Jerusalem Commands

FOUR

YOU THINK YOU ARE without blame? Well, as we used to say in Kiev, there is always room on the tram for one more saint. We were fair judges of people, Jew or Gentile, in the old days before that pseudonymous Red trio saturated the map of Russia in blood and called the result ‘Progress’.

I am not here however to plough up old graves. I myself was once a great believer in the future. You could argue that my convictions were my weakness as well as my strength. Also I trusted others too much, for in that I was always my own worst enemy. I admit it. I continue as best I can to lift high the Torch of Christian Civilisation against the Darkness of the Beast. What better torch indeed! Yet I too have known the burden of guilt and moral ambivalence, the most painfully, the most unbearably, when I have betrayed a fellow human soul! By giving a machine priority over a person and by not arriving in New York earlier to make all appropriate arrangements for transport and hotels, I had betrayed the trust Esmé had placed in me. I had come to understand how it was entirely my fault and no surprise that, in her grief and terror at my presumed betrayal, she had blotted me, her rescuer, her passionate, loving husband, almost entirely from her consciousness.

I was soon to become well aware of her state of mind when I telephoned her at the number Carmelita Geraghty, a well-known ‘baby-star’, gave me.

The hotel agreed she was registered but, every time I called, said she was not available. It was a small but very sophisticated palm-shaded private hotel on Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, in its own grounds. When I presented myself the concierge was polite, accepted my messages, but was otherwise extremely close-mouthed and rather haughty. I understood that this was his habit. I explained some of the tragic events leading to the misunderstanding between us, but nothing I tried would get him to tell me when Esmé was expected back.

My pain was admittedly no more than a dull persistent ache now and I was able to go about my ordinary business without too much effort of will while Carmelita Geraghty, Hazel Keener, Lucille Rickson and Blanche McHaffey helped me forget my heartache. My attempts to contact Esmé became a matter of routine. Every day I left a message. I was a great optimist then. The future seemed infinite and could only improve. It is different now. There are no rules, no boundaries to Time. I grew to maturity and old age in a world that sought to give new shape, even a new meaning, to the universe. What was I to do? Like some ancient mariner cast adrift in an open boat, I made my best effort to chart a safe course for myself across an alien sea beneath an alien sky. The schwartzes swagger into my shop. They say this is their territory now. I am sure it is, I say. It is what things have come to.

Do they delude themselves that I have any time for their zoot and jives, that I envy them their acid society held together by soporifics? I was born into a world of work and pain, where pleasure was earned and paid for, where Nature was not to be Nurtured and Sentimentalised but Tamed, and where crime was punished. There is a piece of metal in my womb. They placed a white-hot iron upon my spirit and my agony filled the galaxy, destroying stars, but I survived even that. I was strengthened by it. I died and came alive. I survived a holocaust. I survived the humiliation and the despair. And even now, living this life of a tradesman, buying and selling the discarded costumes and uniforms of the 20th century, I at least have my voice, my memory, our history; and I have survived to tell the truth of it. To these children the powerful personalities who created their world have become mythic ogres and demigods. I have seen the realities of an entire planet undergoing profound and unprecedented agonies, the most momentous changes she has ever experienced in this Age of Man. I have seen the reality of individuals dying in abject terror and spiritual agony, one by one, to make - death by death - first one million, then two million, then ten million: million by million they died, and one by one, in ditches and in woods, in trains and in camps, in churches and barns, flats and huts, in snow and rain or perfect sunshine. Shot, buried or drowned, tormented, dehumanised, corrupted, robbed of self-respect, they died one by one, children and old people; people of every age. Million upon million they watched their loved ones killed. In the name of progress they died for a future that turned to ash even as they themselves perished. That ashen future still clings here and there in those parts of the world most susceptible to temporal cancers. Once those cancers take hold they are almost impossible to eradicate, even with the subtlest, most radical surgery. Not that anyone will listen to those of us who are capable of performing such an operation. This is scarcely an era of bold and unselfish decisions. Greed is now a respectable Virtue and Envy a fine spur to ‘ambition’, or the lust for power. The Lie is commonplace. The old Virtues are mocked and reviled. They roar with laughter at the noblest sentiments and aspirations. It is why I stopped going to watch for glimpses of myself and Mrs Cornelius at the National Film Theatre. The Roads to Yesterday and other great moral fables of our time were the subject of scarcely suppressed mirth. Now occasionally on TV I get to see a 20s movie not entirely murdered by the introduction of a mocking soundtrack. In those days the cinema was worth visiting. It had moral responsibility; it recognised its influence on the public - it offered a new morality, sometimes, too - to lift them above the level of the greedy herd - a level of aspiration. The Roads to Yesterday with Hopalong Cassidy and Vera Reynolds (whom I met years later in the flesh and was able to congratulate on her performance) showed us the world of the past and illuminated the world of today. On the same day I saw a last lyrical tribute to an older West by William S. Hart who had been superseded by the glamorous daredevil Tom Mix in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Range with Charlie Chan. I enjoyed Ricardo Cortez and Betty Carney in The Pony Express. I was astounded by The Lost World, which I had read as a Strand serial, with Wallace Beery and Bessie Love - it captured my imagination that year until I saw We Moderns, that great moral fable for our time with its powerful climax as the jazz-babies dance obliviously on the deck of the great airship unaware of the plane about to crash into the hull! Certainly, it was based on Zangwill’s book. I have never said that all Jews were immoral! I also saw She with Betty Blythe, Lord Jim and The Wizard of Oz, but We Moderns made the lasting impression and I would have gone to see it more times if I had not begun to realise I was running short of money.

