Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  I looked at his phone.

  It was a photograph of Lynda Korin sitting at a table, a few copies of the original Ursula fanning out from her elbow in an arc.

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked.

  ‘She was really lovely, actually, but she seemed a bit overwhelmed by the whole convention thing. She told me she’d never done anything like it before and said that she agreed to do it because she thought it might be fun, and because she was surprised anyone still remembered her. This was – what? – 2011. In truth, I hadn’t seen any of her films, even Ursula. I just knew about her because she was married to Robert Hosterlitz. That was why I wanted to talk to her.’

  ‘So did you two talk about Hosterlitz?’

  ‘Oh, man. I can’t remember exactly. Probably, ja. I imagine I told her I was a huge fan of her husband’s work. I couldn’t, in all good faith, tell her that I loved the Ursula trilogy, or pretend to her that they were “cult” films.’

  ‘What about “Ring of Roses”? Have you ever come across this idea that Hosterlitz may have been working on something towards the end of his life?’

  But Grant was already shaking his head.

  ‘Honestly?’ he said. ‘No. Never. I find the idea hugely exciting, but, when Marc Collinsky originally phoned me, I went through both our physical archives here, and digitally searched the AKI master vault in LA, and it’s just a dead end.’

  Grant took a long breath, the sweat at his brow reflecting the dull yellow glow from the auditorium’s lamps. We both watched the architect for a moment, the metallic snap of his tape measure carrying across the room to us.

  ‘The fact is,’ Grant said, ‘if Hosterlitz was working on something at the end of his life, I think it’s highly likely that he didn’t tell anyone the full story.’

  15

  Rough Print, the shop that Louis Grant suggested might have some hard-to-find copies of Lynda Korin’s horror movies, was already closed for the day by the time I got there. It was frustrating because I’d planned to head back to Somerset first thing in the morning to take a look at Korin’s house, and didn’t want to have to make a detour into central London again. All I could do was give them a call as soon as they opened and see if it was worth a return journey.

  There was better news from Marc Collinsky, though: he’d emailed through the audio files for both interviews he’d done with Korin. On the tube back to Ealing, I plugged in my headphones and began listening to the first one.

  As Collinsky had suggested, Korin was a good interviewee. Forthright and engaging, she still had an American accent, despite years in south-west England, although she seemed to have lost a lot of her Minnesotan twang. There was a hushed quality to her voice too, a crackle that made me wonder whether she was, or had been, a smoker, as well as frequent, considered pauses – some quite long. She wouldn’t be hurried into answers, conducting everything at her own pace: after Collinsky asked something, she always considered it carefully before giving flight to her words.

  The conversation they had about ‘Ring of Roses’ the first time wasn’t on tape, because it had happened after Collinsky had stopped recording, but his efforts to press Korin for more details in the second interview were. In the end, she didn’t really know enough for the conversation to go anywhere, and – in terms of my search for Korin – it was hard, for now, to see any line that directly connected her to ‘Ring of Roses’. There was something in their marriage, some half-submerged piece of evidence, waiting to be unearthed – I could feel it. But I couldn’t say for sure if ‘Ring of Roses’ was it.

  When I got home, I made myself something to eat and then took it through to the back deck to enjoy the last of the day’s sun. As I ate, I listened to the interviews for a second time. I wasn’t necessarily looking for fresh insight in the conversations she’d had with Collinsky. Instead, it was an effort to familiarize myself with her: the way she spoke, answered questions, her idioms, choices of vocabulary. That was also why it was going to be important to get hold of her films – or as many as I was able to. She’d be much younger in them, but it would continue to help build a picture of who she was.

  What was clear from the interviews was that questions about Hosterlitz, about working with him, didn’t seem to faze her at all. I didn’t ever get the sense she was dancing around an answer, or trying to suppress something. If anything, she was more open and honest than I expected. Collinsky asked her about the nudity in her films, about what it was like having her husband direct her in sex scenes with other men, and she told him it was just acting – it was weird, but it was what she was being paid to do.

  ‘I was pretty confident in my own skin by then,’ she said. ‘I’d been standing around in the buff for years in photo shoots.’ She laughed a little. ‘I’m under no illusions: most of those films were terrible, and I didn’t get cast in them because of my acting talent. But you take what opportunities come your way, and you make the most of them.’

  ‘Did it ever bother Robert?’ Collinsky asked.

  ‘That I was naked? No, it never bothered him. At the end of the day, I was just doing what he told me to.’

  ‘In terms of his direction?’

  ‘Exactly, yeah.’ There was a long pause. ‘Do you know what he called me the first time he met me?’ She stopped again; Collinsky must have shaken his head. ‘He said to me, “You are an angel.” ’ Korin was attempting to do an accent, a mash-up of German and American. ‘ “I think you are the most beautiful woman I’ve met in my life. You’re a work of art.” ’

  That same laugh.

  ‘What did you say to that?’ Collinsky asked.

  ‘What was I supposed to say?’

  ‘Thank you, I guess.’

