“Anything else, folks?” The waitress startled them.
“Just the check, thanks,” said Gil. The waitress left it on the table, and they sat in silence. Chatter and clinking cutlery filled the benign surroundings of the diner; outside, the cars and trolleys rolled by on Sunset; pedestrians squinted on the sunny side of the street—the humble procession of everyday life.
Gil’s eyes met Clara’s, and she knew they were thinking the same thing. “We need the film,” he said. “We need to find the test of Amazon Queen.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Silver
CLARA STOLE INTO THE film archive like a thief under cover of darkness. Only, it wasn’t nighttime. It was an ordinary Monday lunch hour, when Lloyd, Walter, and Miss Simkin would conveniently be at the commissary, tucking into meat loaf or pot roast. To find Amazon Queen, Clara needed information from the archive—a vault number, a reel number—something to point her in the right direction. Chancing upon a decade-old reel of test footage in the vast collection of films stored in the vault would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
The familiar office felt dangerous. A charge of electricity prickled the air as she moved swiftly to Lloyd’s desk. Next to his collection of used coffee cups and scribbled notes sat a hefty ledger—the master archive list, which was searchable by film title, production number, or reel number. She opened the ledger and skimmed the title names. Amazon Queen was never released—or even produced, so she didn’t hold out much hope that it would be listed. And she was right. No mention. She flipped to the section listed by production number, her stomach clenched in a tight fist. A test reel was shot after all, it had to be accounted for somewhere. Her fingers sparked static as she turned the pages to the entries before the war, specifically the production numbers that started with ‘31’. Holding her breath, she ran her finger down the list of numbers: 3187, 3188, 3189, 3190. She stopped abruptly—3190 jumped to 3192. There was no entry for 3191. “Dammit,” she breathed. How could it not exist?
But then she noticed that the nearby entries were stored in vault five. Maybe that was why Connie had gone there. She could imagine Connie popping by the office to see Lloyd and flirting a little, pretending to be interested in his work in order to get a look at the archive ledger. Maybe she only got a quick glance or she just assumed 3191 would be stored in the same vault as the numbers next to it. Lloyd’s jacket hung on the back of his chair. She rifled through the pockets, and sure enough, she found Lloyd’s cheat sheet. Connie could easily have helped herself to the vault combinations.
She closed the ledger and stood at Lloyd’s desk, contemplating the archive like it was a stage set, as though every commonplace item were a prop, carefully selected and brimming with significance.
Eventually her eyes landed on Simkin’s office door. Armed with the film’s title, there was one other place that Clara could check: the card catalogue in Simkin’s office. It had a record of every film, organized alphabetically by title, with more background information on the production than in the master archive list. She marched toward Miss Simkin’s closed door. To cross the threshold of her office felt like a serious breach, but there was no choice if she was serious about finding the film.
With her heartbeat dancing to an uneven rhythm, Clara tried the door, half expecting it to be locked, but the handle turned smoothly, and at once she was inside Simkin’s domain. Clara’s eyes darted around. Everything was bright and sharp and calling to her. She had to slow down and concentrate.
Simkin’s office had little in the way of personality. A desk with a large typewriter, filing cabinets, and her Moviola to check prints. Clara paused at the desk. There were no picture frames or knickknacks, not a plant, a vase, or a china coffee mug. Over twenty years at the studio, since the early days and Manny Silver’s reign, and not a shred of herself—purely professional.
Clara noticed one exception to the professional decor: pinned to the wall near the window was a calendar illustrated with birds of California. It made sense that Simkin liked birds. She had the same penetrating gaze, and she was rarely still. Alert to any infraction, she would swivel around in her chair, blinking like an owl—food brought in from the commissary, Lloyd napping at his desk, Clara’s incorrect choice of footwear, the wireless turned up too loud.