By now I also had the company of some of those ‘jazz-babies’ I watched on the screen. Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and Alberta Vaughan were all ladies who found me attractive enough to spend a little time with and through them, of course, I could obtain good-quality cocaine. The excellent cocaine helped me get a better grip on the truth of my situation. The remaining money in my bank account, together with the assets I had brought with me, would keep me for little more than a month (especially with regular visits to Madame France’s) and I had no wish to borrow money from Mrs Cornelius. She had of course made her generous purse available to me. I was anxious to avoid association with Hearst for a while. I recalled my meeting with Mucker Hever’s erstwhile partner, Goldfish. He had suggested I send him my synopsis of White Knight and Red Queen. As always, rather than mourn a ruined opportunity, I concentrated on reviewing my immediate resources. I had no intention of becoming a full-time script-writer, but I had to earn some money quickly and this was the only way in which I might do that. I would, of course, continue to seek for my inventions a backer with more vision than Hever, an ‘angel’ whose interest in my work was moved by something more substantial than an ‘inflatable conscience’. Equally, I was determined not to take advantage of Mrs Cornelius’s offers to have her boyfriend employ me: I had learned my lesson in that area, at least for the moment!

Thus, from the plethora of pretty, talented and sexually experienced young girls who in those days flooded the market, I found a competent typist and had her write out the plot of the play Mrs Cornelius and I had given up and down the State. In essence I performed the whole thing for her, scene by scene, while she took notes. She was able to help a little with my English spelling, which was not perfect in those days, and before long we had produced some dozen pages ready to send to the famous maverick producer, hero and victim of two great film companies, who by this time had changed his name to Goldwyn and was again starting up as a patron of quality films. ‘Rubbish,’ he often argued, ‘has no long-term shelflife. With your quality you have an investment, a high profit margin which will last you for years.’ It was this belief in quality as a matter of commercial good sense which was to win me to him and offer us both a somewhat radically different place in cinema history. My one regret is that Mrs Cornelius and I were cut from von Stroheim’s Greed. The pirate Meyer took it over and cut forty-two reels to ten! It was a travesty of what all who saw the first version agreed was the greatest movie ever made. It was a masterpiece of epic realism. I would even be prepared to say it eclipsed Birth of a Nation, but von Stroheim was never the professional Griffith was.

Madge Puddephet, my secretary, a pretty girl from Missouri, was impressed by my casual familiarity with the personalities of the screen world. She herself was a great admirer of Mrs Cornelius and, soft-hearted as I was, I promised to get her my friend’s autograph. (Madge later became famous as Vivienne Prentiss, with a particularly large following in France. Drink ruined her but when I knew her she was a smart little jazz-baby who was amazed I should even have heard of Hannibal, let alone spent time there. I did not see any point in explaining the circumstances.) She came to my hotel twice a day and of course it was not long before our natural attraction took us, almost without realising it, to bed. Those were the years before Hollywood succumbed completely to the bourgeois ideal, the notion of the ‘normal’, and Madge provided the consolation I needed. She had been trained, like so many of these girls, by her father.

