Murnau had an appointment with Lasker-Schüler. One of the film’s backers had been balking at the lack of receipts and accounting. Why there was a lack of receipts and accounting wasn’t clear; on that point Grau was evasive. The backer was an entrepreneur of ladies’ shoes named Agnuzzo, who had recently let slip that he had for years been smitten with Else Lasker-Schüler. Grau had immediately used Murnau to arrange a meeting. A bad idea, since she detested that sort of thing.

During the drive into town, Murnau brooded about Hans. The chauffeur was a beautiful and silent boy named Huber. The car was an American Ford, maroon and cream.

He and Lasker-Schüler had been largely out of touch for over a year, for one reason or another. She always needed money. Her novel was still selling and her verse play had had a healthy run, but she was endlessly cheated, and spent money the way she did everything else, refusing to calculate the consequences.

She and Paul lived in pensions and, occasionally, cafés. Often she was evicted from her table for failing to place an order. He’d heard she’d been caught with her hand on a financier’s billfold, and had escaped by claiming it had been guided by an archangel. She’d been arrested at the Zoo Station for being a public nuisance, orating for coins in what she claimed was Arabian.

They had agreed to meet at the Romanische. On the opposite side of the square, the Kaiser Wilhelm Church was ringed with street peddlers. Traffic was bumptious and squawky. On the sidewalk, table artists dashed off caricatures in which everyone ended up looking like Conrad Veidt. Most of the customers were schoolboy bohemians, with the occasional young girl with her Modern Woman haircut and copy of Die Koralle thrown in.

Lasker-Schüler was inside, in a telephone booth yelling into the receiver. He assumed he knew what she was up to. The week before, one of the Mosse papers had published a Where Are They Now? piece claiming that her destitution had reduced her to having Paul sell picture postcards from table to table. This looked like her way of negotiating a retraction with the features editor.

She hammered the receiver against the mahogany booth and then shouted back into it. They didn’t know what they’d done to her! Now shithead tourists from the Ku’damm came round just to offer food. She was like a nature park.

She calmed to listen to their explanation. She should kill them, she finally said. She should come to their bed at night and lay them open from chin to breastbone. She’d find their address. Did they hear her?

A young English couple viewed the performance with delight. This was why they’d come to Berlin. Lasker-Schüler offered them a cupped breast.