Angel of the Abyss

1

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 small 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

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. The 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.

“Look, Parson,” he said in a condescending manner, “you got your nutty Kraut sets, didn’t you? The place looks like Picasso puked all over it. Have I cried about it? Didn’t I give the go-ahead to this nightmare here?”

He gestured broadly toward the sharply angled set jutting crazily in every direction before them. A set painter stood frozen in the middle of it, staring wide-eyed at the plan he held like it was the lost Mormon tablets.

At the far end of the studio, Grace Baronsky stood in her dressing robe worrying her earrings and taking in the set.

“It’s the sex, Saul. The devilishness of this whole thing. The denouement is…well, it’s ghastly.”

“You wanted to make a European picture. Here it is.”

“I’ll probably get arrested. Did you think of that? There are obscenity laws, you know.”

“There are hardly any laws when it comes to motion pictures. The legislature is thirty years behind the times, if not more.”

“There was that case in Ohio…”

“This ain’t Ohio. Christ, this is hardly even America. They’ll want to throw you in the pokey, sure, but they won’t have a leg to stand on. And think of it — this picture will be like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. It will be a sensation. You, Jack, will be a sensation.”

“I’ll be a goddamned pornographer is what I’ll be.”

Saul chuckled through a blue-gray cloud of smoke. He then raised his chin and looked across the open warehouse studio at his nervous star-to-be.

“Grace, darling,” he called to her. “Come on over here for a minute, will you?”

With a strained smile, she stepped lightly on her bare feet, bouncing almost rabbit-like. Jack avoided eye contact with her. He sucked a final drag from his cigarette and crushed the end on the floor beneath his heel.

“Grace, honey,” Saul wooed, “you’ve read the script, haven’t you?”

“I have,” she said. “Of course I have.”

“And what do you think of it? I mean your general impression.”

“I think it’s marvelous, Mr. Veritek.”

“Saul, honey. It’s always Saul.”

She laughed lightly. Jack shook his head, patting his vest pockets in search of another smoke.

“Saul,” Grace agreed. “It sure beats the Keystone Kops, doesn’t it? I mean, this isn’t just a gag, is it? This is — I don’t know—art.”

Stabbing the cigar between his teeth, Saul rocked back on his heels and presented both palms to the director.

“Do you see? Art, my boy. Let Warners bore them to death with whatever thing Barrymore’s doing this year. We’re going to give them art.”

“If by art you mean tits, ass, and fucking the devil, fine. We’ll all agree to call that art.”

“You’re being difficult, Jackie,” Saul complained.

“You had the script changed. I get difficult when I get the wool pulled over my eyes.”

“Only sheep got wool. You’re no sheep.”

“No, but you’re sure a wolf, Saul.”

It was an insult, but Saul smiled. Between the two of them, Grace fidgeted with the hem of the robe. Saul placed a gentle hand at her elbow and took the stogie from his mouth.

“Now Grace here, she gets it, don’t you, Grace? She knows a sensation when she sees one.”

“It’ll sure knock them over,” she agreed, hesitantly.

“Indeed it will,” he agreed. “What’s Paramount got? Aloma of the South Seas? Christ. Fox is doing another war melodrama. It’s a bum year for the picture business, Jack — but you’re gonna cinch it. And you know why?”

Jack just smoked and sweated. Saul sucked a deep breath into his lungs and pinched at the hem of Grace’s robe. “Do you mind, dearheart? It’s for art.”

He gave the fabric a tug for emphasis. Grace swallowed, turned her eyes to the director, but he wasn’t looking at anyone. For a moment she froze, an ice sculpture in flesh, but the unwavering gaze of the studio head made its point. With a crooked smile and a silent sigh, Grace opened her robe and let it fall to the dusty floor at her feet. Beneath it she wore nothing but a sapphire ring on her right hand.

The few crewmen loitering around the studio stopped what they were doing to stare, slack-jawed, at the nude woman in their midst. Grace heard a throaty chuckle and fought against the urge to snatch up her robe and run.

“Audrey Munson did it,” Saul said to Jack. “Annette Kellerman did it. It’s not unheard of, nude women on film. But this, Jack—this. And in the context of that script…Jack, you’re not looking.”

“For Christ’s sakes, Saul…”

“You’ll need your eyes to direct this picture so look at her, goddamnit.”

Jack muttered, “Damn you, Saul.”

Grace tried to force a laugh, but it came out more like a honk. She knelt down and hurriedly shrugged back into her robe. Saul ran a hand over his mostly bald pate and patted her on the behind with the other.

“There’s a good girl,” he said. “Now run along and get into costume. We’ve got a picture to make, haven’t we, Jackie?”

“Yeah,” he said in a half-whisper.

With that, Saul dropped what remained of his cigar to the floor and walked triumphantly out of the studio, head high. Jack and Grace exchanged a brief glance. She then turned and hurried back to wardrobe, clutching the robe tightly closed with both hands.

3

I got married at 23; Helen was only 19 then. It was a stupid move on both our parts and just about everybody told us so, but I didn’t listen. Twenty-three-year-olds don’t listen to much. At least I didn’t.

Eight years went by, most of them sullen and crabby, and then after a week of the old silent treatment, she brusquely informed me that we were done, she’d met someone else, and I was expected to move out by the end of the week. I did, and I hadn’t been in the same room with her since. No kids, no pets to squabble over. I signed a waiver agreeing to whatever she wanted in front of the judge so I wouldn’t have to appear in court. That was what they called an amicable divorce. I didn’t feel particularly amiable about any of it, but I was glad when it was over. I tried dating a little in the aftermath, but nothing stuck. A year later I landed the lab gig and decided to marry that, instead. I’d been holed up in front of my scanner pretty much ever since.

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.

I landed at LAX fifteen minutes early and spent another twenty waiting for my suitcase at the baggage claim. After that I traipsed over to where all the drivers stood around holding signs for specific pickups among which, according to Leslie Wheeler, I was supposed to be one. I glanced at each sign in succession from right to left, but none of them had my name on it. My next glance was through the glass doors leading to the sidewalk outside and the myriad of taxis and vans and limos crowded next to it. A couple of guys were out there smoking, so I rolled my suitcase out to them and asked to bum a smoke. The taller and wider of the two knocked a Camel out of his pack and lit it for me, and I stood there smoking with them until I was done. It tasted like heaven.

When I returned inside, the group of drivers had thinned some, but there still wasn’t one designated for me. I loitered another half hour, bought a coffee at a stand and wished there was someone else to bum a cigarette from, which there wasn’t. No soap. I grumbled and found a quiet corner to dig out my state-of-the-art-in-2002 mobile phone to call the number Leslie gave me. Straight to voice mail. Naturally.

Outside I hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t pop the trunk so I dragged my suitcase into the backseat with me. When he asked me where to, I told him the hotel Leslie set me up with, the Wilson Arms. It ended up being a forty-five-minute ride that made me as poorer in dollars as it had in minutes.

The hotel was right in the heart of old Hollywood, a once glamorous town gone to seed and now on its way back up thanks to regentrification. My old apartment building was only four blocks south, though I wasn’t feeling sentimental. I rolled my case into the narrow lobby, took in what looked like a recently refurbished atmosphere, and then told the clerk my name. He said my room was ready and paid for, and he handed me a key. Not a keycard, an actual key. Some old things still stuck around. I rode the elevator up to the third floor, found 325 around the first corner in the hallway, and went inside.

It was a smallish room, but big enough. A few framed glossies of dead movie stars on the walls. Maybe they’d stayed here, and maybe even in this very room. Maybe the place was haunted. I sat down on the edge of the double bed and had a staring contest with David Niven. He won.

On the credenza there was a white envelope with my name on it. Gratified that at least something did for once, I picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a check for two thousand dollars, signed by Leslie Wheeler. A sticky note on the back of the check read: For the third reel. More if we find them. Start tomorrow? LW.

I folded the check in half and slid it into my wallet. Then I opened the mini-fridge next to the credenza, found a $10 bottle of beer, and drank it. I wanted a cigarette and thought about roaming down to street level to find one or twenty, but instead I lay down on top of the comforter and dropped into a deep sleep, still in my clothes. When I woke up, the clock beside the bed told me it was three in the morning. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water, dug my book out of my travel bag, and read the paragraphs on Grace Baron again. The hazy photo next to the text still failed to compete with the footage I’d seen from Angel of the Abyss. After I set the book down on the bed, I closed my eyes and replayed the reel in my head. Then I waited for dawn.

The unimaginatively named Silent Film Appreciation Society was housed in a narrow postwar building on a side street of Hollywood Boulevard, several blocks east of all the action. There wasn’t anything resembling a guide to the offices in the dusty entryway, so I wandered up the stairs and examined the doors on the second floor until I found what I was looking for. Masticating savagely on a flavorless piece of nicotine gum, I knocked on the door. When a few minutes crawled by and no one answered, I knocked again.

“Ms. Wheeler? It’s Graham Woodard.”

Still nothing. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

I muttered something I wouldn’t say in front of anybody’s mother and wandered back downstairs and out to the sidewalk. I’d passed a cluttered little souvenir shop on the way here that was just up at the corner, and I remembered a sign in the window advertising their ridiculous prices for cigarettes. Six minutes later I dropped eight bucks on a soft pack of Pall Malls and had one in my mouth before I left the shop.

So the elusive Ms. Wheeler failed to have me picked up at the airport and she wasn’t in the office when I expected her to be. She’d paid me — if she hadn’t, I’d likely be en route back to LAX by then — but I had no idea if or when I’d start earning my keep. I was starting to get a little grouchier than usual and entirely unsure how to proceed. For want of a better idea, I returned to the door on the second floor of her building and knocked again, louder and longer. Nothing, as I expected, so for a last-ditch effort I called her number again.

On the other side of the locked door, a mobile phone chirped with its preset ringtone. I jumped a little.

I took the phone down from my ear, but I let it ring and listened to the sound coming from inside. It kept going until I pressed END. I supposed people left their phones behind all the time — I knew I’d done so on many an occasion — but it didn’t gibe well with me. Not with everything else amounting to her total absence since I’d landed in Los Angeles. I felt a small tremble in my knees and knocked again, softer.

“Ms. Wheeler? Leslie?”

Footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs behind me. I turned to see a small woman coming up on the landing. When she saw me standing there, she gasped, “Oh!”

I said, “Ms. Wheeler?”

The woman laughed. She was short and bony, her iron gray hair pulled back into a girlish ponytail. She stretched her thin mouth into a smile and said, “No, I’m Barbara Tilitson. You must be Mr. Woodard.”

Another member of the sewing circle, I decided. She walked slowly toward me, digging a jangling key ring from her knitted purse.

“That’s me,” I told her.

“Is she not in? I’m surprised. Probably stuck in traffic. I can’t imagine the traffic in your neck of the woods can best ours.”

