“Congratulations! Now go make a movie.”

She watched as he strode across the set, pausing to check the placement of the Mazda lights.

“That number three needs to be hotter,” Carrera shouted. “We need it on the girl who plays the doll. Make it look like a moonbeam.”

The set was the interior of a toy shop. A wall of shelves held cheap celluloid dolls, all unclothed. Doll heads covered a long table in the middle of the set, along with hammers and other tools.

A tall figure sat beside the table, smoking. He wore a dress, a mobcap, and high-button boots that must have been a size 15. This was the comic actor Wallace Beery, in character as Sweedie, the Swedish housemaid who was the star of a popular series of slapstick films. Pin tried to recall if Lionel had written this scenario. Sometimes he made up ridiculous scenarios on the fly, or stole them from the Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan.

And, like Pin, Lionel read adventure tales avidly. He loved gruesome accounts of true events—the cannibals of the Donner Party, the recent Eastland tragedy here in Chicago.

“That’s what people want to see,” he told her one morning when she’d met him at a vacant lot near the studio. He’d given her the money for Max, hidden as always in an Omar cigarette box—Lionel smoked Omars, Max Helmars, that was how she could tell which box held the dope cigarettes and which the money for them. Then he lit one of the hashish cigarettes, right there in broad daylight.

“Dead bodies,” he went on languidly. “Not those idiotic Sweedie flickers. Dead bodies and blood. Want some?”

He held out the cigarette, but she shook her head. “Max’d kill me.”

“Max doesn’t have to know.”

She glanced around nervously, then grabbed the cigarette and took a puff. It smelled like perfume but burned her throat and gave her the spins. When she handed it back to Lionel, he pinched it out and put it into his cigarette case, slid his hand into his breast pocket, and withdrew a small book. “Look at this.”

It was a flip-book—photographs of a naked woman, bound and blindfolded. Pin gazed at them, both repelled and curious. Another time, he showed her a small volume with a cover drawing of a woman tied up with so much rope she resembled a parcel with hair. Once he’d passed her a book with pictures of naked men and appeared to wait a bit nervously for her response. Pin thumbed through the pages, but the words were in another language. She looked up at Lionel.

“Is it French?”

“Of course,” he said. “What d’you think?”

She stared at the photographs, recalling the two men she’d seen at the Comique. At last she handed the book back to him. “They must’ve been cold, standing there with no clothes on.”