The Skin Palace

ESTABLISHING SHOT

The Ballard Theatre. Night.

Enter the boy. Fifteen years old. He is an immigrant. He has been in the city for only a week. At times, he has difficulty breathing. He is dressed formally, in a dark, old-fashioned suit that is wet from the storm outside. He has only a tentative grasp of the native language. This does not matter, as the film he has come to see is a silent feature— the original Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.

Enter the young woman. Twenty-two years old. She stands in the entrance to the theatre and removes her yellow rain slicker. She shakes her head, pushes her matted hair back from her face. She moves down the center aisle and takes a seat several rows in front of the boy.

They are the only individuals in the theatre. This may be due to the storm outside. Or possibly the fact that few people have an interest in seeing a silent movie in this day and age.

Several minutes pass. The silence of the theatre is broken occasionally by the wheezing of the boy’s lungs as they strive for a full, deep breath.

Then, finally, the curtains roll back and the wonderful sputter-sound of the projector issues and a beam of blue-white light shoots out above their heads and falls flat against the screen.

The boy and the young woman each watch the film in different ways, with different expectations and objectives.

The boy wishes to break every image down into its smallest components. He wants to analyze technique, to understand the mechanics of this display.

The young woman wants the entire experience of the film, the total package, the overall sensation of another world that she’s been allowed to spy on for the price of her ticket.

This is impossible, as the young woman cannot stop thinking about last Tuesday, when her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. The fishhooks in Lon Chaney’s mouth cannot compete with the image of the doctor’s office, the whiteness of the doctor’s coat, the vague, grey hue of the X-ray sheets suspended against an illuminated background.

And within minutes the young woman is crying again, as quietly as she can manage, slouched down in the Ballard’s velvet seat, turned sideways, her knees brought up close to her chest.

The boy is more confused than annoyed. His vision is torn over and over between the actions on the screen and the silhouette of the young woman ten feet in front of him, the crown of her head just visible over her seat, her sobbing the new sound track for the movie, giving the film a meaning it previously didn’t have.

The boy would like to approach the young woman, ask her if she needs any assistance, if he can call someone for her, if there’s anything at all he could do. But he stays in his seat, as fascinated as he is sympathetic.

He’s never known a film to affect someone else this profoundly.

~ ~ ~

1

A woman’s face appears on the screen. The face is as large as a house, as big as any three-decker in the city. Because of this enlargement, each wrinkle and fold in the skin becomes a dry riverbed, a crevice of incalculable depth. The woman’s eyes are red and sunken, as if she’s spent a lifetime weeping. After a time, her mouth opens and she looks out over the gravel parking lot and says, in the most wounded voice imaginable,

On October first, my daughter, Jennifer Ellis, disappeared while walking home from the Ste. Jeanne d’Arc elementary school on Duffault Avenue. Jennifer is ten years old. She is four and a half feet tall. She was dressed in her school uniform, a green plaid jumper and a white blouse. I implore you, if you have any information at all about what happened to my baby, please call the number on this screen. Please help me find my daughter. I beg you.

“God,” Perry says, “I wish they’d stop showing that clip. It’s on TV every night. I hear her voice on the radio driving to work every morning.”

Sylvia takes a sip of wine and says, “Do you think they’ll find her?”

“They’ve got to find her,” Perry says. He takes a breath, uncomfortable with the conversation, looks across the parking lot and asks, “You think the line’ll be bad at the snack bar?”

“No drive-in food,” Sylvia says. “We’ll both regret it in the morning.”

Perry smiles, nods his agreement, lets his head fall back against the seat.

Sylvia would love to shoot his face this way. To frame it in exactly this light, exactly this expression. But she’s learned. It makes Perry tense when she takes the camera out at moments like this. He smiles, but you’d have to hear the tone of his voice when he says, “Is it necessary to record everything?”

The answer is no, of course not. Most of life is more or less insignificant. But Sylvia’s argument, her defense, would be that what she does with the camera has nothing to do with recording. Her intention isn’t to nail down the image for some kind of documentation. She’s not all that interested in that kind of history. She doesn’t see things that way. And she’d have thought Perry would know that by now.

Anyway, Sylvia doesn’t want an argument tonight. So she leaves the camera in the trunk of the car. But it’s loaded with a fresh roll of Fuji. Just in case.

Perry had called her from the office around three. She was in the cellar, developing yesterday’s shots from the Canal Zone. She was working on a print of Mojo Bettman, the guy without the legs who sits on his skateboard selling newspapers and magazines all day. Perry must have let the phone ring twenty times. Sylvia ran up the three flights of stairs and grabbed the receiver, pulling a little for air. Perry said, “The Cansino. Eight o’clock. Big News.”

And then he hung up. He hates the phone. And he knew if he stayed on Sylvia would press for details.

She’s not sure why he feels the need to be so dramatic. They’ve both been waiting for the big news for months. Perry’s been aching for it. And Sylvia has been fearful of it. She doesn’t like acknowledging that. It makes her feel vindictive and kind of spoiled, maybe mean-spirited. This news is what Perry wants. This is why he puts in all the hours. After she hung the receiver back into the cradle on the wall, Sylvia stood there for a second and tried to picture Perry as he heard the words. She’s sure it was Ratzinger that took him to lunch. Probably at the top of the bank building, that restaurant that used to revolve. The firm has an open account there. Perry says Ratzinger eats there every day of the week.

She pictured them both holding club sandwiches in their hands, little leaves of purplish lettuce hanging over the corners of the toasted bread. Ratzinger dabbing mayonnaise off his lips with the rose-colored napkin. She pictured Perry nodding, that sort of slight, humble tilt of the head, as Ratzinger listed all the things they liked — the studiousness, the ease with the clients, the ability to work on the team.

She could see Perry clenching down on his back teeth, curling up his toes inside his wing tips, waiting for the moment when Ratzinger actually said the word, let it fall from his lips as the waiter cleared the coffee cups: Partnership.

They’re in the backseat of the Buick and they’ve got the top rolled down. It’s the same car Perry was driving on the day they met — a maroon ’65 Skylark that guzzles gas. Last year they dropped a wad getting the floorboards replaced. Now, with Perry’s big news, Sylvia is sure it’s only a matter of time before he starts pushing for a Saab or a Volvo. For all she knows, Ratzinger may have already made the suggestion.

“This is the part I love,” Perry says. So far there are about a dozen parts he loves.

“We’re going down in the elevator,” he says, “and Ratzinger waits for this guy to get out at the garage level, okay? And then he turns to me and he does this clap on the back, and the whole time there’s no eye contact, you know. He’s got his eyes on the floor numbers. And we get to the street level and before the doors open he says, ‘and by the way, there’ll be a little something extra come Fridays from now on.’”

He bites in on his bottom lip and slaps the driver’s seat.

“A raise,” Sylvia says.

He’s nodding at the words. “This is the way these guys work, you know. He never mentions a figure, okay? Just a little something extra, you know. Make me guess. Make me wait for Friday so I can see the numbers.”

“You deserve every dime,” she says.

The Cansino Drive-in is one of the last of its kind in the country. In high school, Sylvia came here a handful of times with a packed carload of forgotten friends. It’s gotten a lot seedier since then. The Buick is parked in the very last row of the lot where asphalt gives way to a scrubby dirt patch that dissolves into full-blown forest. The parking lot is half-filled with teenagers. Lots of pickup trucks with fat tires and skinny girls with blonde hair down to their behinds. The kids all sit in the truck beds around coolers of beer. They smoke cigarettes and make constant trips to the snack bar.

The movie’s sound track is beamed at them over the radio. Those beautiful, ribbed-silver window speakers are long gone, but the white mounting posts they hung from still stand, circles of weed springing up through the posts’ tear-shaped concrete foundations.

They’re half-watching something called The Initiation of Alice. It’s a pretty standard soft-core exploitation job by Meyer Dodgson. Lots of female nudity and beach locations, but nothing too explicit. Upon the screen, a topless coed is admiring her own reflection in an ornate, full-length mirror.

“I spoke with Candice, who got the same pitch,” Perry says, “only from Ford. I knew Candice would be the other one they tapped.”

“I remember. You said Candice.”

“We both figure they’ll run us around the track for a year, maybe a little less. Then they’ll give us the title.”

“Partner.”

“Big day, Sylvia. I want to remember this day.”

“You’ll need some new suits.”

He sits back, lets his shoulders slump a little.

“I want to buy you something, Sylvia.”

“Okay, next movie’s on you.”

His voice goes lower and he reaches over and takes her hand.

“I’m serious. Something nice.”

“A movie would be nice. I don’t need—”

He waves away the thought. “I know you don’t need,” he stretches out the word. “This isn’t about need. Isn’t there something you want?”

She shakes her head, passes him the wine bottle and picks a licorice twist out of its bag.

“C’mon, I want to mark this occasion. If you don’t help me out I’ll pick out something on my own.”

“Perry—”

“Some awful piece of jewelry you’ll keep in the box in the dresser …”

She nods and squints at him and bites the end off the twist. He’s referring to this enormous silver bracelet he gave her last Christmas, which makes her arm look like it just came out of a cast. But she knows the thing cost a fortune and feels guilty every time she opens her drawer to take out a sweater.

She says, “I thought we were going to start saving.”

“We are, believe me. Second check starts the down-payment fund.”

Perry’s all hot for buying a house this year, but Sylvia loves where they live now.

“C’mon, give me some idea. I’ll go out blind and buy earrings. It’ll be scary. Don’t make me do it.”

He can still make her laugh. And he usually gets his way when he’s being funny.

“Okay, there is something …”

He’s thrilled. He does a drumroll on his knees with his fingers and says, “Bingo.”

“I was down in the Zone last week …”

Already, she’s said the wrong thing. Perry hates the Canal Zone.

“Yes,” he says, dragging out the s, trying to prepare himself for anything.

“There was this ad. On a bulletin board in the Rib Room—”

“God,” he says, forcing a smile, trying to make his distaste into a weary joke. “I hate it that you eat down there. I just don’t think it’s healthy.”

She cocks her head to the side, purses the lips a little.

“Sorry,” he says, annoyed with himself for jarring the mood. “Go ahead. An ad.”

“It was a good price. I checked the catalogs. And they said it was in mint condition.”

“A good price on …”

She takes a breath and lets it out, “An Aquinas.”

“An Aquinas,” he repeats.

She nods, not sure whether to get defensive or laugh at herself, like it’s the same old Sylvia and some things never change.

He says, “Another camera?”

“It’s an Aquinas, Perry—”

“What does that make? Four, right? Four cameras?”

“Four?”

“Yeah, four. The Canon, the Yashica, and the Polaroid.”

She stares at him, her mouth crooked like he’s been sarcastic, but still inside the margin of funny. A beat goes by and his expression remains unchanged and she realizes he’s being serious.

“The Polaroid? C’mon, Perry, that’s like a twenty-dollar camera. I just use it for proofs. I just use it for taking note of something I’ll want to do later.”

“A Polaroid isn’t a camera? A Polaroid suddenly doesn’t count as a camera?”

“Okay, forget it,” she says, looking up at the screen as the young woman in front of the mirror starts to rub sunscreen into her shoulder. “It was your idea. You brought up buying something.”

He reaches across for her hand again.

“I meant, like, diamond stud earrings or something, I meant—”

She squeezes the hand and lets it go.

“Diamond stud earrings, Perry? When would I wear diamond studs? They’d clash with the decor down at Snapshot Shack.”

Perry has begun to hate Sylvia’s job. She works in one of those tiny film booths you see at the edge of every mall parking lot in America. To a degree, she understands his feelings. Those little huts are about five feet square. Barely enough room inside for you to turn around. She thinks just the sight of them gives a lot of people a kind of unconscious jolt of claustrophobia. And the particular booth Sylvia works in is even worse. It was built as an enormous scale replica of an old Brownie camera. But she likes the job. Right now, it’s exactly what she wants to do. Maybe it’s this visible lack of ambition, this absence of a career that bothers Perry. Maybe he can’t envision turning to Ratzinger over lunch and saying, “Sylvia? She sells film from inside of a big camera …”

“There’ll be all kinds of places to wear them,” he says. “Believe me.”

“Look, I said forget it.”

His eyes narrow a little. He shifts over to sit next to her. He doesn’t want the night to go bad.

“Okay,” he says, smiling, being indulgent. “Tell me about the …”

“Aquinas,” she says.

“Doesn’t sound Japanese,” he says, putting on a shocked expression.

“It’s made in Italy,” she says.

“Good camera?”

“It’s about the best you can get.”

He says, “Why go for a used one? Isn’t it like a used car? Like you’re buying someone else’s problem?”

She smiles at him. He’s trying. He has to force the interest in cameras. She knows that he’d rather be talking about house hunting. Or maybe even wedding plans.

“You want to guess what a new Aquinas would cost?”

“Not a clue.”

She takes a deep breath. “Try over ten grand.”

This genuinely shocks him.

“You’re kidding.”

She shakes her head no.

He leans forward and says, “The house I grew up in? Okay? My parents bought it for around ten grand.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but the Aquinas doesn’t get water in the basement.”

“How much are they asking for this used one?”

She smiles and shakes her head no again, but says, “The ad said fifteen hundred.”

He stares at her and starts a slow nod and at the same time tries to hold off from smiling. He can’t manage it and the smile breaks and he turns his attention up to the screen as Alice starts a long jog down a supposedly deserted beach.

Then he looks back and says, “All right, let’s get it.”