“I tried her cell phone and heard it ringing inside,” I said. “That is, I assume it was hers. Could be a coincidence, I guess…”

“Well, let’s just see,” Barbara said with a pleasant lilt. She jabbed a bronze key into the doorknob and pushed the door open. I followed her into the dark room and waited for her to switch on a light. When she did, I squinted and looked at what was once probably a pleasant room, furnished with antiques and decorated with framed reproductions of classic one-sheets for silent pictures — but the place had been smashed up by someone who knew about smashing. There were turned-over chairs, broken glass, and the rug on the floor had been pulled up and tossed into a pile in the corner. All of the posters had been ripped out of their frames, like somebody was looking to see if there was anything behind them. In one, America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickord knelt reproachfully in a nightgown beneath the title A Good Little Devil. Beside the poster, a plump woman with short salt-and-pepper hair slumped in a faux leather club chair.

Barbara Tilitson screamed.

I knew then why Leslie Wheeler had been giving me the slip since my arrival. She was dead.

4

The abduction took twice as long to film as Jack anticipated, putting the production a few hours behind schedule. The heavy, a character actor by the name of Billy Terence, kept fumbling awkwardly over Grace when he was supposed to be exerting villainous force, afraid to offend the lady. Jack alternately whined and bellowed, commanding Billy to grab her, dominate her, own her. At first Billy blanched, beside himself in spite of his rough looks. Only when Grace touched him gently on his rocky, weathered face and told him it was all right, that they were only performing, could he get the scene right.

By then, it was well past one in the afternoon and there were still five pages left to finish. Jack leapt from his chair, ordered the take golden, and screamed at everyone to move quickly to the next set. Cast and crew scuttled, moving equipment and changing costumes en route to the other end of the stage. There, an avant garde cemetery replete with angular tombstones and a high black fence stood in shadows, waiting to be illumined by stage lights. Once the light spilled down in sharply angled slats, Jack lighted a cigarette and directed the players to their positions.

Also smoking was the barrel-chested youth who shadowed the chief electrician, Horace, like a lost pup. As Grace floated over to her director, now dressed in a semi-transparent gown with a plunging neckline, the young man smiled awkwardly at her. She ignored him and paused at the edge of the set to talk to Jack.

“Ready to die, pretty thing?”

His starlet feigned an awkward grin and nodded, once.

Behind her, hurrying to form a semicircle around a flat tomb, were six day players in long brown robes tied at the waist with frayed ropes. Grace turned slowly to face them. The half dozen faces regarded her with deference, as though she were already a star, equal to Lillian Gish, Clara Bow. Anyone. The tops.

The director said, “Let’s get the scene done today if we can. No sense in wasting Mr. Veritek’s time or money.”

Grace took her place, lying on her back along the length of the faux tomb. Her tormentors shuffled in close. The one at the head of the tomb fingered a stage dagger jammed in the rope at his middle.

It was time to bring the Angel to the Abyss.

Jack growled, “Action.”

They guide her down, flat as an ironing board, upon the cold stone slab. She is pliant. They work in tandem, hands exchanging her silken flesh until she is, at last, in position. Like a well-oiled machine. Her eyes are open — wide, glassy — but she does not see. Above her, torches flutter flames and pale, angular faces change shapes in the dancing shadows of the light. At the head of the slab, in front of a narrow gray monument, stands one taller than his brethren — the chief minister, perhaps, if such groups have ministers — and he stretches his long white fingers out over her, snatching at air. The others sway slightly in a measured rhythm, join hands. The head man’s hands vanish into the folds of his robe and a pair of disciples, one on either side of her, whisk away the thin fabric that barely conceals her goose-pimpled form. The torches play havoc with the contours of her naked body and the minister produces a strange dagger, shaped like a serpent, and he strikes…

“A specter!” cried Saul Veritek, his right hand concerned with a tumbler filled to the brim with gin while his left played with some blonde bit player’s hair. “Risen from the grave!”

Grace Baron stood in the foyer of the suite, resplendent in her peach crepe gown. Lace at her neck, beneath the pearls that glittered in the chandelier light. If she imagined she heard a gasp, she wouldn’t have been wrong.

The band, all but the pianist Negro, played “Rhapsody in Blue.” Gowned and tuxedoed partygoers danced drowsily in pairs scattered throughout the suite, most of them clutching their drinks more desperately than their partners. Prohibition, it seemed to Grace, had only made liquor flow more freely in Los Angeles.

“Come,” said Saul, releasing his blonde and taking Grace by the elbow. “Have a libation. It isn’t every party that has a virgin sacrifice among its throng.”

His pink pate gleamed with sweat as he led her to the bar, where a Filipino barman was shaking up a martini for a tall, handsome man with a craggy face. Grace squinted at him, then whispered to Saul, “Isn’t that William Hart?”

Saul chuckled. “In the flesh. On his way out, the old cowboy. He’s been pumping everybody he sees for cash, trying to make his own last hurrah. Tumbleweeds, he calls it. Can you imagine? With Tom Mix filling movie houses he wants to make some drab old bore called Tumbleweeds?”

“I saw him in The Scourge of the Desert when I was a girl. We got a lot of oaters back in Idaho.”

“Folks liked that sort of thing back then,” Saul said. “What, you’re starstruck? Come now, I’ll introduce you.”

He guided her to the bar and extended two fingers to the barman. “A couple of gin and tonics, would you, Manny?”

Manny nodded and got to work. Saul turned to Hart and tapped his shoulder. Hart sipped his martini and looked down with a tired smile.

“Oh, it’s you, Saul.”

“Hart, you old horse,” Saul boomed, shaking the tall man’s hand. “I’d like you to meet my new star, Grace Baron. Turns out she’s a fan of yours.”

“You don’t say,” Hart said, widening his eyes at her. He took her hand and pecked the back of it. “I’m always glad to meet a fan, and a new star of the screen no less.”

Grace’s face filled with blood and she smiled. Saul heaved a laugh.

“She’s still fresh. Once people see the new picture and she’s on the cover of Picture Play, you’ll be blushing to meet her.”

“I’m certain of it,” said Hart. To Grace, he said, “Tell me about it. The picture, I mean.”

“Well,” she began, “it’s…”

“Secret,” Saul cut in. “You’re just going to have to wait, pardner.”

“Heavens,” Hart said with a grin. “I’ll wager it’s a corker.”

“You’d win that bet.”

“Say, have I said much to you about my new picture? I’m doing it independently, you know.”

“And I wish you the very best of luck with it, Hart. Really, I do.” Saul patted the tall man condescendingly on the shoulder and took up Grace’s elbow once again. “Look, Gracie — there’s old Jack. Let’s say hello, shall we?”

Quickly he led her away, and as she went she craned her neck and said, “Nice meeting you, Mr. Hart.”

The fading cowboy nodded and drank, his face fallen and colorless. He looked like the grandfather of the star of The Scourge of Desert, though only eleven years had passed.

“Tumbleweeds,” Saul snickered as they approached Jack Parson, seated alone on a windowsill with his eyes on the band. Jack sucked at a cigarette and slouched so that his back curved.

“Not bad, these fellows,” he said absently. “I think I’ve seen the saxophonist in some clubs.”

“Who knows?” Saul said. “One looks the same as another to me. Say, Jackie, where’s your drink?”

“Don’t you know there’s an amendment against that sort of thing, Mr. Veritek?”

“The law’s against making and selling the stuff — there’s no law against drinking it. Hell, I’ll get something from that Oriental over there.” He gestured broadly at Manny, the bartender. “What’ll it be, old boy?”

Jack sighed. “Scotch, I suppose.”

“There’s a man’s drink,” Saul opined. “Pleased to see you’ve some balls left, Jackie.”

The fat man giggled and waddled back to the bar, sloshing his gin on the carpet.

“He’s even worse when he’s in his cups,” Jack said to Grace.

She sat down beside him on the windowsill and took his cigarette from him, drew deeply from it, and then handed it back.

“Saul’s all bark,” she said.

“Some dogs bark too much.”

“Maybe it’s what got him where he is.”

“That’s just fine,” Jack said with a pained expression. “If this picture doesn’t send him back from wherever the hell he came from.”

“Gee, you’re tough on that,” Grace said. She sipped her drink and crossed her long legs. Jack noticed. “I never heard of a director hating his own movie so bad.”

“Happens all the time. First time for me, though. And anymore I don’t think of the damned thing as mine. It’s all his.” He pointed his chin at the bar, where Saul was guzzling something brown and ogling a plump brunette. “So what’s your story, anyhow? Wait — let me guess. You’re from some no-name town in the middle of the country and you came out here with an aunt, only to be discovered in a department store.”

“It was vaudeville for me, actually, but the rest is pretty close. How did you get all that?”

“It’s a very old story, Ms. Baron. I think Scheherazade knew that one.”

“I guess she knew them all,” she said with a wry smile.

“All the good stories were already told before the Lumiére brothers filmed their first frames.”

Grace raised her eyebrows and sighed. She scanned the suite, glancing at red faces hovering above starched collars and gleaming necklaces, but none of them appeared to belong to Saul. A few she recognized from pictures she had seen, though the gin worked diligently at clouding her memory. The band laid into something slow and hypnotic and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking the music in. When she reopened them, Jack was rising to his feet.

“I don’t think Saul is coming back with that drink,” she said.

“It’s just as well. I’d rather be clearheaded for tomorrow’s scenes.”

“You may be the only one.”

He ran his fingers through his thick black hair and heaved a sigh.

“Good night, Grace,” he said. “Don’t let the devils here keep you from the devils tomorrow.”

With his head down and shoulders jutting forward, Jack went past the band and melted into the sweating throng. Grace watched him disappear and downed the rest of her drink while she pondered what he’d said. Something from Shakespeare buzzed in her head, half-remembered: All the devils are here.

She squinted at the glass in her hand, then went tipsily back to the bar for a fresh one.

5

I sipped at a mug of tepid black tea prepared and given to me by Barbara Tilitson. It was bitter and needed sugar, but I didn’t say anything about it. There was a squat guy with red hair bearing down on me where I sat, his necktie crooked and shirt spotted with sweat. Said his name was Shea, and that he was a police detective. I didn’t say much to him either, because he was a policeman and I didn’t have a lawyer present. That much I told him. He said I watched too much TV.

“You’re from Boston,” he said, droning as though he was bored. I agreed that I was. “Got a couple of parking tickets for you here in Hollywood, date back to the nineties.”

“I lived here for a year. Went back home.”

“To Boston.”

I sighed. “Yes.”

“All right. Explain to me again your relationship with Ms. Wheeler.”

“There wasn’t any relationship,” I said. “I never met her, not in person. She hired me over the phone to do a job out here. I was just showing up to work when I — when Ms. Tilitson and I — found the place like this.”

