Chapter 14

Shaking with exhilaration, Mina laughed at her own courage. She was dripping dirty pool water all over the car seat. Schnark drove fast, checking the rearview mirrors constantly. Without taking his eyes off the road, he put his gun into the glove compartment and reached for the agent's briefcase, which he'd thrown in the space behind Mina's seat.

“Go ahead. Open it,” he said. “The journal's in there.”

“Those guys were going to kidnap me,” Mina said. She untied her boots and wiggled out of her wet jeans, letting them dry in the warm night air. Her shirt was sticking to her chest. Schnark didn't seem to be interested in checking her out and kept his eyes on the road. She found Kino's notebook in the briefcase's side pocket. “Got it.”

Schnark gave her a thumbs-up. “Well done,” he said. “The BKA is proud of you.”

“Well,” Mina said. “I'm not sure if I like the BKA any better than those guys. At least they didn't wave any guns around.”

“Yeah.” His grim face again. “They were too smart to pull theirs.”

“Who are they?”

“From what I have been able to ascertain, they belong to a secret branch overseen by a joint board of the six major film studios and the US government. These are the guys who take care of the studios' dirty work. Mainly, they do paperwork, copyright enforcement, a well-timed leak to the press or the cops, that sort of thing. A little bit of intimidation here and there. Snooping. But they won't shy away from violence, and if it's necessary, they'll take someone out. There have always been rumors. Some people think it goes way back. There's a theory they framed Fatty Arbuckle. Got rid of Marilyn when the time came.”

“They're with the government?”

“It's a blurry line these days. As you may know, your Vice President has an inordinate fondness for private contractors, and this administration is desperate to make inroads into liberal Hollywood.”

“Are you saying they're like Blackwater?”

Schnark didn't answer. Mina wanted to laugh, tell him that he'd watched too many movies, but her fear had been real. Whoever they were, these men had attempted to kidnap her. She had really jumped out of a window into a swimming pool while they were beating down the door. There'd been gunfire. Mina was past laughing. She realized she'd been reflexively checking the rear view mirror to see if they were being followed.

“What do they want?”

Schnark accelerated up a freeway ramp and settled into an empty lane. It was past midnight and there were only a few cars on the road. “Movies are America's greatest export,” he said. “Billions of dollars.”

Oh great, Mina thought. Another lecture. Didn't Dr. Hanno just give her that speech? “I know, I know,” she said. “Propaganda and all that.”

Schnark ignored her.

“By and large, the industry controls itself. Hayes had it exactly right: ‘The quality of our films is such that censorship is unnecessary.’ But that doesn't mean the US government doesn't keep a keen eye on the potential of film.”

“They also keep a keen eye on speeding,” Mina said, “so you might want to slow down a little. This isn't the Autobahn.”

Schnark turned his head to give her a half-smile, but he didn't slow down. “In the sixties, the CIA set up something called MK/PSYNEMA, a secret program dedicated to the possibilities of mind control, propaganda, and psychological warfare. But it goes back further than that. Why We Fight couldn't compete with the best of the German films, and the Americans knew it. Have you heard of Operation Overcast?”

Mina hadn't.

“Immediately after V-E day, in a race with the Russians, a special unit of Marines rounded up German scientists: nuclear research, cryptography, aeronautical secrets, as well as mind control and propaganda experts. The same guys who built the V2 to attack London gave the Americans their space program. Heisenberg and Werner von Braun helped them get to the moon and develop ICBMs, and Riefenstahl helped them build modern Hollywood.”

“Leni Riefenstahl?” Mina wasn't sure if he were kidding or not. Then she remembered something. “Oma was telling me about secret Nazi experiments, something called Schwarze Sonne?”

Schnark whistled through his teeth and regarded Mina with some kind of newfound respect. “Yes, Dr. Spielmann's unit. A disciple of Goebbels. All Ufa directors were ordered to cooperate with him. Apparently, tests with Kino's material consistently yielded better than random results. They were, in some way no one understood, effective.”

“Oma said they did horrible experiments.”