She starts to fight him. “Perry …,” she says with this small pseudo-whine to her voice that she can’t stand.

He holds up a hand and says, “Listen, Sylvia, I want to get you something. I honestly do. And this is what you want.”

She shrugs. “I’d have to check it out. I mean, I’d have to check the age and the condition. See what’s included. Lenses. A case.”

“You check it out. If it looks good, if it’s what you want, write the check.”

She stares at the side of his face, more excited than embarrassed.

“Really? I should really get it?”

She thinks she sounds like a teenager. Like her mother said she could use the car on Saturday night. But Perry seems suddenly delighted with himself. He turns to her, leans in and puts his arm around her.

“If it looks good,” he repeats, “buy it.”

“You’re sure?”

He brings his mouth down to the side of her neck, kisses there a few times. Then he moves up to her ear and whispers, “I still want to get you the diamond studs.”

In five minutes Sylvia’s jeans are off and Perry’s pants are down around his ankles and she’s straddling him, riding him, her knees indenting the Buick’s backseat as Perry watches the exploits of the surf-bimbette flashed up on the Cansino’s huge and dingy screen.

And as Perry’s breath starts to catch and Sylvia feels the muscles in his thighs buck and tense and release and tense again and he starts to make that suppressed-whine sound through his nose, she’s thinking of the Aquinas. She’s thinking of the first time she’ll hold it up to her eye and pull something into focus.

She’s thinking of the rush that will come when she presses down on the shutter release and opens the lens and imprints some flawless instant, some slice of life. Some instinctively chosen and absolutely perfect image.

She’s wondering what it will be.

2

Until recently the Hotel St. Vitus served as a convent for a sect of Eastern European nuns known as the Sisters of Perpetual Torment & Agony, a cloistered Order always rumored to be on the precipice of papal destruction due to heretical word and deed. The nuns’ catechistic practice somehow managed to splice their traditional Catholicism with a vague line of occultist teachings. No one in Bangkok Park knows exactly what the Sisters dabbled in, but there was loose talk of midnight rites during the equinox, a kind of earth-mother, druidic gloss layered over their prayers and chanting.

For their part, the Sisters almost seemed to encourage the dark rumors, never venturing out of the convent but for the weekly shopping trip to the all-night Spanish market. Even then they’d remain encased in a cloud of silence, their bodies wrapped head to toe in black wool habits, their faces obscured by hanging black-lace veils. They seemed to purchase bulk quantities of blood sausage, sweet red wine, and candles.

In public, Bishop Flaherty tolerated the Order with pleas for an understanding of the deeply spiritual quest the women had devoted their lives to, but during private lunches with his banker pals in the chancery dining room, Flaherty called them spooky old hags, and voodoo fanatics. And alone in his room, after his nightly prayers, the bishop looked out his window toward Bangkok Park and genuinely wondered if the witches had it in for him.

Officially, the Quinsigamond Police Department does not know what happened to the Sisters. The nuns no longer occupy their old convent. A week after their disappearance, the chancery released a statement that the entire flock had returned to Eastern Europe where their services were desperately needed. The statement made no mention of the rumor that the walls of the abandoned convent’s chapel had been found covered with a mixture of human and animal blood. One of the Canal Zone’s more hysterical news-rags offered speculation that all the sisters had been massacred and the FBI was blanketing the entire event. Another weekly announced there was no mass murder, but rather the nuns had splintered from the Church and become some kind of pagan-feminist terrorists, vanished into an undisclosed mountain region of South America for training and recruitment. The Spy never bothered to cover the story beyond the box ad in the real estate classifieds announcing that the diocese of Quinsigamond was offering the convent for sale at a very reasonable price.

Hermann Kinsky picked up the building for a song and rechristened it the Hotel St. Vitus. He’s held the deed to the property for close to a year now but has yet to check in his first guest. This may have something to do with both the location — on Belvedere Street at the western end of Bangkok Park — and the fact that Hermann never bothered to renovate the place. The St. Vitus is still outfitted as a dark, icon-choked convent, full of stark wooden corridors hung with pictures of obscure and grotesquely martyred saints, small, mattressless cots in cell-like rooms, and a kitchen whose only concession to this century’s progress is running water.

But Hermann doesn’t care if he’s failing as a hotelier. He needs a profession for the tax forms and innkeeper is as good as any. And he’s immune to the spartan, gloomy ambience of the St. Vitus, the haunted, Gothic flavor that emanates from every crevice of the rambling building. It reminds him of his hometown of Maisel in Old Bohemia, the thousand-year-old city of golems and alchemists from which he fled three years ago with his only son, Jakob, his nephew, Felix, and his oldest friend and most trusted business aide, Gustav Weltsch.

In the old country, it had been a given that Hermann could rise only so high, that his will and his intelligence, his savvy and his tenacity would always be undercut by his ghetto birth and the mind-numbing, sloughing grip of decades of Communist puppet-regimes. But here in America, here in the new world, possibilities were endless. You practically had to shun them as they pounded on your door, day and night, saying, here’s a new idea, here’s a fresh venture, here’s another chance for improvement, investment, progress, success.

Back in Maisel, Hermann had labored by day as the owner of Kinsky Neckware, a small, open-air haberdashery booth in Old Loew Square, but it was his night work in the back alleys of the grey marketplace that earned his exit fee — the cash he had to pay to a whiny subminister of Emigration — to bring himself and his three charges to Quinsigamond. He sold contraband gasoline, cigarettes, racks of horse meat. He ran dice and lottery games. He advanced an always growing book of illegal loans, broke a record number of recalcitrant kneecaps. And ultimately, in a manner that became his trademark and gave an additional, darker meaning to the phrase face the music, Hermann garrotted an army of desperate but doomed men with Schonborn piano wire. I only use Schonborn, he would tell his gasping victim, it never breaks.

His wife had died giving birth to Jakob, and his greatest regret is that she was never able to see the bounty of all those long, often bloody post-midnight hours skulking around Kaprova Boulevard in fingerless gloves. There are still late nights when the boys and Weltsch are asleep and he sits at his desk, a former altar, in what was once the St. Vitus chapel, a room of poor lighting with an enormous stained-glass window that depicts a weeping woman being crucified upside down, and Hermann Kinsky allows himself to take out his paper-thin wallet and withdraw a fading photograph of his only love and whisper, Julia, I did it all for you.

Hermann has no use for the irony that the quality he most loved in his late wife is the very one that disturbs him when he sees it in his son. That dreaminess, that vague, lost, otherwordly sense of absence, as if the boy were living on some different plane of existence, as if Jakob believed that by not acknowledging the ugly facts of this life, he could avoid them. It came from the mother. She could keep that same look in her eyes, that glazed, unfocused sheen. In fact, they looked very much alike, both with the thin, almost brittle physique, the small bones and dewy eyes and thin lips, the ears that wing out. Both with the spots on the lung and all the breathing problems. Nothing like Hermann or his nephew Felix with their stocky frames and barrel chests.

Julia loved the movies, just like the boy, just as passionately, as if the picture shows were some kind of religion, were something to be taken seriously. It was the only way she would consent to date Hermann when they first met. For a night in Cinema Kierling, she would sometimes tease, I would walk on the arm of the village idiot.

And if it was Julia’s genes that planted the seed of this movie-love in the son, it was that fishwife, the fifteen-year-old governess Hermann hired out of the Schiller ghetto, that ultimately poisoned little Jakob. Bringing that girl into the household was the mistake of a lifetime. She dragged Jakob to the cinema each day, even when he got older and should have been in school. Felix was immune to the nanny’s influence from the start, born without any interest in artifice. But Jakob was lost from the moment he entered the Kierling. And now Hermann curses the day some foolish genius invented this thing called film.

Because it’s one thing for a woman to waste her time with such trifles and another altogether for a young man. And it’s a prescription for disaster when that young man is heir to the fastest growing crime dynasty in town. Hermann has tried every trick he can think of to get the boy more interested in the business. He’s taken the harsh and angry road. He’s taken the understanding and patient road. He’s yelled, wheedled, begged, threatened. He’s even tried bribery, buying the son his own movie camera, a 16mm Seitz, stolen contraband negotiated out of the trunk of a nervous cabdriver. Remember, the hackman said at the close of the barter, tell him it belonged to Uher himself, his first camera.

Hermann asked Weltsch to speak to the boy, thinking maybe it’s a problem of blood, being too close, the father too large a role model for the son to comprehend. Weltsch — with his CPA and recent law degree, his absolutely dispassionate, almost mathematical sense of logic, numbers as a personal dogma — came back shaking his head, unable to penetrate the fantastic cloud perpetually swimming around Jakob’s skull. He insisted on speaking of a film noir, whatever this is, Weltsch said, his voice as halting as if he’d discovered a new tax code he couldn’t decipher, so befuddled that Hermann found the day’s deposits miscalculated when he reviewed them that evening.

So odd that Felix, the nephew, the brother’s boy, nineteen and just a year older than Jakob, should have all the attributes that the son lacks. Felix has the head for numbers, the instinct to note the viable venture from the probable loser, the anger that could allow him to put a gun to an enemy’s temple, pull the trigger and then go to dinner without another thought. And most important, Felix wants. He wants to be Prince. He wants to emulate his Uncle Hermann in every way. He desires Jakob’s birthright the way his lungs desired air on the day of his birth — an unusually large baby, the midwife said for years that he screamed loud enough to wake all the dead in Strasnice Road Cemetery. Felix wants the number two spot at the table so badly that, unfortunately, Hermann can see he’s come to resent his once-loved cousin. If Weltsch can’t understand Jakob’s dreamy, antibusiness ways, Felix despises them.

But there is hope, there is one deal on the horizon that could bind Jakob into the Family, and make an honorable percentage in the process. First, however, a bit of unpleasant discipline must be dispensed. These nickel-and-dime Asians, Hermann thinks, why do I even bother?

Jakob Kinsky thinks of his bedroom on the top floor of the Hotel St. Vitus as the smallest studio in cinematic history. But that’s all right. He’s still a one-man operation and so far the bedroom fits all his needs. A year ago, upon moving in, he decided that since this tiny cell was where he’d be spending the majority of his time, it should reflect his aesthetic principles. So he’s made everything stark black and white and shadowy. His bed is a metal-frame cot that looks like it was scavenged from Spooner Correctional. The lighting is supplied by a bare bulb hanging from a short length of electrical cord. His clothing — three black suits and three white cotton shirts — hangs from a gunmetal coatrack in the corner.

It isn’t that Jakob sees his room as a blatant rejection of Papa’s bid to make good in the New World. It’s simply that Jakob has a theory that by living day and night in this bleak and boxy terrain, he can’t help but completely realize the imagistic imagination that he’s been striving for since the day his nanny, Felice Fabri, brought him to the Kierling Theatre back in Maisel and together they watched a non-subtitled screening of Beware, My Lovely.

He was just six years old. And he knew, upon emerging back into the blinding, headache-inducing sunlight of Loew Square, that he had to make films. Over the years and countless trips to the Kierling that followed, he knew that he had to make strange, haunting, black-and-white crime films. That he had to become the noir-est of all noir directors. That, in fact, he had to move beyond the confines of simply directing and become a true auteur — conceiving, writing, casting, editing, virtually willing his total vision into celluloid being.

That first screening was a dozen years ago and Jakob’s pursuit of his dream has never flagged. The bedroom, the studio, the original home office of his imagined company—Amerikan Pictures—is a shrine to his persistence in the face of paternal incredulity. The walls are completely papered with old movie posters—The Blue Dahlia. Shadow of a Doubt. So Dark the Night. The cot is covered with dog-eared copies of dozens of screenplays—Thieves’ Highway. The Tattooed Stranger. Sudden Fear. The floor looks like some demented architect’s model for a black, plastic city with towers of videotapes stacked and tottering everywhere—The Big Combo. Call Northside 777. Cult of the Cobra.

The only other things in the room are a black-and-white TV hooked to a VCR and currently playing This Gun for Hire with the volume off, a Hubbard 2000 vaporizer, a wrought-iron bookcase filled with cinematography texts, a portable, manual Clark Nova typewriter, and Jakob’s prize possession, the thing he sleeps with, his most cherished appendage, a Seitz 16 mm movie camera.

Jakob knows the Seitz was intended as a bribe from Papa. But it’s his ticket to attaining his dream and though he sometimes feels a bit guilty about the implications of accepting such a present, there’s no way he can part with it now. Not when he’s this close to a start date for filming on his first feature, on the work that will announce his arrival into the world of film, a masterpiece he’s titled Little Girl Lost.

He’s been writing Little Girl Lost since the Family arrived in Quinsigamond. He thinks he needs one more polish on the screenplay before he’s ready to turn the Seitz loose on the world. He writes every chance he gets, staying up all night in the tiny studio, clicking out rewrite after rewrite on the Clark Nova, scribbling notes and cost sheets and location possibilities in his spiral notebooks. But even with all the hours he’s put in he can’t believe his script is close to completion.

He picks it up now, this revision on yellow paper, holds it gingerly in his hand, stares at the title page:

16 mm: B&W “Lumiere Flat”

Revision 9

An Amerikan Pictures/H.A.G. release

Maisel/Quinsigamond

Little Girl Lost

a screenplay by

Jakob Kinsky

dedicated to the memory of Felice Fabri lover of film

“the image must be pure to the point of horror”

He turns the page to the first scene and reads once again

FADE IN

TIGHT SHOT — THE DOOMED MAN

FILLS SCREEN. CAMERA studies his panicked, sweat-drenched face, partly obscured in shadow. His eyes are blinking and darting from left to right and back again. His Adam’s apple heaves as he gasps for breath. Camera pulls back to

MEDIUM SHOT — EXT. TRAIN STATION — NIGHT — RAIN

The Doomed Man is attempting to hide himself behind a large steel girder. He presses his back against the beam, steals furtive, rapid glances in either direction down the train yard. The collar of his coat is turned up against the wind and driving rain. In the distance, a chorus of barking dogs can be heard, the sound, once detected, getting progressively closer.