“And Ms. Wheeler. Like this.”

I said, “Yeah.”

A couple of blue shirts were tiptoeing around the place, wandering from room to room like they were thinking about renting it. Poor Leslie Wheeler remained where we found her, slumped dead in her chair. In the kitchen on the other side of me Barbara paced and wrung her hands. I wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.

“Okay,” Shea said, rubbing the back of his neck and looking annoyed. “Let me go talk to Ms. Tilitson some more. Looks to me like you just stumbled onto a real bad scene, Woodard.”

“At least I already got paid up front,” I groused.

The detective gave me a sideways look.

“That right? You gonna keep that without doing anything for it?”

“No,” I said. “I plan on doing what I came here to do, actually.”

“I doubt that very much, Mr. Woodard,” Barbara said as she shuffled slowly into the room. Her eyes were red and swollen. “The reel is gone. Whoever killed Leslie must have taken it with them.”

“Reel?” Shea squeaked. “What kind of reel?”

Barbara and I locked glances. I reached for the pack in my pants pocket.

Between the two of us, Barbara and I told the policeman as much as we knew, starting with a primer on Angel of the Abyss, a few biographical details concerning Grace Baron from me, and how Barbara and Leslie’s club got their hands on the reel. I then explained how I got roped into it, remembering along the way that I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure how I did. That was when the little redhead managed by some miracle of modern science to make my day even worse.

“We’ll want contact information for this Florence Sommer,” he said to Barbara. And then, to me: “And for your ex-wife, Mr. Woodard.”

“Do you have to drag her into this?” I whined. My voice rose a few octaves. I sounded like a petulant adolescent.

“She’s already in it, if she tipped Ms. Wheeler to your skills,” he said. “And like you said, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to bring a guy in from the East Coast to do something a hundred guys can do right here in Los Angeles.”

“She wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps,” I said. “This film really is a big hairy deal, Detective. Apart from the people in this room and a few others here in L.A., everybody else in the world thinks it’s lost — gone forever. Ms. Wheeler wanted to keep it that way for a while.”

“Awful secretive for an old movie,” he said.

Barbara snorted. “First of all, it’s not just some old movie. It’s a lost classic, a treasure. Secondly, Mr. Woodard — forgive me, Mr. Woodard — paints the thing like Leslie was trafficking in state secrets or something. It wasn’t like that at all. She just wanted to maintain control over this discovery until we had all of our ducks in a row. A thing like this will explode in a hurry, Detective Shea. You may not care much about it, but there a great many people who do. And there aren’t—weren’t—very many people with a greater knowledge of silent cinema than Leslie Wheeler.”

“I can believe people care a lot about this stuff,” the detective said sourly. “Looks a bit like Ms. Wheeler lost her life over it, doesn’t it?”

“God,” Barbara moaned. Her lips trembled and her face squashed up, palsied with anguish. “My God. Poor, poor Leslie.”

One of the blue shirts chauffeured me back to the hotel. It was just past one o’clock but I felt like I’d been awake for days, so I crawled under the sheets and tried to catch a nap. No dice. Not after what I’d seen, which was in fact the first and to date only dead body to ever cross my path. Though I’d never laid eyes on the woman, I had spoken with her and I couldn’t help but feel a great deal more involved in her death than I liked. And every time I tried closing my eyes, all I could see was her.

So I got up, withdrew another ten-dollar brew from the mini-fridge, and flipped through channels until I came to Robert Mitchum tearing up the backcountry byways in Thunder Road. I watched it to the end and stayed tuned for the follow-up, The Sundowners. I didn’t make it all the way through that one; somewhere around halfway through I crashed, hard. When I woke again, the sun was setting behind Hollywood and there was something with Irene Dunne playing on the television. I switched her off, stepped into my trousers, and dragged myself down to the street for a smoke.

Along the way, I got to philosophizing. It occurred to me that, though I agreed with Barbara about the film’s importance, there was something to Shea’s incredulity, too. Just how important was an old silent movie, anyway? Everyone involved in its production, from the star down to the kid who delivered sandwiches to the set, was long dead by now. More than that, even the most essential contributions to our culture didn’t seem that important in the long run, at least not while I leaned against the hotel’s façade with a cigarette dangling from my mouth and my eyes on the weirdos and tourists shambling up Hollywood Boulevard like zombies. The whole damn world was going to come to an end someday and when that happened, who would be left to give a damn about Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky, or Van Gogh? Never mind Angel of the Abyss. I doubted more than a thousand people alive even knew it ever existed. Only cinema geeks like me and the late Leslie Wheeler could possibly be bothered. Us, and whoever found it necessary to murder her to get their hands on one-eleventh of the film. There were more pointless reasons to die, but I couldn’t think of many.

Dark thoughts like this consumed me and I started to lose focus on the whole nasty situation that enveloped me. I decided I needed a drink, so I stamped out my smoke and went back in to find the hotel bar. Despite the years I’d had to get used to it, I still hated the idea of a bar I couldn’t smoke in, but I swallowed it down and ordered a Dewar’s on ice. Almost as soon as the bartender set to getting it for me, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“There you are,” Jake said. “I’ve been looking for you, pal.”

For Christ’s sake, I thought. I said, “Man of your word.”

“Mama taught me not to lie,” he said, pulling up a stool beside me. The bartender came back round and set my drink in front of me. Jake said, “One of those for me, too.”

With a sharp nod, the bartender got to it. Jake slapped his hand on the bar, startling me a little, and grinned ear to ear.

“Back in Cali, man!” he boomed. I winced. I absolutely hated it when people said Cali. The only thing worse was La-La Land.

“Probably not for long,” I said. He cocked his head to the side as I sipped my scotch.

“Job fall through?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, dish. What’s the story, Graham?”

“Went to meet with the lady who hired me this morning,” I began.

“Yeah?”

“Only she was dead when I got there.”

“Jesus,” Jake said. “Are you serious?”

“Serious as an Eisenstein picture, bud.”

“What, she was old or something? Heart attack, something like that?”

“Not so old. Cops think she was murdered.” They think. It was pretty damned cut and dry, actually.

I killed my drink and signaled for another.

“Holy shit. That’s terrible, Graham. That must have been a hell of a shock.”

I chuckled morosely. “You’ve got that right. My old man dropped dead in the living room when I was in high school, but I never saw the body. Fact is, this is my first, and it wasn’t at a funeral or anything nice like that. She was just crumpled up in a chair, dead as disco. Place was trashed, too.”

I didn’t know why I was being so candid with Jake of all people, but my mouth just ran away with me. Probably I just needed somebody to talk to after everything that happened and he was handy. Nonetheless, I was starting to feel a bit queasy thinking about it and decided to change the subject.

“What about you? You flew out here?”

“Borrowed some cash, got a decent deal on the ticket.”

Figured.

“How’d you find me here?” I asked.

“Made sense you’d stay in Hollywood, so I started calling around. Got this dump on the fourth try.”

“Regular Hardy boy.”

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe I’ll open my own agency. Take pictures of cheating husbands and shit.”

That would probably be the most work he would have ever done in his life, but I kept that to myself.

“Where are you staying?” I asked him.

“Not far. Little motel with questionable morals. I don’t have a sugar mama funding my vacation.” The words had barely passed his thin lips before his face pinched and he dropped his eyes to his lap. “Ah, crap. Sorry, Graham.”

I waved it off. The waving hand was a little uncoordinated. The scotch was doing its job.

“Forget it. Listen, maybe I’ll stay on another day or two. I’ll ask how far ahead my room is covered and cash the check I got. Tomorrow we’ll do something, you know, Los Angelesy. Make the best of it.”

“Hey, that’s the spirit,” Jake beamed.

“Damn,” I drawled, simultaneously tapping the rim of my glass at the barman. “Why let a little murder ruin a perfectly good trip? We’ll go to Disneyland. Get a goddamn star map. Maybe we’ll run into Brad Pitt and get a fucking autograph.”

Jake pursed his mouth and absently stirred his scotch with the little black straw the barman put in it. I laughed and grabbed his shoulder as the guy brought me number three, which I grabbed and clinked against Jake’s glass. After a deep slug from my hooch, I sighed with gratification and said, “Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.”

An old joke we’d once shared, the line from the Polanski film, and enough to break the ice I’d formed by being a morbid ass. Jake grinned, and I slapped him on the back before excusing myself for a smoke outside. It was damned curious how much more I liked the guy when I was in my cups.

Outside the city was brighter in the night than it was in the daytime, lit blindingly with street lamps and glaring neon signs. Traffic had picked up, transporting sightseers and partygoers, though all the characters in cartoon costumes seemed to have gone home for the night. They had been replaced by the same transvestite street walkers I remembered from my time there in the nineties. It was great knowing how things didn’t change.

I fired up a cigarette, dragged deeply on it, and suddenly remembered what the cop had said about getting in contact with Helen. The thought sent me crashing to half-sobriety and I started to worry that I’d end up in a room with her in some grimy police station, my past never quite willing to give me up to the future.

Such were my unhappy thoughts as I worked my way down a smoldering Pall Mall and the brick wall burst in a cloud of dust about six inches from my ear. Without giving it much thought, I dropped to a crouch and another shot cracked the night, this time hitting the wall where my head had been seconds earlier. Pathetically, I was still clutching my cigarette between two fingers.

A set of tires squealed, peeling out, and I looked up in time to see a late-model Saab speeding down Hollywood in a cloud of exhaust and burned rubber. I couldn’t see who was in the car, but I knew damn well that whoever it was, they’d just tried to shoot me dead. I collapsed on my ass and sat there on the sidewalk, half-drunk and dumbfounded, trying to convince myself it was just another one of L.A.’s notorious, mythic, random drive-bys.

But as I finished my cigarette and people came bursting out of the hotel lobby and from both sides of the street, I knew perfectly well that wasn’t the case.

Angel of the Abyss was catching up to me.

6

Though there was a tremendous panic about it at first, Jack’s failure to arrive on set was eventually chalked up to a severe hangover — the man was simply sleeping it off at home. Upon this pronouncement, several members of the crew and some extras got to shuffling in either direction, whereupon Saul Veritek took up the director’s bullhorn and bellowed at everyone to remain where they were.

“This is no recess, you ingrates,” he hollered. “Time is money, for Christ’s sake. We have five pages need shooting and by God we’ll shoot them.”

Grace, barefoot in her ethereal, postmortem silk gown, floated beside him and whispered, “Saul, surely we shouldn’t go under Jack’s nose.”

The producer lowered the bullhorn slowly and turned to flash a dry grin at her.

“Dearheart,” he cooed, “when I want to hear you speak, they will be words I have written. Do you understand?”

She stiffened. Her lip trembled.

“Of course,” she said, softly. She added: “Mr. Veritek.”

