Death Is a Lonely Business Page 9

By the time I reached the Venice Cinema, the fog, impatient, had already gone in.

  Mr. Shapeshade’s old Venice Cinema was special because it was the last of a series of night riverboats, afloat on the edge of the tide, anywhere in the world.

  The front part of the cinema was on the concrete walk that leads from Venice down toward Ocean Park and Santa Monica.

  The back half of it stuck out on the pier so that its rear end was over the water.

  I stood in front of the movie house at this late hour of the day, glanced up at the marquee, and gasped.

  There were no films listed. Only one huge two-foot-high word.

  GOODBYE.

  It was like being stabbed in the stomach.

  I stepped forward to the ticket booth.

  Shapeshade was there smiling at me with manic good will as he waved.

  “Goodbye?” I said mournfully.

  “Sure!” Shapeshade laughed. “Ta-ta, toodle-oo. Farewell. And it’s free! Go in! Any friend of Douglas Fairbanks, Thomas Meighan, Milton Sills, and Charles Ray is a friend of mine.”

  I melted at the names from my childhood; people I had seen flickering on ancient screens when I was two, three, four on my mother’s knee in a cool movie house in northern Illinois before the bad rice came and we steamed west in an old beat-up Kissel, ahead of the Okies, my dad looking for a twelve-buck-a-week job.

  “I can’t go in, Mr. Shapeshade.”

  “Look at the boy who won’t!” Shapeshade threw his hands to the heavens and rolled his eyeballs like Stromboli, irritated by Pinocchio and itching to cut his strings. “Why not?”

  “When I come out of movies in daylight, I get depressed. Nothing’s right.”

  “So where’s the sun?” cried Shapeshade. “By the time you exit, it’s night!”

  “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about three nights ago,” I said. “Did you by any chance see that old ticket office man, Bill, Willy, William Smith, waiting out front here that night?”

  “I yelled at him, yes. What happened to your head? I said. Did a grizzly bear claw your wig off? I said. His hair was a laugh riot. So who took a lawnmower to him? Demon Cal?”

  “Yeah. Did you see someone meet William Smith and take him away?”

  “I got busy. All of a sudden, six people came for tickets, six! When I looked around, Mr. Smith, Willie, was gone. Why?”

  My shoulders sank. My frustration must have shown in my face. Shapeshade quickened with sympathy and enunciated his Sen-Sen breath through the ticket booth’s glass speak-hole.

  “Guess who’s inside on the big 1922 moth-hole-sieved silver screen? Fairbanks! The Black Pirate. Gish! Broken Blossoms. Lon Chaney! Phantom of the Opera. Who was greater?”

  “Lord, Mr. Shapeshade, those are all silent.”

  “So? Where were you in 1928 you didn’t notice? The more talkie the less movie! Statues, they played. Mouths moved and your feet went to sleep. So, these last nights, silence, hmm? Quiet, yes? Silence and gestures forty feet across and scowls and leers twenty feet high. Quiet phantoms. Mum’s-the-word pirates. Gargoyles and hunchbacks who talked in winds and rains and let the organ speak for them, eh? Plenty of seats. Go.”

  He thumped his brass ticket key.

  The machine stuck a nice fresh orange ticket out at me.

  “Yes.” I took the ticket and looked into the face of this old man who hadn’t been out in sun for forty years, who loved films madly, and would rather read Silver Screen than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His eyes were gently mad with his love of old faces on yesterday’s posters.

  “Is Shapeshade your real name?” I said, at last.

  “It means a house like this where shades are shaped and all shapes are shadows. You got a better name?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Shapeshade.” And I hadn’t.

  “What—” I started to ask.

  But Shapeshade guessed with relish. “What happens to me tomorrow when they knock my movie house down! Say, not to worry! I got protection! So have my films, all three hundred of them up in the booth now, but soon, down the beach one mile south, the basement there where I go run films and laugh.”

  “Constance Rattigan!” I cried. “I’ve often seen that funny light flickering in her basement window or up in her front parlor, late nights. Was that you?”

