Broken Heart (38 page)

I felt my whole body compress.

He’s turned her into Életke Kerekes
.

In terms of their shape, they were completely different. Korin was fuller, curvier, bustier. She was taller too. Kerekes was more straight up and down – not boyish exactly, but smaller, slight, petite. Yet they shared something more than just the same dress, the same hair and the same smile.

It’s their eyes
.

Except, maybe for Hosterlitz, it went even deeper than some minor physical similarity. Maybe he saw something in Korin, and was drawn to her, not because of the way she looked but because of the way she
was
– her demeanour, her nature. Maybe that was the reason he became so obsessed with her, why he treated her scenes with such reverence, why he might fill an entire album full of photographs of her. Which made the scene in
Axe Maniac
what exactly? A tribute to Kerekes? A love letter? Or some sort of confession?

I desperately tried to dismiss it, coming at it from the other direction. I rewound to what Rafael Walker had told me, about the
National People
story being a plant. Now Glen Cramer had called me to confess to a secret he couldn’t keep any more. Could it have been Cramer who’d phoned the
National People
? Why would he have done that? It was hard to see straight, impossible to see the lines connecting one part of this to another.

I looked at my watch again, knowing it was time to go – but still I couldn’t move. Because now all I could think about
was whether Lynda Korin had finally found out some terrible truth about her husband, years after she’d buried him.

I hope you can forgive me, Lynda
.

Maybe the discovery had set this whole thing in motion.

Maybe it was the reason she’d disappeared.

55

Glen Cramer arrived late, but not by much.

The taxi pulled up outside Limehouse station and an interior light came on. I could see Cramer reaching forward, paying the taxi driver. The driver clearly recognized his passenger: he was talking to Cramer animatedly, laughing, and made the effort to get out and open his door for him. Cramer shuffled across the back seat, hauled himself out, and flipped up the hood on a thin raincoat he was wearing. The night was still enough for me to hear the driver asking him if he definitely wanted to be dropped off here, and then the taxi was gone and Cramer was alone, half covered by darkness, face hidden inside the hood.

I was standing in the shadows of a doorway further down the street, but continued to watch him, looking for signs of a tail. He was on edge, anxious, but the more time that passed, the more certain I was that it was safe, so – after seven minutes of waiting around – I called him. He fumbled around in the pocket of his raincoat, a dinner jacket visible underneath, and answered his phone.

‘David?’ There was already mild panic in his voice.

‘I need you to listen, okay? Head south, turn right at the end on to Ratcliffe Lane, and then left on to Butcher Row. Two minutes further down, on the other side of the railway bridges, you’ll find a red-brick building. It says “Public Baths” on it. Are you getting this?’ I watched him nod, and then he told me he was. ‘The building’s empty, but there’s an
arched entrance next to it that takes you around to the back, into a kind of courtyard. I’ll meet you in there.’

I hung up, pocketed my phone and watched him. I knew caution was necessary, but it was hard not to feel a pang of guilt at the sluggishness of his movements: I was making a 91-year-old man walk half a mile in the dark.

I followed him at a distance all the way there, and when Cramer finally reached the building, he paused, placing a hand on the wall, the arched entrance that led to the baths’ courtyard beside him. With a final look up at the front of the building – its windows boarded, its render chipped and gouged – he stepped through the arch and the night swallowed him up. I headed in after him.

Under foot was a floor of concrete, cracked and uneven, plants crawling out of the rifts and fissures, vines climbing the walls. Cramer was standing right at the back, at the edge of the shadows, his hands in his pockets. He looked frail and grey, the mix of darkness and light emphasizing the folds and creases of his face. I saw a shimmer in his eyes as I approached, a moment of fear. The closer I got to him, the more he seemed to shrink, as if losing weight in front of me.

Next to him was a set of doors. A rusting chain had been looped around the handles, and a padlock attached, giving the impression there was no way in.

It was all a lie.

Just like everything else in this case
.

There was no mechanism inside the padlock, so while the shackle looked like it was secured into the body of the lock, it was all show. I pulled the shackle out, removed the padlock from the chains and began unravelling them from the door
handles. Twenty seconds later, they were in a pile on the floor at my feet.

‘I need to check your phone,’ I said.