With that, Grace Baron swept up the length of the cloudy gown and padded across the cold stage floor to the lot outside, where she lighted a cigarette and groaned with frustration.

“Trouble in paradise?”

She started, coughing on the smoke and moving her arms up to cover her bosom, and spun on her heel to find a lean youth leaning against the façade of the stage, a metal flask in his hand. He was in his shirtsleeves, rolled up to the elbows, with suspenders keeping up his sagging brown trousers and a rumpled cap on his head. The handsome youth assisting Horace with the lighting. Grace comported herself, stepping back and sucking deeply from her smoke.

“Drinking on the job?”

“Whatever gets you through the day.”

“Can’t think but Mr. Veritek wouldn’t like it much.”

“That old rummy? You’re kidding.”

“Most fellows can’t carry it like he can.”

“I do all right.”

He smiled, took a pull. Grace raised an eyebrow.

“Lighting man?”

“Apprentice electrician. I’m working under Horace.”

“Hope he’s making me look good.”

“Shouldn’t be hard,” he said.

Her cheeks, high on her otherwise pale face, pinked.

“I’m Grace,” she said, offering her hand.

He accepted it, said, “You don’t say.”

“Now don’t be smart.”

“Who, me? I didn’t even finish high school.”

“What’d they call you when you quit?”

“Dummy. These days I call myself Frank. Frank Faehnrich.”

“Used to know a Frank,” she reminisced. “Back home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Idaho, if you can believe it.”

“Sure, I believe it.”

“Does it show?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

She finished her smoke, dropped it on the ground. “Where’s headquarters for you, Mr. Electrician?”

“Uh-uh. First tell me who’s Frank.”

“Which Frank?”

“Idaho Frank.”

“A nobody. Probably still making ice-cream sodas at the drugstore on Chance Street.”

“It’s a job.”

“Spill, mister.”

“Not far from here. A little town called San Domingo. What’s so bad about a soda jerk?”

“I’ve known loads of jerks,” she said. “A jerk’s a jerk.”

“And a man’s a man, and a woman’s a woman. What’s it amount to? Ain’t here but enough time to get confused about it all, anyhow. Hell, maybe all jerks ain’t created equal, when you think about it.”

“What sort of jerk are you, Frank?”

“Only the best kind,” he teased.

“That a fact? And what kind is that?”

“Grace! Set!” Saul boomed from inside the set. “Now!”

“Maybe you’ll find out,” Frank said. “Best hurry along now. I’ve got to help shed some light on that pretty face of yours.”

“A charmer,” she pouted, fluffing her hair. “I’ve known loads of them, too.”

She offered a sardonic wink and rushed back inside. Saul stood dead center, his fists planted on his broad hips and sweating profusely. His shaggy brown eyebrows were squashed together and the cigar in his mouth wasn’t lit.

“Only in Hollywood,” he groused. “Anyplace else and you’d be on the goddamn street.”

“Don’t strangle yourself,” she chided him. “Only having a cigarette.”

She bounced past him, back to the cemetery at the northwest corner of the sprawling stage, where a day player in a grave-digger’s getup leaned on a shovel, half-asleep. Taking her position, Grace glanced over her shoulder at the lighting rig beside Jack’s — now Saul’s — chair. Horace was sweating worse than the boss beneath the white-hot lamp, cranking it up and playing with the shades. Behind him Frank stood with his hands behind his back, his eyes on Grace and the rest of his square face a cipher.

Vacant and crawling with mist, the cemetery lies dormant, the once imperious stones now cracked and covered with lichen. Only a bright shaft of moonlight slices through the pitch, illumining the tomb upon which, some years earlier, a maiden’s heart was pierced by the ritual blade. The heavy lid trembles, disrupting the blanket of mist, and then edges away, catty-corner to open a broad black triangle leading down into the cold finality within. From the grave, a lone hand slowly rises, its ashen, feminine fingers curling around the edge of the stone. She is risen.

Grace emitted a stunted yelp upon pulling the chain on the lamp. The dim bulb threw a yellow haze across the bungalow that caused Jack Parson to sit up, cough, and smile wanly at her from the edge of her bed.

“Christ have mercy, Jack,” she wheezed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing and smoothing out his sport coat with his hands.

Grace laid her bag on the chair and shut the door. She then fumbled for a cigarette from the box on the dresser, lighted it, and frowned at Jack through a blue haze.

“Are you drunk?”

“I wish I were.”

“Don’t you dare touch my liquor.”

He went over to where she stood, inspiring her to take a few steps back. Without asking, he took a smoke for himself and lighted it with her crystal lighter.

“Did you shoot today?”

“We shot.”

“Brought you back to life, did he? Saul, I mean.” He spoke the man’s name like a foul oath.

“That’s what it says in the script. Those are the pages for Tuesday, which is today, by the by.”

“The son of a bitch is turning it into some sort of…horror picture.”

“Hard to influence the course of events when you don’t show up at the studio, Jack.”

She puffed with exasperation, kicked off her shoes. Jack moved the bag to the floor and sat down in her chair.

“Why don’t you go somewhere else for your next one?” Grace asked, the cigarette dangling from her lips as she struggled her way out of her dress. Jack fixed his eyes on the floor. “Or do like Bill Hart’s doing — he’s making a picture all on his own.”

“Hart’s washed up. A joke.”

“Well, you’re still a young man. Just make Saul’s picture and put a lid on the sad-sack routine. You’re only making enemies, boyo.”

“In this town, it’s easy.”

“Easier still when you do all the work.”

Standing in her brassiere and bloomers, she crooked one foot behind her and pushed out a sigh at his boyish embarrassment.

“You’ve seen me stark, for Pete’s sake.”

“Talk to your boss — that was his scene, you know.”

“It’s art, remember? With a capital A.”

“God, you’re a lively one tonight,” Jack said. He leaned forward to stamp out his pilfered smoke.

“Certainly I am,” she answered, shrugging into a shiny robe. “I’m freshly resurrected, or didn’t you hear?”

“Didn’t you ever read Mary Shelley? Even the resurrected can get put on ice.”

“I thought you had a beef with the ghoulish stuff.”

“I just wanted to make a great picture, Gracie. That’s all. Something to really lift the form.”

“How much lifting does it need? You never saw a Griffith picture? I don’t guess you’ve got anything up your sleeve to make Intolerance look rotten, or do you?”

“Don’t be cruel to me.”

“You’re cruel to yourself,” she spat. “Like I said, you’re young yet. Everything won’t go your way, not for a while, maybe not ever. You’ve got a lot handed to you on a gold platter and you act like you’re dying in a trench.”

“My brother-in-law died in a trench,” he said low.

“And you didn’t, brother — you’re here right now in Hollywood in the picture business, surrounded by enough glut to make old Babylon drool with envy. Get out of here, Jack. I want to go to bed.”

“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

Grace grimaced, dropped her smoldering end in the ashtray.

“You’re a fool, and much too sober. Go find a tavern and drink them out of house and home. You’ll want to crawl in a hole come morning, but I bet you’ll thank me for it.”

“I can’t work like that.”

She laughed. “Who’s working? My director was a bald, fat man chomping on a cigar. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

Jack lurched forward, arched his right arm around her waist. Grace squirmed and planted her hand roughly on the center of his chest.

“Stop it, Jack.”

“Let me stay. Just for tonight.”

“I told you no already.”

“I’m wounded, Gracie. My pride is. I don’t want anything from you. Just let me stay here tonight.”

“Get going, Mr. Parson. You’ve got a lot of self-pitying to catch up on and I don’t want to play.”

He relented, released her. Narrowed his eyes to slits.

“Cruel,” he groaned.

“I didn’t get this part in any back room, yours or anyone else’s. And I won’t do any back-room foolishness to keep the part now. Leave this instant, or Saul Veritek is going to hear an ugly little story tonight and I really will have a new director on this goddamn picture.”

Jack marched for the door, opened it, and grumbled low and indistinctly.

Grace said, “Good night, Jack.”

He slammed the door shut.

She dreamed of low, snowy hills and a gable-front house with icicles on the eaves, Daddy waving goodbye and somewhere her mother softly sobbing. Aunt Eustace would be along in the morning. There was going to be more for little Gracie than digging potatoes out of the cold earth. Much more.

You get you some rest, Gracie, Californy is a long ways away.

7

The two policemen who took me the handful of blocks to the station on Wilcox didn’t say much. They didn’t seem involved, or like they wanted to be. Just a pair of well-armed chauffeurs. Inside, I was guided to a dimly lit office that still smelled like the cigarettes they used to allow in there, in the previous century. I sat down in front of an old metal desk and waited for ten minutes, looking at a framed photo of a redheaded cop, his wife, and their daughter. The wife had red hair, too. The kid was Asian.

When Shea came in, he had a Styrofoam cup steaming in each fist. He passed one to me on his way behind the desk, said, “Heard you were a bit stewed.”

“Wasn’t planning on getting shot at,” I told him. He was about half-right; I figured I was well on my way to sobriety before the second shot stopped ringing in my ears. I sipped at the coffee — it tasted like pencil shavings.

“Taxpayers’ best,” Shea commented, having noticed the sour look on my face.

“Nice family,” I said, looking at the photo again. He ignored that, like it was meant to be an insult.

“Tell me some more about this job you’re here for,” he said, leaning back in his chair. It squeaked loudly.

“Nothing shady about it, at least not on my end. Look, I’m just a film geek. I teach a couple of courses about old flicks at a community college every year and spend the rest of my time digitalizing ones nobody really cares about before the celluloid dissolves. This lady—”

“Leslie Wheeler?”

“Yes. She called my office out of the blue a few days ago—”

“In Boston.”

“Right. She told me her little club had come into possession of a particularly rare film. Well, part of one, anyway. A reel.”

“How’d she get it?”

“Someone named Mrs. Sommer gave it to her. Them. Whatever.”

“Her and Barbara Tilitson?”

“I guess. I only really knew about Ms. Wheeler.”

“All right, go on.”

“That’s all there is, really. She offered me a gig to come out here and work on the reel. Good money in it, and she said they might even dig up the rest of the picture.”

“From this Sommer woman?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“What’s the movie?”

“It’s called Angel of the Abyss.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“No one living has. Not in its entirety. It’s been lost for most of a century.”

“But you have. Seen it, I mean.”

“No, just the third reel. About ten minutes or so, twenty from the start.”

“Tell me.”

I washed the knot in my throat down with more of the terrible coffee, and then I told him. I told him about the scene I’d only seen by way of an emailed mpeg, its brilliantly stark lighting, Grace Baron’s masterful performance done without the benefit of dialogue. It occurred to me in retrospect how much she reminded me of the French silent actress Maria Falconetti — Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc — and I told Shea that, but he just shrugged and reprimanded me to stay on topic. He scribbled on a notepad the whole time, which made me chuckle. I’d have guessed an L.A. detective would have upgraded to at least a Blackberry by now.

