Broken Heart (24 page)

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey.’ I gestured to the house. ‘Thanks for organizing this.’

‘Sure.’ She stopped in front of me – her eyes on the photographers, on the girls gathered at the gates – and cut to the chase: ‘Do you think we’re in danger?’

My head was still filled with noise – with Egan, with the idea that I might have located the man known as Microscope, with the prospect of interviewing Glen Cramer – but, when I
looked at her, everything seemed to fall away for a moment. Without her heels, she was shorter than me by about six inches, so, even from four feet away, her chin was tilted slightly as she looked up at me. I could see the lines of her neck, the ridges of her collarbones, the bronze of her skin; and I could see the worry in her face, the tautness of her expression.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘If Egan was going to make a move, he would have already.’

‘I’m glad you’re so confident.’

‘He’s been watching me for at least a day. He’s almost certainly been watching you for longer than that. If you were any immediate danger to him, he wouldn’t be stalking around in the shadows taking your picture.’

She frowned. ‘So what’s he waiting for?’

‘That’s what I need to find out.’

Alex eyed me for a moment. ‘You’re asking me to put my trust in a guy I only met for a couple of minutes two days ago.’ She looked from my car, to me, to the pad I was holding, and then a smile traced her lips. ‘That’s you, by the way.’

I returned the smile. ‘I realize that.’

‘Can I trust you, David?’

‘If I told you that you could, would you believe me?’

Her gaze lingered on me.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I think I probably would.’

I could feel the heat of her eyes on me, but I focused my attention on the house instead, on Cramer, on everything I needed to cover in the next hour. A second later, we were crossing the road towards the gates, shutters buzzing like a field of crickets, as the celeb-spotters took camera-phone pics of us. They didn’t recognize us from
Royalty Park
, from
TV, from the movies, from anywhere – but they still took their shots, just in case.

It felt weird being there. I found myself wondering what Cramer would be like, how he would come across, how different he would be from the characters he played onscreen. I thought about what my daughter would say when I told her I’d interviewed one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Briefly, I even thought about asking Cramer for a photograph afterwards, so I could message it to Annabel in Spain. I smiled at the idea of writing something casual like ‘Me with my best pal Glen’ or ‘Glen Cramer says hi’, and smiled again at the thought of her response. But then the intercom at the gate buzzed into life, and all of that seemed to drop away again, and I was back in control and felt ridiculous for getting carried away.

‘Hello?’

‘Anthony, it’s Alex Cavarno.’

A second later, the gate hummed once and bumped away from its frame. Alex moved through ahead of me as I pushed the gate shut again, and then we made our way across the driveway to the front steps. As we started the climb up, the front door opened and Glen Cramer emerged from inside.

Even though – at ninety-one – this wasn’t the same version of him that I’d seen in Hosterlitz’s noirs, it felt strangely like I knew him already. He remained tall, but he’d become very thin and, as I’d seen in Egan’s photograph, he now had a veil of chalky hair. It was fine, almost like thread. I’d seen a crookedness to him too in the picture, and that was clearly evident now, his spine curving at the halfway point, so the top third of him teetered like a building on the brink of collapse. Elsewhere, his face was criss-crossed with lines and folds of skin, his complexion a mesh of tiny blood vessels, and his trademark blue eyes had lost some of their lustre. But the echoes of
the man he’d been, square-jawed and stately, were still there, and age had robbed him of none of his presence.

He kissed Alex on both cheeks and they both looked at me as Alex said, ‘This is David Raker, Glen. He’s the man I was telling you about.’

Cramer held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, David.’

‘A pleasure, Mr Cramer.’

We shook and then he said, ‘Please, come in.’

He looked beyond us both and waved to the people waiting outside. One of the teenagers squealed with delight. I saw that she was wearing a
Royalty Park
T-shirt. The press photographers were already on our side of the street, cameras in front of their faces. Cramer gave them another wave before we stepped past him and he closed the door.

He rolled his eyes at us, good-naturedly. ‘I’ll admit,’ he said, ‘until I started on
Royalty Park
I thought my days of screaming teenagers were over.’

