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Mr. Big ordered his secretary to bring coffee. I wanted to talk about Dean Reed, but he yawned, interested only in the deal, and so I drank my coffee to cover my boredom.

"You'll want to see a script, of course," Leslie said.

No, Mr. Big said and offered him a Havana cigar.

Nothing was more astonishing than that no one in Moscow asked to see a script anymore; they asked how much money you had to spend. Leslie had been sneaking around Eastern Europe for years in order to make his ground-breaking drama-documentaries and he had met secretly with Soviet dissident generals in back alleys and taken illegal photographs of the Communist Party headquarters in Prague and the shipyards in Gdansk. Suddenly, in the heart of Moscow, all anyone talked to him about were below-the-line costs and exchange rates.

Hopeful, Mr. Big pushed his box of Havanas at Leslie.

"Cigar?" he said in English.

"Can we film in Red Square?" Leslie said for the second time.

Sure, you could film in Red Square, although the Kremlin is heavily booked years in advance.

"What did you think of Dean Reed?" I finally said.

Mr. Big shrugged his beefy shoulders. It had been Dean's ambition to play John Reed, the American who took part in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 1980, the director, Sergei Bondachuk had planned to make a Russian version of John Reed's life and Dean promoted himself for the part. Bondachuk went to California and, language notwithstanding, offered the part to Warren Beatty. Beatty subsequently made his own version instead and called it Reds.

According to Mr. Big, directors were interested in Dean as an actor, but only up to a point. Dean would only work for hard currency. "We'd love to use you," directors would say, "but currency is what we lack."

As I pushed the conversation in the direction of Bloody Heart and as Mr. Big watched Leslie, trying to decipher his intentions, the door opened and a man, maybe sixty-five, ambled in. He wore a shiny blue suit, a greasy yellow shirt and a tie that might have come from a Soviet production of Guys and Dolls. He looked like Harry the Horse. Like Mr. Big he didn't offer his name.

Harry slumped into a chair. His back permanently curved, as if he'd spent too much time shooting craps, he held his cigarette between this thumb and his forefinger. In preparing Bloody Heart, Dean had come to Mosfilm to look for costumes and Harry the Horse was his minder.

Harry accepted a Marlboro from me.

Mr Big said, "Dean wasn't such a big star, but the young girls were crazy about his looks. He became in the end a little bit yesterday's man. Many actors are gifted, but stupid. Dean saw what was going on. Dean was not stupid."

Realizing that no money would change hands that day, Mr. Big lost interest in us and looked at his watch. Harry the Horse took charge.

"You would like to see studio?"

It smelled of make-up and cigarette smoke. We traipsed across a sound stage at Mosfilm with a set for a fairy tale that was in production. Mismatched green plastic leaves dangled from Styrofoam trees and a few actresses in pink tulle smoked cigarettes. The cameras were as big as dinosaurs, the lights as big as tanks.

In the make-up department, a group of women in cotton smocks and hairnets worked silently with pots of paint and powder. Like everywhere else in the country, there were shortages in the movie business. Good blood, stage blood, was hard to come by. The youngest girl in the room had a Walkman on and she jiggled to the music while she worked. Across the room in a glass case were a pair of false limbs, the exquisite work of the prosthetics team; in another case was Rasputin's wig.

The costumes were stored in a separate warehouse. In one section alone there were hundreds of military uniforms and, at the end of every rack, a detailed diagram of the uniforms it held, including the period, the size, and the rank and order of the soldier or officer in question. The Nazi uniforms were crowded together. They looked old and smelled stale, and for a minute I had the feeling they weren't costumes but captured uniforms. German caps were piled on a shelf; black and brown leather gloves lay in tidy pairs in a carton on the floor; in another, larger box, jackboots, tied together by their laces, were neatly stacked.

I had to get some air. We went out into the snow where, clutching his pack of Marlboros, Harry the Horse escorted us to the back lot and left us there underneath a gallows with a rope dangling from a post. Next door was the London Street with quaint shop fronts and nineteenth-century signs; it was falling down; Baker Street had begun to rot.

Out in front of the studio, our car and driver were waiting at the front gate. The driver looked like Karl Malden. Every day, he expected and we gave him Marlboros. Cigarettes, especially Marlboros, were like currency in Moscow. You could even hail a passing car - a regular car, not a taxi - by holding out a pack of cigarettes and the driver would stop and, after negotiating the number of packs, give you a lift. There was always a lot of debate about how many packs you had to hand over.

I said to our driver, "You know what? You look just like a famous American actor."

"So what are you giving me tomorrow?" the driver asked.

I talked to more nameless film people in Moscow and a few were convinced that the final contracts on Bloody Heart had never been signed. There was apparently only one person who could really help, a lawyer who was unavailable until the end of the week. We passed the time hanging out with Art and Svetlana, and then the lawyer called and invited us to meet him at Sovinfilm, the state production bureau. The lawyer's name was Boris - he didn't mention a last name, just said to call him Boris - and we sat in the same conference room where Boris and Dean had negotiated the deal on Bloody Heart. Lilia Liepine was with us.

Boris was the legal advisor to Sovinflim, he wrote the contracts and witnessed them. A nice man with a good smile, he had a head like a skull. He had been fond of Dean, he said. He had been really emotional after he died because he liked him.

"Was the contract for Bloody Heart canceled?" Leslie asked. "Was Bloody Heart shelved?"

Boris wanted to reminisce.

"I have a friend who is very similar in appearance to Dean Reed - my friend and I were buddies in the army - so I felt friendly towards Dean," he said. "Dean was always enthusiastically welcomed, a permanent friend of the Soviet Union. Yes, he always had nice photos of himself in a bag, ready to deliver when anyone asked. He behaved himself. He was a good guy."

"Completely?"

Boris was a lawyer and he shifted into a moderate gear.

"Dean was temperamental - he scolded, he shouted - but he was a good guy all the same," he said again.

Boris reiterated what we already knew: how important Bloody Heart was to Dean; how he was obliged to take a codirector; how the codirector got cancer a few months before filming began, leaving everyone in the lurch and the film companies in East Berlin and Moscow nervous.

But what about the contracts?

The first Bloody Heart script had been approved as far back as November, 15, 1984. Boris dove into a large leather bag, looking for the contracts. Leslie and I waited, not looking at each other. If the contracts had not been signed, if Bloody Heart had been shelved, it would have been the end of the road. It would make you believe Dean's death might have been suicide.

We had been on the road for a year, looking for answers. I was impatient. I sat on my hands while Boris put aside his bag and knelt down to open the bottom drawer of his desk.