Paper Conspiracies. Susan Daitch

The distant third person was a stand-in. For a man fond of cryptography (especially cases where one set of words becomes a substitute for another) and jokes with names, this makes sense. Are there more traces of biography in the actualities than in the preconstructions?

      Both Méliès and Dreyfus had granddaughters named Madeleine, but there are no other similarities between them that I’m aware of. Georges, drawn in by his cousin Adolphe, was sympathetic to the Dreyfus cause, supportive to the point where he had to break off with his brothers. Although the trial did divide families, Méliès was a public figure, and therefore easily victimized for his position as a Dreyfusard. Many were ridiculed: Émile Zola; Femande Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer; Prime Minister Clemenceau, and others found their caricatures on postcards, posters, painted on chamber pots, printed in newspapers and on the boards of children’s games. They were the butt of all kinds of cartoons. Like Zola and the rest, Méliès was a physical target, easily recognized, the first film celebrity to have to go into hiding from the press. He acted in most of his own films, as you know, but what you may not know is that he also had a double, a man who played Méliès as a kind of stuntman. This man who looked like Georges was the one who had to take the fall time and time again. A head explodes, a deep-sea diver is swept away, a figure explores the polar ice cap in a hot space suit, all of these were filmed using a stunt double for Méliès. Méliès made films after 1899. We know he wasn’t murdered, but the double, his substitute, never appears again.

      Yours truly,

      Jack Kews

      I opened the door, looked down the empty hall. New reasons to be afraid, came the voice of an actor from behind one of the doors. The note could have been lying on the floor for hours, but I’d only just seen it. No one answered when I called out. Sounds came from behind the Godardistes’ door, but they didn’t respond to my voice. Everyone else had left. I shut the door and leaned my back against it.

      I put the note on top of the light table. It was typed on plain white typing paper. The J of Jack’s signature vaguely resembled Julius’s Js — he began his capital Js and Ts with the same broad hook at the top, a kind of roof supported by the stem of the letter — but the Jack Kews, the sneeze that remained, had a different slant and bore no resemblance to Julius’s handwriting. Jack’s K was angular, and Julius’s capital K always had a loop in the center as if lassoing a pole. I turned the note upside down and put a magnifying loupe over Jack Kews. The J looked like a fishhook or a nose seen in profile. (Du Paty de Clam had said that if the bordereau, a detailed note or list, matched Esterhazy’s writing then it would only prove that Dreyfus himself had produced a good forgery. Esterhazy had lied so many times that when he admitted to having written the bordereau, no one believed him.) I didn’t suspect Julius. He wouldn’t, I don’t think, have tried to scare me in this way, changing his voice, leaving an oddball note, a few harebrained conclusions deduced from Méliès’s memoirs. The office tricks Julius played were blatant and obvious slapstick, like coming to work in a gorilla suit when we were preserving an old print of King Kong.

      So maybe there really was a Jack Kews, inquisitive but skittish, a man who supposed, as did Julius, that these films might not be as harmless as they appeared. In spite of Jack’s belief that this bit of silent film had caused riots, looting, vandalism, murder, there was nothing incendiary left in The Dreyfus Affair that I could see. Whoever Jack Kews was, those two down the hall might have seen him. While looking for me, he probably knocked on their door, turning into one of the Tom, Dick, and Harrys the women referred to with such annoyance. I wanted to ask them if they remembered what the other interlopers had looked like, but was afraid to knock on their door again that night. I walked past it instead and tried the entrance to Alphabet just past the corridor of editing rooms. The front door was unlocked, just as I’d instructed Antonya to leave it, but I decided to secure it now. The dark hall, the sound of a running toilet coming from down the corridor, unlocked stairwells where anyone could do anything were all ominous in the range of possibility they offered. I sat at Antonya’s desk, pulled out a telephone book, and looked up Kews just in case that London business wasn’t true.

      Kew Gardens Florist

      Kews, F

      Kews, Lilly

      Kewshansky, Tatiana (probably Tchevshanska, originally)

      Expensive black leather coats tight around their bodies, the Godardistes approached. I put the telephone book back in a drawer and spun around in Antonya’s chair. They were leaving for the night, carrying bags of tapes and speaking to each other in loud, emphatic voices. They were in agreement in their disgust and disappointment about something or other. The illusion the two women presented as they walked toward me was that the carpet had been transformed into a conveyor belt. As if on a people-mover found in airports, they appeared to glide effortlessly in my direction. I was a motionless sitting target until their hip bones abutted Antonya’s desk, and, assuming I was the receptionist, they handed me the key to their room along with a bag of detritus from their Mexican dinner. I threw it in the trash on top of Antonya’s junk mail and day-old newspaper.

      “There was no garbage can in the viewing room,” one said with a slight French accent.

      I apologized as if it were my job to provide furniture and services, then asked if they could describe anyone who’d interrupted their work besides myself and the delivery boy.

      “Short, sort of a goatee, moustache, and wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a jacket and underneath his jacket he wore a sweatshirt turned inside out.”

      “What did he say? Anything?”

      “Wrong room.”

      “That’s all?”

      “Yes. He knew he had the wrong room and he left us in peace, which is more than some people have done. Can we leave these tapes with you? We don’t want to carry them around all night.”

      “No. I’m not the concierge. You should have locked them in the editing room.” They headed for the elevator, smoking, fuming, chattering like monkeys, brittle, hard as nails. Dreyfus waited for me in the editing room, shackled to a prison bed, and I didn’t know exactly what to do with him. Why was this worth saving? I could smell the coil of old nitrate film lying dormant in a can as it had for years and feel its crumbly slickness under my fingernails, but could make little connection between the life of a man delivering take-out food who had been smuggled into the city in the trunk of a car with holes punched in the top for air and the value of saving old film. Some part of me remained unconvinced.

      I step into the shoes of the man who shot deer, tied them to the back of his car, and waved with glee at the people who stared at him in disgust as he drove down the interstate. As if by knowing this neighbor well and by playing with his children, I have more than a glimpse into a life organized around utilitarian motivation; more than a passing acquaintance with a house dominated by the maypoling twins of hunger and satisfaction, one continually chasing the other. There is no room for history, no reason to preserve the feeble or antique. Why not melt the films down for boot heels? This is a dangerous and actually false confession for someone with my job, but sometimes the cobwebs stick to my hands, the reasons elude me, and for a moment I’m watching deer cut from the back of the car or truck, fascinated by torn fur, looking over the surface of the carcass for the evidence of the wound. This confession might mark me as a slacker who sees only futility in the project at hand, but I’m not, I’m very good at conservation and very careful. I would never rub out an actor or a scene, despite jokes to the contrary and perverse temptation.

      Why bother with Dreyfus taken away at gunpoint? Are new Dreyfuses born every day? Julius traveled to Paris during the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and returned with Charlotte Corday and Marat cigarette lighters for everyone in the office, as well as condoms printed with pictures of Robespierre that he only claimed to have and showed to no one. For the anniversary of the trial will there be Dreyfus (innocent) lighters and Esterhazy (guilty) condoms, already torn and punctured with sneaky pinprick holes?

      Julius was yelling into the phone. I needed to talk to Antonya, but we both listened