“It’s art, remember? With a capital A.”
“God, you’re a lively one tonight,” Jack said. He leaned forward to stamp out his pilfered smoke.
“Certainly I am,” she answered, shrugging into a shiny robe. “I’m freshly resurrected, or didn’t you hear?”
“Didn’t you ever read Mary Shelley? Even the resurrected can get put on ice.”
“I thought you had a beef with the ghoulish stuff.”
“I just wanted to make a great picture, Gracie. That’s all. Something to really lift the form.”
“How much lifting does it need? You never saw a Griffith picture? I don’t guess you’ve got anything up your sleeve to make Intolerance look rotten, or do you?”
“Don’t be cruel to me.”
“You’re cruel to yourself,” she spat. “Like I said, you’re young yet. Everything won’t go your way, not for a while, maybe not ever. You’ve got a lot handed to you on a gold platter and you act like you’re dying in a trench.”
“My brother-in-law died in a trench,” he said low.
“And you didn’t, brother — you’re here right now in Hollywood in the picture business, surrounded by enough glut to make old Babylon drool with envy. Get out of here, Jack. I want to go to bed.”
“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
Grace grimaced, dropped her smoldering end in the ashtray.
“You’re a fool, and much too sober. Go find a tavern and drink them out of house and home. You’ll want to crawl in a hole come morning, but I bet you’ll thank me for it.”
“I can’t work like that.”
She laughed. “Who’s working? My director was a bald, fat man chomping on a cigar. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
Jack lurched forward, arched his right arm around her waist. Grace squirmed and planted her hand roughly on the center of his chest.
“Stop it, Jack.”
“Let me stay. Just for tonight.”
“I told you no already.”
“I’m wounded, Gracie. My pride is. I don’t want anything from you. Just let me stay here tonight.”
“Get going, Mr. Parson. You’ve got a lot of self-pitying to catch up on and I don’t want to play.”
He relented, released her. Narrowed his eyes to slits.
“Cruel,” he groaned.
“I didn’t get this part in any back room, yours or anyone else’s. And I won’t do any back-room foolishness to keep the part now. Leave this instant, or Saul Veritek is going to hear an ugly little story tonight and I really will have a new director on this goddamn picture.”
Jack marched for the door, opened it, and grumbled low and indistinctly.
Grace said, “Good night, Jack.”
He slammed the door shut.
She dreamed of low, snowy hills and a gable-front house with icicles on the eaves, Daddy waving goodbye and somewhere her mother softly sobbing. Aunt Eustace would be along in the morning. There was going to be more for little Gracie than digging potatoes out of the cold earth. Much more.
You get you some rest, Gracie, Californy is a long ways away.
7
The two policemen who took me the handful of blocks to the station on Wilcox didn’t say much. They didn’t seem involved, or like they wanted to be. Just a pair of well-armed chauffeurs. Inside, I was guided to a dimly lit office that still smelled like the cigarettes they used to allow in there, in the previous century. I sat down in front of an old metal desk and waited for ten minutes, looking at a framed photo of a redheaded cop, his wife, and their daughter. The wife had red hair, too. The kid was Asian.
When Shea came in, he had a Styrofoam cup steaming in each fist. He passed one to me on his way behind the desk, said, “Heard you were a bit stewed.”
“Wasn’t planning on getting shot at,” I told him. He was about half-right; I figured I was well on my way to sobriety before the second shot stopped ringing in my ears. I sipped at the coffee — it tasted like pencil shavings.
“Taxpayers’ best,” Shea commented, having noticed the sour look on my face.
“Nice family,” I said, looking at the photo again. He ignored that, like it was meant to be an insult.
“Tell me some more about this job you’re here for,” he said, leaning back in his chair. It squeaked loudly.
“Nothing shady about it, at least not on my end. Look, I’m just a film geek. I teach a couple of courses about old flicks at a community college every year and spend the rest of my time digitalizing ones nobody really cares about before the celluloid dissolves. This lady—”
“Leslie Wheeler?”
“Yes. She called my office out of the blue a few days ago—”
“In Boston.”
“Right. She told me her little club had come into possession of a particularly rare film. Well, part of one, anyway. A reel.”
“How’d she get it?”
“Someone named Mrs. Sommer gave it to her. Them. Whatever.”
“Her and Barbara Tilitson?”
“I guess. I only really knew about Ms. Wheeler.”
“All right, go on.”
“That’s all there is, really. She offered me a gig to come out here and work on the reel. Good money in it, and she said they might even dig up the rest of the picture.”
“From this Sommer woman?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“What’s the movie?”
“It’s called Angel of the Abyss.”
“Haven’t seen it.”
“No one living has. Not in its entirety. It’s been lost for most of a century.”
“But you have. Seen it, I mean.”
“No, just the third reel. About ten minutes or so, twenty from the start.”
“Tell me.”
I washed the knot in my throat down with more of the terrible coffee, and then I told him. I told him about the scene I’d only seen by way of an emailed mpeg, its brilliantly stark lighting, Grace Baron’s masterful performance done without the benefit of dialogue. It occurred to me in retrospect how much she reminded me of the French silent actress Maria Falconetti — Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc — and I told Shea that, but he just shrugged and reprimanded me to stay on topic. He scribbled on a notepad the whole time, which made me chuckle. I’d have guessed an L.A. detective would have upgraded to at least a Blackberry by now.
“And how about the rest of the thing? What’s it all about?”
“I can only tell you what I’ve read. It’s a very dark melodrama, way I understand it. A peasant girl from a broken, abusive home heads to the city to improve her lot, ends up getting mixed up with a con man who arranges for her to be sold into a white slavery ring and, eventually, some kind of Satanic ritual where they sacrifice her.”
“How sweet. You say this was a silent movie?”
“1926.”
“Didn’t know they made crap like that back then.”
“Some people thought it was brilliant.”
“Sounds like torture porn to me.”
I snickered. “There’s more — she makes a deal with the devil, comes back to ruin the lives of the con man and his main lieutenants. So it’s got this whole supernatural revenge thing going for it.”
“I’m more of a Steve McQueen guy, myself.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
He gave me a look.
“All right, Woodard,” he said like it was an effort, “so a woman you’ve never heard of calls you out of nowhere to fly all the way across the country to work on this old movie. You agree, get here, find her dead. Right so far?”
I shuddered, but not so he noticed. “Yeah.”
“And the movie, the reel, is gone. Other valuable stuff left behind, but not this reel you’re supposed to be working on. Which means the job’s dead, so it’s time for Graham Woodard to buzz back off to Beantown, am I correct?”