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“Oh, Clare … I can't … I don't … ”

Suddenly, there were tears flooding from her eyes. Embarrassed, she slapped me hard across the chops. That really hurt, but it punctuated her absolute seriousness. “Listen, I'm in there fighting the Second World War all over again. I'm letting that Nazi faggot shit all over my best principles—just to keep him pinned down. Do you know what I've had to sit and listen to from that … that … I ought to get the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now you do what I tell you, or just never, never,
never
come looking for me again!”

“What if I get caught?”

“Well, I don't know. Shoot your way out.”

“Clare!”

“It's pitch dark. Nobody will see you. If they do, play dumb. Play drunk. People have been swiping from this place all night. Who's going to care? I'll keep Chipsey and the
Übermensch
busy. Just work fast, that's all.”

I stood helpless and shaken and despairing before her. Relenting, she raised herself and gave me the warmest kiss I'd ever had from her. “This means everything to me,” she said. God, it was like Lauren Bacall sending Bogie into the night on a mission of danger.
Take care of yourself, darling. You're all I've got.
How could I refuse?

As I set off in search of Sharkey, I tried to justify what Clare was asking of me. I had to see it from her point of view.
Les Enfants du Paradis
wasn't simply another movie for her; it belonged in a special category all its own. It was a thing of beauty that had been bravely raised up in an act of defiance by its creators against the barbarian intruder. How could she let even one print of that film fall into the hands of the despoiler? I knew what she feared. Jürgen von Schachter's father would do something far worse than destroy this movie. He would
enjoy
it, as if he had the right to do that. Of course that mustn't happen!

I found Sharkey stoned and still nude in the company of a half-dozen stoned, nude people at the swimming pool. To my surprise, he responded eagerly to “the caper” as he gleefully envisioned it. “Wild!” he yipped. But not quite grasping the importance of secrecy, he loudly invited his swim mates to join us. Some, but not all, troubled
to put on a robe or towel as we took off across the lawn. They in turn invited others along the way. By the time we reached the car, we'd become a raucous collection of amateur bandits making enough racket to be heard from one end of the estate to the other. Fortunately, we were not the only noisemakers on the grounds. A jazz combo had staked out some space on the roof of the villa and was filling the night with hot licks.

If somebody had filmed what happened during the next hour, Sharkey, Gates, and Company might have rivaled the best of the Keystone Cops. Sharkey assured me he could crack the car in thirty seconds flat. “Just the trunk,” I told him, lighting the lock with match after match. But after he'd picked away at it for several minutes, one of the dizzy young women in our group decided to speed things along by heaving a large paving stone through a rear window. Her friends, not wanting to be left out of the fun, proceeded to smash the other windows.

“Hey, this is wild!” Sharkey wailed as he struggled into the car through the back window. “ill have this buggy hot-wired in thirty seconds flat.”

“No, no,” I said. “We're not stealing the car. We don't want the car.”

“We don't? What're we stealin', amigo?” he asked.

“The movie.”

“What movie?”

“There's a movie in the car. In the trunk.”

“No it isn't,” Sharkey said. “Here it is—in the backseat.”

I peered into the dark interior of the car. Sure enough, Sharkey was sprawling across a number of film cartons. “I thought it was in the trunk,” I said.

“Well, is this a movie or is this a movie?” Sharkey asked and started pitching the cartons to me through the window. It was only then, as I stacked them on the lawn, that I realized we were a very long way from my car.

“Sharkey,” I said, as I grunted over the heavy cartons, “we've got to get these all the way to the other side of the house.”

“No sweat,” Sharkey assured me. “Everybody! Lend me a hand,” he shouted.

There were now several people hard at work on Jürgen's Mercedes, demolishing the headlights, amputating the windshield wipers, flatting
the tires. Others, attracted to the spectacle, stood looking on amused. At Sharkey's call, they stumbled forward to pick up the cartons.

“Lead on, bwana!” Sharkey sang out, a film carton balanced on his head. “Into the bush. Boom-ba-ba-boom.”

