“Slow down, mister,” Grace advised. “You can’t just go from teetotaler to sodden in one night.”
“I’m…I don’t know. Excited, I suppose. I’ve had the scales knocked out of my eyes, as the apostle says.”
“Why Jack, you sound like you’ve had an epiphany.”
“That’s a mighty big word for a girl from Idaho,” he said, accepting a fresh drink from the barman.
“I can even read when my mind isn’t too muddled on corn whiskey,” she answered in a faux twang.
“Touché.”
“So out with it, already. What does this Russian have to do with it?”
He mulled it over for a moment, swishing the gin in his mouth. When he swallowed, he said, “Darkness.”
Grace raised both eyebrows and waited for him to expand. When he didn’t, she prompted him: “Darkness?”
“In a word.”
“We’ve been over this, Jack — I’ve allowed you as many words as you wish.”
With a small chuckle, he downed the remainder of his gin, wiped his mouth, and lighted a fresh smoke.
“All right,” he began. “I’ll set the stage, as it were. About twenty years ago — probably before you were born, you young thing — there was a mutiny aboard a Russian vessel dubbed the Potemkin. Now this is before the Red revolution, you understand, but an event that precipitated it, to be sure. Anyhow, the mutineers went wild, taking the ship from their tsarist superiors, and as mutinies tend to be, things got rather violent.”
“Christ, Jack, you might elaborate a little more and begin at the dawn of time.”
She grinned; he crooked his mouth to one side and waggled a finger at her.
“I’m getting to it. From how I understand it, a fellow like Sergei Eisenstein is fairly limited to the kinds of stories he can tell under the Reds, so he makes pictures about the revolution. This is his latest, and the thing, this picture…” He trailed off, savoring the memory.
Grace said, “Jeepers,” and finished her drink. She didn’t need to request another; the barman set it down the second after she swallowed.
“Here’s the thing,” Jack continued. “I’ve seen a great many pictures, pictures from all over the world, but I’ve never seen anything like Battleship Potemkin. It’s changed the way I look at cinema, Gracie. It’s changed the way I look at myself. I guess I have your friend Joe Sommer to thank for that.”
“How did he—?”
“He telephoned the studio, simple as that. I guess you mentioned me to him, my, well, problems…”
“Jack…”
“No, no — it’s perfectly fine, my darling girl. He saved me, your friend. He opened my eyes.”
“To what? Darkness?”
“The darkness cinema can offer, yes. Human darkness.”
“Gracious, Mr. Parson,” she said. “I’ve seen a few movies myself, and I can’t say I’ve ever had my whole life changed by one.”
“Angel of the Abyss is going to be that one,” Jack said. “Count on it.”
Grace Baronsky looked at her director and wondered.
13
Junior’s was nestled back on Vineland, where I found an actual parking lot where I wouldn’t have to worry about getting booted. The flipside of the key fob identified the unit as 13D, which was way at the back of the maze. I unlocked the heavy padlock, pulled it out of the loop, and handed it to Jake so I could heave the shutter door up. Instantly my nose was assaulted with the odor of dust and decay, but at least it was a hundred times better than the old man’s daughter’s place.
Jake found the light switch, which set a yellow bulb in a wire cage glowing from the ceiling. The light barely illumined a stockpile of crap piled so recklessly on top of itself I could hardly tell what I was looking at. After the initial shock started to wear off, I identified a broken rocking chair, a ping-pong table, a pair of carnival fortune teller machines, a rotting moose head, and in the far right corner, an old 35-millimeter film projector that was caked with gray dust.
“Help me move this table,” I said to Jake. It was blocking the way to the projector.
“Where to? There isn’t enough room in here to swing a dead kitten, let alone a full-grown cat.”
“We’ll put it outside. I want to look at that projector.”
The table was piled high with open boxes made of weak cardboard; we hauled those out first. In one of them Jake found a stockpile of old nudie mags from the fifties, which got him to giggling. I barked at him about the table. He pouted, but we got the damn thing out.
Now that I had a narrow path, I squeezed farther into the cramped hothouse and angled around that nasty moose head to get to the projector. There was a Guinness bar towel hanging over the side of a close-by crate, so I snagged it to knock as much dust off the machine as I could. It was an old Keystone Moviegraph, probably upwards of seventy years old. The thing was rusted all to hell and next to worthless on the secondary market, but I marveled at it like it was an original Da Vinci. I was particularly fond of the hand crank: the projector was made for silent films, mostly short subjects. And to my surprise, its reels were loaded up with about eleven feet of sadly decrepit-looking nitrate film stock.
“Jesus Christ,” I gasped.
“What is it?”
“Might as well set a bomb in here. This is some irresponsible stuff right here.”
“Is that nitrate?”
I made a sound in my throat agreeing that it was. He made a sound of his own and backed out of the unit.
“Get back here, man,” I called out to him. “Let’s get this out, too.”
“What are you going to do, steal it?”
“I’m going to borrow it.”
“I don’t recall you saying anything to that nice old lady about borrowing anything.”
I gave him a look. “Shut up and help me, would you?”
The projector sat on top of a wretched-looking cabinet that even the termites had given up on. I lifted it up and passed it to Jake, who acted like I’d handed him a ticking time bomb. While he edged his way out into the sunlight, I took a peek inside the cabinet. It was filled with cobwebs and dust, a few small black spiders, and by my count seven film canisters.
Paydirt.
I collected the canisters, heavier than they looked, and hauled them out. One of the spiders hitchhiked along. I swept it off to the ground and carried the load to the rental.
“Load it all up. I’m going to poke around to see what else I can find.”
“Let me know if you find the Ark of the Covenant in there,” Jake scoffed. “Maybe my whole day won’t be completely wasted.”
I shot up, ramrod straight, and felt the hairs on my neck bristle.
“Who invited you in the first place, you prick?” I growled.
“Hey, man,” he said, putting his palms out defensively. “I was only joking.”
And he was. He was just messing around, and I’d bitten his head off. Now I changed my mind about who the prick was between the two of us.
“Jake…”
“Forget it,” he said. “Getting shot at earns you a little intensity, right?”
“That’s a fact.”
“Go on. I’ll get this shit in the car. But for fuck’s sake don’t smoke in there, okay?”
I had one before I went back in, far from the car to ease Jake’s nerves. The smoke eased mine, too. I didn’t find any more film in the storage unit, but I did come across a framed one-sheet for Angel of the Abyss, an art deco deal with sharp angles all in sepia tones. Grace Baron’s character was naked to the waist and reaching up for a fruit hanging from a branch. She had a weird-looking serpent coiled around the reaching arm and a half dozen menacing figures in sharp black shadows crowded below her. It was probably worth ten times as much as the projector I was lifting. I admired it for a few minutes, but I left it behind.