Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  #92 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

  No. I’m not emailing you, DMing or anything else. Just ask Korin this: why did Hosterlitz repeat the same scene 11 times? See what she says.

  #93 | Posted by MarcCollinskyCine on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

  And what do you think she’ll say?

  #94 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

  I don’t know. But she knows more about Hosterlitz than the rest of us can ever hope to learn. Those films have the same ending. Same soundtrack. Same voice-over. Are we seriously suggesting she didn’t notice?

  Same ending. Same soundtrack. Same voice-over.

  What voice-over?

  No one really picked up on the comment about the VO. It got lost among a discussion about the repeated scene, about Korin, about Hosterlitz as a director. I looked at my TV, where Death Island was paused on the credits, picked up the remote control and rewound it. I stopped it just before the beginning of the end sequence, where the ninety-second dolly began. Pulling a chair in close to the TV, I plugged my headphones in and pressed Play. I wanted to cancel out as much peripheral noise as possible – from the hotel room, from the people passing in the corridor, from the traffic rumbling past outside. All I wanted to hear was the film.

  The sequence began.

  I listened hard as the sound of the heartbeat and Korin’s breathing began to get louder. That was all I’d heard on the soundtrack up until now, and it was all I could hear again. There was no voice-over. The heartbeat and breathing reached a crescendo about halfway between the camera’s starting point and where Korin was positioned, and then it began to drop off a little as the camera finally reached Korin and manoeuvred past her towards the TV set.

  I rewound it for what felt like the hundredth time and played everything over again. This time I didn’t watch the sequence, I just ducked my head away from the TV so the images wouldn’t distract me, pressed my headphones deeper into my ears and listened. I heard the familiar sound of her breathing fading in, her heartbeat. I tried to will myself to hear beyond them both.

  Then, vaguely, I caught the tail end of something.

  Like a whisper.

  It was the first time I’d heard it. It was so soft I wasn’t sure if I’d even heard it at all. I hit Rewind on the remote and spun the film back ten seconds. This time, as the camera drew level with Korin and began heading towards the TV set, I turned the volume right the way up.

  My head thumped in protest.

  But this time the whisper was even clearer. It was the softest of voices, half hidden within the breathing and the heartbeat, like the glimpse of a silhouette. I couldn’t quite pick up what was being said, so I rewound it again. On the next play, I realized it was a man, but his voice was so delicate, so deliberately gentle, it was almost feminine.

  I rewound it yet again, playing it through, and this time I picked up the hint of an accent in the man’s voice.

  He was saying, ‘You don’t know who you are.’

  He was saying it over and over. ‘You don’t know who you are. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know who you are.’ He was repeating it constantly behind the noise of the heartbeat and the breathing. ‘You don’t know who you are.’ He did it all in the same, soft timbre, and it didn’t stop until the credits rolled.

  You don’t know who you are.

  The voice belonged to Robert Hosterlitz.

  21

  After a restless night’s sleep, I woke up after seven, showered, and headed down to breakfast. The restaurant stank of fried food, the buffet loaded with trays of oily bacon, eggs and hash browns. I stuck to cereal, fruit and coffee, then took my laptop to a table in the far corner of the room.

  At just gone eight, I tried Marc Collinsky.

  He was in Berlin, but I hoped by calling early I’d catch him before he headed out to whatever event he was there to cover. It worked. He said he was about to board a train, so I got right to the point and gave him an overview of what I’d discovered the previous night – including the voice-over.

  ‘Voice-over?’ Collinsky said.

  ‘You didn’t know about that?’

  ‘I remember that person on the forum – Microscope – they said something about a voice-over, but I never really followed it up because they were just so weird and unhelpful. You said you think the VO is actually Hosterlitz himself?’

  ‘It sounds exactly like him. I watched a documentary about him that was floating around on YouTube. He speaks in an American accent but it’s got that slight Germanic tone. He keeps saying, “You don’t know who you are” over the film’s ending. Does that mean anything to you? Is it related to any of his movies?’

