Frames (17 page)

“But there wasn’t any—”

The remote pointed at him again; and if it were a gun he’d be ducking. “You’re asking me to take a lot at face value.
If
you’re who you say you are,
if
you own the Oracle,
if
there’s a skeleton and a film in a hidey-hole in the basement, that wall was there when I bought the place. You’ll have to ask Max Fink. You’ll find him in Forest Lawn under six feet of California.”

“The brickwork in the entrance was relatively new. Anyway nowhere near as old as the building. And the skeleton—”

“A lot of people have been in and out of there since me. Maybe there were two rooms in that basement and maybe there weren’t; I can’t trust my memory any more than you can, but I’m not so senile I’d forget a little thing like a skeleton. Talk to the real estate people, or the movie junkies that rented the place from them, or the hippies that moved in after they left. What are you, a cop?”

Here was anger, cold as sharpened steel. Valentino sat back.

“No. I work for the UCLA Film Preservation Department. The Oracle is a personal extravagance. Naturally I’m curious about the things that came with it, but I’m more interested in you professionally. I understand you were a film technician at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”

Pegler rested the remote on the arm of his chair. The muscles in his face relaxed. His visitor suspected this sudden shift was a symptom of his disease. “Don’t make it sound so grand,” the old man said. “I was a developer, and someone’s assistant at that. Young squirt that I was, I planned to run the studio one day, take Thalberg’s place. Do you know Mr. Thalberg?”

The change in tenses disturbed him a little. Maybe this was one of those regressions the chubby young man in the office had mentioned. “I know of him.”

“Well, ambition’s one thing, luck’s something else. I had too much of one and not enough of the other. Some damn fool who had no business being in the lab went out and left a cigarette burning next to fresh film stock. When the flames hit the chemicals on the shelves, the darkroom went up and me with it. They had to cut me in half to save what didn’t burn.” He touched the stump again, rubbed it absently.

“I’m sorry,” Valentino said.

The old man looked down and saw what he was doing. For an instant he seemed to be wondering what had happened to the rest of the leg. Then he returned to the moment.

“Not necessary. I was going to direct, then produce, then buy the studio. Instead I bought a theater. Folks needed a place to go to forget when times got hard. It was a good living right up till I got robbed. Poor Gerda.”

“Who’s Eric?”

“Eric?”

“Someone told me you ask for him sometimes.”

The confusion passed. On an old face it resembled fear. “These kids around me cackle like hens. I get my years mixed up from time to time. Eric was my first dog. Smartest Great Dane you ever saw. Hell, he’s dead ninety years. Coal wagon ran over him.”

“I thought it might have been Erich von Stroheim. You both worked at Metro about the same time.”

“That fraud. I’d hear him snarling at my boss outside the darkroom, coming on like the Kaiser. You couldn’t print a frame fast enough to bring a smile to that fish face. Said he once belonged to Franz Josef’s Imperial Guard. I bet he shoveled out the stable.”

“He was a great director, though.”

“DeMille was greater. He knew how to work inside a budget, and he didn’t put on airs.
Von
Stroheim, my aunt’s fanny.
Von
old hack.”

Valentino couldn’t resist. “Any DeMille stories?”

“You know that old chestnut that ends, ‘Ready when you are, C. B.’?”

“Everyone must know that one by now.”

“Never happened.”

“Never?”

“No one on the lot ever called him C. B. Especially not a lowly second-unit cameraman. It was always Mr. DeMille.
That’s
what makes a great director.”

Valentino thanked him and rose. He stopped at the door. “Did you ever know a young man named Albert Spinoza? He was a projectionist.”

Pegler was quiet for a moment. Then the old chin wobbled, a pathetic sight. “I’m sorry, mister, I wasn’t listening. Did you say you were from Mr. Thalberg?”

He let himself out. Bogart and Hepburn resumed squabbling the moment he drew the door shut.

