The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  —There’s quite a lot in there about you.

  Claude ran his fingertips over the cover image of the Bender Bijoux at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn. It showed a crowd of people—men in derby hats, women in day frocks—standing in line at the ticket booth. He couldn’t bring himself to open it.

  —That’s your copy. I found it in a used bookstore in Santa Monica.

  —Thank you.

  * * *

  The lights went out for a few seconds. When they came back on, Martin slid another photocopy across the table, this one with a picture and caption of Chip Spalding in front of his stunt gym in Venice Beach. Taken in the 1940s, it showed a squinting Chip in khakis and a windbreaker—still wiry and athletic in his sixties—flanked by would-be stuntmen.

  —Somehow he’s still alive, Martin said.

  —The Australian?

  —He married an American and they settled down in Venice Beach after the first war. He had regular work as a stuntman with the studios and then he ran his own stunt gym for thirty years.

  Claude read the article to himself, his lips trembling as he mouthed along.

  —Where is Chip now?

  —His wife passed away and he’s living in a nursing home. I called the stunt gym, which is now a judo dojo, and the owner told me where he ended up after he sold the building.

  —We all ended up in Hollywood, one way or another, but I never once saw them again after the war. Venice Beach might as well have been Venezuela.

  * * *

  They listened to the rain and wind for a moment. Then a thunderclap rattled the windowpane and Claude’s suite went dark. The refrigerator hummed into silence and they heard a commotion out in the hallway. Doors were being opened and residents were talking to one another as they came out of their rooms. Claude cocked his head to one side, listening to the voices.

  —We need to go check on Susan. She’s terrified of storms. On top of the refrigerator, you will find a flashlight.

  * * *

  They descended the stairs to the ninth floor and passed Susan Berg out in the corridor. She was wearing slippers and a tattered negligee, her hair tied back with a threadbare scarf.

  —Is he still here? she said to Claude.

  —Who?

  —I heard he was dancing just now out on the Lido patio. Valentino. Everyone is hurrying down to see him.

  Rudolph Valentino had died years before the hotel opened.

  —It’s just a storm, Claude said. We’ve lost power.

  He touched her arm very gently, coaxing her back to 1964. She took hold of his elbow and they turned back toward her apartment.

  —Well, I insist that you boys stay for dinner.

  It was after midnight.

  —I can’t be alone in an electrical storm, she said definitively. It’s a widely known fact.

  —We would be delighted to join you, wouldn’t we, Martin?

  —Of course.

  * * *

  And then they were stepping into Susan Berg’s sulfurous living room, their hostess already busying herself in the cluttered kitchen. The smell of the soup warming on the gas burner came all at once—a weather front of fermented cabbage and curdled milk. With the flashlight, Claude picked out the archeology of the living room for Martin’s benefit: the snake plants that somehow thrived in the subterranean fug, the dusty bookshelves filled with volumes on Egyptian numerology, art history, zoology, and Hitler, the film industry plaques and tarnished trophies, the peeling production shots of Susan in her twenties, in a bikini or a nightgown, ablaze in diamonds and coy beauty. The bathroom was visible with its damp laundry, a dozen gauzy undergarments hanging like pennants.

  —Under no circumstances do you eat the soup, Claude said quietly.

  Claude watched Martin’s panicked face as Susan singsonged them to the table. In the area next to the kitchenette there were two steaming bowls of soup placed at one end of a wooden table. At the other end, there was an enormous jigsaw puzzle laid out, half completed, depicting a Dutch Golden Age winter scene, peasants frolicking and skating on a frozen river. They both sat very quietly, lowering themselves into the hemisphere of soup steam.

  —Be careful not to get soup on my Avercamp.

  —You will not be dining with us, Susan? Claude asked.

  —Oh no, I never eat past twilight. It’s how I keep my figure.

  Claude nodded, spooned through the soup, creating little swirls and eddies. Martin followed suit.

  —Delicious, Claude said.

  His spoon hadn’t once left his bowl.

  —Wonderful, Martin said. How did you make it?

  —My mother grew up in Idaho pulling potatoes out of the ground. Consider us people of the broth.

  * * *

  They both made a show of clattering their spoons on the ceramic bowls, and Susan didn’t seem to notice that they weren’t eating. She bent over the Dutch Golden Age at the other end of the table. Claude unscrewed the cap from the flashlight and the tiny bulb cupped the table in its pale embrace. The storm was now headed out into the valley, growing fainter by the minute.

  * * *

  At some point, Martin asked Susan if she remembered any of Sabine Montrose’s film roles. She considered this while she placed a piece of jigsawed ice into the frozen river.

  —Oh yes, she moved like a swan in front of the camera. That long white neck, all that floating grace. When you watched her, though, you wondered how something so pure and fierce could just swim by like that … Personally, I always wanted to grab her by that long pale neck and pluck her goddamned feathers. I wanted to make a pillow out of those white feathers and sleep on it every night. That’s how we all felt about her …

  Claude laughed, not mockingly, but with an appreciation for Susan’s phrasing.

