His wife had died giving birth to Jakob, and his greatest regret is that she was never able to see the bounty of all those long, often bloody post-midnight hours skulking around Kaprova Boulevard in fingerless gloves. There are still late nights when the boys and Weltsch are asleep and he sits at his desk, a former altar, in what was once the St. Vitus chapel, a room of poor lighting with an enormous stained-glass window that depicts a weeping woman being crucified upside down, and Hermann Kinsky allows himself to take out his paper-thin wallet and withdraw a fading photograph of his only love and whisper, Julia, I did it all for you.
Hermann has no use for the irony that the quality he most loved in his late wife is the very one that disturbs him when he sees it in his son. That dreaminess, that vague, lost, otherwordly sense of absence, as if the boy were living on some different plane of existence, as if Jakob believed that by not acknowledging the ugly facts of this life, he could avoid them. It came from the mother. She could keep that same look in her eyes, that glazed, unfocused sheen. In fact, they looked very much alike, both with the thin, almost brittle physique, the small bones and dewy eyes and thin lips, the ears that wing out. Both with the spots on the lung and all the breathing problems. Nothing like Hermann or his nephew Felix with their stocky frames and barrel chests.
Julia loved the movies, just like the boy, just as passionately, as if the picture shows were some kind of religion, were something to be taken seriously. It was the only way she would consent to date Hermann when they first met. For a night in Cinema Kierling, she would sometimes tease, I would walk on the arm of the village idiot.
And if it was Julia’s genes that planted the seed of this movie-love in the son, it was that fishwife, the fifteen-year-old governess Hermann hired out of the Schiller ghetto, that ultimately poisoned little Jakob. Bringing that girl into the household was the mistake of a lifetime. She dragged Jakob to the cinema each day, even when he got older and should have been in school. Felix was immune to the nanny’s influence from the start, born without any interest in artifice. But Jakob was lost from the moment he entered the Kierling. And now Hermann curses the day some foolish genius invented this thing called film.
Because it’s one thing for a woman to waste her time with such trifles and another altogether for a young man. And it’s a prescription for disaster when that young man is heir to the fastest growing crime dynasty in town. Hermann has tried every trick he can think of to get the boy more interested in the business. He’s taken the harsh and angry road. He’s taken the understanding and patient road. He’s yelled, wheedled, begged, threatened. He’s even tried bribery, buying the son his own movie camera, a 16mm Seitz, stolen contraband negotiated out of the trunk of a nervous cabdriver. Remember, the hackman said at the close of the barter, tell him it belonged to Uher himself, his first camera.
Hermann asked Weltsch to speak to the boy, thinking maybe it’s a problem of blood, being too close, the father too large a role model for the son to comprehend. Weltsch — with his CPA and recent law degree, his absolutely dispassionate, almost mathematical sense of logic, numbers as a personal dogma — came back shaking his head, unable to penetrate the fantastic cloud perpetually swimming around Jakob’s skull. He insisted on speaking of a film noir, whatever this is, Weltsch said, his voice as halting as if he’d discovered a new tax code he couldn’t decipher, so befuddled that Hermann found the day’s deposits miscalculated when he reviewed them that evening.
So odd that Felix, the nephew, the brother’s boy, nineteen and just a year older than Jakob, should have all the attributes that the son lacks. Felix has the head for numbers, the instinct to note the viable venture from the probable loser, the anger that could allow him to put a gun to an enemy’s temple, pull the trigger and then go to dinner without another thought. And most important, Felix wants. He wants to be Prince. He wants to emulate his Uncle Hermann in every way. He desires Jakob’s birthright the way his lungs desired air on the day of his birth — an unusually large baby, the midwife said for years that he screamed loud enough to wake all the dead in Strasnice Road Cemetery. Felix wants the number two spot at the table so badly that, unfortunately, Hermann can see he’s come to resent his once-loved cousin. If Weltsch can’t understand Jakob’s dreamy, antibusiness ways, Felix despises them.
But there is hope, there is one deal on the horizon that could bind Jakob into the Family, and make an honorable percentage in the process. First, however, a bit of unpleasant discipline must be dispensed. These nickel-and-dime Asians, Hermann thinks, why do I even bother?
Jakob Kinsky thinks of his bedroom on the top floor of the Hotel St. Vitus as the smallest studio in cinematic history. But that’s all right. He’s still a one-man operation and so far the bedroom fits all his needs. A year ago, upon moving in, he decided that since this tiny cell was where he’d be spending the majority of his time, it should reflect his aesthetic principles. So he’s made everything stark black and white and shadowy. His bed is a metal-frame cot that looks like it was scavenged from Spooner Correctional. The lighting is supplied by a bare bulb hanging from a short length of electrical cord. His clothing — three black suits and three white cotton shirts — hangs from a gunmetal coatrack in the corner.
It isn’t that Jakob sees his room as a blatant rejection of Papa’s bid to make good in the New World. It’s simply that Jakob has a theory that by living day and night in this bleak and boxy terrain, he can’t help but completely realize the imagistic imagination that he’s been striving for since the day his nanny, Felice Fabri, brought him to the Kierling Theatre back in Maisel and together they watched a non-subtitled screening of Beware, My Lovely.
He was just six years old. And he knew, upon emerging back into the blinding, headache-inducing sunlight of Loew Square, that he had to make films. Over the years and countless trips to the Kierling that followed, he knew that he had to make strange, haunting, black-and-white crime films. That he had to become the noir-est of all noir directors. That, in fact, he had to move beyond the confines of simply directing and become a true auteur — conceiving, writing, casting, editing, virtually willing his total vision into celluloid being.
That first screening was a dozen years ago and Jakob’s pursuit of his dream has never flagged. The bedroom, the studio, the original home office of his imagined company—Amerikan Pictures—is a shrine to his persistence in the face of paternal incredulity. The walls are completely papered with old movie posters—The Blue Dahlia. Shadow of a Doubt. So Dark the Night. The cot is covered with dog-eared copies of dozens of screenplays—Thieves’ Highway. The Tattooed Stranger. Sudden Fear. The floor looks like some demented architect’s model for a black, plastic city with towers of videotapes stacked and tottering everywhere—The Big Combo. Call Northside 777. Cult of the Cobra.