by K. W. Jeter
Funny to think about Wysbar now. When von Behren had brought Gunther to the Romanische tonight, there had been a street musician outside, a blind man with a wheezing button accordion. Just a few notes of the awkward melody had reminded von Behren of something, and now he remembered in full what it had been – the ferryman’s song in Wysbar’s film. He softly hummed what he could recall of the words. The soul, something something… struggling against the kingdom of shadows.
Wysbar had gotten that right, at least. Das Schattenreich. That was what this world had become. All grey and black, with a few bright, spurting wounds of red. He missed the old Berlin, the Twenties that had seemed so golden to everyone, even if the gold had been as false as the money. And even if there had not been a lot to eat, there had been plenty of sex around, a sort of warm ocean of it, and not the hearty, brown bread and baby-making kind the Nazis were promoting these days.
It didn’t seem so long ago that von Behren had tagged along with one of the other scriptwriters – that was how he had started out back then, at the old Nero studio – following him to a shabby flat all the way out past the Landwehr Canal. The hallways had been dark, but they had stepped from them into a tightly pressed little world of light and blaring, syncopated music. And the black woman had been there, the one who had already taken Paris and now was conquering the hearts and loins of Berlin – that was the kind of thing that one could just stumble into back then, a laughing miracle exploding in one’s face. The Negress had worn her trademark skirt of ripe bananas, and she’d danced among the drunken partygoers, snaking her glistening ebony hips past the bellies of financiers giddy with champagne and bankruptcy. Her smile had been a kingdom of avaricious joy. Then she had gone to sleep on a horsehair sofa, a pretty child in a sailor’s suit clasped in her willowy arms.
Back then, it had been possible to believe that Africa itself would blossom in the middle of Germany. And how he had longed to be that pretty boy, or girl – impossible to tell which – resting a rouged face against the black woman’s breast.
All that was gone now. Just about the only things that had survived from that world to this, das Schattenreich, were the chess-players up in the Romanische Cafe’s gallery. Those hunched-over crows would likely still be there, contemplating their slow, tedious strategies, when all was rubble around them.
In this world, there were no dancing Negresses. In this world, someone such as poor Wysbar could get into trouble for having a yellow-haired man fall in love with a fair-skinned brunette.
Then again, there was no point in handing these people the stick with which they could beat you. “What I need,” said von Behren, rubbing his chin and gazing up at the blue clouds of cigar smoke drifting to the Romanische Cafe’s distant ceiling, “is an angel. Of light.” His fingertips pushed through his beard. “To put into a film.” He nodded slowly. “That would keep them happy.”
Gunther shot him another glance. “You mean a blonde. Why don’t you just say so?”
Von Behren shook his head. “No… not just a blonde. There are plenty such, God knows.” They all seemed to hang around the UFA studios like golden vultures. “I need something… sadder than that. And more beautiful.” He had been drinking spirits before they had come to the cafe, and now he was in that stage where the alcohol had started to die and fade from his blood, leaving a clarity of thought that made words difficult to match to the tumble of images in his brain.
People always needed what they themselves were not. What they had forgotten how to be, or left behind, like old clothes in a suitcase tied up with string. When people were dirty and poor, they wanted cleanliness and pretty things, up on the screen where they could lose themselves in one big collective embrace. When they felt weak, they wanted the hard clenched fist, even – or especially – if it was in their own faces.
And now, when people were so full, every corner of their souls crammed with thundering speeches, the Fuhrer ’s words like election posters slathered on the bone walls behind their eyes – what people could no longer be now, was to be merely empty. And how, in a tiny closet behind their hearts, they would long for that – von Behren could see it so plainly, the future of all dreaming written not in fiery letters, but in a blunt pencil scrawl on a torn scrap smeared with ashes.
How could he ever explain that – or anything important – to one such as Gunther? It was hopeless to try.
Gunther shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of that crap.” His hard eyes scanned across the cafe’s tables. “There. How about that one? She should do for you.”