“And how about the rest of the thing? What’s it all about?”

“I can only tell you what I’ve read. It’s a very dark melodrama, way I understand it. A peasant girl from a broken, abusive home heads to the city to improve her lot, ends up getting mixed up with a con man who arranges for her to be sold into a white slavery ring and, eventually, some kind of Satanic ritual where they sacrifice her.”

“How sweet. You say this was a silent movie?”

“1926.”

“Didn’t know they made crap like that back then.”

“Some people thought it was brilliant.”

“Sounds like torture porn to me.”

I snickered. “There’s more — she makes a deal with the devil, comes back to ruin the lives of the con man and his main lieutenants. So it’s got this whole supernatural revenge thing going for it.”

“I’m more of a Steve McQueen guy, myself.”

“I’d never have guessed.”

He gave me a look.

“All right, Woodard,” he said like it was an effort, “so a woman you’ve never heard of calls you out of nowhere to fly all the way across the country to work on this old movie. You agree, get here, find her dead. Right so far?”

I shuddered, but not so he noticed. “Yeah.”

“And the movie, the reel, is gone. Other valuable stuff left behind, but not this reel you’re supposed to be working on. Which means the job’s dead, so it’s time for Graham Woodard to buzz back off to Beantown, am I correct?”

“That was my thinking,” I agreed.

“Except maybe somebody would rather you didn’t.”

“You don’t still have drive-bys in Los Angeles, Detective Shea?”

“On that stretch of Hollywood? Sure, it could happen. I’d be surprised, but it could happen. But you factor in how much trouble somebody’s going to over this whole ‘angels in the abbey’ crap—”

“Angel of the Abyss.”

“—it does seem pretty damn coincidental to me, I got to admit.”

I wasn’t arguing. Simply thinking about it got my skin prickling all over again.

“So the way this goes,” Shea went on, absently worrying his necktie, “is that you tell me whatever it is you haven’t told me yet, because there are some awfully big pieces left out of this puzzle, Mr. Woodard.”

Downing the foul dregs of the coffee, I made a tight knot of my eyebrows and locked eyes with Shea. I hadn’t said a word about Jake, though despite my diminishing liking for the guy concurrent with my rapid sobering up, I didn’t think for a second he had anything to do with any of it. My ex-wife, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.

I said, “Helen.”

“Yes,” he said. “The former Mrs. Woodard.”

“I haven’t spoken to her in more than a year.”

“But she got you the job, didn’t she? She recommended you to Ms. Wheeler.”

“That’s what I was told.”

“Are you not on good terms with your ex-wife?”

“I’d say not. She left me for another guy. I didn’t take kindly.”

“Then why would she want to help you out like this?”

“It’s not that I need the help,” I said. “I’m not hurting.”

“She pulled for you.”

“I don’t know if she did. She knows—knew—Ms. Wheeler in some capacity. Dropped my name. Maybe she didn’t even think about it first.”

“Just slipped out.”

“Like that,” I said.

“For a gig a hundred people in Los Angeles could do without traveling.”

“Probably a thousand. And a lot of them better than me.”

“Isn’t that just a little strange?”

“She said she wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps.”

“Leslie Wheeler said that?”

I nodded. “She wanted to maintain control over the project. Over the film. I think she was afraid if L.A. people got involved, it would get out of hand and it wouldn’t be her baby anymore.”

“Wanted all the glory, then?”

“Such as it would be, sure. Far as I know, nobody outside of me and that little knitting club knew a thing about it.”

“Knitting club?”

I grinned. “My nickname for their group.”

“I see,” Shea said.

He tapped the tip of his pencil on the notepad and made a guttural noise in his throat. When he glanced up at me again, his sourpuss had softened to a look of concern, or close to it.

“Do you know where your ex-wife lives, Mr. Woodard?”

“Somewhere around here.”

“In Hollywood?”

“In L.A.,” I said. “I have no idea where, exactly.”

“We had a recent address for her and a Ross Erickson — you know him?”

I frowned. “Yeah. That’s the fu — the guy she ran off with.”

“Well. A couple of officers went to have a word with her this afternoon, after we last talked at Ms. Wheeler’s office.”

“Fantastic.” My hand contracted, splitting the cup.

“She wasn’t there, is the thing. Nobody was.”

The last few drops of room-temperature coffee dribbled down my wrist, but I paid it no attention. “What are you driving at, Detective?”

“Fact is, no one’s seen her or Mr. Erickson for about a week. Far as we can tell, they haven’t been at home at all. Their apartment doesn’t appear to have been tossed like Ms. Wheeler’s office was, and there was jewelry inside. A small amount of cash, too. No robbery, and no planned vacation in all likelihood. Folks don’t usually leave everything behind when they’re planning on going away for a week.”

I mulled this over, unsure how to react. I wondered if they’d found anything approaching drug paraphernalia, and decided Shea wouldn’t tell me if they had. All I could manage to say was, “I don’t talk to her.”

“You don’t seem very upset.”

“I don’t know what I am. Today I’ve found a body, been shot at, and now I’ve just been told my ex-wife is — what, missing?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re suggesting it.”

“Does she do anything with movies? Like you or Ms. Wheeler?”

I moved my jaw without a sound a bit, jarred by the change in topic.

“She — no. She’s in insurance. Or she used to be. She couldn’t care less about something like this.”

“But she knew Leslie Wheeler.”

“Apparently.”

“Seem like strange bedfellows to you?”

“I couldn’t say, as I never met Ms. Wheeler.”

Shea grinned. “You have a point there. You want another coffee?”

“I’d rather drink crude oil,” I complained. “Listen, how long am I going to have to stay in town?”

“You watch too many old movies, Mr. Woodard.”

“It’s what I do.”

“You’re not obligated to remain here. Of course I’ll need to talk to you again as this comes together, but I can’t keep you from going home to Massachusetts. I’d appreciate it, however, if you’ll keep me apprised of your whereabouts.”

Shea didn’t have anything else to drill me about after that. He asked a few pointless questions, small talk about where I grew up and what I’d done when I was in L.A. last, but I sensed it was all devised to let me down gently after informing me that Helen was missing. He gave me his card for the second time in one day and told me they’d posted a couple of guys in an unmarked car in front of the hotel — a security detail, he called it. As he was walking me back to my dour chauffeurs, he patted me on the back in a fatherly way and said, “Don’t worry about your ex, Mr. Woodard. I doubt it has anything to do with this mess.”

I wasn’t nearly as confident as he was, but I didn’t say so. Outside, in the perfect Southern California night, Shea fired up a Parliament and offered me the pack. I accepted, delighting in the slight buzz I got from not chain-smoking all the time and getting used to it. We puffed in silence, waiting for the patrol car to come around, until he cleared his throat and narrowed his eyes.

He said, “Whatever happened to this Grace Baron, anyway?”

“She vanished,” I told him. “She was declared dead less than two years later. Some folks say she ran off with a Communist agitator, or that he killed her. It’s probably just an urban legend born of the McCarthy era.”

“So that’s, what — ninety years ago?”

“Thereabout, yes.”

“Before Black Dahlia,” he mused.

“Yeah,” I said, “but after Virginia Rappe.”

“Good old Tinseltown,” the detective mused. “Cold-case capital of the world.”

“Is that true?”

The patrol car pulled slowly up on Wilcox and idled in front of us. Detective Shea shrugged and dropped his smoke on the sidewalk, grinding it under his heel.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Go on back to your hotel, Mr. Woodard. Try and get some sleep.”

“Too bad the bar’s closed by now,” I said, and I got into the back of the police car.

The conscientious hotel staff had, however, restocked my expensive mini-fridge, so I made myself a fifteen-dollar highball and sat back on the bed. I reflected on how surprised I was that the detective seemed to know who Virginia Rappe was — the aspiring actress whose mysterious death ruined Fatty Arbuckle’s life and career — which led me to think about what a wild time the 1920s really were in Hollywood. Murders, drugs, prostitution, blackmail, organized crime…the modern movie business had nothing on them. Rappe died in ’21, followed by the murder of William Desmond Taylor in ’22 from being stabbed in the back. Plenty of grim tales of the like followed, from Thelma Todd to Elizabeth Short, but in the 21st century were they anything more than lurid stories from a bygone era?

Perhaps they all were, I thought. All except the disappearance of Grace Baron. Gone since the year after my maternal grandfather was born, but still stirring the pot. Whatever had happened to her, to her only picture, the perpetrators thought them both to be buried forever. Now the picture was resurfacing and with it, maybe, something somebody needed to stay in its grave. Leslie Wheeler knew enough to get her killed; hell, I knew next to nothing and they were taking shots at me. And since I strongly doubted there was a gang of supercentenarians gunning for me, I was more puzzled than ever. Puzzled, and more frightened than I cared to admit to myself. It was insane to think anybody could resort to murder over something older than almost anyone living, but insanity was the order of the day.

Lucky me, I was caught right up in the middle of it with one corpse behind me and God knew what ahead. I made a second highball with what remained of my cola and whiskey and I downed it into two Herculean gulps. Somewhere beyond the marginally safe confines of my police-guarded hotel, somebody was washing Leslie Wheeler’s blood from their hands — and making room for mine.

But I wasn’t the only one. There was still Barbara Tilitson, Ms. Wheeler’s colleague. Shea hadn’t mentioned her, though he needn’t have — it wasn’t like I was his colleague. Still, I wondered what the police were doing to protect her. More than that, I wondered what she knew.

It occurred to me that she might also have been acquainted with my ex-wife, and that a supposed expert on the era of American silent films could also shed some light on what the hell was going on. I was already stepping into my shoes and rinsing my booze-infused mouth out with mouthwash before I’d made up my mind to go talk to her.

The clock radio on the nightstand told me it was a quarter to three in the morning. The black-and-white monster movie playing soundlessly on the television backed up its sentiment. I sat back down on the mattress and, like I’d done before I found Leslie Wheeler’s body, I waited. While I waited, I zoned out, revisiting that reel in my mind, but subconsciously recasting Grace Baron’s role with Helen…

I snapped out of it and looked out the window. The charcoal smog was settled over the tops of the buildings, obscuring antennas and bright neon signs and the distant Capitol Records tower, but the first orange light of morning was beginning to battle it back for another day. I snatched the room key from the dresser and headed out to find Barbara.

8

9

“Here’s one in Mission Hills,” Jake said, his mouth half-full of syrupy pancakes. “Not sure it’s spelled right.”

He turned his smart-phone around to show me the screen: a site called Find 411 listed a Barbara Tilitson between blocks of ads in Mission Hills, in the San Fernando Valley.

“Is there an address?” I asked him. “Or a number?”

“You have to pay. These things are scams.”

I grunted. The waitress swung by to refill our coffee cups. I’d barely touched my omelet, but Jack was nearly through devouring his breakfast.