Schnark nodded. “I got hold of Kino's immigration files. Lots of blacked-out pages. He told the Americans that the Nazis could never use his movies because his was the art of liberation, beyond anyone's control, but I'm not so sure they believed him.”

“Where are we going?” Mina finally thought to ask.

“I'd like to introduce you to someone who has some answers for you.”

“Now?”

“Marty never sleeps. I hope you're not tired?”

Mina shrugged. She wasn't tired. She was wide awake.

“I'm fine,” she said. “I feel fine.”

“Good.” Schnark settled back into his seat. “Hey, this is a great car!”

They arrived at an art deco house somewhere in the Valley. It was the only one on its block with the lights still on. Schnark rang the bell, and they were buzzed in. They found their way to the kitchen, where a white-haired man greeted them. He looked like he'd once been handsome but was now old and balding, with a rough grey stubble covering his wrinkled cheeks. He wore black silk pajamas. He'd been doing the crossword puzzle at the kitchen counter and eating soup.

“Hey Marty,” Schnark said. “It's late for soup.”

“I never sleep. Did you bring my cigars? You must be Wilhelmina. It's such a pleasure. I used to work with your grandfather. Aber Mädchen, you're soaked! Do you need dry clothes? I got some duds my ex-wife left behind.”

“Please, call me Mina. And yes, I would love dry clothes.”

Mina followed Marty to a bedroom with a walk-in closet, where she picked a pair of slacks and a white shirt, both too big for her, but they would do for now.

She found Marty and Schnark in a dimly lit study lined with book shelves, reclining in cushy armchairs, drinking scotch and smoking cigars. They were talking in hushed tones when Mina came in.

“Much better,” Marty said. “You look like Kate Hepburn.”

He offered her a seat, a glass of scotch, and a cigar. Mina settled into the free armchair and declined both the drink and the smoke. The men seemed like co-conspirators to her, accomplices, sharing secrets in the dead of night. Mina leaned back in her chair, ready for anything. Marty exhaled a pungent cloud of cigar smoke. “Inspector Schnark tells me Penelope is in the hospital?”

“She's in a coma. The doctors don't know if she will come out of it. She was doing an insane amount of drugs.”

“Always has, always will,” Marty said, but when he leaned forward, Mina could see his forehead crinkled with concern. “I am sorry. Is somebody with her?”

“This guy Chester. He's her nurse.”

Marty smiled. “I've known some of her Chesters.”

Schnark was quietly sitting back in his chair, and for a moment, Mina thought he might have fallen asleep. Then the end of his cigar flared up, and she saw that he was watching her intently.

“I was a kid when Kino hired me as a grip on Jagd zu den Sternen. Did you know that?”

“Back in Germany?”

“I was a huge fan. People said Kino was terrible with plot, that his dialogue was wooden, his characters two-dimensional.”

Mina nodded. Three days ago, she didn't know there was anyone who gave a damn about Kino.

“His movies were adventure stories, and he played fast and loose with facts, but out of the schmaltz and the melodrama, he distilled indelible moments. If you could see past the imperfections, they were full of strikingly persistent poetic images. Hell, if you watched them enough, you began to love the flaws, too. Genius, I tell you.”

He puffed on his cigar. Mina couldn't have said why, but this old man, sitting up in the middle of the night sucking contentedly on a cigar, struck her as the most trustworthy person she'd met in days.

“I worked closely with Kino on the preproduction for Pirates, in 1933, but my wife and I left Germany after the Machtergreifung.”

“While my grandparents stayed.”

“Kino claimed it was because of Penelope's father. People here thought he was an opportunist or worse. Either way, what happened to his films was a terrible tragedy.”

“You believe that?” Mina asked.

Marty Wagner nodded.

“I was practically a kid when I first met Kino. By the time they finally arrived in Hollywood, I had worked my way up at RKO. My name is on more than thirty pictures. Cat People. Body Snatchers. Citizen Kane.”

“You worked on Citizen Kane?”

Marty pointed to a framed black-and-white photo on the shelf by the door. “That's me in Xanadu,” he said. “Orson took the picture.”