He seemed reluctant, but he did as I asked. I checked his Recent Calls, texts, emails – and found nothing – then checked for any sign of a trace; any apps that set off alarm bells, any additions to the phone itself. When I was done, I removed the SIM card and battery and left them on a window ledge. Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe I hadn’t thought any of this through properly.

My head started thumping again.

‘Follow me,’ I said.

Using a penlight I’d found in Egan’s car, I led us deeper into the bowels of the building. It smelled damp, stagnant. Cramer followed close behind me as I wove a path through the decayed corridors, into the male changing rooms, past a shower block that smelled brackish and stale, and out into the main pool area.

The empty pool ran at a slant from one end to the other and, above us, there were chunky glass panels built into the curve of the ceiling. A lot were cracked or missing altogether, moss and vines twisted around the vacant frames.

I stopped about halfway along the pool, where a weak shaft of moonlight broke through the gaps in the roof and erupted against an alcove between two pillars. There was a slab of stone inside, a natural bench, and I gestured for Cramer to sit. As he shuffled in, a moment of unease struck me. I scanned the room, looking hard at the shadows that painted so much of it. The space was large, maybe three hundred and fifty feet from one end to the other, and most of it was dark, or barely lit.
I should have gone somewhere smaller. Somewhere more manageable
. I looked down at the pool, at the place where people had once swum. It was a bed of bronzed mulch; the evidence of a thousand fallen leaves.

Cramer collapsed on to the bench with a heavy breath, joints popping, his entire body seeming to sigh. He looked pale under the moonlight, old and tired, every day of his ninety-one years. Mostly, though, he just looked scared.

‘You said you had something to tell me, Mr Cramer?’

‘Glen,’ he said softly, eyes on the floor. He was at the edge of the bench, his legs perfectly adjacent to one another, a veined hand on either knee.

‘Glen. What is it you want to say?’

He swallowed. ‘I did something.’

Életke Kerekes
. It had to be her.

‘What did you do?’

He looked up at me, his eyes flashing in the half-light. ‘When you came to the house on Saturday, asking about Bobby, you asked questions that made me think you might know more than you were letting on. As soon as you left, I started to panic. I started to think, “He knows …” That was why I ended up calling you on Sunday, and when I couldn’t get through, why I called again this afternoon. I did it both times from a phone booth because I didn’t want them to find out.’

‘Who? Zeller and Egan?’

He nodded and took a long, crackling breath. ‘I’ve got to tell someone before it’s too late. I can’t go to the grave with this on my conscience.’

‘Why haven’t you gone to the police?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s no time for that. Filling them in on who’s who, on the background to everything, on years and dates and all that bullshit – it’ll take weeks. That’s time I don’t have any more.’

I eyed him. ‘Time you don’t have?’

‘My life is measured in days now, David.’

‘Do you mean you’re sick?’

He just shook his head. ‘None of that matters. All that matters is what we did. All that matters is that we did something terrible.’

56

I looked at him, a pale sliver of a man set inside two stone pillars, and thought of the picture of Hosterlitz, Zeller and Cramer at
The Eyes of the Night
premiere, Kerekes off to the side.

‘Are you saying you killed Életke Kerekes?’

Cramer’s eyes were on the empty swimming pool, the cracks in its base. Softly, he said, ‘We all had different parts to play.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We didn’t all brandish the knife, but we all did our part. Bobby, Saul, me – we all played a role.’ His hands had been on his knees, but finally he moved them, lacing his thin, pale fingers together on his lap. ‘American Kingdom – it’s a lie. Every picture Saul green-lit in the time since that woman died is a lie, because he should never have been there to do it. Every film I did for them is the same. We should have been in prison. We should have been going to the gas chamber, not walking around doing
this
.’ He gestured to the space above our heads, but I got his meaning.
This freedom. This success. This career. This money
.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

Somewhere above us, a bird took flight, flapping its wings in the shadows. Cramer tried looking for it, his wet eyes searching, and when he didn’t find it, he started nodding, as if he’d been waiting a long time for the question to land.

‘Elaine,’ he said quietly. ‘We never knew her as Életke. I
never even knew that was her actual name until the papers ran stories about her. But I guessed she wasn’t American, because she had this beautiful accent, like Sophia Loren.’

‘When did you first meet her?’