Poor, martyred Arbuckle, whom I came to know quite well, and Hays between them sent the American movie down a road which ultimately put middle-class slacks on Mickey Mouse and replaced Pearl White and Theda Bara with Blondie and Kiss Me, Hardy. When this happened, they said America had ‘grown up’. But we had a code and a wisdom of our own and might have looked after our own had not Big Business and International Zion conspired to attack that love of liberty and tolerance which made the film community what it was in those early, innocent years when sexual liberation was something less reverent and more pleasurable than it seems nowadays. The final victory over Art came when we at last had a chance to speak, to give our own interpretations to our roles - whereupon every artist of integrity and individuality was systematically replaced by the Nice American Guy and the Ail-American Girl. Clara Bow, with whom I last corresponded in 1953, knew all about the conspiracy, as did Mrs Cornelius and Norma Talmadge. Louise Brooks wrote about it. John Gilbert was destroyed by it, as was John Barrymore. Clara married. She tried to be a good girl. But it drove her mad. Her nature was free as mine. Freedom is a threat to easy profits. It is the first thing the Corporations eradicate. They substitute a range of choices and call that Freedom. But we knew what real freedom was in 1924.

Madge herself took my manuscript to Goldfish’s office but she was only able to hand it in to a flunkey, so we were both thoroughly surprised when a telephone call the next day ordered me to visit Goldfish at four o’clock that afternoon. These were the days when he had already severed his partnership with Metropolitan and with Meyer (whose fortune, ironically, was founded on Ham). He was again an approachable eccentric aristocrat rather than one of the Hollywood kings. Samuel Goldwyn Productions had already made some highly successful and critically acclaimed films like Tarnish, In Hollywood With Potash and Perlmutter and many others. He was a typically flamboyant Warsaw Jew. Out of politeness I addressed him in Yiddish, but he insisted on English until he grew more relaxed, and returned to Yiddish in which he was more fluent. He was impressed by my story. He had been looking for something like it.

‘We need,’ he said gravely, ‘to show people how it is over there.’ He liked my basic plot and he thought he had just the man to direct it. ‘He’s Swedish as a matter of fact, but who’s counting?’ He chuckled at me and winked. ‘What does anybody know anyway?’ I found him a warming and engaging type, not unlike some of those who had inhabited Esau the Hairy’s, my old Odessa friends of the Slobodka. We were both nostalgic for pre-war Russia.

Goldfish said my story had that ring of authority, had clearly come from personal experience. He asked a little about my part in the Civil War. I told him how I had actually ridden with the White Cossack Host, how I had been captured by Anarchists, how I had escaped to Istanbul. He seemed sympathetic but not greatly impressed. ‘With a lie like that you should be Roman Novaccio,’ he said. Doubtless he had heard many tall tales from newly-discovered relatives and countrymen who wanted a job. I was determined not to trade on my military career, although naturally I was anxious to demonstrate to him my thorough lack of anti-Semitism. This, too, he accepted naturally, as if there were no other civilised position. Indeed he seemed a trifle discomfited by my references to Benya the Accountant and all my other Hebrew pals in Odessa. No embarrassment resulted, however, for soon we gave our whole attention to the realisation of my tale which, though changing in detail as Goldfish suggested ways in which it might be better presented on the screen, remained essentially true to my original conception. More than once he remarked how my story gripped him to his soul. He asked me how I would visualise the scene where the commander of the Women’s Battalion of Death, Tatania (a Countess before the Revolution), sentences Prince Dimitri, the White leader, to the firing squad.

I explained that I was by training a civil engineer and that it might be better if I drew the scene for him. He handed me a block of paper and I quickly sketched out the scene - the accusation, the verdict, the sentence. Goldfish was approving. ‘Not many of us have the right talent for pictures.’ Then, abruptly, the interview was terminated. A secretary who introduced herself as Sadie escorted me to the front gates. Goldfish would let me know if the studio could use the story. Meanwhile Sadie had an envelope for me which I should sign a receipt for. I walked a block or two until I was sure of not being seen by anyone from his office, and opened the envelope. It contained a cheque for $250.00 and a letter from Goldfish himself telling me that I was now officially retained by Samuel Goldwyn Productions to write a script based on my story. He would contact me as soon as he returned from Berlin.