  —No, no, Susan, you are mistaken. Swans mate for life, I believe. She was more like a praying mantis … The females, you see, eat the heads of their mates during sexual congress.

  Susan looked up, delighted, and gave a chortle that involved her shoulders. But then she collected herself and continued in her own vein.

  —In England, the Queen owns all of the swans. Did you boys know that?

  They both shook their heads.

  —Oh yes. A royal pedigree that dates back centuries. I have a book on swans if you’d like to borrow it. Somewhere on the shelf over there with the Hitler biographies. The boys are called cobs, the girls pens. And they sometimes call a flock of swans a lamentation … Isn’t it marvelous?

  * * *

  When the power came back on, they’d been listening to Susan’s monologue on swans for several minutes. Her rooms didn’t blanch with light, since she lived in permanent low-wattage. Instead, a few lamps came on and the radio began to murmur. Claude said, Susan, I am afraid we cannot finish our second helpings of soup. Will you forgive us? She looked down at the winter scene in the new lamplight.

  —Just this once I will allow it. But you must come back. There is always something simmering on the stovetop.

  Claude switched the flashlight off and put it into his pocket. Susan opened the door for them and kissed Claude tenderly on the cheek before they set off into the fluorescent hallway. As they walked toward the stairwell, Claude said:

  —When I first came to the hotel, I used to take women out on dates. Susan Berg and I had a series of unfortunate suppers and an ill-fated weekend on Catalina Island.

  —What happened?

  —I was going to ask her to marry me. I went for a walk along the beach, trying to pluck up the courage, and didn’t come back for hours. I left her waiting in the hotel lobby half the night. She didn’t speak to me again for years, until she finally went a bit mad in 1957. Then I started to bring her soup bones and check in on her. She didn’t forgive me for what I did to her … she just forgot. Sometimes I see it in her eyes … the vague certainty that she’s been deeply wronged by me.

  They stood in the cement stairwell, someone whistling jauntily above.
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  —Why didn’t you marry her?

  Claude stopped and looked down at his hands.

  —Something in me wouldn’t budge. I had every intention of starting over. It was like an errand I meant to run for fifty years.

  29

  The Messenger

  In the journals Claude kept in the floorboards of the château, he paid careful attention to time. Meals and weather were time-stamped in his looped cursive, right next to filming locations and the names of plundered villages. The descriptions were flat, almost mechanical, as if verbs and nouns were the only things that hadn’t been looted. He wrote of paraffin and sugar, chicory and salt. The verb ravager appeared frequently. A town where all the inhabitants buried their silver, china, and clocks in the ground was said to be ticking under our feet. A roadside incineration of bodies was noted as a mound of more than twenty deceased persons.

  * * *

  At 4:15 p.m. on August 20, 1915, the word Flammenwerfer appeared in the journal. Bessler had filled dinnertime conversation with reports of the specialist regiment that had been formed to dispense Greek fire. The description of seeing the flamethrower in action was matter-of-fact. It included no mention of filming his fellow Frenchmen in flames, or directing Lance Corporal Kaufer to prop a burned soldier against a barbed-wire entanglement. Instead, he wrote: A range of no more than twenty yards, the Flammenwerfer runs out of fuel in two minutes. The trenches must be very close together. Six men to operate. Easy targets for enemy fire without the protection of a parapet.

  * * *

  That summer Claude weighed little more than 120 pounds. He had to cinch his British riding trousers with a length of rope to keep them from falling off his waist. His hands shook when he loaded a camera, and a persistent cough rattled through his chest. His nails were bitten to the quick and he frequently blacked out—tiny flickers of a neural switch. Some of his footage swerved into a corona of daylight in the middle of a harrowing scene, as if the viewer were being forced to stare into the sun.

  * * *

  Most nights, he ate alone in his basement bedroom. Kaufer brought him a tray of leftovers and sometimes snuck a piece of chocolate or some sugar cubes under a saucer. Every once in a while, Bessler summoned him to the dinner table, especially if a visiting dignitary or an officer of the high command was visiting from Berlin. Claude was ordered to shave and put on a fresh shirt, to tell stories of the Palisades, of Thomas Edison, American tycoon and hero, sending them all bankrupt. Bessler told his guests that Claude Ballard, a pioneer in the film world, was working on a masterpiece of propaganda that they would soon unveil in Brussels. By now Claude had a full laboratory at his disposal—developing chemicals, a Williamson motor-driven printer, a supply of German positive and negative film stock.

  * * *

  Hal Bender was able to send a letter to Claude that summer through the American Legation in Brussels, along with the newspaper clipping about Sabine’s exile. It was forwarded from Brussels to Berlin to Louvain to the château. Between Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium and American diplomatic pressure, the sway of a neutral power was mounting. Claude knew that everything was riding on Bessler’s cinematic debut, a war film he was calling The Victor’s Crown.

  * * *

  Each Sunday afternoon, Claude showed Bessler the week’s footage and they talked about how it should be edited together. The only official frames to be included from the Flammenwerfer reel were the hillside pans of scorched bodies, the aftermath softened by dusk. After the premiere, Bessler hoped to put the film into wider distribution. Movie ticket sales in Brussels had tripled since occupation, he told Claude, and the sidewalk cafés were crowded with German soldiers on leave from the trenches, their pockets full of banknotes.