Mina sat up straight, in awe of the old man in his silk pajamas. Citizen Kane was Sam's favorite movie in the entire world.

“Kino and Penny were too proud to ask for my help when they showed up in this town, and I was hurt when they didn't come to see me. Those years were hard for them. They were shunned. Wilder, Lang, Pommer–no one would talk to them. Then and now, it's a company town, and your grandparents were considered Nazi collaborators. They lived in a tiny apartment in East Hollywood, eking out a living I don't know how. After the war I was in charge of the story department writer's stable. The Ruskies were the new enemies, and the movie business boomed. We needed more writers, and I hired Kino under a pseudonym.”

“You helped him,” Mina said, nodding to herself. Kino had spoken fondly of Marty.

“Penny wanted him to get a job, anything but the movies, to live anywhere but in Hollywood, but Kino wouldn't quit. I've never seen anyone so stubborn in my life. So I did what I could, but the mimeographed pages always came back from the front office with unequivocal notes: too melodramatic, too absurd, too violent. They were forever complaining about plot holes. ‘Plot holes?’ he'd shout. ‘Miserable accountant souls! Life is filled with plot holes!’ But he kept writing. Every Tuesday, he turned in a new draft. When he finally came up with an idea they liked, Penny made sure it went nowhere. I'll never forget the time we were all invited to a party at Marlon Brando's house. She threw a marble ashtray at Orson Welles.”

Mina laughed at the thought; she was quietly proud of the old bat. “I can believe that,” she said, but Marty shook his head. It wasn't an amusing anecdote to him but a painful memory. It seemed to her that Schnark was shaking his head, too.

“I had no choice but to fire him,” Marty said. “After that, I didn't see them for decades, but there were rumors: drugs, suicide attempts, infidelity, you name it. Later, he made TV commercials. Didn't last there, either. By ‘63, they were nonentities. I'd completely forgotten about old Kino until I stepped into his taxi.”

“I read about that in his journal,” Mina said, glad to know this part of it was true. “You gave him another chance.”

“I was at Paramount at the time, and there had been disaster after disaster. Cleopatra almost bankrupted Fox, TV was taking over. We were desperate. We were willing to try anything. Cinerama, 3-D, Smell-O-Vision–why not Kino? There hadn't been a major pirate epic since The Buccaneer, and Kino's script was good, a reworked version of the movie Goebbels shut down in 1933. It had melodrama, adventure, wenches in costumes, and it would look splendid in Technicolor. Hell, we'd shoot it in Cinemascope. I saw the potential, but Katz had misgivings from the start. He wanted someone else to direct. I knew what Kino was capable of behind the camera, and I got the go-ahead. The hard part was getting him to sign.”

“Because of Penny.”

“I'd never seen anything like it. Here I was, offering him the chance of a lifetime, a comeback with a major Hollywood studio, and Penny screened his phone calls and threw my letters in the trash! I mean, sure, we lowballed him on his fee, but money wasn't the problem. Penny was determined that Klaus would never make another movie again. When I finally got through to him, she had him committed and pumped full of downers.”

“She thought making the movie would kill him.”

“And she was right.” Marty gave Mina a long, sad look. “They were both drunks, addicted to God knows what else, and they were smacking each other around. The kid, your father, had been shipped off to some school on the East Coast. I thought she was out of her mind, and I pulled some strings to get him released. Hushed up the whole thing.”

“You believed in him,” Mina said.

“I did. Now, this was not long after Dr. King's march on Washington, Kennedy was still president, and there was hope in the air. ’I have a dream, too,‘ Kino would say. I got a thrill being around him again, sharing his enthusiasm. Kino admired those kids in France who were breaking all the rules–so why shouldn't we be able to make a movie that was popular entertainment and art at the same time? Yes, I believed in Kino, all the things he said. Most of it, anyway. Pirates should have been his masterpiece.”

“But that's not what happened,” Mina said.

Marty didn't answer. His cigar had gone out, and it took him several fumbling attempts to relight it. There was no sign that Schnark was even in the room except for the occasional red flare from the end of his cigar.

