“He enlisted. Jack is in the navy.”

“He’s a drug addict,” said the man who’d claimed the same thing about Owen Moore. “Jack and Olive Thomas are vipers. They do cocaine, and sometimes they do it with Owen Moore.”

So many people volunteered what they knew that Münsterberg couldn’t keep track of where the information was coming from. But he kept hearing a puzzling fact, a romantic connection between Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, something he hadn’t read anywhere. And yet everyone seemed to know it.

“Beth is a wet blanket.”

“She seems nice to me.”

“Doug doesn’t need nice.”

Münsterberg tried to imagine Doug with Mary. They seemed like a profoundly well-suited pair, and the emotion it engendered was so simple it startled him. He was happy.

He puzzled over what pairing of lovers Doug and Mary best resembled. But of the first dozen that came to mind (Dido and Aeneas, Helen and Paris, Abélard and Héloise, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, etc.), none had ended well. Why did he have faith that this couple would be different?

In fact, what did he or anyone around him know about Doug and Mary? Only what they had all seen onscreen, acting, and what they had read in the magazines and newspapers, which had also insisted he himself was a German spy. He knew nothing about Doug and Mary. His happiness depressed him.

It dawned on Münsterberg that he was about to see Pickford and Fairbanks and Chaplin and Hart speak on behalf of the war. He wanted to leave. Between him and the street corner were several hundred thousand people. Bitterly, he returned to looking at the stage. The tub of water, near the far corner of the stage, gurgled and spat as the wind whipped across it.

He saw one plain-faced and well-fed man in his fifties ascend to the corner of the stage platform and adjust his glasses to stare outward.

This was Secretary McAdoo. McAdoo was motionless, gazing at the populace in what he did not know—for he was unfamiliar with show business—was the time-honored tradition of the manager gauging the house.

They had not yet made enough money. Also: he could not find Chaplin.

Fairbanks volunteered that Chaplin was probably sulking, but he only rolled his eyes when asked what was causing it.

“Do you know where he is?” McAdoo asked.

“Pardon me,” Fairbanks said, for he had stood still for several minutes now. With a quick running jump, he hurtled himself to the top of the sawhorses between himself and the crowds. He waved. “Hello!” And the crowd roared, so he waved again, and then dropped to the ground, and stepped back to Pickford and Hart. “What was the question?” he asked.

McAdoo sighed. He checked his watch. “And are you all right, Mary?”