staggered whenever he turned his head and steamed with the afternoon rain, wasn’t capable of giving an insult. “Mr. Remfrey, have your hands always shaken like that?”
“Of course not.”
“If your daughter wouldn’t mind leaving the room, it would be helpful to examine other areas.”
“Fuck yourself,” said Walton. “I am intact and unsored.”
The doctor, showing a bit of spine, marched over to the open French window and latched it.
“Well, what shall we do?” asked Dulcy.
“Morphine,” said the doctor. “With a regular emetic.”
“Your mother was an inbred whore,” said Walton, ratcheting himself out of bed to reopen the window. “Heal thyself, cretin.”
Walton worried about his eye falling out, but he had no notion that his brain was losing control of his limbs. He stalked up and down the halls of Victor’s apartment like a marionette. Dulcy made his nurses take him outside, and though he moved along with some of his old pace, the foot slap continued. “But I’m dead if I don’t walk,” he said. “I need the air.”
Victor insisted on interviewing staff personally, probably with an eye for spies, and chose a dimpled redhead for a nighttime nurse. “This won’t do, will it?” asked Henning, his eyes sad.
“No,” said Dulcy.
Henning hired the next applicant, a stout Bavarian with bottlebrush hair. She carried her own metallic thermometer, and Walton, without his glasses, went into a frenzy: the giant woman would put the giant needle in his cock, kill it for good.
Not such a bad idea, dozens of women too late. He moved quickly; she rarely had a chance to warn them.
•••
Long, dark, still days, such large windows and so little light. Dulcy had Walton’s bed moved closer so he could watch gulls and pelicans, and once he claimed a falcon brought a fish to the sill. No one believed him. People hid in corners of the apartment. They were all very quiet—Victor had a problem with noises. He liked some voices, notably Dulcy’s and Henning’s, but as Walton’s grew weak and hoarse, it grated despite the English accent. Victor had told Dulcy that he’d never liked his mother’s voice, even when he was a baby, and maybe he hadn’t liked to be touched, even then. Some of his fitness mania had to do with his pleasure in not having clothes against his skin; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear people seeing that skin. He liked soft, light fabrics, which worked well with his Byronic profile. It was all very misleading.
Their truce continued, careful indifference. Victor and Henning disappeared most evenings, and Henning shrugged when she asked where they went: banquets, the opera, dinners with nervous investors for new hotels. Victor inevitably sent Henning back up the elevator for things he might have forgotten, a neuroticism she’d once found charming. She learned to wait to make the run to the kitchen or to search through the papers on Victor’s desk, where she found doubt and rage, half-written letters to creditors and debtors and unions and commands to Henning:
Tell them I’ll use them for ink if they threaten a stoppage.
Tell Monty we ’ll find him, wherever he goes.
And:
Tell the doctor to give us some hope, or I’ll break the old fool’s cranium myself and dig my money out.
Victor’s aversion to laying a hand on another human was now reassuring. She wondered how far Henning’s duties went. His only free nights came when Victor visited his new fiancée, whose existence had dripped out over the course of the week. The girl’s name was Verity; her father, predictably, owned a dozen Western newspapers. Walton, in a stage whisper: “He’s found someone perfectly unhaveable. She looks like a tall goat, a thin stoat, a human moat.”
His language had become obsessive, unaware. If he said “putting on the dog ” in the morning, someone later would be lying doggo, being dogged, suffering through dog days, and (eventually) acting dodgy, which then led to Dickens and daggers and digging. It took a night’s sleep to break into a new letter of the alphabet. She couldn’t imagine that he’d really met the fiancée; Victor wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.
Victor’s chef, a tiny, dun-colored man named Emil from Strasbourg, liked to put capers in every dish and sent a menu of dinner options to the captives each afternoon. Walton always requested the same few things and ate little of what arrived. After the first week, once Dulcy heard the chef’s tiny lurching footsteps move above her bedroom in his attic quarters, wine bottles clinking gently, she went to the kitchen and made Walton the things he truly liked, despite the enthusiasm for greens and lean meats he claimed when he spoke to doctors—potpies and veloutés and puddings, nothing fresher than parsley or an apple. She snuck a glass of wine from any bottle Emil hadn’t emptied.
On a pretty night after days of rain, when Victor had stayed home with a head cold and she could hear him droning at Walton in the library, she grabbed an open bottle and climbed out the window onto the fire escape where she’d seen Emil smoke. The steps hung only a story over the hotel’s central roof, not as scary as the full drop. She pushed the bottle out, and then a glass, climbed up on a chair and crawled out, and turned to see Henning perched a few feet away, smoking a cigarette.
“Get another glass,” he said.
•••
According to Walton, when Henning had left Sweden at seventeen, he’d been about to start his second year of university, with the intention of teaching literature like his parents. But his brother-in-law beat his pregnant sister, and when she miscarried and nearly bled to death, Henning set out to find him, then took the ferry from Malmö to Copenhagen before anyone fished the brother-in-law’s body out of the harbor. He sailed on to Hamburg, then to Galveston, where he sent a telegram to his cousin. He’d worked for Victor ever since, moving up from an errand boy to an emissary and negotiator, working in his spare time and investing some of his own money in the growing number of film studios in Queens.
By the time he had to abruptly board a ship again late in 1901, this time to England after Victor had responded poorly to his broken engagement with Dulcy, Henning had begun to wonder at the point of returning. Victor had been drinking heavily, which always made him a little looser, a little likelier to act directly, and had started a fight at a friend’s wedding party that continued at the bars in the Village. The next morning a dead rich boy was found frozen into winter mud in an alley off of Bleecker Street, and Henning was perceived to have the least to lose as an inquiry began. Victor’s parents put him on a merchant ship to Southampton with a chunk of blood money in his pocket; Victor offered more if Henning found Dulcy in London and reported back.
In London, Henning did find Dulcy, and followed her long enough to understand what had happened, though he did not telegram Victor for weeks. He walked around the city, thought things through, and ended up buying himself a job at Clarendon Studios. He held the cameras for Alice in Wonderland, and he even did well writing the scripts, because his very direct English had a good pithy ring. He read—he still read—all the hours of the day he wasn’t working or sleeping around—and decided that he’d been born to record beauty: Shakespeare, fables, history. He didn’t want to film a stage—why limit yourself if you didn’t have to? Why not film The Tempest on a beach, or A Midsummer Night ’s Dream in a forest; why not give the words of the whole play underneath, while the image spooled out? If Henning could keep up, even with an immigrant’s English, surely the average schtuck could