“We shot on the back lot,” Marty finally went on. “I was to keep an eye on Kino. He dried out, showed up on time, and was in control of cast and crew. It was marvelous. I'd seen him do amazing work with far less talent and money. The dailies looked great, and I was sure we had a quality picture on our hands. We were under budget and on schedule when the entire production went to Mexico for the location shoot.”

“Did Penny go?”

“Oh no. I made sure of that.” Marty grinned to himself but didn't explain. “We took over a remote bay in the Yucatan, with a pristine beach and a town set dressed up as Mulberry Island. The location would really make this picture. The Buccaneer was all done on studio sets, and we'd blow it out of the water.”

“Tulpendiebe was shot on a sound stage.”

“Right. I don't know what would have happened if we'd stayed inside, but once we got down there, things quickly spiraled out of control. Kino now commanded the biggest production of his career, and when he found himself on location, he lost his bearings. He was like an addict on a binge.”

“And you were there to supervise him?”

“Ach Gott, ja. I was.” Marty took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, scratched his beard. Mina was touched by how embarrassed he looked. “I don't know what I was thinking–the best I can say in my defense was that we were all swept away by Kino's vision. He certainly knew how to rouse the crowd. He gave an impassioned speech about Lang's dragon, about how we had a chance to make something great and lasting. We were all seduced by this man who had been broken and beaten again and again but still believed in his art before anything else–even those of us who had never thought of the movies as art in the first place. In that tropical paradise, all seemed possible, and the crazier Kino acted, the more we wanted to believe that we were making something special. A cathedral of light, that's what he called it, and we all cheered. He stirred something in me that I'd long forgotten. I wanted him to succeed, no matter what.”

Mina bit her lip. She wondered if Pirates ever stood a chance at all. There must have been a moment when everything still hung in the balance, when things still might have worked out. She knew better than to wish for a different ending to the story. She reminded herself that she already knew how it ended.

“It was disastrous, and I should have seen it coming. I was a fool. Instead of betting a few million on a decent adventure movie, I staked my career on Kino's masterpiece. Within days, Klaus was manic. He'd gone off schedule and off script, rewriting scenes in the middle of the night, presenting his actors with new dialogue each morning. I don't think he slept at all. He was improvising again. There was a new drug making the rounds, something a friend of Cary Grant's had brought down in a little vial. It wasn't like the opium we used to smoke, cushy and cheerful. It was acid, and it made everything more real rather than less. Everybody got high on it. The actors were afraid of their own shadows, hiding behind the set, jumping in the surf naked, dancing all night, banging on drums and drinking tequila. We all felt like we were teetering on the edge of revelation. Kino got rid of his hand-crafted prosthetic leg and strapped on a crude prop peg leg.”

Mina couldn't help but laugh at the image. She thought of her own burst of anarchy at her wedding reception, but this was on an entirely different scale. Marty furrowed his brow, and she caught herself. “Please,” she said, suppressing another chuckle. “Go on.”

Marty hesitated. None of this was funny to him. “People stayed in costume at all times, and even the crew started wearing pirate outfits. The camera always seemed to be on, and we wasted a shameful amount of stock. The budget ballooned, and still, I didn't see what I had to do. ’Trust me, Marty,‘ Kino would say to me, ’trust me! It's all going to come together in the editing room!‘ And I wanted to believe him so much, I let the madness go on. Kino was gripped by a vision, and he would not compromise. ’Only at play are we open to our full potential!‘ he would shout. ‘Art is pleasure! If it's not fun, why bother?’ I'm lucky nobody died. He even wrote a part for himself and he acted in a few scenes–the ghost of Grapefruit Silko. It was ludicrous.”

Marty had talked himself into a state, and Mina squirmed on her stool. It wasn't her fault that her grandfather had been out of control, but somehow she felt complicit. She knew that if she had been there, she wouldn't have stopped Kino either.

“He came into my room one night, woke me from a deep sleep, and told me he changed the title of the movie. Now he wanted to call it Twenty-Twelve, Or The Hair-Raising Adventures of Captain Darius Silko, Heir of Mulberry Island and Leader of His Legendary Crew of Anti-Corporate Pirates of the Gaia II and Their Friends and Protectors, the Noble Mayan Nation of Xunantanich and Their Spiritual Descendents.”