We followed Cramer into a gorgeous airy foyer with a chequerboard-tiled floor and an ornate oak staircase on the right. A man in a navy-blue blazer, built like a gorilla, was sitting in an armchair close to the stairs.

Cramer said to Alex, ‘You’ve met Anthony, my security man.’

‘I have,’ Alex replied.

‘Vera?’ Cramer said, shuffling to a stop.

A few seconds later, a short woman in her late fifties emerged from the kitchen, an apron on, a pair of Marigolds dotted with soapsuds on her hands.

Cramer looked at us. ‘Can I offer you something to drink?’

‘Coffee for me,’ said Cavarno, and – to make things easy – I said coffee was fine for me too. After the housekeeper had disappeared back into the kitchen, Cramer led us into the living
room, another impressive space full of original Georgian flourishes, and a set of rear doors that opened on to an emerald-green square of lawn, dappled with late-evening sun. The house looked the part, but it was obvious he was renting. There was none of his history here, no photographs, no cabinets full of awards, or reminders of the life he’d enjoyed. I watched him shuffle to one of the sofas and topple back into it, and then I sat down on a second sofa, opposite him. Alex took an armchair.

‘So,’ he said, hands planted either side of him, veins worming their way beneath ivory skin, ‘Alex tells me you’re an investigator, David.’

‘That’s right.’

‘ “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” ’

I smiled. ‘I’m not quite Jack Nicholson.’

Cramer laughed. ‘I actually read the
Chinatown
script when they were still casting it, but Robert Towne told me that they’d already got John Huston in mind for Noah Cross.’ He grinned, his teeth the only part of him that hadn’t really aged – bleached, artificially perfect. ‘I haven’t many regrets, but that’s one of them.’

‘You still made some pretty good choices.’

‘I did okay, I think. You a fan of the movies, David?’

‘Very much so.’

‘This must be an interesting project then?’

Alex leaned forward. ‘I told Glen that you’re looking into the possibility of there being some undiscovered material from Robert Hosterlitz’s AKI days.’

Cramer nodded enthusiastically.

‘That’s right,’ I said. I felt bad about lying to him, but I went with it for now. ‘Is it okay if I ask you some questions?’

‘Of course,’ he said, opening out his hands. ‘Ask me anything you want.’

34

I eased Cramer into it with something straightforward.

‘What do you remember of Robert?’

‘What do I remember of him?’ He took a long breath, as if there was too much to recount, the question too vague. ‘He was a good man. Intelligent and reputable. I felt honoured to call him a friend.’ Cramer stopped, looking out over my shoulder to the rear doors, where the sun spilled a rectangle of tangerine light across the living room. The more thought he gave it, though, the more sombre he seemed to become. ‘Oh, Bobby,’ he said eventually, quietly, almost to himself. ‘Those HUAC hearings back in the fifties … Man, they were such bullshit. Just random target practice for assholes on Capitol Hill with a God complex. I knew him for over four years before he was being defamed in that disgusting pamphlet the
National People
, and I’m telling you, Bobby Hosterlitz wasn’t any communist. No way. He was a moderate. Most of the time, I never even heard him talk about politics. All he really cared about was movies.’

I pulled my pad towards me and made a couple of notes. ‘The
National People
was a US magazine back in the fifties and sixties – is that right?’

‘Sorry, yeah,’ Cramer said, holding up a sinuous hand in apology, ‘I forgot you guys have probably never heard of it. Lucky you.’ He shook his head. ‘It was a tabloid, kind of like the
National Enquirer
, feeding on sex, violence and scandal. Nothing else. It was just full of hateful lies. They broke the
story about Bobby supposedly being a communist, and – as soon as they did – the vultures at the HUAC were circling him, and that was it. “Sex-obsessed Hosterlitz outed as a Red”.’

‘That was the headline?’

‘Correct.’

I thought of Hosterlitz’s trademark style – the lingering camera, the secret watcher – then of what Veronica Mae had said about his relationship with Korin.

‘Why “sex-obsessed”?’ I asked.

Cramer shrugged. ‘There always had to be some sex angle to everything. It was all about sex. And if it wasn’t about sex, then they just made something up.’

‘Did they make something up about Robert?’

