Flicker (14 page)

Chipsey tried to sympathize. “I do understand, Clarissa. We all have our first time.”

“Let me guess what yours was.
King Kong
?”

“No, as a matter of fact, it was Kenneth Anger's
Fireworks.”

“Oh God,” Clare moaned.

“I think I could honestly say I learned my total personal destiny from that movie. You know the big scene where the sailor's penis turns into a firecracker….”

“Please stop, Chipsey,” Clare begged. “I'm going to be sick.”

“Chacun à son goût,
Clarissa. Of course, later on Kenneth went completely superficial.”

“Why does your Nietzschean pal want
Les Enfants du Paradis?”
Clare wanted to know. “What does it mean to him?”

“Well, actually he hates the film. Like myself, he sees it as totally retrograde and defunctive.” Clare winced. Chipsey noticed. “Sorry, Clarissa, but art marches on, you know. Actually, Jürgen doesn't want the movie for himself. It's for his father. You see, during the war, the elder Von Schachter was something like the military minister of art or culture in occupied France. Did you know France was occupied during the war? By the Germans? Isn't that amazing? I never heard of that until Jürgen told me. Well, anyway, that's when
Les Enfants du Paradis
was produced. And it seems the old man was mixed up with the film somehow—making sure of its political tone and so forth. Or maybe just turning a blind eye, I don't know. The father's living in Argentina or Paraguay or someplace like that. Jürgen wants to send him the movie for his birthday. The man's quite sick, I understand. So you see, it's a sentimental gesture. I gather a couple of the girls in the movie were the elder Von Schachter's mistresses. Well, you can understand.”

They say animals can smell an earthquake coming hours before it hits—some sort of instinctual ESP. That's what I felt standing beside Clare just then. The earth getting ready to split. The shock wave seemed to be rushing at us a mile a minute. But all she did was stand staring at Chipsey. A long, long stare. Then she gave a quizzical little smile and said very quietly, “Jürgen's father was the Nazi minister of culture in France. That's what you're telling me? And you're selling Jürgen this movie so he can send it to his father who's hiding out in Paraguay?”

“It might be Argentina. I forget which. I suppose it's a secret.”

“Chipsey, this is insane,” Clare was nearly squealing in protest. “Don't you know anything about this movie? It was made by starving
actors in an occupied country. The whole cast and crew was mixed up with the Resistance; they risked their lives to hide members of the underground. This film … it was made in the belly of the beast, a celebration of life and love and art …” But Clare could see she was wasting her breath. Chipsey was simply staring back at her, blank and bored. “For Christ's sake, Chipsey, your boyfriend's goose-stepping father is a war criminal.”

“Well, if you ask me,” Chipsey said with a weary sigh, “I think people have blown this Hitler thing out of all proportion. Anyway, Clare, what do I care about politics? Especially old,
old
politics from way long ago?”

“Don't you realize what the Nazis did to homosexuals, as well as Jews?”

Chipsey assumed a deeply confidential tone. “Clarissa, I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body, you know that. But believe me, I've met plenty of Jews and queers who would've deserved it.”

I was still waiting for the promised tremor to hit. It never came. I could see the knuckles of Clare's fisted hands turn white at her side. But the voice was dead steady and cool, as if it were somebody else's voice, not Clare's. “Chipsey, I'd love to meet Jürgen. Would you introduce us?”

“Delighted! As soon as we've finished up here.”

“I'll tell you what,” Clare answered. “I'll let Sharkey work something out with you about the Jerry Lewis stuff. Whatever he decides. He really is a better judge of such things than I could ever be.”

“All right, if you want it that way.”

Then, turning to me, she said, “And why don't you help Jerome load that film?” My bewildered stare only brought an intimidating shove in Jerome's direction. “It's a
long
movie. He's going to need help.”

