While the prince dipped his pen in an inkwell filled with ruby-red ink (“Lord of Pokrovskoe and Petrovskoe; Heir to Lotoshino; Duke and master of the Vesholi-Podol palace,” and so on), Chaplin went to his office, with strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed except for Syd.

Chaplin had done his office with leather padding on which he displayed framed playbills of the Lancashire Lads and Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes. There were scrapbooks and piles of mail on the floor, and books angled at the edge of an ornate Louis XIV desk that might collapse any moment. It was cavelike, and when Syd finally did come in to sit, he had to dislodge one of the studio’s orange-marmalade cats, who nested atop Chaplin’s overcoat.

“How’s the war movie?” Syd asked.

“How’s the war?”

“It should be over by Christmas, they say.”

“Is that a fact?” Chaplin poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher he kept on the floor behind the desk. “I was thinking. Comedies end with a marriage. What about tragedies?”

“Death?” Syd wished they weren’t discussing tragedies. Tragedies made no money. He suspected his brother had no mind for them.

“No,” Chaplin said. “Every story ends in death, if only you follow it long enough.”

“Every story is a tragedy, then. Can we just start rolling on the next picture? What’s the setup?”

“No setup.” Chaplin was feeling a new vein of energy. “No story ends happily. The happy ending is only about knowing where to end on a smile, at the very moment where fortune is still on the ascent. The open road. The wedding.”

“I guarantee you, when the war is over, we’ll all be happy.”

“Something will come along to replace it.”

“There will be dancing in the streets.”

“Until there isn’t.”

Syd tugged on his nose, a habit he had developed in the last year or two of these conversations. “Then something good will happen again. Eventually.”

“Puppies. The lovers reunited. Or it’s all been a dream. It’s annoying.”

“Yes, Charlie, but you’re better than that. You’d never just have it be a dream.” After a moment, Syd said, “What?”

Chaplin drummed his palms on his desk. “Say I kill the Little Fellow at the end of this picture,” he said, and he watched with satisfaction as Syd swallowed hard. “Say we end with a bullet through his head.”

“You didn’t do that,” Syd said quickly.

“You’re right. That would betray the audience—they walked in looking for a comedy. So it will have to be the next story, maybe, or one after that. The one about Napoleon.”

Syd sized up his brother. His unshaven jaw. “Have you cut it together yet?”

“I think it’s called Shoulder Arms. That’s a British command. No doughboy would ever hear it, so it’s unrealistic, but—”

“And you were up all night?”