Missing Reels (45 page)

“Anything I do with Harry, I suppose. The secretaries don’t work for the postdocs.”

She waited for him to look up. She said, a bit tentative, “We’ll be on the same floor.”

“For one more year.” He hadn’t mentioned Anna. Why the hell did she pick an Italian restaurant, come to think of it? She tried to relax her shoulders.

“Wouldn’t you want to stay at Courant?”

The swizzle sticks were starting to look like Siamese-twin spiders. “Of course I would. Doubt they’d have me once the postdoc’s done. The better the town, the more desirable the post. I’m not a star.”

“Do you want to go back to England?”

“I wouldn’t mind. But at the moment there’s no jobs.” He checked his work.

“So what kind of town do you think you’d rate?”

“Not New York. But maybe not Boise State either. Mid-range. Oklahoma perhaps. SUNY Buffalo.”

He pulled off his last straw and began to re-attach it. She tried to think of something positive to say about Buffalo, but all she could come up with was Niagara Falls and bowling alleys.

“They tell me Buffalo’s much nicer than Rochester,” she said finally.

“Good to know.”

“Personally, I think Buffalo would be fine. I like snow.”

“Of course you do.” Eyes still on the fractal. “You just never learned to dress for it.”

“Southerners love snow. We appreciate it. Yankees don’t. And you don’t have the right clothes either, by the way.”

“If I get tenure track in Buffalo, believe me, I’ll buy them.”

“We’ll go shopping together,” she blurted, put a hand on her neck, and when he looked at her, she forced herself to drop it on the table. He put down the fractal and slid his hand over hers.

He was going to say it soon. She’d been waiting ever since he came back, and for the last month she’d been expecting it almost every time they saw each other or spoke. The night after they found the nitrate, when he dropped his work after saying he shouldn’t, and they split a bottle of wine at his place and laughed like maniacs while Matthew drunkenly mapped her post-secretarial career as the Indiana Jones of film preservation, doorstepping doddering old people world-wide. The night he phoned from Los Angeles, when they’d spent a half hour talking about Martin Amis and neither one of them knew how to end the call. All those times he’d pushed her hair away to get a better look at her face. And now, when he left his hand where it was as the seconds ticked by, until he took it away and went back to his fractal.

She was so close to hearing it, sometimes she felt as though she’d already said it back.

I
SABEL WAS BULLETING THROUGH THE LOBBY
. “H
ELLO
, C
EINWEN
. K
ELLY
, ring Fred and tell him his appointment is here, please. Have to dash now. Meeting a potential donor. Let’s talk at some point.”

No ID. How about that. At last, she was in with Isabel.

Fred was up in a matter of minutes and took her down to the laboratory. She lasted until her foot hit the top step and then she barked, “What did you find?”

“Silents,” said Fred. She was walking ahead of him and had to wait for him to catch up when she realized she didn’t know which door it was. “Lots and lots of silents.” Andy storing silents, who’d have thought. She bit down hard to keep from bursting out with Emil’s name. “Great nitrate of
The Crowd
, for one.
The Wind. The Silk Bouquet
, Chinese-produced thing with Anna May Wong. A Colleen Moore, not
Flaming Youth
unfortunately.
The Magic Flame
, that’s a Henry King—heard of it?”

“No.”

“Ronald Colman and this Hungarian actress, name of Vilma Banky. Lots of Chaplin. Couple of Arbuckles. Harry Langdon.
Wedding Bills
, that’s a Raymond Griffith we didn’t have. And, um, the 16-millimeters were also silents and, ah, it was stuff we already had in the collection. All of it. Some of the rarest titles we’ve got.” He pulled up a seat for her. He had a reel on his desk. Thirty-five millimeter.

“That’s interesting,” she said, hoping she sounded noncommittal.

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing one elbow and squinting at her. “That’s
just
what I said. Interesting as all hell.” He tapped the canister. “And here we go. The most interesting of all. Check it out.”

He grabbed a pair of gloves from a drawer and pulled them on. He took the film out of the canister and carefully unfurled a tiny bit, then a foot or so. It didn’t look fragile. He pulled out another foot and held a frame up to the light, then grabbed an eyepiece off the desk.

“A loupe,” she said.

He screwed it into his eye. “It’s like one. How do you know that word?”