‘They said he had a taste for prostitutes.’

Cramer obviously saw that element as another part of the hatchet job the
National People
did on Hosterlitz, but Lynda Korin had admitted in the interview she did with
Cine
that Hosterlitz had paid for sex during his struggle with booze and painkillers in the 1970s, in the years before the two of them had met. It didn’t seem like much of a stretch to suggest that he might also have done the same in the 1950s. The question was whether it was in any way relevant.

‘Do you ever remember Robert dating anyone?’

‘In the fifties?’

‘Yeah. Girlfriends, relationships.’

‘I guess he must have.’

‘But you don’t remember anyone specific?’

‘He was a young, successful director, so there were always hangers-on. But if you’re asking me if I specifically remember
individuals
, then I’d have to say no, I don’t. It was a long time ago, and I’m an old man, so that doesn’t help.’ He smiled again,
although I could see that he wasn’t finished. ‘But if I’m being honest, Bobby was always something of a lonely soul. I never really figured out if it was being an only child that did it, or whether it was a German thing, some product of how he’d been brought up. But he was comfortable in his own skin, his own company. He didn’t go looking for relationships. I remember he used to tell me how, growing up, he’d spent hours on the sets of Fritz Lang’s pictures, observing how Lang worked, how he directed, and he would compile these reams of notes.
That
was what interested him. I mean, does that sound like the kind of thing
you
were doing as a teenager, David?’

‘Not really, no.’

He held out his hands. ‘Nor me.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘Oooh,’ Cramer said, pressing a couple of fingers to his head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him for a long time after he moved here. I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, I’ve spent most of my working life in LA, and he was on the other side of the world – here in the UK, in Germany, in Spain – so we kind of lost touch with one another after a while. I don’t think he wanted anything to do with Hollywood after what had happened – and who could blame him? The industry sold him down the river. They fed him to the sharks. All the crap on the front pages, all the lies in those HUAC hearings, and no one – not studio execs, not directors, not producers, not a single actor he worked with – ever went out to bat on his behalf.’ He paused, blinking slowly, smaller somehow, as if the colour had been rinsed from him. ‘I’m embarrassed to say, that also includes me.’

The housekeeper entered, carrying a tray with three coffee mugs on it and some biscuits, but Cramer didn’t look up. He just stared into space, quiet and far-off, and the remorse
didn’t leave his face for a long time. Eventually, Alex stepped in and began talking about the launch party, about some of the people who were going to be there, and then Cramer got on to the subject of this series of
Royalty Park
being his last, about how audiences might react to him being killed off in the last episode. He turned to me quickly after he said that and apologized for giving the plot away, but I told him not to worry, and he and Alex picked up the conversation again. He talked about the lease running out on this place, how he planned to move back to LA, how he was going to miss London but not the weather, and then everything came full circle and they were back on to the party.

Despite the expensive sheen of his surroundings, it was easy to forget that this man had once been one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, and maybe still was. No male actor had ever won more Oscars than him. No one had been as critically acclaimed
and
as commercially viable, and now he was bowing out from what might currently be the biggest television show in the world. As I chewed on that, I thought of how Cramer’s experiences contrasted so dramatically with those of Robert Hosterlitz, the person who had plucked Cramer from obscurity, who had waited for him at the stage door of an off-Broadway play and told Cramer he could be a Hollywood star. They’d both won Oscars for
The Eyes of the Night
, but while Cramer had gone on to become a phenomenon, Hosterlitz had died on a hillside in Somerset, alone except for the love of one woman, with thirty years of movies and TV behind him that no one remembered, much less cared about.

I gently returned Cramer to our conversation. ‘Did you ever see any of the other movies that Robert made after he left the US in 1954?’

‘I saw
The Ghost of the Plains
.’

‘His western?’

‘Yeah. When was that released? Mid sixties?’

‘Nineteen sixty-seven.’

‘I remember seeing that at the pictures. I loved it. I know the critics were sniffy about it, and I know it didn’t make Paramount a whole bunch of money, but I preferred it to the spaghetti westerns that Clint was making. Bobby’s film had real class. Although, well … I guess he made
Ghost
after he
returned
to the US.’