  ‘No. Well, not that I can think of. When I interviewed Korin that first time, I’d only managed to see Axe Maniac, so I had nothing much to go on – in terms of the stuff about the repeated scenes – other than a weird theory some stranger online was pushing my way. But, in between the first interview and the second, I got in touch with a journalist in our Spanish office and she managed to track down a copy of Hell Trip, through a collector.’

  ‘That was when you realized the same scene was repeated?’

  ‘Right. Near identical in both movies.’

  ‘Did you bring it up with Korin in that second interview?’

  ‘Not during the interview, but I did afterwards,’ he said, which explained why I hadn’t heard him pose the question on either of the audio files he’d sent over. ‘She said she just went along with whatever Hosterlitz asked. She wasn’t an actress, she was a model, so she never questioned the direction she was given.’

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘Yeah, I think she was being honest. She was always the first person to tell you that her acting abilities were limited. She just did what Hosterlitz asked her.’

  ‘But being asked to do the same scene eleven times?’

  ‘Maybe she just never thought that hard about it, or maybe she figured it was some kind of calling card for Hosterlitz. You know, something he included to identify the film as one of his – like a Saul Bass title sequence, or the Kubrick Stare.’ He stopped, sighed a little. ‘But I don’t know. Maybe she was lying to me. I just never got that sense from her. I really didn’t. I honestly believe that she respected Hosterlitz’s artistic vision.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. He didn’t feel like she was lying and maybe she wasn’t – but something was going on. I changed direction. ‘So what do you think they mean?’

  ‘Mean?’

  ‘Those scenes. The films I watched last night, they’re terrible. They’re full of sloppy editing, shrieking music, there’s no subtlety or craft to them – apart from those scenes with Korin when she’s alone. Those moments feel completely different.’

  A tannoy started up in the background of the call. When it was over, Collinsky said, ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt that their inclusion was completely intentional. He must have been aware that he could get away with putting them in, because no critics were reviewing his work, and punters at the time didn’t care about the story because they were too busy getting their fill of blood and boobs. And then, almost as soon as those films were out, they were forgotten again, and Hosterlitz was prepping his next, terrible horror movie. He wasn’t as prolific as some of the European horror directors like Franco or Fulci, but he was making them fast enough that they came and went in the blink of an eye.’

  He stopped, but I could tell he wasn’t finished. ‘I need to get the train in a minute, but if you want my opinion, I think those scenes are some kind of allegory, probably for the way he was treated by Hollywood. The dolly into her represents the path of his career. The blood on Korin symbolizes the way he was stabbed in the back by the HUAC hearings, the way Hollywood fed him to the wolves. It’s a statement on the death of his career, and probably – given the lurid red of the blood – some sort of comment on him being labelled a communist as well. Did you listen to the interviews I sent you?�
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  ‘Yeah, a few times.’

  ‘Then you would have heard Korin talking about how Hosterlitz called her an “angel”. A lot of people say he was obsessed with her, and I think they’re probably right, but I don’t think it was in a scary, stalkerish way. Why would she marry him if he was some psycho? I think he was obsessed with her beauty, the way she looked. And so he used her as a sort of canvas to paint everything on, because she was a part of his life too, like the HUAC. Maybe the major part. After all, when everyone else turned their backs on him, Korin didn’t.’

  Some of that felt like a stretch, but what Collinsky had said about Korin, about Hosterlitz being obsessed with her, resonated with me. I’d thought the same thing the night before.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what about the television?’

  ‘The one that plays that footage being shot from inside a car?’

  ‘Yeah. What do you think that’s about?’

  ‘Absolutely no idea.’

  ‘No theory about what street it’s showing?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Collinsky paused. I could hear him moving, the squeal of train brakes, the hum of people’s voices. ‘But there might be someone who does.’

  ‘Microscope,’ I said.