CLOSE UP — EYES OF THE DOOMED MAN, RAPIDLY BLINKING

MEDIUM SHOT — FREIGHT CAR ACROSS THE YARD FROM THE DOOMED MAN

The Doomed Man makes an awkward, tripping dash across the open yard, planting feet in deep, muddy puddles, finally reaching and boarding the ancient, rusted, wheelless freight car. He sits inside on the floor, huddles into himself, cups hands and blows on them, stares up, terrified, at the smashed-out windows of the train. Finally, he pulls from inside his coat a crumpled page of newsprint.

POV/THE DOOMED MAN

Camera tracks in on the newspaper. The headline reads:

BODY OF MISSING GIRL DISCOVERED

Divers recover remains of Felice Fontaine

Accompanying photo shows sweet-faced, ten-year-old child.

TIGHT SHOT — FACE OF DOOMED MAN

as he reacts to newspaper. Face dissolves in weeping horror. He crumples newspaper in hands, brings it to face as if a handkerchief, and begins to cry into it.

A throat clears behind Jakob. He jumps, pulls the script into his chest. His cousin Felix is standing in the doorway wearing an annoyed grin.

Felix shakes his head and says, “We’re ready to start the meeting.”

Hermann Kinsky is seated at the head of the altar. Weltsch has left this month’s ledger before him but Kinsky hasn’t bothered to open it. Hermann doesn’t need a balance sheet to tell him when he’s been betrayed. He feels the Judas in his stomach, senses the transgression the old way, in the blood and the spleen.

Felix sits next to him on his left and Uncle Hermann knows his nephew is anxious to tell of this week’s exploits by the resident Kinsky muscle, a growing gang that’s come to be known as The Grey Roaches. Hermann doesn’t know why Felix has settled on this appellation, but there’s something about it he likes. He’s upset, however, by the fact that the Roaches take their marching orders from Felix rather than Jakob. It’s a bad sign to hang out to the neighborhood, a gesture that could easily be misinterpreted. And for this reason he refuses to pay too much attention to gang business. He lets Weltsch keep track of the pack’s extortion accounts and pharmaceutical dealings.

Jakob sits to his father’s right, dressed, as always, in his black bar mitzvah suit, though he’s outgrown it by a size or two. Look at the boy. It’s as if he’s uncomfortable with his own presence. As if each moment of his short life has been lived on the trap of a gallows. Why can’t he have some of his cousin’s confidence and bravado? How did two boys, raised together since Felix was orphaned in the July Sweep, end up so different? Kinsky blood running through both sets of veins, Hermann thinks, looking at his son’s profile, but they’re night and day.

What Hermann doesn’t realize is that through the open chapel door, Jakob can see across the hall into his bedroom and makeshift studio where he’s left the TV on, playing a tape of This Gun for Hire. The volume is turned off and as Alan Ladd mouths dialogue, Jakob can hear each line in his head.

Jakob would love to be Alan Ladd, or rather, Ladd’s character on the screen: Raven, the heartless, hired killer, the contract assassin who walks through a beautifully moody, 1942 black-and-white world in his trench coat, possessed by his legion of inner demons. When Laird Cregar asks Raven how it feels to kill someone, Jakob mouths the response, “It feels fine.”

Weltsch enters the chapel with Johnny Yew, one of Hermann’s new mid-level managers based down in Little Asia. Johnny runs the sex co-op on Alton Road that the Kinsky’s picked up in a very hostile takeover last May. Hermann brought in a Bulgarian contractor for the move and disappeared Yun-fat, the cooperative’s founder and Johnny’s former boss. Normally, that kind of brassy nerve would have triggered some all-out reprisal, but since Doc Cheng was eliminated last year, Little Asia has been up for a lot of quick grabs.

Weltsch sits down next to Felix without a word and Johnny Yew slides in next to Jakob, saying, “Good to see you, Mr. K,” across the table to Hermann.

“It is good to see you, Johnny,” Hermann says in a low and unusually warm voice, so friendly-sounding that Jakob looks away from the distant television screen for a second to study his father’s face.

“Gustav tells me you have something important to discuss,” Yew says, both nervous and excited. He’s dressed in a double-breasted shark-skin suit that looks a little like the one Felix is wearing.

Hermann gives a slow nod.

“I’ve asked you down today, Johnny, to discuss your future with the company.”

Jakob hears Yew swallow, feels his legs shift under the table.

“We’re extremely pleased with the job you’ve been doing for us down at the co-op. You’ve settled in nicely.”

Johnny’s head bobs. “It’s a wonderful position, Mr. Kinsky. I’ve worked hard and—”

Hermann waves a hand.

“We know you have, Johnny. Gustav and I never anticipated such returns. To be honest with you, there were doubts at the start.”

“Yes, sir. Doubts.”

“Huge doubts,” Felix pipes up and his uncle puts a hand on the nephew’s shoulder.

“You have to understand, Johnny, Little Asia is not our home base. We didn’t know quite what to expect from the locals. Yun-fat was a popular man.”

“Popular, yes, sir.”

“We envisioned some degree of backlash. Resentment against a foreign investor.”

“You cleaned the place up, Mr. K. It was a mess under Yun-fat. Merchants always fighting. A poor selection of goods. The quality of service shot up immediately.”

Hermann smiled. “You’re being too modest, Johnny,” he says. “We couldn’t have done it without you. You’re only as good as your people on the front line. You’ll need to remember that.”

“I will, Mr. K. I’ll remember.”

“Because when we send you out on the road, you can’t be calling back home every few minutes. You’ll have to develop some personnel skills. You’ll have to learn how to pick the cream of the crop.”

Johnny sits up in his chair. He looks from Weltsch to Felix, wonders if this is some kind of confusing joke.

“On the road?” he finally says.

Hermann pushes up from his seat, walks to Yew’s back, puts both hands on the manager’s shoulder and says, “Tell him, Gustav.”

In a bland and quiet voice, Weltsch says, “The co-op has proved so successful that we’ve decided to back a franchise. Ultimately we’d like to go national if arrangements can be made with the Families. For now we will initiate a pilot program. Keep things in the northeastern China-towns. You move in for the entire length of the start-up and training programs. I estimate a three-month stay in each town.”

“You’ll need your own bankroll,” Hermann says from behind. “We’ve already begun to contact the appropriate people about lines of credit. But you’ll have to seek out the workforce and the merchants. I’d be happier if they didn’t speak English. At least at the beginning.”

Johnny Yew can’t believe his ears. He made the jump to Kinsky only six months ago and now he’s about to become a trusted lieutenant. He’s about to become wealthy. He’s about to become a man of influence and respect and importance in the scheme of this Family. Johnny Yew, who escaped Hong Kong and a street hustler’s short life by selling his sister to a freighter captain, who spent his first years in Quinsigamond washing dishes and gutting fish around the clock for any noodle house that would have him, who doesn’t even have his first gang tattoo yet, this Johnny Yew is about to become the chief sales rep for the Kinsky Family. He’d like to dive into the Benchley tonight, find what’s left of Yun-fat’s body, pull it to the surface just to spit in the skeleton’s face and say, Fuck you and your tribal preaching. I’m not your shop clerk anymore, asshole.

“All our projections say we can’t miss,” Hermann says. “The sexual appetite is something you can bank on. You’ll want to monitor which booths become our top grossers, see if this differs from city to city or if there’s a standard we can rely on.”

“We should be tracking the demographics from the start,” Weltsch adds.

“What’s to track?” Felix says, staring at Johnny. “Every hard-up chink in the country. There’s your customer base.”

“Felix!” Hermann barks and glares at the young man. “Forgive my nephew, Johnny. He has a weakness for crude humor that I can’t seem to curb. I don’t have to tell you that we harbor no exclusionary policies in this family. The coops will be open to all peoples.”

“Everyone’s money is green,” Johnny says.

Hermann nods. “You are a real find, Johnny Yew.”

He reaches into his pocket and slaps a wad of crisp new cash in front of Johnny.

“You go out and celebrate tonight, young man. You are on your way, as the saying goes.”

Hermann’s hand slides back into his suitcoat pocket.

“I know of the perfect club,” Hermann says. “You must take your young woman. Do you like music?”

Johnny just stares down at the money. The top bill features a picture of Grover Cleveland. Across the table, Felix stares up at the ceiling and laughs.

“Mr. Kinsky …” Johnny begins and immediately goes silent, unable to harness words powerful enough to express the enormity of his gratitude.

Herman pulls out a length of Schonborn wire, twines it in equal lengths around both of his meaty hands.

“Piano music, Johnny?” he asks. “Do your people like the piano music?”

“How can I thank—” Johnny starts, shaking his head at the immensity of his good fortune, beginning to turn around and smile on his benefactor.

It’s a single, fluid move, one honed into a reflex in the alleys off Kaprova back in Maisel. Nothing harsh or jerking, a simple arc over the Asian’s head and then the retraction backwards. The wire has already bitten its groove into Yew’s neck before Johnny realizes he’s choking.

“You steal from me,” Hermann explodes now. “You pathetic yellow cur.”

The piano wire passes in all the way to the trachea as Johnny’s eyes do the patented bulge and his hands flail upward furiously but ineffectually.

“You steal from Kinsky,” Hermann screams, his body an unmoving block of stone, the fat hands doing all the work, keeping the wire taut and ever-closing.

Blood is oozing down Johnny’s chest, soaking the tailored shirt under his jacket. The body begins to jerk in its seat as if the impetus toward death were electricity. Felix stares at the scene, tries not to blink, studies his uncle’s form, concentrates on the victim’s tortured upheaval.

Jakob stares out the door and across the hall where Veronica Lake is doing a combination magic act and song and dance routine.

But the sound track to Veronica’s performance is the horrible noise seeping from somewhere in Johnny Yew’s face, a muted scream grafted onto a nauseating gurgle, all accented by the furious scuffling of his loafers off the floor and the chair legs.

And then, finally, it is over.

Hermann unwraps the wire from his left hand, takes hold of Yew’s bristly buzz-cut and pulls Johnny’s head back, which opens the running gash fully from ear to ear. The smell of blood gulfs around the table and no one speaks.

Hermann leans forward until he’s inches above Johnny’s slack face. Then he spits into the left eye and Felix hears him mutter, “Never steal from Hermann Kinsky.”

Hermann turns and walks to the far side of the room until he’s standing before the stained-glass window, bathed in the transformed light of the moon. Weltsch and Felix nod to each other, get up simultaneously, take hold of the body, and begin to carry it from the room as if they were disapassionate medics who have seen too much of an endless war.

The silence in the chapel is awful.

Until Hermann turns away from the window and stares at the quivering back of his only son and whispers, “You see how easy it can be, Jakob?”

3

They get home, both a little drunk, Perry worse than Sylvia, though he drove. They try to be quiet helping each other up the back stairs to the apartment, hoping they don’t wake Mrs. Acker, the landlady, or trip over one of her cats. It’s not that Mrs. A would get angry. She’d just start in again, asking Perry about the legal ramifications of her refusal to return the grocery cart she appropriated from Blossfeldt Discount Mart. But they’ve got so many carts, she always ends up yelling with her hands at the sides of her head.

There are mornings Sylvia see Mrs. Acker from the living room window, coming back from the grocery store or Levi Park, and the landlady could be mistaken for some homeless streetperson. But Perry got talking to her one night and found Mrs. A has six figures planted in mutual funds that she tracks on a daily basis. She’s really a sweetheart and she’s been kind to them, but Sylvia doesn’t want to talk with Mrs. Acker right now because Perry’s hands are everywhere. The back stairway has always had this effect on him, even when he hasn’t had a drink. When they first moved into the apartment, they could barely get in the door with their clothes on.

Sylvia remembers the first month they lived together, coming in from the movies, groping each other with more force and speed at each landing, and finally making love with her back pressed up against the door to their third-floor apartment, the bedroom six yards away, one of the calicos mewing around Perry’s ankles.

Now he just grabs her behind and tickles her and slides his hands inside the waist of her jeans. It’s more playful than passionate and that’s okay. She jiggles the key inside the old lock and Perry leans against her, rests his head against her back.

“The Counselor’s a lightweight,” she says, opening the door.

“The Counselor is getting old,” he says, following her in and locking up behind them.

Sylvia turns on the kitchen light and shrugs out of her blazer. Perry pulls off his tie and unfastens the top button of his shirt, looks at the stack of catalogs on the counter and asks, “Anything come in the mail?”

“Junk,” she says, going to the refrigerator for some ice water. They’re both going to want aspirin before bed, so she pours a full glass. She closes the door and turns around, leans against it and looks at him as he browses the new offerings from the book club. His eyes look heavy.

“You done good, partner,” she says.

He looks up from the mail, still hunched over the counter, leaning on his elbows.

“Partner in the corporate sense or the romantic one?”

“Both,” she says, extending the water to him. Then she adds, “Which one buys me the camera?”

He laughs, thinks and says, “The lover buys you the camera.” He comes upright and puts his hands on the small of his back and arches backward. Sylvia actually hears a cracking sound.

