BOZAL PICKED UP the telephone handset, which appeared to be a direct line to the projection room. “Finished rewinding?”
“Sí, Abuelo. Just putting the last reel in the can.”
She was teasing her grandfather. Obviously she’d overheard him upbraiding Eduardo for his Spanish conceit; but he didn’t rise to the bait. He seemed to be more permissive with his granddaughter. “Bring ’em all down.”
A tense silence—tense for Valentino—fell while they waited. Presently the young woman descended the steps with cans under both arms and at a nod from Bozal stacked them on the vacant seat beside him.
He scowled up at her. “I don’t expect the eggheads in that high-dollar school to teach you anything, but don’t my lessons count?”
Red spots showed on her dusky cheeks, the first sign she’d given of embarrassment. She muttered an apology and rearranged the cans so that they stood upright, braced by the armrests.
He said something in a flood of Spanish too rapid for even one fluent to keep up; thus did he deliver a rebuke for her earlier impertinence and display his superior vocabulary in one stroke. Lips pressed tight, she nodded and made her exit.
He waited until the door closed, then tipped a hand toward the film. “Do with it how you like; give it to your bosses or use it to re-open your playhouse with a bang.”
The remark, off-hand as it sounded, shook Valentino head to toe. He was ashamed of all the unworthy things he’d been thinking. He was even prepared to forgive Esperanza for her relentless flirting.
At first he thought he’d misunderstood. At the risk of changing the old man’s mind, he said, “You’re offering me Bleak Street, free of charge?”
His host smiled wearily.
“Please. What would I do with the money, stuff it in my mattress? It’s lumpy enough as it is. I don’t sleep as good as when I was ninety.”
“A rediscovered classic of this quality, and a mysterious disappearance? I can hear our man in Information Services rubbing his hands over the publicity. These days, just unveiling a priceless property isn’t enough. You’ve got to have a brass band and the lead story on Fox News.”
“These days, my aunt’s fanny. I told you nothing’s changed in this town. MGM spent a cool million in ’thirty-eight scouring every beauty pageant, finishing school, and Campfire Girls jamboree in the country looking for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, when it had already signed Vivien Leigh; that’s a million in Depression dollars. Then it was newsreels and fan magazines, now it’s a continuous crawl on the bottom of a TV screen. I guess that’s what they call progress.”
“This gift is beyond generous, Señor Bozal. There may be an honorary doctorate in it for you and a seat on the board of regents.”
“Muchacho, a spick with a buncha letters after his name is just a wetback with a diploma, and I stopped going to meetings before you were born. Nothing ever gets finished except a lotta pastry.” The old man’s snicker carried traces of Dan Duryea and Torquemada. “There is something you can do for me, and it won’t cost you a cent.”
Valentino was back on his guard. When someone promised something that “wouldn’t cost you a cent,” you better be sure you can afford it.
This time he wasn’t kept in suspense. “I got some Vatican bigshots stalling over a theme park I want to open in Tuscany, dedicated to classic Italian cinema; I need the Pope’s okay to bring the authorities in Rome on board, on account of some of the steamy scenes in La Dolce Vita and Eight and a Half. I’m this close to swinging a visit by a delegation of Cardinals.” He pinched the air. “I know I can win ’em over with a face-to-face on my own turf. An exclusive screening of Greed could seal the deal. The flick drips with Old Testament justice; they lap that up. The fact that it was lost for eighty years is a bonus.
“I’ll pay for the dupe,” he added, when his listener hesitated.
But the brief silence was from shock and relief, not doubt.
“You’ll have a print if I have to bootleg it myself,” Valentino said.
“God, I love foul play!”
Henry Anklemire leapt up from behind his desk next to the boiler room. As always, “Our man in Information Services” resembled an evil cherub in a toupee a shade too dark for his vintage and a checked suit (size portly), polka-dot tie, and striped shirt that made a cataclysmic statement Valentino thought could not have been coincidental. The little flack had an arrangement (perhaps sexual, perhaps mercenary) with most of the wardrobe mistresses in the industry that kept him supplied with costumes reaching as far back as the slapstick comedies of Hal Roach. His face glowed as from a strong shot of whiskey. So far as the film archivist was aware, he was no lush; he got his highs from the prospects of a successful hype.
“We’ll keep that angle between ourselves until we spring it on the public,” Valentino said. “The dean thinks Sherlock Holmes was a sociopath.”
But there was no stopping Anklemire once he was on a roll.
“Look at Marilyn Monroe; not one-tenth the talent of Billie Holiday, but she had the good sense to get murdered by the Kennedys. You ever see Billie Holiday on a T-shirt?”
“From time to time. It’s Judy Holliday you’re talking about; and the answer is no. In any case you wouldn’t know Judy from Jumbo if I hadn’t forced you to watch Born Yesterday on DVD. Also, there’s some question about whether the Kennedys were involved in Marilyn’s death.”
Anklemire had offered his expertise to the university after a year of retirement on top of forty years of advertising cigarettes, automobiles, and feminine hygiene products for a venerable agency on Madison Avenue, on condition that his salary wouldn’t threaten his retirement benefits. Even when the government changed the law to allow unlimited compensation from the private sector without penalty, he hadn’t applied for a raise; twelve months of shooting golf and playing canasta with his next-door neighbors in Tarzana had made him desperate for any activity that didn’t involve listening to anyone’s blow-by-blow account of his prostate operation. The department director had assured him that low pay was no obstacle to his employment.
