“He’s plenty real,” Syd said, nose to nose with disaster.

“What do we know about him?”

“The world loves him.”

“Love is only permanent because we say it is. Eventually, it stops. Every picture I’ve made before this one, every one of them, lies somehow.” Chaplin stared at his shoes. “He’s Jewish.”

“Pardon?”

“Wouldn’t that at least be interesting? If he was Jewish?”

“They say the early ones are still making money. Can we make a new print of Her Friend the—”

“We’re not talking about that now.”

Syd bit down on his thumb. He looked into his brother’s eye as if gazing down the barrel of a mugger’s gun. “You know I like Mildred.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m just saying she’s a bit of a prize.”

“Maybe, but I’m still going to kill the Little Fellow.”

“You’re going to make him Jewish, send him into a museum, and then kill him?”

“Oh.” Chaplin hadn’t thought this through. “I suppose those are three entirely separate idées fixes.”

“Put him in a museum, Charlie. Kill him in the next picture.” Sensing an exit point, Syd stood.

“Don’t you want to know why I want to put him in a museum?”

“No.” Syd was out the door and in the hallway. For he, like Alf, knew when to leave.

“Statues,” Chaplin called out. The screen door swung shut with a bang. “They’ll come to life,” he said. “The censors will never know what hit them,” he added.

A few minutes later, Chaplin was behind his desk, eating orange segments and being careful not to get juice on some photographs. He had hired day players in the past, those not as innocuous as extras but also not bound to be in his stable of actors—from the Krotona Academy of Artistry & Talent, a school for live models that also had some spiritual bent—your body is a temple and a breadbasket, something like that. Kindly old Mrs. Dunbier, who wore a beret and still referred to his business as “the pictograph,” sent him sets of matte-finish studio photographs that showed a full-body image, and three facial close-ups to demonstrate expressive range.

However, Krotona had closed up shop (Chaplin wasn’t sure what that said about the spiritual side of Hollywood), and he had something new in front of him: binders of photographs, each in its own sleeve, and each with a sheet of typed statistics showing height, weight, age, hair color, etc. There were separate books for juveniles, handsome men, ingénues, “character” actors, and a slender, single binder marked “old.”