Silver Nitrate(16)
Abel sat back, laced his hands together, and smiled at them. “Yes and no. It’s too obscure for anyone to remember it. But it should be remembered if only for Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. It’s not every day you run into a German occultist who is writing movies in Mexico City.”
The name was alien to her, and she thought she would have remembered such a name.
“It sounds like you’re about to recite a tall tale,” Montserrat said, raising a skeptical eyebrow at the old man. “German occultists?”
“There’s a healthy history of German occultism. In fact, there was a fellow called Arnoldo Krumm-Heller who moved in Parisian circles before making his way to Mexico City, where he served as a physician for none other than President Madero. In 1927, he founded the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua in Mexico City.”
“Maybe that’s true, but I happen to know the scriptwriter for Beyond the Yellow Door was Romeo Donderis, if that’s where you’re headed,” Montserrat said and she plucked Tristán’s glass from his hand and took a sip of it. She hadn’t felt like drinking, but the mood was changing. Whatever defensive measures she’d erected were swiftly brushed aside, and she felt festive, even giddy, since she knew she’d caught Abel fibbing. “He was also the scriptwriter on a Western that I quite appreciated.”
“But I didn’t say Ewers was the sole scriptwriter. Ewers worked on the treatment, so to speak. He also modified bits of dialogue and polished certain scenes.”
Montserrat considered that.
Tristán took the glass back. He looked very relaxed as he stretched out his legs and inclined his head. “An occultist and a writer. I can’t even remember my appointments for Monday,” he said with a cheeky grin. “But I do admit people can get into bizarre hobbies when they’re in show business. Is that why the film ought to be infamous? Because that German boy said abracadabra and presto?”
“Oh, no. It’s more than that. It’s the whole of it. The Nazi connections, the secretive little stories.”
“Nazis! We’re not in Argentina,” Tristán said with a hearty laugh.
“I take it you’ve never heard of Hilde Krüger, or Hilda, as she called herself in Mexico. She was a Nazi, an actress, and a spy, who cozied up to many Mexican government functionaries in the 1940s. Gabriel Soria auditioned her for a role or two, which is how I learned about her. There were Nazis floating around Mexico around that time.”
Tristán’s smile faded a little. Montserrat leaned forward, looking carefully at Abel. “You’re serious? You worked with a Nazi writer?” she asked. This no longer sounded like a fib, or an elaborate joke. They were at the edge of something special.
“That’s the thing. Ewers told different versions of the same story. In one version, he’s a young man who stumbles into the circle of Nazi occultists, in another there’re no Nazis at all but he’s studying with Erik Jan Hanussen, who teaches him hypnotism, before he must flee Germany when Hanussen is assassinated. Even Ewers’s age was in question. In 1961, when Beyond the Yellow Door was filming, he looked to have been in his thirties, and at the time of Hanussen’s death in 1933 he would have been barely fourteen, which contradicts some of his stories.
“But it didn’t matter what version you heard, what wild tangle of events Ewers spun for you; after you met him you believed that he did possess secret knowledge. It was how he spoke, how he carried himself. It made folks nervous on the set, especially since we were shooting a horror film. Then, suddenly, Ewers died. He was mugged one night. We lost our funding, we couldn’t complete the film, and misfortune seemed to follow the crew.”
“What kind of misfortune?” Montserrat asked.
“Anything and everything. If you ask theater performers, they’ll tell you Macbeth is cursed, but they probably can’t pinpoint the exact source of the trouble, and it was the same with Beyond the Yellow Door. People who worked on it had accidents, or couldn’t get new roles. Vague stories, half rumors about things that happened on set. I had a friend who joked that the film had been cursed. ‘Remember Abel’s cursed movie?’ Some people had heard about Ewers and his magic talk, and they also knew it had been a horror film. Altogether it made a spooky story. I had to admit it was fun to bring it up at parties. If you have a failed production, you might as well have one that is cursed.”
Abel poured himself another glass of brandy. “Of course, that only lasted for so long. Eventually, people forgot all about the curse. Poof, gone, even that. Say Beyond the Yellow Door nowadays, and no one can remember I worked on that.”
“What happened to the reels you were able to shoot before your backers pulled out?” Montserrat asked.
“The reels were destroyed when the backer left. And my work? It doesn’t amount to anything. All I can do is tell you stories of dead people, and of Ewers, the sorcerer who swore one day I’d be one of the greats.”
She thought he might add something else, that he was about to elaborate on what he meant, but his face turned sour and distant.
A painful silence, and then Abel chuckled. “Well, I thought I was going to tell you a fun and interesting horror story, and it seems I’ve simply told you a sad one. I’m sorry.”
Abel’s eyes looked glassy as he clasped his hands together. He reminded her of Boris Karloff in The Black Cat. His visage was both elegant and worn down, and his hands looked frail. Before, she’d been able to envision the younger Abel Urueta with a colorful handkerchief around his neck, but now that image had faded. She was left only with the impression of age and melancholy.