When Clara had first started at the archive, Max confided that Simkin had been an editor, back in the 1920s before the advent of sound, in the days when movies were still a curiosity, when knitting together the film footage was seen as women’s work. After the film industry began to boom, once there was money and prestige, there was a surge of male editors. Some women made the leap to cutting sync sound, but others—like Miss Simkin—were pushed out.
Clara looked at the calendar. It was still on the month of April, where a red-tailed hawk stared at her, witness to her trespassing. She turned the page to May, where an industrious woodpecker, his head crested with a shock of red feathers, tapped at a tree trunk. Instinctively Clara’s eyes were drawn to May 16, the day of the murder, and it dawned on her that this was the first time she had been in Simkin’s office since that night. She recalled herself that evening, sitting at the Moviola, its lamp bright against the dark windowpane. There was the mirror image of the office in the glass, her own reflection—Clara’s double—staring at her as she held the phone to her ear, waiting for Gil’s voice, and getting instead the switchboard’s perfunctory “No answer, miss.” She chewed her lip as she remembered his changing story—he had been working in Roger’s office and hadn’t heard the phone; he’d found himself on the Argentan battle set lost in memories of war. Clara stared through the window and into that moment. Did she have any doubts about Gil? No, she shook off that question immediately; she felt disloyal even thinking it. He was the detectives’ fall guy and that was all a fiction, whereas she was uncovering the truth.
Before opening the wooden drawers of the card catalogue, Clara went to the supply closet. (Simkin liked to have it close so she could keep tabs on who took what.) She flung open the metal doors and opened a random box—cotton gloves, the ones editors used to avoid getting smudges on the film. She took out a couple of pairs and left the closet doors wide open. If anyone came back early from lunch, it would look as though she had stopped into the office to get supplies for Sam. Her cover taken care of, Clara moved to the card catalogue, all the time keeping alert to the sound of a footstep or the hinge of the door.
Rows of narrow wooden drawers housed the index cards of alphabetized film titles, every project shot at the studio since the early days. Simkin favored the purity of numbers—a production’s title could be changed several times before a film’s release. Therefore, the alphabetized titles weren’t updated as often. Perhaps there was a chance that the Amazon Queen record was still here. The long narrow drawer with A to C was smooth to open. The wood was warm and soft. It looked like oak. She flicked through the five-by-seven index cards of A titles: About Time, All for One, Amazing Grace—that last card gave her a false surge of hope. She flipped to the next card and felt a jolt of electricity zing through her body from scalp to toe. Amazon Queen (3191). But the exhilaration soon faded: a neat pencil line ran through the title. Clara squinted at the other notes on the card. Camera test, Exteriors, Technicolor. There was a vault number that had been scratched out, and next to it in Simkin’s neat cursive: SR underlined and the date 1941. What did it mean, SR? Clara turned the card over. It was blank on the back. She held it up to the light, to see if she could make out the old vault number, but to no avail. That familiar futile feeling washed over her. Another dead end.
“It’s freezing in here,” said a voice. Miss Simkin marched back into her office rubbing her hands together. Clara’s thoughts scattered.
“The editors must be at the thermostat again,” Simkin continued, setting her purse on the desk and grabbing her jacket from the back of the chair.
Clara slotted the card back into its
place and closed the drawer. She reached for her cotton gloves in the supply closet, faltering with her delayed pantomime.
“I’ve ordered more of those,” said Miss Simkin, nodding to the gloves. “Someone must be eating them, we go through so many.” Then she glanced at the card catalogue drawers. “You need help finding something?” Simkin missed nothing.
Clara closed the supply closet and grasped for a lie—she could randomly pluck one of the film titles from A to C and claim she’d been checking something. She quickly assessed her options. If there was a last chance of finding Amazon Queen, she would need Miss Simkin’s encyclopedic brain. Her heart thumped. “In the card catalogue,” Clara said. “What does it mean when a title is crossed out?”
Miss Simkin tucked her purse into the desk drawer. “The film is no longer in the vault,” she said in a brisk tone. “It was either damaged or unusable—most likely destroyed.”