  “Who else?” beamed Shapeshade. “For years now, when I finish here I just foxtrot along the shore with twenty pounds of film under each arm. Sleeps all day, Constance does, watches films and eats popcorn with me all night, that’s Rattigan, and we sit and hold hands like two crazy kids, and rob the film vaults, and cry sometimes so much we can’t see to rewind the spools.”

  I looked out at the beach beyond the cinema front and could not help but see Mr. Shapeshade jogging the surf in the dark, toting popcorn and Mary Pickford, Holloway Suckers and Tom Mix, on his way to that ancient queen to be her subservient lover of multifold darks and lights that sprocketed the dream screen with just as many sunrises as sunsets.

  And then Shapeshade watching just before dawn as Constance Rattigan, so the rumors said, ran naked to leap into the cold salt waves and rise with healthfood seaweeds in her straight white teeth and regally braiding her hair, while Shapeshade limped home in the rising sun, drunk on remembrance, mumming and humming the drones of the mighty Wurlitzer in his marrow, soul, heart, and happy mouth.

  “Listen.” He leaned forward like Ernest Thesiger in the dim halls of The Old Dark House or as Dr. Praetorius looming in Bride of Frankenstein. “Inside, go up behind the screen, have you ever? No. Climb up on stage in the night behind the screen. What an experience! Like being in Caligari’s lopsided chambers. You’ll thank me forever.”

  I shook his hand and stared.

  “My gosh,” I cried, “that hand of yours. Isn’t that the paw that slid out of the dark behind the library bookshelves in The Cat and the Canary to grab and vanish the lawyer before he could read the will?”

  Shapeshade stared down at his hand cradled in mine, and beamed.

  “Aren’t you a nice boy?” he said.

  “I try, Mr. Shapeshade,” I said. “I try.”

  Inside, I blundered down the aisle until I felt my way to the brass rail and half-flopped up the proscenium steps onto an always-midnight stage to duck behind the screen and look at the great ghosts.

  And ghosts they were, the tall, pale, and black-eyed shadow phantoms of time, twisted like white taffy from the slanted angle at which I saw them, gesturing and mouthing in the silence, waiting for the organ music, which had not yet begun.

  And there in swift clip after chop after clip was Fairbanks with an askew face and Gish wax-melting down the screen, and Fatty Arbuckle thinned from this sideview and knocking his starved head against the top of the frame and slithering off into the dark while I stood feeling the tide move under the floor, the pier, the theater which foundered in swarming waters, now tilting and creaking and shivering, with the smell of salt coming up through the boards and more pictures, white as cream, dark as ink, blinking across the screen as the theater lifted like a bellows and sank down exhaling like a bellows, and me sunk with it.

  Just then, the organ exploded.

  It was like that moment a few hours ago when the great unseen steamliner had plunged to strike the pier.

  The theater careened, heaved up, and fell as if on a roller-coastal tide.

  The organ shouted and brayed and ricocheted a Bach prelude so that dust flew off the ancient chandeliers, the curtains stirred restlessly like funeral gowns, and myself behind the screen reaching out to hold on to something but terrified that something might touch back.

  Above me, the pale images ached and gibbered their mouths and the Phantom strode down the stairs at the Paris Opera in his white-skull mask and plumed hat, even as Shapeshade, a moment before, must have strode down the dark aisle to rattle and chime the brass rings holding the short curtain around the organ, and seat himself like Destiny and Doom to spider the keys and shut his eyes and gape his mouth to let Bach out.

>   Afraid to look behind, I stared out past the thirty-foot phantoms at an audience unseen, riveted in place, shuddering with music, drawn by terrible images, lifted and then jolted down by the night tide under the theater deck.

  Among all those pale faces, fixing their eyes upon the flickering past, was he there? The mourner on the train, the pacer along the canal rim, the leaver of three-in-the-morning rains, was that his face over here, or that one over there? Colorless moons trembling in the dark, a cluster of souls in front, another back halfway, fifty, sixty people, dreadful suspects on yet another fog excursion rushing to collide with nightmare and sink with no sound, only the great suck of the sea going back for reinforcements.

