Except for when I wasn’t, and when I wasn’t, I was usually habituating the back end of Bukowski’s, a neighborhood pub in Back Bay, nursing something dark and working my way through a peanut butter burger. I thought they sounded downright blasphemous first time I saw it on the menu, but curiosity got the better of me and I’d been a believer from that moment on. That’s what I was doing within an hour of hanging up the phone at the lab, washing my heart-clogging repast down with a pint of the black stuff and wondering how the hell Helen managed to creep back into my life.
I hadn’t gotten quite that far into the conversation with Leslie Wheeler. Once I’d agreed to the job, she told me she’d get everything arranged and get back in touch. I didn’t really think Helen was so evil that she wouldn’t recommend my skills to somebody looking for what I do, but I still couldn’t get past the fact that there were experts better equipped than I who weren’t three thousand miles away. I appreciated the commission, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense.
I was halfway through swallowing the second-to-last bite when a shadow intercepted the setting sun glaring through the window. I glanced up as Jake Maitland sat down across from me.
“Guya, Gake,” I said with a maw full of peanut butter, white bread, and beef.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?”
I shrugged and swallowed the rest. Rinsed my gullet with the rest of my Guinness.
I said, “Why don’t you rustle me up another one?”
“One on you?” he asked.
I shrugged again. He traipsed off to the bar.
Jake Maitland was tall and rangy with a pitted face and short-cropped hair. Sort of an Ed Gein look-alike, almost. He was in the same class of failed screenwriter as I was; we’d both gone out to L.A. in the nineties to make good on the so-called indie boom and both came back to the East Coast inside two years with our tails between our legs. You could say one of my lousy scripts got produced, unlike old Jake, though by the time they were done with it none of my words were left intact. I got a “story by” credit and enough scratch to leave town with.
We hadn’t known each other out there, but I’d met him at some lame party around 2001 or 2002. An okay guy, talked too much. Still had visions of grandeur. I’d lost mine somewhere between Albuquerque and Little Rock on the drive back home.
When he came back, Jake set my pint in front of me and took a long draw from his own. It left an off-white mustache across his top lip.
“How’s the old movie business?” he asked.
“Picking up.”
“I couldn’t do it, man. Hell, I can hardly watch films anymore. I always think I could’ve done better.”
Like I said: visions of grandeur. I let it pass.
Jake sat down and said, “So what’s new?”
“Heading out to L.A., looks like.”
His eyes popped wide. “L.A.? What’s doing out there?”
“Nothing half as good as you’re thinking,” I said. “A restoration job, sort of.”
“What, they don’t got people for that on the left coast?”
“They got plenty. It’s kind of a weird deal.”
“Does it pay?”
“Sure, it pays.”
“Gift horse and all that, then,” Jake said.
“Sure,” I said. “And all that.”
We finished our pints, ordered another pair, and chatted aimlessly about everything from the resurgence of South Korean cinema to whether Ken Russell would ever be appreciated enough in the U.S. After I paid — for all of it — I made my excuses and started to leave. Jake grabbed my wrist as I started to walk by him, stopping me dead.
“This hasn’t got anything to do with Helen, does it?”
I groaned some, pulled my wrist free.
“Yeah,” I said. “A little.”
Jake screwed up his mouth and shook his head.
“Nothing half as bad as you’re thinking,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it is.” Truth was, I didn’t really know. Not yet, anyway.
“How you planning to get out there?”
I glanced at the time on my phone, making a bit of a show out of it.
“Flying, I guess. Folks I’m working for are covering everything.”
“Forget that,” Jake said, killing off his beer and standing up from his chair. “I’ll drive you. I miss the old town, it’s been years. And besides, we’ve never been there together, have we? Powers combined, right?”
I laughed awkwardly, avoided eye contact for a minute.
“Look, I’m not going out there to do anything but work on an old print,” I said. I didn’t know if Jake had ever heard of Angel of the Abyss, but I wasn’t going to press my luck. “I’ll be in the lab all day and sleeping all night. Besides, driving there would take half a week. They’ll want me there sooner than that. Sorry, buddy — can’t do it.”
I patted him on the shoulder and gave an apologetic smile. Jake smiled back, and as I finally got past him he said, “Okay…see you there, Graham.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said with a laugh on the way out. But I sort of knew he meant it.
While the lead attendant went over her safety speech in a droning, half-asleep voice, I leaned over the one book I brought for the trip: Lives of the Silent Film Stars. I was proud to possess an impressive library of texts on film history, criticism, and theory, though the volume in my lap wasn’t one I’d spent much time reading. It was structured more or less like Butler’s Lives of the Saints—I used to be Catholic, so I couldn’t help but make the comparison — but these were saints of the silver screen, almost all of them actually sinners. The one chapter dealing with Grace Baron dedicated only two paragraphs to the subject. I read them three times over before the plane started down the runway.
She was born Grace Baronsky in Boise, Idaho, in June of 1901 (exact date unknown), though some sources listed her year of birth as 1904. She moved to Hollywood with an aunt in 1922 and, upon being discovered by Monumental Pictures head Saul Veritek, began production on her only film, Angel of the Abyss, in 1926. She was either 22 or 25 at the time. Production lasted ten weeks, and the picture premiered at the Domino Theater in Hollywood on August 15. It was an instant sensation — of the bad kind. A pair of nude scenes scandalized a packed house of Hollywood elites, while the subject matter drove them from their seats. No script, footage, or stills were known to exist, but the first and last picture to star Grace Baron, as the studio rechristened her, reportedly dealt with such taboo topics as rape and a graphic occult ritual that depicted Baron’s character giving herself to an anthropomorphic goat.
Not long after, according to my reading, Monumental shuttered. Saul Veritek was ruined. The director, Jack Parson, skipped to Europe and ended up making expressionist pictures in the Weimar Republic until Hitler took over. After that, he went to England, then Canada, and eventually back to the States, where he fathered a future minor movie exec and melted into obscurity. And Grace Baronsky vanished from the face of the earth. Extensive searches were made for her in both California and Iowa for over a year, but in early 1927 she was officially declared dead by the City Coroner’s Office of Los Angeles. Rumors persisted to the present that she had gotten mixed up with some sort of underground Communist cabal that had something to do with her disappearance and, possibly, her death. But no one really knew.
The plane lifted off from Logan and I closed the book. I had six and a half hours to kill and I spent it nodding on and off, half-thinking and half-dreaming about a forgotten starlet who was notorious for one night before the worst kind of fame swallowed her whole.