I had no idea why I should want to help Jerome, and Jerome showed no signs of wanting help from me. But after another, more insistent push and a muttered “Go
on
!” I did as I was told, though I felt rather like a kid being packed out of the way by his mother. I gathered Clare simply wanted me off the scene for some reason. Picking up one of the cartons Jerome hadn't stacked yet on his dolly, I started to tag along behind him.

“And come find me upstairs when you're finished,” Clare called after me.

When I found Clare again, she was part of a small still relatively sober group that had drawn off into one corner of a glassed-in porch. There was a sweeping vista of the moon-silvered Pacific from here, but nobody was giving it any attention. Instead, like Clare, everyone was drawn up around Chipsey and the elegantly dressed young man who lounged beside him on an oversized pillow. Jürgen, I gathered. He was fair and lean to the point of being cadaverous; atop his head he carried some three inches of pompadoured Nordic locks. And, as Chipsey said, there were indeed scars—or at least one scar that showed, positioned rather too cutely under his left cheekbone. Though his face was frozen in a blank, bored expression, he seemed to be following what Clare had to say with great care, now and then giving a small twitch of amusement.

Moving in quietly behind Clare, I took my place at the fringe of the group and quickly picked up on the subject under discussion. Early German cinema. It was a topic on which I'd heard Clare hold forth many times. But this time there was something decidedly odd about what I was hearing. It was her tone. So calm and measured. So … respectful. She was explaining everything she said with great patience.
And
she was listening. Listening and nodding politely. Clare never behaved like that.

Then I heard Jürgen say, “But this man Kracauer—he is just shit, you know.”

And Clare said, “Oh? Do you think so?”

And Jürgen said, “Obviously he has been hired by the Jews.”

Now at that point, I would have expected Clare to go for the jugular like a wolf that scented blood. Siegfried Kracauer was one of the few philosophers of film for whom Clare had any respect. I'd heard her defend his book
From Caligari to Hitler
several times with impassioned conviction, as if she might have written it herself. That was a rare compliment for Clare to pay anybody.

Kracauer's big idea was that the Germans of Hitler's time had been
driven crazy by the movies. Following the First World War, the country, still dazed by defeat, had been flooded with films that acted upon its wounded psyche like so many viruses. To begin with, there was
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,
a movie about madness and murder in which all the borders of sanity were systematically erased. Universally praised as high art, this film, along with a host of others, had saturated the German unconscious with a psychotic repertoire of ghouls, black magicians, vampires. Above all, the movies of that period had been obsessed with hypnotism. Again and again, the screen presented stories of mad doctors and master criminals who could mesmerize their helpless victims and then force them to commit hideous acts. Clear anticipations of Nazism, so Professor Kracauer believed. Such movies had poisoned the soul of the nation with images of perverted power. At last, along came
Der Führer,
who, like the evil hypnotist Caligari, spellbound the public and turned it into an army of murderous zombies.

Clare liked this idea. She thought it did justice to the strange, psychological influence of film in the modern world, its uncanny ability to charm and delude. She believed Kracauer was fighting for a deeply ethical understanding of that influence. I'd seen her explode with impatience at someone who dared to say that his book was somewhat overstated. “How can you overstate the danger of arsenic?” she demanded. But here she was now, sitting by demurely while a snotty stranger spat on work she admired with her whole heart.

What was going on?

In answer to Jürgen's crack about the Jews, all Clare did was smile (a bit sourly) and say, “You'll really have to take that up with Chipsey. He'd be in a better position than I to know. How about it, Chipsey? Are
your
people financing Professor Kracauer?”

Chipsey, flushed with drink, burst out in a dismissive laugh. “Clarissa, I don't understand a word that man writes. Besides, all these things you're talking about—and you are talking about them beautifully, my dear—they're practically prehistoric. My life, you must understand, happens in the creative present. Don't you agree, Jürgen? Art really must transcend these merely political ephemera.”

