Rollie had turned his head from the statues back to the angels. “Is putting them right as crucial as—”

“We need to coordinate it with the chariots,” Chaplin had said.

“Chariots?”

“Weren’t you here? Chariots. When they move, they’ll startle the statues into life. Which is why you’ll be focusing on the ground, and you’ll see the dolly’s tracks. So up you go,” Chaplin had finished, pointing with his violin bow.

Rollie had looked with misery at the balloon. Sausage-shaped, strapped with dozens of wires, a dinky basket under its belly, it was an observation station recently used to protect Los Angeles in case of invasion. Now it had been converted for the use of the Chaplin Studios, and a full crew of AEF boys was ready to take him up for his overhead shot of the set.

“But can they really do a smooth-enough descent to—”

“Up you go,” Chaplin had said, now heading to begin conducting the orchestra, and leaving Rollie, who had taken a tug of whiskey from his flask, and then ordered a magazine of film brought to the balloon.

Upon the twenty-fifth iteration of the opening measure of the 1812 Overture, Chaplin allowed it to continue, the mood of the tune changing from melancholy to low anxiety and yearning. The horns came in like the edges of a distant storm, the timpani brought in lightninglike strokes of punctuation, and the rest of the set could now continue its work.

The chow wagon was serving coffee. The angels were let down from their perches, for it was discovered that their harnesses had never been tested before, and the fishing line—though tolerably inexpensive—was hardly safe. Then they were sent back up.

The overture continued, Chaplin lost in the shifts from war to peace, from brutality to sentiment. It told the story of the French army taking Moscow, their momentary triumph, the Russians burning their own city down to the ground. The finale proclaimed Russia ascendant (and destitute), Napoleon and his soldiers forced into the brutal winter, which finished them off. It was a piece of music Tchaikovsky had found useless, all noise and drama and arson and explosions.

Chaplin thought he detected a few measures of a Russian wedding dance, something repeated on flute, then clarinet, and he closed his eyes, conducting, imagining his pastoral, kindness, and he was back at the beach house, a different life, in which he had kept his mouth shut and bedded Frances.