“Not like this,” Ben said quietly, so that Lasner busied himself putting the cigar out, avoiding him.
“Wonderful,” he said finally. “Cohn gets Eisenhower and I getI’ll think about it. Let Freeman call. We’ll see.” A dodge.
“I’ll be at the Signal Corps base in Culver City. A local call.”
“Fort Roach.” He caught Ben’s look. “Hal Roach’s old studio. The Army took it over. They’ve got some of my people down there. Drafted. My best cutter. Splicing film on VD. How does your prick look with crabs. Talk about a waste of a good technician.” He glanced up. “You want to make the picture there? Fort Roach?”
“No, I want to make it at Continental. With you.”
“Because we were such good pals in Germany. Looking at things.”
“Freeman said you were the first call to make. You were there for the Relief Fund. You hired refugees in ’forty. You-”
“So back to the well.”
“He said the others think they’re Republicans.”
Lasner snorted. “Since when did Frank get funny? If I heard two cracks from him my whole life it’s a lot.” He shook his head, then snorted again. “Mayer keeps a picture of Hoover in his office. Hoover. And now with the horses. A Jew with horses. So he’s fooling everybody.” He paused. “Don’t push me on this. We’ll talk. In an office. We make a picture if it makes sense to make a picture. Not just someone tells me it’s good for the Jews. Anyway, what kind of name is Collier?”
Ben smiled. “From Kohler. My father. It means the same thing.”
“So why change it? Who changes names? Actors.”
“My mother. After the divorce, we went to England. She wanted us to have English names. My father stayed in Germany.”
“Stayed?”
“He was a Mischling. Half.”
“And that saved him?”
“He thought it would.”
Lasner looked away. “I’m sorry. So it’s personal with you? That’s no good, you know, in pictures. You get things mixed up.”
“Not personal that way. I just want to get this done and get out of the Army. Same as everybody.”
Lasner picked up the cigar again and lit it, settling in.
“Why’d you pick the Signal Corps?”
“They picked me. My father was in the business. Maybe they thought it got passed down, like flat feet. Anyway, I got listed with an MOS for the Signal Corps.”
“What’s MOS?”
“Military Occupational Specialty. Civilian skill the military can use. Which I didn’t have, but the Army doesn’t have to make sense. They probably wanted guys with German but everybody did, so they grabbed me with an MOS. And once you’re assigned-”
“Well, at least it kept you out of combat.”
“Until last winter. Then they needed German speakers with the field units.”
“So you saw some action?” The standard welcome-back question.
“Some. The camera crews got the worst of it. They had to work the front lines. We lost a lot of them.”
Sometimes just yards away. Ed Singer, so glued to his lens that he never saw the shell that ripped his arm off, just turned and looked down, amazed to see blood gushing out. Ben scooting over. To do what? Dam the blood with a wad of shirt? A stump, spraying blood as it moved, even the camera covered with it. Ed looking at him, frantic, knowing, until his eyes got calmer as shock set in, then closed, no longer there to watch his life run out.
“I was lucky,” Ben said. “The closest I came was in a plane. When nothing was supposed to happen. You see Target Berlin? Some of the night footage in that. They told us the AAs had been wiped out, but they forgot to tell the Germans. Our gunner was hit. We get back, the plane is full of holes.”
He stopped, embarrassed, then took out a cigarette.
“Sorry. What am I doing now, telling war stories?” He inhaled, then blew smoke up toward the round observation roof, in this light oddly like the glass bubble of the Lancaster. “The thing was, I used to live there. Berlin. So it was the enemy, but also someplace you knew. It’s a funny feeling, bombing someplace you know. You think what it must be like on the ground.”
Lasner stared at him for a minute, saying nothing. “And thenwhat? You’re showing Zanuck around Europe. In uniform. He had it made, you know that? A tailor.” Almost a wink, a joke between them. “And for that they needed-what’s it again? — an MOS. Because your father was in pictures. Where, Germany?”
“Uh huh,” Ben said casually, sorry now that he had brought it up. “He came here for a while. Years ago. I was born here, in fact. California. But he went back.”
“Collier,” Lasner said, thumbing a mental file.
“Kohler then. Otto Kohler. He was a director.” The old hesitancy, as if the name, once his own, would somehow brand him.
“Otto? My god, why didn’t you say so? Wait a minute. I thought his kid was already over here-at Republic or some place. We were going to do something with him once, but then it didn’t work out. I forget why.” He stopped, confused. “Same name, though, as Otto. Kohler.”
“My brother,” Ben said, about to say more, and then the moment was gone. Why not tell him? But why would Lasner care? Something still private, and somehow not real. “He changed it back. Kids pick sides in a divorce. He was closer to my father.” Moving away from it. “You knew him? Otto?”
“Of course I knew him. He worked for me. You didn’t know that?” He glanced at Ben, a slight suspicion. “We made Two Husbands. You must have seen that.”
Ben spread his hands. “I was only-”
“That picture was a classic. He didn’t keep a print? Never mind. I’ll run it for you. You should see it. The talent that man had.” Lasner was off now, waving his cigar to draw Ben along with him. “He was the one that got away. The Ufa directors who came over. The great ones.” He raised three fingers. “Murnau-well, he got away, too, that car crash. Lang we’ve still got. And Otto. His trouble? Expensive. Sets. He thought we were making Intolerance.” He looked again at Ben. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Now I know who you are,” he said, leaning back and opening his jacket, visibly relaxing.
Ben smiled to himself. An industry, but still a family business.
“He was ahead of his time with those sets, you know,” Lasner was saying. “But they were all like that, the Ufa people. Even the ones who came later. You know why? No Westerns. They never learned to shoot outside. It was all controlled light with them. Of course, they had the facilities. In those days, what they had in Berlin-I’m still knocking my brains out in Gower Gulch trying to borrow arc lamps, and over there they’re making cities. Otto,” he said, shaking his head. “I can see the resemblance now, around the eyes. I knew your mother, too. A looker. So what happened? They split, you said.”
“Another woman, I guess. That’s what I heard. My mother never talked about it.”
“Well, he was like that. He always had an eye. So that’s why he stayed there? Some skirt?”
“I don’t know. He probably thought he’d get through it-that’s what people thought then. He was making pictures with Monika Hoppe. Goebbels liked her. Maybe he thought that would protect him, they’d look the other way. Anyway, they didn’t. He was arrested in ’thirty-eight. They sent a notice to my mother. This was when they still thought they had to explain it.”
“So,” Lasner said, looking away. “Some story.”
With everything Ben remembered left out. The good days in the big house on Lutzowplatz. The parties, sometimes with just a piano, but sometimes with a whole band, the air full of perfume and smoke, Ben looking down through the banister. Faces even a child recognized. Hertzberg, the comedian with the surprised round eyes; Jannings, jowly and grave even with a glass in his hand. And afterward, sometimes, the quarrels-were there women even then?
Sunday mornings, the room still smelling of stale ashtrays, his father got them ready for their walk. Scarves in winter. Umbrellas if it rained. But the walk without fail, because that’s what you did on Sundays in Berlin. Down Budapesterstrasse to the zoo, afterward a cake at Kranzler’s, his father desperate by now for a drink. Later, when they were too old for the zoo, they would head straight for the cafes, where his father met friends and Danny tried to sneak cigarettes. Then, a few years after that, they were on a train for Bremen, an American woman with her two boys, their father back on the platform at Lehrter Bahnhof.