“But the attorney pays for it,” he says.

* * *

In ten minutes, Perry falls into one of his heavy-breathing wine-comas. Sylvia knows that when she makes the bed in the morning he’ll have drooled on the pillowcase.

The wine seems to be having the opposite effect on her lately. They’ve started buying it by the caseload, direct delivery by an import company out of Boston. Perry’s delighted and kind of proud of the enormous discount they’re getting. But having that much wine in the house all the time encourages you to kill a bottle with every dinner. For a while there they were crazy for these heavy reds and then, somehow, Sylvia got the idea that red wine can lead to edginess and paranoia. She dipped into a couple of reference books to back herself up, but couldn’t find this theory confirmed in print. Once it was in her head, though, it was as good as true, so their next purchase was twelve bottles of a four-year-old French Chardonnay. She fell in love and Perry called the importer and loaded in three more cases.

They’ve made this small makeshift storage rack down in the cellar, around the corner from where Sylvia has set up the darkroom. With two of her favorite pastimes situated there, the basement has become a dank retreat for her. She’s drawn to it more and more often. She’s not content on the couch in the living room anymore, labeling Polaroids while Perry dozes on the couch with the television tuned to a sports network. She finds herself thinking Why am I listening to the sound of kickboxing from Reno, Nevada, when I could be playing with the enlarger, sipping a glass of ’88 white burgundy.

She doesn’t want to give the impression of dissatisfaction. Perry has pulled her life together for her. They’ve known each other almost three years now, lived together for over a year, and before Perry there was no direction. After her mother died, Sylvia quit her job at the front desk of the Baron. She’d had one night too many of taking smut from the mouths of fifty-year-old bellhops. She moved into her mother’s apartment, closed the drapes and became a kind of secular nun in the religion of grief and confusion.

Her father had died when her mother was seven months pregnant with Sylvia. Ma had never had a lot of money, but what she left behind was burned through by the end of that year. Because she couldn’t bring herself to move any belongings out of her old apartment, Sylvia paid rent and utilities on both places. From June through Christmas, she stayed on Ma’s couch, like she was in grammar school again and had come down with the flu and was watching old I Love Lucy reruns on the TV and Ma would be bringing in a tray of toast and tea before the next commercial.

She read a couple of the paperbacks she’d found jammed in the drum table by the front window, big fat novels that usually chronicled some family of immigrants who toughed it out through unbearable hardships to make good in America. But mostly she watched dozens of old forties movies on some all-night cable channel. After a while they all seemed to star Rita Hayworth.

While she was growing up, Sylvia and her mother shared a consuming passion for movies. It never felt as if her mother had actively instilled this love in any way. It was more like she’d passed on a rare gene, that Sylvia picked up the obsession in utero, came into the world already addicted to film. When she recalls the nights of her childhood, she thinks of sitting in her mother’s lap, in an overstuffed easy chair, both of them staring at the blue-white beam from the RCA watching Tales of Manhattan or You’ll Never Get Rich. As she entered adolescense, Sylvia’s devotion increased like a religious vocation or an eating disorder. And her mother encouraged the calling. They went to every new release that opened, then came home and pushed the TV into the bedroom and fell asleep watching the classics.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that when her mother died Sylvia’s life boiled down to watching old films and sleeping. She slept about fourteen hours a day. Always in her clothes. And always on the couch.

Twice a week, she’d force herself outside for food and supplies. She’d walk down to the corner at two in the morning and buy everything at the all-night convenience store. She didn’t care that she was paying double the price for things she could have gotten six hours later at the supermarket. She considered the cost part of the deal, the charge for the privilege of shopping while everyone else was alseep.

When Perry first heard the story of her life as a hermit, his immediate response was, “Didn’t anyone come looking for you? No friends? No relatives?”

He had a hard time believing that the answer was simply “No.” Sylvia knew nothing about her father’s family or even if there was one. Her mother had one older brother who’d died in the Korean War. Sylvia had gone to college out in the western part of the state and hadn’t kept in touch with any childhood friends she might have had.

She remembers Perry shaking his head as she told him this. His reaction got her slightly angry. She said, “These are the facts. I’m not making this up. People have lives like this.”

The day after Christmas, as she sat on the couch and opened the checkbook to pay some bills, she realized she had no money. She closed the checkbook and stood up, and pushed it in under one of the sofa cushions. Then she put on Ma’s winter coat and went outside and started to walk. She wasn’t used to the sun and with the glare off the snow, she was half-blind for the first block. The freezing air was kind of painful going into her lungs and yet she didn’t want to go back inside. She wanted just to keep moving, to keep her legs in motion. She didn’t care about direction or destination. She just wanted to be walking and breathing. She didn’t want to think beyond those two actions.

About three miles from Ma’s apartment was a small shopping plaza, an old fifties kind of thing, a strip of a dozen linked stores all housed in a large one-story rectangle of a structure with a flat roof and dingy metal canopy that hung out over the sidewalk. There was a five-and-ten and a drug store, a liquor store, a soft-serve ice cream shop, and a shoe repair place. More than half the shops were empty and the plate glass windows were whited out with what looked like soap. Sylvia stood and stared at the soaped windows and wondered why they did that. Didn’t that just call attention to the demise of the business and contribute to the seedy feeling of the place in general? It drove her kind of crazy that she couldn’t come up with a single decent reason for whitewashing the window of an empty storefront.

She crossed the street to the plaza and noticed, at one end of the parking lot, what looked like an enormous old camera. It took a second to realize it was a drive-through photo shop. The Snapshot Shack, one of those boxy huts where you pull up to a little window and drop your film for developing and the clerk always tries to push new film on you. In this particular store, the drive-up window looked like an enormous round lens, which was okay, even kind of cute. The problem was that they’d painted the place this awful shade of brown, like an old camera, but at this scale — five feet high and wide — the brown was drab and sort of depressing.

To this day, Sylvia has no idea why she walked over to the shack. But as she approached the window, she saw the hand-lettered cardboard sign taped to the glass that read

HELP WANTED

No Experience Necessary

and when the obese woman inside slid open the window and asked if she’d come about the job, Sylvia shook her head yes and took the clipboard and questionnaire.

Then the fat woman slid the window closed again and Sylvia stood out in the cold with this horribly dull pencil filling in her name and age and work experience and her breath kept forming a cloud in front of her eyes. She had to knock on the window when she was done and the woman acted annoyed as she took the clipboard back inside. The clerk was reading a supermarket tabloid and Sylvia had always remembered one headline: Screen Siren Denies Porno Past.

The fat lady started to read the application and stopped halfway through. She looked out at Sylvia like she’d been insulted and said, “This says you went to college,” all accusatory, like she was some suspicious prosecutor and had uncovered hidden evidence. Her tone was confusing and Sylvia just shrugged at her.

The lady moved up closer to the window until her head was framed between inside and outside. “It says you got a degree in fine arts.”

Sylvia nodded.

The lady turned her head from side to side like she was looking at these invisible assistants crammed somewhere inside the shack.

“What the hell do you want this job for?” she snapped.

Sylvia said the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be the truth: “I’m very interested in photography.”

About a month later, at the beginning of February, Sylvia was getting ready to shut the Shack down because of an approaching blizzard. Perry pulled up in the Buick just as she was hanging the Closed sign. He dropped off a roll of 24-exposure Kodak 200 Gold and they got talking. He was just finishing at the public defender’s office at the time, just making the move to Walpole & Lewis. He sat with the car idling for fifteen or twenty minutes as the snowfall started to pick up. Before he drove off, Sylvia agreed to meet him the next night for spaghetti at Fiorello’s down on San Remo Ave.

That’s when everything changed. That’s when Sylvia reentered the world and real life regained its status as slightly more relevant than Rita Hayworth dancing her heart out through the musical number “You Excite Me.”

As she gets undressed, Sylvia stares at Perry, all hunched up in the bed. And she tries to imagine what her life would be like right now if he hadn’t driven up to the Snapshot Shack that day.

4

Sylvia wants to be clear about her feelings for the Canal Zone. She’s not an insider. She’s never lived there. She knows that half those people would just as soon spit on her as give her the time of day. She’s fairly sure that most of the poetry readings are really just clashes in the latest fashion war, that the bulk of talent that hangs out on Rimbaud is in the areas of posturing and attitude. And she can’t say Perry is totally wrong when he points out that the lines between the Zone and Bangkok Park are blurring more each year.

She’s never pretended to be some cutting-edge bohemian. It’s not like she wants to carve some place for herself down in the clubs, to integrate herself with the Black Hole group or Mona Jackson’s clique. It’s just not like that. She’s older than most of these people. She never got kicked out of any of the great schools. She’s never dyed her hair to some attention-grabbing shade. She’s not great with obscenity. She doesn’t even own a whole lot of leather.

It’s just that, compared with the rest of the city, in the Zone it’s all right to want to spend your days scouting images, looking for that one sweet shot. In the Zone, her job at the Snapshot Shack is like a hip career and, given the choice, she’d rather someone view her eight hours inside an enormous camera as some kind of oblique statement rather than a sign of laziness or retarded ambition.

And maybe she is too concerned with what other people think of her, but if they’re going to start dwelling on her faults, this would be pretty low on her list. The thing is, the Canal Zone can also be a lot of fun. It’s never stagnant. People are outside all the time, middle of the night, middle of the winter, they’re standing in small packs, imported cigarette smoke engulfing their heads, their eyes jumpy from lack of sleep. She can usually find a way to ignore the trendiness and the retro-snobbery. She tried to tell Perry that she gets what she wants out of the Zone. Dozens of weird little one-room ethnic restaurants open and close every month. Every corner has some old bibliophile holdout ranting against the big chain stores and offering you some coverless Verlaine paperback for a dime, a buck for volume J of the eleventh-edition Britannica. There’s some kind of bizarre parade every other day and it’s always a challenge to decipher the theme. The handbills posted on the telephone poles and stop signs are invariably mondo tracts, little Cliff’s Notes to the Kabbala, even when they’re just advertising a new band or a common boycott or a special at the Afghani deli. It’s like a funny, ongoing flea market, she tells Perry. It’s like a little front against boredom. What’s so bad about that?

Jack Derry’s Camera Exchange is supposed to be down on Waldstein. That’s near the border of Bangkok Park and if Perry knew she was that close to the war zone, he’d have a fit. The city has pretty much given up on the Park. Everyone accepts now that you’ll never really know what goes on in Bangkok. The Spy has begun to act like the place just didn’t exist, as if they’d already filled some quota for murder and drug and gang stories, as if the nightly body count in the Park no longer qualified as news.

Sylvia had one experience, a long time ago, in Bangkok Park. It’s the kind of story that will always lose something in the telling because it had more to do with her interior reaction than with the landscape. For that reason, she’s never told Perry about that day. It’s like trying to put words to someone’s first look at one of Kettelhut’s Cambodian photographs. No matter how perfect the phraseology, it’s destined to fall short of what really took place in the viewer’s heart and brain. She doesn’t mean to be melodramatic, but she was only nine years old at the time and things can hit you as a child, things can take hold of you.

She can’t remember what year it was, but there was a gasoline shortage, a crisis — that was the word they used — and her mother was driving a Ford station wagon that was on its last legs. It was the beginning of summer and Ma had lost her job. The wagon’s transmission was going and they didn’t have the money to get it fixed and they didn’t have the money to buy a new car and every time Ma got in behind the wheel and turned the key it was like the woman willed the Ford to work. Like strength was coming out of her body and passing into the engine of this dying car.

So it was nighttime and they were coming back from a drive they’d taken to see about a job at a resort in New Hampshire. Only the job had turned out to be a chambermaid position at a back-road motor court and the manager had been this greasy little pig of a guy and they wasted the whole day and all this gas. And by the time they got back to the city, Sylvia could just tell her mother was really beat and down. Ma didn’t want to talk or sing or play and Sylvia climbed into the rear of the wagon and was lying on her stomach looking at the highway slide a1way behind them when the wagon started to make this god-awful noise, this horrible grinding metal noise. And she heard Ma say no, not yelling but in a voice that said she was on the threshold of crying. Then Ma pounded the dashboard. Sylvia had never seen her mother hit anything in her life and no one said a word as Ma steered the car down the first expressway exit they came to.

Only it turned out to be the exit into Bangkok Park. And the next thing either one of them knows, they’re barely rolling their Country Squire station wagon down the east end of Goulden Avenue. And the noise they’re making is calling attention to them. Every hooker and pimp and dealer is squinting to see what kind of monster has invaded their sleazy quiet. And Sylvia just lay there in the back of the wagon, staring out at all the neon and all these strange faces, these exaggerated circus faces.

And at some point, Ma turned a corner. And the car seized up for a minute. Or maybe it was just Sylvia’s imagination. But in that instant, she looked out at this woman, this prostitute, this girl who was probably younger than Sylvia is now. And they stared at each other. They each took it all in under the spot from the corner street lamp. The hooker had red permed hair. And this strange peach-colored knit dress. And a purple ring around her left eye. A big, ugly, black-and-blue welt orbiting the whole of her eye and seeming to make the eyeball itself bulge slightly.

Then Sylvia and the hooker were separated. And Ma forced the Ford out of Bangkok and into what’s now called the Canal Zone. The wagon died maybe four blocks from Sylvia’s vision. They left it there, unlocked, and took one of the last buses home. And Mother wept on the bus. She never made a sound and Sylvia saw her trying to bite on her lips to stop, but the tears slid down her face anyway. She never wiped them away and her daughter didn’t move to touch her.