I gathered I was bwana and struck out into the darkness, but with no clear idea which way to head. Finding my car in the moonless night became a nightmare, but I seemed the only one to care. Behind me was a raggle-taggle safari of prancing and singing inebriates carrying film cartons on their heads, having the time of their lives. All along the way, Sharkey urged our queer trek on with jungle hoots and tom-tom rhythms beaten out on the carton he carried. We zigzagged around the villa and grounds for what seemed like hours before I spotted the car.

When the cartons had been dumped into the backseat, I sent Sharkey to tell Clare, but with no confidence he would make it back to her. Driving away, I was still trembling with guilt and the dread of being caught. I needn't have feared. Nobody who took part in the heist was likely to remember a thing the next day. Maybe I wouldn't remember myself; I'd followed Clare's advice and downed a few more drinks before going after Sharkey. Still, one thing stuck vividly in my mind on the way home. I was certain my wayward bearers had lost two or three cartons along the way. Perhaps a few of them were still meandering about the Goldstein estate with stray reels on their heads. There weren't more than five in the backseat; there should have been nearly twice that number.

I'd rescued only half the children of paradise. How would I explain that to Clare?

“You didn't lose two or three reels. You lost the whole damn thing.”

“What d'you mean?”

“The whole film. You lost it.”

“But it's in the car. In the backseat.”

“There's a film in the car. But it isn't
Les Enfants du Paradis.”

“It isn't?”

“It isn't.”

“Well, where's
Les Enfants du Paradis?”

“You tell me.”

Clare was hovering above me where I sat drooped over the kitchen table, swilling strong coffee, trying to muffle the pounding in my head with a cushion of caffeine. Under her insistent questioning, I felt like a cornered boxer hanging on the ropes. We looked a sight, the two of us. Red-eyed, sallow, bedraggled, the last people on earth who were qualified to be talking about the children of paradise.

Clare, I discovered, had collapsed toward dawn and spent what remained of the night at Chipsey's, sharing the living-room carpet with a few dozen other dissipated casualties. In the late morning, she got a lift home and found me still asleep. I woke under her pummeling to find her glaring down at me, demanding to know “Where is it? Where?”

I told her the film was in my car outside, but added that I might have lost a few reels along the way. She rushed out to check and came storming back into the apartment to tell me how complete my failure was.

“It was so dark… .” I explained feebly. “No, I didn't check the labels on the carton. Why should I? I wanted to get away fast. Sharkey was making such a rumpus. Oh, Clare … I thought they'd catch us all.”

“All? How many people were in on this?”

“Dozens and dozens. Sharkey brought them along. They were trashing the car, and singing, and … ”

Clare slumped into a chair and grabbed my coffee away. “So you fucked up. That Nazi louse got the movie after all. Oh God! I wish I could drop a bomb on somebody. Maybe
you.”

“But I did steal a film. I remember that. What film did we get?”

“Something called
Judas Castle,”
Clare groaned.

“Judas Castle?
I never heard of it.”

“Is that so? Well, neither have I. Christ, what if it's one of Jürgen's masterpieces! If it is, I'll burn it.”

Neither of us had much incentive to bring the film in for inspection, but finally I did: five battered thirty-five-millimeter cartons. On a few of the boxes I could see the remnants of stamps, labels, stenciled words—all in German. And along the side of each box the words
Judas Kastell.
Or
Kastell Judas,
written in a rapid, crooked scrawl. I unbelted each carton and inspected the film canisters inside. They were in remarkably good shape, tightly shut and undented as if they hadn't been handled much.

While I busied myself, Clare sat at the kitchen table bemoaning her loss. “Every night of my life, I'm going to know that some slimy fascist fugitive is ogling my favorite film. There were actresses who had to sleep with him to get the picture made. I never knew that. Damn, damn, damn!”

She put this melancholy theme through several variations, but it was the same lament. And it was my fault. I tried to console her, but not very effectively.

“Well … we did get
something,”
I observed with unconvincing cheerfulness. “I don't think this could be Jürgen's work. It's a feature film in thirty-five-millimeter. Look what I found.”

I held out a messy bundle of papers that had been jammed into one of the cartons. There were a couple of personal letters in English scratched off in longhand, others typed in German, and what looked like a manuscript: a piece of writing much inked out and corrected. This last item was written in French and tightly typed on legal-sized paper now crisp and brown with age.

