Which is how Mary Pickford ended up auctioning off a curl of her hair for thirty-three thousand dollars. At the end, the locks went to the de Youngs, who mostly wanted to keep it away from the Spreckels family. It was later photographed, and then went into a jeweled window in the Chronicle lobby, where for the next ten years drunken newsmen attempted to stroke it through the plate-glass display case.

The addition of thirty-three thousand dollars was welcome, but still McAdoo checked incoming receipts against some projections he had in folders. They still weren’t Over the Top.

“Charlie, there’s a lot riding on you.”

“How so?”

“We need to raise more money.”

“How much?”

“About two million.”

“Two—but she only raised thirty-three thousand. I have to raise two million?”

“No, no, you just have to raise …” McAdoo ran his finger down a column of numbers scrawled on the back of a legal tablet. He turned it back over several times, showing off what looked like a handwritten musical score turned inside out by a lunatic. There were function and derivative signs, and several side-formulae that relied on further Greek symbols.

“What is that?” Charlie asked.

“Oh, it’s just a formula,” McAdoo murmured. “It’s still in process. For every thousand dollars you raise yourself, another amount, something between ten times and a hundred times, depending, comes in at the Liberty Loan booths throughout the city. So, when Mary sold her braid, it motivated, I estimate, another one million two hundred thousand in pledges.”

Chaplin stared. He was torn, feeling the dreaded tug to go onstage, but also fascinated by what he was hearing. “Between ten and a hundred?”

“It’s much more precise than that, but there are many variables. We’re at ninety-seven-point—what?—eight percent. I based it on a pet project of mine, an attempt to put real value on the more intangible desires.”

“Why does part of that formula say ‘squirrels’?”

McAdoo reddened. “Never mind. Can you outdo Pickford? You need to raise fifty thousand.”

“Of course I can,” he said.

“Well … Go on and give it your best,” McAdoo said.

“Mom,” Lee said again. She kissed him, and he could smell the wet wool of her uniform, the salt air about her, her Lady Pompeii shampoo, her Duveen’s face powder, which made him realize how much he had missed her. “You found me.”

“Leland,” she said, “of course I found you.” She explained that after he’d been gone for about an hour, she’d been puzzled until the postman arrived with a delivery of a parcel of books on how to be a Four Minute Poet or Four Minute Singer. She had been in San Francisco almost as long as he had.