by Tim Weaver
He looked between us. It was obvious that he was referencing the fact that cancer had accounted for Hosterlitz as well, and that the hidden messages in his horror films had been his own form of confession – the black frame, the photo of Kerekes, the delicacy of the scenes with his wife. At the scrapyard, I’d got the impression that, unlike Cramer, Egan had watched Hosterlitz’s horror films. In turn, that meant that, even if Zeller hadn’t seen them himself, he knew enough.
‘We’ve been watching Glen for a while,’ Zeller said, glancing towards Egan. ‘We’ve been waiting for this moment. You’re a smart guy, Mr Raker. We found a battery and a SIM card on a window ledge on our way in, so even if we’d gone to the trouble of bugging Glen’s phone, we would have had a real hard time tracking you both to this place. But you never factored in a guilty conscience and old age. At the launch party tonight, Glen went to the restroom and left his phone on the table. He’d made a note on his cell of your meeting place at Limehouse Tube station, so we knew you had to be around here some place.’
Zeller shrugged. ‘We all do what we have to do to survive, it’s just some of us are better survivors than others. I tried to help Bobby, I tried to help Glen, I try to help my daughter in her weaker moments – but you can only do so much.’
There was no reaction from Alex to that.
‘The world didn’t stop spinning when Elaine Kinflower died. It didn’t stop spinning when your wife died either.’ He paused, letting that last part settle. He was telling me he knew about my background, my life. He was trying to shake the sanctity of my marriage, to make my memories of it unclean. At his shoulder, Egan smirked, plainly amused by all of this. Alex hadn’t said a word yet but, in her acquiescence to Zeller, I could see that he frightened her.
‘I’ve run AKI for a long time,’ he said. ‘When I started, most of the industry looked at us like we were dog shit on the bottom of their sneakers. Everyone saw the same company that my father had started in a nickelodeon theatre back in New York. In order to change that, in order to get us to where we are now, I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve hurt people. Things have happened that no one can trace back to me, but which I’ve sanctioned nevertheless.’
He shrugged again, staring me down. Zeller had flown over for the launch party because, the minute I’d turned up at the Comet, Alex and Egan had let him know I was looking into Korin and Hosterlitz. He’d come over to deal with me, and once that was done, he’d return to the business he’d built on lies and blood. The actors who worked for him, the directors, producers, the public, no one knew anything of the real AKI, and they never would. Zeller had constructed the whole thing like a set, a façade, hiding the reality behind a Hollywood veneer.
‘You know how many of the things I’ve done I actually regret, Mr Raker?’ He carried on studying me for a moment, as if trying to see into my head. ‘Zero. None of them. When they write my obituary, it won’t say, “He hurt some people.” It’ll say, “Saul Joshua Zeller was a fucking giant. He turned AKI from a joke into a multi-billion-dollar company.” Full stop. The end.’
‘Glen told me everything.’
I said it flatly, trying to suppress any fear that might have been building in me. There was one exit out of this place – and it was beyond the gun Egan was aiming at my head – but I kept my eyes fixed on Zeller.
The immediate comeback, the indifference of my response to him, seemed to unbalance the old man, and – on cue – Egan came around to his side. Alex had finally looked up at me as well.
‘No,’ Egan said. ‘No, he’s still chasing shadows.’
I looked at him. ‘Not as many as before.’
There had been a faint smile on his face, but now it was gone. He looked at Cramer, blaming him for helping to build a better picture of everything that had happened. ‘You should have kept your mouth shut, Glen,’ he said frostily.
Cramer said nothing.
I looked back at him. He was sitting on the stone bench, staring at me. He knew I was lying – the question was whether he would play along. They’d come here to kill me, but they wouldn’t kill him, whatever they said and however much they threatened him. They faced the same problem as Zeller had faced with Hosterlitz in 1954: if you wiped someone like Cramer from existence, even if you buried him deep, the media and public would ask questions. He was one of the biggest names on the planet. Plus, he would be dead inside a month, anyway.
