Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  At best it was a deliberate fob-off, at worst a bare-faced lie, but I needed to know more before I made a commitment one way or the other.

  ‘Can I ask you something else?’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of “Ring of Roses”?’

  ‘The nursery rhyme?’

  ‘I think it’s more likely to have been a project that Robert was working on before he died.’ I stopped, thinking. ‘Maybe project is too grand for what it was. It’s just … Lynda mentioned to the journalist who did that piece on Robert that he’d started writing again before his death, once they moved back to the UK. A name that came up is “Ring of Roses”. It could have been a full-blown script or it could have been a name on the back of a napkin. I think a full-blown script is unlikely, but the name – “Ring of Roses” – is something I’d like to try and tie up.’

  ‘ “Ring of Roses”?’

  ‘Right. This would have been in the years between 1984 and 1988.’

  She paused. ‘I’m trying to think …’

  ‘If you’re not sure, that’s fine.’

  I didn’t want her misremembering something because I’d pushed her too hard – or, worse, pretending to remember because she wanted to help.

  Eventually, she muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She sounded desperate to help, her voice emotional as frustration began to claw at it. I tried to come at it from a different angle. ‘You talked just now about the trips Robert and Lynda took to see you out in Minnesota …’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You said that, during the Christmas 1984 visit, you found Robert a little discourteous because he just upped and left for the week.’

  ‘Yeah. The scouting trip.’

  ‘The name “Ring of Roses” never came up then?’

  She took a long breath. ‘I mean, it was such a long time ago, but I honestly don’t remember that name – “Ring of Roses”. I don’t even remember if he took a camera with him, or a typewriter. He could just have been getting away from us all for a week. Like I told you, I’m not sure that even Lynda knew what he was up to while he was away.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I just remember asking her, “Where’s Bob gone?” and she …’ There was a crackle of air as Wendy made a noise. ‘She just kind of shrugged.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he have told her what he was up to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The way you describe them, they sounded close.’

  ‘They were,’ she said. ‘Honestly, they were.’

  ‘Do you think it had something to do with his sickness?’

  She considered it for a while. ‘Well, Bob got told he had cancer a fortnight before he flew out to us in ’84, so I guess it’s possible, but … I don’t know.’

  I tried to match up the timings. As I understood it from what I’d read in Marc Collinsky’s feature, Hosterlitz shot his last film with Korin in Spain during the autumn months of 1983. After that, they moved to Somerset in early 1984, where he retired. Sometime in mid December 1984, he was diagnosed with cancer, and then – at Christmas – he and Korin visited Wendy in the US.

  So did Hosterlitz disappear for a week because of the diagnosis he’d received before he left the UK? Was he simply trying to seek out some time by himself, away from the noise and commotion of a family Christmas? It would be understandable if that had been the case, but why keep it back from Korin? Why not just tell her the truth? If they were close, surely Hosterlitz would tell his wife that he needed some space, some time, to reflect upon news that would change everything – them, their marriage, their time together. It was literally life and death.

  Ultimately, I couldn’t plough a clear enough path through my thoughts to see the answer, and, after a while, wondered if that unaccounted-for week even mattered at all. Maybe, in a similar vein, ‘Ring of Roses’ didn’t either. Maybe none of this mattered.

  I just wasn’t sure if I really believed that.

  The ‘scouting trip’ to northern Minnesota, ‘Ring of Roses’, the carving of the words ‘Lake Calhoun’ and the film projector into the tree at Stoke Point – I didn’t know what any of them meant or where they led yet, but I was pretty certain about one thing.

  They were threads.

  And threads always came loose from something bigger.

  14

  The address Louis Grant, the American Kingdom archivist, gave me turned out to be a crumbling art deco cinema in Southwark called the Comet that had been closed since 1998. It felt like a weird place to meet, but – as he’d agreed to see me so quickly – I went along with it. The cinema was next to the high belly of a rusting railway bridge, and though the building was old and decayed, the paint flaking, the bricks starting to crumble, I felt a powerful sense of nostalgia as I approached it, memories firing in my head as I remembered the one just like it that I’d gone to as a kid.