He found me in the hotel lobby, poring over an old-school phone book lent to me by the desk clerk, who was herself astonished to discover they actually had one. I was squinting at the sundry Tilitsons around Hollywood, none of them Barbaras, when Jack appeared at my shoulder with an offer to front me breakfast if I gave him the lowdown on the shooting. I obliged, we wandered a few blocks up to a greasy spoon, and now that I’d told him what little there was to tell, he was attempting to help me track Barbara down.

“Why don’t we go to that office? You know, the knitting club.”

“Crime scene, my man,” I explained.

“Probably find a Rolodex in there or something. Worth a look.”

I ended up paying the tab.

The hall looked like something straight out of a television show, replete with flickering ceiling light and yellow police tape crisscrossing the door to the late Leslie Wheeler’s office. When we’d exited the cab, we saw no police cars, no cops on guard duty. Up on the second floor it was just as vacant. Jack went directly to the taped-up door and I followed closely behind. He tried the knob. It was locked.

“Better wipe your prints off that,” I said.

He snorted. “Yeah, all right, Columbo.”

He did it anyway, looking a little embarrassed.

“Pascal’s wager,” he said.

He shrugged and I grinned at his misuse of the phrase, and then we headed back for the stairs when the door clacked behind us and squealed open. Jake flattened against the wall like it somehow made him invisible, but I stepped forward and narrowed my eyes at the doorway. Barbara Tilitson poked her gray head out into the hall and raised her eyebrows at me. Her eyes were pink and swollen. She’d clearly been crying.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Woodard,” she rasped. “I thought I heard someone try to open the door.”

“You did,” I said. “We didn’t expect anyone to be inside.”

“No one is supposed to be. Not even me.”

By then Jake had overcome his terror of the woman and slinked back up behind me. I stepped aside and said, “This is Jake Maitland.”

“Barbara Tilitson,” she said, limply shaking his hand. “Forgive the state of me. I really shouldn’t be here. I was going through old newsletters, if you can believe it. The police took so much, but they left the newsletters. I didn’t think anyone would mind. Of course, we do it all by email now. But Leslie handled all of that. I’m not very good with computers, Mr. Woodard. Not very good at all. With Leslie gone, I really don’t know…”

She trailed off, hiccupped, and covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes welled up and she turned so that I couldn’t see her face. I touched her shoulder, softly, and waited for her to compose herself.

“Good Lord,” she said with a breathless laugh. “The state of me. I swear.”

“Is there still tea inside?” I asked, a bit impulsively.

Barbara nodded while wiping her eyes with her fingers. “And a kettle. Nothing criminally suspicious about all that, I suppose.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “Let’s sit down in the office. I’ll make the tea this time.”

Again she nodded and waddled back through the tape, barely disturbing it with her small frame. I made it through with almost as much ease, but Jake tore it down entirely. I shot him a look, which he ignored. To my surprise, Barbara sat down in the chair we found Leslie Wheeler in the previous morning. She sat nervously, her knees together and back hunched, like a school kid waiting to be scolded by the principal. At her feet on the bare floor — the rug was gone now — about a dozen crude newsletters were fanned out. The paper was yellow and crinkled, a hand-drawn legend photocopied at the top of each one: The Silent Film Appreciation Society. The issue on top, featuring a fuzzy publicity photo of Rudolph Valentino, was from Fall/Winter 1989. I decided she and Leslie must have been at this for quite some time.

“There are Typhoo bags in the cupboard above the hot plate, Mr. Woodard.”

I found them, looked over to Jake, who shook his head no. While I heated the kettle on the hot plate, I glanced over at a corkboard on the wall beside an old plastic telephone. On it several notes were tacked, containing movie titles, event reminders. A program from a Lillian Gish retrospective at the Cinémathèque. And a few photographs of Barbara and Leslie that looked to span a great many years. In each of them the two women held on to one another in a tight embrace, grinning broadly or looking at each other. I began to better comprehend Barbara’s grief.

The kettle squealed and I poured two cups that I brought out to the front room. Barbara took hers with a pained smile. I sat at the table, next to Jake.

Barbara sipped cautiously from her cup and said, “I’m surprised you’re still here. In Los Angeles, that is. I’m afraid you can’t help us anymore.”

“I’d still like to try,” I said. “You see, Ms. Tilitson—”

“Barbara. Please.”

“Barbara, we came around here hoping to find a way to get in touch with you. I hate to alarm you, but somebody tried to kill me last night.”

“Kill you? Good God, that’s terrible.”

“You’re telling him,” Jake piped up.

Barbara said, “This damned town. Forgive my language, but really.”

“I don’t think it’s just this town, and frankly the police don’t seem to, either. I think it has something to do with what happened to Leslie. And with Angel of the Abyss.”

She seemed to hold her breath for a moment, her eyes focusing on something invisible in the center of the room like cats sometimes do. When she snapped out of it, she shivered slightly and heaved a deep sigh. Her face was drawn. Though only a day older than the last time I saw her, she seemed as though she’d aged significantly since then.

“Forgive me if I sound accusatory, Barbara,” I said, followed by a protracted silence in the room, “but is there something you’re not telling me? Something I should know?”

“Mr. Woodard,” she began. “Graham. How much do you know about Grace Baron?”

“Not much,” I confessed. “Whatever the available bios and websites have to say. It’s not a lot. I don’t gather anyone really knows that much about her.”

“Some people do,” Barbara countered. “Leslie did. She knew quite a great deal about Grace. And of course as long as she remained a distant memory and her only film remained lost, no one could really be bothered by anything she knew.”

I pursed my mouth and breathed through my nose, frustrated and confused. It was the same aggravating question posed over and over again: how could something so old have riled up so many people?

“You’re waiting for me to tell you everything,” Barbara went on at last. “But I’m afraid I can’t. We were close, Leslie and I. But she didn’t tell me everything. In fact, ever since she came into possession of that damned reel — me and my mouth again, I’m so sorry. Honestly, I never talk like this…”

“What about the reel?” I said, cutting her off.

“It’s just like she…closed off, I guess you could say. Shut me out, to some extent. That reel, and the promise of the rest of them, seemed to mean more to Leslie than anything else in the world.”

“More than just her love of old movies?” Jake asked. I’d nearly forgotten he was there, but it was a good question.

“Oh, yes. Heavens, yes. We’d been involved with a few terrifically exciting projects over the years, and by God it was something we shared together. We found Losers Weepers together, at an estate sale in Sawtelle back in ’92.” She laughed girlishly at the memory. “It was our bond, our glue. Not this time. Not with the Grace Baron picture. That Leslie kept all to herself. She didn’t really want me anywhere near the thing, or at least that’s how I felt.”

“And she brought me into it because of my remoteness from it all,” I mused aloud. “From it, and the both of you. From Los Angeles.”

“Apparently so, yes. I don’t know why anyone would want to harm you over this, Graham. I really don’t. But I’m sorry about it and I want you to believe me, Leslie would never have asked you out here if she’d have thought for a second something like that could happen.”

I nodded solemnly and sipped at my tea. It was going cold.

“Did you ever meet this Mrs. Sommer?” I asked her.

“You mean the woman from whom Leslie got the footage in the first place? Yes, I met her once, quite briefly. It was when Leslie picked the reel up — I went with her, though she tried like hell to put me off.”

“What was she like? How did she end up with it?”

“Mrs. Sommer was fairly ordinary, I suppose. A bit awkward, socially. She told us the reel had belonged to her father, who died and left behind a small estate that included it.”

“Did she know what she had?”

“Not at all. In fact she held on to it for more than a year before she stumbled upon a magazine article that mentioned Angel and she remembered it gathering dust someplace. After a little research, she realized she had a treasure and ended up finding us — well, Leslie — by our little website.”

“I wonder,” Jake muttered. I turned to him and raised my eyebrows. He lowered his and went on: “I was just wondering whether the cops have a lead on this lady. Maybe she decided the footage was too valuable and wanted it back? Like, real bad.”

“Did you or Leslie pay her anything for it?” I asked Barbara.

“Not that I’m aware of. She agreed to let us take care of preserving it. I’m sure Leslie would have been quite clear that the reel would remain her property.”

“What about the rest of the picture? I was told there might be more reels, in time.”

“My impression was that Mrs. Sommer hadn’t yet catalogued the entire estate. There were some other films — nothing rare or valuable — but the notion was there could still be more, maybe even other parts of Angel. Of course, that was all between her and Leslie. I had very little to do with it, I’m sorry to say.”

She crinkled her eyes and touched her mouth. The moment passed as quickly as it came on.

I said: “Do you remember where this Sommer woman lived, Barbara? I think I’d like to pay her a visit.”

“It was in the Valley. Sherman Oaks. I remember.”

I made another couple cups of tea, but I didn’t touch mine. We were all quiet for a while, but I still had one more question for Barbara.

“Do you know a woman named Helen Bryan?”

She canted her head to one side, thinking it over.

“No…no, I don’t think. Who is she?”

“His worst mistake,” Jake offered.

“My ex-wife,” I specified. “She was the one who dropped my name to Leslie. I never quite got how they were acquainted.”

“I’m sorry, but this is the first I’ve heard of her. Like I’ve said, Leslie kept me in the dark a lot over all of this. It doesn’t sound like you’re on very good terms with her, but perhaps she would be the one to ask?”

“Probably so,” I said, “but she appears to be missing.”

“What?” Jake crowed. “You didn’t tell me that, Graham.”

“Slipped my mind,” I lied. His mouth hung open. “Later,” I said.

I told Barbara that I was sorry to have bothered her so much, and she said it was no trouble, though she looked mighty troubled to me. I offered her a hug, a bit out of character for me, which she accepted. I noticed she was clutching a small, crumpled photo in her left hand. It was of Leslie Wheeler, smiling toothily and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. We had both loved and lost, I thought, but her loss was a hell of a lot worse than mine.

10

Eustace piloted a 1918 Olds, a touring car, that sputtered as though it was dying all the way from Hollywood where she collected her niece. They were heading to the Valley, where Eustace now manipulated the contraption along narrow, winding roads with gloved hands and squinted eyes.

It was the crummiest automobile Grace Baronsky had ever ridden in, an enormous step down from the Twombley back in Idaho or the car Saul sent for her every workday morning.

“It is absolutely divine to see how well you’re doing, Gracie,” Eustace hollered above the wind and the motor. “Divine. And you look terrific. Better than I’ve ever seen you. To think what a skinny child you were before I whisked you away from nowhere. A transformation. A meta — what is it?”

“Metamorphosis,” Grace said.

“You’re a butterfly,” replied her aunt.

