Séance Infernale Read online

  “Maybe I just don’t want this job.”

  “You’re lying. The cards are being dealt and your fingers are itching to play.” He filled in the check, signed, tore it out, and folded it on the table. “Actions lie louder than words, Mr. Whitman. You see, if you are willing to sit here listening to my rant while perhaps your sole fear in life springs from my fireplace, I bet you’d take this job for free. You would even betray your family for it, if you still had them around.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Valdano laughed. “This should pay for your advance, plus all traveling and other expenses.” He pushed the slip of paper toward Whitman. “Just another check for you not to cash.” He pressed the button on his desk again and the fire retreated to charcoals.

  Whitman felt his muscles relax and his breathing return to normal. He swallowed, giving himself a moment to breathe. Then he reached to the desk and slowly unfolded the check, holding it between his index and middle fingers. “You said I keep coming back. This time I won’t. Goodbye.” He flicked the check back to Valdano’s side of the desk and rose from his chair.

  “Mr. Whitman,” he heard the film collector calling to him from behind. Alex Whitman turned his head and for the first time saw pleading in Valdano’s face. Sure, he was trying not to blink, to retain his overbearing smirk of self-importance. But his posture gave him away; it wasn’t proud and confident anymore; it was crouching, imploring for help.

  Valdano weighed his words carefully. “When you’re not drowning in sarcasm and self-pity, you are the best this business has to offer. I may not like you, but I don’t have to; you do a damn good job.”

  Captain Fantastic, Whitman thought. He was intrigued by Valdano’s self-proclaimed defeat; surely another of his intricately crafted mind games. Valdano was right: Whitman was curious about the lost footage. He ignored the nagging in his gut. In the past, he had come to trust these warning hunches.

  “Any family?” Whitman asked, sitting back down on the chair.

  “I have not been able to trace any of Sekuler’s descendants. This, of course, should not deter you from giving it a try yourself. I have compiled a folder containing all information pertinent to this project. As you will see, most of it has to do with the man himself, as there is nothing known about ‘Séance Infernale.’ Start from the Science Museum in London and Sekuler’s former workshop in Edinburgh.”

  “What do you think happened to him? Sekuler, I mean.”

  “Perhaps he meddled in affairs he shouldn’t have,” Valdano said, staring at Sekuler’s picture.

  “Do you think Edison got to him?” Thomas Edison had filed his own patent for a working moving-pictures camera just a year after Sekuler disappeared. Conspiracy theories abounded; stealing other inventors’ ideas was not new to Edison.

  “Would not surprise me. History is not written by the victors; it is written by ruthless patent thieves.”

  “The title sounds like it’s a story, maybe even a linear narrative,” Whitman said.

  “Almost three decades before Griffith’s Intolerance? That would be a revelation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with wishful thinking. We’ll be lucky if it’s even projectable.”

  “We’ll be lucky if it even exists. I haven’t exactly taken on this kind of job before.”

  “Hence the number of zeros on the check.”

  —

  The steps from the main hall of Valdano’s office building sloped down to a travertine-paved path leading to a marble arch fountain and a bizarre set of statues. The courtyard, unusually for the neighborhood, was partitioned from the outside world by six-foot-high walls and electronic iron gates.

  The statues—three ugly winged goddesses with their torsos, arms, and hair intertwined with serpents—were clad in clay. They were clothed in the long robes of mourners and bore brass-studded whips. They were unresting, angry, vengeful. Once convulsed in their anger in the dark world of Tartarus, they were implacable by sacrifice or tears. Damn hounds of the netherworld, he thought, barking like a tortured conscience. Behind him, gargoyles glared out into the distance. The Gothic building seemed out of place and out of time among the Spanish and Colonial Revival residences of the historic neighborhood.

  He thought he heard someone behind him and grasped Valdano’s folder tighter. Turning around, he saw only a dog walker. He crossed the silent street, passing the Andalusia and a parking lot, north toward the busy thoroughfare of Sunset. Chateau Marmont loomed over the north side of the Strip. He wondered whether James Dean, trapped in some quirk of time, was hopping through one of its windows to audition with Natalie Wood for Rebel Without a Cause.

