The Silver Blonde

by Elizabeth Ross

  An invisible young woman like Connie, no one would miss her. She’d been disposable. And by this logic so was Clara. Her stomach seized up at the thought of how this would play out. What was he going to do to her? Danger thrummed down her spine, and she gripped the edge of the couch as though it were a precipice and all Roger had to do was push her off.

  “The vault wasn’t part of the plan, but perfection is the enemy of good. I saw her standing there, looking like Bannon’s twin—in her costume, her makeup done. It wasn’t as tidy a location as the dressing room, but it still played.”

  When the phone rang, they both jumped. Brackett looked at it like he’d never seen the contraption before and didn’t know how to stop the intermittent noise. He let it ring; it lasted an eternity. Clara flicked a glance at the door. Finally Roger darted toward his desk. Clara made a run for it, but tripped on the edge of the coffee table and stumbled. She heard a drawer open. As quick as a cat, Roger was in front of the door. He had a neat revolver pointed at her chest. Roger was done talking.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Vault

  MAGIC HOUR HAD FADED by the time Roger marched Clara across the lot, his silk-lined blazer draped over his arm, concealing the gun. She moved forward like an automaton, her feet betraying her with every step. But she had no choice, with a gun at her back—he’d killed before. The studio lot was on the cusp of night. The sky had drained to a washed-out shade of cotton candy, and the last few cars were lined up at the gate to join the procession of lights on Melrose. Clara’s mind spun. Where was he taking her? How could she get away? Her eyes scanned rapidly for a means of escape, a way of attracting attention or distracting Roger. Where were the extra security guards and the police cruiser that had been stationed on the lot since the murder? Clara’s chest caved in. With Gil in custody—the perfect fall guy—as far as the cops were concerned the killer had been caught. She began to feel frantic, her fists clenching and unclenching, all while she walked calmly as instructed.

  To any onlooker they would have appeared innocuous. Roger might even have seemed courteous, his left hand touching her back, guiding her in the right direction. He navigated them carefully to avoid anyone at close range—not a difficult task at this hour. As a precaution he avoided the wide walkways. Instead he had them zigzag between the vast soundstages. The buildings loomed over her. If only she could be transported to one of the fictional worlds on the movie sets and out of this one. The loquacious Roger from moments earlier—spilling details of how he’d planned a murder—had been replaced by a more sinister silent version. She couldn’t predict what he would do next. But there was no doubt that she was in danger.

  When they rounded the corner of stage eleven, they almost collided with two custodians and a cart of cleaning supplies. Clara gasped, but before she could utter a word, she felt the barrel of the gun poking into her right kidney—a reminder to keep quiet, to not try anything. All it would take was a squeeze of the trigger. She heard Roger apologize, and all too quickly the men continued on in the opposite direction, their voices and the squeaking cart fading to nothing.

  They passed the actors’ bungalows. She had a flash of Connie in Bannon’s dressing room on the night of the murder: Bannon doing her stand-in’s makeup, the mirror ringed with lights, Connie trying on the actress’s costume and swiveling around in front of the full-length mirror. The borrowed heels clicking on the asphalt as she strutted toward the vaults feeling armed and powerful, poised to find dirt on the studio—to blackmail her way into a career or to burn the whole place to the ground. Either way it must have felt intoxicating.

  They were approaching Gower on the west side of the studio, where there was a pedestrian gate. She wondered if Roger was planning on leaving the lot. But instead of turning to the exit, he nudged her on, and Clara realized with a sense of dread that, of course, he was taking her to the film vaults. A chill in the air made her shiver. She slowed her pace, but Roger prodded her. “Keep moving.” As they reached the concrete building, Roger looked over his shoulder—there was no one around.

  “Are you going to strangle me too?” She gave this line a kind of impertinent edge as though she were channeling an indignant Katharine Hepburn.

  “Nonsense.” He sounded offended. “Vault five, come on.” He ushered Clara to the end of the corridor. “Open it.” It had been two weeks since the night of the murder—was history repeating itself?

  It was dim in the corridor; Roger hadn’t turned on the lights. She flubbed the combination and had to start over, her fingers trembling.

