When they were all dressed, he asked his carpenters to make the T-intersection that he’d used since Easy Street into a village block. He put on his trousers, his vest, his shoes, and stood on the lawn, tapping his cane against the cement curb. The septet was playing Strauss. He tapped his cane out of time with the music. This went on for an hour, but he still didn’t have an idea.

His eyes fell on one serious-looking girl curry-combing a horse. “Excuse me, aren’t you—” He could swear he’d seen her in a Girl Scout’s uniform, but after a while, everyone here began to look like someone else. That was rather the point.

“Did the Academy send you?”

She nodded, and then he nodded, and then Rebecca returned to combing her horse and watching everything.

There were some real clouds overhead, but they were of the Los Angeles sort, sheeplike and embarrassed-looking. Chaplin would have put better clouds in the sky. And by the way, the Tramp was now Jewish.

Only a few miles away, a solitary passenger slouched inside a trolley that was approaching barren Sunset Park. This was a park in its kindergarten: tiny king palms dwarfed by new, shining lampposts; pathways still fresh with gravel; a fountain with lily pads that might attract actual frogs.

One hand went up to the cord and pulled. The trolley stopped, and the passenger stepped out. When the streetcar rattled off, what stood revealed across from the park was the massive and unlikely Beverly Hills Hotel.

Three hundred rooms, no waiting, the locals had joked. It was a monstrous Spanish-style faux mission, with classical façades, roof tiles the color of mud, lengthy arcades with high arches, midget king palms that matched Sunset Park’s, and mighty casement awnings providing shade for exactly no one. Until five years earlier, this had been a beanfield.

The acreage surrounding it had been carefully replanted, and gardeners had to remove tendrils of bean plants from the otherwise spotless lawns and tennis courts. It was hoped that people from the East Coast would find it, and that houses and business districts would grow in its shadow. Advertising in New York newspapers celebrated its perfect location “between the mountains and the sea,” as if that might make a destination out of the nowhere between two other nowheres.

It was, today, the perfect place for Carlyle Robinson. No one from Hollywood would come here. He walked across the lobby, nodding at the many bellmen alert to his presence. The manager plumped up when she saw him coming; then her shoulders sagged when she saw he had no luggage.