I said, ‘I know about Ring of Roses.’
Zeller flinched, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, his right hand opening and closing, like a shell snapping shut over and over again.
‘Bullshit,’ Egan said.
‘It was a place on Pierre Street in Van Nuys. It doesn’t exist any more, but it did back in 1953. Ring of Roses was a building.’
My words reverberated across the room.
Egan tried to shrug it off. ‘So?’
But I could tell he was worried.
‘I’ve emailed an account of everything Glen told me to a journalist friend of mine. He’s going to meet me at 7 a.m. If I don’t turn up, he publishes.’
Egan was shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’ He looked across at Zeller, Zeller at him. ‘No,’ he repeated. It was said with more vehemence this time, but the ripple effect was palpable. The two of them were panicking. Egan took a couple of steps forward, anger in his face, the gun still raised. Behind the two men, in the same position as she’d been the entire time, Alex stared at me, an expression on her face that took me a moment to work out. It’s relief. She wanted this secret to get out. She was tired of keeping it – the violence, the deceit, she hated all of it.
I ripped my eyes away from her and focused on Zeller again. ‘All the pain you’ve caused, the people you’ve hurt, all the lives you’ve cost running your little empire, it’ll be all over the front pages in two days if Egan pulls that trigger.’ I looked between the two of them. ‘You’ll be ruined. People will be selling AKI stock faster than you can blink. Everything will burn to the ground around you.’
‘And if Billy doesn’t kill you?’
Zeller again. There was a tremor in his voice.
I’ve got them. I’ve got them exactly where I want them.
‘If he doesn’t, then we can talk about –’
‘He’s lying.’ Cramer’s voice hit as hard as a bullet. ‘He’s lying, Saul.’
I glanced at him.
He was looking at Zeller.
‘I never told him what Ring of Roses was. I never told him anything, except that it was a building. He never emailed anyone at a newspaper. He’s lying to you.’
60
Cramer’s words were still echoing around the room as he slowly got to his feet. He looked at me, his eyes full of tears, and then across at Zeller and Egan.
‘I’m sorry, David,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He shuffled past me, disturbing the air between us – dust swirling like a sandstorm in his wake – and made his way over to the others. Egan was smiling again, clearly delighted that my gamble had failed. Zeller seemed less ready to let Cramer back into the fold, maybe because he didn’t trust him, maybe because he thought this was some ploy the two of us had worked out together. Alex just looked broken.
Cramer fell in line behind her at the back of the group, his head bowed, the shadows binding him like ropes, and stared at the floor, a scolded boy. Egan came forward, in front of them all, the gun directed at my face.
I was alone.
‘You’re a dead man,’ Egan said.
I stared at him, trying to remain unmoved, but fear gripped every muscle in my body, and my heart was punching against the inside of my chest.
‘We need to talk,’ I heard Zeller say to Cramer.
He’d couched it vaguely like a threat. Cramer nodded solemnly as Zeller turned back towards the changing rooms. I glanced around me, searching for possible escape routes, places to make a run for it – but when I looked back at Egan, he was even
closer, maybe only six feet away, and could see what I was thinking. I backed up an inch, hands raised, feet crunching on a bed of broken tiles.
‘Do it,’ Zeller said to his son.
My whole body stiffened as Egan took another step closer. I swallowed. Shut my eyes. Waited for the shot.
But the shot never came.
Instead, I heard movement. As I opened my eyes again, I saw Cramer take two steps towards Alex and reach out to her with something. A split second later, she folded. She fell to the floor in a heap, hand at her throat where Cramer had made contact with her. Cramer bent – slower this time, his bones creaking – and touched her again with his closed fist. He was holding something.
A stun gun.
She jolted on the floor as another huge electrical charge travelled through her body. Zeller tried to make a grab for her, to stop the attack on his daughter, the fingers of his hand brushing the hem of Cramer’s coat.
