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man’s dying words.
    “‘She can’t…’ says the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settles in, the screen grows brighter, in flickers, and the pilot looks back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He takes off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it becomes clear that all is lost. By the time he arrives the farmhouse is engulfed in flames and the pilot falls to his knees and slumps forward. Then something very strange happens: the film switches to color again, but not because it’s a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remains hunched forward in sorrow and despair as ashadow—the shadow of a human being—emerges from frame right.
    “It’s the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you can see that her eyes are blue. She kneels down beside the pilot and puts her hand beneath his chin and gently lifts his face toward hers. By this time the color has become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly pans down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opens, palm up. In her hand she holds a small silver swastika, which gleams in the light. It seems to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. As the film switches again back to black and white, the familiar Hollywood music begins, signaling the end. The camera slowly pans up to the pilot’s face, which wears an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continues panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farmhouse.
    “At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farmhouse to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farmhouse, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. The truth is the ending of the film was too terrible, too truthful, to ever really talk about, involving a technique that used multiple split screens, a technique I’d never seen before that literally split the screen into not two but four or five panels of action, each one divided by a vertical red line.”
    *
     
    My notes say Laing’s description of these two films (although description isn’t the right word) lasted about three hours (it can’t have been that long) and that I left the motel for lunch and returned a while later, having agreed with Laing that the only business we should conduct together in the motel room was “movie business.” When I return he has straightened the room up a bit, shaved, and the scarf isn’t to be seen.
    “ Hutton ,” Laing says, “was the name of it. A short film, but suggestive of something much longer, almost historical in length, epic, with all the darkness that trails history, catching up with it, overtaking it, devouring it.
    “As I remember it, Hutton waits in the car. These are his instructions. To wait.”
    As Laing recalls the movie he sometimes squints, as if bringing it, or parts of it, the parts of it he wants to remember, into sharper focus.
    “It is late in the afternoon, now. He has been there since 10 a.m., in his gray suit provided by the Messiah Detective Agency. Out the passenger side window is a city park. Families come and go. Out the driver side window is an old red-brick apartment building,