“One of my roommates is a jeweler.”

He held the film close to the eyepiece, and lowered it. “Take a look.” He handed her the loupe, and she put it against her eye; it wouldn’t stay put, her face muscles weren’t cooperating, so she held it with one hand and thrust out the other for the film. “I’d better hold it,” he said. She held the eyepiece in place, and he moved a bit of the long ribbon in front of it. And kept it there, for longer than she’d have thought possible for him to hold anything without moving.

A title frame. White letters curled next to decorated Gothic capitals.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
. From the novel by Ann Radcliffe. Starring Edward Kenny as Valancourt. Introducing Miriam Clare as Madeleine. Directed by Emil Arnheim.

All those other frames to look at later. Right now, this one was enough.

Fred lowered the film and she put down the loupe. He still wasn’t twitching.

“I’ll be,” she said, at last.

“Yeah. Great find.” said Fred. He started winding the film back against the reel. “Thought you’d like to see for yourself.”

“Incredible,” she said. Was this what shock felt like? “After all these years.”

“Thrilling,” said Fred, with absolute calm. He laid the film back in the canister and replaced the lid. “This has the potential to be, um, a pretty big deal.” He peeled off the gloves. “And what I can’t get over,” he said, “is this is the very film you and Matthew came here to research. How about that, huh?”

She looked back at the reel. “When do we get to see it?”

“That’s really something, isn’t it? You guys come up here and look at the fragment. Next thing you know, here it is.” He threw up his hands. “Wow!”

“Is it going to take a while to get it ready to be shown?”

“A while, yeah, kinda hard to say exactly how long. I’ll explain in a minute.” He rested his elbow next to the reel. “But, ah, back to what I was saying. You and me, we have a chat about how to store nitrate, hypothetically speaking, and then, um, we get kinda drunk one night and talk about Chris Bixby and that collector up in Vermont. The one, um, the one who had what was probably a screen test for
Mysteries of Udolpho
. Then we go see Steve and whaddya know, we talk about Vermont that night, too. And
then
, all of a sudden, this lost film turns up. In your boyfriend’s building. Yeah. That’s just, um …”

“Incredible,” she supplied.

“You said that.”

“Like a movie, almost,” she ventured.

“I thought so too. The kind of thing you see in a movie and think, ah, no. That wouldn’t happen.” He ran a finger over the remnants of the glue on the canister, where the label had fallen off. “Not exactly like that, it wouldn’t.”

All she could come up with was one of Granana’s favorite lines. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”

A long, motionless look; but she had finally learned how to outwait men. “Okay, then.” He gave the canister one tap of his finger. “Even your clichés are vintage, you know that?”

Her favorite part of a musical was always the moment right before Judy Garland or Fred Astaire broke into song—that instant when everything rose from their lungs and rushed into their eyes, and then they were singing, and dancing, and it seemed that anyone who felt something that strong could conjure an orchestra, just like they did. She bet she could. They’d found it. They’d saved it. She wanted to tell Matthew, she wanted to tell Norman and Harry, she wanted to tell Jim and Talmadge and Donna and Roxanne and hell, she even wanted to tell Lily if she ever saw her again. Most of all, she wanted to tell Miriam.

“The whole movie,” she burst out, drumming her heels on the floor. “Sixty years, nobody sees anything except a two-minute screen test, and now we have the whole movie.”

Fred uncrossed his legs. “Um, well. Not so fast. I’ve been through almost everything. And, ah, I’m pretty sure that what we have is six reels.”

She rested her feet. The orchestra had barely tuned up. “Oh no.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This one,
Mysteries
, none of them were labeled. And the first one I found, I think it’s the third reel, and I recognized the actress, from that fragment we saw. What’s her name …”

“Miriam Clare,” she said.

“Yeah. She’s, ah, she stands out. That reel was starting to go, but barely starting, you know? I can work with it. Once I realized what I was looking at, I, ah, I was really hoping it would all be there. I called down Isabel, and we looked at what little we could on that reel without damaging anything. And, um, it’s pretty hot stuff. Considering everybody’s wearing these old costumes. So then when I reminded Isabel that this was probably all there was of the Arnheim, she, ah, she got excited. We kinda had everybody going through everything else looking for these.”

