“That’s all right,” I said. “I promise to bring the key back as soon as I can.”
We shook hands and she opened the door for us.
“That poor woman,” she said. “I guess I can expect the police to come around with all sorts of questions.”
“You can bet on it,” I said. “One more question, if I may — what did your late father do for a living?”
“Oh, Daddy did all sorts of things, but for a few years he was involved with the picture business, booking theaters and things like that. He even owned a few small ones in the area for a while. Daddy got bored with any one thing after doing it for too long. His family included.”
I pursed my mouth and she smiled sadly. We went back to the rental, bound for North Hollywood.
12
The weekend came and went, replete with drinking and dancing and fighting off suitors like Fairbanks with his stage sword, and Monday Grace returned to the stage on Sauls’s little corner of the kingdom to find Jack Parson back in his chair. She paused en route to wardrobe to lock eyes with the director; he looked back, but there was nothing on his face to suggest he was even aware that he’d been neglecting his duties.
Saul worked his magic, she thought. Or put the fear of God into him.
The street from which she had been abducted the week before had been struck, replaced over the shooting break with the interior of the tavern where she — as Clara, in her living days — served wine and bread to the same sort of men who came to ruin her. While she slid into her dress and apron and sat down to have her hair done, Grace thought over the pages she hadn’t bothered to look at lately, piecing the scene together from memory before it was time to begin.
“The fly becomes the spider today,” Saul roared at her when she returned, made-up and costumed. He embraced her, filling her nostrils with his ever-present cloud of cigar smoke. “Until now you have suffered, my Grace. Now let’s have some lovely revenge, shall we?”
He chuckled and stepped aside, allowing her full view of the set and the boxy camera already situated atop its three-legged stand. The cameraman fussed with the contraption while a heavy man lingered over top, fascinated and intrusive. It was Joe Sommer.
“I believe you know Mr. Sommer already,” Saul said. “And you can thank him for bringing our prodigal director back to us, should you feel so inclined.”
“I figured that was you.”
“It would have been,” he assured her. “And it wouldn’t have been quite so smooth, not like Joe did it. I’m a bull in the china shop, but that Joe’s got a soft touch.”
She looked back to Jack, who was now immersed in his heavily penciled script pages. It was astounding how calm he seemed, how satisfied-looking. She wondered if his creative crisis was finally at an end. She hoped for as much.
“Bella donna,” Joe crowed, gliding from the camera to her. “I talked my way in, as you can see. Said I knew the star.”
“And they believed you, the rubes,” she said.
“Anything for a face like this,” he answered, grinning clownishly.
Saul patted his shoulder and wandered back over to Jack. Grace laced her fingers at her waist and arched an eyebrow.
“You’ll have to tell me your secret. Last I saw Mr. Parson he was an inch away from a complete breakdown.”
“I spoke to him in his own language.”
“You don’t say. And which language is that, exactly?”
“Why, the language of the cinema, naturally.”
“I didn’t think the pictures had much in the way of language just yet.”
“They will, and soon. But that’s not what I mean. I extended Mr. Parson the courtesy of my hospitality, whereby I did what I do best — I exhibited a movie for him.”
“You mean to say you showed him a picture and that cleared his head?”
Joe Sommer nodded proudly, rocking on his heels.
“Must have been some picture,” Grace said, incredulous.
“Possibly the very best yet made, my dear. Do you know Eisenstein?”
“No…”
“Soviet man, does revolutionary pictures over there in Russia. His newest is called Battleship Potemkin, and I just so happen to have a print.”
“And a Red movie saved the day.”
“More or less.”
“Next you know he’ll be demanding the crew stand up to Saul, string him up by the rafters.”
“We didn’t dwell on the politics,” Joe said. “More the technique.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Sommer.”
His face reddened with some secret pride. Grace narrowed her eyes, trying in vain to decode it all, when Jack called across the studio to her.
“Come along, Ms. Baron — your cunning plan is about to commence.”
“I shan’t delay a rising star,” Joe said, and he kissed her gently on the cheek.
She cocked her head a little, then turned for her position on set.
“Ms. Baron, a word?”
Grace lingered in the broad opening from the studio to the warm lot outside, where she lighted a long cigarette and curtsied.
“You may have as many words as you like, Mr. Parson — why settle for only one?”
Jack worried his driving cap between both hands, his face a mask of boyish discomfort.
“I’m afraid I was really quite boorish the other night. I have no excuse, and even if I had, it would remain inexcusable.”
“I accept your apology,” she said.
“But I haven’t apologized yet.”
“And what’s this ‘Ms. Baron’ hoodoo? You’ve never been so formal, and it’s not even my real name.”
“Establishing boundaries, I suppose.”
“Well, knock it off. We’re friends. You had a tough night, happens to everybody.”
“You’re very kind.”
Stepping out into the failing daylight, Grace craned her neck back and closed her eyes, luxuriating in the Southern California afternoon.
“What say you buy a girl a drink,” she said when she returned to earth, “and tell me what changed your mind?”
“I could write a book.”
“Give me the digest version, then.”
Jack sniffed. He offered her his elbow.
“It’s all a matter of perspective, really,” he said, absently stirring his gin with a toothpick.
“That’s profoundly vague,” Grace responded with a smirk.
Jack took his neat, but hers was cut with soda water. They both smoked from the same silver cigarette case: his. All around them the speakeasy was strewn with fake Hawaiian décor, a permanent and technically illegal luau in the middle of the Californian desert. The barman, a Pacific Islander with a thin black mustache, looked appropriately tired of looking at it all.
“I’ve been a terrible prude, that’s all,” Jack went on. “What’s the saying? I couldn’t see the forest for all the damned trees. Every opportunity for art—real art, Gracie — right in my hands and I was too stupid to see it.”
“It never was the Keystone Kops,” she chided. “And thanks for going back to Gracie.”
Jack blushed.
“I know it isn’t, and the devil knows I’ve got the finest actress I could hope for on this picture…”
“You flatter me, Jack.”
“I mean it. I do, Gracie.”
“So what was the forest?”
“I expect I may as well call it my Black Forest,” he said.
“Spoken like a true artist — making no sense at all.”
“I don’t mean to dance around the subject.”
He killed off his drink and lifted a finger at the barman.