“Come on,” Johnny said, as if this were indeed my payment. “Let’s get you cleaned up and go see Graus.” He rubbed his clean chin. “Hey, how do you like my new look?”

Graus Menzies was running the SS. He stood in the center of the city’s huge flower market, surrounded by camera equipment, technicians, and other actors. Dressed in a Nazi uniform, he took a sniper’s gunshot to the chest, which exploded a squib hidden on him.

It was a movie called Beach Head, in which Nazis time-travel to the present and fight spring-break students. The actor was playing fifth banana to Wally Caking, a rubber-faced comic refugee from MTV.

—

Graus was having trouble with the timing of his scream, turn, and fall. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time that day.

“Cut!” an exasperated voice cried.

A young, moussed director flew out of a chair and started screaming at him in English. The actor, who was lying on the ground, took a while to find his feet. After he did, he painstakingly brushed himself off. The director continued to berate him. Graus waited for the guy to finish. Then he spat in his face.

“Uh-oh,” Johnny said, from our vantage point a few feet away.

The two began a vein-popping shriekfest, punctuated by American and German curses. It took four crew members to separate them. As Graus was led away, he yelled, “For Fassbinder, maybe! But not for you!”

Lunch was called. After being painfully stripped of his squib, Graus joined us, his chest heaving, sweat dripping from his face.

“When that video pig gets to hell, he’ll find me there,” Graus said.

“Chill out, Graus,” Katie said, agreeably.

Hearing that, I thought the actor would literally explode. Instead, disarmed, murmuring “Little boy and little girl,” he kissed and hugged Katie and Johnny. He was about to do the same to me, when he caught himself.

“Ucch,” he shuddered, and turned away.

Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to grill him on his past. “I’ll kill you before I tell you anything,” he had said, when he tried to eat me in the bar. Had that been anything but hyperbole? I would have been happy to find out later.

“When you get a minute, Roy here still wants to chat with you,” Johnny said, heedlessly. “It’s about The Day the Clown Cried.”

Graus looked at me. His heavily made-up face was the color of a polluted sunset. Fake bloodstains soaked the shirt beneath his uniform.

“Do you want more of what I just gave that director?” he shouted. “I told you I don’t want to talk! Store closed! Out of business!”

“Well, actually,” I said, uneasily, “you suggested that you would just rather see me dead before you—”

“Sorry! I can’t hear you! I’ve gone deaf!” Graus started doing a crazy parody of sign language.

Soon Johnny and Katie were following his lead, their fingers flying, “answering” him, laughing like kids. Graus drew them into one more group hug.

I began to slowly back away. I was getting fed up with their mood swings. Also, I liked information more, and yelling and physical pain less, than they.

The filming started again. I figured that that would buy me some time. I saw only Katie turn and casually notice I was gone.

The time for fooling around was over. I headed quickly back to the B&B. If Graus had anything to tell me, I might find it in his room.

SNEAKING INTO SOMEONE’S PLACE WAS MORE FOR THIEVES THAN DETECTIVES. But desperate times called for desperate measures.

I waited until the chambermaid started doing her rounds.

Graus’s door was left open, after the woman, barely more than a teenager, entered. I walked soundlessly on flowered carpet until I reached the threshold. Peeking in, I soon saw that she had entered the bathroom, and that her back was to me.

I slipped inside.

Recognizing that the room was identical to my own—bed, table, TV/VCR, not much else—I knew just where the closet was. So it didn’t take me long to open and then close its door over me.

Graus’s clothes smelled of all kinds of smoke.

It was almost dusk, and fading light streamed in through the slats in the door. Standing straight in the compressed space, I could only bend my head slightly and I couldn’t move my arms at all. I hoped the maid would be finished soon.

Then someone else entered the room.

Graus was already home. I shouldn’t have been surprised; his behavior had suggested he wouldn’t be long for the set. But my heart pounded deafeningly as he shut, then locked, the room’s door.

He greeted the maid by her first name.

She gave a startled little cry, then a muffled laugh. I stared through the skinny openings in the closet door. It was hard for the girl to be heard with her mouth buried in Graus’s neck.

The actor used to like chambermaids, and, apparently, his taste hadn’t changed. I saw glimpses of the two grappling, the girl yipping, Graus growling. Then they moved to the—out of sight—bed.

Starting to sweat a little, I thought that Gene Hackman had replaced George Segal who replaced Michael Moriarty in Lucky Lady.

The sounds of brutal sex play continued, grew in volume and intensity—slaps, bites, and “I am Graus!”—until they subsided.

Then the complaining began.

Even though he spoke in German, I could tell Graus was bitching about the day’s work. The phrases Fassbinder and video pig were unmistakable. The girl whispered to calm him down, then did something else in silence, and it seemed to work. In a second, his comments were quiet, grateful, and almost inaudible.

Then I heard him rise.

Through the closet, I now saw terrifying glimpses of a naked Graus Menzies. His bulging eyes, barrel gut, and hairy back rocking my world, he came right toward me. Then he started to open the closet.

I backed up through Graus’s aromatic wardrobe, flattening myself against the closet wall, hidden by slacks, shirts, and ties. Crouching, the actor reached a stubby hand in and grabbed a bag up off the floor. Then he pulled back, without seeing me, and shut the door again.

I stepped forward and groped my way out of the silk and wool curtain. I pressed my face right up against the closet slats. Simian in his nudity, Graus now took a videotape from the bag, shook it from its box, and stuck it into the VCR. Then he moved out of view, back to the bed, to watch with his friend.

The TV faced away from the closet; I couldn’t see the screen. So I directed my ear to a slat, trying to hear any sound from what I assumed was a porno flick.

I heard nothing. Then, after a while, there came a voice.

It was Graus’s. He was mumbling. Then he was screaming, incredulously, in perfectly audible English.

“Home movies?” he said. “Home movies!”

Furiously, he approached the TV. Nearly punching the machine, he popped the tape out. Then he jammed it, cursing a blue streak, back into its box.

I recognized the tape as mine. Or, more precisely, as Dena’s father’s.