Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Read online

  “There’s a hidden staircase here.”

  “What?” He had to put on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the realtor. He’d followed her up the center aisle, across the apron of the orchestra pit, and back along the right wall toward the exit to the lobby. She’d stopped abruptly to pry with her fingers at a seam in the plaster. A six-foot-tall rectangular section came away, squealing on parched hinges. Dust motes swarmed up the current of air in a narrow shaft filled with steps.

  “It leads to the projection booth.” Anita frowned at a split nail. “Fink’s crew seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to keep it out of sight.”

  “Illusion.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “They called Hollywood the Dream Factory. A dream doesn’t work if you know where it’s coming from.”

  “Do you teach film?”

  “No, the university pays me to look for them.”

  “Do they go missing often?”

  “Since the beginning. Ninety percent of the movies made before the advent of sound are lost, mostly due to deliberate destruction back when no one thought there would be profit in reissuing them. Carelessness and neglect has seen to the rest, and it’s not only silents. Poor storage conditions have decimated films made as recently as the nineteen fifties. My job is to scrounge up what’s left before it vanishes.”

  “Huh. Well, all this gussying-up is lost on me. I just like to pop in a tape or a disc and veg out on the sofa in my sweats.”

  He smiled. “Bet you liked Moulin Rouge.”

  “Oh, yes. It was fabulous! Now, watch your step. I’m sure these stairs aren’t up to code.”

  In the stairwell he thought he smelled stale popcorn and the residue of thousands of Lucky Strikes and nickel cigars. It was probably dry rot, or possibly phantom Fink sneaking a snack and a smoke. Valentino had to turn sideways to avoid brushing the walls and soiling his shirt.

  The booth was actually a spacious loft, with a square opening overlooking the remains of the screen. He remembered that The Oracle had been one of the last L.A. theaters to show 3-D movies during the brief heyday of Bwana Devil and Dial M for Murder. That process had required twin Bell & Howell projectors, each the size of a VW Beetle. They’d have needed plenty of room, but not this much. He could have put all the furniture in his apartment into this space.

  Anita seemed to sense the source of his curiosity. She pointed. “There used to be a wall there. On the other side was a sort of lumber room where they stored posters and props. I probably don’t have to tell you they had live shows during the Depression, to entice people who wouldn’t normally spend money on a ticket. In the sixties this was a hippie commune.” Her voice dropped to a whisper on the last two words, as if she were referring to a colony of lepers. “There’s a bathroom through that door, which the projectionist used. It’s a comfortable bachelor arrangement. Is there a Mrs. Valentino?”

  He wondered if she was hitting on him, then discarded the thought as embarrassingly narcissistic. In any case a romantic relationship with someone who thought Moulin Rouge was fabulous was doomed.

  “I barely have time for a private life, much less marriage. What’s in there?” He pointed to a shallow alcove whose back wall curved to follow the shoulder of the roof.

  “Just some cans, the flat kind they put film in. They’re empty.”

  He felt a flash of disappointment. He’d once found two hundred feet of Theda Bara’s Cleopatra being used to demonstrate a toy projector in a junk shop in Oklahoma City, and on first glance that place had held far less promise than this. “Is it all right if I look?”

  “Be careful. The floor’s in bad shape.”

  The enclosure was six feet wide and four deep. Stepping inside, he felt with his feet for the joists beneath the curling plywood.

  “It was plastered over too,” she said, “probably to conserve heat.”

  The air was stale but dry and cool. There was no light fixture. He peered through the dimness, groping at built-in wire racks holding jumbles of film cans that made a tinny empty noise when he moved them, a melancholy sound. He placed a hand against the cantilevered back wall to support himself and reached down to tug at the first in a row of cans standing on edge on the bottom rack.

  Something thumped inside.

  CHAPTER

  2

  “THE NAME IS Valentino.”

  “Yeah, right.” The attendant in the campus garage, gray-haired and wearing bifocals, was old enough to assign some meaning to the name. “You look a little like him, at that.”

