The Black Box

16

Bosch had begun making his way through the Art Pepper recordings his daughter had given him for his birthday. He was on volume three and listening to a stunning version of “Patricia” recorded three decades earlier at a club in Croydon, England. It was during Pepper’s comeback period after the years of drug addiction and incarceration. On this night in 1981 he had everything working. On this one song, Bosch believed he was proving that no one would ever play better. Harry wasn’t exactly sure what the word ethereal meant, but it was the word that came to mind. The song was perfect, the saxophone was perfect, the interplay and communication between Pepper and his three band mates was as perfect and orchestrated as the movement of four fingers on a hand. There were a lot of words used to describe jazz music. Bosch had read them over the years in the magazines and in the liner notes of records. He didn’t always understand them. He just knew what he liked, and this was it. Powerful and relentless, and sometimes sad.

He found it hard to concentrate on the computer screen as the song played, the band going on almost twenty minutes with it. He had “Patricia” on other records and CDs. It was one of Pepper’s signatures. But he had never heard it played with the same sinewy passion. He looked at his daughter, who was lying on the couch reading a book. Another school assignment. This one was called The Fault in Our Stars.

“This is about his daughter,” he said.

Maddie looked over the book at him.

“What do you mean?”

“This song. ‘Patricia.’ He wrote it for his daughter. He was away from her for long periods in her life, but he loved her and he missed her. You can hear that in it, right?”

She thought a moment and then nodded.

“I think. It almost sounds like the saxophone is crying.”

Bosch nodded back.

“Yeah, you hear it.”

He went back to his work. He was going through the numerous story links that Bonn had supplied in an email. They included Anneke Jespersen’s last fourteen stories and photo essays for the Berlingske Tidende as well as the ten-years-later story the newspaper published in 2002. It was tedious work because the articles were in Danish and he had to use an Internet translation site to piece them together in English two or three paragraphs at a time.

Anneke Jespersen had photographed and reported on the short first Gulf War from all angles. Her words and pictures came from the battlefields, the runways, the command posts, even the cruise ship used by the Allies as a floating R&R retreat. Her dispatches to the BT showed a journalist documenting a new kind of war, a high-tech battle launched swiftly from the sky. But Jespersen did not stay at a safe distance. When the battle moved to the ground in Operation Desert Sabre, she found her way into the action with the Allied troops, documenting the battles to retake Kuwait City and Al Khafji.

Her stories told the facts, her photographs showed the costs. She photographed the U.S. barracks in Dhahran, where twenty-eight soldiers died in a SCUD missile attack. There were no photos of bodies, but the smoking hulks of destroyed Humvees somehow imparted the human loss. She shot the POW camps in the Saudi desert, where Iraqi prisoners carried constant weariness and fear in their eyes. Her camera caught the billowing black smoke of the Kuwaiti oil fields burning behind the retreat of the Iraqi troops. And her most haunting shots were of the Highway of Death, where the long convoy of enemy troops as well as Iraqi and Palestinian civilians had been mercilessly bombed by Allied forces.

Bosch had been to war. His was a war of mud and blood and confusion. But he saw up close the people they killed, that he killed. Some of those memories were as crystal clear to him as the photographs now on his screen. They came to him mostly at night when he couldn’t sleep or unexpectedly when some everyday image conjured up a somehow connected image from the jungles or tunnels where he had been. He knew war first hand, and Anneke Jespersen’s words and pictures struck him as the closest he had ever seen it through a journalist’s eyes.

After the cease-fire, Jespersen didn’t go home. She stayed in the region for months, documenting the refugee camps and destroyed villages, the efforts to rebuild and recover as the Allies transitioned into something called Operation Provide Comfort.

If it was possible to get to know the unseen person on the other side of the camera, the one holding the pen, it was in these postwar stories and photos. Jespersen sought out the mothers and children and those most damaged and dispossessed by war. They may have just been words and pictures but together they told the human side and cost of a high-tech war and its aftermath.

Maybe it was the accompaniment of Art Pepper’s soulful saxophone, but as he painstakingly translated and read the stories and looked at the pictures, Bosch felt that he somehow grew closer to Anneke Jespersen. Across twenty years she reached forward with her work and tugged at him, and this made his resolve stronger. Twenty years earlier he had apologized to her. This time he promised her. He would find out who took everything away from her.