  Among all these night travelers, which was he, I wondered, and what could I shout to panic him up the aisles, with me in wild pursuit?

  The giant skull smiled from the screen, the lovers fled to the Opera roof, the Phantom pursued to unfurl his cape and overhear their fearful love-talk and grin; the organ shrieked, the theater bucked and heaved with heavy waters celebrating sea burials should the planks gape and drop us down through.

  My eyes raced from dimly upturned face to face, and up, up, to the little window of the projectionist’s booth, where a section of brow and a maniac eye peered down at the delicious dooms painted on the screen in geysers of light and dark.

  Poe’s raven eye.

  Or rather, Shrank!

  Tarot card reader, psychologist, phrenologist, numerologist, and …

  Film projectionist.

  Someone had to run the film while Shapeshade clawed the organ in paroxysms of delight. Most nights, the old man ran from ticket booth to projection room to organ, bouncing off each like a manic boy disguised as rambling man.

  But now—?

  Who else for a late night menu of hunchbacks, striding skeletons, and hairy paws snatching moon-pearls from a sleeping woman’s neck?

  Shrank.

  The organ music peaked. The phantom vanished. A new clip, from Jekyll and Hyde, 1920, jittered across the screen.

  I leaped down off the stage and ran up the aisle, among all the fiends and murderers.

  The Poe eye in the projectionist’s window was gone.

  By the time I reached the projection booth, it was empty. The film unspooled itself in the firefly machine. Jekyll, on his way to becoming Hyde, slid down the lightbeams to strike a hairball on the screen.

  The music stopped.

  Downstairs, on the way out, I found an exhausted but happy Shapeshade back in the ticket booth, selling seats to the fog.

  I thrust my hands in to grab his and squeeze.

  “No bad rice for you, huh?”

  “What!” cried Shapeshade, complimented but not knowing why.

  “You’ll live forever,” I said.

  “What do you know that God doesn’t?” asked Shapeshade. “Come back later. One in the morning, Veidt in Caligari. Two, Chaney in Laugh Clown Laugh. Three, The Gorilla. Four, The Bat. Who could ask for more?”

  “Not me, Mr. Shapeshade.”

  I moved off into the mist.

  “You’re not depressed?” he yelled after.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you got to think about it, you’re not!”

  Full night had arrived.

  I saw that Modesti’s Cafe had closed early, or forever, I didn’t know which. I couldn’t ask questions there about William Smith and celebratory haircuts and dinners.

  The pier was dark. Only a single light shone in A. L. Shrank’s tarot card shack window.

  I blinked.

  Scared, the damn light went out.

  “Bad rice?” said Crumley, on the phone. But his voice was bright, hearing that it was me. “What kind of talk is that?”

  “Crumley,” I said, swallowing hard, “I got another name to add to our list.”

  “What list?”

  “Along with the canary lady—”

  “That’s not our list, it’s your—”

  “Shrank,” I said.

  “What!”

  “A. L. Shrank, the Venice pier psychologist—”

  “—Tarot card reader, weirdo librarian, amateur numerologist, Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?”

  “You know him?”

  “Kid, I know everyone up, down, above, in, and under the pier, every weight lifter kicking sand, every dead bum on the night beach resurrected by the smell of seventy-nine-cent muscatel comes the dawn. A. L. Shrank, that measly dwarf? No way.”

  “Don’t hang up! I can see it in his face. He’s asking for it. He’s next. I wrote a story last year, in Dime Detective, about two trains in a station, going opposite ways, stopped at a siding for a minute. One man looks across at another man, they trade stares, and the one man realizes he should never have looked across, because the man on the other train is a murderer. The murderer looks back and smiles. That’s all. Smiles. And my hero realizes that he himself is doomed. He looks away, trying to save himself. But the other man, the killer, keeps staring. And when my hero looks up again, the train window across the way is empty. He realizes that the killer has gone to get off the train. A minute later, the killer appears on my hero’s train, in his car, walks down the aisle, and sits in a seat right behind my hero. Panic, huh? Panic.”

  “Great idea, but it don’t happen that way,” said Crumley.

