Angel of the Abyss

by Ed Kurtz

  ANGEL OF THE ABYSS

  Ed Kurtz

  First Edition

  Angel of the Abyss © 2014 by Ed Kurtz

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  For my Ma

  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.

  “Is the cinema more important than life?”

  —Francois Truffaut

  PART ONE: GRAHAM

  1

  Boston, 2013

  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 smal
l 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.

  Her eyes went wild then, extraordinary eyes, bigger than Theda Bara’s. The brute lunged behind her, grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her in close. His face like a slavering wolf, right up against hers. She drew in an enormous breath, her eyes widening still…and then just sighed it out. Defeated. Her expression died there on nitrate stock, heavy-lidded eyes and her formerly full mouth forming a thin, straight line. She slumped, and the brute relaxed his grip, nodding as he grinned.

  Together they walked back into the mist until they were subsumed by the shadows. There the video ended.

  The only film of Grace Baron, or at least a part of it. And I’d just watched it by way of a close-shot cell phone video. My mouth hung open like the hinges were broken. I was transfixed, partly because of the insane Indiana Jones moment in front of me, but mostly because the few surviving stills of Grace in her short prime did little justice to her haunted beauty.

  She was extraordinary.

  * * *

  “Well, Mr. Woodard?”

  I still held the receiver to my face, but until she spoke I’d managed to forget it was there. I cleared my throat and tried to focus. All I really wanted to do was hang up the phone and watch the reel again. And then again after that. Instead, I closed out the window and sucked a deep breath into my lungs. I wished it were infused with nicotine more than ever.

  “This isn’t bullshit,” I said. That elicited a small laugh.

  “No, it certainly isn’t,” she said.

  “But listen: this is a major find. I mean, it’s a really major find. I know it’s the wrong end of the continent, but somebody like UCLA would probably be the place to take this. And the lady who found it—she’s here in Boston, too?”

  “Oh no, Mr. Woodard,” she said, “I’ve never even been to Boston, I’m sorry to say. I’m right in the heart of old Hollywood, as a matter of fact. UCLA would be a skip and a jump for me, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the route I want to take just now.”

  “Well, why the hell not? This is bigger than Convention City.” Classic MGM comedy; offended the Catholics, so the studio boss ordered all the prints destroyed. I could always feel it in my gut that there was still a print out there somewhere.

  “It’s the Holy Grail,” Ms. Wheeler agreed, “or one of them, at least. But I want to know more, and while I’m trying to figure that out, I want you to restore the one reel we have so far.”

  “God, I hope you’re keeping it in a cool, dry place,” I said breathlessly.

  “I am, don’t worry. I know a thing or two about film preservation too, Mr. Woodard.”

  “Of course you do,” I came back, a little worried that I’d offended her. “I’d be glad to dupe the reel, though I won’t sleep a minute until it arrives. Shipping something that fragile—”

  “Again you misunderstand me,” she interrupted. “I prefer not to ship the film. I would prefer you came here to do the work. I can provide you with all the equipment you need, all the software, to ensure an excellent negative dub and digital copy can be made. I’ll expect you to work on the grain and decay of the print, of course…”

  I sat down in Freddie’s chair, slumped.

  “You want me to come out to L.A.? Ms. Wheeler, I’m afraid that’s impossible; I have a job to do here on the right coast, you know. Two jobs, as a matter of fact—I teach, too, when school’s in—but neither of them affords me the luxury of skipping off to California for God knows how long.”

  “All of that will be taken care of,” she insisted. “You’ll have a hotel room, a decent one, and free reign of a lab to work in. And with some luck, we’ll turn up the rest of the picture while you’re here, increasing your workload—and your pay—tenfold.”