When they got home, neither of them turned on a light. Sylvia got undressed and climbed into bed and Ma walked over to her and just touched her forehead and said I promise it will be all right. Sylvia didn’t know what the woman was talking about and was close to terrified, probably because it was the first time she’d seen Ma lose her grip. It was also the last time. Years later, Sylvia remembered thinking about that night and realized they must have been in real trouble moneywise. But right now, she doesn’t think money had much to do with her mother’s promise.

About a week later Ma found a job in a bakery. Sylvia doesn’t know what happened to the Country Squire. But the vision of that prostitute — the red hair and the purple eye and an instantaneous look that said she lived someplace past desperation — it held onto Sylvia like a religious apparition. She can see the hooker now. She can call her up. The hooker is a personal icon. A definition of knowledge that Sylvia doesn’t want to have. The sight of her face was like a hammer to the head. A terrible epiphany that said there are worlds you can’t even imagine yet and things can always get worse.

Sylvia has driven through Bangkok a couple times in the past few years. Always during the day and never stopping. It’s still an unsettling experience. It should be a photographer’s paradise. There was a rumor in the Zone about some midwesterner just out of design school who got a grant to go in there with his Minolta. Something about doing a big coffee table book on graffiti. The rumor said, of course, the guy never came out, that a week after he disappeared a roll of film got mailed to the Spy. And when they processed it they had thirty-six shots of a torture ballet: The photographer stripped naked. The photographer hanging a foot off the ground, handcuffed to water pipes in an empty factory loft. The photographer toasted like a marshmallow, jet-flamed with a welder’s acetylene torch.

Sylvia pulls her notepad from her jacket pocket and checks the address. She moves down the street trying to position herself but none of the storefronts show numbers. She walks past two hookers in front of Poligny Discount Liquors and one of them quotes her a price in this throaty singsong whisper. She moves by Jeannie B’s Imposter Club, Buquet’s Grille, and Krause & Company, all of them seeming to be in a kind of middle state between operational and out-of-business. The storefronts all date from around the 1930s and their names are uniformly announced above display windows in half-lit, cursive neon, mainly green and rosy-pink. A hand-lettered sign in Buquet’s reads Back at 2:30. Whatever products Krause & Company traffic in will be a mystery forever — the front window is empty and covered with two ragged pieces of white, bandage-like tape formed into an X as if the proprietors secured the store for a hurricane and then left forever.

She turns a corner and is shaken to see the huge and frozen face of Jenny Ellis, the missing girl, staring down at her from a billboard atop some generic mill. It’s a close-up, Jenny’s grinning, unaware face caught in surprise, the eyes wide and blue, the thin blonde hair parted in the middle and hanging down close to the shoulders. The billboard reads

Have You Seen This Child?

Jenny Ellis was last seen on October 1

leaving the schoolyard of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc Elementary School

She was wearing a green plaid jumper with white blouse

She is 10 years old, 4 ft. 6 in. tall, 65 lbs.

blonde hair, blue eyes, slight overbite

If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of

Jenny Ellis please

call 1-800-FIND-JEN

Reward Offered

Sylvia would like to avoid looking at it, but her eyes are inevitably drawn upward each time she passes one of these signs and she can’t help staring into this little girl’s face, backed by the hyper-clear autumn sky, the child’s eyes looking down on the city, displaying the innocence of her years.

So far, at least according to the local press, there isn’t a single indication of what happened to Jenny Ellis. It’s as if she walked a block away from her grade school and then was assumed bodily into the clouds.

Sylvia breaks eye contact, moves on, speeding up her pace, and at the end of the block, sharing a dividing wall with Brody’s Adult Books, she finds Jack Derry’s. In the window are cardboard displays for cameras that Kodak stopped making when she was a kid. The people in the ads are dressed in wildly outdated swimsuits and there’s a caption that reads Save that vacation forever! The door of the place is covered with metal bars, but a plastic Open sign is hanging from the doorknob.

She steps inside and her first impression is that Perry was right. She’s made a mistake coming down here. The place is a disaster. The walls are fitted with a cheesy old rumpus-room kind of paneling, only it hasn’t been cut right and different sections fail to cover the gouged plaster walls underneath. The floor is covered with a scarlet shag carpet that looks like it’s never been vacuumed. Heads of stubbed-out cigarettes and faded candy wrappers are everywhere. There’s a drop ceiling that’s missing half a dozen tiles and the ones that remain are either mismatched or display huge brown water stains. The plywood counter looks like it could tumble with a touch and behind it there’s a wall of metal shelving loaded to bursting with a ridiculous assortment of camera equipment. Nothing is even close to being organized. Boxes of film are everywhere. Camera parts and lenses, straps and cases are piled on the shelves and on the floor behind the counter. And there’s a blanket of heavy dust coating it all. The place has a stale, smoky odor. The lighting is yellow and dim.

“We’re closed,” comes a yell from a back room.

“The door was open,” Sylvia calls back.

There’s no response and she starts to think about leaving when the burlap curtain covering the back doorway is pulled open and a tall, emaciated man steps forward with his huge hands covering his eyes, his fingers and thumbs massaging the sides of his temple.

Finally, he removes his hand and stares at her, takes a labored breath and says, “Forgot to lock the door,” nodding his head too fast.

It’s hard to hang an age on him. He looks haggard, but somehow still kind of soft. His skin seems doughy and too white. He’s bald but for a crown of still-red hair that’s cut close to his scalp. He’s over six feet, but he’s got rounded, bony shoulders. He’s wearing a summer jersey covered by an argyle wool sweater-vest, both tucked inside the waist of army green fatigue pants. Sylvia can’t stop herself from leaning forward a little and she sees he’s got on leather sandals and black stretch socks.

She wants to run. She wants to go home and wait for Perry and say, “You were right. We’ll go with the jewelry.”

The guy behind the counter looks her up and down and then plunges both his thumbs inside his waistband like some demented geek of a cowboy. He says, “We’re not interested in any damaged equipment. And we pay in merchandise credit. No cash.”

“But—” she begins, and he cuts her off with an annoyed shake of his head.

“Look, we won’t have an argument here. No exceptions. Store credit. No cash. That’s all I can do.”

Now she’s more annoyed than unnerved and she squints up at him and gives a mildly disgusted exhale. When he shuts up she says, “I’m not selling anything. I’m here to buy.”

His tones changes immediately. He brings a palm up to his mouth, goes from gunslinger dork to embarrassed schoolmarm.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. It’s just, we get so many desperation sales. You know. They just dump the camera on the counter and plead with you. ‘Whatever it’s worth,’ you know. ‘Name the price.’”

“Like I said. I’m here to buy.”

“Of course. Whatever you’d like.” He kind of steps sideways and his arm swings out from his body in a clumsy attempt to present the mishmash behind him.

“We’re not really set up for browsing,” he says. “Is there something specific you had in mind?”

She stares at him for a few seconds to show she’s not going to be placated so easily. Then she pulls out her notepad and reads, “One nineteen seventy Aquinas 50 °C/M medium format SLR. Fine condition. With original carrying case, instruction booklet, and Polaroid magazine attachment.”

She looks up from the notepad and stares at him.

He waits a second as if he thinks she’s going to continue and when she doesn’t his head bobs down and his eyes bug out and he says, as if mildly shocked, “Oh, the Aquinas.”

“Yeah,” Sylvia says, “the Aquinas. There was an ad on the bulletin board at the Rib Room. Is it still available?”

He seems to get nervous and looks past her at the door. She turns around and looks, but the door is still shut. No one’s come in. She looks back at him and gives a shrug and says, “Did someone buy it already? Am I too late?”

The hand comes up to the mouth again and this time the eyes close for a good ten seconds. When they open, he shakes his head no, but appears a little off-balance. He holds up his index finger to indicate she should wait a minute, turns on his heel and disappears through the curtain into the back storeroom. She hears noises, sounds like cardboard boxes being shuffled around. Then there’s the sound of glass breaking, followed by the clerk giving out a high-pitched, “Shit.”

Finally he comes back to the counter holding a boxy beige leather case against his chest, kind of cradling it like an oversized kitten. He puts it down on the counter gingerly, wipes dust off the top of the case with a studied sweep of his hand. Then he takes a step backward, puts a fist on his waist and starts to massage the back of his neck with his other hand.

She stares at him. She wants to get across that she’s not crazy about his act. That his weirdness is not endearing here. It’s not good for business.

“This is it?” she says.

“That’s it,” he says. “Go ahead, take a look.” But he doesn’t sound like he means it.

Sylvia steps up to the counter, takes the case in her hands, looks it over. She presses in the silver metal clips on the sides and opens the top of the case back on its hinges. Instinctively, she puts her face close down and takes a deep sniff, takes in the aroma of old, long-stored leather, a fragrance she always names age. And she’s surprised and suddenly thrilled by the wonderful, slightly sour, acidy bouquet of old film or wax, a closed-up smell, something you’d expect to come from a wooden cabinet in the dining room of an ancient and forgotten Victorian. She brings her head up and looks to see the clerk staring at her as if he were being forced to watch an autopsy, something terribly unsettling, some sight the squeamish should avoid.

She ignores him and takes out the main body of the camera. It weighs a ton. It has that solid, fixable quality of density, something that will never blow away. It’s beautiful.

Sorry Perry, Sylvia thinks, I’m in love.

She’s only held an Aquinas in her hands once before. Perry and she were spending a long weekend driving around the Berkshires. It was a sleepy Saturday afternoon near the end of fall. It was cold and they were walking the main street of a storybook town, this too-immaculate postcard street, where all the storefronts are weathered shingle cottages that house antique shops and gift boutiques that sell gorgeous quilts and handmade sweaters that cost a week’s pay. Perry went to browse in the window of a real estate office and Sylvia wandered into a homey little camera shop and got to talking with this old bearded man in a navy cardigan. He had one Aquinas in his display case and he was just thrilled for the chance to take it out and put it in her palm and give her the spiel, the showcase pitch that might nail down a single ten grand sale. Perry came into the store halfway through the lens-grinding section, just after the mini-lecture on the life of Pasqual Aquinas.

Perry head-motioned her outside and she had to hand back the camera and interrupt the sermon. That was over a year ago and she still feels guilty about leaving the way she did.

The pitch whet her appetite, though, and she started to do a little reading up on the Aquinas, started to tell herself that if she ever hit the lottery she knew what her first purchase would be. The camera is a five-inch-square black box trimmed in silver with a fat two inches of lens protruding off the front and a winding crank jutting out of its right-hand side. Placed on its film-magazine back, with the lens pointing upward, it resembles a kind of sleek and threatening jack-in-the-box.

She pops open the viewing hood, stabilizes the camera body against her chest and brings her head to hover above the hood. She looks through and focuses on the clerk. The light in the store is lousy but as she brings his image into clarity it’s clear he’s still hesitant, kind of upset. He’s staring at her, staring into the lens. And he looks like he’s watching a car accident beginning to happen.

Sylvia looks up from the hood and raises her eyebrows, hoping maybe the guy will feel self-conscious and give her some explanation for his wariness. But he just says, “Have you ever owned an Aquinas before?”

She shakes her head no instead of answering. She wants to keep the pressure on. She wants to find out what the problem is here.

He’s really squirming now. He looks down at his sandals and mumbles, “You don’t often find them used. I mean, you know, secondhand. They don’t come on the market too often.”

“I know,” Sylvia says. “The ad really surprised me. You must hate to part with it.”

He bites in on his bottom lip. “Oh, no,” he says, as if she’s confused him. “No, it’s not like that. It’s not my camera. It’s not a shop camera. I’m selling this for someone else. It’s a consignment sale. A commission … I mean, this is a …” then he just drifts off with a sigh and a shake of the head.

“Person must really need the cash,” Sylvia says, trying to sound sympathetic.

“Well, no,” he says, blurting it out, like he can’t decide whether to explain or not. “That’s the thing. That’s the tragedy, really. It’s just awful.”

“It’s awful,” she repeats, trying to keep him going.

“It’s just one of those horrible ironies. You know, like that pitcher, that baseball pitcher who lost the arm to cancer. You know, that arm. The pitching arm.”

“Horrible,” she says, frowning, shaking her head along with him.

“It’s one of those stories you hear and you just think, you think to yourself, you know, nature can just be absolutely cruel. Deliberately cruel.”

She doesn’t know what to do but nod.

“I don’t know him well,” he says and gestures to the camera.

“Something happened to the owner?” she says, looking at the camera, not making eye contact.

“He had a fairly well-established little business. Did the weddings. Graduation shots. And he freelanced on and off. Talented eyes. Until they went …”

There’s a long, dry pause while both of them take a breath and in that moment the shop seems to darken a little, as if the bulbs in the hanging light fixture were losing power gradually. Finally, Sylvia puts her hand on top of the camera and say, “What was his name?”

The man pulls his head into his neck; a six foot, badly dressed turtle. She’s confused him.

“The man who owned this camera,” Sylvia says. “Would I know his name?”

“I doubt that,” he says and then his tongue darts out of his mouth and moistens his lips.

“Well, what was it?” she says, trying not to sound too persistent.

He gives up a practiced smile. “I really can’t give out that information.”

Sylvia thinks about this. “Well, can you tell me, you know, I’m just kind of curious here, what was the story with his eyes? What exactly went wrong with the eyes?”

“That,” he says, “I wouldn’t know.”

“Did he go blind?” she asks. “Did he lose the sight altogether?”

“I just don’t have the details,” he says.

