Broken Heart (47 page)

‘A letter saying what?’

She pointed at the wedding-ring box. ‘Lift up the padding.’

I did as she asked. Underneath the felt padding for the ring was a folded piece of paper, reduced to a square about an inch and a half across.

I took it out.

It was thin, delicate, and smelled old and faintly perfumed.

‘Do you know what Ring of Roses is?’ she asked.

I looked at her. ‘It was a building in LA.’

‘Not just a building.’

‘So what else was it?’

Korin glanced at the letter. ‘The answer’s in there.’

68

The moment seemed to hang in the air.

I unfolded the letter. When I glanced up at Korin, she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the letter, her gaze fixed on it. It was an extremely thin sheet of A4, not far off the consistency of tracing paper. Hosterlitz had filled both sides of it, his hand spidery and hard to read. The ink had faded to a watery blue, and there were spots where the fountain pen had leaked. In the very corner was a date:
March 1988
.

The month he’d died.

My dear Lynda,

There seemed to be so much time to write this, and yet no time. When the doctor gave me two years, I thought, ‘Well, at least I have two years.’ When the two years was up, and I still felt the same, and the doctor said, ‘You’re still alive, Robert – make the most of it’, I think a part of me started to wonder if there had been a mistake. Maybe they were wrong about me. Maybe I wasn’t dying! I knew, deep down, that wasn’t the case, of course, but I think it lured me into a certain laziness. I let things drift. I kept telling myself that there would be time to tell you everything and I kept not telling you. And now this. I hope I find the courage to tell you the truth to your face. But I know, equally, I can’t stand the thought of the last days of my life being an argument with you. I couldn’t stand to see you look at me as nothing but a betrayer, and die with that image of you burned into my mind. So I’m writing this letter as a back-up. A coward’s way out, I suppose, but a letter that will bring to light some things that I should have told you a long, long time ago. At my check-up last week, Dr Rodgers said I may have a month. So, by the time you finally bury me, this letter will be finished and left for you to read.

I stopped. ‘That’s why you only found it last year,’ I said aloud, although it was more to myself than to Korin. Hosterlitz thought he had more time – three weeks, a month – but, in the end, he’d only had days. He’d hidden the letter behind the plasterboard, working on it when he could, in the belief he had the time to finish it and then leave it somewhere she would be able to find it.

Instead, it had remained hidden for over a quarter of a century.

The key I will leave for you is for a council garage in Bath. The address will be on a tag I’ll leave with the key. In the garage, you will find twelve boxes. I haven’t had time to sort them out, and I don’t think I will now. I’m so sorry. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you, but I’m afraid the thought of having to look at some of that stuff was too painful for me.

However, the boxes will tell the story of who I really am. They will tell you that I did a terrible thing in 1953. They will tell you that I had a part in taking a woman’s life, but not the part – until I found out the truth – that I thought I had. I thought I killed her. I thought she died at my hands. But she didn’t and, I suppose, if there is a Heaven or a Hell, that will allow me some degree of absolution. Her name was Életke Kerekes, but most people knew her as Elaine.

Hosterlitz began telling the story of what he believed had happened in the Pingrove that day, the aftermath, how the media had hounded him out of the US, and how his career
had fallen apart. He wasn’t aware that he hadn’t killed Kerekes himself until Cramer said something in passing to him in 1966, while Hosterlitz was in America making
The Ghost of the Plains
. I remembered Cramer saying the same thing – that he almost told Hosterlitz the truth, but then panicked.

Glen told me that Zeller had lied to me, and that he, Glen, had taken an ornament of mine – an angel that Elaine had carved for me and given to me as a present – to a building called Ring of Roses on Pierre Street in Van Nuys. At the time, I sat there and didn’t say anything to him. I wasn’t in a good state of mind back then. Away from the film set, I was drunk pretty much constantly, I used speed to keep me awake and alert when I was shooting ‘The Ghost of the Plains’, and the comedown was awful. I was a mess. But when he started to tell me it was all a joke, something awoke in me. I looked at him and I saw through the haze, and I thought, ‘He’s not joking. He’s just pretending he is.’ So I started looking into this Ring of Roses building, and I found out that it belonged to the CCS.