“I think this is a movie called
Judas.
It was made by Max Castle … or Kastell. That's what this letter says. It's very old. Wasn't Jürgen saying something about Max Castle last night?”

Clare spread the letters on the table and studied them. As she did so, I noticed her expression alter. The anger and hurt melted away, replaced by deep concentration.

The first letter was from the Chicago film collector Joshua Sloan. Clare had dealt with him several times over the years, never very pleasantly. “Pompous old fart,” was how she described him. Addressed to Ira Goldstein and dated 1946, this letter was part of a series (the rest missing) whose subject was a film swap. Old Ira was trading his private reserve of
The Wizard of Oz,
of which he apparently held several prints. Ira had been the film's principal backer; his role in the production was connected with one of his legendary bits of advice. He agreed to invest in the picture on one condition. “Absolutely you
don't
cast Shoiley. The public is sick of her already. You need a good singer. Get that whatsername … Judy Rooney. She'll work cheap.”

The letter read:

2724 Wacker Drive, Suite 22
Chicago, Illinois
January 16, 1946

Dear Ira:

So the miserly old fox is finally trading his
Wizards.
About time. And of all things, for Dietrichs! Can this mean there is some truth to the rumors we have all heard about Ira the Terrible's one-time intimate relations with Marlene the Magnificent? I do hope so.

I will confess that I am sorely tempted by your proposition. But
four
Marlenes for just
one
Judy! Come now!

Let me make a counter-proposal. I will reluctantly part company with
Shanghai Express
and
Blonde Venus
—both 16 mm., pristine condition. Hate to lose them, but how much longer can I go without a
Wizard
of my own?
Scarlet Empress
is, however, strictly off-limits. Still, think what you are getting. The sheer delight of Marlene vamping the Hot Voodoo in a gorilla suit. Surely it is one of von Sternberg's moments of sheer genius. Beauty and the Beast united. Delicious!

Clare looked up from the letter, an expression of pained disgust across her face. “I always suspected Sloan was a fruitcake. And he owns millions in film treasures. Jesus!”

The letter went on:

Of course, I've heard tell that you never actually look at what you collect. Can that be true? Hopeless philistine! Even so, you must see this from the connoisseur's viewpoint. There
are
pictures on these strips of film, and for some of us, they are dear in ways that money cannot measure. For that reason,
Scarlet Empress,
never!

Yours faithfully,

Josh

This was followed by a letter from Sloan dated February 21, 1946:

Dear Ira:

No wonder they call you the Shylock of the celluloid marketplace. Very well, I'll throw in
Morocco,
though God knows I hate surrendering Marlene's exquisite lebby impersonation. Movies were never tastefully bolder. That really ought to satisfy you. But I suspect it will not. In which case, let me sweeten the offer. I can put you on to an alternate supplier of Dietrichs. I know for certain that Curt Mangold in Toronto has at least three of her films, one of which is
Scarlet
Empress.
And I know he's willing to trade—for the right item. Now here's a hot tip. Curt has lately become passionately involved (filmically speaking) with Louise Brooks. And along that line, I have something that just might serve as tempting bait: a film called
Judas Jedermann,
directed by Max Castle (
né
von Kastell). Ever heard of it? I daresay not. I've been unable to find a listing for it anywhere since it came my way early this year. A mystery movie indeed. But there is the possibility—
just
the possibility—that luscious Louise makes her German film debut here.

How do I come to have the film? Bear with me while I boast a little. For the past year, I have enjoyed a most convenient cultural liaison with the War Department. I have agreed to purchase any unclaimed film (sight unseen and regardless of condition) that U.S. forces collect as spoils of war in occupied German territory. For these exalted cultural purposes, I am known officially as the American Universities Film Archive, headquartered at the U. of Chicago, where, one day, my collection will reside. All very public-spirited and academic, what? (Tax-deductible contributions always welcome.) Thus far, I have for mere nickels and dimes acquired some sixty films or fragments thereof, courtesy of the U.S. Army, mainly from bombed-out movie houses or military field theaters. (Can you guess what most of these turn out to be? Disney cartoons!) I have also picked up about a half-dozen prints of a little propaganda horror called
Jud Süss.
Would be willing to trade.