  Sadly, that was true. His light olive coloring, clean profile, and the glossy black hair that he could control only by brushing straight back from his forehead were a coincidence that caused him grief on a regular basis. In college he’d been known as Sheik, a nickname he’d likely still be suffering under if the new generation were aware there had even been a silent cinema, let alone a star who shared his name.

  He stuck his driver’s license outside his window. “Look it up on your list.”

  The attendant took the card and ran a thick finger down the sheet on the clipboard hanging inside the booth. He grunted and handed back the license. “Next time don’t forget your parking pass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And bring your camel.”

  His office was a crawl space in a building that had once been part of the university’s power plant, and a reliquary of film books and piles of videocassettes, laser discs, and DVDs, with kitschy likenesses of old-time movie stars and cartoon characters in cloth and porcelain and painted tin on shelves—gifts from well-meaning friends who’d overestimated his interest in vintage cinema culture. He couldn’t spend more than thirty minutes there without becoming claustrophobic, but he had part-time access to a secretary named Ruth and full-time access to Kyle Broadhead, a Film Studies professor whose name appeared in the bibliographies of half the references in Valentino’s office. Broadhead occupied the room across the hall.

  But not at present.

  Valentino knocked, then opened the door to the little monastic cell, bare of books and bric-a-brac and Broadhead.

  “He’s out.”

  He turned to face the gray, polished-stone stare of Ruth, forted up behind her desk in the linoleum no-man’s-land that separated the two offices. Every dyed-black hair was in place and sprayed stiff as vinyl, and her expression was unreadable as ever behind its enamel mask of makeup. She resembled Jane Russell circa 1943, put up in brine.

  “I can see he’s out,” he said. “He’s never out. Which hospital did they take him to?”

  “The fall term began today. He makes it a point to drop in on his classroom the first and last day of the semester.”

  He looked at his watch. Third hour had just started. “It’s too much to hope for that they’d wait till fall. I’d settle for the end of August.”

  “Since when do you care? You don’t study and you don’t teach.” Which by her standards was the sum total of anyone’s usefulness to academe. She herself attended a course in kickboxing two nights a week.

  “Every day we see each other, he asks, ‘What’s new?’, and I say, ‘Nothing much.’ The first time all year I have something worth talking about and he suddenly remembers he’s faculty.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Not you, Ms. Buzzkill.”

  “What’s that?” Her store of vernacular had closed its doors after Sputnik.

  “Someone who stands in front of the Pantages and shouts at the people waiting in line to see The Crying Game, ‘She’s a man!’”

  “It was the Pacific, and I was speaking in a normal tone of voice. The fresh kid at the popcorn counter short-changed me.”

  “When Kyle gets in, please tell him I want to talk to him.”

  Her telephone rang. She snapped up the receiver. “Power plant.”

  Valentino kept his silence and carried it into his private space. He and Broadhead had been trying for years to persuade her to say “Department of Film Preservation” whe
n she answered the phone. It was Ruth’s opinion, frequently expressed, that an electric generator performed a more important service to the community than two grown men sitting around watching movies day after day. Apart from the fact that it was nearly impossible to dismiss an employee with her seniority, they put up with her for her inexhaustible supply of industry gossip. Her sources riddled the clerical departments of all the major studios, and she’d been around town longer than CinemaScope. Not only did Ruth know where all the bodies were buried in Hollywood; she’d helped dig some of the holes.

  He opened a computer file and tried to busy himself cataloguing recent acquisitions, but they were mostly documentaries on extinct local flora and home movies of wooden oil derricks on Sepulveda and orange groves in the Valley; subjects of interest mainly to the people who wrote pamphlets for the historical society. He kept pausing to check the clock on the screen, whose second hand seemed to have contracted catatonia. After a glacial age, the door opened without a knock and Kyle Broadhead stuck his big sleepy-looking face into the office.

  “Rotten feng shui,” he said, dragging his gaze around the clutter. “You ought to shovel all this crap into a Dumpster.”

  “I need the crap. We don’t all of us carry a forty-volume encyclopedia of film around in our skulls.”