Marty paused, waiting for a response. “That'd be hard to fit on a poster,” Mina said. Marty nodded, satisfied.

“Maybe he could get away with that shit at Ufa,” he said, “but it was career suicide in Hollywood. He dressed up crew members in white robes and gave them roles. He was banging Katz's girlfriend. I didn't wake up until I realized he was preparing to torch the entire set on the last day of shooting. The pirate wedding was supposed to be the film's happy ending, but Kino wanted mayhem instead: a riot, a battle, and a fire that would destroy the buildings. Now, a shoot like that wants to be carefully planned, but Kino just wanted to keep the cameras rolling and see what was going to happen.”

“He had a thing for fire.”

“I don't care. Lives were at stake. There was no excuse for this. I might've been able to ignore the orgies, the improvised whims, the wasted stock, but when I saw the crew dousing the set in gasoline, something in me snapped. I was done fronting for Kino. I tried talking sense into him but there was no arguing with him. He threatened to have ‘the shamans’ take care of me. He'd completely lost touch with reality. The whole thing was ridiculous, and yes, I called the front office and let them know that the production had gone off the rails.”

Mina couldn't contain her disappointment. “You ratted him out!” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Schnark stirred and shook his head.

Marty held her gaze. “I betrayed him, yes. I had given him this opportunity, and then I took it away. Kino had his assistants lock me into a trailer while he set fire to the set. The crew torched everything and Kino filmed his grand finale. It was a miracle no one got hurt. A few hours later, Katz himself arrived by water plane. He found a stoned debauch on the beach, his set destroyed, and his producer locked up. He stopped the production immediately, ordered everybody back to L.A., and demanded to see dailies.”

“Wow,” Mina said. “Busted.”

“Yes, wow. Kino was furious. ‘I had my film shut down before, and I will never allow it to happen again, you money-grubbing dilettantes! At least Goebbels had taste!’ and so on. In the end, he had no choice but to relent. He realized that screening an unfinished answer print for Katz was his only chance to save his movie. He refused to talk to me, but I was there, two weeks later, when the top brass at Paramount gathered at Katz's mansion to screen the rough cut of Twenty-Twelve. Your grandfather was still wearing his goddamn peg leg.”

“Penny thought that Kino was at his best in the editing room,” Mina said. “She said that's where he worked his magic.”

“Maybe. But what he had cobbled together for Katz that day was a three-and-a-half-hour long disaster. The picture I had approved was a swashbuckling romance: sea battles and a grand love story and so on. I knew things had gone crazy in Mexico, but I had hoped he'd be able to salvage the footage. What he showed us was entirely different.”

“No good?” Mina asked. “None of it?”

“We expected missing scenes and rough editing, that would have been acceptable. But Kino had changed the story. In this version, the handsome pirate captain had turned into a villain. Silko kidnapped Bonnie and took her to his mist-shrouded hideout, and he showed a taste for retribution and violence that certainly wasn't in the original script. There was talk about ‘destabilizing the financial system,’ and brand-new scenes about a below-deck conspiracy against Silko. Once the Gaia landed on the island, Bonnie was drawn into increasingly tangled pirate council politics, with long discussions about Silko's greed for power and treasure, and what was to be done to defend the constitution of Mulberry Island. It barely resembled the script Kino had handed me in the cab, and it didn't work. My heart sank deeper every time Katz shifted in his seat. It was ponderous and boring. And then it got weirder: on an excursion into the wilderness, Bonnie discovered that the Indians living on the island were descendants of a lost Mayan civilization. They were a tribe of shamans whose prophecies and drug-induced dreams took up a big part of the narrative.”

“And that's not what you signed on for,” Mina said.

“Damned tootin‘. As the movie went on, editing, storytelling, and direction got more and more haphazard. Kino's methods had gotten the better of him. Worst of all, there was no ending. The last half hour barely made sense, a jumbled mess of incoherent scenes intercut with shots from the fire and mayhem he shot that last day, along with scenes he seemed to have swiped from other movies, bits and pieces from assembled newsreels, loose ends he found around the editing room. He even put the Cuban Missile Crisis into the film.”