  Korin laughed again. ‘He meant it, that’s the thing. Up until that point, a lot of men had said the same thing to me, but most of them were trying to get their hands up my skirt. As a woman at that time, especially in the industry I was in, men were basically trying to molest you every day, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It was a male world, top to bottom. But Robert said it, just once, and never followed up on it – at all. I mean, he never touched me, never even asked me out. I had to make the first move. That sadness he had that I talked about, that was powerful. But so was the moment he said those things to me. After the first Ursula, he did all his own cinematography. He told the producer on those movies that it was because it would save money, but it wasn’t that. It was because he wanted to see me through the lens.’

  She stopped, clearing her throat. The tone of her voice was softer, more reflective. ‘That probably sounds creepy, but it never felt like that. Sometimes he used to spend hours setting up shots that I was in, even unimportant scenes, trying to frame them just right. No one would care or even notice, but when I watched the rushes back, or I saw it up on screen, I noticed. He never got weird or inappropriate. He never tried to come on to me. This wasn’t an obsession. It was simple: he just loved the way I looked.’

  The interview continued, Korin and Collinsky’s conversation fading into the background as I tried to make some sense of what she’d just said.

  ‘… women like Maria Hadak and Veronica Mae.’

  It snapped back into focus. I stopped the recording, rewound the audio and listened again. Korin was talking about other women who’d starred in Hosterlitz’s Spanish horror movies. I’d heard this once already on the train back home, but on a second listen something registered with me that I’d missed first time.

  Veronica Mae.

  ‘… Hadak and Veronica Mae,’ Korin repeated. ‘Veronica did six films with Robert and me, so we were all quite close back then. She got to know us very well.’

  ‘I read that she doesn’t live too far away from here,’ Collinsky said.

  ‘That’s right. She was from Bristol, although you’d never be able to tell. We used to tease her about her plummy accent. But I liked her. We both did. She was the one who actually persuaded Robert and me to buy a house in this area.’

 
; I recalled the scan of the Polaroid that Wendy Fisher had emailed to me, of Korin and Hosterlitz sitting together in Madrid in 1983, his arm around her, her leaning into him. The back of the photo had been scanned in too, where ‘Madrid 1983: Bob and Lyn, by Ronnie M’ had been written. I’d assumed that Ronnie M was a man. But what if Ronnie M was Veronica Mae?

  If she lived close to Korin, if they still spoke, she might be able to provide some insight into Korin as a person. I made a note to track down her address and then listened to the rest of the files.

  By the time I was done, I felt jaded. I’d been up since 3.30 a.m. and had spent half the day in the car and the other half in the heat of the city. At 9 p.m., as the light escaped from the sky, I collapsed on to the bed and tried to sleep.

  An hour later, I was still awake.

  Eventually, I got up again, went to the TV and started trawling Netflix for Robert Hosterlitz’s noirs. All four were on there, alongside his western, The Ghost of the Plains. Making myself a coffee, I set his debut, My Evil Heart, going.

  Before I knew it, one film had turned into four.

  Over the course of the next six and a half hours, I watched My Evil Heart, Connor O’Hare, Only When You’re Dead and The Eyes of the Night back to back, only getting to bed at just after five. All four were mesmerizing. But as I lay there in the dark of the bedroom, still unable to drop off, I found it difficult to articulate why they had such power. I just knew they did.

  The longer I chased an explanation, the more I concentrated on what connected them, the themes they shared. There were the world-weary protagonists: a small-time gangster in Connor O’Hare who had become tired of the game; downtrodden cops in both My Evil Heart and The Eyes of the Night; a private detective struggling for work in Only When You’re Dead. There was always a murder at the centre of the plot, and the murder always brought the male leads to the doors of a femme fatale. All the men were portrayed as corruptible and weak, the females as liars and seductresses, and Hosterlitz used his Los Angeles settings like labyrinths – an unending maze of streets, of bars, clubs and lounges; of identical houses – that the male characters finally became lost in, unable to distinguish right from wrong. All four used flashbacks – and all ended on a downbeat note.

  Each of them was immaculately shot too, a beautiful marriage of light and shadow, the action choreographed and edited with such precision. There were no rough edges, not a single bum note. It was slick, handsome and smart.

  There was something in Hosterlitz’s dialogue too, the way sentences were constructed and words were used. It was like the characters who populated those four films had some kind of unique vocabulary, a way of speaking and interacting that marked them out as being Hosterlitz creations. It didn’t ever feel unnatural or wrong. In fact, quite the opposite: it was almost lyrical, like poetry.

  Close to 6 a.m., having not slept at all, I got up again and decided to start streaming The Ghost of the Plains, Hosterlitz’s western – his fifth studio picture. It had never been rated in the same way as his noirs. It had a bad reputation because it had tanked at the box office in 1967 and ruined any pretensions Hosterlitz may have had about being restored to the A-list. Yet, while it wasn’t as good as his earlier films, something echoed through it that I recognized instantly – something unique to the way that Hosterlitz shot his films.