To celebrate this further upturn in my fortunes, I took Madge to Christmas dinner at the Cafe Alphonse and from there we went on to a nightclub for cocktails. It was not possible to get her into the Hollywood Hotel without inviting disapproving attention so instead we booked a room for the night at Madame France’s, where we spent a memorable Yule. Everywhere soon began to go to seed, however. Even in those days, downtown Los Angeles showed evidence of social decline and the hotels were almost all what we used to call ‘commercials’. Every one of them is that now, of course. Possibly inspired by her surroundings, Madge proved to be a woman of imagination and spirit. I had, I discovered, only sampled a soupçon of her outstanding sexual menu. It was impossible to believe that she had developed certain of her appetites and proclivities in rural Missouri. I concluded, discreetly, that she was no stranger to the cheap hotel and a nom-de-guerre in the register and possibly had worked at establishments like Madame France’s; yet I came to feel a strong attachment for her and soon decided to employ her regularly as my secretary as soon as I was in work again. Even after a night’s extravagance I was still in pocket to the tune of some $150 and might reasonably expect considerably more if Goldfish were as good as his word. The money in hand would take care of my bills for a month and give me time to find employment more suitable to my talents. I had already considered approaching William Randolf Hearst in his capacity as chief of a great engineering concern rather than a studio boss, and drafted letters to various other eminent tycoons, including Hughes and Dupont, offering them the opportunity to develop some of the inventions I had begun to see realised in Russia, Turkey and France before circumstances brought me to America. Madge would type them for me as soon as she had time.

I took her with me to enjoy the rest of the season with Mrs Cornelius, her beau and their friends, who were mostly established movie people. Mrs Cornelius displayed considerably less jealousy towards Madge than she did towards Esmé. She confided to me that she thought Madge a ‘decent sort’ and advised me to stick with her. I pointed out that I remained betrothed to another. I was in no position to give Madge more than a temporary commitment. Moreover there were other young ladies available. I am, I hope, a gentleman, and would not take advantage of a young girl from Missouri. Although, as I pointed out, she was no shrinking virgin when we met.

‘An’ she’s not th’ only one!’ Mrs C. was emphatic, but whether in reference to herself or someone else was not clear.

Since we were alone together in the drawing-room I used the chance to ask if she had managed to discover anything more about Esmé. All she knew was that Meulemkaumpf, a notorious avoider of publicity, was at present unusually assiduous in pursuing privacy. ‘That could ‘ave somefink ter do wiv ‘is wife, I shouldn’t wonder, Ivan.’

I took her meaning. The Press would be bound to read the worst into Meulemkaumpf’s offer of protection to my darling. Now, knowing more about the man, I no longer suspected him of bearing her away to have his will with her at some lonely ranch. I realised that Esmé, believing herself deserted, had appealed instinctively to a native American gentleman. I longed for the chance, I told Mrs Cornelius, to explain what had happened. She offered the opinion that it was possible we both had some explaining to do, but before she could elaborate we were joined by Buck Buchmeister and a couple of his louder technician friends who were discussing a set they had just constructed for J.M. Schenk’s Graustark.

Buchmeister had had some hand in directing the picture, I gathered, under a pseudonym. It was not particularly uncommon in those days for people to ‘moonlight’ for rival studios sometimes for the extra money, sometimes to help out a friend, or to fly, as it were, under flags of convenience. It is safe to say that in Hollywood not more than one person in three retained anything like their original name. This fashion was started by the Jews who, of course, had every possible motive for encouraging the habit, since it helped so many of them to assimilate into American society. Not that these particular Jews were illiterate or uneducated. I have nothing against the better type of Jew. They contribute a good deal to our society and are frequently very charitable. My only reservation is the common one, that it is not healthy or sane to have one minority race, with all its inherited traditions, many of which are at odds with our own, dominating our culture. It is not surprising that certain alien ideas crept into the cinema in those years. I need only mention The Enemy, Name the Man, He Who Gets Slapped, The Case of Lena Smith, or Man, Woman and Sin, most of which were set abroad and dealt with subjects in ways that scarcely married with the ideals of the American people. Not that I had anything against Jeanne Eagels, whom I admired in all her films, but it was no surprise to me when I learned of her tragic death. There is a certain strain accompanying the kind of role she had to play in, say, Jealousy and The Letter. And, inevitably, Communism had eaten into Hollywood’s great heart by the 40s when it became necessary to cauterise the wound by methods some found crude and brutal, even cruel, but which many of us knew to be all too kind. The proof of this was that the communists did go to other countries to continue to propagate their messages while others, as in the case of the infamous ‘Kubrick’, simply changed their names and did not stop for a second! And we now see the results, day after day, on BBC and ITV which are nothing but a catalogue of every disease ever carried by word of mouth. Tolerant and easy-going as I am, sometimes I think my ‘live and let live’ attitude was inappropriate, especially during my Hollywood glory days.