At the end of the hall he met Kym Trujillo carrying an armload of file folders. She was a pretty, sharp-featured brunette of thirty who had turned down a modeling job for
Sports Illustrated
to study for her MBA.
L.A. Magazine
had included her in a recent spread on Latinas who made a difference.

“How was your visit?” she asked.

“I couldn’t tell when he was forgetting and when he was pretending.”

“That’s how you know it’s one of his good days.”

**

CHAPTER

16

WAITING IN FRONT of The Oracle for his appointment to arrive, Valentino felt his heart sink when a white stretch Mercedes limo squashed to a stop at the curb and a chauffeur got out to open the door for a small man in a three-thousand-dollar suit. The license plate read FLIX.

“Mr. Kalishnikov?” He shook a hand in a white doeskin glove. The little man wore a white fedora and a white cashmere coat over his shoulders like a cape. The temperature was eighty-six degrees in the shade, but the newcomer wasn’t perspiring. Valentino was sure he couldn’t afford to hire a man who didn’t sweat.

“Mr. Valentino. Ha! A dead movie star and an obsolete assault weapon. Kismet! Pick me up in an hour, Rupert.”

The chauffeur got in and drove away. Leo Kalishnikov surveyed the busload of chanting Berkeley students circling the sidewalk. He had eyes the color of chocolate syrup and a tiny black moustache like a lowercase
w
in the middle of his round face. He was younger than expected, or else a man addicted to nips and tucks. “Who is this rabble?”

“Protesters. I can’t get them to believe that skeleton didn’t come over on the land bridge from Siberia twenty thousand years ago.”

The little man charged up to a hulking student with hair to his shoulders and put a gloved finger to a chest in a cutoff T-shirt reading MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS. “Young man, what are you protesting?”

The student wet his lips. “Four hundred years of white aggression against my people.”

“I see. And you, young lady?” He turned the finger on a heavyset female with short hair and a tribal tattoo on one cheek.

“Same thing.”

“I see. How about you?”

One by one, the Russian asked the same question of fourteen young people who had stopped chanting and put down their signs to provide the same answer. Kalishnikov then returned his attention to the hulk in the shoulder-length hair.

“How many parts Indian—”

“Native American.” The protester bunched his chin.

“I am native Russian myself. How many parts Native American are you?”

“One-sixteenth Cherokee.”

“Yes, that is the popular one. Pardon my atrocious comprehension of English and arithmetic, but do I understand that one-sixteenth of you has come here today to demonstrate against the actions of the remaining fifteen sixteenths?”

The young man opened his mouth, closed it, colored, opened it again. “Bolshevik!”

“That is very close to the word that occurred to me. Carry on.” He led the way into the theater as if he were the host and Valentino the visitor. As the boarded-over glass door drifted shut against renewed chants from outside, Valentino said, “May I ask what the point of that was? You can’t change their minds with fractions.”

“Sorry I made you uncomfortable.” The Russian’s accent lightened, along with his diction. “Where I was born, a protest wasn’t a protest if it didn’t involve standing in front of a tank. Anyone can see the only Indians that bit the dust here did it up on the screen.” He snatched off a glove and laid a smooth palm against the mahogany side of the ticket booth, leaving a print like a child’s in the dust. “This belongs outside, under the marquee. They probably moved it to keep people from chucking rocks through the glass. See how it foreshortens the perspective in the lobby.”

“Bad feng shui?”

“Actually, it cuts ten feet off what should be a journey of wonder starting at the sidewalk. The whole point of these structures was to rescue you from reality long before the lights came down and the feature rolled. Did you notice the inconsistency in the stained-glass windows?”

“Some panes are broken.”

“Those can be replaced. I know a glazier in the Valley who specializes in restoring stained glass in churches and cathedrals. His shop looks like he moved it intact from eleventh-century Venice. He’s expensive, but he’s worth it. I was talking about the subjects: angel, angel, pastoral, knight.” He turned in a circle, stabbing a finger at each of the discolored windows. “A Teutonic knight, no less; note the Maltese Cross on his breastplate. That was Fink’s architect’s way of preparing the patrons for the variety of the fare that awaited them. Take a good look at the fellow’s face. Does he seem familiar?”