  “What do you get from the bobble-head Popeye, memoirs of the early days at Fleischer Studios?”

  “I didn’t ask you in here to discuss interior decorating. I bought a theater. The Oracle, in West Hollywood. And that’s not the biggest news.”

  The professor removed a stack of original screenplays from a plastic scoop chair and stretched out in it, almost supine with his rumpled head resting on the back and his ankles crossed, unscrewing and screwing back together the pieces of the pipe he was no longer permitted to smoke on campus. With his eyelids at half-mast and his chin drawn into the loose flesh around his neck, he looked like every musty Russian pedagogue Oscar Homolka had ever played. “Best thing you can do for that mausoleum, the humanitarian thing, would be to smack it in the kisser with a wrecking ball.”

  “I’m going to restore it.”

  “Why?”

  Valentino shook his head. “For someone who spends most of his time threshing around in the past, you’re incapable of nostalgia.”

  “There’s a difference between preserving history and trying to apply CPR to a corpse. The Golden Age is always the one you missed, and you can no more bring it back than last year’s lapels. Your sentiment isn’t even firsthand. You’re what, thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “A sprout. You weren’t born when places like the Oracle stopped showing first-run features. Your generation grew up watching Indiana Jones in a concrete bunker at the end of the mall.”

  “I have an old soul.”

  “My inner child is older than your old soul. Also, you’ve forgotten where you live. You’ve no concept of the bureaucratic nightmare you’re about to enter. You can’t comply with one ordinance without violating three others.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t mention the cost.”

  “Not to mention the cost. But that’s your five-thousand-pound hog and you can slop it. Don’t ask me for a loan. I’m saving up for a funeral that will blow the doors off this town.” He clamped the pipe between his teeth and held up his hands, like a director framing a shot. “I can see the headline in the Mirror now: ‘Who the Hell Did He Think He Was?’”

  “The Los Angeles Mirror folded years ago.”

  “My point precisely. Leave the Jurassic to us fossils.”

  “Anyway, I don’t need your money. I knocked a hole in my savings to put down a deposit, and I’ve got a four-oh-one K just sitting around drawing interest.”

  “Drop in the ocean.”

  “Will Rogers told Joel McCrea to bite the bullet and buy a ranch. He said they weren’t making any more real estate. McCrea died a millionaire many times over.”

  “No danger of that in your case. The Big One could come tomorrow and dump us all in Davy Jones’s locker.”

  “Just as long as my check clears first. I haven’t told you my big news.”

  “Bigger than going broke on the scale of William Randolph Hearst?”

  “Try Greed.”

  Broadhead unclamped his pipe and pulled it apart. “This is the opposite of greed. It’s financial hara-kiri.”

  “Not ‘greed,’ lowercase Roman. Think uppercase italics.”

  “Greed?”

  “Greed.”

  “Greed as in Erich von Stroheim? Greed as in forty-two reels and eight to ten hours’ running time? Greed as in thirty of those reels sent straight to the incinerator by MGM in nineteen hundred and twenty-five? That Greed?”

  “That Greed.” Valentino frowned. The word was starting to sound strange after so much repetition. “I take exception to the incinerator theory. There were enough cans on the rack to suggest at least four hours of footage. That’s twice as much as anyone’s seen in eighty years.”

  “Bah!” said Broadhead, and he’d never sounded more like Oscar Homolka. “You need to spend less time in the processing lab. The acetate’s eating your brain.”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking that. You’ve forgotten more about film than I’ll ever know.”

  “Flattering, but inaccurate. I’ve forgotten nothing.”

  Idle braggadocio, from anyone but the author of The Persistence of Vision, the bible of celluloid preservation. The book chronicled Broadhead’s thirty-year quest for the original 1912 version of Quo Vadis? produced in Italy; a quest interrupted by the three years he’d spent in prison in Yugoslavia, accused of spying. He was Valentino’s only mentor. Valentino filled the old historian in on the details of his discovery.