  “Come on, Girl Friday,” said Roger.

  Girl Friday. She remembered him sticking up for her when Thaler had reluctantly given her the apprentice editor job. She had been duped into believing that he was decent, that he cared about giving a young woman a shot, that he was on her side.

  She got the right combination and opened the outer door. Roger waved the gun toward the vault. He jerked his head. “Go on.”

  With trepidation Clara pushed open the inner door and stepped inside. Roger hit the light switch on the corridor wall and the vault came to life. The floor was spotless—someone had attacked it with bleach—the murder of two weeks prior wiped clean away. She blinked at the reels, neat and gleaming in their metal canisters, towering toward the ceiling on either side. She could imagine Connie searching in vain for the reel that was supposed to be in vault five, not knowing it wasn’t there, that it was supposed to have been destroyed, that Max was hiding it under the Oscars.

  Roger followed her inside and pulled the inner door closed. Clara backed away from him. The tight space was claustrophobic. She glanced behind her, but there was nowhere to go, just a cobwebbed airshaft. He put the gun down, slowly, on top of a canister, giving her a warning look not to try anything. Clara could feel her chest rise and fall rapidly. He put his blazer back on, shrugging the shoulders into place, fixing his cuffs. Clara’s eyes darted past him to the door. She could make a run for it, but she’d need the strength to overpower him—and in the narrow space that would be impossible. The proximity of real danger was screaming at her; she had to get out of that vault.

  Roger removed his belt and came at her. Clara took the chance and charged him. She pushed him hard with her shoulder as though ramming a door, and tried to scrabble past. But as she lunged to open the inner door, he grabbed her, and she felt a sharp crack on the side of her head. She was stunned and swayed to one side, cradling her head, cowering against another blow. He was holding the revolver, butt facing out—he must have clocked her with it.

  “You done?” he barked.

  Brackett stuffed the gun into his pocket and picked up the belt, which he’d dropped in the struggle. He dragged her to the back of the vault, shoved her against the film racks, pulled her arms behind her back, and began to tie her wrists to the metal upright of the shelves.

  Momentary relief—the belt was to tie her up, not to strangle her. The terror ebbed, but she was still rigid, heart thumping. “Is this really necessary?” Again Katharine Hepburn piped up—as though his actions were an inconvenience to her dinner plans. “I won’t be able to unlock the door from the inside.” But underneath she was a swirl of panic, claustrophobic at the idea of being trapped in the vault.

  “Stop talking,” he said. His voice was as cold as slate. As he wrestled to secure her wrists, she could hear his labored breathing in her ear.

  The belt was tight, and the metal upright dug into the heels of her hands. Her head throbbed. She tried to breathe through the pain, in and out, in and out. She thought of the night of the murder; her parents’ party and Otto’s sonata came swimming back to her. She tried to focus, convincing herself to remain calm until he left. He wasn’t going to shoot her or strangle her. He must have wanted her out of the way, presumably so he could make a getaway. A security guard might check on the vaults; they’d upped their rounds since the murder. At worst, Lloyd or the ne
w kid would find her by morning. She licked her lips. Her mouth was dry. Take it easy, Clara. Have a Coke. Her head was foggy. She was drifting somewhere. Focus, her rational voice said again. She had to stay alert. She coached herself to go over what would happen: in the morning Lloyd would find her, he would let her out, she would call the detectives, Gil would be released. Her eyes drooped. She felt woozy again. She blinked quickly. She had to talk, stay awake. It could be dangerous to succumb to this drowsy feeling.

  “Did you plan to frame Gil all along?” she asked.

  Roger finished tying her up. He checked that her constraints were tight enough and stepped back. His face was empty of any emotion—that scared her more than the gun in his pocket.

  “Gil was my wild card,” he said. “I knew there was tension between him and Bannon from day one at the read-through. Couldn’t figure it out. Until later.” He smiled. “I suppose he must have been very much in love with her.” A wicked gleam in his eye. “I had him stay late that night, alone in the office. Another suspect for the cops to eliminate, and someone to muddy the waters, someone with a link to Bannon. But Gil proved more than useful: he became the suspect. I ran with it, I improvised. I made sure the police thought he was still in love with her.”

