“Oneway andhay ashesway ethay otherway. One hand washes the other.”
“Allen, what could I possibly do for you? I’m just a screenwriter.” I paused. It didn’t seem like enough. Surely I could do worse. “A Negro, faggot, Commie, screenwriting hack.”
“Who went to Harvard.”
“They can put it on my tombstone. It’s not really much good otherwise.”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“You went to law school.”
“For a year.”
“Harvard Law School.”
“It doesn’t count unless you graduate, Allen. Then you’ve got to pass the bar. Without following through it was just an idea. My parents’ really. They thought I should be a credit to my race. In the end they got a son with credits in race movies. I wouldn’t have made much of a lawyer. Law school put me to sleep.”
“But you went to law school with people.”
Where was he headed? “That’s the way it usually goes, Allen.”
“I looked you up.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Harvard, class of ’33. Harvard Law, class of ’36.”
“Except I quit in ’34.”
“You said.” Sloane reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket — single-breasted, the coming style, precisely what I planned to go out and buy, his a soft, loosely woven tan. The hat beside him was dark brown, with a thin tan band. On his feet were artfully made white-and-brown oxfords. For a straight white man, he had style. “Let me give you some names. You tell me if they ring a bell.”
He started reading from a typed sheet in a curiously thin voice, maybe an octave higher than normal, as though he had rehearsed it and needed to succeed. I had seen actors do this at auditions when there was more than a role at stake. Immediately I recognized the names. He must have gotten hold of the list of the class of ’36. To each name he appended a title, or a description. It was easy to see how he was such a good handicapper of horses. He knew more about my former classmates than I did, maybe more than they did. Two were clerks to federal judges, about a dozen worked for the Department of Justice directly, one was with the FBI, one with Immigration, three were in the State Department, a dozen or so were in state government, including two in California. “The rest are in private practice or business,” he said. “One died — tuberculosis, that’s a killer. Larry, you Harvard Law guys, you are at the top of your profession. There isn’t a sweet spot you aren’t in.”
“Allen, I’m not a Harvard Law guy.”
“For my purposes, you are.”
“What purposes?”
He folded the paper slowly, slipped it back into his breast pocket and at the same time with his right hand pulled the gold cigarette case out, effortlessly extracted a Viceroy, and lit it with the gold lighter that appeared in his left. Magic. He took a long drag, sucking hard through the crude filter. That’s the way they made them, then. In the gay community — we didn’t call it that, then — we sniggered that we knew what it meant when a fellow sucked hard on a Viceroy. Of course, straights smoked them too. “Larry, maybe I don’t look like it, but I am a desperate man. I’m going to be kicked out of my own country. If that happens, and I don’t have Vitamin P, I’m going to end up in some jungle-bunny country, no offense, where the currency is coconuts. I got someone I love who wants to be with me, but it’s going to be hard for both of us in Bora Bora.”
“Allen, you lost me at Vitamin P.”
“Vitamin P. Protection. I need some help from people in a position. I’m well connected in certain quarters, but in others, like federal judges, you might say I’m a stranger. When I heard you are a Harvard man and went to Harvard Law School to boot, I concluded you are my ticket.”
“For the last time, Allen, I’m not anyone’s ticket to anything, much less Vitamin P. I’m just a colored queer.”
“Does it hurt you to try?”
“You want me to try?”
“That’s all I’m asking. I did for you.”
“You did, and I’m grateful. But I don’t know what I’m trying for.”
“You’re trying to help me out. I’m a friend. A friend tries to help a friend.”
I found myself sighing. Allen Sloane was right. I didn’t know what it was I was trying, but the least I could do was try.
Fritz slept on.
X
The next day, September 3rd, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany. Call me callow, but I recall the date because Fritz showed up at the Garden of Allah with a sheaf of papers he pulled out of his battered German briefcase.
“It is the land of liberty, so I took it,” he said, and sat down heavily on the green leather sofa. He lit a Chesterfield. “Would you like to read?”
“Read?”
He handed me a folder. Neatly typed on a square, red-bordered, yellow sticker on the front page was this:
HOOFBEATS OF LIBERTY
an original film script by
Laurence Bellringer and Fritz von Blum
Someone had crossed out “film” and replaced it with the word “movie” in a delicate and formal hand. I flipped to the last page, one-twelve. “Who wrote this?”
“We did,” the little man said.
“We? I didn’t.”
“Certainly you did. We wrote it together. You and I. We sat, we talked, we worked, we plotted. We created.”
“We created?”
“I typed,” he said.
“This is a whole script, Fritz. I don’t know how good it is, but it is a script.”
“Larry, it is a marvelous script,” he said. “Full of history, romance, heroism. It resonates, if that is the correct word. Acta est fabula.”
“The story has been completed?”
“Perfect, my dear Larry. And they say all Negroes can do is play jazz music and tap-dance.”
“Apparently we can write entire scripts without putting one word on paper.”
“Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit.”
“Add a little…”
“Add little to little and eventually there will be a big pile.”
There remained the question: A big pile of what? I sat down in the easy chair opposite the green leather couch, upon which Fritz was already stretching out, and turned to the first page. By the time I got to the second Fritz was asleep. When I reached the end I went to make a pot of coffee. “I’ve never read anything like this,” I said, while the little man held a steaming cup in his hand and looked down into it as though it contained more secrets, more structure, more dialogue, more tension, more laughter, more tears, more… life. “Fritzi, how did you do it?”
He sipped from the coffee. “In magnis voluisse sat est.”
“In big…”
“In great things,” he said, “will is enough.”
XI
Looking back, 1939 was a hell of a year. A loaf of bread cost eight cents; Kate Smith, America’s sweetheart, was on the radio endlessly belting out God Bless America, which was written by an immigrant Jew who called himself Irving Berlin; Pan American started regular flights across the Atlantic; DDT was invented and so were nylon stockings; Gone With the Wind won the Oscar for best picture; the Spanish Civil War ended; the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and conquered Poland; London was bombed by the Luftwaffe; the World’s Fair opened in New York; and EZ Shelupsky burned down his own studio.