“But if this guy’s been around for twenty-five years—”

But he cuts her off and says, “You know, I really have to start locking this place up.”

“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Our fall hours.”

“Fall hours?” she repeats.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “Do you have a driver’s license on you? Some identification?”

She nods.

“All right, I’ll tell you what. Let me just copy down your name and address and you can take the camera home and try it out. See how you like it.”

She puts her hands in her jacket pockets. “You’re going to let me take this camera home? An Aquinas?”

He nods and smiles. “With this big a purchase,” he says, “you should know what you’re getting into.”

Sylvia shakes her head, digs out her license. “When do you need to know if I’m buying?”

“You try it out,” he says, taking the license and looking around for a piece of scrap paper. “Shoot a roll. See how it feels. If you still want it in a week or so, we can do all the paperwork then.”

“Don’t you want a deposit, at least?” she asks.

“I know where you live,” he says, crouches down to the floor and starts rooting through a pile of used cardboard boxes. “And you don’t look like the transient type.”

He finds a box he likes, brings it up on the counter, packs the Aquinas and the accessories into the leather case, then loads the case into the carton.

He lifts the carton over the counter and places it in her arms.

“This is really trusting of you,” Sylvia says.

He comes around the corner and takes her arm, starts to lead her to the door.

“Store policy,” he says. “That’s how we’ve stayed in business for so long.”

He pulls open the door, pokes his head out a bit and looks into the street.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” she says. “I’ll be trying it out tomorrow at the latest.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her, just keeps nodding, his eyes darting from Sylvia’s face out to the sidewalk.

“I’m sure you’ll find it does everything you’ve heard,” he says.

She steps outside and says, “Thanks for your help.”

But he’s already bolted the door. She’s not sure what the hell has just happened. But suddenly it occurs to her that she’s standing on the edge of Bangkok Park with a fifteen-hundred-dollar camera in her arms. She starts to hurry down Waldstein. At the corner, as she begins to cross Goulden, she looks back to Jack Derry’s in time to see the lights go out.

5

The Cadillac is a 1966 Fleetwood Seventy-five sedan, a huge, black, box of a car with seating for nine and a V-8 under the hood that on a good day could launch you to Mars. This particular model has a few customized features installed by a manic-depressive mechanic named Jimmy Clifton. There’s a thirty-gallon gas tank, bulletproof glass and four Sturmgewehr MP44 submachine guns mounted in the trunk. The Caddy is registered to Castle K Enterprises, a privately held corporation whose entire board of directors is currently seated inside the vehicle. So, pragmatic as always, Gustav Weltsch, the treasurer and comptroller of Castle K, decides to use the drive time for their annual meeting.

Felix, though secretary of the company, resents his chronic dual status as wheelman. He loves the car, but he’d rather be enjoying it from the backseat, like his cousin Jakob, an individual upon whom status and comfort are utterly wasted. Felix glances in the rearview, tilts the mirror until he can see Jakob, the eternal putz, a schlemiel who never grew out of his schoolboy imaginings, who thinks all of life is story-time. Jakob doesn’t even hear Weltsch droning on about the size of the loss Castle K will have to eat due to that firebombing over on Diskant Way. Look at the little weasel, turned sideways in the seat, away from the old man, his back to the old man for Christ sake, staring out the window at the lights of the Canal Zone, every now and then bringing his hands up near his face, thumbs out at right angles pointing to each other, fingers pressed together and straight up in the air. What is that crap? Poor Uncle Hermann, Felix thinks, it must be so humiliating.

Jakob is scouting locations, looking into the mouth of every alley they roll past and making judgments about the light and the shadows. When the Caddy drives by a pack of teen hookers on the corner of Edeson, he tries to capture each face, see if there might be some raw talent he could build on, a pair of eyes that would be loved by the camera, a pair of legs that would look captivating in flight, some composite quality that could be made to look six or eight years younger.

There are times when he’s made uncomfortable by this chronic reflexive impulse, this need to objectify, to mutate real life, as it’s happening around him, into manipulated images on a finite screen. It’s anti-life, he admits, in his most honest moments, it’s cannibalism. But it’s also a compulsion. So he lets himself wonder what the small-boned redhead might look like in black and white.

He thinks suddenly about the article in this morning’s paper, the update on the search for the missing child, Jenny Ellis. He remembers something Felice Fabri once said to him back in Maisel, as they exited the Kierling Theatre: Nothing is safe in this life, Jako, and sometimes people disappear.

And now he’s lost his appetite for scouting locations and actresses. And Gustav Weltsch’s babble is giving him another headache. So he closes his eyes and thinks back to the old country and his days with Felice.

The Kierling was on Havetta Boulevard in Old Loew Square, just three blocks away from Papa’s haberdashery. It was an old building, originally used for live performances, particularly those of the touring Yiddish troupes that passed through Maisel seasonally. It was purchased the year before Jakob’s birth by an insomnia-plagued Zionist named Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill who converted it to the city’s first all-night cinema. And though the Kierling was forever in a state of evolving disrepair, its original, homey beauty managed to shine through its ramshackle facade. It could only seat a little over two hundred people and its offerings usually consisted of scratchy prints of decades-old, B-budget, American crime dramas. But there were always homemade dumplings and cinnamon kava for sale in the lobby and if a splice broke before the movie ended, Yitzhak gave a full refund and a promise of a double feature the next week. This invoked a loyal camaraderie among the regulars, among whom no one was a more faithful visitor to the Kierling than Felice Fabri.

Felice began taking Jakob to the movies when he turned six. She’d rush through the cleaning and the laundry, then run the length of Jesenska Way with the boy in tow, just in time for the afternoon matinee. Cousin Felix balked at the Kierling from the start and Felice began to leave him with the neighborhood women so that she and Jajob didn’t miss a screening of The Reckless Moment or A Double Life. Then after the show, as the credits rolled, she’d reverse her sprint, falling into the kitchen in time to make supper for Hermann. At the evening meal she’d always cringe with the fear that Papa Kinsky had discovered how she and the boy were spending their days. But the patriarch simply grunted for more boiled ham and stewed fruit, his mind a thousand miles away from the comings and goings of the servant girl.

Years passed in this manner and the Kierling Theatre became Jakob’s sole reference point, his school and his playground. And something more. As Felice often whispered to him during the coming attractions, Remember, little Jako, this is our church.

If the Kierling was a holy building, Jakob wondered if this meant the people he watched on the screen — bodies blown up beyond life-size, faces spread out as big as the houses on Diamant Road — were prophets. Or maybe angels. Non-human beings full of arcane wisdom whose job was to lead him toward salvation. Their strange names seemed like something out of a foreign and sacred book— Alan Ladd, Gloria Grahame, Dan Duryea, Coleen Gray, Neville Brand, Audrey Totter, Farley Granger, Valentina Cortesa, Ray Teal. His young brain tried to memorize the lessons of their black-and-white movements, draw conclusions from the turmoil of their tormented, shadowy lives. In the end, all his trips to the Kierling became stations in one long pilgrimage. And if a decade of chewing prune jelly drops for lunch didn’t help his general health and constitution, by the time he entered adolescence, Jakob Kinsky had an aesthetic sense that went beyond convictions about art and beauty. He had an elaborate cosmology regarding how the universe is put together. And how it comes apart.

Which was shaken to the point of rupture during one cold autumn weekend. Jakob had just turned fifteen years old. And while cousin Felix was already starting to extort from his first merchants and assemble a loose gang of boythieves to do his bidding, Jakob was still worshipping at the patched white altar of the Kierling, taking his first steps into the priesthood of the film-religion by buying a small notebook that he could hide under his mattress and fill with his virginal attempts at a screenplay.

Felice at this time was more edgy and distracted than ever. Jakob couldn’t understand her skittishness. It couldn’t be the increase in the street beatings, as those were directed mainly at the Hasidim. And they’d stopped worrying about Papa’s wrath years ago when they both came to realize that nothing happened in Old Loew Square without Hermann Kinsky’s knowledge and consent and as long as supper was ready when he came through the door each night, they could spend their days in Moravia for all he cared.

Then came the moment that Jakob now thinks of as the fall from grace. He had stayed up late into the night, scribbling in his notebook, writing down dreamlike images of a doomed man in a crumbling city. He fell into nightmare still gripping his pencil and woke in the morning to find the apartment empty, Papa and Felix already out on the prowl for fresh veins of blood and money. When he failed to smell coffee or the harsh smoke of her cigarettes, Jakob knew Felice had not arrived. He found a note slipped under the door—

Kiss Me Deadly

this afternoon at the Kierling.

Meet me in Dvetsil Park.

Felice was waiting for him on one of the benches by the Pietà where the university students came to neck. She’d already purchased their two tickets. As they made their way to their favorite seats in the rear of the Kierling, Jakob saw Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill wink at the governess in a manner that brought on chills.

An hour into the film, as Jakob stared up, fascinated by the strangeness of this story, as he tried to pull apart how the look of the picture was achieved, he heard Felice shift in her seat. A moment later, he felt her hand in his lap. Confused, he offered her his popcorn. She took the box of buttered kernels and put it on the floor, then slid her arm around his shoulder, pulled his body toward her and began to kiss and suck at his neck.

Jakob’s first instinct was to flee the Kierling, but he stopped himself and as a warmth spread through his legs and stomach, he gave in to a flood of jumbled but intense sensation, pulses shooting through his system that lacked any precedent. Without being fully aware of his actions, he pulled Felice Fabri — his lifelong nanny, a woman twice his age, his mentor, his counselor, his only benign, working definition of human into his lap and he began to kiss and fondle and grope her with no regard to the pockets of watchers lodged just a few rows away.

It was the first time in a decade he missed the end of a Kierling feature.

“We’re almost there,” Hermann Kinsky interrupts. “Jump ahead to new business, Gustav.”

Gustav Weltsch hates altering the orderly flow of his thoughts. He finds it a waste. Hermann lets the numbers and projections bounce off him. Kinsky decides on a new venture based entirely on the sensation in his stomach. And it makes Gustav feel as if he’s present at these summits merely as decoration, an icon, the brainy, bean-counting analyst that a man of Hermann Kinsky’s growing reputation should have at his side. If only Hermann would listen once in a while. They could have goosed their gross take twenty percent over the past eighteen months. Gustav has tried to tell the man that the future lies in soybean-based fast foods and genetic manipulation. Weltsch has the statistical models and theorems to back it up. It’s plain as day. But Kinsky is lodged in dying notions of real estate and banking and the vice markets. The world is ready to leave Hermann behind. He bases his moves on superstition, revenge, and instinct. And the fact is that Hermann’s intuition fails him on occasion. Those film booths he picked up from Yunfat are bleeding him day and night. They don’t even generate enough dollar volume to serve as minor laundries for semi-sour cash. You can’t even dismiss them as trophy boutiques, like the nightclub or the gambling lodge or Der Geheime Garten. There’s no sex or flash to these Snapshot Shacks. It’s like owning a garbage dump. Vulgar. Common. Better to drop the match tonight than waste another month on these embarrassments.

Gustav knows, though his boss will never admit it, that Kinsky held onto the Shacks for Jakob, thinking something vague like: They’re shaped like cameras, the boy likes the cameras, the boy will like this business. No spreadsheet in the world can argue with motivations like that. It’s the apples and the oranges. So, once again, Gustav nods and moves on to hew business.”

“We will be meeting with the proprietor himself, a Mr. Hugo Schick. Research says he’s a grand egotist, Hermann. If you find yourself wanting the deal, you may have to tolerate a good amount of preening.”

“I’ve dealt with narcissists before,” Hermann laughs and Weltsch thinks, every morning, my friend, in the shaving mirror.

“Schick is a nationalized citizen out of Austria. There was a good deal of family money in the early part of the century, but it’s been bled away over generations. They seemed to have a knack for backing the losers in all the major conflicts.”

“Nazi bastard,” Felix pipes in, imitating a favorite, tough-guy comedian.

“Jump ahead,” Hermann snaps. “How is the operation structured?”

Felix swings the Caddy onto Brodine and just misses a collision with an oncoming Harley. No one comments. He rights the car and Gustav continues.

“Schick arrived here in Quinsigamond almost twenty years ago,” Weltsch says. “He had a good deal of money with him, though no one knows where it came from. Essentially, he’s an enormously talented con man. When he took title to the Herzog Theatre it was in total disrepair, on the verge of being condemned by the city. We know he’s burned through a half-dozen investors in his attempt at restoration. Some old Windsor Hills money. Some shadow banks with cash to hide.”

“He makes the movies himself?” Hermann asks.

“He has what he calls a family of players, a cast and crew that he uses from film to film. He has two studios above the theatre itself. He makes and edits the films, then tries to run his own distribution. A suicidal plan, but he insists. What is the saying, too many irons in the fire? That will be one of the first things we will want to change, Hermann.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Gustav. How do you see the specifics of the deal?”

“Schick is starving for revenue. Some of my sources say he could be on the street in a matter of months. He’s had to halt the finishing touches on the theatre. He’s attempting to wrap up what he thinks of as his masterpiece. A film he’s been trying to make for the past seven years. This is a crucial moment for him.”

“Every moment is crucial, Gustav.”

“If you choose to go forward, we advance the money immediately. Reasonable terms. We let things appear to be within the parameters of normalcy. We suggest the building and the stock as collateral. If my data remains relevant, he should begin to default in eight weeks. You would own the property and the businesses by the first of the year.”