  Clara was queasy. “The letter from France, was that you?” He gave a little bow and took off an imaginary hat. “A decent forgery, I thought.” He smirked. She felt dizzy, and for a moment there were two Rogers bowing in the vault. She blinked through her double vision. She could feel a trickle of blood run down her temple, into her hair.

  Through the pulsing pain she watched with confusion as Roger removed a canister of film from the racks. He opened it and unspooled the footage across the floor. Then he took another and did the same. A third and fourth he removed from their canisters; he placed them—still tightly wound—on top of the loose footage.

  “What are you doing?” Clara stared at him, bewildered.

  “No loose ends, my dear. American audiences, they like their films tied neatly in a bow. No ambiguities, no guesswork—we’re not European.”

  Roger stepped out into the corridor. She waited for him to lock the door as she stared at the mess of film footage snaking over the floor. Then she heard a match strike and she could smell tobacco. It sharpened her senses and jolted her out of her stupor. Roger hovered in the doorway and took a long inhale on the cigarette.

  “Roger, put that out!” It was suicide.

  He raised an eyebrow and gestured to the no smoking sign on the wall. “You’re right. The whole place could go up.” He smirked and stepped into the vault.

  “Roger, don’t. Put it out. This is crazy,” said Clara, terror shooting up her back. She was aware of the towering racks of flammable film all around her.

  Roger held the cigarette in one hand and a book of matches in the other. “It’s a filthy habit,” he said, and tutted. He wedged the butt of the cigarette inside the book of matches, the burning end sticking out a couple of inches. “I imagine Conrad has insurance, and it’s, what—an accident, or maybe suicide, with your boyfriend arrested for murder?” With absolute horror Clara realized how it would play out. The cigarette would take a few minutes to burn down and would ignite the book of matches, which would set the film alight, and then—whoosh. The loose footage, like dry tinder, would burst into flames and light the compact reels. The whole vault would be ablaze. Roger would have time to escape the vaults, and maybe even the studio lot, before the fire trucks came screaming.

  “No, Roger. No!” She was begging him. “Please—don’t.”

  Carefully he placed the improvised incendiary near the unspooled film. He had the concentration of a props man positioning an object before the camera rolls. Focused, efficient, cool under pressure. He nudged the matchbook closer to the loose film and then, as if the AD had just called “Action!” he ducked away, swiftly closing the doors. She heard the combination lock spin. The light went out.

  Clara began to thrash against her constraints. There was a faint bar of ambient light from the corridor. The only other source of light was the ominous ember of the cigarette, a tiny glowing coal about to ignite an inferno.

  In the darkness the sheer terror of her situation took hold. Clara screamed until she was hoarse. She started to cry. No one had heard Connie the night of the murder—they wouldn’t hear Clara either. She was trapped in a concrete bunker, the doors locked tight, insulated by hundreds of reels of film—reels of fuel. Nitrate film contained the same chemicals as explosives. And the whole place was about to blow sky high.

  Quickly Clara slipped her heel out of her shoe. She lifted her foot, curled her toes to keep the shoe from falling off, aimed in the darkness, and then pitched it toward the cigarette. It went long—she heard it land on the concrete. One more try. She wished she were wearing the sturdy rubber-soled lace-ups instead of the flimsy heels. She flung the other pump off her foot toward the faintly glowing target. A rustle as it landed on the film stock—but the cigarette remained smoldering. She cast a wild gaze about her: blackness. She was surrounded by film reels—her passion, and now the fuel to a fire that would kill her. Her pulse raced, she couldn’t breathe—she was completely trapped. She watched the cigarette burn. How many times had she witnessed such an innocuous thing, a burning cigarette? She could see it now, Gil’s hand on the wheel of the convertible, cigarette between his fingers, the way he would ash it over the side of the car at a stoplight.

