Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  I briefly considered lying about my line of work, but he’d read my medical history. He was smart enough to know that I wasn’t holding down a job in retail.

  ‘I find people,’ I said.

  ‘Find them?’

  ‘People who are missing.’

  ‘I see.’ He adjusted his glasses and slid back in his seat. ‘And that appears to be quite dangerous work.’ He studied me. ‘Are you having trouble sleeping? You look … tired.’

  I shrugged, recalling the night I’d spent watching Hosterlitz’s movies, and the way I couldn’t stop thinking about them afterwards – their themes, what linked them, the way the camera sat there and watched, the dream I’d been left with afterwards, when I’d dropped off.

  ‘Is that a yes?’ he said.

  ‘I happened to have a bad night last night.’

  ‘I see. Any particular reason?’

  ‘Just work.’

  ‘I see,’ he said again. ‘Are you feeling depressed at the moment?’

  ‘No.’

  His head rocked to one side and he pursed his lips, like he was having a conversation with himself. ‘Do you mind if I ask whether you have any family?’

  I frowned. ‘I have a daughter.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No wife or partner?’

  ‘My wife died.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. What about brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re an only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘What’s the relevance of this?’

  He nodded again, this time more forcefully, as if my answers were helping cement whatever conclusion he’d reached. ‘How long ago did your wife die?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘Mr Raker,’ he said, his voice suddenly softer. ‘I don’t know how honest you’ve been with me, but I’m guessing not very.’ He waited for a response, as if he expected me to fight him on it. ‘You’re alone, you’re tired, you can’t sleep, you may even be having a delayed reaction to the trauma of burying these people you cared about. You were diagnosed with PTSD back in November, you had chronic fatigue, were probably depressed. As a result of that, you were referred to a psychologist, yet I can see from your notes that you never turned up to any of those appointments at the hospital.’ He stopped again, steepling his fingers in front of his face. ‘It’s difficult to move forward if we don’t know precisely what is wrong with you, and earning a living in a world where, as a matter of course, you’re attacked with knives, and sustain blows to the head … well, I can assure you, that isn’t going to help you recover what you’ve lost.’

  ‘What I’ve lost?’

  His eyes strayed to the scarring on my head, to other scars he knew I had on my body. ‘I used to have a friend, back in Mumbai, who worked as a detective for the Indian Police Service. He joined after his brothers were killed in a house burglary. He never wanted to be a policeman, not really, although I dare say he was good at it, but he thought the police service might bring him some answers; maybe he thought it would address the emptiness he felt. But you can’t bring back the dead, Mr Raker, and trying to do so … well, that will make you careless. My point is, this job of yours might cost you your life. And maybe it won’t be because you get stabbed. Maybe it will be because you’re sick.’

  ‘I’m not sick.’

  ‘How do you know if you don’t turn up for your appointments and don’t take the pills I prescribe you? Mr Raker, I don’t know you. I don’t know how long your wife has been dead. But the only reason to do the kind of work you do is to make something right.’

  He looked at me, almost as if he pitied me.

  ‘Grief is a sickness, Mr Raker. My friend – the one I was just telling you about – he was so devastated from the loss of his brothers, he felt so much the need to avenge them, the grief he carried was so heavy, that he tried to take down a gang of four thieves one night in November 2010, entirely on his own.’ He shrugged. ‘They lured him into a dead end, and then they shot him in the back of the head.’

  We stayed there in silence for a moment, looking at each other, and then Jhadav opened up his hands. ‘In the end,’ he said quietly, ‘my friend chose not to see what was coming. Just make sure you don’t do the same thing.’

  PART TWO

  * * *

  00:06:44

  ‘You know what they used to call this place?’

  Ray Callson is looking out of a window to the left of him. Five floors below, traffic is backed up along Wilshire Boulevard in a long, unbroken line. Nothing moves out there. It’s just late-afternoon sky and the shimmer of exhaust fumes. Above the whirr of the camera and the hum of air conditioning, it’s possible to hear car horns and police sirens in the distance, and there’s music closer by – the deep thump of a bassline.

  He turns back to the camera. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Do I know what?’ a voice responds.

  ‘What they used to call this place?’

  ‘You mean, Los Angeles?’

  ‘Right.’ Callson glances out of the window again. ‘When my old man moved here – back in the early twenties – they used to call it the “white spot of America”. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah. LA was billed as this Protestant promised land where you could live in peace and harmony among your own kind. But it was all bullshit. Blacks, Latinos, Asians – they were already here. I mean, this place doubled its population in the twenties – you think that happened because only white people came to live here?’

  ‘Do you think it’s better or worse now?’

  ‘LA?’ Callson tears his eyes away from the view and looks back at the camera. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that everything in this place is a lie. Always has been, always will be. By the middle of the twenties, they had six hundred brothels in the city. You could get your dick sucked by another man at a Ninety-Six Club a few blocks from City Hall. We had communists running around Boyle Heights. We had elephants and circus freaks luring people out to housing developments with the promise of a free lunch, and people gawping at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea because they’d never seen neon signs before. Some white Protestant promised land, huh? All it was, all it is, is a magic show. LA was a lie back then, and it’s a lie now. There’s no black or white here. There’s just grey.’

