Kino (18 page)

As the steam engine prowled through the night, I felt a surge of freedom that I hadn't felt in years. We were leaving everything behind: the Nazis, the dead father, the war, and the insipid operettas. We'd sold our house and the cars. I would never see Neubabelsberg again–Hollywood lay ahead. Penelope, too, glowed with excitement. We hadn't had sex in years, but on that train, we fucked like young lovers.

We reached the French border at dawn. A contingent of Gestapo officers boarded the train and knocked on every door. I wasn't awake yet when two officers demanded our passports.

They lingered over them for too long.

“
Moment mal
,” the older of the two said, just when he should have handed the papers back. A grin began to spread on his face when it dawned on him that this was a bust he'd brag about for years to come. “I recognize you!” he said, already reaching for Penelope's arm and twisting it behind her back. “Your name isn't Teigmann. I've seen you in the movies!”

We were taken back to Berlin on the back of a truck, handcuffs biting into our wrists, our bright new future a victim of our past, our escape foiled by Penelope's too-memorable face. There was a hearing and we were locked away in Plötzensee prison–separated, awaiting an uncertain fate. I demanded a trial, I demanded a lawyer, I wanted to speak to Thea, to Goebbels, we had friends in high places and didn't they know who I was! But for over a year, there was nothing but the sound the deadbolt made in the door and the guard shaking his beefy head under his Stahlhelm.

The punishment, when it finally came, was worse than death: one cold morning, four SS officers escorted me out of my cell. It was the time of day for executions–I often heard the rifle pops from the backyard–and I was certain I was done for. Starved and sick, I was so weak I could barely walk, and they hit me with the butts of their guns.

Penelope, emaciated and pale, was waiting in the yard. They wouldn't let us talk, and I couldn't read anything in her eyes, still as large and beautiful as always but filled with new depths of suffering I could not fathom. A large, coiled mass of black things snaking out of silver shells filled the center of the courtyard. Penelope's legs were shaking. Then I realized what it was they had dumped onto the cobblestones: a heap of film, carelessly thrown and left to unspool in the morning breeze like so many dangling black curls, flapping over the asphalt, almost light enough to lift up and fly away.

Weidemann, the vice-chairman of the
Reichs-Film-Kammer
, had presided over the delivery of the prints himself. He gave us a curt wave, signed them over, got back in his limousine, and drove away.

It was the saddest sight in the world, my films there on the ground, beyond salvaging, image after image after image unspooling on the cobblestones. Nitrate prints are highly flammable, but that didn't keep the executioners of my life's work from pouring kerosene on for good measure. Just like on the morning during World War I when my father had all enemy literature burned, I clung to hope until the last possible moment while the commander lazily fished a cigarette from a silver case, struck a match to light it, took a deep drag, blew a few smoke rings, and, almost as an afterthought, flicked the match into the amassed celluloid.

The explosion almost knocked us off our weakened feet, and when I close my eyes I can still see the sudden flame, higher than the tallest prison watchtower. What was left after the initial burst burnt quickly and left sticky soot on the faces of everyone there.

I expected them to kill us after the last cinders had turned to ash, but instead, we were shoved on the flatbed of a truck, guarded by two soldiers each. The commander offered us a smoke and handed us a change of clothes, a manila envelope with two hundred marks, passports, and passage through Denmark and from there to America on the steamer Walter Siegfried Steiner. We were to live! Penelope and I would go to America, but Lilly and the sailor,
Tulpendiebe, Land der Gande, Meine wilden Wanderjahre, Jagd zu den Sternen,
even the shit movies I had made on Goebbel's orders, all the images I had dedicated my life to creating, had gone up in the steely morning sky, forever lost. My work and my history, all signs of my genius had been cruelly exterminated before my eyes. We were to live, but I had to go on living in a world where my movies didn't exist.

Ten years after opening its arms to all the other immigrants, America was not kind to us. After months of interrogations, Penelope and I were approved in November, weeks before Pearl Harbor would have made it impossible. In Hollywood, our oldest friends turned their backs on us. We were considered enemy aliens and forced to carry special IDs. There was a curfew, mistrust, suspicion, and outright hostility. The FBI kept tabs on us, and we were asked more than once if we were Nazi spies by the people we used to consider friends. We were treated like outcasts, like traitors. Peter Lorre called me a collaborator. Joe May, that hack, accused me publicly of sidling up to Goebbels. That bastard Lang was allowed to keep on making grim and terrible movies, and we weren't welcome at Salka Viertel's house in Santa Monica where all the émigrés congregated.

Penelope, of course, had changed. The ordeal of the last decade had left her a woman I could barely reconcile with the regal movie star I had fallen in love with. On our transatlantic voyage, in constant fear of torpedoes, mines, and stray allied bombardment, I came to realize that the last remnants of her love and support had vanished, and as if to mark the transformation, she changed her name before we arrived at Ellis Island. Penelope became Penny–quicker, cheaper, meaner. A name well suited to our new life.

I refused to give up. I managed to find work as a writer at RKO. Eventually, I knew, I would find my way back into the business and direct another movie. Penny now openly sabotaged me, and her petty intrigues cost me all sorts of jobs. On the day the Marines landed in South Korea, she surprised me with the news that she was pregnant. Now, when we had nothing, we were going to become parents? I couldn't stand the thought of it.