Hermann reaches over the seat, squeezes Weltsch’s shoulder. “Fine work, my friend. You pick the restaurant tonight.”

Behind the wheel, Felix rolls his eyes, knowing they’ll be dining on roast tongue in juniper sauce at Boz Lustig’s ratty Jidelna.

“Here’s what I wish to do,” Kinsky says. “We listen to the man. Let him present his case. Whether I’ve decided yes or no, I will play undecided. No commitment one way or another. We say we call tomorrow. We will call the day after tomorrow. Gustav, you are the voice of reason. You are anxious to leave this sinful place,” Hermann pauses to chuckle at himself, “Felix, you are the threat. You are interested, but only on your terms. You leer. You come to the edge of insulting, yes? If there is a woman present, you give her a bit of uncalled-for attention.”

Felix smiles, pleased with his lot, wholly confident of his ability to deliver.

“And son,” turning finally to Jakob, “if things progress as I suspect they will, you are to be our inside man. This is a fine opportunity for you, Jakob. This is the one we have been waiting for, no,” squeezing the boy’s thin arm through his top coat. “This is perfect for us. Perfect for you, Jakob. You know this business from birth. Your mother would be so happy tonight.”

Jakob stares straight ahead into the rear of Felix’s neck and makes himself nod as the car pulls to a stop in front of Herzog’s Erotic Palace. All noise ceases and everyone stares out and up at the building. It’s as if, in driving a few miles west from their home, they’ve been transported to some kind of haunting and ethereal landscape where the senses are made doubtful by ridiculous amounts of colored light, strange angles, a hint of engulfing fog.

“I’ve seen it,” Hermann whispers, “during the day, but it never looked this, this—”

“Beautiful,” Jakob finishes for him.

The doors of the Caddy are pulled open by steroid-enhanced men all dressed in identical uniforms — black spandex jackets with a breast-pocket logo that tries to replicate the splendor of the theatre in a line drawing.

The foursome reassembles on the sidewalk, Felix forgetting to tip the valet, who drives away too fast in the Fleetwood. But nobody notices. They all have their heads tilted back, their eyes furiously trying to take in the architectural dream rising up before them. Suddenly, their stark bachelor quarters back on Belvedere seems unsuitable and, in Hermann’s case, degrading. He leans to the side and begins to whisper into Weltsch’s ear.

Jakob doesn’t notice the transaction. He’s too busy playing Moses, looking out on the expanse of an ever prophesied Promised Land and hearing a voice in his head, the voice of the woman who sometimes comes in his dreams. Maybe Felice Fabri. Maybe his long-dead mother. It’s a voice of revelation, a voice of piercing truth and instant epiphany. It’s a sound that’s coasting through his nervous system at a greater and greater speed, making his body vibrate, making his heart take on a rhythm it’s never known before. It’s a noise that says, This is it, Jakob. The time has come.

Herzog’s Erotic Palace is a textbook example of form following function, if the text’s author was a visionary egomaniac living on hallucinogens and gothic novels. It’s theatrical to the point of self-parody, but it never quite crosses that line. It’s too impressive, and in some ways foreboding, to mock its own harsh angles. The theatre is five stories high, divided into three platform levels, an eccentric, dramatic mix of French château and Bohemian Sondergotik styles which somehow yields a baroque and, at the same time, fortress-like aura to the structure. The granite walls are covered with intricate etchings that depict the likeness of forgotten actors all the way up to the slightly smaller second level that features a series of vaulting archways and rounded, turret-like corners that rise into spires. The crown of the building is an extra-wide steeple rimmed by an open-air balcony.

But what the eye is immediately drawn to is the marquee, the lone signifier that this is, in fact, a movie theatre and not the headquarters of some occult inquisitor or hemophiliac prince. Out of place with the severity of the rest of the building, this winged canopy hangs out as far as the curb and runs close to a hundred feet down the length of Watson Street. Its neon garishness suggests a kind of cheap humor at the heart of the structure’s stone earnestness. And the green neon that spells out HERZOG’S EROTIC PALACE in an elaborate, cursive script looks like a monumental practical joke that the structure itself doesn’t yet know about.

They sit in the darkness, in the front row of the theatre proper. There’s a faint undercurrent of music that only Jakob recognizes as a wildly overblown rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Slowly the immense and heavy-looking maroon curtains begin to pull back. The procedure takes quite a while and when they’re finally fully receded, the clan stares up at the enormity of a stark white screen, the largest movie screen any of them have laid eyes on. The screen is illuminated by a single narrow white spotlight that impacts at a low, center point and spreads onto the lip of the stage. The overwhelming whiteness, and maybe his proximity to it, gives Felix a slightly queasy feeling.

They begin to hear a distant sound, a clicking, like tap shoes walking across a concrete floor. The noise increases and Jakob knows it’s being enhanced by a fairly sophisticated sound system.

Finally, a figure emerges onto the stage and walks in an odd, kicking march-step out into the path of the white spotlight. It’s a tall, bulky, bald man, dressed in a tuxedo. The man’s head is massive and the skull gleams under the spot. The man turns right and then left, though there’s no one else in the theatre beyond the four guests in the front row. The man brings a hand to his forehead as if to salute, but instead only shields his eyes and looks down on his audience, to whom he now gives an elaborate, lengthy bow.

“The Esteemed Family Kinsky,” he says. “It is my great honor to entertain you tonight. I am,” a pause, “Hugo Schick.”

Jakob feels there should be applause. The moment calls out for it. The entrance was built for applause. But instead, cousin Felix calls out, “We’re not here to be entertained.”

Gustav Weltsch grinds his teeth, but Hermann says nothing, just stares up at this ego-fat lamb begging for slaughter. Hugo Schick is thrown off, but only for a moment. His recovery is admirable and telling. He begins to nod and moves forward to the lip of the stage.

“Of course, you are right,” he says. “I was merely attempting to give you a sense of the majesty of our surroundings. I have forgotten your interest lies elsewhere.”

“It’s a magnificent theatre,” the voice unexpected and totally out of character.

Felix turns to look at Jakob, to see if the kid has lost his mind. He waits for Hermann’s elbow to crash into the son’s ribs and is shocked to see another, entirely different reaction. Hermann Kinsky is beaming at Jakob. Nodding, smiling. He claps the boy on the back and says, “You are right, my son. You are absolutely right. Magnificent is the word. Forgive our rudeness, Mr. Schick. We were, perhaps, overcome by the grandeur.”

Even Weltsch looks confused. This is not a good turn of events. When Hermann decides on a course of action, even if it’s the choice of a restaurant or a newspaper, he never wavers. When the event is a crucial business meeting, he becomes resolve incarnate. What the hell is going on here?

Hugo Schick claps his hands together, forgets his improvised “let’s-get-down-to-numbers” tack, and falls back to the “impress-the-peasant-wise-guys” routine he’s worked out all week.

“There are bigger theatres,” Schick says in a grand opera voice. “The Congress in Chicago. The Valencia in Queens. Surely, The Million Dollar in LosAngeles—”

“The Paramount in Oakland.”

“Excuse me,” Schick says.

“The Paramount,” Jakob says. “It originally had three thousand, four hundred and seventy-six seats.”

The expression on Schick’s face grows more smug than distracted.

“How delightful,” he says. “We seem to have an expert on out hands.”

“The boy likes the movie shows,” Hermann says.

“How wonderful for the boy,” Schick says.

Hermann nods and stares at Jakob, then he rises out of his seat and walks to the stage and grasps the brass railing, his head now level with Hugo’s shoes. He looks straight up to the domed ceiling, stares at a mural, a reproduction of Saturn Devouring his Children.

Hermann lowers his voice and says, “How much money do you need, Mr. Schick?”

Felix and Weltsch stare at each other, horrified.

Hugo is taken off-guard. He’d been told Kinsky would make him grovel. Now he’s not sure what to do. Figures are running through his head, inflating themselves as they go.

“I’m really not …” Schick begins. “I wasn’t prepared, that is, there are many, you see,” he takes a breath, begins again. “There is the restoration itself. And then the production expenses. The distribution costs. I don’t know where to—”

Hermann cuts him off.

“This is my attorney,” thumbing over his shoulder in Weltsch’s direction. “He’ll draw up the terms of our agreement tonight and have the paperwork on your desk in the morning. You will determine how much of an infusion is required and we will fill in the blanks when we sign the contracts. This is acceptable?”

Hugo doesn’t know what to do beyond tug at the collar of his shirt.

“Mr. Kinsky,” he finally says, “don’t you even want a tour of the building?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Hermann says. “I’m sure you are a very busy man.”

“But, Mr. Kinsky, we haven’t even discussed—”

Hermann waves away the objection.

“We are both very busy men, yes? You will find my terms the most reasonable in Bangkok, Mr. Schick. You will profit and I will profit. The technicalities are all very standard and, I assure you, exremely boring for men of vision like ourselves.”

“But, Mr. Kinsky—”

Hermann brings an index finger to his lips to indicate the need for quiet, then he says, “There is, however, one unusual condition to my approval of our venture.”

“Condition,” Schick says.

Kinsky’s finger floats out into the air and becomes a beckoning tool, calling Hugo forward. Schick squats down and duck-walks a few steps to the edge of the stage, turns his ear toward Hermann.

“It’s my son,” Hermann says, “my boy, Jakob. He’s a brilliant young man. Very creative.”

“Creative,” Hugo whispers and the sound carries around the theatre.

“You would find him extremely helpful in your line of work,” Hermann says.

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Men like you and I, Mr. Schick, we need all the help we can get, yes? Our burdens are very great.”

“You want me to hire—”

“I believe the phrase is assistant director, yes?”

“Mr. Kinsky,” Hugo says, “I already have—”

“You look at your staff tonight,” Hermann says. “You see if you have need for this assistant director. My attorney will come by in the morning. You tell him your decision then.”

And then Hermann does the signature belittlement. Before Hugo Schick can respond, before he can speak or even change his posture, Hermann Kinsky pats him on the head like a dog, like a Viennese mongrel he stumbled upon in the park. Kinsky turns and moves for the center aisle, snapping for his people to follow him at once. Weltsch and Felix bound from their seats and parade to the exit behind their leader.

But Jakob lingers for a moment, staring at the theatre, pivoting his head in a slow pan, trying to take as much in as the darkness will permit.

He comes to Hugo Schick, still squatting, watching the hulking shadow of Papa exit the theatre. At the back of the hall, the doors swing open and closed.

Hugo looks down at the boy, takes a breath and says, “It will be a pleasure working with you, son.”

6

There are probably things Sylvia hates worse in this life, but right now, standing at Perry’s side like this well-groomed, brain-addled, pseudo-spouse, listening to Ratzinger hold court with his circle of pre-partner associates, she can’t think of one. Every time this guy makes another denigrating joke about his wife, she digs her nails deeper into the palm of Perry’s left hand. There’s a sycophant tax guy named Gordon-something who’s choking himself on forced laughter, spilling shrimp cocktail sauce on his designer tie. Sylvia’s feet are killing her and the room is too hot. She wants to be home. She wants to be down in the cellar. Down in the darkroom with the Aquinas on the worktable, going over the instruction book step-by-step, removing and installing the lens. Maybe even hooking up a flash and shooting some of those Polaroids.

Right about now, channel 6 is starting their weeklong Peter Lorre film festival. They’re going to begin with Mad Love and close out with The Patsy. They’re going to run all the Warner Brothers dramas from the forties. There will be a roundtable discussion of The Lost One, a trivia quiz on The Maltese Falcon, and the first uncut, local screening of Pionier in Inoplastaldt with the corrected subtitles. She just wants to be back home waiting for the Sydney Green-street collaborations, checking the schedule for Passage to Marseille, now and then looking at the picture on the tube through the Aquinas.

And she wants to be wearing her sweats and her sneakers. She wants to have her hair pulled back and her face washed. It’s not like she’s reactionary when it comes to dressing up. She’s got on the black velvet dress and the pearls Perry gave her at Christmas a year ago. She knows he likes her like this and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t get a kick out of his reaction as he came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and saw her in front of the bureau mirror and said, “God. Just gorgeous.”

But it’s so close and humid in here. She wants to grabs one of the waiters and tell him there’s a sweet tip if he can locate the air-conditioning and lower the temp a little.

The killer is that on the drive downtown, Perry started in on how they’ve got to get used to all these receptions and fund-raisers and open-house deals the firm throws. That there are only going to be more in the future and once he makes partner his presence is always going to be required. Sylvia said, “Fine, but why does that mean my presence is required? I don’t work for these guys. I don’t even have a law degree.”

He said, “Because it looks better. It looks good. For you to be there with me.” And she gave a little laugh she couldn’t help and then regretted it right away. He’s still pumped up about the partnership offer and Sylvia honestly doesn’t want to ruin it for him.

He said, “You don’t think so, fine. But it still works this way. It sends a message to the old boys. The guys above Ratzinger. It says I’m stable. It says I’ve got plans and direction. Focus. And, I’m sorry, I don’t want you to take this any way but as a compliment, but it says I’ve got taste. That if this looker came with me there must be something.”

She stared at him as they pulled into the underground garage. She stared until he said, “What?” in this kind of great, flinching whine.

“Looker,” she said.

“Jesus, Sylvia.”

“Looker?” she couldn’t get over the word. “Did you, like, age a generation in the shower?”

“Sylvia, c’mon—”

But Sylvia couldn’t stop. “Looker? Is this part of the deal now? We have to change the way we speak? Should we practice tonight? Perry, could you have the darkie bring your cupcake a martini …”

So she stepped over the line at the end there. He was self-conscious and hurt and she had to calm him down in the garage before they went up to the reception.