Hot stuff? Could he be any more vague? “
How does it look
? How does the camera move? Were there any unusual shots? Like of dust or something?”

He pulled back, almost laughing. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t project it yet. All I personally saw were a few feet of frames. The ones I found, um, showed this woman, um, I guess she’s the maid, spying on Miriam Clare while she was in bed. Nice shot, like it was framed between, um, some panels or something. Lighting looks good, like they were going for the candlelight effect. Once it’s cleaned up it’ll be easier to tell.” He paused. “Dust? That would be weird. It’s not
Greed
.”

Once again, she had to wait. And she better change the subject before he got any more suspicious. “So,” she said. “You’ve got assistants.” Four reels gone.

“Yep, three of them. You’ll have to meet them sometime.”

“I’d like that,” she said. Only six reels left.

“Oh, they’d like you too. Trust me. Um, as I was saying, ah, this first reel is in great shape. Like it was barely screened. Fantastic. We’ve got just a very little decay on the third and the others, um, I think we got those just in time. I mean, we can do it. But it’s gonna be a job. Probably at least a year.”

“The missing reels—do you have any idea what happened?”

“Could be they were some of the ones that were so bad I couldn’t tell what they were. There were maybe a couple dozen or more unlabeled and just … dust. Some of them crumbled as soon as we opened the can. Or, ah, could be they were just never there at all. I tried to call Evans as soon as I figured out what we had. Been trying all week, but, well. He doesn’t pick up his phone. Or his messages at work either, I guess. But, um, I knew six reels couldn’t be the whole movie.”

“No,” she said sadly. “Nine reels after the cuts. Emil’s copy would have been ten.”

“Emil?” She realized what she’d said. Fred put his elbows on his knees and said softly, “What makes you think this was Arnheim’s print?”

They were in the back of the building, but she could hear what sounded like the traffic outside. “I don’t. But I read that he had a print. When I was doing research. For Matthew’s project.”

“Right. The project.” Fred sat up and grabbed his neck. “Yeah. One thing I can tell you about your project. And, ah, Matthew too. With old movies, the really old ones, you gotta take what you can get.”

He’d shaved today, she noticed. Fred thought this was a big enough deal to merit his razor. He didn’t look unhappy. She picked up the loupe and weighed it in her hand.

“Six reels is better than nothing,” she said.

He smiled, very slow and very broad. “Much, much better.”

He was taking her back up when she paused on the stairs. “Fred? Andy—Professor Evans isn’t going to make trouble, is he?”

“I’d like to see him try. I’ve seen some crazy people in my time, I mean, look at Steve. But storing nitrate in NYU faculty housing, that pretty much takes the cake.” He started to walk, but she didn’t. “Hey, we got a signed agreement. Isabel told me, um, she said if Evans didn’t answer his phone at some point, she was willing to go down and crash one of his classes.”

She giggled. “Let me know if she does. I’d like to see that.”

“Heh, I already told her there was no way I was missing it myself. I wasn’t sure she’d wanna give this a lot of priority, but she totally does. Man, she’s on fire. She wants to put out, you know, a press release in a few weeks.”

Oh god. Leon. What if it made the papers and Leon saw it? “Is that a good idea? Are you sure you have all the rights?”

He leaned against the banister, hand tapping while he furrowed his brow at her. “Not my job, but um, I don’t think the rights, ah, they’re not really a factor. Novel’s public domain and Civitas hasn’t been around for years.”

“We don’t know how Andy got it. Maybe there was something dodgy involved.”

“Dodgy?” he repeated.

“You know, shady. Obviously there was something weird going on, and what if he didn’t come by it honestly?”

For an instant it seemed he was going to pat her shoulder, but he grabbed his own shoulder instead. “It’s ours. Okay? Nobody else is gonna get it. And if somebody tries, well, Isabel can handle it. She, um, she’d probably love to sink her teeth into a big fat legal dispute.”

“Isabel can handle it,” she echoed, trying to convince herself.

Fred smiled again. “Of course she can. That’s what Isabel is
for
.”

She felt herself melting a little at Fred’s look when he said that. The only possible word for it was tender. Ceinwen wondered whether Isabel was ever going to realize that there was a man in this world who loved her not for her beauty, but for her ability to scare the ever-loving crap out of everybody.