Valentino studied the stern features under the slotted visor. “He looks like Francis X. Bushman.”

“Good eye. The original glazier must have gone to see
Ben-Hur
while he was working on the project. The Archangel Gabriel bears a family resemblance to the Barrymores, and unless I miss my guess that milkmaid is Mary Pickford.”

“I never noticed. It’s kind of tacky when you think about it.”

“Tacky, yes, but with gravitas. Gothic sculptors were known to carve gargoyles into caricatures of their wealthy sponsors.”

“I’m surprised Fink isn’t represented. The historical commission dedicated that plaque to him much later.”

“Take a closer look at winged Pegasus.”

He compared the sculpture’s equine features to the face on the plaque. “Holy Mother of—”

“Max. She’s here, too, in plaster relief above the mezzanine entrance. I see they covered her when they suspended the ceiling over the landing. Let’s hope the squirrels haven’t gotten to her.”

“How do you know so much about this theater? Have you been here before?”

“I never was able to work it into my schedule. I’ve seen so many across the country. But after we talked yesterday, I went to the Civic Center and had a long look at the building plans. They’re on file there, along with the Beaudry Reservoir and Dodger Stadium.”

“I was down there just the other day. I didn’t think to look.” Valentino paused. “You don’t look like the kind of person who spends time going through dusty records.”

“You should see my dry-cleaning bill. I started out in sweaters and jeans, just like any other contractor. My phone never rang. Then someone told me doing business in Hollywood is like attending one long masquerade party. So I became Vittorio De Sica out of Frank Lloyd Wright.” As he spoke, Kalishnikov took off his coat, hat, and jacket, and handed them to Valentino. By the time he put his studs in a pocket and turned back his cuffs he appeared older and less pudgy; a man getting ready to go to work. “Let’s assess the damage.”

The archivist spent the next forty-five minutes following him around, carrying his outer clothes like a valet, while Kalishnikov pulled frayed wires spaghetti-fashion out of holes in the walls and flushed toilets and ran faucets in the restrooms and listened to the banging in the pipes as if he were a musical conductor isolating an untuned string in the violin section. It smacked faintly of affectation, but the designer muttered to himself in what sounded like peasant Russian and made close notes with a gold pencil on the inside of his starched cuffs. They covered the building from the attic, water-stained and streaked with pigeon droppings and bat guano, to the basement, where yellow police tape still festooned the room that was no longer a secret from anyone. No officers were present. Apparently the place had been squeezed dry of important clues and no one cared who tracked what onto those that remained.

The auditorium came last, as if the designer had been saving it for dessert. Valentino entered behind him hesitantly, but this time no spirits were in attendance. The tatters of the screen were blank. Kalishnikov tested the floorboards in the aisles with his weight, plucked pieces of horsehair-laced plaster from inside the proscenium arch, pounded a quart of dust out of a brittle velvet seat, and dusted off his palms. Back in the lobby he slapped the corner of a silk handkerchief at smears on his trousers and used it to wipe off his alligator shoes, patting Pegasus on the side of the neck as he did so, as if to apologize for propping his foot up on the pedestal.

“I’ll do a computer search for its mate,” he said, “on the long shot an employee or someone took it home to jazz up his rec room. It’s custom work; there’s not another like it in any theater I’ve been to. We’ll probably have to build one from scratch. Fortunately, I know someone: Not a Michelangelo, but he could copy him so you’d never know the difference.”

“In the Valley?”

“Paris.”

“Paris,
France”?”

“Ornamentation’s going to be the biggest part of the budget on this job. Hazmat comes next. That’s asbestos dangling from the ceiling in the ladies’ lounge.”

“Not rock wool.”