“No shit?” Mina said.

“Language, Mädchen,” Schnark said. It was the first time he'd spoken since they sat down.

Marty ignored them both. “From what I could gather, Silko's own men attempt to assassinate him during the pirate wedding and Mulberry Cove is burnt to the ground. There was an incomprehensible voice-over by one of the Mayans, and I have no idea what happened to his bride, Bonnie. She disappeared. It was a mess.”

Mina wished that she could have seen that movie. Maybe it was the effect of jumping into the pool, or the jetlag, or the lingering effect of the red pills and the coffee, but what Marty described did not sound like the disaster he was making it out to be. She didn't say anything though, and Marty went on.

“Katz was outraged. He stormed out of the screening room before the lights had come back on, cursing like a Schiffschaukelbremser. And that was the end of my career, too.”

“I am sorry,” Mina said. Somehow, she felt responsible. “So sorry.”

Marty sighed. “Katz took Kino off the picture and fired me. After that night, I never worked in movies again. Thirty years in the industry, over. They had some hack write a new script, reshot a few scenes, and went with the original title. The Pirates of Mulberry Island was released in the summer of 1963, and let me tell you, it was a piece of shit.”

“The beginning seemed pretty good,” Mina said.

“It was shit,” Marty repeated. “I'd given Kino a stellar opportunity, and he thanked me by ruining my career. He'd blown it for both of us. Now he'd truly lost everything–even hope.”

Mina remembered what Penny had told her about Kino's brains on the movie screen. She was surprised Kino had even gone to the premiere. That they had let him.

“What gets me,” Marty continued, “is that he must have known what was going to happen. I don't know why he ruined the movie the way he did, why he stopped caring about success. It wasn't the shotgun blast that killed him, it was the movie–and I gave him the movie. I despised myself.”

Mina wasn't sure what to say. Marty had gotten Kino into Pirates, let him do as he pleased, and then betrayed him. How different would things have turned out if he hadn't called Katz down to Mexico on the last day of shooting?

Marty was waiting for her to say something, but when she didn't, he made a grimace and went on. “I spent a lot of time replaying Kino's final film in my head–not the botched Pirates, but Twenty-Twelve, the rough cut he screened for us. I know now that he'd done the only thing he could have. Back behind a camera for the first time in twenty years, he tried to pack everything into this one film, all of his disappointed hopes, his accumulated grief, his wildest ambitions. He turned it into something we weren't ready for, using every trick he had learned, from the expressionists, from the Nazi masters of propaganda, from the commercials, from decades of obsessive viewing. Twenty-Twelve contained bits and pieces from earlier stories, scenes pilfered from his other movies, and a strange private mythology. It was reality-warping and prophetic.”

“Tell her about the assassination,” Schnark said.

Marty gave a sigh. “You want to bring that up?”

“Tell the girl the whole story. That's why we are here.”

“In one of the final scenes of the cut Kino screened for us that night, Silko and Bonnie are riding through Mulberry Cove in a horse-drawn carriage. The mutineers send a sharpshooter who tries to pick him off with a musket.” He paused. “Do you see?”

Mina shook her head no.

“This was months before Dallas, and it was shot from exactly the same angle as the Zapruder film.”

Now Mina understood. “Wait,” she said. “You're saying Twenty-Twelve predicted the Kennedy assassination? That's just crazy. Besides, in here–” she petted the journal “–he does talk about another murder, in the 1920 s, that happened the same way. Somebody was shot in a convertible. It's just a coincidence. Movies can't predict the future.”

“You're thinking of Walter Rathenau,” Marty said testily. He didn't like being contradicted. “He was killed point-blank from another car, and there was a hand grenade.”

Schnark leaned forward in his armchair. “Have you noticed anything since you watched Tulpendiebe?” he asked. “Moments of…overlap?”

“I haven't had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long,” Mina said. “I couldn't tell you what's real and what isn't if my life depended on it.”