I looked up at Korin. ‘What does CCS stand for?’

‘It stands for California Children’s Services.’

Something began to congeal in my stomach.

‘Ring of Roses was an orphanage?’

‘Yes. They had this water fountain at the front of the building, made from marble and granite, and it sat in the middle of a flowerbed surrounded by roses. That’s how the name came about.’

‘So why did Cramer take the angel there?’

‘Because he felt guilty,’ she said.

And then the truth crashed against me like a wave.

I looked up at the photograph I’d seen earlier, of Kerekes’s
first husband holding Martin as a baby, and then I thought of something that Cramer had said that had never really registered at the time:
Elaine didn’t want the pond life from the
National People
slithering all over the steps of her house, where a kid might be playing one day in the future
. I thought he’d been talking in general terms about Kerekes having another child with someone, at some point, in the years to come.

But he hadn’t been talking about that at all.

My eyes remained glued to the picture of Martin as a baby, cradled in the arms of Kerekes’s first husband – except, what I realized for certain now, was that it wasn’t her first husband, and the baby wasn’t Martin.

The man was John Winslow.

The baby was his and Kerekes’s.

‘
You don’t know who you are
,’ I said quietly.

I tore my eyes away from the photograph and looked up at Korin.

She was nodding.

‘My real name is Viktoria Winslow,’ she said, her eyes slowly filling up with tears. ‘Életke Kerekes was my mother.’

69

Everything started falling into place.

It was why Cramer seemed so confused when I showed him the photograph of the angel at the baths. In the days after I first asked him about the ornament at his house, he must have gone back over everything, tracing the angel’s path from the orphanage all the way to Lynda Korin, and finally made the connection: Korin was Viktoria Winslow. That made me think that Zeller and Egan would have a pretty good idea about who Korin really was too.

The minute they discovered the angel photos in Korin’s attic, they would have known that Cramer had lied about destroying it in 1953. From there, they’d have connected the same dots as Cramer, seeing the age gap between Korin and Hosterlitz, the similarities between Korin and her mother, the fact that Korin had ended up with the angel in her possession, and that Hosterlitz – a man who’d never dated, who’d never held any interest in relationships before – married her inside six months. Egan had found the one photo in the album with something on it too – a handwritten message from Hosterlitz to Korin, asking for forgiveness. Maybe it was written years ago and never discovered by Korin, or maybe it was written in his last few days, but it confirmed their worst fears: Korin was Viktoria Winslow, Hosterlitz had told her everything, and now she knew what the three men had done.

It explained why Hosterlitz had photographed Korin over
and over until her pictures spilled from the pages of an album, why he treated her film scenes with such reverence. It explained the end sequence too. Korin covered in blood was the violence that took a family from her. His voice-over was the truth he had never been able to say to her face. The footage on the TV was the road that led to the orphanage, to a life she never remembered. All ripples on the same pond, caused by the same men.

‘Cramer wanted you to have the angel,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Guilt makes you do stupid things. My birth mother made that angel for Robert, Robert was forced to give it to Cramer to get rid of, and Cramer found out where I’d been taken and returned it to me because the guilt was too much for him to bear. I was only one at the time, so I remember nothing. I guess maybe he left it somewhere outside, with a note next to it, or put it in a shoebox. I mean, it wasn’t like Glen Cramer could walk into a building at that time without being noticed. However he got it to me, that angel has been with me my entire life. I just never realized my true connection to it until I read Robert’s letter.’

As I chewed on that, something else gnawed at me. How did Hosterlitz end up married to the daughter of Életke Kerekes? The odds of them happening to meet were impossibly huge, almost incalculable. But before I got a chance to ask, Korin looked up at me and said quietly, ‘Robert wasn’t really impotent.’