The sun hung white and hazy, low in the sky but above the hills that surrounded the San Fernando like sentinels. Houses and bungalows were springing up all around, with filling stations and clothing boutiques and minor movie palaces to service the people who would live in them. Los Angeles never stopped spreading, growing. Grace felt like the whole of the country was spilling into the city and its environs, as if America had been upended by some great, massive god and all the people were helplessly rolling west. How many of them came in search of fame and fortune? How few were as fortunate as she, discovered within a few short years and primed to take the world by storm?

How lucky…

“Just how did you meet this Joe?” she asked, eager to disrupt her own musing.

“Joe, Joe,” Eustace sang. “Good, good Joe. The man is a prince, my child. Not too rich — not yet, anyway — but none too poor, either. And he knows everyone worth knowing. Well, everyone apart from you, of course. But aren’t we just about to change that?”

Grace smiled, barely.

“He sells pictures all over the country; to theaters that want to show them, see. A lot of them are all connected up to the studios, but there are tons that aren’t, and my Joe writes them and works it out. So if your old ma sees your picture at the Boise Century, it might very well be Joe Sommer who got it there.”

Her throat constricted slightly at the thought of her mother watching Angel of the Abyss—watching little Gracie die and come back, murder and flaunt and fornicate. It was far from the first time this waking nightmare stirred horror in her breast, but it had yet to relent in its intensity.

“Matter of fact,” her aunt continued, “I might even bet on that. You see Joe knows Mr. Veritek, dearheart. Not extraordinarily well, mind you, but Veritek is an independent and Joe says the independents represent the prepon — prepolder…”

“Preponderance.”

“Of his business, yes.”

“This one may be a tough sell in the heartland,” Grace said low.

“What’s that, Gracie?”

“Never mind. Are we nearly there? The motor is jangling my nerves.”

“Spitting distance!”

“Grand.”

The bungalow sat low and squat at the bottom of a gradually declining hill, surrounded by equally squat palms and crawling vines that struggled toward the windows. Eustace almost flooded the Olds easing the thing down to the bottom, where she guttered it and clapped her gloves together with an awkward squeal.

A stone path curved between the palms toward the front door, above which an open transom window coughed up a thin rail of pungent cigar smoke. Grace wrinkled her nose. Eustace knocked gingerly.

The man who opened the door revealed himself to be tall, a bit round around the middle, gray at the temples. He wore a thin black mustache just above his upper lip, which tightened around the end of his cigar. His eyes were gray, friendly but lingering. Grace felt blood fill her cheeks as her aunt planted a hand at the small of her back and pushed her forward.

“Mr. Sommer,” she said. “Allow me to present my niece, the picture star Grace Baron.”

“Oh, she’s not a star yet,” Joe Sommer said, spreading his lips to show short, squarish teeth. “But I reckon she will be. You can wager that.”

“A gentleman of the highest order!” Eustace declared. Joe took Grace by the hand, a bit roughly, and brushed his mouth across the back of it.

“Champagne on the lanai,” he said. “Olives and cheese. I have the cheese delivered.”

“La-nai,” Eustace mouthed to Grace.

They all went inside.

The bottle popped like a gunshot, causing Grace to flinch. Joe’s mouth stretched into a lupine grin and he laughed at her.

“Let’s see those glasses, ladies,” he said.

They sat in slat-backed chairs on a concrete patio behind the bungalow — Joe’s lanai — which was surrounded by more ratty palms and a new white fence. The sky looked like the ocean and a mild breeze picked up from the west. Eustace kicked off her shoes and giggled. Grace drank her champagne quietly.

“Saul Veritek,” Joe said at some length, his mouth full of half-chewed olives, “is a friend of mine. He may be a small fry compared to the big boys, Paramount and United Artists and what have you, but the man’s got a solid head on that flabby neck of his. You can trust me when I tell you if Saul Veritek says he’s going to make a star out of you, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

Grace’s ears burned. Her aunt tittered and shook all over, sloshing her champagne around in the glass.

“Good God, Gracie,” she said. “You’re a long way from Idaho now.”

“I suppose I trust Saul,” Grace said with some caution. “It’s Jack Parson I’m worried about. He’s missed days, you know. And when I went home the other night, he was in my place waiting for me. You’d have thought he was drunk as a lord, but he really doesn’t drink much. He’s getting a little, I don’t know…crazy.”

Joe chuckled. “I know him too, a little. That Parson thinks he’s an ar-teest. Our man Saul doesn’t have the patience for that malarkey, not when there’s money at stake — and in the picture business, money is always at stake. You want to be an artist, go paint a picture. This is industry, I always say. We’re all cogs in the machine, but my God, what a beautiful machine.”

“Alarming that he broke into your home, though,” Eustace said. “What sort of man does that?”

“Feh,” Joe groaned, waving his hand. “That one’s harmless. Believe me. I probably shouldn’t say this in the company of nice ladies like you two, but Jack Parson hasn’t exactly fomented a reputation as a ladies’ man in this town.”

Eustace’s face paled and her cherry-red mouth formed a broad O. “You don’t mean…”

“I don’t know the old fellow that well,” Joe said. “I don’t have the hardest evidence here, but word gets around in Hollywood. You screw up and everybody knows it. And glory be, just about everybody screws up out here.”

“Some worse than others,” Grace commented, half to herself.

“How do you mean, Gracie?” Eustace leaned in, eager for something juicy.

“It’s just a strange place,” Grace said, her eyes fixed on her glass. “You hear all kinds of things that make Picture Show look like a fat pack of lies. In the magazines, everyone is just so happy to be here. Playground of the gods, and all that. But I haven’t met very many happy people, Aunt Eustace. Most of the people I’ve met seem…broken, somehow.”

“Half of ‘em are dipsomaniacs, a quarter of them faggots,” Joe grunted, shaking his head. “Sure, there’s crime. A few bodies’ve been buried. But hell — pardon me, ladies — but seriously, my old man worked the iron mines in Michigan in the nineties and you know what? The men running that show were a bunch of crooks, too. Like I said: industry. Just keep your nose clean, Gracie. You do your work and go home at the end of the day. Stay away from the vultures. You’ll be fine, darling. Just fine.”

Just fine, she mouthed. She didn’t believe it.

11

With one of my cigarettes clutched between his fingers and a thousand-yard stare ahead of him at the 101, Jake exhaled noisily and flicked his ash out the window.

“We could write a screenplay about this,” he said dreamily. “You and me. It’s some story already.”

I was driving, a rental from the last century we’d picked up for a little more than twice what I expected to pay. Good old California. I turned the volume knob down on the ancient tape deck radio and said, “Have at it — you have my blessing.”

“Sorry, man,” he came back. “I guess you’ve got a personal line in all this.”

I said: “Yeah, I guess I do.”

He tossed the smoke out the window, and I glanced in the rearview mirror, scanning for cops. Maybe Jake forgot how serious they were about tossing butts in Southern California, but I sure hadn’t. They didn’t screw around when it came to fire hazards.

“So tell me,” he said, rolling the window back up. “What the hell happened?”

“When?”

“With your wife, man. What’s the story there?”

“She left me. You know that.”

“It’s about all I know. What with all this shit, seems like there’s more to it, you think?”

There was. Plenty more. Truth was, I’d been married to a sociopath for years and pretended I didn’t know it. I did know it, though. I just didn’t want to know it.

“She’s out of my life,” I said tersely.

“Not anymore she’s not. I mean, she’s out, but she keeps cropping up.”

“We’ll be in the Valley pretty soon,” I said. “Traffic’s not bad, considering.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, taking the hint. “Considering.”

If there was a Knucklehead Hall of Fame back in Boston, I’d have a revered place on the wall. I was never a world-class fuckup — that’s a different hall of fame altogether — but I’d done my share of significantly stupid things over the years that knocked me down a peg or two to plain old knucklehead status. Marrying Helen Bryan was chief among them.

Maybe that’s not fair. Marrying her I can forgive myself for. Sticking around? That’s another matter.

After we made it official I worked on an impractical English Literature degree and she talked about all the things she wanted to do but never had the motivation to actually execute. After about six months up there, my wife clammed up on me. Stopped talking to me. Just shut me out. Then she started running around with a new friend, who happened to be male and liked to take her out to fancy restaurants and late-night movies. I complained about it, and she threatened to divorce me if I was going to make a big deal about it. I relented. See what I mean? Grade A Knucklehead.

Things went from bad to mind-bogglingly shitty from there. By then I knew damn well that I was being cuckolded, as they used to say, but I just swallowed that pill and immersed myself in my graduate work, knowing it would never amount to anything since I wasn’t planning on continuing with it once they handed me a diploma. I tried to write a novel. It didn’t go anywhere so I gave it up. I got to drinking a little more than I ought to have. Then I got to drinking a lot more than I ought to have. The booze drove me into a hole and it drove my wife even deeper into the arms of Mr. Wonderful. Then one night I got a call from the Norfolk County lockup. My bride was being held after her beau got pulled over in Brookline and the cops found a gram of blow in the trunk. A little while and a warrant later, they found an ounce in Helen’s purse, too.

I bailed her out to the tune of five grand. The charges didn’t stick. She literally begged me on her knees to forgive her, to put it all behind us. Knucklehead that I was, that’s just what I did. And when it turned out she was pregnant and we both knew, given the coldness of our marital bed those last several months, that it couldn’t possibly be mine, I turned a blind eye once again while my wife quietly took care of it. As they used to say.

The Other Guy disappeared from our lives and though things didn’t exactly go back to normal, at least she stayed around. I quit drinking. I never asked about the coke and she never brought it up. We ate supper together, watched television. Went to bed at a reasonable hour. It was tense, though, the way so much was said without either of us ever saying anything. The way she’d recoil if my leg accidently brushed up against her in our bed at night.

And then, just like that, she was gone. She didn’t take much, enough for a long vacation, but there was no note, no phone call. No warning. I got an email a week later. Helen had run off to California with Other Guy Number Two. I didn’t even know about this one. She’d been a lot more careful. The divorce papers showed up in the mail within a month. I signed the waiver and sent them back, and then I went directly to the nearest package store to buy the biggest bottle of bottom shelf rotgut in the place. Inside six weeks they knew me by name there. Good morning, Mr. Woodard. Yeah — morning.

Goddamned knucklehead.

Destroyed by love and stupidity. I can’t think of an older story than that.

Florence Sommer lived in a small postwar crackerbox house in Sherman Oaks with rotting shutters and stray cats lingering arrogantly in the small side yard. I pulled the crappy rental onto the side of the street in front and enacted that age-old L.A. tradition of trying to figure out whether I could legally park there. The signs all seemed to contradict one another and even on their own didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I threw caution to the wind and left the car where I’d stopped. There wasn’t a meter, but I didn’t much care.

A doormat welcomed us by way of smiling cat faces and the legend HOPE YOU LIKE CATS! I didn’t really have an opinion about them one way or the other but felt like it was about to swing sharply. Jake rang the bell. We heard shuffling feet and a hoarse voice politely asking someone named Mr. Kitty to move out of the way. A second later the door opened and there stood a heavyset woman, mid-sixties, with a terrible blue-black dye job and a hideous sweater more cat hair than wool.

