He mouthed the word spectacular.

“Keep talkin’, Craig Kennedy.”

THE COPS LOCKED ROSCOE in a cell by himself, checking on him twice in the first four hours, and he’d made jokes with them, trying to make them feel at ease, but they’d only answer with curt replies about supper, toilet paper, or a tin cup for water and walk back down the hall. He’d laid back into his narrow bunk, the newsboys already noting his bunk was made for a man half his size, and he’d wriggle his toes in his silk socks and look at the ceiling. Roscoe knew what disappointed reporters most was the fact that he’d weighed in at only two hundred sixty on the Bertillon charts, not the three-fifty he’d told the press men in Hollywood. He loved making up stories for the publicity folks at Paramount about how he ate a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs every morning with a pot of coffee.

The cell was six by six. One of the walls decorated with some nice prison art, stick figures of Gloom and Joy shaking hands, Mary’s Little Lamb, and the simple inscription HELL above his head.

But it wasn’t so bad. Roscoe had fashioned a coat hanger from a strand of wire from the springs of his bunk. He’d hung the Norfolk jacket he’d had fitted at Hart Schaffner Marx neatly from a single hook and knocked off his shoes by the bed.

He had paper and a pouch of tobacco Dominguez had brought him along with a safety razor and some soap.

When he was a boy, this little place would’ve seemed like a palace. Sometimes he’d awake from a drunk or a dream and think he was still living in that sod house in Smith Center, Kansas, with dust storms and tornadoes and gully washers that would turn half the kitchen into a pile of mud. Other times he’d be in that dead, dazed time in Santa Clara after his mother had died and he was sent north to live with a father he hadn’t seen in years only to find his father had split town and started over again. He remembered the shame of sitting in the train station overnight and waiting for ole Will Arbuckle to show up and finally finding pity from the man who’d bought his family’s hotel and offered him a job.

When the old man finally came to claim him, those wild, drunken beatings had returned like some half-remembered dream, and so did the comments about his fattened face and blubbery belly, and, once in a bath-house, his father lay drunk in a tub and pointed out his son’s genitalia with the tip of a burning cigar, calling it a tiny worm. Sometimes Roscoe liked the beatings better than the insults. When the old man took to drink and held the power of the whip in his hand, at least the bastard would shut up.

You fashioned your own way, carried your own water.

Roscoe had always been good at that. When people stare and point and smile, you just do a little dance and make them smile more. It was a hell of a trick he learned.

He heard the guard walking the length of the hall and the splatter of a man pissing in the cell next to him, calling out to Fatty to do some tricks for him. Roscoe turned over and felt for the shaving mirror Dominguez had brought.

He stared at himself for a long time, looking at his pale blue eyes and the odd way God had left his face to resemble an infant’s. He smiled at himself and then stopped, and then just looked into his eyes.

He just wished he could remember.

HEARST HEARD THE HORSE HOOVES from a mile up the great hill, as he sat on a boulder he’d known since he was a boy staring out at midnight over the Pacific Ocean. The old campsite at San Simeon was dotted with crisp white canvas tents lit from the inside like paper lanterns, while men worked to unload wagons and trucks, not stopping for the last three months, only working in shifts, to bring in his collection from back east. Little mementos from Bavarian strongholds and Italian palaces that would become the foundation, the cornerstones of his American castle. The foundation had been poured, and already he could imagine the way the stone turrets would rise from the ragged hillside in a way that no man said could be done. So he’d used a woman architect from San Francisco who dreamed without limits.

By the time the horses rounded that final bend on the great hill, he could barely make out the man’s face sitting next to the coachman. The white hair, the big nose, and little eyes of Al Zukor, who stared straight ahead under a bowler hat with great annoyance that brought a smile to Hearst’s face. He walked toward the wagon as it slowed and Zukor hopped to the ground, dusting off his three-piece suit with the flat of his hands and readjusting the bowler on his head. He still looked like a guy peddling furs on the streets of New York, not the head of Paramount Pictures.

He stood a good two feet below Hearst, who was a tall man. The wide-brimmed hat and big boots on Hearst made him seem even larger, as he gripped the short man’s little hand.

“I’ve cabled you sixteen times.”

“I’ve received them all.”

“And you did not cable back,” Zukor said.

“No,” Hearst said. “No, I did not.”

“What’s all this?”

“Just a little cottage or two.”

“Five miles up in the goddamn air?”

Hearst shrugged, wrapped his arm around Zukor, steered him back to the old childhood rock, and swept his free hand across the expanse that hung in the air like a dream above the clouds. And Zukor closed his eyes and then opened them wide, taking in the way the moonlight caught on the great mossy boulders down along the craggy shore and all the inlets and coves and hardscrabble pines clinging to the hills and wide pastureland with little dots of cattle below. A single stray cloud moved under them and the sight of it made Zukor step back from the edge to find his feet and turn back to the familiar movement of the Chinese workers tearing into great wooden crates and pulling out statues of winged women and horses and thick, beaten columns that Zukor had probably only seen in papier-mâché.

“How much is this goddamn thing gonna cost?”

“Do you Jews only think about money?”

“Yes,” Zukor said.

“Let me show you something,” Hearst said, steering into a brightly lit tent, larger than the others, pulling the canvas door aside. He took Zukor to a table littered with drawings of great fountains with spitting lions and a mammoth swimming pool copied from a Roman bath, of fireplaces large enough to burn a forest, and of a cleared strip to land his airplane atop the mountain instead of having to be jostled all the way up the hill like poor Zukor.

“How’s that Arabian picture coming along?” Hearst asked.

“It’s in the can.”

“That’s the one with the Italian fella.”

“Valentino.”

“And he’s playing a sheik.”

“Like a girl from Brooklyn playing a queen. We all like to pretend, Willie.”

Hearst grinned at him with his big teeth and breathed, and then smiled a bit more.

“I came for Roscoe.”

“I didn’t crush that poor girl.”

“You’re not just crucifying this fat boy in your goddamn papers, you’re making the whole goddamn picture industry look like devils. That’s bad business. Very bad business.”

“I don’t tell my men what to write.”

“And you don’t start wars with Spain either. You must lay off Arbuckle, see? What’s with your paper showing him as a drunken spider? The Examiner printed that crazy letter from Henry Lehrman. Have you gone nutso?”

Hearst narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms.

“Let’s have a drink.”

“Don’t screw me, Willie, okay? We got a nice thing going with Cosmopolitan and we have a nice run ahead of us with those pictures with Miss Davies, okay? I just can’t figure out why you’re doing this. Those stories get read in small papers everywhere. In two days you’ve turned my biggest star into a three-hundred-pound gorilla with bloodlust for snatchola.”

“Come now.”