‘Get off her!’ he screamed.
Egan had swivelled by this time and taken two steps closer, automatically going to the aid of his sister. He switched the gun so the butt was facing up and brought it smashing down on to Cramer’s head. There was a horrible pop, like a hollow piece of fruit splitting, and Cramer dropped like a dead weight.
I turned and ran.
I had no idea what the hell I was doing, or where I was going. The room was so large that great swathes of it remained in shadow. I just made a break for it and hoped.
A gunshot sounded. A second pinged off a piece of stonework about two inches to my right, dust and chips of masonry spitting out at me. I could hear footsteps behind me, voices beyond that, but I just kept going.
All of a sudden, a raised square – about eight foot in diameter – came out of nowhere. It took me a split second to realize what it was: a plunge pool. It was full of dust and glass and fallen leaves. I had to sidestep to stop myself clattering into it, and as I reached for its edge, to try and grip on to something, my foot disappeared beneath me, into an open drain just next to it. Lurching awkwardly to my right, my leg dropped out of sight.
Straight away, I yanked it out again, looking for Egan, and then across the room to where Zeller, Alex and Cramer were, each of them positioned at the edge of the light. Alex was on her feet again, woozy, unsteady. Cramer was moaning and had rolled on to his back.
I looked down into the drain.
It was about three feet across, dirty and fetid, plants crawling out of it like the tendrils of some vast, hidden creature.
But there was a hint of light too.
I glanced from the drain to the back wall of the building – the light must have been coming in from outside, bleeding into the drain through a crack or a gap in the exterior wall, somewhere below me.
It could be a way out.
Or it could be a dead end.
I teetered on the edge of the drain, unsure, my head filled with thoughts of getting trapped down there, cornered, killed. But then I heard Egan somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the plunge pool and knew I didn’t have a choice.
It was this or nothing.
I stepped forward and dropped inside.
00:23:02
‘He told me he never killed her. Right from the first moment I arrived in that room. He said, “I never killed her. I swear to you, I never killed her.” I remember it clear as day. I took him down to the precinct to book him, and he said to me, “Why would I kill my mom? Why would I do this to her?”, and I said to him, “I don’t know, son. You tell me.” And he just kept saying the same thing, over and over again: “I didn’t do it.” ’
Ray Callson pauses, pressing his lips together, as if he’s trying to hold a part of himself in. He looks like he’s about to speak, but doesn’t. Instead, he starts rubbing his fingers together again; another echo of his former life as a smoker.
‘The evidence was all against him,’ Callson says finally. ‘I let him sweat for an hour before I even as much as asked him a question, thinking that might clear his head. You know, give him some time to mull things over and face up to what he’d done. But I got back inside that interview room and it went completely the other way. Not only was he telling me he didn’t do it, but he starts weaving this story about how these two guys, Saul Zeller and Glen Cramer, are somehow involved. I’m like, “Glen Cramer, as in the actor Glen Cramer? The guy who won an Oscar?”, and the kid says, “Yeah, that’s him. Him and Zeller. They’re involved in this somehow.” ’
Even before he finishes the sentence, Callson is shaking his head. ‘I thought it was pure fantasy land, like some fever dream, but all the same, I went to speak to Cramer at his house up in the Hills, then I went to talk to Zeller. He’s the guy that runs American Kingdom. They were both real nice, real cooperative, gave me the run of their places – told me they were so horrified by the suggestion that they could be involved with Kerekes’s death that I was welcome to turn their homes upside down if I genuinely believed they were hiding some deep, dark secret. Open house, basically. It was a waste of time. I mean, Cramer was a good friend of Kerekes. They saw each other all the time. There was absolutely nothing to back up what the kid was saying. So I went back and talked to Martin again, and I said to him, “This is the situation, son. You’ve got an assault beef hanging over you. You’re a damn drunk at sixteen years of age. Forensics found speed and sleeping pills in your system, so the state’s gonna paint you as a drug addict too. You got her blood all over you and her hair on your hands, and scratch marks down the inside of your arms, and you can’t remember anything about last night – except that it’s someone else’s fault.” ’
‘What did he say?’