“Yes?”

“Are you Mrs. Sommer?” I asked, channeling my inner Jack Webb.

“I’m Florence Sommer…” she began with no little caution.

“My name is Graham Woodard,” I told her. “I work with the Silent Film Appreciation Society?” Came off as a question. Not very firm.

“Oh, Leslie and Barbara,” Mrs. Sommer said. “Nice ladies. Well, come on in. Hope you like cats!”

Jake and I exchanged glances and he shrugged. We went on in. It smelled like cat shit and ammonia, a combination that wrestled my nostrils and won in nothing flat. Florence Sommer tottered from the door to the nearby kitchenette, where she hovered over the range.

“Tea?” she squawked. She sounded like Louis Armstrong’s little sister. When she fired up a filterless Camel, I could see why.

“You got any beer?” Jake said.

I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. “Tea is fine, thank you.”

He hissed in my ear: “I’m fucking sick of tea, man.”

I jabbed him again. His eyes watered and he smiled nicely at the old lady.

“I’m sorry to tell you I haven’t gone back through my father’s things since I last talked to Leslie,” she said, setting the kettle on the burner. “I’m sure she’s getting impatient, and I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Are you boys her enforcers?”

She tittered. It was like a goose choking to death.

“Ha, no,” I deflected. We hadn’t discussed whether to tell Mrs. Sommer that Leslie was dead, primarily because it hadn’t occurred to me whether we should. I was too preoccupied with thoughts of my ex-wife, which led me directly to re-experiencing all the anger I had ever had about her. Now I was in the mix and had to make the call, and fast. “Ma’am, do you mind if we sit down at the table for a moment?”

A dark look overcame her jowly face and Mrs. Sommer nodded, gesturing for us to sit down first. The table stood just to the side of the half-kitchen, the top cluttered and stacked high with magazines, unopened mail, and cans of cat food. When she sat across from us, she laced her fingers as a fat orange cat leapt up on the table in front of her. I was startled, but she just petted the animal and waited for me to begin.

“I’m afraid I have some ugly news,” I said, wincing at the banality of my wording. “Ms. Wheeler has, well — she’s passed away.”

“Oh, no,” she said, bunching her eyebrows and looking down at the cat.

Jake cleared his throat.

“It’s a little more serious than that,” he said.

I said, “Jake…”

“Look, Graham — this situation is fu — it’s dire, man. I mean, isn’t it? Now that we’re in it?”

“We’re not in it. I’m in it. You’re just here.”

My heart was starting to pound in my chest. That anger I was harboring toward my missing ex was finding a new target in Jake. As for poor Florence Sommer, her eyes were getting glassy wet and her mouth hanging open, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I dropped it.

“Leslie Wheeler was killed yesterday,” I said. I said it like we were talking about someone neither of us knew, a third-rate celebrity we vaguely remembered. Florence Sommer erupted into tears.

“Oh God, oh my God,” she sobbed. The kettle screeched. I looked to Jake, and he rushed over to take care of it. “I barely knew her, but God. God. What happened?”

Jake was pouring hot water, being domestic. I could have laughed otherwise.

“It’s all pretty hazy right now, but it certainly looks like it has everything to do with the film,” I said.

“My father’s movie? Angel of the Abyss?”

“That’s the one, yes.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice even more gravelly, if such was possible.

She tamped her smoke out in an empty can of cat chow and immediately fired up another. I pulled the pack from my pocket, shook it and asked, “Do you mind?”

“No, no — go ahead. Smoke up a storm. God’s sake.”

I lit up. Filtered, which made me feel like second fiddle to her hardcore habits.

“I take it the police haven’t come around to talk to you?” I asked her.

“No, nobody. This is news to me. Dreadful news. I’m so sorry about Leslie, but how in the world could this possibly have anything to do with that old movie?”

I tightened my mouth, half-amazed at the cops’ ineffectiveness — we’d gotten to Florence Sommer before they did? — and half completely expecting it. Overworked and understaffed, maybe. Hell, it wasn’t like they didn’t have other murders to contend with. This was Los Angeles, after all.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Whatever it is, whoever it is, they’re taking it seriously enough to have killed one person already and tried to add me to the list.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Everything makes sense, even if you don’t quite get it yet,” Jake said, stepping slowly over with two steaming cups. I was impressed with his Zen, even if it was bullshit.

“I think what he means is that there’s an answer to all of this, we’re just in the dark now.”

“It’s crazy,” she said, accepting her cup from Jake with a small smile. “I’ve found loads of odds and ends from Dad’s estate, called all over the city to find people to deal with them. That movie was just one of them — I didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up.”

“Nobody knowing what it is seems to be a status quo somebody wants to maintain,” I said.

“But it’s just an old movie,” she muttered. It was getting to be a song I was tired of hearing despite the truth in it.

“It’s got to be more than that, given what’s been happening. I don’t know if you read anything about Grace Baron when you looked the picture up, but she disappeared shortly after the movie was made. She was declared legally dead a little while after that.”

“What are we talking about here?” she asked me. “The 1920s?”

I nodded. The cat purred loudly.

“Crazy,” she said again. Like I didn’t know.

“Mrs. Sommer, do you think we could have a look at your father’s things?”

“The estate?” she said, eager to be sure we were all on the same page as to the definition of the collection.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t keep that stuff here, I haven’t got the room. There’s a storage unit I rent, in North Hollywood. That’s where it all is.”

“I’d really like to go check it out,” I said. “If you’re willing to do that.”

“Hell, honey,” she said, shaking her head. “Truth is, it’s all junk. Most of it, anyway. Half of it’s broken and most of the rest worthless to begin with. I was only reminiscing, going through some of it, when I chanced upon that old film can. Far as I’m concerned, you can borrow the key.”

Jake said, “That would be very kind.” I was surprised by his manners.

Mrs. Sommer rose from her chair, grunting a little, and wobbled back into the short hall by the front door where she rooted through a drawer. The fat orange cat followed, slaloming her legs, and was joined by another cat, this one black and thin. When she came back, she was dangling a bronze key by a plastic fob. She put it in my palm and I looked at the fob. It said JUNIOR’S STORAGE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD. The street address and phone number were printed in gold underneath.

“Thank you.”

“I’d go with you, but to be honest, I don’t really know you boys, do I?” said the lady who let us into her house and gave me a key to her dead father’s personal possessions. I shrugged and forced a smile.

“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.

“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.

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:

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.

I’d barely managed a hello before a froggy voice croaked, “Mr. Woodard? This is Florence Sommer. I do so hate to trouble you, but do you think you could come see me right away? There are a few things I didn’t tell you and your associate while you were here, important things.”

“We’re just watching some of the reels we found among your father’s things,” I told her. “There were quite a few, as a matter of fact. Can I call you back after we’re done?”

“I’d rather talk to you now, if I can,” she said, a little breathlessly. “I was reticent before, but to be truthful this simply can’t wait.”

I narrowed my eyes, stepped out of the lobby to light a Pall Mall.

“What’s this all about, Mrs. Sommer?”

“Please do hurry, Mr. Woodard. I’ll put some coffee on before you get here.”

With that, the phone clicked abruptly in my ear. She’d hung up.

The picture was into the fifth reel when I went back in to explain the situation to Jake. To my surprise, he was almost too engrossed to care what I said to him, when what I said amounted to I’m going back to Sherman Oaks, take notes.

As I reluctantly left, poor Clara was being stripped naked on a tomb in a foggy cemetery, surrounded on all sides by cloaked apparitions. I prayed this wouldn’t be my last shot at seeing the rest — or most of the rest — of Angel of the Abyss.

Mrs. Sommer’s cottage was lit up from every window when I pulled the rental back in front of it for the second time that day. I checked the digital clock in the dash before I killed the engine — it was a quarter past eight in the evening.

After I made my way down the path to her door, I knocked all of once before the door opened without any clicking locks and Florence Sommer’s substantial frame filled the doorway. Her face was slick with sweat and her chest heaved as though she’d been humping it on a treadmill, a piece of equipment I was willing to bet good money she neither owned nor had ever used.

“Thank you, Mr. Woodard,” she wheezed. “Thank you for coming. I’m so sorry to have inconvenienced you this way.”

Her voice was monotone, unnatural. Almost robotic. I scrunched one eye half-closed as I pushed into the short hallway, a moment too late to grasp her blatant attempt to alert me. By then it didn’t much matter.

The arm that wrapped around the woman’s neck yanked back, dragging her violently into the kitchen where two other men waited. It took me a few seconds to register what was happening, for their faces to come into focus. They were regular faces, people you’d see in the street and instantly forget. I thought then that I’d have a hard time describing them to the police later.

Something snapped and a white star of light glinted beneath Florence Sommer’s chin. My eyes darted toward it and I saw a clean blade jutting from the hand of the one who was restraining her. She yelped hoarsely. I froze in place, staring like the aliens had just landed.

One of the men nearest the sink fired up a smoke. I wondered if he was trying to assert his dominance by doing so. Old Florence wouldn’t have minded.

He said, “Graham Woodard, yes?”

I nodded.

The man sucked deeply from his smoke, sighed the poison back out. He looked to his compatriot with the knife at the woman’s throat. Then he nodded, too.

It happened in slow-mo. Sort of. I realized what was going to happen before it happened, a sort of well-informed premonition. Then I tried to lunge for the knife, but my body wasn’t on speaking terms with my brain by then. All I managed to do was stumble forward a few paces so I could get a better look at the blade slicing a poor old woman’s neck open, right in front of me. The skin parted like a puppet’s mouth, exposing red that stayed inside a second too long before it all spilled out at once. The blood formed a curtain that draped down over her cat-hair-infused sweater, soaking it in no time at all. Florence Sommer’s tongue lolled out of her mouth and she made a wet sound that turned my stomach over twice before it seized like a fist. I wanted more than anything to throw up, but my stomach wasn’t cooperating any better than the rest of me. So instead I just screamed.

Somewhere nearby but out of my field of vision, one of her cats hissed.

“Shoulda stayed in Beantown, shit-bird.”

That was the guy by the sink again. I turned to him as the killer let Mrs. Sommer’s body slump to the dirty linoleum. She slid in her own blood, which smeared up the side of her face. She was dead.

I said, “Hey.”

It was all I had time to say in my defense. The third man, a phantom until now, produced a small black gun from the inside of his jacket. The gun went up, pointing at me. I raised my hands. Pointlessly, it seemed at the time, I memorized the gunman’s face. Gray eyes, blonde hair. Clean shaven. Vertical lines on his cheeks, like some people have. I could pick him out of a lineup if I had to.

He squeezed the trigger and the gun barked fire.