  And, eventually, after the sun was up, peeking through the curtains at the living-room windows, it hit me. I finally understood why the movies were so potent and compelling. It’s the way he uses the camera. He didn’t ever utilize fast cuts, rarely panned, never zoomed. Instead, he stationed the camera in one place and watched his actors, only tracking slowly, drinking in the intricacies of their performances, the beauty of the scenery surrounding them, the sets, the lighting.

  His films weren’t ever uninteresting but they were static. He examined. He observed. Sometimes it was even like he’d crept into the scene unnoticed, filming from afar without anyone realizing. In The Eyes of the Night, there was a scene where he filmed a two-minute conversation between two actors through the gap between a door and its frame. It gave the whole thing a strange, detached feel. In a way, it made it seem like he was intruding on something – or hiding from view.

  As that idea came to me, as I began to imagine the camera as an uninvited guest, that scene grew to become something else. Something discomforting. I started to see the lens as a watcher, a prowler, a voyeur. The concept stayed with me as I lay back on the sofa and closed my eyes, bone-tired. This time around, I dropped off quickly, even while cubes of sunlight filled the room – but my thoughts trailed me into sleep.

  My dreams became full of distorted faces, of actors repeating lines, of black and white cities whose streets seemed to go in circles, spiralling further and further towards the centre of their maze. And then, just before I woke again four hours later, sweat-stained and disorientated, the dreams abruptly seemed to darken, and I found myself bound to a chair, in a house I didn’t recognize, gagged and frightened, being made to face something in the corner of the room.

  Silent, motionless, hidden by shadows.

  It was a camera.

  16

  Any plans I had to leave early for Somerset were over before I even fell asleep, not least because I’d only dropped off at 8 a.m. When I woke again at midday, my head fuzzy, I picked up the phone and called Rough Print to see if they had any copies of the films Lynda Korin had made with her husband in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It turned out I was in luck. The owner of the shop said he had four: Ursula: Queen Kommandant, the second of the three Ursula films; The Drill Murders; Axe Maniac; and Hosterlitz’s last movie, Death Island.

  ‘The only issue,’ the owner said, an old man with a slight wheeze, ‘is that two of the four films aren’t in English. They’re dubbed into Italian and Spanish. In fact, English versions of the two dubbed films don’t exist any more. Does that matter to you?’

  I thought about it. ‘That’s fine. I’ll still take all four.’

  ‘Excellent,’ the shop owner said. ‘I really am quite pleased. I’m a big fan of Hosterlitz’s early work, so I picked these up at an auction in Bilbao about six months ago for next to nothing. But no one has shown the remotest interest in them until you called me. It’s so sad how it ended up for him, don’t you think?’

  I agreed that it was and headed to the Tube.

  By the time I was back home from Rough Print, it was after two-thirty. I thought about getting into the car and heading down to Somerset, about paying for a room in a hotel somewhere so I could make sure I got the early start I’d wanted to get today. But then my phone started ringing.

  It was Melanie Craw.

  ‘At the risk of sounding like an old, nagging wife,’ she said, by way of a greeting, ‘you have a doctor’s appointment in an hour. You remembered, right?’

  I’d forgotten all about it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Raker.’

  I was in the kitchen now. From where I was, I could see the untouched bottle of antidepressants on a shelf in the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want me to drag you down there?’ she said.

  ‘Look, Craw, I –’

  ‘Let’s not forget, at the end of last year, you hit the deck like a rag doll. You need to check in with someone, Raker, just to get the okay. If you don’t do this, if you keep on pretending that what went on last year didn’t happen, next time you might black out and not wake up again.’

  ‘I think that’s unlikely.’

  ‘You’re a doctor then, are you?’

  ‘Craw, I’m not going to the –’

  ‘Stop being so bloody selfish.’

  Her words hung there on the line between us. For a second I thought of the moment with Alex Cavarno at the Comet cinema the day before, and then the guilt started to pool in my stomach again.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Let me know what they say.’

  And then she was gone. Basically, it was
Craw in a nutshell: five seconds after telling me my health was both our concern, she’d hung up on me. I looked at the time, and then over at the four horror films.

  For now, they’d have to wait.

  My doctor was a small Indian man in his late fifties called Sunil Jhadav. He had an immaculate silver beard and old-fashioned, horn-rimmed spectacles. The first time I’d been in, after I’d blacked out, he’d set up an appointment for me every three months, ostensibly so he could write me a fresh prescription for the antidepressants I never took. But I missed the last one, and I’d only made the one before that because Craw had happened to have a day off and told me she was going to drive me.

  ‘How have you been since February?’ he asked.

  If it was a jab at me, he’d disguised it well.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Headaches?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any difficulty speaking, or understanding people?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever feel like you’re going to be sick?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  He checked my heart and then moved on to my blood pressure. After that, he looked over some scarring I’d sustained to the head, shone a penlight into both my eyes, and then stepped back, rolling his chair out from under his desk.

  ‘Any more blackouts, Mr Raker?’

  ‘No.’

  He sat down. ‘I’m not sure we ever discussed your medical history.’

  I just looked at him.

  ‘It makes for colourful reading, I must say. Injuries to your back, your hand, you’ve been stabbed in the stomach, you even had your heart stop on the operating table. Did I ever ask you what it was you did for a living?’