Most of the academic community loathed the little caricature of a man, for the very reasons the archivist liked him. He was an aggressive promoter who knew the common denominator that shook loose money from every corner of society, and he had no patience for objections based on propriety or prestige. Give him a salable commodity and he’d sell it. He knew nothing about movies or their heritage, but he knew how to turn silver nitrate into gold.
Even Kyle Broadhead, who tolerated him at best, acknowledged that one crass little garden gnome like him was worth twenty “ornaments of the university,” as the professor himself had been ordained.
“Born Yesterday, great flick. They ought to colorize it.” Anklemire’s face grew solemn, or as close to it as it ever came. “What you want to do, you want to send the pitcher on tour, book the revival houses, pass the hat for donations. Hey, invite the FBI! They could sponsor the whole schmear, tack on a documentary feature about how crime don’t pay.”
“Henry, J. Edgar Hoover’s been dead almost fifty years.”
“Sure. I don’t just read the trades. Right now, the Bureau can use a boost more than us. You don’t win no friends slapping the cuffs on folks just for telling fibs; who’d be left?”
“Not you.” Valentino smiled.
“Okay, it’s a long shot. Nobody ever gained nothing by not trying. After it’s finished the circuit, this—what’s it called again?”
“Bleak Street.”
“Stinko title. Change it. No? Okay, we’ll work around it. After it’s made the rounds, we lease it to TCM, then bring it out on DVD: Two-disc set, buncha talking heads yakking about what the movie really meant to say, how the lab rats saved it from ruin, yada-yada, that stuff everybody says they care about but nobody watches all the way through, only they buy it, ’cause who’d settle for one when he can have two? This outfit sure can use the cash.”
He raised his voice above the banging of the water pipes next door. “What we do to get the media to cooperate is play up the mysterious-disappearance angle, especially the mob connection; pound it into the ground. That didn’t hurt Geraldo one little bit, even if he did come up with bupkus from Al Capone’s secret vault.”
Watching “Angle-worm Anklemire” work himself up to orgasm was always entertaining, but as Valentino saw it, part of his job was to keep him from flying off the rails. “We found a ground-breaking movie that’s been missing for six decades. Isn’t that worth anything?”
“Boring. Strictly third paragraph, bottom of the hour after the weather. Nobody cares.”
“Nobody but the people you and I work for. They’re what’s keeping you from sitting around watching Matlock with your fellow inmates in an assisted-living community in Oxnard.”
“Which is where’d I be, if I followed that line of reasoning.” His face was grave. When you least expected it, the court jester took off his cap and bells and assumed all the dignity of a Supreme Court justice. “Tell you what, Professor; you do what you do best and leave me to mine.”
To this little man, who liked to brag that he’d been making his way in the world since dropping out of school at sixteen, everyone else at the university was a tenured Ph.D.
Valentino was too cowed by this solemn display to put up an argument on behalf of film history. “What do you need from me?”
“You’re the archaeologist. Start digging. I can’t write copy without material.”
“Archivist, not archaeologist.”
“What’s the difference? Do some homework. Interview people. Get me color: big hats, gun molls, armor-plated Cadillacs, rat-a-tat-tat!” He mimed firing a submachine gun.
Here he was again, the living video arcade; and for the first time his visitor realized that the buffoonery was a mask. He used his antics to distract people from the fact that he was as serious about what he did as anyone else at UCLA, Valentino included. It made people underestimate him and drop their guard just as he moved in for the kill.
“I can’t promise much, Henry. Bleak Street was shelved in post-production, before the publicity mill could warm up. All I’ve got is rumors and some inside stories Bozal overheard. Without corroboration, they’re useless. The public isn’t as ignorant of hype as it was sixty years ago; it wants sensation—dirt, to be blunt. You’ve got a star with possibly sinister connections who dropped off the face of the earth just as the underworld was consolidating the power it drew from Prohibition. A pro like you could build a campaign as tall as the Watts Tower on a foundation like that. What else could you possibly need?”
Ignacio Bozal had nothing on Henry Anklemire when it came to blowing a juicy raspberry.
“That’s prologue, the kind of stuff they used to blow off in whatchacall expository text after the title card and the bill. Nobody goes to the movies to read, for Pete’s sake. They want faces, sex, action, the bloodier the better. Forget the on-set baloney. Find somebody who was there and make ’em dish up.”
“You’re forgetting how long ago this was. Whatever happened to Oliver has found its way to everyone else connected with the picture. There’s no hit man like Old Father Time. Wait.” An image leapt into the foreground of Valentino’s brain. He’d been only vaguely aware of it at the time of exposure. He took out his phone, into which he’d entered all the information he used to keep in notebooks, tapped keys, scrolled.
“Roy Fitzhugh’s still with us,” he said; “or was when I entered his name here. I saw him in the film, playing a mob henchman. It was an early role, and he had only one line, so he didn’t make it into the end credits. I was overwhelmed with the whole package, so it didn’t register at the time.”
“Fix that. Save being a fan for after quitting, when you’re sitting at home with a bowl of popcorn in your lap. Be a working stiff when you’re on the clock.”
“I interviewed him last year about a bit he had in M Squad. Here it is.” He stopped scrolling.
“He must be a hundred.”
“Not quite that bad. He always played older than he was. He had one of those faces. I hope his memory’s still good.”
“Go see him. I’d send a photog with you, but the flash might stop every pump in the joint. Try to keep him on topic. We want to know what happened to this monkey Oliver, not how many football teams Jayne Mansfield slept with.”
Valentino laughed. “What do you want me to do, solve his murder?”
“If you can squeeze it in.”