The last stop on Bosch’s digital tour of the life and work of Anneke Jespersen was the memorial website constructed by her brother. To enter the site, he had to register with his email address, a digital equivalent to signing the guest registry at a funeral. The site was then divided into two sections: photos taken by Jespersen and photos taken of her.

Many of the shots in the first section were from the articles Bosch had already seen through the links provided by Bonn. There were many extra photos from the same pieces, and he thought a few of them were better than the frames chosen to run with the stories.

The second section was more like a family photo album, with shots of Anneke starting from when she was a skinny little girl with white-blond hair. Bosch moved through these quickly until he came to a series of photographs that Anneke had taken herself. These were all shot in front of different mirrors over several years. Jespersen posed with her camera on a strap around her neck, holding it at chest level and shooting without looking through the viewfinder. Taken together, Bosch could see the progression of time in her face. She remained beautiful from image to image, but he could see the wisdom deepening in her eyes.

In the last photos it was as if she was staring directly and only at Bosch. He found it hard to break away from her stare.

The site had a comments section, and Bosch opened it to find that a flurry of comments beginning in 1996, when the website was constructed, tapered over the years to just one in the past year. The poster was her brother, who built and maintained the site. So that he could read the comment in English, Bosch copied his comment into the Internet translator he had been using.

Anneke, time does not erase the loss of you. We miss you as a sister, artist, friend. Always.

With those sentiments, Bosch clicked out of the website and closed his laptop. He was finished for the night, and though his efforts had brought him closer to Anneke Jespersen, they did not in the end give him insight into what had sent her to the United States a year after Desert Storm. It gave him no clue to why she had come to Los Angeles. There was no story on war crimes, nothing that appeared to warrant follow-up, let alone a trip to Los Angeles. Whatever it was that Anneke was chasing, it remained hidden from him.

Harry looked at his watch. The time had flown. It was after eleven and he had an early start in the morning. The disc had ended and the music had stopped, but he hadn’t noticed when. His daughter had fallen asleep on the couch with her book and he had to decide whether to wake her to go to bed or just cover her with a blanket and leave her undisturbed.

Bosch stood up and his hamstrings protested as he stretched. He took the pizza box off the coffee table and, limping, walked it slowly into the kitchen, where he put it on top of the trash can to take out later. He looked down at the box and silently chastised himself for once again putting his work ahead of his daughter’s proper nutrition.

When he came back out to the living room Madeline was sitting up on the couch, still half asleep, holding a hand in front of a yawn.

“Hey, it’s late,” he said. “Time for bed.”

“No, duh.”

“Come on, I’ll walk you in.”

She stood and leaned into him. He put his arm around her shoulders and they walked down the hall to her bedroom.

“You’re on your own again tomorrow morning, kid. That okay?”

“You don’t have to ask, Dad.”

“I’ve got a breakfast appointment at seven and—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

At her doorway he let her go, kissing her on the top of her head, smelling the pomegranate from her shampoo.

“Yes, I do. You deserve somebody who’s more around. Who’s here for you.”

“Dad, I’m too tired. I don’t want to talk about this.”

Bosch gestured back down the hall toward the living room.

“You know if I could play that song like him, I would. Then you’d know.”

He had gone too far with it, pushing his guilt on her.

“I do know!” she said in an annoyed tone. “Now, good night.”

She went through the doorway and closed the door behind her.

“Good night, baby,” he said.

Bosch went to the kitchen and took the pizza box out to the trash can. He made sure the top was sealed against coyotes and other creatures of the night.

Before going back inside, he used his keys to open the padlock on the storage room at the back wall of the carport. He pulled the string to the overhead light and started scanning the crowded shelves. Junk he had kept through most of his life was in boxes on the dusty shelves. He reached up and brought one box down to the workbench and then reached back for what had been behind it on the shelf.

He pulled down the white riot helmet he had worn on the night he met Anneke Jespersen. He looked over its scratched and dirty surface. With his palm he wiped the dust off the sticker affixed to the front. The winged badge. He studied the helmet and remembered the nights the city came apart. Twenty years had gone by. He thought about all of those years, all that had come to him and all that had stayed or gone away.

After a while he put the helmet back on the shelf and replaced the box that had hidden it. He locked the storage room and went back inside to bed.