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projector and screen. Movies, Christian explained to Elmer and Jean, were his passion. In fact, he was soon heading to America to become a filmmaker. His favorite genre was film noir, in particular the works of Alfred Hitchcock. He said he would show them an example, and he dimmed the lights and flicked on the projector.
    Just then Jean’s stomach growled. “We skipped lunch, and I guess we’re sort of hungry,” she interjected before the film began.
    The Kellns invited the entire family for dinner in a restaurant. They all declined, except for Christian, who directed Elmer and Jean to a typical Bavarian place, with music playing, where they sat in a wooden booth and, over wurst and beer, talked of America.
    â€œI want to take your picture!” Jean exclaimed once their drinks arrived.
    â€œWait,” Christian said. He turned his head this way and that in an effort to find the perfect pose. “Now,” he instructed, his hand pressed insouciantly to his temple. The camera clicked, capturing the young German with his eyes blazing, staring straight into the lens as if he were getting his head shot taken at Twentieth Century Fox.
    After dinner they returned to the Gerhartsreiter home, where Christian led the Kellns to a spare bedroom and said good night.
    â€œI feel so uncomfortable!” Jean whispered urgently to her husband. She couldn’t put her finger on why. The house was perfectly pleasant, as were Christian’s mother, father, and brother. And, of course, Christian couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating to them. But he completely ignored his parents.
    â€œGo to sleep, Jean,” Elmer said.
    â€œI don’t know if I can.” Unable to shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with this unusual young man and his family, she lay awake all night. “I felt he was living in a fantasy world of which his parents were not a part,” she recalled.
    Elmer, looking back on the experience, said he was more puzzled than anything else on their one night in Christian Gerhartsreiter’s home. “He did mention that he wanted to get to the United States,” he recalled. “You can tell when a hillbilly is happy in his log cabin and when he wants to live in New York. In his mind, he had to be something someday. You could pick that up in everything he’d say and do. He wanted notoriety, I guess, fame. And there’s no question that he felt he had to divorce himself from the German culture ’cause he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he remained a German.”
    The next morning the Kellns were eager to leave, but Christian insisted they stay for coffee and rolls. After exchanging contact information with their young host, the couple said goodbye and drove off, thinking they’d never see him again.
    Not long after that, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter pulled out a piece of paper and placed it on his desk: the application for a tourist visa that would allow him to come to America. On the line asking who would be sponsoring him during his brief visit, he wrote, “Elmer and Jean Kelln.”

CHAPTER 2
    Strangers on a Train
    T he court was a circus, a never-ending parade of seemingly good, honest, trusting people who, to varying degrees, had been duped by the defendant. Once so friendly and charming, the man known as Clark Rockefeller respectfully acknowledged the people who would decide his fate, the judge and jury, by standing when they entered and exited. But as for the witnesses—especially those testifying against him—he didn’t even look their way.
    One afternoon early in the proceedings, as an immigration official gave sketchy accounts of how the defendant had come to America as a young man, I got a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear.
    â€œAre you free for a drink this evening?” asked a man who later requested that I not reveal his identity.
    He told me to meet him at a bar near the courthouse