  A door had been left open for me at the back, and inside the air was musty and stagnant, a corridor rolling ahead of me with two other doors off to the left, and a staircase at the end that wound up and to the right. The oppressive summer heat followed me in: sunlight glinted off the chipped floor tiles and the peeling vinyl wallpaper, and illuminated the dust in the air as I approached the stairs.

  I headed up, following a vague hint of light, the smell closing in around me – old wood and furniture, and the whiff of stale cigarette smoke. At the top was an elegant foyer: marble floors with geometric squares, limestone stairs, balustrades made from chromed steel, and a ticket booth, standing alone like a lighthouse in the middle of the room. Beyond that was the auditorium itself. I stepped closer and looked in. The screen, taped in a couple of places and half hidden behind thick curtains, looked out over a sea of worn, red velvet seats.

  There were three people in conversation halfway down, all with different accents: two men – one local, one South African – and an American female.

  ‘Mr Grant?’

  All three looked up.

  ‘Ah, Mr Raker.’

  Grant broke away from the group, moved up the aisle and shook my hand. It was clammy, but I didn’t hold it against him. The auditorium was hot, the air dense, and Grant – a man of about fifty – was carrying a couple of stone of extra bulk. Sweat beaded his hairline, which was thinning, and his armpits were damp, but he was smartly dressed in black trousers, a black tie and a grey shirt, and had a trimmed silver beard that ran in perfect diagonals across both cheeks.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me so quickly.’

  Behind him, the other man – in his late forties, stocky, with a shaved head and a tape measure clipped to his belt – headed off towards the front of the auditorium, while the woman approached us. She was forty, maybe a little older, and absolutely stunning: olive-skinned, slim, smart, dressed in a blue skirt and heels with shoulder-length black hair cascading against the white of her blouse.

  ‘Mr Raker,’ Grant said, ‘this is Alex Cavarno.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘Alex is the COO of AKI Europe.’

  I smiled. ‘I didn’t realize I was that important.’

  She returned the smile. ‘I wish I could pretend that was the reason, Mr Raker, or that it’s because I attend every single meeting my staff schedule – but, the truth is, I dragged Louis down here this afternoon to talk about where our new archive is going to be. That’s why you’re standing in a dusty cinema at the moment, and not in our current office out in the Docklands.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting here,’ Grant added.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘It was just more convenient for me.’

  I turned back to Alex Cavarno. ‘So this is going to be …’

  ‘Our new office,’ she said.

  ‘I thought that was what you meant.’

  ‘Hard to believe at the moment, I know.’

  We all looked around the auditorium.

  ‘T
his place brings back all sorts of memories,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Cavarno said. ‘Did you use to come here?’

  ‘Not to this one, no. I grew up in a village where there were two shops and a pub and about eight other kids, so I’d get the bus into the next town. But we had an art deco cinema like this one.’ I pointed towards the front of the room. ‘You haven’t watched a movie until you’ve watched one on a taped-up screen.’

  She smiled again, more fully this time, revealing a perfect set of teeth. ‘I grew up in East LA, next to the Santa Ana Freeway. That was literally the first thing and last thing I heard every day. My mom and dad, they had no money …’ She shrugged. ‘My dad spent a lot of my teen years off work – he had back problems, and then he got a knee replacement – and we never went on vacation, because we could never afford it. So the thing we did instead was watch movies. I’m that rare thing among studio executives – I actually know something about films.’ She paused for effect, and started grinning again. ‘That was obviously a joke. Well, sort of.’

  Her handbag and laptop were perched on one of the seats nearby. She reached into the bag and took out a business card. ‘Louis tells me you’re trying to find Robert Hosterlitz’s widow. I can’t claim to be an expert on Hosterlitz’s films, I’m afraid, as bad as that sounds coming from someone in American Kingdom management, and someone who just told you they know about films. But if you need anything else, let me know. I have a great team here in the UK.’ She handed me the card and looked at Louis. ‘Not that I’m suggesting for a minute that Louis won’t have it covered. This guy knows more about films than anyone I know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, holding up the card.