  “More often than you think. A friend of mine drove a Rolls-Royce across country last year. On the way, he was almost run off the road six times, through Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and Illinois, by men who resented that expensive car. If they had succeeded, it would have been murder and no one the wiser.”

  “That’s different. An expensive car is an expensive car. They didn’t care who was in it. Kill. But what you’re saying is—”

  “There are murderers and murderees in this world. The old man in the trolley waiting room was a murderee, so is the canary lady. It’s in their eyes: take me, it said, favor me, spoil me away forever.

  “Shrank,” I finished. “I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Don’t,” said Crumley, suddenly quieter. “You’re a good kid, but God you’re wet behind the ears.”

  “Shrank,” I said. “Now that the pier’s collapsing, he’s got to collapse, too. If someone doesn’t kill him, he’ll tie Decline of the West and Anatomy of Melancholy around his neck and jump off what’s left of the far end of the pier. Shrank.”

  As if agreeing with me, a lion roared, hungry for blood, off in Crumley’s African territory.

  “Just when you and I were beginning to get along so well,” said Crumley.

  And hung up.

  All over Venice, windowshades were going up for the first time in weeks, months, or years.

  It was as if the ocean were coming awake just before going to sleep forever.

  A windowshade right across from my apartment, in a little white-flake-painted bungalow, had lifted during the day, and …

  As I entered my apartment that night, I glanced over and was fascinated.

  The eyes were staring at me.

  Not just one pair, but a dozen, not a dozen but a hundred or more.

  The eyes were glass and lay in shining paths or were displayed on small pedestals.

  The eyes were blue and brown and green and hazel and yellow.

  I walked across my narrow street and stood looking down and in at the fabulous aggie-marble display.

  “What a game that would make in the schoolyard dirt,” I said, just to me.

  The eyes said nothing. They rested on their stands or strewn in little clusters on a white velvet cloth, fixing their gaze through and beyond me, at some cold future just over my shoulder and down my spine.

  Who had made the glass eves and who had put them in the window and who waited inside to sell them and pop them into people’s sockets, I could not say.

  Whoever it was was another of Venice’s unseen manufacturers and salesmen. I had, on occasion, far back in the cavern reaches of this bungalow, seen a piercing blue-w
hite flame and someone’s hands working at teardrops of melting glass. But the old man (everyone is old in Venice, California) had his face hidden behind a thick metal-and-glass fire-torch mask. All you could see, far off, was a new stare coming to life, a blind eye being brought to focus in flame, to be laid out like a bright bonbon in the window next day.

  Whether anyone ever came to buy this special jewelry, that also I did not know. I had never seen anyone blundering into the place or striding out with a fresher gaze. The windowshade had only been raised once or twice a month during the last year.

  Looking down, I thought, strange eyes, do you see the lost canaries? and where did they go?

  And added, watch my place, yes? During the night, stay alert. The weather may change. Rain may come. Shadows may touch my doorbell. Much note, please, and long remember.

  The shiny agate-marble-mib long-years-ago schoolyard companions did not so much as blink.

  At which point, a hand like a magician’s slid from the shadows behind the display and pulled the lid down over the eyes.

  It was as if the glass blower resented my staring at his stares.

  Or perhaps he feared I might sneeze out one eye and come in for a refill.

  A customer! That might spoil his perfect record. Ten years of blowing glass and not a single sale.

  As a sideline, I wondered, does he sell bathing suits from 1910?

  Back in my apartment, I glanced out.

  The shade had gone back up again, now that I was not the Inquisition standing outside.

  The eyes were bright and waiting.

  What, I wondered, will they see tonight?

  “With nothing trembles—”

  Instantly, I awoke.

  “What,” I said to the empty ceiling.

  Had Lady Macbeth said that?

  With nothing trembles.

  To be afraid of nothing for no reason.

  And having to live with that nothing until dawn.

  I listened.

  Was that the fog bruising my door? Was that the mist testing my keyhole? And was that the special miniature rainstorm prowling my doormat, leaving seaweed?

  I was afraid to go look.