“Oh.” Clara’s heart sank. “Why destroyed?”
Simkin fastened her eyes on Clara like April’s hawk. “Why, what are you looking for?”
Clara shrugged. “Nothing,” she lied. “I haven’t seen a title crossed out before. The note says ‘SR 1941.’ I was just curious what it meant.”
“Show me,” said Simkin. Clara swallowed hard, put down her prop gloves, and went to the card catalogue. She slid out the A to C drawer and flicked through the As, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake by confiding in Miss Simkin. The film librarian peered over Clara’s shoulder. Clara, breath held, plucked out the card, imagining it was radiating something powerful and dangerous.
“Amazon Queen,” Clara said. “Production number three-one-nine-one. Why is it crossed out?”
Miss Simkin always had an answer for everything; she had a “right” way of doing things; she would over-instruct and nitpick; her knowledge of every reel in the vaults was legendary. But in response to Clara’s question she said nothing. The moment stretched as Simkin stared at the title, a curious look on her face, her gaze drifting through the card to somewhere else.
“Miss Simkin?” Clara prompted, and the film librarian blinked quickly, remembering herself. Her eyes returned to the index card.
“It was scrapped. Silver recovery—melted down for parts essentially.” Simkin pointed to the date. “Back in 1941.”
“Destroyed?” said Clara, watching her former boss carefully, and she caught a flicker of something behind Miss Simkin’s eyes.
“Many of our silent-era films were sacrificed for their silver, especially during the war.” Her tone was back to being businesslike as she returned to her desk and began to shuffle through paperwork. “The silver on the emulsion was deemed more valuable than the picture on it. Shortsighted, of course.” She gave a small shrug, her shoulders already up to her ears. “We have a limit on how many films we can store in the vaults—with the leap to sound and then to color pictures, many of the old black-and-white films got scrapped.” She picked up a wad of papers and moved to the filing cabinet. “Why were you looking for it?” Simkin asked. Her tone was casual, but Clara saw the whites of her eyes as she cast a glance at the door. She must be checking that no one was around to overhear their conversation.
Clara toyed with the cotton gloves. “No reason,” she said, watching Miss Simkin flit around the office like one of the birds on her calendar, unable to keep still. “I came across the title,” said Clara innocently, “and I’d never heard of it.”
“No one asked you for it?” Again, the question was light—a casual inquiry—but there was a tightness to her voice.
“No,” said Clara.
“Well,” said Simkin, relaxing her shoulders. “You’d best get back to Sam.” Their conversation was over; the subject was closed. Clara couldn’t push it without revealing more.
She left the film archive, her mind reeling. As she climbed the stairs to editorial, she thought it through—silver recovery. In her first days at the archive she had studied the postproduction manual, cover to cover, and she had read about this process of melting down old silent-era films. The footage was destroyed when the silver and celluloid were recovered. It sounded plausible. But there was something that didn’t add up: Miss Simkin had referred to Amazon Queen as an old black-and-white silent film. The test reel for 3191 had been shot in color—it was marked on the index card in Simkin’s own hand. Technicolor. The librarian would never make a mistake like that. It could only mean one thing: Miss Simkin was lying.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Gold
CLARA LEANED AGAINST THE carpeted wall outside the screening room, waiting for a film to finish. Waiting to see Max. As the minutes ticked by, her mind drifted back to the archive and replayed Simkin’s reaction to Amazon Queen. Why had she lied? It gave Clara the same feeling as when she’d asked Max about Leni’s visit to the studio, how he’d gotten strange and warned her off. What were they trying to hide?
