“What for?”

“Items. Who’s in whose compartment. Who got tossed out of the bar. Who’s on the train. You know, N.Y. to L.A. Everybody meets the Chief.”

“Like the boats in New York,” Ben said, looking at the land outside, now as black as the night sea. Soon they would cross the Mississippi, something out of books. “And you don’t want them to know. What does it matter? I mean, what if Katz sees you? Any of them?”

Lasner said nothing for a minute, then grunted. “You’re not in pictures. You don’t know the first thing about it. Not the first goddam thing.”

Ben sat back in the chair, waiting for more, but Lasner was quiet, drifting. When he spoke again even his voice had changed, pitched to a different role.

“You know how I got started?”

“How?” Ben said, the expected response.

“Fourteenth Street. On the east side, near Third.”

Ben looked over, surprised to start with an address. But Lasner was smiling to himself, his voice stronger, buoyed up by memory, as if the past, already known, could steady his irregular heart.

“By Luchow’s, where the cheap beer gardens were. Next to one of them there’s a dry goods store. Like a shoe box, you know, just a long counter, some drawers for notions. Lousy space for retail, long, but at night they clear the counter and put a projector in. There’s a sheet at the end of the room. For this the space is perfect. So, a nickel. On benches. The first time, I’ll never forget it. I didn’t even have English yet. Just off the boat, and I’m sitting there laughing like everybody else. An American. This thing — I thought, here is something so wonderful, everybody will want it. A nickel. You couldn’t move in the place. I wonder sometimes what if I hadn’t gone in, on Fourteenth Street. But you know what? I would have gone in somewhere else.”

“And after that you wanted to make pictures?”