  ‘Sure. Well, I’ll leave you two to it. We’ve got a launch party for the new season of Royalty Park on Monday and I’m supposed to be taking an interest.’

  Royalty Park was a television costume drama, co-funded by the BBC and American Kingdom, the third series of which had been the UK’s most-watched TV show of 2014. I’d only ever seen it in snatches, but there were adverts for it everywhere in anticipation of its return.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my architect being here,’ Alex Cavarno said, looking past me, and I remembered the other man. He was measuring up some panelling on the front stage. ‘Billy,’ Cavarno called out to him. ‘Please get me that drawing for the projection room tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Will do,’ the man said, holding up the tape measure.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s what you said last week,’ Cavarno muttered under her breath, and rolled her eyes. She shook my hand again. ‘Pleasure, Mr Raker.’

  ‘David,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Alex.’

  Her eyes lingered on me, her smile still evident at the corners of her lips, and, out of nowhere, I felt a sharp fizz of electricity scorch my veins. My gaze drifted to her left hand, automatically, without thinking, searching for a ring. It was a movement that – when I looked up at her again – she seemed to be aware of, because, when I found her ring finger empty, it was like she gave a little shake of the head. I’m not married, I’m not engaged, I’m not seeing anyone. We remained like that, caught in a silent conversation neither of us appeared to be quite sure was happening, and then I shuddered out of the moment, grabbed a hold of myself and thought of Melanie Craw. What the hell was I doing?

  ‘Anyway,’ Alex said, ‘you have my number.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, just for something to say.

  Her eyes lingered on me for a moment more – and then she was gone. It was almost a relief. I felt embarrassed, thrown, guilty.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Grant was saying, and I realized he was directing me to a line of seats in the back row of the cinema. ‘I cleaned all the cobwebs off these.’

  I got out my pad and pen, then spent a moment trying to clear my head, pretending to leaf through my notes. When I was ready, I explained about my meeting with Marc Collinsky, how the subject of ‘Ring of Roses’ had come up, and how I wanted to find out more.

  ‘Well, I can tell you everything I know about Hosterlitz,’ Grant said, ‘which will take us some of the way into his career, but not all of the way. I’m afraid, like most people, I have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to his horror films.’

  ‘You mean the ones he made in Spain?’

  ‘Particularly those, but also the ones he made here in the UK too, during the early seventies. I’ve seen House of Darkness because that became quite infamous – he was turning up drunk, or spaced out on painkillers, every day during that.’

  In Collinsky’s article, I remembered the quote from the House of Darkness producer that claimed the same thing. The late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to have been when Hosterlitz was at his lowest – depressed, addicted, bankrupt.

  ‘I’m happy to tell you what I know, though,’ Grant said.

  Although his South African accent was close to estuary English – no doubt softened over time – it was still peppered with hard vowels and Ja instead of Yes.

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, so I’ll give you the brief A to Z. Hosterlitz made his debut in 1949 with My Evil Heart, made for a company called Monogram. After that, he shot three of the greatest film noirs in the history of cinema, one after the other, all for American Kingdom. Connor O’Hare in 1951, Only When You’re Dead in 1952, and then the biggie: The Eyes of the Night in 1953. That won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, and also Best Actor for Glen Cramer. What makes that win extra special is that Hosterlitz was just twenty-eight at the time. Incredible when you consider how good it is. Have you seen any of his early films?’

  ‘The Eyes of the Night – but a while ago.’

  ‘Well, you can get them all on Netflix, so they’re easy to find. The original negatives are in our LA vault, and we maintain a pristine distribution print of all three here in London. We obviously don’t own the rights to My Evil Heart, but in terms of style you can lump that in with the other three. They’re all of the same ilk and explore the same classic noir themes. My personal favourite is Only When You’re Dead, but the Oscar wins obviously made The Eyes of the Night the most notable. Anyway, given all of that, Hosterlitz should be up there with the biggest names in movie history. Instead, he’s barely a blip on most people’s radars.’

