Ed Kurtz
Angel of the Abyss
For my Ma
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many heartfelt thanks to Greg F. Gifune and all the gang at DarkFuse. Angel of the Abyss could not have found a better home nor better support. Thanks also to Todd Robinson, Steve Weddle, Ron Earl Phillips, David Cranmer, Liam José, Andrew Nette, Cameron Ashley, Jon Bassoff, Tom Pitts, Joe Clifford, and everyone else who has supported my fiction — short, long, and in between — along my way to becoming a crime writer.
EPIGRAPH
“Is the cinema more important than life?”
PART ONE: GRAHAM
1
I was in the lab, working on a digital scan of an obscure Monogram musical from the mid-thirties, when the call came in. Freddie Garcia, one of the interns, poked his head through a crack in the door and said, “Phone for you.”
I left the print running through the scanner and followed Freddie out to the front office. The receiver was sitting on a mess of papers. I picked it up.
“This is Graham Woodard.”
“Mr. Woodard,” came back an unfamiliar voice, “my name is Leslie Wheeler — with the Silent Film Appreciation Society?”
She left it off on that lilt. I hadn’t heard of them, so I waited for her to continue.
“We were contacted recently by a lady who seems to have found something quite rare, a 35-millimeter reel dating from the mid-twenties.”
I sighed quietly, casting a glance back at the door to my lab. The scan was going to take another forty-five minutes at least, but I hated not sitting there with it. Leslie Wheeler gently cleared her throat, snapping me back.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not necessarily rare. Depends on what it is.”
“Mrs. Sommer — that’s the lady who found it — certainly didn’t know. That’s why she got in touch with us. But I’ve had a look at the reel, Mr. Woodard, and I’d have to say it’s terribly rare, indeed.”
I rolled my eyes, glad I wasn’t talking to this lady in person. Truth was, I fielded calls like this fairly often: people who were damn sure they’d stumbled across the find of the century when it was only some great-aunt’s home movies or, at best, a modern dupe of a perfectly ordinary film. Just a few weeks earlier I heard from a guy in Needham who paid a hundred dollars for a stack of cans at an estate sale, believing he’d tricked the seller into parting with a lost Martin and Lewis picture. Turned out it was only Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla with Martin and Lewis clones Mitchell and Petrillo. Not only ordinary, but public domain. I nearly strangled the guy when I found out.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll bite. What is it you think you’ve got?”
“The reel is in terrible condition, of course,” she went on. “Cellulose nitrate, you know.”
I knew. Highly degradable — and flammable — film stock they used back in the good old days. More than fifty percent of the films made before 1950 were lost forever because of that stuff, but occasionally something turned up. But that still didn’t make it the find of the century.
“Careful with that,” I advised. “The heat from your projection lamp could ignite that like it was gunpowder.”
“The thing is, I didn’t recognize the actress,” she said, ignoring my warning completely. “If you knew me, Mr. Woodard, you’d be surprised. There isn’t very much about the silent-film era I don’t know.”
“Bully for you,” I said.
“But of course I’d only ever seen Grace Baron in still photographs.”
That stopped me cold. I sputtered for a minute before managing to speak English again. “Did you say Grace Baron?”
“The one and only.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Grace Baron only made one film…”
“I know. Angel of the Abyss.”
“Which was destroyed almost a century ago.”
“The El Dorado of lost films, Mr. Woodard. One of the great enduring stories of old Hollywood.”
I rubbed my forehead and longed for a cigarette. I was on quitting attempt number three of the year so far and hadn’t had one in days.
“Ms. Wheeler,” I said as calmly as I could, which wasn’t much, “are you telling me you have Angel of the Abyss in your possession? Right now?”
“Only part of it, the one reel that was found.”
“An original print?”
“It would have to be. No copies were ever made to my knowledge. After all, it’s been considered lost since 1926.”
From the lab I could hear the cut-rate, Poverty Row chorus girls warbling away, their off-key voices in the process of being saved for posterity by champion of cinema, Graham Woodard. I cradled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and leaned over to pull the door shut. I couldn’t have cared less about the musical I was working with if what Leslie Wheeler was saying was true. It was almost too incredible to believe.
“Ms. Wheeler,” I said, “please understand that in this line of work, I come across a great many people who, in their excitement over a find like this, make mistakes with regard to identifying the film in question. And since no one has actually seen Grace Baron in motion since Calvin Coolidge was in office, I’m sure you can understand my skepticism.”
She gave a soft laugh and said, “Yes, I was forewarned of your…curmudgeonly outlook, Mr. Woodard.”
It figured someone had passed my name along. I wasn’t the first guy anybody called about something like this — not even in Boston — so I paused at that, wondering who exactly was doing the forewarning. Before I could give it much thought, she asked me for my email address. I rattled it off to her and she said, “Give me just a second, please. I’m sending you something I think you’ll like very much.”
Her fingers clacked over a keyboard on the other end, and I waited with the ever-familiar constriction in my chest from the nicotine fit I was experiencing.
“There we are,” she said after a minute. “Sent.”
I pursed my mouth and sat down at Freddie’s computer, where I brought up the browser and logged on to my account. There at the top was a new email from Leslie Wheeler, which I opened. She had sent it so quickly there were no comments, not so much as a hello — just an attached file. A video.
I double-clicked it and held my breath as it opened.
The set was magnificence in simplicity — intricately painted backdrops mimicking old-world buildings lining a cobblestone street. All studio, of course, the effects more akin to live theater than film. Low stage lights penetrated the otherwise dark, misty air between canvas shops and restaurants, creating floating will-o-wisps that silhouetted the figure emerging from the middle distance. As the figure moved closer, slowly, to the camera, it was revealed to be a woman, dressed in an archetypal babushka costume, shawl and headdress and all. She carried a rotting basket in her small white hands, and shot wary glances around at the mist and fog as she stepped lightly up the street. When she reached the middle of the set, she stopped, canted her head to one side as though listening for something. She reached beneath the cloth covering the basket and withdrew a jagged table knife with a shaking hand.
The film jumped here. I presumed it was placement for an intertitle, some dialogue to be inserted or translated for foreign markets. Next thing on screen was a stock brute character creeping up from the shadows: heavy five-o’clock shadow, rumpled cap on his sweaty dome. His eyes made up all black and menacing. The woman stepped back, threw a hand up to her mouth and in the process dropped her basket. Apples rolled down the street. She stuck out the knife as if the brute would impale himself on it, but he only seized her wrist and knocked it from her hand. She screamed — silently — and her attacker whipped both shawl and head-wrap from her like they were performing a choreographed dance number. She spun, milk-white breasts heaving, her then-fashionable bob all raven’s-wing black.