‘We used to go to this club on Sunset Strip called the Blue Orchid, before the Pingrove became the place to be seen. This must have been 1951, because I’d just done
Connor O’Hare
and I was starting to get a bit of attention.’ He paused; a flicker of a smile. ‘As hard as it is to believe now, I used to get quite a lot of female attention. Most nights at the Orchid, I went home with someone.’

‘Did you go home with Kerekes?’

‘Oh no. No, she was engaged to John Winslow by then. Elaine wasn’t some floozy. She had class. She was intelligent. She took her commitments seriously.’

‘So you just got talking to her?’

‘Saul introduced us.’

‘This was before she was employed as a screenwriter?’

‘Yeah. The year before. Officially, she was still working for old man Zeller
and
Saul, running around doing their bidding. But they were starting to use her for more than just typing up letters. She had this …’ He paused, his eyes squeezing shut as if he couldn’t think of the word. ‘This gift, I guess. She wrote these stories for kids, but it was more than that. These days, studios pay a fortune for someone like her, someone with that kind of intuition, who understands the audience. And Elaine, she understood kids’ films. She got how kids were wired, and back then – when Disney were making millions from animated pictures – Elaine gave the Zellers an edge none of Disney’s other competitors had. Did you know that most of the cartoons that AKI made in the fifties were based on her ideas? Saul was still mining her
stories even after she was murdered. It was disgraceful.’ His head dropped.

‘So did she come with Zeller to the Blue Orchid that night?’

‘She came with a bunch of guys from AKI. I was there with a date. Bobby was there too. He didn’t bring anyone. He never did. I said to you when you came to my house that Bobby was a lonely soul. That part wasn’t a lie. I loved him like a brother, but he had no interest in …’ He waved a hand through the air, back and forth, to signify sex, or maybe love, or maybe both. ‘Zeller used to call him a fag all the time – only half joking, I think – but at least if Bobby had been gay, he would have felt something. It was more like he was … I don’t know …’

‘Asexual.’

‘Exactly, yeah.’ He stopped again, rubbing at one of his eyes. ‘Anyway, Saul brought Elaine over and –
wow
. I thought she was incredible. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I had to pretend I was interested in my date, but it was really Elaine I was interested in. A little way into the evening, I watched as she went off to the bathroom, and saw my chance. I made an excuse and waited for her outside the restrooms, and when she came out, I stopped her and said, “Would you let me buy you a drink?” She smiled at me – this killer smile – and replied, “Thank you, Mr Cramer, I’d love a drink with you and your date. It’ll fill the hour before my fiancé picks me up.” ’ Cramer stopped, the hint of a smile. ‘Like I said, she took her commitments seriously. Her work. Her family. Relationships. It all mattered.’

‘But after her second husband died?’

Cramer shrugged. ‘Saul and I, we both had a thing for her. I’d like to believe my feelings were more profound than his,
because Saul’s were simply lust. He just wanted to sleep with her, no more, no less. I think she spent most of her working day fending off advances from him, and I’m sure he tried to use that against her – “Put out, or you’re finished at AKI”, that sort of thing. But it was all bullshit and both of them knew it. Saul loved two things more than he loved women: money and power. Talent like Elaine had, like Bobby had – like I had, I guess – gave him those things. Saul surrounded himself with talent. It was smart and pragmatic.’

‘So did you ask her out?’

He nodded. ‘I waited, obviously. She was grieving for John Winslow and she was a mother. Kids should always be the priority. I never had any myself, but I know that. I think Winslow died in October 1952, so I called her and offered to help in any way I could, and then bought her lunch a couple of times a little while later, and gradually, over the course of five or six months, I got to know her better and it felt like we grew close.’ He swallowed, rubbing his fingers at a dry spot on his face. ‘I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t physically attracted to her, because I was. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think about what it would be like to sleep with her, because I did. But I never tried anything with her – not for a long, long time. I just enjoyed her company, enjoyed getting to know her, enjoyed trying to make her laugh. In that time, I never went to her place, never met her son – she never invited me, and I never pushed it. I thought she was probably embarrassed about where she lived and that she wasn’t ready to introduce a new man into her home life, and I understood that. So we’d just meet up somewhere and share a coffee, or go to a diner for lunch, or take a walk in Griffith Park. That was what it was,
all
it was, until, I don’t know, May or June.’