read the names.
Fritz repeated them.
“Yes, I remember her.” He reached to touch. “And that one. And, yes, this one. My God, what a rogues’ gallery.”