  ‘Because of the HUAC hearings?’

  ‘Right, ja. I don’t know how much you know about it, but the House of Un-American Activities was a committee that was set up to investigate allegations of communism among US citizens during the Cold War. In the late forties, it started targeting Hollywood professionals. Its power began to wane by the sixties – that was why Hosterlitz felt safe coming back to the US in ’62 – but the damage was already done for him. Instead of staying and clearing his name – or attempting to – he packed his bags and headed to the UK.’

  ‘So was he a communist?’

  ‘Never proved one way or another, as far as I know.’ Grant shrugged. ‘You can understand why he decided to leave the States, though. You didn’t even have to be a confirmed member of the American Communist Party to be subpoenaed to appear before the committee, or to face potential blacklisting – or even a prison term if it really went south for you. It was little better than Nazi Germany. Just a witch hunt, all based on rumour and counter-rumour.’

  Grant continued: ‘So, anyway, he fled to the UK in 1954 and made one film here, but it was all downhill after that. He went to Germany for a while and then returned to the US in ’62 and ended up directing episodes of TV shows like Bonanza, Petticoat Junction and The Defenders. His TV stuff’s not bad, actually. Some of it, anyway. But he always loved movies – TV just paid the bills. Unfortunately, his comeback, The Ghost of the Plains, was a bit of a disaster. People are sniffy about it because it bombed at the box office, but it has its moments. Have you seen it?’

  ‘No. It’s a western, right?’

  ‘Right. It’s not The Searchers, but it’s pretty good. Anyway, that’s the point at whic
h it gets a bit cloudier for me, as he did some more TV stuff for a couple of years after The Ghost of the Plains bombed, then returned to the UK to make some budget horror movies, then ended up in Spain making even lower-budget horror movies. They were basically like production lines. He made fourteen in seven years.’

  ‘That’s where he met Lynda Korin.’

  ‘Correct. Have you seen the Ursula films?’

  ‘No. I was going to ask you about those Spanish films, actually. I’ve been trying to find some copies for reference, but they’re pretty hard to get hold of.’

  ‘You should be able to find the Ursula films on DVD somewhere, but I agree: the ones he made after that are much harder to track down.’ He stopped, his fingers drumming on the arm of his seat. ‘There’s a place called Rough Print, just off Charing Cross Road. The owner is a kind of collector of rare films and books. He might have something. I know he’s a big fan of Hosterlitz.’

  Grant found the number in his phone and gave it to me.

  ‘What are the Ursula films like?’ I asked.

  ‘Garbage, really,’ Grant said, ‘but not without small moments. The saddest thing about it is that you can see these very short, very brief sights of Hosterlitz’s talent shining through, but most of the rest of it is borderline unwatchable.’

  ‘Do you know much about them as a couple?’ I asked.

  ‘Hosterlitz and Lynda Korin?’

  He looked out at the auditorium, thinking. The architect was on the opposite side of the room, using his tape measure at the stage and scribbling the measurements on to a notepad.

  ‘Not much,’ Grant said. ‘However, I did meet Korin at a convention a few years back.’

  ‘Was that Screenmageddon?’

  ‘Ja,’ Grant said. ‘That’s the one.’

  I remembered Collinsky mentioning the same event. He’d told me that it had been the first time he’d met Korin, and that she’d given him her card.

  ‘It’s a sci-fi, horror and fantasy thing – you know, paradise for geeks like me.’ He smiled and got out his phone again, searching for something. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, continuing to search, ‘it’s massive – like, 200,000 visitors – and they have some big guests there, but they have tons of minor ones too; the sort of people who were in the cockpit of an X-Wing for five seconds in the original Star Wars.’ He stopped searching and handed me the phone. ‘They always have this European horror section as well. That was where I met her.’