“Maybe we can agree that movies can be mind-altering,” Schnark said, “and Kino was a visionary, one of the greats.”

Mina nodded. Movies like drugs–who had said that to her? She didn't know what to believe anymore. The Zapruder film? It was all getting more absurd and more intriguing by the minute. She wished Sam could have been there with her, just so she could hear how serious these men were. Dr. Hanno, Penny, they all agreed that there had been something extraordinary about Kino. Mina was surprised by how proud Schnark seemed. She wished she could watch Tulpendiebe again.

“Over the years,” Marty said, “I've seen snippets of Twenty-Twelve everywhere. Your grandfather's last movie anticipated Kubrick, Brakhage, Malick, Lynch. It was a new kind of movie, unfinished, but bigger and truer than anything I'd ever seen. For decades I sat on the suspicion that your grandfather had been on to something marvelous. Cinema promises infinite possibilities, but in reality, it's a factory product. A movie passes through so many hands, and there's so much money at stake, that when you're done you're barely able to remember why you wanted to make it in the first place. Kino tried to stuff something entirely new down our throats. Twenty-Twelve was a movie long before its time, and I've come to see its failure as an inconceivable loss.”

“I would have liked to see it.”

Schnark nodded. “You're not the only one, Mädchen. You're not the only one.”

Mina rubbed her face and took a deep breath. “Thank you for telling me all of this–it's a tragic story. But none of it explains what happened to me. Where did the print of Tulpendiebe in my apartment come from? Who stole it in Berlin? And why are these agents still after me, MPAA, Halliburton, or whatever they are?”

“Well,” Marty said, choosing his words with deliberation. “Within certain circles, Kino's work has taken on something of a reputation. There are people in powerful positions who have first-hand knowledge of the Twenty-Twelve rough cut, people who would be very curious to see it. Katz's nephew is running Paramount now. They know Kino's films would have changed everything. Unconsciously or not, Hollywood has mined your grandfather's final vision ever since. If Twenty-Twelve was released today, it might ruin an industry built on one or two ideas per movie, castrated versions of what's possible. Back then, it could have caused a revolution, mass hysteria, I don't know what.”

“You're talking about that PSYOP stuff.”

Marty cleared his throat and lowered his voice, as if these things could not be spoken of at normal volume, not even in your own home in the dead of night. “There is a lot of renewed interest in mind control and psychological warfare. What they call coercive interrogation techniques. Homeland Security is reopening old files. These are people who are intimately familiar with MK/PSYNEMA and the experiments at Schwarze Sonne, and they would like nothing better than to pick up that research. These people don't want Kino's work to get out. They want to use it for their own horrible ends, in their own secret prisons.”

Mina rubbed her eyes again. The lack of sleep was catching up with her. “But it's all moot because it's lost, right?”

The men exchanged glances again. Marty made a display of checking his watch. “Oh, will you look at that.” He stubbed out the end of his cigar. “Would you like some breakfast?”

They moved to the kitchen and turned off the lights–early dawn was falling in through the wall-length windows. Working in tandem, Schnark and Marty set up an impressive German breakfast at the table in Marty's study while Mina watched, not even offering to help: cold cuts, rolls, brown bread, homemade jellies, cheeses hard and soft, soft-boiled eggs, fresh coffee. It was much more elaborate than what she'd had at Dr. Hanno's place, when was it, two days ago? The day before? Mina couldn't tell anymore. Yesterday, it must have been yesterday. Mina was certain of one thing: she was hungry. She reached for a bite of brie.”Where do you fit in?” Mina asked Schnark.

“Don't talk with your mouth full.”

Mina shook her head. Something about the way he'd said that reminded Mina of her father–who would be arriving soon, she remembered with a sinking feeling. Who was on a plane right now, furious with her.

“Just answer my question,” Mina said, her mouth still full of food. She felt that Schnark was holding something back. Something crucial.