  When I first started talking to Leslie Wheeler, I pictured some old maid with too much time on her hands and a chunk of dough left to her by some relative or another, enough to set her up sipping tea and talking about old movies to all of her old maid friends. Now I wasn’t so sure. More and more she was starting to sound like someone with some kind of stake in finding and restoring Angel of the Abyss, though I couldn’t for the life of me see what that was. Still, money was money, and the opportunity was undeniably golden even if I’d be a lot closer to my ex-wife than was comfortable to me. Last I’d heard from her, she’d jaunted out to Southern California with the Neanderthal she’d left me for. But hell, L.A. was a big town, easy to miss folks, and I’d be hunkered down in the lab all the time anyway.

  And more than that, I’d be a part of history and one of the very first people to see a lost treasure in nearly a century.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Let me talk to my boss here in Boston. Guy’s the biggest old-movie nut in the world, so when I tell him what we’ve got—”

  “No, you can’t tell anybody about the film,” she said suddenly. “Not now. Not yet. Not until we have a much better grasp on what it is we’ve got. Surely you can understand that.”

  I didn’t. But I said, “Sure, I understand. But that still leaves my day gig.”

  “Tell them it has to do with Helen, family drama. You are coming to Los Angeles, after all.”

  My fingernails dug into the chair’s upholstery.

  “Hang on a minute—how do you know about my ex-wife?”

  Leslie Wheeler chuckled softly.

  “Who do you think recommended you to me, Mr. Woodard?”

  2

  Hollywood, 1926

  At the sound of the telephone, Grace Baronsky rolled over on the thin mattress and pulled a lumpy pillow over her head. The bells jangled across the whole bungalow like she were sleeping in a belfry, and she silently cursed Saul for installing the damned nuisance in the first place. She had never lived with one before and hardly understood why she had to start doing so now. If Saul wanted to talk to her, she was only a taxi ride away. And if he needed her at the studio at a certain time, there was plenty of time to tell her before she left for the day. So she rebelled, punishing her boss by ignoring it entirely. Or at least not picking up the receiver; no one could ignore such a hellish racket, even if they were stone deaf.

  After eleven infuriating rings, the bungalow fell silent again. But Grace could still hear the bells echoing inside her skull.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she groused, and she threw the pillow across the room. Her hopes of sleeping a little longer were dashed, and the throbbing behind her eyes from last night’s gin came on full. “Damn it, Saul.”

  The head of Monumental Pictures may have been the savior who pulled her from the hard work and obscurity of vaudeville, but he was also a relentless taskmaster—both on and off the set. Late fifties and built like a teapot, Saul Veritek never tired. He drove cast and crew like a lion tamer from nine in the morning until six at night, and when the stage lights dimmed and the camera stopped rolling, it was time to hit the gin joints. And when Saul Veritek asked you to join him, he wasn’t asking.

  Grace sat up and threw her slender legs over the side of the bed. T
he cold floor met the bottoms of her feet and she hissed through her teeth. The place was sweltering by noontime, but then she was almost never home between the start of the workday and last call. How a fat, middle-aged man who smoked half a dozen cigars every day could outlast her was anyone’s guess, but she knew for a fact Saul wasn’t hurting this morning.

  The Sonnig watch she never wore shone at her from the nightstand, informing her that she had about fifteen minutes until her driver pulled up out front. She groaned, rose tremulously, and padded naked to the wingback chair in the living area, over which the gown she wore the night before was slung. Let the ladies in hair and wardrobe fuss, she thought. Whose picture is this, anyway?

  She laughed at her own momentary audacity. “Saul’s, of course.”

  A horn sounded outside. The driver was early. Grace slithered into the gown, smelling strongly of tobacco and spilled booze and dance floor sweat, and stepped into a pair of heeled court shoes. She then fumbled for her bag, found the flask at its bottom, and took a belt to get her started. It was a big day, after all.

  Today, Grace Baronsky was scheduled to die.

  * * *

  Jack Parson sat in his canvas-back chair with the tattered shooting script in one hand and a smoldering butt in the other. He was in his shirtsleeves, no collar, and sweating through the tan vest slung over his sloping shoulders. A few feet away stood Saul Veritiek, immaculate as always, sucking on a cigar and trembling with silent laughter. He was enjoying his director’s agony. He always did.