For all that my thoughts were constantly turning to Esmé and speculation as to how she was spending her first holiday in America, that Christmas at Buchmeister’s was happy enough. I got to talk to several of the set-technicians and to discuss solutions to their problems. It seemed they thought I had a natural talent for their discipline and one of them, Van Nest Poldark (a Cornish buccaneer, as he styled himself, descended from a long line of novelists, smugglers and wreckers), told me I should be working in the technical department of a major studio. I laughed and pointed out that I was an engineer by profession and vocation. He argued that this was all the more reason I should try my hand at film designing. ‘It requires the knowledge of an Isaac Newton coupled with the aesthetic eye of a Michelangelo,’ he said. I thought he, in the manner of so many members of the kinema fraternity, was exaggerating somewhat, but then he gave me his card and suggested I come to see him at Paramount, which he had just himself joined. I did not throw the card away. As I told Madge later, if I could not see my inventions come to life in the real world, at least I might have the pleasure of seeing them realised on the movie screen. Thus, too, I might acclimatise the public to, as it were, my cerebral vision. I have never disdained nor, I hope, abandoned the popular arts. Fired by this vision of how I might popularise some of my ideas, I began to consider Poldark’s offer.

My enthusiasm for this was quickly replaced, however, by an altogether different diversion. Madge and I, availing ourselves of the festive confusion, were actually able to slip back into my bedroom where, to help her sustain her pleasure, I introduced her to the benefits of that much-maligned substance its original discoverers called el nevada and which has proved such a peculiarly apt servant to 20th-century Man. By the following afternoon we were both exhausted, having attempted almost every sexual variation possible for two athletic young people to enjoy in the confines of a small hotel room on a bed four feet by six. I loved the musty stink of a creamy dark skin which suggested that long ago there had been a lick of the tar brush in Madge’s family. It has been my experience that women of the octoroon or mulatto persuasion make the most passionate lovers, particularly if there is also Jewish blood in the mixture. One need hardly speculate as to why Moorish women are still very highly prized in the harems of North Africa and the Middle East, but I will come to that later. (It was Madge, needless to say, who first raised the notion of extending our number to three.)

I told Madge to report for work the next day. I would rest and prepare further notes for the proposed script. She said that she would have to come in the late morning rather than the afternoon as she had an appointment at four, an audition for a movie at last. I wished her luck but warned her not to get too involved with the idea. For every hundred girls in Hollywood perhaps one or two ever got legitimate movie work.

Informing me that she, better than anyone, knew how to keep her head screwed on, my spirited little floozy kissed me on the nose and left. Half-an-hour later the telephone rang. The concierge told me a young lady had arrived and was asking for me. Conscious of the exaggerated morality of the place, I told him I would come down to the lobby. Doubtless Madge had forgotten to clarify something and since she had no easy access to a telephone she had simply turned in her tracks and come back. I dressed quickly, aware that while I did not look at my best, neither did Madge, and descended yielding Turkey and red plush to the lobby where, all in white, like the angel I knew her to be, her hair in a fashionable bob so that anyone might easily have mistaken her for Ruth Taylor, my darling had come to me at last! With joy I advanced towards her and then, conscious of my lack of sleep, I paused. ‘Esmé?’

If I needed confirmation her wonderful, trilling laugh filled the great lobby. ‘Maxim! Now it is Emily Dane. Like you, I am at last an American.’ She opened her arms to embrace me. Though this was what I had longed for, again I hesitated. I could smell the stink of the past sixteen hours on my body. Madge’s perfume was still in my moustache. ‘I am filthy,’ I said. ‘I have been working all night. Sit here and let me get clean. I can be back in fifteen minutes.’

‘But Maxim, I only have fifteen minutes! The car is waiting.’ She made a gesture of desperate, apologetic impatience.

‘The car?’ Stupefied, I gaped at this vision of my bride-to-be. Here at last in the flesh was the child I had rescued from the most vicious slums of Istanbul. My boyhood sweetheart, she had been fucked so much there were calluses on her cunt but this reincarnated Esmé was Esmé purified, my own sweet little angel, my little sister, my restored betrothed! And she said she was leaving? ‘Where are you going?’

‘I have to meet Willie. It’s so awful. He’s, you know, moody. I’ve been longing to see you. This is the first chance I’ve had, my darling!’ She writhed with helpless desires. I began to reach towards her, then halted the gesture.

