by Ed Kurtz
“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.
“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 mention
ed 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
North Hollywood, 2013
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.
As I climbed back into the car, Jake asked, “Where to now?”
“If this thing works, I should be able to project it on any wall, so we might as well go back to my hotel.”
The poor guy sweated the whole way back to Hollywood. As for me, I was foaming at the mouth to see those reels in the trunk. And I decided along the way that I’d be giving Barbara Tilitson a call as soon as I did.
It seemed to me the job was back on.
* * *
And of course the damn thing didn’t work. The bulb was older than my dead grandfather and the plug looked nothing like any plug I’d ever seen. It sure as hell wouldn’t fit the outlet in my room, or any other room I’d ever been in. I sat down on the bed and groaned.
History was kicking my ass.
I was inches away from making for the mini-fridge and considering it an insoluble problem for now when Jake said, “I know a guy.”
He went for the phone.
Thirty-seven minutes later I found myself smoking in front of a derelict theater with Jake beside me, bouncing on the balls of his feet and impatient for me to finish. Between us, on the sidewalk, were seven reels of old, flammable nitrate film footage. Some of the cans were marked, others were not. One of them was labeled as reel 5 from Battleship Potemkin, strangely enough, but we brought it along just in case.
When I finished my smoke, Jake helped me haul the cans into the lobby, where a sullen-looking teenager was sweeping up for the night.
Jake asked him, “Is Franco here?”
The kid jabbed a thumb at a door marked OFFICE. Jake went for the door while I waited, eyeballing the Junior Mints in the concession counter.
Shortly Jake reemerged with a reed-thin guy in a ridiculous red bowtie, who I presumed to be Franco. I wasn’t introduced. The three of us carried the cans through the office door, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway to a projection booth. There we were greeted by a greasy-faced kid who eagerly volunteered to load the film up for our enjoyment. We went back down. Jake directed me to auditorium two of two. We sat in the dead center. I wished I had some of those Junior Mints.
The film was eleven reels long. We were still missing reels 2, 7, and 11—and number 3, which was swiped when Leslie was killed. The result was something of a disjointed mess, but I’d spent my fair share of time in dilapidated grindhouses to piece together a story from a bad print missing key segments.
What we did have was the title card:
SAUL VERITEK PRESENTS A MONUMENTAL PICTURE—
ANGEL OF THE ABYSS
Following that, a vertical list of the key players, Grace Baron at the top
. Jack Parson was name-checked after that, and then the picture began.
* * *
The girl hustles from one scarred wooden table to the next, her tattered apron flowing around her. Her arms laden with steins and plates piled high with roasted turkey legs, braised pork giving off curls of white steam. The big men pound the tables with their fists, toothy grins slicing through their beards. Among them a giant with coal dark eyes raises his voice above all the others—Intertitle: Clara! More beer! More wine! Hurry, girl!—which sets her scurrying back for another impossible armload.
At the bar, a rail-thin old man with sunken cheeks touches Clara’s elbow, leans in close.
Serve the Bürgermeister first, child! Do not keep him waiting.
Indeed the Bürgermeister grows impatient, hollering and standing atop the bench. Clara collects flagons of wine, foaming steins, and rushes from the bar to his table where a booted foot strikes out to catch her ankle. With startled, wide eyes, Clara tumbles forward and sends the libations flying toward an adjacent table where spirits drench a threesome of hunters. The Bürgermeister howls with mirth. The hunters leap to their feet, soaked and enraged.
A melee ensues. Plates and flagons shatter. Tables are overturned. Fists the size of hams collide with huge, hairy faces. The thin man snatches at his ears and laments the horror. The Bürgermeister laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
Clara erupts into tears and escapes out the back. Waiting for her is the thin man’s wife, a bullish woman with a shock of cloud-white hair.
Intertitle: You needn’t ever come back, devil. Black devil!
From a frosted window in the tavern, the grinning Bürgermeister watches gleefully as Clara scuttles away.
* * *
The next reel, number two, was not among our footage. The picture skipped then to the fourth reel, though I’d already seen the third by way of Leslie Wheeler’s cell phone capture. It was much, much better on screen as it was intended to be seen. The film was battered almost to the point of unwatchability, but the magic remained—as did the horror of Clara’s terrible abduction. While it was running, the phone in my pocket vibrated. I checked the screen and didn’t recognize the number. All the same, I bolted for the aisle and answered it on my way out of the auditorium.
