“You’re right.” Von Behren nodded. “She could be an angel.” The angel of sadness and emptiness. The girl was made lovelier by those things. And more desirable – he had enough of the instincts of other, supposedly normal men to recognize that.
“An angel,” scoffed Gunther. He showed an ugly smile as he shook his head.
But Gunther didn’t matter now. For von Behren, Gunther was already dead, vanished. All he could see was the girl at the far table. And beyond her, to that other world of light and shadow, where her face would emerge from the screen’s darkness and into the silent chambers of men’s hearts.
The girl turned her head and looked at him as he threaded his way among the cafe’s tables. There was nothing inside the gaze with which she watched and judged him; beyond hope, beyond despair. “ Fraulein… a moment of your time, bitte…”
“Yes?” She gazed up at him as he stood beside the table. He felt his own heart stumble, then shiver into pieces…
LOS ANGELES
1938
EIGHT
“Hey, I got something I want you to see -”
Ray Wilson’s eyes snapped open. He’d fallen asleep in the plush chair, one of a half-dozen that faced the white rectangle of a small theater screen. There had been plenty of times he’d sat in just this spot, watching whatever dailies had come in. “I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I should get going. I’m really bushed.”
“Naw, come on.” David Wise had carried a fresh drink over to his desk and flipped open a panel on its burnished mahogany surface; the lights dimmed and the curtains drew across the curved expanse of windows as he pushed buttons. “Stick around.”
“Dave, I really got to get some rest. I’ve got work to do.” Technically, he was head of security for the Wise Studios. Other times, when the crises were small enough for him to delegate to one of his crew of ex-LAPD detectives, he was David Wise’s drinking partner. “The work you pay me to do, remember?”
Actually, he just wanted to head home and go to bed. He’d just gotten done with a bad one, the kind he had to take care of all by himself, to avoid even the remotest chance of bad publicity.
It had necessitated driving all the way south to Tijuana and a cheap and notorious fleabag hotel down there. He had pulled out of a grimy numbered room ne of the Wise Studios’ leading actors, who’d come into unfortunate proximity with a small boy and a camera.
“That putz.” That had been David’s comment when Wilson had finally returned to the studio lot at three in the morning. David had shaken his head as he gazed at the actor sleeping it off in the back seat of the sedan. “He’s just about more trouble than he’s worth. One more time, and I’m going to toss him to the wolves.”
“Where do you want me to take him to?”
“The hell with him.” David had grabbed Wilson’s arm and pulled him toward the main studio building. “I’ve got a bottle waiting up in my office.”
That had been several drinks and – Wilson checked his watch – a couple of hours ago. He shifted in the upholstered chair. “I’m just about ready to call it a night.”
“Just a little while.” Wise walked past him, toward the projection booth tucked behind the office’s rear wall. “I just want you to take a look, that’s all.”
A little while. Before too much longer, there would be people camping out in the office’s lobby, glaring at Wise’s cool, snippy receptionist, people who would cut off one or more limbs for a piece of David Wise’s time, even a few minutes. Not even forty, and Wise was out there in the big marketplace of dreams with the Goldwyns and the Zanucks, putting dreams into the darkened theaters where the people could see them, fall into and become those dreams for a little while. Somebody like that could make dreams come true as well, the dreams of those who hungered to become real, to become those deep luminous faces, magnified in the dark. And for those who wanted to stay in the shadows, where the dreams were bolted together, out of light and word and desperate wish, the murmur of the watching dreamers, the faces on the screen whispering their desire to be real forever, world without end… for the dream-workers, the directors and writers and all the other bearers of these secrets, there was David Wise’s money, that made all things possible. Money that he had scrabbled together out of his dead father’s string of fleapits, jerkwater theaters with screens that were hardly more than tacked-up old bed sheets, broken-down seats that leaked scratchy horsehair and a lingering smell of urine – movie-houses that had staggered so close to the edge of bankruptcy that the only way to get something to show was for the twenty-year-old heir to make the movies himself, sticking a broken-down silents cowboy behind a rented camera and playing penny-stakes rummy all night at the developer’s lab to get reel-ends of undeveloped film to shoot with. Anything that moved, anything that people would watch, went up on the screens.
Wilson knew the rest of the story; he had known it even before he come here to work for the man. When the money started coming in, David Wise had gone on hustling and pyramiding and betting everything. More than once, he had put up ownership of all the theaters, clean ones now, palaces with chandeliers in the ladies’ rooms, all against the first weeks’ receipts on films with real actors with real names in them. Those bets had finally paid off in a studio lot scraped out of twenty acres of Southern California orange groves, with a front entrance modeled after the Arc de Triomphe, a uniformed guard at the barrier gate and the name WISE in spot-lit above.
Behind himself, Wilson heard the soft clatter of the film projector, muffled by the wall with its small inset window. Wise knew how to run the equipment himself, from his days scrabbling around, doing everything in the shabby movie-houses his father had left him. The chair next to Wilson’s creaked as Wise sat down beside him.
The screen had filled with light, shadow and form. Faces. Wilson watched, and listened to them speaking. His fatigue was deeper than he’d thought – he couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
He leaned his head toward Wise. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a German movie.” Wise continued to gaze straight ahead at the screen. “Somebody shipped it to me.”
“Who?”
“Beats me.” The studio head shrugged. “I’ve got some contacts at the UFA studios over there. One of them must have smuggled out this print and sent it to me. I was watching it when all this other bullshit happened.”
“Great.” Wilson shook his head. “Probably some goddamn Nazi propaganda. That’s all they do over there anymore.” He’d had gone along with Wise to one of the first fundraiser parties for the Hollywood League Against Nazism. Melvyn Douglas had just gotten back from Europe, with a pile of production stills showing greasy-bearded rabbis and hook-nosed war profiteers leering at blonde Teutonic virgins, all the simple-minded caricatures that Goebbels’ pet filmmakers specialized in. He didn’t have the same aesthetic standards as his boss, but the sheer crappiness of stuff like that had put a sour taste in his mouth anyway. He didn’t care for any kind of cardboard characters, let alone ones with the word kike smeared across them. How could somebody like David Wise – Weiss, actually; that had been his grandfather’s name – watch this kind of crap?
“Shh.” Wise raised his hand and pointed. “This is what I wanted you to see.”
The dialogue had stopped for a moment. On the screen was a dirty city street, tiny little shops with signs in German; probably somewhere in Berlin, Wilson figured. A girl in a shabby coat and a cloche hat walked slowly down the street, looking into the shop windows.
The camera moved in for a tight close-up, the girl’s face mirrored faintly in the window glass. Her gold hair spilled from under the edges of the cloche.