  ‘You sound frustrated.’

  Callson smirks. ‘Yeah, I guess I am. That’s something you learn to get used to as a homicide detective. The frustration. Thirty to forty per cent of all the cases you take on, you won’t solve. That’s just a fact. You gotta face reality.’

  ‘Is that because people lie?’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘But most of the time?’

  ‘Yeah, most of the time people lie. You spend enough time in this city, I honestly think it gets into your blood. It becomes a part of who you are. You’re lying without even realizing. I mean, what do you expect from a place where men and women stand around on studio lots, in make-believe sets, and get paid to pretend they’re someone else? Of course they’re gonna lie. They’re doing it every day of their lives. It becomes second nature.’ He shrugs. ‘This city is just a magic show. Everyone’s got a trick.’

  17

  In the end, I decided to get out of London.

  I stayed in Bristol, at a hotel near Temple Meads station. It was one of the last rooms I could find, as the bank holiday weekend had accounted for everything else. After checking in, I took a walk through the crowds at the Harbourside, found something to eat, then returned to the room, keeping the lights off and the air conditioning on, and sat at the window, looking out to where the spire of St Mary Redcliffe rose upwards like a pale blade out of the earth. Six floors up, everything below me seemed stilled, more obscure; all suggestion and shadow.

  After a while, I made myself some coffee and grabbed my rucksack off the floor. Inside were the
four horror films Korin had made with Robert Hosterlitz.

  The set had cost me £44, which seemed steep for four movies no one else in the city had even looked at in the entire time they’d been on sale at Rough Print. The owner suggested a book too, Dia de los Muertos, about the European horror movie industry in the 1970s and 1980s, which included a section on Hosterlitz – or, rather, Bob Hozer, the alias he’d gone by during that time. I’d decided to take it when I saw that it had a chapter on the Ursula films and a transcript of the panel Korin did at the Screenmageddon convention in 2011. That had been the same panel that both Marc Collinsky and Louis Grant had attended. In the end, it proved to be the only public appearance Korin would do at an event like that in the years after she walked away from acting.

  The four films were all shrink-wrapped and sported equally lurid covers. Ursula: Queen Kommandant had a full-length colour photograph of Lynda Korin in her mid twenties, in a ridiculously tight shirt, buttons open far enough to reveal the curves of both breasts, a swastika stitched on to one of her pockets. Above a title awash in blood was a tagline: She’ll make you scream for more!

  The cover for The Drill Murders was grisly – a close-up shot of an unseen assailant, just his hand visible, about to start drilling into the head of a screaming woman. It was the Italian version of the film, so I understood nothing of the copy on the back, but a ridiculous tagline on the front, written in English – Drill, drill, drill! Kill, kill, kill! – helped to offset the gratuitous, somewhat distressing nature of the photo. When I checked the credits, I saw Hosterlitz again listed as Bob Hozer – as cinematographer, editor, writer and director – and another name I recognized in the cast: Veronica Mae. Out of interest, I logged on to IMDb again and found a photo for her, taken in her twenties. She was petite, pretty, with long, sandy hair and a tiny beauty spot at her nose. It was her eyes that stood out, though – they were a startling green, like chips of jade.

  The covers of the other two films I’d bought – the English version of Axe Maniac, and Death Island in Spanish – were basically just repeats of each other: both featured a generic, buxom woman running away screaming, one in a forest, another on a sandy beach fringed with palm trees.

  The room came kitted out with a DVD player, so I removed Ursula from its case and dropped it into the tray, flicking through Dia de los Muertos while it loaded up. In the section on Hosterlitz’s years as Bob Hozer, there was a page examining his shot composition. One section in particular caught my attention:

  Most critics agree that Hosterlitz was never the same film-maker once he was forced to flee the US in 1954, even when making his comeback as a writer-director in 1967 for big-budget western The Ghost of the Plains. But, in truth, even when you examine his horror films, beyond the shambolic nature of the acting, his loss of confidence as a writer, the illness, addiction and depression that skewed and neutered his talents, Hosterlitz was still showing flashes of that same innate brilliance during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: in the beauty of his shot composition, in the way the camera lingers and reveals, in the minute expressions he captures in trademark close-up, or in the scenes he watches from a distance.

  That description of his shot composition all rang true based on what I’d seen of his noirs the previous night, and while the second Ursula film proved to be an absolute mess – violent and tedious, ramshackle, full of gratuitous nudity and toneless acting – once you set your mind to it, it was easy to start locating those same Hosterlitz trademarks, even while they were more infrequent. The difference was, in his noirs, the observation of the scene, of the characters and their stories, was supported by actors like Veronica Lake and Glen Cramer. By the time he made Ursula, Hosterlitz’s gift for dialogue was gone, ground out of him during his decline, and he no longer had the actors for it, anyway.

  I sat through countless shots of women showering, a couple of prolonged sex scenes, a disembowelling, a man being stretched on a torture rack, and then decided to fast-forward through the rest, only stopping when a moment arose that I recognized as truly belonging to Hosterlitz. The more I watched, the easier they became to spot, flourishes that were like ghosts from another time.