Von Behren turned to look. A girl, perhaps not even twenty yet, sat at one of the tables near the cafe’s doors, close enough that the wet, sloppy wind brushed against the hem of her skirt every time someone went in or out. On a night like this, no matter how crowded the Romanische might get, the drafty tables by the entrance usually went empty. The girl – von Behren had never seen her here before – must have instinctively realized that the waiters would leave her alone, even if all she ordered was one small coffee that she let go cold and clouded over a span of hours.
Gunther’s lip curled. “All you want is some little wren, with its wing broken. Well, there she is. Surely you could put her in a film, and have the whole audience sniffling into their handkerchiefs.”
In the early morning hours, the Romanische’s crowd had thinned a little, and there was no one between this table and the one at which she sat. Unsmiling, her gaze seeing nothing before her, not even the barely touched cup next to her hand. The night’s chill had turned the skin of her throat into translucent ivory. Beautiful… and even beyond that…
“You see?” Contempt sharpened Gunther’s voice, the scorn of one member of the unmoneyed tribe for another. “That is all the cash she has.” Gunther had learned, on the Tauentzienstra?e, the skill of reckoning strangers’ exact financial condition. The girl at the far table had a few folded bills in one hand. “She has counted it over and over, and she has no idea where or when there will come any more.”
Von Behren felt his breath stop in his throat. The girl had lifted her face, and he saw now that she was beautiful. And empty.
He could tell just from looking at her, that she had cried a great deal. But not recently – her eyes were no longer reddened from it. Whatever had happened to her – whatever had been taken from her – that was already sealed in the past. Leaving this shell behind, the parts that could no longer be hurt.
“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 c
urtains 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.
“God, she’s lovely.” Wise leaned forward, gazing avidly at the screen.
She looked young, maybe twenty at the most – and she was beautiful, Wilson admitted to himself. Her hair looked like spun white gold. But there was something more in her face and eyes, more than mere beauty. A sadness, loss made eloquent in this silence. Wilson watched as the woman laid her fingertips against the glass. That mute, untouchable element, he knew, made her even lovelier.
“Who is she?”
Wise didn’t take his gaze away from the screen. “Um, Marie – no, Marte something. I’ve got it written down somewhere. There weren’t any credits on this print, so I had to send a cable to find out.”
The name meant nothing to Wilson. There were plenty of beautiful women, in movies made here and all over Europe. This one might be special; he had no way of knowing.
He glanced over at Wise. The film producer, the owner of the studio, gazed raptly at the screen, his eyes caught in this waking dream. The shifting light played over Wise’s face, as though he had become part of that other, more real world.
Don’t – Wilson stopped himself from reaching out and touching Wise’s arm. Don’t; it’s not true, it’s just a movie. You don’t know who she really is -
But he could see that it was already too late. He watched the other man, watching the image on the screen, a face of loveliness and sadness, light and shadow.
BERLIN
1939
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate,
Death lays his icy hand on kings…
- James Shirley (1596 – 1666), Dirge, from The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses
NINE
“ Herr Reichsminister -” The functionary, a little man with sleek-polished hair, made a bow. “This is one of our honored guests tonight. Herr David W
ise – from America.”
With a champagne glass cradled in her hand, Marte watched as the Reichsminister fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda nodded in greeting. She stood close to him, closer now than she would have if the Reichminister ’s wife were still at the reception. But after giving Marte a hard, knowing gaze, Frau Goebbels had given her apologies and gone home to look after their brood of golden-haired children. Which allowed her husband the freedom to drape his arm around Marte’s shoulders – left bare by the ballgown that the studio’s costume department had given her – and shepherd her through Berlin’s political and cinematic elite.
“It is, of course, a pleasure to meet you, Herr Wise.” Joseph spoke in the low, courtly voice with which she had already become familiar. “I assure you that I know very well the films of the Wise Studios. Excellent work. You must be proud to have been the producer of such… how to say?… such visual epics.”
The American shrugged off the compliment. “We try our best.” He stood taller than Goebbels, with dark, curling hair and only a slight Hebraic bump to his nose. Different from what Joseph had told her about Hollywood film producers. They were all supposed to be squat, swarthy, hook-nosed lechers, with cunning, leering stares. This one looked decent enough to have appeared in his own movies, perhaps as the lead actor’s kindhearted friend, something like that.
“You are a craftsman.” Joseph smiled. “There can be no higher tribute.”