It was late afternoon, and Clara couldn’t hang around much longer or Sam would miss her. The comedy—she assumed from the volley of high-pitched dialogue and slapstick sound effects—was in its third act. The muffled audio track vibrated through the screening room wall and down the back of her neck. She moved away from the wall and began to pace. Both Simkin and Max had been in HANL, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, in the lead-up to the war—Max was vocal about it, Simkin less so, but she had overheard her mention it once to a veteran sound editor. Why would either of them protect Pearce? Max of all people had no love for the studio head’s politics. Max’s own family was from Vienna, and not all of them had made it out. Auschwitz, he had told her once. The Jews from Vienna had ended up at Auschwitz. Max’s complicity in the Leni cover-up—if that’s what it was—didn’t make sense. She had to talk to him again.
Eventually Clara recognized the crescendo of dialogue, and the last zinger was delivered. After the jaunty music rose to a fanfare, the door opened and a posse of executives filed out, all of them stone-faced. Clara waited for the last straggler—a stenographer shuffling notes—before slipping into the screening room. She turned immediately to her right and walked up the few steps and into the projection booth.
“Meine kleine Klara,” said Max. He was unloading the reel from the projector.
“Hi, Max,” said Clara, smiling at the familiar refrain. She wasn’t his “little Klara.” She was at least two inches taller than him. “How was the comedy?”
Max raised his bushy eyebrows. “Schrecklich,” he said.
“That bad?”
“Nobody laughed for an hour and forty-five minutes.”
It was their usual back-and-forth, where Clara resisted speaking German and eventually Max would lapse back into English. She drew up her perch, an apple box pilfered from the grip department, and sat down near the projector. She clasped her hands on her lap. “Max, I need your help.”
He stopped what he was doing and looked at her, brows knit together, then went back to his task, loading the reel into its canister. “Help with what? I already spoke with your mother. She wasn’t impressed.”
“No, it’s not about that.” Clara took a deep breath of resolve, her eyes pinned to him. “In 1938, Leni Riefenstahl visited the studio. After being chased out of town by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, she traveled to Palm Springs, where she was a guest of Conrad Pearce at his desert compound.” Max put down the reel and turned to face her, a hint of suspicion on his usually kind face.
“I’m assuming you knew all that?” said Clara.
He shrugged. “Why are you focused on dragging up the past?” he said, his voice clipped.
“Because it’s not the past, Max. Leni’s visit to California might be connected to the murder at the studio.”
“The Milligan girl?” he said, surprised. “How?”
“Connie Milligan worked as a secretary for Conrad Pearce in Palm Springs around the time Leni visited.” That got Max’s attention. “If you
think back, can you tell me everything you remember about Leni’s visit?”
Max exhaled a long sigh. “Ja, it’s true, Riefenstahl came to the studio. She had also been to see Mr. Disney. She had been all over town trying to sell her Olympic picture to the US market. Most studios turned her away. HANL even had private detectives trailing her—they knew all the moves she made in town. No room in Hollywood for Leni Riefenstahl.”
Clara nodded impatiently; he’d told her all this before.
“After a tour of Silver Pacific,” said Max, “Mr. Pearce decided it would be safer to show Leni’s film at his house in Palm Springs, away from all the bad publicity. He took me aside and asked me to drive out to his desert house and handle the screening.” Max’s expression soured. “He said he trusted me to be discreet.”
“You screened Olympia?” asked Clara.
Max nodded and sat down heavily on his beaten-up stool. “All four hours of it.” He shook his head. “There must have been sixteen, seventeen reels of the damn thing.” He gazed through the projector window at the blank screen, remembering. “I should have refused, but I was afraid to say no—to say no to Mr. Pearce. I knew exactly what she was—a Nazi. ‘It’s just a movie, Max. It’s the Olympics, not politics. Don’t be so serious.’ That was Pearce’s take on it.” He frowned. “And yet in ’38—even after Kristallnacht—I agreed to Mr. Pearce’s request.” He smoothed down his tie. “I’m not proud of it, okay?”
Clara understood that he felt ashamed, but she couldn’t spare him. She had to find out more. “What do you know about Amazon Queen?”
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