“Well,” Schnark said very slowly. “There's a remote chance that–well, Twenty-Twelve may have survived. You see, my agency is always scanning the Internet against a series of names and keywords related to our mission. Two weeks ago, we came across an alert about a lot of ’movie memorabilia.‘ Sketches, storyboards, and a ’canister containing celluloid of uncertain provenance‘ that went up for auction on eBay. There were photos, including of what were clearly two cans marked MULBERRY ISL. - KINO, with a red border. Marty confirmed that at Paramount, a red border indicated an answer print. Chances are good that this is the director's cut of your grandfather's last movie.”

He paused for dramatic effect. “Apparently, John Botha, an assistant editor on the film, was a bit of a pack rat and smuggled this stuff out of the studio. Usually, outtakes, dailies, and answer prints are destroyed, but Botha kept this box and stashed it in his attic. He recently died, and now his daughter is hocking everything.”

“What are we doing here, then?” Mina sat up. “You've got to stop them.”

Schnark ignored Mina's urgency. “We called Miss Botha and asked her to return the materials to the German people. She suggested that if the German people were interested in the film, they might want to put up a bid.”

“And did you?”

“In fact, I spoke to your father.”

“You did?” Mina said. How many lies had this man told her? “Why didn't you tell me until now? What did he say?”

Schnark held out his hand as if to shush Mina.

“He shut us down, your father. He doesn't care about Kino's legacy, cinema, or German cultural heritage. He wanted to know if this had anything to do with that movie you'd been sent, and that's how I found out you were in Berlin.”

Mina was processing this. “So who sent me Tulpendiebe, then?”

Marty and Schnark looked at each other and shrugged.

“You don't have any idea?” Mina said. “Not a guess? I don't get it. Even now, you don't trust me.”

“I trusted you with the journal to help you understand what's at stake,” Schnark said. He pointed at her with a piece of Fleischwurst. “What matters now is Twenty-Twelve. The auction was cancelled two days ago. Irene Botha is not returning my calls, and now, your father is on his way to California.”

Mina shook her head. She had lost Tulpendiebe. It had been stolen from her hotel room while she was sleeping, but neither of these men seemed to care. They were all about Twenty-Twelve, a movie that for practical purposes did not exist–except it did, and it was for sale on eBay.

“You understand that we have to retrieve the print before they do,” Marty said.

“I think I get it,” Mina said. “It's the little guys against corporate power and government control, right?” She saluted with her fist. “Down with the man!”

But they weren't in the mood for jokes. Mina felt sheepish, always joking around, going too far. Dr. Hanno had not appreciated Mina's sense of humor, either.

“Show Wilhemina the cans,” Marty said.

“It's just Mina,” Mina said. Her heart was beating fast. What cans?

Schnark left the room and returned with two film canisters that looked exactly like the ones Schnark had described: military green with a red label that said “MULBERRY ISL. - KINO.” Schnark sat the canister on the table, and Mina remembered Dr. Hanno's excitement when he first laid eyes on Tulpendiebe in her hotel room.

“Go ahead,” Schnark said. “Open them.”

Mina popped the latches and pulled the loose end of the film strip from the reel. It was wider than Tulpendiebe and in color. She held the film up into the light. “That's a pirate all right.”

“Yes,” Schnark said. “With Marty's expertise, we created reasonably realistic-looking facsimiles of the cans Botha is selling, and we put a Pirates release print in there. I don't think anybody could tell the difference at first glance.”

“You want to switch this for the real thing. Is that what you want to do?”

Schnark put his hand on her arm. “There is a good chance that your father is coming here for the film. The auction has been taken down, and Mrs. Botha is not answering my phone calls. We may not have much time. Should the opportunity arise, you call me, and we will arrange an exchange.”

“You want me to help you steal Twenty-Twelve?”

“Find out what your father knows. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” Mina said. “But I don't think he cares about the movies.” These men acted as if Kino meant nothing to her, as if this wasn't her legacy, too. Seeing the facsimile cans here in front of her, holding the celluloid in her hands, all Mina could think about was how badly she wanted to see her grandfather's tripped-out rough cut. How much she hoped it still existed.

The sun had begun to creep up over the ridge of the hills outside of Marty's window, and it was time for Mina to pick up her father.