  He went into a friendly looking, low-key bar, hidden behind neon lighting and a lack of door signs. He was in no hurry. He sat at the cigar lounge on the spacious patio and ordered a Grand Marnier. He could just make out the labyrinthine alcoves and staircases, past the stripper’s pole, the Mickey Mouse portrait on the wall, and the wall-mounted televisions playing reruns of The Twilight Zone.

  Whitman took out his Old Holborn and rolled a cigarette. He looked at his lighter and tried to make sense of why matches, but not lighters, caused him to regress to a state of pyrophobic panic. When the waitress brought him his drink, he opened Valdano’s folder. He perched his reading glasses on his nose.

  The folder contained a typed report on Augustin Sekuler, his life and inventor’s career, from his birth in Metz to his mysterious disappearance on the train from Dijon to Paris in 1890. A bibliography and reference list were the main sources of information on the inventor’s work. Between the photocopies of citations, there was a photograph of Sekuler, stapled to a piece of paper outlining the main theories for his disappearance. The filmography section was accompanied by photographic stills of each surviving frame of the footage. As a sign of good faith, Valdano had also included Eistrowe’s letter.

  Whitman took a sip of his drink. The liquor warmed him.

  He took money out of his pocket and placed it on the table. Dusting flecks of tobacco from his shirt, he got up and got into the first cab that stopped outside the bar. A dark figure watched him from a distance.

  2

  From Santa Monica Boulevard at the boundary between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood until Hoover Street in Silver Lake is a high-end fashion lover’s mecca; along Melrose’s boutiques with tawdry storefronts and fluorescent window displays, salons with funky names in a garish haze of Day-Glo and neon; emporiums of famous designers emblazoning beacons of chic. Among the rows of stores desperately trying to look outlandish, the Crypt was a wolf in black sheep’s clothing.

  It was cleverly hidden between a new-age bookshop and a parking lot, between pierced noses and Ferraris, on the western stretch of Melrose, inside a mock-Gothic building that used to be a mortuary. No sign on the door indicated it might be a shop.

  The Crypt was a movie haunt. Lining the walls, posters of zombies, killer clowns, and alien monsters in exaggerated makeup and far-fetched costumes staggered after scream queens in torn skirts and heels. Pristine film memorabilia was displayed over two stories and a basement, sprawled on Persian rugs and tucked between fine shelves.

  Nostalgics mingled with obsessive film buffs, purist poster collectors, and rabid sci-fi nerds. The “reel deal,” however, was located below-ground; the basement housed catalogs of select rare titles. For every scrap of Japanese monster flick, German street film, and Italian Giallo, there were people who were willing to put up serious money: pill-popping rock stars, erratic Japanese millionaires, workaholic business sharks, sixteen-millimeter-print collectors, for whom a few cut frames may mean a decrease in value in the region of thousands of dollars. The material—be it nitrate or acetate film, the A4 paper of original typewritten screenplays, or the plastic of a prop—is entirely worthless. People with sound sense would not accept these items even for free. But pity the idiosyncratic mind of the film collector; present him with the original one-sheet poster of Flying Down to Rio or “Touchdown Mickey” and he is likely
to sell his own mother to attain it. This business was not about buying a piece and selling it at a profit; rather, it was about finding the specific piece that caters to a specific collector’s obsession, then holding on to it until he offers everything he owns in exchange.

  The studded shop door of the Crypt yielded to Whitman’s hand with a jerk. The bell fastened above it tinkled.