It was the truth that she never knew herself until she read it in his letter: he wasn’t impotent, he just came to hate the idea of sex with her. To him, she was – and always would be – the daughter of the first, perhaps only, woman he’d ever loved. The daughter of a woman he’d hit so hard she’d blacked out. But watching Korin from the corners of the set,
that would have been different for him. He wasn’t the one touching her any more, and watching her was a natural extension of what he’d always done with a camera. Her beauty, her nature, the ways in which she mirrored her mother and made him feel like he’d been given a second chance –
those
were what he loved. Sex with Korin crossed a line that he came to loathe.

‘You knew nothing about your background?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘My father – my adoptive father – worked at the GM plant in Van Nuys. They adopted me when I was eighteen months. Then my dad got offered a job in Minnesota. I remember moving to our house in Lakeville when I was about three. That’s my first, clearest memory. And I remember snow.
Lots
of snow.’ A smile traced the corners of her mouth, and was gone again soon after. ‘I never knew I was adopted because they never told me. I don’t know if they were
scared
to tell me, or if they ended up leaving it so long that, after a while, they couldn’t break the news, but I guess they didn’t think they could have kids naturally until Wendy was born. I know it’s easy to say now, but I always felt different. I loved them all, I really did, but I never quite felt like I belonged.’

She fell silent and I returned to the letter. Hosterlitz was explaining how he finally worked out what Cramer meant when he’d ‘joked’ about Zeller lying.

After Glen made his ‘joke’, it didn’t take me long to find out what Ring of Roses was – it was an orphanage out in Van Nuys. Back in 1953, when Elaine died, all I could think about was Martin and you. I knew you must have gone into the system somewhere. I just kept thinking, “Where are you now? Are you okay? Are you in a happy home?” but I couldn’t ask around at the time because it would have raised too many questions. It would have incriminated me. But, by 1966, I don’t say I didn’t care any more about whether I incriminated myself, because I did. I didn’t want to go to prison. But I needed to know the truth. I needed to know what happened to you after your mother died, and I needed to know how Martin was too. In my sober moments, of which I’m ashamed to say there were very few, you two became everything to me. So I did two things.

Firstly, I drove all the way up to San Quentin to see Martin. I wasn’t there that night in the bar at the Pingrove, so he didn’t suspect my involvement. He just suspected Saul and Glen. I went all the way up there to tell Martin the truth … but, in the end, I couldn’t. He was so different from the boy I knew back in 1953, so big and hard and cold, so embittered. I always understood why: he’d been in prison for 12 years by that time. He was innocent. He’d been on death row wondering if this month, this week, was going to be when he got sent to the gas chamber. Of
course
that would grind the life out of you. Of
course
you would change. I can see that now. But I’d gone up there to talk to the boy I knew … and that boy didn’t exist any more. And, when it came down to it, I’m sorry to say I just couldn’t see enough of the Martin I once knew to tell him the truth.

The second thing I did was start looking for you. It wasn’t like it is now. Adoptions weren’t dealt with in the same way, with the same level of care, so the paper trail wasn’t as complete, but information – when it was there – was easier to get at. I paid hundreds of dollars in bribes. Any money I earned, I ploughed into finding you.

‘He followed a trail of breadcrumbs,’ Korin said, ‘but it took him years.’

I looked up at her.

She grimaced, some colour forming in her cheeks as she did, her eyes speaking eloquently of how she felt. ‘
The Ghost of the Plains
bombed at the box office in 1967, and that sent
him into a spiral. Then his mom got worse, and he had to go back to TV – which he
hated
– and then, in 1969, his mom finally passed on. He was addicted and he was depressed, and he was a mess. But through it all, little by little, like he says in the letter, he wanted to find out what had happened to me. He did so much wrong. He did a terrible thing, and sometimes I’m not sure I can forgive him for it. But he was, I think, a good man.’