  This ploy of Roger’s was theatrical, absurd, terrifying. But then she thought of the charade with Bannon and what Roger had done to Connie, and for what—to save his reputation, to prevent a scandal, to protect his image, his fading career. And with Gil found guilty and Clara out of the way—no one would ever know the truth.

  Clara fought for her life. She struggled hard, but the racks laden with reels were immovable. She tried to wriggle her wrists free, but Roger had wrapped the belt so tightly, all she got was raw chafed skin. She tried to rub the belt against the metal rack to wear it down, but the leather was tough. It would take forever. All she had was seconds. Her head throbbed.

  She reached her stockinged feet toward the loose film, to pull it, tease it away from the cigarette. She could barely reach it—her toe grazed the edge of a loop of film, but she had hardly any purchase. Then she heard something shift like a log displaced on a fireplace, and she worried she was accelerating the process. The cherry on the cigarette was smoldering millimeters from the edge of the matchbook now. It wouldn’t be long. She had a flash of Miss Simkin describing how old films were destroyed. Melted down for silver.

  She tensed, waiting for the inevitable. Her palms were sweating; she was shaking. Her stockinged feet were cold on the concrete floor. Now the burning cigarette end had reached the book of matches—it caught in a flash. The brightness burned her eyes, and there was a reek of sulfur in her nose. She watched with horror as the gold crest of the Biltmore hotel was swallowed by flames, she imagined it devouring the futile warning: Close cover before striking match. The flames licked the edge of the film stock. She turned her head away and squeezed her eyes shut. Any second now the film would catch. Clara braced herself for the inevitable, the tornado of flames, the blinding heat. The link between her and Connie forged in death, to share the same fate—murdered in the film vaults. One strangled, the other burned alive in a nitrate fire.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Blonde

  A NITRATE FIRE TAKES hold with such speed and intensity that it will continue to burn even when doused with water. Nitrate creates oxygen, its own fuel, as it burns. It sounds like a tornado, like an airplane engine down a runway—it roars. All the facts that Clara had learned about nitrate since she’d started at Silver Pacific studios, all the anecdotes of accidental fires and tragedies, unspooled through her mind in a blink: film collections lost forever, cinemas burned to the ground, a matinee filled with children. The power of film: to bewitch and
to destroy.

  As Clara cowered in the vault with her eyes closed, her body rigid, waiting for the inevitable, she was transported to their kitchen in Berlin, the red-and-yellow oilcloth, the smell of pickled herring. The memory was so vivid that she could feel the vinegar prickle her nose, and her taste buds smarted—miraculous what trickery the mind performs.

  But no—Clara really could smell vinegar. It was overpowering. She opened her eyes. Incredibly, the film hadn’t caught. She squinted hard at Roger’s little time bomb. The matchbook flare was small and sputtering, and the frames of unspooled film appeared to have collapsed and melted. Then it hit her. Acetate film smelled like vinegar, and unlike nitrate, it wasn’t flammable. The small rolls of film that Roger had randomly pulled off the shelf and unspooled were 16 mm—an acetate base. Her relief was short-lived. She couldn’t know if all the reels he had pulled were acetate. There was still a risk. The change in temperature, the heat from the matchbook that was still smoldering, something could still spark and catch. Not to mention that if there were old or damaged reels of nitrate decomposing, they gave off a flammable gas. The wait, the not knowing, was excruciating.

  Time passed. The matchbook was out. Her wrists were throbbing and her head felt foggy. She could hear girls’ voices in German as she drifted in and out of consciousness. They were calling her name. She was running toward them. Early-morning light, and they were walking to school. A threesome of linked arms, in step—Klara, Freya, and Ruth. Two blond heads and Ruth’s dark brown waves. Ruth Hoffman.

  In a rush Clara was transported to Freya’s garden at the end of summer 1938. The three girls were sprawled on the lawn, banished from Freya’s house while Frau Thome bustled through housework and a batch of baking. Freya lay on her side, absently ripping at blades of grass, her blond hair fanned over her shoulders. Klara and Ruth were bickering. “Klara, it’s not broken. I can fix it.” But Klara snatched the flower crown from Ruth and tossed it toward Frau Thome’s rosebushes, where it hung snagged on a thorn.