The rumor about him had no source. It was a quality of the air, a gas whose existence wasn’t noticed until it ignited. He was not an agent of the Kaiser. He just didn’t want his lovely northern countryside, where his family had a sugar-beet plantation, where he had spent summers at the natatorium, writing letters to a lonely cross-eyed girl who played the cello, destroyed. But audiences no longer saw a Harvard professor of applied psychology telling them how wonderful they were for loving the movies. They saw a German spy.

He could hear throbbing through the wall against which he sat—the opening notes of the recently seated forty-piece New California Orchestra playing the overture for the new Chaplin film. He had so been looking forward to Chaplin. Lonely Münsterberg, sighing that no one else could understand what it was like to have such ideas fly about the atmosphere until the person himself was replaced.

There was a startling Bang! above him, at the top of the stairs, the projectionist’s door slamming open against the ironwork stair rail. Münsterberg glanced upward. A small, dapper young man holding a derby hat was cringing at the top of the stairs. Obviously embarrassed to have caused such a noise, he held a finger to his lips, and daintily, with caution fully out of proportion, he edged the door closed.

His suit was pure bespoke tailoring, his pocket silk alone a week’s salary. He had black curly hair that was waxed into place, and for a moment, when his fingertip was under his nose, Münsterberg had thought, just a little bit, that he looked like … But, no, that wasn’t likely.

The young man floated down the stairs, each step of his shoes making no sound, really quite an accomplishment on such open metal grates. He clutched at his hat as if it were a baby, and maneuvered around Münsterberg on the last stair, finger still to his mouth.

Muffled by the thick stone walls, the orchestra continued playing its overture, plaintive and sentimental, with small leaps of humor among the horns. The young man nodded vaguely, and looked back toward the theater, craning his neck and shading his eyes the better to see where the vast A Dog’s Life posters were resting. He shrugged, red with embarrassment, as if Münsterberg had caught him having himself paged.

If Chaplin were not in costume—that is to say, if the real Chaplin descended from the screen—this was Münsterberg’s idea of how he would dress. “Are you …”

The young man fitted his derby on and spun on his heel. A second later, he was at the mouth of the alley, and then he was gone in the crowd.