  The lighting was kept dim. Collector plates and posters embellished the walls. Shelves bowed under the weight of pressbooks and screenplays. Piles of photographic stills and lobby cards were stacked around glass cabinets displaying rare autographed pieces. Some were particularly rare: Chaplin’s jacket from The Great Dictator; Evel Knievel’s helmet; Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates; Batman’s armor costume; the ventriloquist’s dummy from Dead of Night; Michael Myers’s mask from the first Halloween; Robert Englund’s original worn blade glove from A Nightmare on Elm Street; Jack Nicholson’s “Heeere’s Johnny” door-wrecking ax.

  Weird figures lurked in every corner; life-size props and statues of John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, and Harry Potter watched the customers through eyes of wax, plastic, or glass. Scattered around the dummies lay antique perfume sprays, evening gloves, cigarillo holders, many of these signed, with their certificates of authenticity. Mannequins and clothes rails held layers of garments worn by famous stars: full-length velvet once sported by Claudette Colbert; chiffon evening gowns pinched at the waist, worn by Lauren Bacall; and day dresses that captured the venerable finesse and charm of Audrey Hepburn’s 1950s era. Old club chairs extended an invitation to settle in. Oak chests nearby lay half-open, inviting the visitor to sift through the treasures within.

  At the far end of the store, behind a pile of photographic stills, stood Charlie Carmichael, a man of medium height and considerable girth, with the kind of eyes that always seemed to smile.

  He had helped Whitman set up and open the Crypt during the eighties, first on the eastern part of Melrose, at a time when thugs and outlaw bikers dominated its graffiti-strewn locality; that was before their move to the Heights, where the crowd gradually got younger and the boutiques and trendsetters started rolling in. Whitman and Charlie had met during a midnight screening of Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery at the Vogue, on Hollywood and North Las Palmas. That was before the cinema became a strictly night theater during the eighties. The Vogue featured seventy-millimeter projection and would get first run on bookings, even though most A-list films opened at the Chinese. As if spurred by a magic wand, the two strangely found themselves the only people who showed up to see the film; the neon marquee and the beautiful geometric murals on the walls had not attracted any passersby that night. They realized they were laughing with triumph at the same scenes, and an initial conversation on whether the final shot of the bandit firing his gun toward the viewer should be placed in the beginning or the end of the print led to a lifelong friendship.

  Together they had mediated the events that had turned their business from hobby-oriented to dealer-driven. And when Whitman moved with his wife to Edinburgh to open a second Crypt there, Charlie had kept the L.A. store running. Charlie never missed the chance to converse with customers, to hear their stories and offer them film information. “What do these people want from me?” Whitman would ask.

  Charlie stood talking to a teenager wearing oversize trousers and a scruffy T-shirt. His face was lit up and he was waving his hands ecstatically in the air. When Whitman approached them, he realized why. Clasped in his hands was an eight-by-ten publicity shot of Freaks, showing director Tod Browning, a thin man with a wax-tipped mustache and a brooding expression, next to the statuesque blond Olga Baclanova. The photo was signed by both.

  Whitman took Charlie aside, next to a replica prop of Johnny 5.

  “What did Valdano say?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m leaving for London tomorrow. Can you hold the fort?”

  Charlie made a whistling sound. “Sure. What’s he after this time?”

  “A film by Augustin Sekuler.”

  Charlie frowned, puzzled. “The French dude? I thought he just recorded footage of scenes.”

  “That’s what the history books say. Valdano thinks differently.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t care, as long as I’m getting paid,” he said, although his eyes said otherwise. “His workshop was in Edinburgh, so I’ll have to…you know.”

  “You sure you want to go back there? After—” He broke off in sudden embarrassment.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  They were silent, then Charlie said, “Well, what about The 39 Steps? We’ve been sitting on this info for too long; someone might snatch the print.”

  Whitman took off his glasses and observed them under the ambient light of a solid brass bridge lamp. Hitchcock’s 1935 suspense spy thriller was the first in what would become a motif of narrating tales of innocent men on the run. The unforgettable action sequence on the bridge, where Robert Donat jumps from the train to escape, was filmed at Forth Road Bridge in Edinburgh. For the past two months, Charlie had been in contact with a woman based in Edinburgh who claimed her late husband had been in possession of film rolls containing scenes from The 39 Steps. Apparently the man had been a stand-in during the shooting and had sneaked into Hitch’s tent and taken the film. The woman said her husband had left notes accompanying each roll.