‘You forgive me?’ Tears were starting in my eyes. I held them back.

‘For what?’ she said. ‘Kolya explained you had to do what you did. And when you weren’t at the ship, I simply assumed you were still in hiding and would contact me in Los Angeles. Willie was so kind. He had a train of his own which was going to the Coast from Chicago and offered me a lift. Now he’s putting me up. Well, you know how it is, darling. I have to be diplomatic. But here we are, together at last anyway, no harm done. There’s a strong chance I’ll have a part in a picture soon! Won’t you be proud of me?’

‘I’m already proud of you, my angel. I have so much to tell you, to explain. I am probably going to be working for the movies myself.’

‘Oh, darling! You’re already a film-star!’

‘Not exactly. I shall probably be directing the film I am currently writing. As to an acting role, well I have certainly had the experience. We shall see.’

‘I have read all your letters and your little notes and everything, Maxim.’ She was a distant bloom, a dream of heaven in white flowered silk and fur, her little heart-shaped face framed by a sculpted helmet of newly blonde hair, her blue eyes glowing dark against all that fairness. I had never seen her so beautiful, even on that first occasion when I had suddenly noticed her, my resurrected muse, at La Rotonde. Ma soeur! Meyn shvester! Moja rozy! Dans la Grande Rue, lallah . . . Hiya maride. Ma anish råyih . . . Qui bi’l’haqq, ma tikdibsh! Awhashtena! Awhashtena! Samotny, Esmé. Samotny! So lonely, Esmé. So lonely. Oh, I have longed for you down all those empty ages. They took you, my muse, my ideal, my reason for living, and they made a whore of you. Was it not a sign, I now wonder, of God’s eternal grace, that you should come back to me, time after time, as if in confirmation that real beauty, real love, real altruism, is imperishable, no matter to what depths we think the world has sunk and that these imperishable values should never be rejected or forgotten? And here you were, speaking rapidly of Meulemkaumpf’s kindness, and your situation in which you were now somewhat compromised, not having told Meulemkaumpf every exact detail of your story. ‘He thinks my brother was to meet me and was probably killed in the gangster-fights.’

How could I blame her for a white lie or two? I had told them myself, in exactly similar circumstances, and while they rarely do any harm, they can sometimes prove a shade embarrassing or produce unexpected complications, which is why I long since gave them up. ‘When can you get away to see me?’ I asked.

‘Very soon. We’re going north for a couple of days, to visit Hearst at his ranch, and should be back by the end of the week. Maybe you could speak to someone about a part for me?’ This last was begged with that disarming, humorous sweetness I could never forget. ‘Of course. But we must talk more soon.’ Even though her innocent mention of Hearst had produced an unwelcome frisson, I was far more terrified that she should leave me again and we should be parted for another eternity! I drank in her beauty. She had hardly changed. Rather more sophisticated than when I had last seen her, of course, because in Paris she had begun to learn the manners and demeanour of a well-bred lady and doubtless Kolya and his wife had helped her. Her marvellous poise could rival Theda Bara’s. I mentioned that Mrs Cornelius was now making a great success of her movie career and Esmé murmured a remark in Turkish which I did not catch. Nor was there time for her to repeat it. She dropped her voice and asked in French if I had some ‘neige’ I might spare her. She had run out and Willie Meulemkaumpf was disapproving of both drugs and alcohol, so was no help. ‘It’s what he and Hearst have in common apart from their millions.’ I was glad merely to be of service to my sweetheart.

The drug had already become a bond, a way of remaining in touch until such time as she was able to save Meulemkaumpf’s feelings and return to me. I had heard it was possible to get married in Nevada without producing too much in the way of identity papers and tried to communicate all this to her as I returned with the little paper packet and pressed it into her warm, childish hand. How extraordinarily beautiful she was! Louise Brooks was to model herself on my Esmé and make a fortune in Germany. But that, as I know too well, is the price one pays for being ahead of one’s time. Not only do you receive no credit, but you rarely receive the kind of money made by your imitators. And then I moved to kiss her, but thought better of it. In an explosion of silver, she had sped to the waiting Mercedes, flung herself into the cavernous upholstery and waved her negro chauffeur on, for all the world as if instructing a coachman to whip up his horses.

Only when she had disappeared did it come to me that her uniformed driver was also familiar. It had been none other than Jacob Mix himself. Perhaps I had him to thank for Esmé’s change of mood?

Me duele. Tengo hambre. Me duele. Me duele.