“For all … That’s a good …” He touched his forehead, which was aching. “Why that amount?”

“That’s what the translator asked for. It’s enough to get them all train fare out of Hollywood.” Rhiannon put the first jacket—a naval officer’s coat—onto a hanger. She brushed at it with her palm.

Chaplin rubbed at a blue worsted suit that had probably been sewn in Moscow by tailors from France, perhaps worn by a humble penitent at Solnechny Strana. People had been streaming into town to try their luck. Of course, some would eventually leave broken-hearted.

Now Rhiannon was deliberately not meeting his eye. She put a stiff ballgown on a thick hanger, and regarded how the sunlight hit it. “I should put these away.”

“Rollie,” he said, for a rubber-legged Rollie Totheroh was approaching, looking slightly greenish from his trip up in the captive balloon. “How’s the light?”

“Better through the bottom of my next glass of ale.”

Chaplin explained what he had in mind: how he wanted to end the film. Everything they did from now on would aim directly toward this.

When he was finished talking, Rollie wet his thumb and stubbed out some dirt on his lapel. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“I’ll still want to do it tomorrow.”

“I know. Tomorrow. We’ll go to Phelps Ranch, shoot it in the afternoon, good shadows until they go bad.”

Chaplin squinted at him. “I’m quite serious about this.”

“See you tomorrow at Phelps Ranch.”

“I’ll see you.” Chaplin shook his hand, and they parted, and Chaplin hadn’t gotten ten feet before Rollie called to him.

“Charlie?”

“Yes?”

“If you do change your mind, have the boys call me before first light tomorrow.”

“I won’t.”

Rollie growled his deep laugh, took a slug of bismuth, and kept walking.

On the way home, Charlie stopped at Pearl’s, a louche café out in the wilds of Wilshire Boulevard, where younger actors and actresses of some talent tended to gather without gossiping. There was no other place like it, and no sentence on any set had ever begun with “Do you know who I saw at Pearl’s last night?”—for no one, especially the speaker, had any business going there. It had lasted eleven months so far, and Chaplin knew it could not last much longer.

He was there, in the back room, checking his watch—plenty of time for supper—and sipping soda water. He tipped scales back and forth in his head as girls with short hair and ropes of beads that went past their waistlines took turns attempting to get his attention. He wondered who had thought of ropes of beads like that and why no one had ever thought of them before, because they forced the eye to wander. Short hair, bobbed like Irene Castle’s. The very opposite of curls, of course. He wished more women would bob their hair.