Groc took his time tapping his napkin on his little rosebud smile, took another swig of cold milk, crossed his knife and fork on his plate, and scrambled down. He paused and thought, then said, “Not Titanic, Ozymandias is more like it!” and ran out.
“Why,” said Roy, after a moment, “did he make up all that guff about manatees and woodcarving?”
“He’s good,” said Fritz Wong. “Conrad Veidt, small size. I’ll use that little son of a bitch in my next film.”
“What did he mean by Ozymandias?” I asked.
All the rest of the afternoon Roy kept shoving his head into my office, showing me his clay-covered fingers.
“Empty!” he cried. “No Beast!”
I yanked paper from my typewriter. “Empty! Also no Beast!”
But at last, at ten o’clock that night, Roy drove us to the Brown Derby.
On the way I read aloud the first half of “Ozymandias.”
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
Shadows moved over Roy’s face.
“Read the rest,” he said.
I read:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
When I finished, Roy let two or three long dark blocks pass.
“Turn around, let’s go home,” I said.
“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.
“Since your night is ruined, drink!”
Roy and I glanced nervously around the restaurant.
No Beast.
When the champagne was poured, Groc toasted us.
“May you never have to curl a dead man’s eyelashes, clean a dead man’s teeth, rewax his beard, or rearrange his syphilitic lips.” Groc rose and looked at the door through which his women had run.
“Did you see their faces?” Groc smiled after them. “Mine! Do you know why those girls are wildly in love with me and will never leave? I am the high lama of the Valley of the Blue Moon. Should they depart, a door would slam, mine, and their faces fall. I have warned them also that I have hooked fine wires below their chins and eyes. Should they run too far too fast to the end of the wire—their flesh would unravel. And instead of being thirty, they would be forty-two!”
“Fafner,” growled Roy. His fingers clutched the table as if he might leap up.
“What?”
“A friend,” I said. “We thought we might see him tonight.”
“Tonight is over,” said Groc. “But stay. Finish my champagne. Order more, charge me. Would you like a salad before the kitchen shuts?”
“I’m not hungry,” said Roy, the wild disappointed Shrine Opera Siegfried look in his eyes.
“Yes!” I said.
“Two salads,” Groc said to the waiter. “Blue cheese dressing?”
Roy