THE ARCHIVIST WAS still shaking his head when he dropped by the lab to see how the technicians were coming with the film he’d brought back from East L.A.
“Why are you shouting?” Jack Dupree, an uncommonly handsome young man with a gleaming shaven onyx head, squinted as if against bright sun. He wore a yellow Haz-Mat suit, minus the sci-fi hood and latex gloves, which he’d don before approaching fragile, volatile celluloid.
“I’m not shout—” He remembered then that Dupree had been present at his surprise party in the Bradbury Building. Without doubt he hadn’t taken in enough paté and crackers to absorb the champagne. Valentino lowered his voice to a hush. “Talk to Kyle Broadhead. He came back from the Adriatic with a killer hangover cure.”
“I talked to him. Killer’s the word. Where do you even find hog thistle? You’re tenth in line; and that’s only because the board of regents think Broadhead’s the Golden Goose and you’re his fair-haired boy. Normally we assign priority according to the age of the print. Right now we’re duping footage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.”
Valentino, who had a good layman’s knowledge of what went into making a new negative from an old positive, then a new master from the negative, kept his impatience to himself. “Okay. I’d appreciate a heads-up when you’ve started.”
Dupree pressed his temples. “Don’t say ‘head.’”
From there Valentino went to his office in the university’s old power plant, where Ruth, the gargoyle who guarded the gate, sat at her computer in the doughnut-shaped reception desk. Her long, red-lacquered nails rattled like sleet against glass as she manipulated her computer keyboard.
“Is Professor Broadhead in?”
She didn’t look up from the screen. Her pulled-back, implausibly black hair and white-on-white face wore a coat of varnish as impervious as the one on her nails, and the legs of her heavy steel-rimmed bifocals hugged her temples so tight he thought they must leave grooves when she took them off. If she ever took them off; it was Broadhead’s opinion that she slept in the building’s attic, upside-down, like a bat. She was a motion-picture industry veteran whom, it was rumored, the tyrannical old studio CEOs had been too afraid of to fire. She’d occupied this particular bunker when Valentino came to work on his first day and would likely still be there when he retired in twenty or thirty years.
“If he isn’t,” she said, “he climbed out the window.”
This reference to her alertness was no idle boast. He’d never known her to go out for lunch or take so much as a bathroom break.
He left her to continue clattering away and tapped on Broadhead’s door.
“It’s unlocked. I lost the key years ago.”
Valentino entered just in time to see a feathered dart bury its point in a corkboard attached to the faux-wood-paneled wall opposite the door. The board was a new feature in the Spartan office. Its concentric rings were colored individually, and numbered from five to ten, working from the outer circle to the bull’s-eye. The prospect of Broadhead taking exercise of any kind was good for the front page of the faculty newsletter.
“Let me guess. Fanta’s been after you to get in shape, and this is your answer.”
“Don’t be a loon. I address that by taking the stairs instead of the elevator the third Wednesday of each month.”
“Why the third Wednesday?”
“It’s the day my Social Security check is deposited. That way I never forget, and have become the fine physical specimen you see before you as a result.”
The pot-bellied academic, in a corduroy jacket worn shiny at the elbows, ill-advised horizontally striped sweater vest, frayed collar, baggy slacks, and scuffed Spectators, stepped up to the board and retrieved the dart.
Valentino held his tongue as regard to his mentor’s self-description; Broadhead’s infamous iconoclasm did not extend to remarks directed against himself. “In that case, I can only conclude that you intend to turn this place into an Irish pub.”
“English. The Irish need the extra room for drunken brawls. I can say that without incurring the wrath of HR, because my grandfather on my mother’s side came from County Sligo. He disinherited Mom for marrying a Brit.” He returned to his mark—it was there on the floor, an actual chalk line—and took aim.
“Where are the other darts?”
“Budget cuts.” The projectile struck the target dead center. “Blast!”
“What’s wrong? You hit the bull’s-eye.”
“Don’t offer an opinion until you understand the rules. This infernal enterprise represents my work ethic.”
“You call this working?”
Broadhead cocked a polished elbow toward his computer, a battleship-gray antique as big as a pizza oven. “It’s how I warm up. The part of the board I hit determines the number of pages I’ll write that day.”
“So today it’s ten.”
“As on every other day, it’s best two out of three. I can manage the five pages represented by the outer perimeter standing on my head—if I use fifteen-point type and three-inch margins.”
“Blocked?”
“No, I just suck at darts. Blast and double-blast!” Ten again. He left the dart there and slouched behind his desk. “I can’t seem to finish the damn chapter on drinking in the movies. It makes me thirsty, and I swore off liquor a year ago.”