  ‘Right. I just don’t know how the hell you find him.’

  I called Louis Grant at AKI and asked him the same questions I’d asked Collinsky, but he was similarly unsure, so I returned to my room to get my things together, then sat down in front of my laptop again. Going to the forum I’d looked at the night before, I found the Hosterlitz thread and the posts from Microscope, and clicked on the name. It took me to a public profile. When users signed up to the forum, they had to provide some personal information – but it amounted to very little, and there was nothing to stop them from lying about who they were. Age, sex, location – it could all have been faked.

  I studied Microscope’s profile.

  Male. Forty-five. He’d listed his location as London W1. That was it. A man in his mid forties from central London. There was no way to tell if that was true. I had no idea if he had posted from an apartment he was renting, a house, a place of work, or if he had just been passing by – he could have posted from a hotel room, or a coffee shop. He could have posted from another city, or country.

  It was a dead end for now; another loose thread.

  I gathered my things together and headed to the car.

  22

  Once I was out of Bristol, the traffic started to melt away and the grey of the city became the green of the country. It was hot again, the sky an immaculate blue.

  Veronica Mae, the actress that Korin had mentioned in her interview with Marc Collinsky, and also the woman who’d taken the Polaroid of Hosterlitz and Korin in Madrid in 1983, lived about a mile south of the village of Litton, right on the edges of the Mendips. I planned to call in on her before heading to Korin’s place, a few miles down the road. In truth, I didn’t know what I expected to get from Mae – or even if she would be home – but it felt like it was worth a journey.

  I followed the A37 south through a succession of villages, until it became the A39 and cut across a high sweep of sun-drenched pasture, divided up by drystone walls and criss-crossed by telephone poles. A few minutes later, in a cleft a couple of villages on, I found Mae’s cottage. I parked up, got out and rang the bell.

  After the call with Collinsky over breakfast, I’d done a little more digging on Mae and had managed to find some other pictures of her from the early 1980s. Her career had broadly mirrored Korin’s: she’d made low-budget dross – mostly horror films – and her fame, such as it was, had been built on the notoriety, and minor cult status, of one project in particular. For Korin, it had been the Ursula trilogy. For Mae, it was a 1984 horror film called Mr Crow, about a scarecrow that comes to life and starts murdering people with a corn scythe.

  The front door opened.

  The second she appeared, I knew it was her. She was fifty-five, a little plump, her hair short and bleached an ash colour – but it was her. I recognized the beauty spot to the left of her nose, but mostly it was those green eyes, as perfect now as they had been three decades ago. She wore a pair of unflattering, baggy tracksuit trousers and a vest which accentuated every crease of flesh at her waist, but as her eyes caught the fringes of the sun moving over from the back of the house, their colour like a sheet of emerald glass, it became easy to see the visual potential Hosterlitz had glimpsed in the younger version of her.

  She was holding the door open with her right hand, her left on her hip. I couldn’t see a wedding ring on her finger, so I played it safe.

  ‘Ms Mae?’

  She eyed me with suspicion. ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s David Raker.’ I already had a business card out and handed it to her. ‘I find missing people – and at the moment I’m looking for Lynda Korin.’

  Her expression changed instantly: surprise, then concern.

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you’re aware, but Lynda has been missing for ten months – since last October.’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’ She looked from me to the business card again. ‘I haven’t seen Lyn for … oh, I don’t know – eight, nine years. I used to live out near Chew Valley Lake for a long time, so we’d still bump into each other. But then I moved into Bristol for a job, and then back down here, and we just kind of lost contact.’

  ‘I totally understand,’ I said. ‘But if you’ve got a spare half hour or so, it would be useful to talk to you. I promise not to take up too much of your day.’

  She looked like she might be trying to come up with an excuse, but then acquiesced, stepped back further into the hallway behind her and invited me in.