The boy, Detlef, was never more than a pawn to Penny. It was her who insisted I make commercials when our boy needed an education. Yes, I became a director for television commercials. And why not? I had no honor left. Clean smiles with Colgate! I knew how to do this, show a world where everybody consumes and agrees. It was soulless work, even more mind-numbing and insidious than the operettas. I had managed to slip things past the Nazi censors, but American companies demanded deadly, suffocating perfection.

Eventually, I quit that, too. Instead, I drive a cab. The new automatics are easy enough for aging cripples. At night I crisscross the streets of Los Angeles, where my old friends still ride white-wheeled limousines to gala premieres. I'm a good cabbie. I like the night shifts, when it's quiet, and between fares, I work on scripts, sketching scenes, polishing dialogue, incorporating snippets from newspaper headlines and overheard conversations in the backseat. Sometimes, I wonder if I could drive fast enough so the passing street lights would flash by at twenty-four frames a second. What kind of world could I see through my dusty windshield then?

I am Kino.

Herr Dokter, I never forget this, even at my lowest. I always knew there'd be another chance, here in America, no matter how much Penny spread lies, smeared my name, and manipulated my old friends into shunning me. If I held on to my imagination, I would make another movie.

And I was right. Two months ago, I picked up a fare at LAX, and when I looked at the man in the rearview mirror, I recognized old Martin Wagner. I could have jumped on top of my hood and danced! It was Marty!

I've driven a few old friends and even more enemies, and lifted their luggage, too, but Marty Wagner and I went back all the way to
Jagd zu den Sternen,
where he was an assistant to the camera man. He has done well for himself since our days in Berlin, very well indeed–he is an executive producer at Paramount, and in my taxi he bragged about working with Stanley on
Spartacus
.

Then came the awkward pause when it was his turn to ask about my life, but I was not asking for pity. I told him that I was working on a new, updated version of
The Pirates of Mulberry Island
. I had a copy of it sitting right there next to me on the passenger seat and handed it to him through the divider. He promised to take a look and gave me a nice tip.

Promises come easy in California, and I didn't think about it again. Imagine my surprise when three weeks later, I found a piece of paper in the trash can, between the used coffee filters and the orange rinds. It had been torn to pieces, but I could still make out the Paramount letterhead: “From the desk of Martin Wagner.”

Penny had meant to shred the letter but she couldn't even get that much right. I confronted her, and she admitted that she'd been shielding me from inquiries. Marty loved my script! His secretary called but Penny kept her from reaching me, and the letter was his final attempt to set up a meeting. Marty had convinced his bosses that I could do for Paramount what I'd done for Pommer's Bioskop in twenty-seven.

Do you understand what this means, Herr Dokter? They want me back. There's interest in my person from inside the business, from one of the majors. Fate, in its infinite wisdom, has elected to give me one more chance. Since the day the SA marched into my studio and forced me to abandon
The Pirates of Mulberry Island,
I have perfected the script, not only restoring the tragic rewrites we did for Weidemann but making it better, much better. I poured everything I've learned into it. I know now that the true secret to a story's power lies in its architecture. The only difference between tragedy and comedy is where you stop, and I never stopped. The meaning of
Pirates
won't lie in its scenes but in the spaces between them.
The Pirates of Mulberry Island
will be my masterpiece.

And that, Herr Dokter, is why I am here. Hollywood wants me back, and my wife would rather see me rot in your
Klapsmühle
than let me take my proper place in the canvas chair again, with a bullhorn in my hand. That's why she had me committed.

Now, Herr Dokter, can you understand the fury I felt when I found Marty's letter buried in the trash? Penny is attempting to rob me of my reason to live. When she realized she couldn't contain me, she called the police and had me taken away, carried off in handcuffs by thugs in uniforms, just like her father had been taken away, never to return. You and your frocked henchmen did the rest, and now I waste away in your cell while somewhere on the Paramount lot, a producer waits for me. Right now, you see, everything is still at stake. After all these years, there's an offer on the table, my chance to direct
Pirates,
and Penny is trying to keep me from my destiny. Her twisted mind blames me, blames my movies, for everything that went wrong, and that's why she wants to destroy me.

I ask you: which one of us is insane?

Chapter 12

Mina aimed a cherry-red Thunderbird up Pacific Highway. She was filled with wild exhilaration: the sun was setting over the ocean that roared to her left, her hair was whipping her face, and on the radio, Lou Reed sang about Sweet Jane. Mina had come all the way to California, to the far edge of the continent, all by herself. She'd taken the same journey that her grandparents had made by ship and train in 1943, but for her, it was just a long day's flight. The convertible had been a snap decision at LAX.

Mina had reached Sam by phone from the terminal. “Did you get my email? You're not mad, are you?” she'd said, aware right away how disingenuous it sounded.

“I got your email,” he said, and that was all Mina needed to hear. Of course he was mad. Finally, he'd gotten mad. “I got your email. You're having a big adventure while I'm rotting in this shitty hospital. Now you're in California. I try to understand you, Mina. I do try.”

“Oh I know, baby, it can't be easy. But if you'd seen the movie, if you'd read the journal–”

“Have you heard of dengue shock syndrome? My temperature's been going up again. The doctor says I'll need a platelet transfusion if my blood cell count falls any further. These nurses here, they're the only ones who give a shit. The mortality rate is much higher for people with a second infection, but that doesn't mean I'm not in danger. I could die in here.”