Flaherty had seized upon their idea. He visited Murnau that first night in the clinic and described with precision his idea of the most memorable images from Nosferatu and Faust, which he’d just seen. He’d particularly admired the vampire’s ship gliding into Bremen harbor, and the Devil’s pestilential cloak spreading over Faust’s little medieval hamlet.

From his bed of pain, Murnau reciprocated by describing how exalted he’d been upon seeing Nanook.

Flaherty was much impressed that Murnau had driven all that way in such trying circumstances to work with him. In seven days they’d worked up a proposal for a joint project and negotiated and signed a contract with a new company, Colorart, that had approached Flaherty. The new contract, in terms of freedom, was a dream; it stipulated no company presence on location, and the whole picture would be made on location! By the 18th of April, a budget of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been approved. Murnau and David would sail from San Pedro at the end of the month. Flaherty would leave a month later by steamship with the crew and supplies.

Spiess was still out there, somewhere near where they were going. Murnau had proof. Recently he’d been getting a series of “gifts” through the mails: badly wrapped seashells, carved bits of bone (one labeled “Sea-Monster!”), and lumpen charms and amulets. They’d been sent to Murnau’s original Los Angeles address. The last package featured a rough squatting figure with a head split in two, on the back of which was carved H.E.-D: Hans’s initials. It had been wrapped in a handbill advertising a showing of Dernier des Hommes: Der Letzte Mann, on which someone had scribbled in German How’s this for worldwide success—your name now known in Bali. Heading east. Hecate. Murnau had been pained by the reference to their schoolboy recitations: Hans as Medea, himself as Jason.

In eight years he had made no progress on the question of Hans’s suicide. He fought the notion that no progress was possible. Lasker-Schüler had passed along a few letters Hans had written to her, and then she had refused any further help. In the letters, Hans mentioned neither suicide nor Murnau. Other old friends and acquaintances were less helpful still. Hans’s commanding officer had been killed in the Spartacists’ uprising after the war. Only Spiess remained.

While Murnau had been waiting for David to return from Tahiti, a boy he’d hired to monitor Pacific shipping transactions had sent word that an “E. J. Spies” had been one of three partners at Papeari, east of Samoa, who’d been hoping to barter copra for a thirty-foot yawl. The other two partners had been listed as “Robert Dean Frisbie, writer” and “Ropati, speculator.”