  The cottage was tidy and smartly decorated, the hallway running through to a modern kitchen and a conservatory with two big leather sofas and bi-folding doors. She led me to the conservatory – cooled slightly by a breeze coming in off the farmland – and asked if I wanted something to drink. Once she’d returned with two mugs of tea, she sat on the other sofa and I talked a little more about my line of work and about my search for Lynda Korin. When I was done, she started filling me in on how she’d first met Hosterlitz and Korin.

  ‘After I did my A levels,’ she was saying to me, her accent elegant – Korin had joked that it was ‘plummy’ in the interview with Collinsky – ‘I took a year out and went travelling around Europe with a friend of mine. We started in the south of Spain and the idea was we were going to go in a loop: Spain, France, Belgium and Holland, then back down through Germany – West Germany as it was then – into Switzerland, and then finish up in Italy. But we ended up staying in Madrid.’

  ‘Because that’s where you met Robert Hosterlitz?’

  ‘Right. My friend and I were in a bar near Atocha station because we were due to head down to Valencia, and Bob, Lyn and some of the other cast and crew from the third Ursula film were in there. They’d just wrapped up the shooting.’

  ‘How did you get talking to them?’

  ‘Lyn came up to the bar to buy a round and my friend and I were there. When she heard us speaking English, she started talking to us, and before we knew it she was buying us beer and we were sitting with her and the crew. It was a fun night. My friend and I were pretty drunk by the end of it and we didn’t have anywhere to stay because we’d planned to be in Valencia. So Lyn said we could crash at the place she and Bob were renting in Alcobendas. Next day we wake up and wander through to the living room and there’s a photograph of Bob – this old black and white shot – and he’s holding all these Oscars. He’d told us the night before that he was a director, but I didn’t recognize any of the cast, and I didn’t recognize him either, so I didn’t think much of it. But then I started to quiz him about the photograph and he told me this film he’d made had won seven Oscars, including Best Director. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, seven Oscars. You just never would have believed it. The place they were renting – it was a complete dump.’r />
  ‘So how did you end up working for him?’

  ‘He was due to start shooting on the first of – I don’t know – ten or eleven films he’d agreed to make for Mano Águila. Have you ever heard of Pedro Silva?’

  ‘I’ve seen his name mentioned.’

  ‘He was a producer. Mano Águila was his company. Anyway, the first film Bob made for him was … Goodness, it was so long ago. Cemetery House?’

  ‘That’s right, yeah.’

  She nodded. ‘He told me he needed victims – you know, people who could be killed off by the monster. My friend and I thought it’d be fun being slathered in fake blood, it was a chance to be in a film, and they paid us ten thousand pesetas, which was, I don’t know, forty, fifty pounds. He asked if we had any acting experience. I said I’d done a bit of drama at school, so he gave me a couple of lines and then we bomb up to this old warehouse north of Madrid and the cameras start rolling – and that was that. The whole thing was laughable, really. Pure amateur hour. I was a terrible actress and my friend was even worse, but we were young and we had a great time, and by that stage of his career I’m not sure Bob’s quality control was particularly high. When he finished the film, he said I looked great on camera, and would I consider doing another movie. I told him I’d think about it, finished travelling around Europe with my friend, and then returned to Madrid a year later to work on … I think it was The Drill Murders. My friend had to get back to the UK for university, but I had no course to return for and no job waiting for me, so I figured, what the hell? I ended up staying in Spain until 1983, when Bob decided to retire. Pedro Silva wanted him to do more films, but Bob said no. That was how they ended up in Somerset. I told them it was beautiful, that they’d love this part of the world, and so they bought their house here.’

  ‘That’s the place a few miles up the road?’

  ‘Right. It’s gorgeous. They lucked out.’ She stopped, taking a sip of her tea. ‘We used to see a lot of each other for a while because I was in a teacher training programme here – that’s what I’d always wanted to do – so I just stayed with my parents while I was studying. But then my first placement was in London for a couple of years, and by the time I returned, Bob had been dead for six months.’