Reflecting on last night, Valentino realized he hadn’t seen Broadhead do more than lift his champagne glass in salute. “Why? I’ve never seen you drunk.”
“Nor will you. My age is the time to quit bad habits for good. That way I won’t have to keep it up for long.”
“So put the chapter aside and move on.”
“Not an option. In addition to being a recovering alcoholic I’m an obsessive compulsive. I cannot ‘move on’ to Chapter Four until I’ve completed Chapter Three.”
“You’ve only written three chapters? You started the book two years ago.”
“Thank you for pointing that out. Something tells me you didn’t come here to cause me torment. When I need that, I can always call out to Ruth.”
His visitor pulled up the only other chair in the room and sat. He told him about his trip to Bozal’s house and the old man’s gift and what he’d asked for in return.
“You both profit,” Broadhead said. “He winds up with the director’s cut of the most eagerly sought Grail in our profession, and you get yet another feather to stick in a cap that already resembles a Sioux war bonnet.”
“Actually, Bleak Street and Greed are equals, in terms of being fellow victims. They were both considered to be casualties of attrition and neglect, destroyed probably to make storage room for more commercial properties.”
“Like Francis the Talking Mule.” Broadhead stabbed a fistful of tobacco into his dilapidated pipe from the Taster’s Choice can where he kept it; his disdain for the aesthetics of his vice stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his disregard for university rules and state law. He struck a match and filled the room with smoke the color of dirty cotton batting and the odor of burning tires. Valentino tipped his chair far enough back to crack the door.
“So what troubles you, sprout? Conflicted over whether to keep this latest windfall to yourself or pass it along to the university that keeps you in Milk Duds and Big Gulps?”
“No. I resolved that issue by turning it in to the lab. Maybe you can use your influence with the dean to loan it to me for the premiere. You’re teacher’s pet; I got that on the authority of Jack Dupree.”
“And who in thunder is Jack Dupree? Sounds like a riverboat gambler.”
“He’s only run the lab as long as I’ve been here. You just gave him your hangover cure.”
“Oh, yes, the black youngster with the bowling-ball dome. Did it help?”
“Never mind that. You should make an effort to learn the names of your staff.”
“I’m an educator. I don’t have a staff. That sign on my door was a gift in lieu of a raise.”
“There isn’t any sign on your door.”
“I misplaced it along with the key. My position as head of the Film and TV Preservation Department is strictly honorary, a title to impress would-be donors in the endless round of cocktail parties I’m obliged to show up at and pretend apple juice is bourbon. I made it clear at the outset I would attend no meetings and make no decisions.”
“Kind of the way you teach class.”
“I never miss the first day or the last. I provide the sturdy bookends between which the teaching assistants mold young minds. Many of those moldy young minds have gone on to respectably mediocre academic careers.” He took the pipe from between his teeth and let it smolder in the jar cover he used for an ashtray. “Cut to the chase, lad. Those five pages aren’t going to write themselves.”
“Ten.”
“Speak!”
“Henry Anklemire wants me to close the case on Van Oliver’s vanishing act.”
Broadhead’s expression was as bitter as his tobacco. “That little imp of the perverse has gotten you in Dutch more times than his closet has moths. I wouldn’t complain, except sooner or later I always get sucked in.”
“You always volunteered. I never asked you to do anything that would put you in danger or in trouble with the police.”
“That’s what I meant when I said ‘sucked in.’ Any muddling about in real-life crime, no matter how remote and how much dust has collected on it, is a slippery slope; and Anklemire’s the banana peel. Have you ever seen even one Mack Sennett comedy in which the peel got hurt?”
“All I want is your advice.”
“Tell the little troll to strap a refrigerator to his back and swim up the coast. Chances are he’ll meet Oliver on the way.”
“You know his heart won’t be in the publicity campaign if I don’t at least make the effort.”
“Why ask me if your mind’s made up?”
“Because I knew you’d do just what you’re doing: make faces, apply a colorful metaphor in reference to Anklemire’s lack of physical stature and excess of chutzpah, and eventually come around to give me grudging approval.”
“I haven’t come around.”
Valentino rose, walked to the corkboard, jerked loose the dart, took up Broadhead’s late position, toe to the mark, took aim, and pierced the target in the No. 5 ring.
“Days of Wine and Roses,” he said, dusting his palms. “The drying-out scene, with Jack Lemmon screaming in restraints. If that one doesn’t kill your taste for booze, you’re better off eliminating the chapter altogether.”
The professor’s scowl deepened. He stuck his pipe back between his teeth, drew a gnawed yellow pencil from the plain white mug on his desk, and scribbled a note on his blotter. Then he raised the pencil to make the sign of the cross. “Go with God, my son. You’ll need Him.”