?But what is it??
?Death, I guess.?
Crumley took the cardboard box. It stirred and rustled and whispered.
Crumley lifted the lid off the carton and peered down in. Some strange papier-mache thing stared back up at him.
Crumley said, ?So that?s the former head of Maximus Studios, is it??
?Yes,? I said.
Crumley studied the face for another moment and nodded quietly. ?That?s death, all right.?
He shut the lid. The weight inside the box shifted and whispered something like ?sleep? in its rustling. No! I thought, don?t
27
We talked in the morning.
28
At noon, Crumley dropped me in front of Roy?s apartment house out at Western and Fifty-fourth Street. He examined my face carefully.
?What?s your name??
?I refuse to identify myself.?
?You want me to wait??
?You go on. The sooner you walk around the studio and check things out, the better. We shouldn?t be seen together, anyway. You got my list of checkpoints and the map??
?Right here.? Crumley tapped his brow.
?Be there in an hour. My grandma?s house. Upstairs.?
?Good old grandma.?
?Crumley??
?Yeah??
?I love you.?
?It won?t get you into heaven.?
?No,? I said. ?But it got me through the night.?
?B.S.,? said Crumley, and drove away.
I went inside.
My hunch last night had been right.
If Roy?s miniature cities had been devastated, and his Beast pounded back to bloody clay
There was a smell of the doctor?s cologne in the hall
The door to Roy?s apartment was ajar.
His apartment was eviscerated.
?My God,? I whispered, standing in the middle of his rooms looking around. ?Soviet Russia. History rewritten.?
For Roy had become an unperson. In libraries, tonight, books would be torn and sewn back together, so that the name of Roy Holdstrom would vanish forever, a sad rumor lost, a figment of the imagination. No more.
No books remained, no pictures, no desk, no paper in the trash can. Even the toilet roll in the bathroom had been stripped. The medicine cabinet was Mother Hubbardbare. No shoes under the bed. No bed. No typewriter. Empty closets. No dinosaurs. No dinosaur drawings.
Hours before, the apartment had been vacuumed, scrubbed, then polished with a high-quality wax.
A fury of rage had fired the sound stage to bring down his Babylon, Assyria, Abu Simbel.
A fury of cleanliness here had snorted up the last dust of memory, the merest breath of life.
?My God, it?s awful, isn?t it?? The voice spoke behind me.
A young man stood in the door. He was wearing a painter?s smock, much used, and his fingers were smudged with color, as was the left side of his face. His hair looked uncombed and his eyes had a kind of animal wildness, like a creature who works in the dark and only on occasion comes out at dawn.
?You better not stay here. They might come back.?
?Hold on,? I said. ?I know you, yes? Roy?s friend? Tom??
?Shipway. Better get out. They were crazy. Come on.?
I followed Tom Shipway out of the empty apartment.
He unlocked his own door with two sets of keys. ?Ready? Set! Go!?
I jumped in.
