Читать книгу A Graveyard for Lunatics - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 14

9

As we were driving back in through the main gate of the studio, the hearse whispered out. Empty. Like a long autumn wind it drifted off, around, and back to Death’s country.

“Jesus Christ! Just like I guessed!” Roy steered but stared back at the empty street. “I’m beginning to enjoy this!”

We moved along the street in the direction from which the hearse had been coming.

Fritz Wong marched across the alley in front of us, driving or leading an invisible military squad, muttering and swearing to himself, his sharp profile cutting the air in two halves, wearing a dark beret, the only man in Hollywood who wore a beret and dared anyone to notice!

“Fritz!” I called. “Stop, Roy!”

Fritz ambled over to lean against the car and give us his by now familiar greeting.

“Hello, you stupid bike-riding Martian! Who’s that strange-looking ape driving?”

“Hello, Fritz, you stupid …” I faltered and then said sheepishly, “Roy Holdstrom, world’s greatest inventor, builder, and flier of dinosaurs!”

Fritz Wong’s monocle flashed fire. He fixed Roy with his Oriental-Germanic glare, then nodded crisply.

“Any friend of Pithecanthropus erectus is a friend of mine!”

Roy grabbed his handshake. “I liked your last film.”

“Liked!” cried Fritz Wong.

“Loved!”

“Good.” Fritz looked at me. “What’s new since breakfast!”

“Anything funny happening around here just now?”

“A Roman phalanx of forty men just marched that way. A gorilla, carrying his head, ran in Stage 10. A homosexual art director got thrown out of the Men’s. Judas is on strike for more silver over in Galilee. No, no. I wouldn’t say anything funny or I’d notice.”

“How about passing through?” offered Roy. “Any funerals?”

“Funerals! You think I wouldn’t notice? Wait!” He flashed his monocle toward the gate and then toward the backlot. “Dummy. Yes. I was hoping it was deMille’s hearse and we could celebrate. It went that way!”

“Are they filming a burial here today?”

“On every sound stage: turkeys, catatonic actors, English funeral directors whose heavy paws would stillbirth a whale! Halloween, yesterday, yes? And today the true Mexican Day of Death, November 1st, so why should it be different at Maximus Films? Where did you find this terrible wreck of a car, Mr. Holdstrom?”

“This,” Roy said, like Edgar Kennedy doing a slow burn in an old Hal Roach comedy, “is the car in which Laurel and Hardy sold fish in that two reeler in 1930. Cost me fifty bucks, plus seventy to repaint. Stand back, sir!”

Fritz Wong, delighted with Roy, jumped back. “In one hour, Martian. The commissary! Be there!”

We steamed on amidst the noon crowd. Roy wheeled us around a corner toward Springfield, Illinois, lower Manhattan, and Piccadilly.

“You know where you’re going?” I asked.

“Hell, a studio’s a great place to hide a body. Who would notice? On a backlot filled with Abyssinians, Greeks, Chicago mobsters, you could march in six dozen gang wars with forty Sousa bands and nobody’d sneeze! That body, chum, should be right about here!”

And we dusted around the last corner into Tombstone, Arizona.

“Nice name for a town,” said Roy.