  One of the scenes involved a cameo appearance by Hitchcock as one of those killed during the shoot-out in the train sequence. However, his short appearance had already been pinpointed at the beginning of the film, tossing some litter while Robert Donat and Lucie Mannheim run from the theater. If the notes were anything to go by, this would render The 39 Steps the only Hitchcock film with two director sightings, one of which had, until then, been lost forever. Neither Charlie nor Whitman could find any mention of this in back interviews or catalogs, but that wasn’t what made Whitman skeptical.

  “I don’t know if it’s worth traveling all the way for it. The old woman might be out of her mind. Second cameo, my balls. Ridiculous.”

  “That’s what you thought before we found those extra scenes for Peeping Tom. Who’d think Michael Powell had filmed an extra scene involving the girl with the harelip and an extended suicide sequence?”

  “We had a good pointer there,” Whitman said. “All the inconsistencies across catalogs when it came to duration. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out it was either a mistake or a case of missing footage. For the time being, I’d rather have you here keeping an eye on things.”

  Whitman turned around. “Shop’s closing,” he told the remaining customers. He looked around him; in the dim light, the outlines of shadows explored the celluloid necropolis.

  His glance came to rest on the small shop window. Through the grille he saw a woman and her child just outside. The girl must have been about six years old, and that made it worse. She was pulling and tugging at her mother’s hand, urging her to go inside the store. The mother, holding a bag of groceries in her other hand, was shaking her head and resisting, her face saying, We’re not going in there.

  No, Whitman thought. Don’t.

  He moved to the door and locked it so they couldn’t get in. “Shop’s closing,” he shouted, pouring a drink from the Chivas Regal bottle on the table. “Everybody out through the back door. Now.”

  3

  On his way home, Alex Whitman saw his daughter in a stranger’s car. But Ellie had been missing for more than ten years. A stone’s throw from the arterial road, crossing the parking lot of a gas station bathed in the veraman phosphorescence of mercury vapor, he froze in front of the beige-colored Toyota Celica. The girl sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the seat belt, waiting for someone in the shop.

  She was around five years old, exactly Ellie’s age when she had disappeared. She had the same gentle nose and wide hazel eyes as Ellie; her rosy cheeks and curly silk hair were identical to Ellie’s. She held a rag doll against her heart; the same as Ellie’s rag
gedy homemade doll. Unaware of being watched, the girl carefully stroked the doll’s red yarn pigtails.

  The sight opened a doorway in his mind, behind which the incident at the park had never happened. It was as if time had fr—

  Now he realized the girl was looking at him. They stared at each other, two strangers amid veraman rays.

  He gave one more glance to the girl, who had lost interest in him and was playing with the seat belt, sliding it forward and backwards, side to side and then in circles. He turned south on La Cienega, hoping the traffic would drown his thoughts, which had already been whisked away to the green-laden grass of an Edinburgh park ten years before.

  Ellie’s disappearance had marked the last in a number of high-profile child kidnappings that had prompted fear throughout the city of Edinburgh, beginning with the kidnapping and death of Danielle McKenzie in February of 1984, followed by a series of further abductions. Police had tried to determine whether Ellie’s disappearance could have some connection with the missing girls.

  Forty-eight hours after his daughter’s disappearance, the Scottish police had yet to come right out and tell Alex Whitman that Ellie didn’t have a chance of turning up; but there came a time when he knew without needing to be told. The police had said they were following up on more than a hundred tips, including reports that a man had been in the Meadows and had spoken to children. They had declined to speculate on what might have happened to Ellie, although they said she would have been able to survive outside that night, when it was unseasonably warm.

  —

  Darkness was fierce when Alex Whitman got back to his apartment. He went to the bathroom, wrapped gauze around his palm, and ignored the pain.