  Broadhead put away the pipe and tugged down the points of his sweater-vest, its pattern blurry beneath a layer of spilled ash. He’d been violating the university’s tobacco ban for years, confident in his tenure and reputation as an ornament of the institution. “I thought I was a buccaneer. I never committed to buy a house on the evidence of a label on a film can I didn’t even open.”

  “I didn’t want to open one under those conditions. You know how unstable that old nitrate stock is. Also I didn’t want to make Anita suspicious and hike the asking price. I made sure the contents came with the building. For all I knew, the next person she showed the place to might have been with MCA or Ted Turner. Or worse, some real-estate developer who wouldn’t know Stroheim from Streisand and throw it all out. I took a leap of faith.”

  “Evel Knievel took a leap of faith. You jumped off the Empire State Building. Val, you’ve been daydreaming for years about buying one of these broke-down popcorn palaces and fixing it up. If you thought you needed an excuse, it didn’t have to be the grail.”

  “You’re right up to a point. My lease is running out and I need a place with a screening room. But I didn’t imagine seeing that label. You know I’m more down-to-earth than that.”

  “Not on recent intelligence. As long as we’re quoting the dead, you may remember what W. C. Fields said.”

  Valentino smiled. “‘In this town, you can’t tell where Hollywood ends and the d.t.’s begin.’”

  Resting his case, he propped his feet up on his desk, a thing he rarely did in the presence of his personal hero, and let Broadhead ponder while he breathed in the cramped academic atmosphere. It was alien to his own restless nature. He gave it his time in return for the heady uncertainty of never knowing when he might be called upon to abandon everything on a moment’s notice and fly to Rome to retrieve a Fellini outtake or to a landfill in Alaska, quite literally to dig up the lost westerns of Thomas Ince. He had truly married adventure when he’d dropped out of film school to apprentice the ragtag team of professional scrounge artists who had founded the film preservation program. He couldn’t act, direct, or write screenplays, but he could Dumpster-dive with the best.

  “Everything’s against it, including timing,” Broadhead said. “The film was
four years old when the Oracle opened. By then you couldn’t give away tickets to a silent feature, so what was it doing in storage? I think your realtor salted the mine. She probably did her homework on you after you made the appointment to see the place.”

  “That’s diabolical, even for California.”

  “Von Stroheim chose the title Greed for a reason.”

  “Anyway, it can’t hurt to check it out. I want you to go down there with me.”

  “Why? I’ve made my pilgrimage for this term: two hundred and forty-six steps one way, and nothing but cretins with iPods on the other end. All I want to do is soak in a hot bath and watch Survivor. I won’t be your Sancho Panza.”

  “I’m nervous about handling nitrate stock. If I drop a can and the lid pops off and twenty minutes of Greed implodes on contact with the air, I’ll wind up sticking my head in an oven. You’ve got decades’ more experience dealing with disappointment.” Valentino took his feet off the desk. “Kyle, I don’t ask you for many favors, just a point of reference now and then.”

  “And each point was five years of my life, not counting that shit hole in Zagreb.” The professor dug out his pipe and a leather pouch nearly as traveled as he. “It’s time we laid this chimera to rest. It’s consumed too much money and far too many careers, starting with von Stroheim’s.”

  “So the answer’s no.”

  “Who said that? My God, man, it’s Greed. Pick me up out front.” He struck a match.

  CHAPTER

  3

  RIDING UP LA CIENEGA, wearing the flat tweed cap that made him look like an immigrant fresh off the boat, Broadhead sat unnaturally erect, hands gripping the dashboard and gaze fixed on the street. Suddenly he said, “Turn here!”

  Valentino, ever the dutiful protégé, made the right turn onto a side street he’d passed ten times a week and had never noticed before, a narrow wandering affair with too many cars parked on it in front of small clapboard houses predating the motion-picture industry: student housing, from the ROOM TO LET signs and telltale Segway scooters parked on some of the porches. Broadhead directed him to stop before a chalky two-story with basketballs and soccer balls on the lawn like melons in a patch. The professor got out, knocked on the door, and vanished inside. Minutes later he reappeared, holding open the door for a girl to come out.