The day after David returned, they ate alone in Murnau’s newest place in the Hollywood hills. The domestic staff had been instructed to prepare the meal and leave. The two men served themselves from a banquette. Pal sat in his wingbacked chair and kept an eye on both of them.

The dining table had a view of Los Angeles. They reviewed the charts and drawings David had brought back. They laughed about his inability to eat for all of Murnau’s questions. For stretches Murnau just stared at the navigational map of the Tuamotus. He reminded himself of the Nosferatu peering over Hutter’s papers while his guest apprehensively dined.

He told David about the yacht he’d bought, which he’d renamed the Bali. Other than that, he said, he’d spent the last few months making the round of kidney specialists. Hollywood, he concluded, was wearing him out. He was getting too old for this, now nearly forty-one, and had no heart left for battling the studio.

Commiserating, David looked as if he recognized forty-one to be Methuselan.

That look prompted Murnau to announce that he was going to the South Seas. There was a pause. He asked if David would accompany him.

David, dumbfounded, answered that he was obliged to rejoin his brother in Mexico. Murnau had swung into action as his old persuasive self. That Flaherty’s film was at the point of being suspended was an open secret around the Fox lot; even Murnau had been privy to that news. So why shouldn’t they all join forces, then, and make a film after their own hearts, in Tahiti?

David had had certain hesitations. Murnau asked: Shouldn’t brothers seize every opportunity to work together? He stayed at it, selling his enthusiasm far into the night. He himself, of course, had neglected his connections with his own brothers for years.

The next day, they set off in his new red Packard to convince Flaherty, whose funding was stalled in Tucson. The doctors had been unanimous that the trip would be disastrous for Murnau’s kidneys. They proved correct. The pain became difficult before they’d left the city limits, and they had to make frequent stops. Murnau spent the night of their arrival in a clinic. In between, there’d been three days of the sort of good talk he hadn’t had in years, and excited planning. He told David about Hans: about his poetry, the intensity of their relationship, their estrangement, and Hans’s death in the war before that estrangement could be addressed. David knew some of the poetry in translation, from an old compendium of verses from the war dead entitled The Flower of German Youth.