Chipsey was a great one for pumping helium into any conversation. With his help, things bounced and floated aimlessly for several minutes more before they struck another snag. Clare had come back to Kracauer's book, trying as tactfully as before to explain this and that
about it, when Jürgen interrupted to ask, quite casually, “And Von Kastell, for example? How would he fit in?”

Clare stopped short. “Who?” she asked back.

“Castle, if you prefer. Max Castle. Would you say this absurd theory applies to him?”

It must have seemed to her a lethal opening on Jürgen's part, more than she could resist. “Surely you aren't suggesting we give trash like
Feast of the Undead
serious critical attention!”

Jürgen waved her objection aside. “I mean, of course, his early films. His
German
films.”

“Do any of them still exist?”

“Not many. My father personally destroyed several of his movies.”

“Oh?”

“During the Reich. Part of the cultural policy.”

“Well, if your father destroyed them, I would have loved to see them.”

“He was, of course, only following orders.”

“Of course.”

“He was actually a great movie fan. Your Jean Harlow—she was a great favorite of his. Also Porky Pig.”

“How nice. But he burned the movies anyway.”

“Actually, he managed to save a few of them. Which is perhaps fortunate. There is some interest now in Castle's work—his early work. You know Victor Saint-Cyr in Paris?”

“Oh yes. We haven't been in touch for years.”

“He contacted my father about some of Castle's things. Of course, Victor's approach, it will be very abstract, very Cartesian.” He gave a derisive little giggle. “Very French.”

At this point, Clare caught sight of me seated behind her and excused herself. “Please don't go away,” she told Jürgen. “I'll be right back. I do so much want to continue.” She hustled me across the room, asking, “Where the hell have you been all this time?”

“I was listening to you and … ”

“You might have made your presence known,” she scolded. “You think I was enjoying myself?”

“Well, it sounded … ”

She cut me off in mid-sentence. “You know where his car is?”

“Yeah, it's a big white Mercedes. It's parked over … ”

“You can find it again?”

“Sure.”

“And the movie is in the car?”

“Yeah. Jerome was loading it into the trunk when I left.”

“Now listen carefully. Would you say you were reasonably sober?”

“Well, I guess, more or less… .” Actually, I'd been guzzling all night long, matching her drink for drink. I rather wondered why she was looking so much less sloshed than I felt. I gathered her sense of urgency was keeping her focused.

“Then take a couple more stiff drinks. Because you'll never do what I want you to do if you're sober. First of all, go get Sharkey. Somebody said he's out at the pool. I don't care if you find him stuck in some chick all of his full three sad inches' worth. Pull him out. Are you following me?”

“Yes … ”

“Then take him to Jürgen's car. And steal the movie.”

These words seemed to take a long time getting to me, echoing down a winding, dreamy corridor. “Steal the movie? How can I do that?”

“Break into the car. Take the movie out of the car. Put it in your car. Drive it home. That's how you steal it.”

“But his car is locked. Jerome had to use a key to …”

“That's why you need Sharkey. He knows all about breaking into cars and things like that.”

“He does?”

“Probably he doesn't. Probably he's a fat liar. But he's been telling me for years about how he used to be a thief. He went through some romantic hoodlum phase in his distant, fictitious youth. If he's forgotten, remind him what a rogue he's supposed to be. But just get him to help you. If he's drunk enough, he'll do anything for kicks.”

“But, Clare …
stealing?”

She snapped back at me savagely, “This isn't stealing! This is a political act, understand? That warmed-over Hitler Jugend in there is absolutely
not
going to make a gift of
Les Enfants du Paradis
to his Gestapo father. Not if I can help it. Don't put it that way to Sharkey. It sounds too decent. Just tell him it's a caper. If he gives you any trouble, tell him I promise to go to every female I can find at this party and deliver a detailed critical review of his last ten years of sexual nonperformance.”

“But what if we can't get into the car? What if… ?”

“If you can't get the film … burn the car.”

“What?”

“Burn it. Blow it up. Destroy it.”

“I don't know how to do that.”

“Jesus! Drop a match in the gas tank.”