  * * *

  Claude didn’t write about the newspaper article in his journals, but he wrote the word Andorra at the top of an otherwise blank page. He taped the article on the wall of his basement room. As he stared up at it, the room seemed to dim away. The tiny country with its blue slate verandas was unfathomable, the detail of the copper bathtub impossible. He pictured Leo and Cora with their rarefied lessons. He remembered his mother teaching him how to read, his father bringing him to see the wildflowers pressed inside the family bible, a world within a world. When he became aware of the room again everything was inscrutable: his knuckles, his breath, the gauzy membrane of his own thoughts. In a jar beside the bed, he saw that he’d kept months of nail clippings and strands of his own hair and he couldn’t think why.

  * * *

  The unexploded bomb appeared in the château garden amid the celery and radishes. The gardener, a peasant from a nearby village, went out to weed and water one morning when he found the twenty-pound aerial shell, its nose dug a few inches into the soil. He informed Bessler and his officers, who were eating buckwheat pancakes on the flagstone terrace, and they hurried out to inspect. Claude followed them and they all stood there deliberating in the early, slanting light. There were colored bands of red and white wrapping the explosive but nobody knew what they meant. They were many miles from the real fighting, and no British planes had flown over this territory. Claude pictured a villager delivering this messenger in the basket of a bicycle under the cover of night, saw a man on his knees, planting the shell in the Belgian soil with a trowel.

  * * *

  Bessler rushed inside to telephone the ordnance corps and prepared to evacuate. He told his men that he had no idea whether the bomb was powerful enough to gouge a six-foot crater or break all the windows in the château. We will take no chances, he said. I used to run a tourist bureau and now I’m expected to be an expert in artillery and munitions. The officers, Berliners with literature and engineering degrees, rushed between rooms and began loading the Opel staff cars. Claude descended the stairs to the basement. He packed his camera equipment into his suitcase and went to retrieve the footage from under the pantry darkroom floorboards.

  * * *

  Something new took hold of him. He understood that he could move through the house invisibly, detached from his body, because there had always been tiny gaps in time, hidden passages and crawl spaces where he’d moved undetected. While the château erupted into commotion he finished packing his suitcase and methodically took down the newspaper clipping and folded it into his pocket. He understood the shell was a signal for action, its tailfins a perfect X on a map. He left his belongings on his cot and walked up the stairs and out into the garden. The bomb was still there, lying half-submerged amid the bolting celery stalks.

  * * *

  By the time Claude lifted the shell out of the dirt and carried it into the château, cradling it gently in his arms, the Germans were assembled in the drawing room and ready to evacuate. He stood with it by the white grand piano and the telephone, the space under the skylight where the officers gathered in the evenings to listen to Brahms or a crackling recital from Berlin. He was amazed at how steady he felt with the cool metal against his forearms, the color draining from his captors’ faces. He thought of Chip Spalding on the tightrope, an emperor of burning air.

  * * *

  Bessler worried the top of his cognac-colored holster with his fingertips.

  —I want the lance corporal to drive me to Brussels, Claude said.

  Bessler touched his fingertips together, puckered.

  —I want to be delivered to the American Legation. You will retrieve my passports and place them on top of the piano. The lance corporal will fetch my suitcase and tripod while the rest of you wait outside.

  Claude saw himself riding in the front seat of the Opel staff car, Kaufer’s hands on the steering wheel at precisely ten and two o’clock.

  —You will never get through the checkpoints, said Bessler.

  —You’ll call ahead and make sure I do.

  Bessler pushed out his lower lip and switched to German:

  —Even if I did, there’s always a hypothetical soldier who takes matters into his own hands. A Mauser fires as you speed aw
ay. The staff car blows up on the roadside. Worst-case scenario is a dead lance corporal and a suspected spy who’s carrying at least one enemy passport.

  * * *

  Before Kaufer could translate, Claude realized he’d caught every word of it, that he’d always understood more German than he’d admitted. His mother spoke it to him when he was very young and, later, when she was very sick, the language of fairy tales and convalescence and death. He also realized, looking at Bessler’s pale, aristocratic face, that he’d mistaken the Oberstleutnant for a war bureaucrat, for an aesthete with no stomach for death. In fact, standing there, Bessler would unscrew the nose cone on the bomb just to prove a point.

  * * *

  Bessler told the officers to go wait outside on the terrace. Kaufer remained by Bessler’s side, ready to translate.

  —I intend to carry this the entire way to Brussels, said Claude.

  —What then? Nothing is getting in or out of Belgium, not even a telegram, without German approval. You think we’d let you just walk out with your suitcase and cameras?

  Claude felt the shell tight against his rib cage.

  —I promise you, after we show our film in Brussels, you will be free to leave. You have my word.

  —You’ve kept me here as a prisoner for almost a year.

  —Nonsense. You’ve been our guest.