K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

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…

“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 curtains 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.