  When I was done with Ursula, I grabbed the copy of Axe Maniac and set it running. It was easily as terrible, maybe even a little worse. Korin’s performance turned out to be the best of an awful bunch, but again there were glimpses of Hosterlitz’s identifying style among all the chaos: individual scenes – flawless, coherent – that stood out a mile. The moment I spotted them, I paused the action and watched them properly, and then hit Fast-Forward once they were over.

  Gradually, something started to dawn on me.

  There was a pattern, a connection between all the moments that I chose to pause on: it was that the best scenes, the ones where the genius of the man rose above the artlessness of the films, were always the ones featuring exactly the same person.

  Lynda Korin.

  In Ursula, and even more in Axe Maniac where she just had a supporting role, any time Korin was onscreen by herself – alone, or away from the rest of the cast – Hosterlitz got his act together. He treated her scenes with a reverence and care that he never bothered to apply to any other part of the movie. She was lit perfectly, he reduced the dialogue she had – so she wouldn’t be shown up as a mediocre actress – and he simply watched her.

  When he filmed her from a distance, he’d use wide shots and little in the way of music or sound effects, concentrating on her, on things like her humming to herself, or the sound of her footsteps as she wandered around the rooms of a house. Or he’d do the complete opposite and come in tight to her and listen to the rhythm of her breathing, repeatedly using a device where her eyes acted as a mirror, reflecting back other people in the same scene – as if she were the window to the whole movie. But anything else in the film, any time the other actors were involved, it changed. The rest of it was subordinate to whatever he did with Korin. He’d whip through reams of dialogue, even if other actors were mumbling or delivering lines with zero expression, and scenes without Korin were never lit as well, or framed as exactly as hers. Yet the minute Korin had a scene where she was alone, there was a complete reversal of quality. That was when you caught a glimpse of the man Hosterlitz had been; the director whose film had won seven Oscars.

  Pausing the action on a close-up of Korin, I shuffled forward on the bed. Her profile was frozen onscreen, the vague hint of the film’s deranged killer in the background, the contrast between the dark of his silhouette and the flawless, snow-white of her skin so stark and beautiful it could have been a still from one of the noirs. The more I looked at the perfect composition of the shot, the more I wondered whether Hosterlitz’s approach in these scenes simply came down to nepotism, to a husband favouring the contributions of his wife, or whether it was something even more deliberate.

  When I allowed the scene to snap into life again, something Korin had said in the interview with Collinsky came back to me: Do you know what he called me the first time he met me? she’d asked. He said to me, ‘You are an angel … You’re a work of art.’ The more I thought about that, the more I started to recall about the rest of her interview: He wanted to see me through the lens. Sometimes he used to spend hours setting up shots that I was in, even unimportant scenes, trying to frame them just right.

  This wasn’t an obsession, she’d said to Collinsky.

  Except now, in this moment, it felt like that was exactly what it was. It was eerie and slightly discomfiting knowing how he’d felt about her, and seeing the results playing out. As the camera lingered on her, it was almost like a soundless conversation between them; between the stillness and lure of Korin’s beauty and the constancy of Hosterlitz’s camera. I felt like an uninvited stranger standing at the window of a house, straying into the privacy of someone else’s life.

  I continued to watch, the film rolling towards its conclusion. The axe maniac of the title had noisily butchered eight people at a dinner party and was now pursuing Korin’s cha
racter and her onscreen boyfriend, the hero of the movie, through the rooms of a house. The film had regressed again now that other characters had become involved, a mess of confused camerawork, bad editing and worse acting.

  But then, as the hero sacrificed himself for his girlfriend, as Korin finished off the killer with his own axe and stood there, breathless, bloodied and alone, it all started to change again. The music dropped out. The camera started to move.

  And something weird began to happen.

  18

  It started with a wide shot, inside a living room, with Korin perched on the edge of an armchair, spattered in blood, and the killer lying on the floor at her feet.

  Slowly, the camera began dollying in towards her, in profile, motionless on the edge of the chair, her eyes downcast. There was no music, no sound at all except Korin’s breathing, which got louder and louder the closer the camera got to her. Halfway between the camera’s starting position and Korin, the sound of her heartbeat began to fade in too, thumping in the spaces between breaths, like the distant pulse of tribal drums. I’d seen continuous evidence of Hosterlitz’s fascination with Korin throughout the movie, in Ursula too, but this was different: it was a truly incongruous moment, a much longer, slower, more intense movement in towards her – almost like we, as the audience, were creeping up on her, unseen. There were no other actors left to disturb her, no lines left to speak, no scenes to play out, nothing that could draw the camera’s attention away from her.

  It was just her and us.

  I expected the camera to come to a halt once it reached her – but it didn’t. Instead, it inched right past Korin, towards the corner of the room, where a walnut-cased television set was playing soundlessly. The TV was showing footage from the inside of a car as it drove slowly along a nondescript street. I could make out the upper windows in a series of three-storey buildings, the camera tilted so that only the very tops of people’s heads were visible at the bottom of the shot. The footage ran for ten seconds and then ended.