“Why?”
“This poem sounds just like the studio and the graveyard. You ever have one of those crystal balls you shook and the snow lifted in blizzards inside? That’s how my bones feel now.”
“Bushwah,” was Roy’s comment.
I glanced over at his great hawk’s profile, which cleaved the night air, full of that optimism that only craftsmen seem to have about being able to build a world just the way they want it, no matter what.
I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die.
“Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we are.”
And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999.
The maître d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny.
“Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly.
“About this place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”
That rippled the fur on the maître d’s neck, but he let us in anyway.
The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables.
There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth.
Stanislau Groc.
“God,” cried Roy. “You!”
“Me?!”
Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut.
“What are you doing here?” he exclaimed.
“We were invited.”
“We were looking for someone,” I said.
“And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc.
Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc.
“Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man.
“Roy,” I warned.
For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin.
“Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t do.”
“For what? Hold on! Yes! Is it the Search?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips.
“But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who could I scare?”
“Not to worry,” said Roy. “The scare comes later, when I think about you at three A.M.”
That did it. Groc ripped off the greatest laugh of all and waved us down in the booth.