Callson shrugs. ‘Not much he could say.’
‘Did he ever mention Cramer and Zeller again?’
‘Oh, sure. He never forgot those two.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, he started off telling me that Cramer and Zeller were involved in his mother’s death, whatever the hell reason they had for wanting to kill her, and then after he was done with me, he told anyone else who would listen to him at the station, and then, finally, he told his lawyer, and that was the point at which his lawyer probably said, “Whoa, whoa, shut your hole. You sound absolutely nuts. No one believes Cramer was involved with your mom’s murder. He’s a movie star and you’re a waste of space, and you were found in that room with all the evidence in the world pointing at you, like a neon fucking sign.” Words to that effect, I imagine. The best they were gonna get out of the jury was the kid being sent to the big house for the rest of his life. Him not going to the gas chamber once he turned eighteen – that would have been like a lottery win. But one thing was for sure: if Martin went into that trial shooting his mouth off about Cramer and Zeller and whoever else, the jury would turn against him like that.’ Callson clicks his fingers. ‘No one wanted to hear wild conspiracy theories from some delinquent kid. That would have been a disaster.’ Callson stops again, this time for longer, and in the silence he scratches away at some dry skin on the knuckles of his hand. ‘The irony, of course, was that Martin did exactly as his lawyer asked him to and never mentioned Cramer and Zeller at the trial – and it still got him a one-way ticket.’
‘He was sent to a juvenile facility?’
Callson shakes his head. ‘He was tried as an adult, remember.’
‘So he got sent straight to San Quentin?’
‘Correct.’
‘But he was never actually executed?’
‘No.’ Callson thumps the centre of his chest. ‘Heart problems. He blacked out in the prison yard about eighteen months after he got there. Congenital something or other. Anyway, even back in the fifties they weren’t about to send some sick kid to the gas chamber, so he made his home on death row instead. Twenty-some years later – 1977 – his heart finally popped while he was working in the prison library.’
But there’s a flicker of something in Callson’s face.
‘Mr Callson?’
‘Did
you know that kid wrote me once a month, every month, for the entire time he was at San Quentin? Twelve letters a year for twenty-three years.’
‘No. I didn’t know that.’
An unmistakable sadness blows like a cloud across Callson’s face, and then lingers there. ‘Every month, always the same. “I’m innocent of this. Please help me.” I used to throw them in the trash to start with – just write them off as another asshole trying to clear his conscience. I’d had those letters before, these guys getting in touch with me, telling me I had it all wrong, giving me random names of the people who really did it – “The jury were paid off!” – all that bullshit. Those letters, they were an office joke. We all used to laugh about them, because we all used to get them. But, I don’t know, Martin’s letters …’ He fades out.
He starts to speak and then stops again, and the words hang there for a moment. ‘I guess it’s just that it got me thinking,’ he says eventually. ‘After a while, I stopped dumping the kid’s letters in the trash and I started to read them and I started to consider something: how much did you have to believe in something in order to write the same letter to the same person, claiming the same thing, over and over and over again? I mean, in those circumstances, you’ve got to be one of two things, right? You’re either a total fruitcake – or you’re not.’
‘And which one was Martin Nemeth?’
Callson looks into the camera. ‘I don’t think he was a fruitcake.’
61
It had been a month since there was any hint of rain, but there was rain tonight: a faint mist drifted across the still of the night, swirling beneath the street lights like a swarm of insects. It dotted against my skin, cool and fine, as I opened the gates to my driveway. The hinges moaned gently. A few loose stones crunched beneath my feet. I paused, looking at the space where my BMW should have been, and then across to the darkness of my house. The windows and entrances seemed to be untouched. Everything appeared exactly like I’d left it.