Walpole & Lewis has rented out the main gallery of the art museum. If she’d listened more closely Sylvia would know all the details, but she was thinking about the camera while they were getting ready to go. She was thinking about just getting home and playing with it, taking it apart and getting used to the feel.

Perry mentioned something about a new client, some political action group that’s really up and coming and got “a pool of money and a national network.” Sylvia doesn’t know what their grudge is, but they’ve just tossed a wad to W & L as a retainer and she knows Perry said something about “they really want us to put our best teeth in the mayor’s ass.”

The fact is, Sylvia’s just not a political creature and never will be. There’s no juice in it for her. No charge. And for her to make a connection with something, to give it her time and her thought, there has to be some natural gravitation, an ongoing connection where she’s dwelling on it in her sleep, where she’s thinking about it in line at the supermarket or while she’s getting her hair cut.

On Sylvia’s thirteenth birthday, at about six o’clock at night, her mother put the supper dishes in the sink to soak. Then Ma brought this small cake out of the refrigerator, this chocolate cake with butter cream frosting. And after Sylvia blew out her candles, Ma put a small box in front of her, about the size of a doughnut box, maybe a little smaller, and wrapped in pink and white paper with a bow saved from some other holiday. Sylvia sat there a minute to let the excitement build, to consciously savor the feeling and let it expand just a little. She carefully unwrapped the box and handed the paper back to her mother and watched as Ma smiled and sort of absentmindedly refolded the paper on the kitchen table. Then Sylvia looked down to see a bright yellow display case and the red letters on the top that said Kodak. It was a hinged box and she lifted the top back and there, sitting in these black, mock-crushed velvet inserts, was a flashcube, a black plastic cartridge of film, a detachable black plastic wrist strap, and her first camera, a classic Instamatic, all grey and silver and this round bug-eye lens in the front.

She pulled the camera from its resting place in the box. And she was honestly speechless. She stared up at her mother and, she still has no idea why, she started to cry. The tears just helplessly came down her face. And the horrible thing was that Ma immediately misinterpreted the reaction. She thought Sylvia was crushed by what must have been the inappropriateness of the gift. Ma got terribly upset and started repeating, “But you asked for one, last summer, you asked for one.”

And it was probably ten minutes before Sylvia could convince her mother that she was crying from the excitement, from the thrill, that she didn’t know why she was crying but that she loved the camera, that it was, in fact, exactly what she’d wanted. Ma huddled with her and they read the instructions and loaded the film and tried to memorize the Tips For Better Pictures booklet. And then Ma agreed to pose in every room of the dingy little apartment up on Harper Ave. And Sylvia used up the flashcube that had come with the set, then turned on all the table lamps, hoping it would make things bright enough.

It didn’t. The next day her mother brought the film to the drugstore and Sylvia waited out a god-awfully long week until the photos came back. Only four shots were printable. But that was enough. The pictures were wonderful. There was her mother, in full color, captured forever inside a three-inch-square frame of glossy paper, posed, laughing, embarrassed but pliable: At the kitchen table where they ate together every night. Tilted back in the paisley rocker in the living room. Perched on the edge of a too-small twin bed with her hands folded in her lap. Close up and in profile before the refrigerator, looking like a practice mug shot.

Ma hated them all, good-naturedly threatened to tear up the prints and negatives. Sylvia laughed off her complaints and was oblivious to the eight blackened squares on the negative strips — the shots that hadn’t come out. She was infected. She was converted. Very simply, she knew, without doubt or hesitation, with a surety that usually visits the religious or the lovesick, she knew what she wanted to do with her time. She wanted to take pictures. She wanted to bring this miraculous black box up to her eye as often as possible and press that silver rectangular button, and expose her visions to film, enshrine them, verify them, make them into something lasting.

Sylvia had fantasized about going to some hip art school, someplace like RISD or the Kertész Center in Boston. But there was just no money, so she took out loans and went to a state college and studied fine arts with a concentration in cinema. Now, those four years are like a blurry filmstrip for her. Isolated images that refuse to flow together. She got pretty good grades and worked in the dining commons. She wrote papers and took exams and for one semester she shot pictures for the school paper. In her sophomore year, she slept through a standard bout of mononucleosis. In her junior year, she slept with her Cronenberg: Fear, Fluids, & the Body professor. The word slept is a misnomer. The guy seduced her in the projection booth of the campus cinema while screening a double feature of Rabid and The Parasite Murders.

Basically, Sylvia bided time, lived like a phantom, made few friends, and spent virtually all of her free hours either watching movies or shooting film in the little nearby farming towns, then developing prints in the school darkrooms.

That’s what she remembers about the years she came of age — focusing a lens at a rusted tractor, a grade school playground, a row of icicles under a railroad bridge. And hours alone in narrow, windowless, closetlike rooms, breathing chemical-thick air and straining her eyes in deep red light.

They’re standing in a circle next to the bar which has been set up in a small room off the main gallery. Actually, it’s not a room at all, but, as the plaque on one of the walls points out, it’s a

Chapter House

French, 1160–1175

Painstakingly reconstructed and

originally part of the Benedictine

Priory of St. John, at Le Bas Nueil,

a hamlet north of Poitiers in

West Central France.

It’s a stark, low, dome-ceilinged, chapel-like cove of a room that makes Sylvia feel they should all be praying instead of making insipid small talk. And though she doesn’t like how severe and cold the surroundings are, she can’t take her eyes off the sculpture in the corner. She leans away from Perry and squints at the info-plaque next to the artwork.

Virgin & Child

French, Late 14th century

Limestone

By arranging the Virgin with her weight resting on one foot, the sculptor gives the figure a gently swaying motion. The serenity of the Virgin’s face conveys the awe and majesty that early Gothic artists sought in their images of divine personages. Combined with this ideal quality is a certain amount of naturalism which points forward to the realism of the late Gothic style. The realism is further evident in the child with his grinning, mischievous expression and peasantlike features.

She reaches up to touch the Virgin’s face, feels how cold the stone is. And she hears, “Sylvia and I were just discussing this last night, right dear?”

It’s Perry’s voice and Sylvia tunes in to see the whole circle suddenly focusing on her. And she has no idea what they’ve been talking about.

“That’s right,” she manages.

Last night. Last night I was riding Perry in the last row of the Cansino Drive-In. And there’s a part of her that wants to blurt this out.

“Well, I have to say, this surprises me.”

It’s Ratzinger, the closest thing Perry has to a boss and a guy who will spend his life anguishing over the fact that his father’s bloodline will always keep him from being pure WASP. Ratzinger’s closing in on his fifties, but tries to dress himself ten years younger. Perry’s told Sylvia all about the twenty-year-old the man keeps in a high-rise condo down by the reservoir, a quick fifteen miles from the Windsor Hills wife and therapy-addicted son, Sylvia thinks Ratzinger colors his hair.

She tries to fake understanding. “Surprises you?” she says, smiling.

He gestures to her with his champagne flute. “Yes. You being a photographer and all. And by now I think all of us have been beaten into accepting photography as a legitimate art form.”

Perry gives her hand a please don’t squeeze.

Sylvia can’t help it. “I’m not a photographer,” she says.

“But I thought—” he begins.

And Sylvia opens her mouth to cut him off with something about his need to understand what a beating is, but Candice, a blonde from Perry’s department, gets there first and says, “C’mon, Earl, please, just admit that it isn’t an aesthetic argument. This is power politics at its most anal. You’ll push the mayor and Welby will push back and you’ll measure each other’s column inches in the Spy.”

Ratzinger turns full attention to Candice, surprised but clearly impressed by the show of what he calls office balls.

“Did you see the Mapplethorpe exhibit when it passed through town, Candice? Did you come down here and take a look?”

But Candice stays loose and friendly. “I did, Earl. But my judgments about the exhibit have nothing to do with what’s really going on here. The old boys—”

“Watch it,” Ratzinger says, smiling through a squint.

“The senior partners,” Candice continues, shaking her head slightly, “couldn’t care less about obscenity or the First Amendment or the moral disintegration of America. You know this better than I do. Every one of us here knows this. The senior partners’ big hope is that they can cash a new check before their pacemakers shut down. FUD’s money is as green as anyone else’s. That’s the issue. That’s why we’ve got a fat new cow to milk.”

“Candice,” Gordon scolds, but Ratzinger is amused and nodding like he agrees with the woman’s pronouncement.

“Well let’s try it this way,” he says. “Let’s say you’re one of the old boys. You haven’t had a thing to do with the real work in ten years. Your big job is P.R. and an eye on the bottom line every month. You’re a figurehead who’s steered Walpole & Lewis through enough miles to think you deserve all your last years at the widest part of the trough. Okay, Candy? Can you hold that picture? Now, your favorite congressman calls up one day and says he can put something sweet in your lap. Something that will really send you out in style. Okay? So you go up to the top of the bank building and you eat some red meat with the congressman’s new friends. And after the chocolate mousse is resting in your belly, the FUD boys offer to write a check. Pay to the order of W & L. Ready for deposit in the corporate account. And that check is going to change all the numbers next quarter. It’s going to trickle down to the maintenance crew, for Christ sake. And all you’ve got to do is slap your best people on their team and say a few Amens for the cause. What decision does Candice make? I want to hear.”

They’ve both kept the argument civil. They’ve both showed how smooth they can play conflict without rolling over. They’ve sounded intelligent and savvy at the same time. Informed but colloquial and always sure of themselves. Sylvia wonders how people end up this way.

“What do I do?” Candice says. “I endorse the check and say Praise the Lord to the comptroller. Every one of us would do what the old boys did. That wasn’t my point, Earl, and you know it. I’m saying let’s admit we’re hypocrites—”

“Pragmatists,” Perry says and Sylvia sees Ratzinger nod to him.

“Whatever,” Candice says, now looking at Perry. “We’ve cashed their check. So we’re in bed with the Families United for Decency. But that doesn’t mean we’re married to them. Does it, Earl?”

She scores with a not-so-subtle shot about the mistress. Sylvia would call it suicide, but Candice is a smart woman and she must know Ratzinger gets off on the clash, gets some juice from a little rough sparring.

Ratzinger raises his champagne toward Candice, lowers his voice and says, “A First Amendment fetish.” He gives a put-on, too-loud sigh and adds, “I guess some of us will never get over our years at Berkeley.”

Sylvia would give a night in the darkroom to hear Candice’s comeback, but the gallery fills with that awful microphone whine and everyone turns to see this crew-cut, squinty-eyed guy in a tux craning his neck and looking impatient behind a heavy wooden lectern. He’s positioned in front of a massive medieval tapestry that hangs from an upper balcony. The tapestry depicts what might be a Grail scene, some crude-looking knights and horses about to enter a dense forest.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the guy says, “If I might have your attention.”

The crowd converges and forms into a loose semicircle and gradually voices start to lower.

“As some of you know, my name is Raymond Todd and I am a broadcast journalist at Quinsigamond Radio WQSG.”

“Jesus,” Sylvia says into Perry’s ear, “I thought the voice was familiar.”

“He’s just doing the intro,” Perry whispers.

Todd waits for everyone’s full attention, gives an annoyed glance to a waiter still taking a drink order, then begins. “It is my great honor tonight to have been asked down to the museum to introduce you to some new friends of ours. Some very brave, very hard-working people who have decided to lend a hand in the struggle of a lifetime. Now it may be apparent to you that Raymond Todd is in an extraordinarily fine mood this evening. And it may occur to you that this is not the demeanor you’ve come to expect from Raymond Todd. My friends, I will not argue with you. I yield to your incisive judgment. I agree with the verdict. Because, my friends, Raymond Todd has been waging a very lonely crusade that began to appear less and less winnable with each passing dark day.”

He does his trademark pause, goes into the rubbing of the sore neck and the slow, daunted shaking of the head without ever breaking eye contact.

“I, like you, have watched this, my native land, my native city, the place of my birth on this planet, plummeting downward, racing brakeless toward the bowels of damnation. You know, people, you don’t have to be some historian, some insulated, book-touting academic, to know that at some point in the past few decades, every value and moral and treasured teaching that our chosen nation has embraced has been uprooted and cast to the ground, trampled under the feet of everything from progress to good intentions. You’ve heard me speak before. I’m not going to run down the whole litany for you.”

“Wanna bet,” Sylvia whispers, but Ratzinger hears her and gives a patronizing smile.

“Simply put, we have lost track of what is important. We have, through ignorance or willful pride, turned our backs on the only things that should matter during our time on this earth. Now I’m as guilty as the next man of losing heart, people. You’ve all heard it. You’ve heard me throwing in the towel, ready to forsake the good fight. Seems I’d forgotten one small truth that should have lit the way.”

And he closes his eyes and delivers the patented slap on the lectern that echoes through the gallery and causes at least one gin and tonic to crash to the marble floor.

Then Todd opens his eyes, points a finger into the thick of the crowd, lets a greasy smile spread across his lips and intones, “The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind surely.”

A pocket of listeners down near the front breaks into applause. When they die down, Todd takes a good breath and speeds up, loudens up, gets wildly dramatic. “The wheels are in motion, my friends. That’s why we’re all here tonight. We’re here to turn the key together. We’re here to watch the mighty wheels of judgment begin their trip through the city of Quinsigamond.”

He spread out the last word with this weird, pseudo-Southern drawl and widens each syllable. There’s a wave of murmuring throughout the hall but Sylvia can’t tell whether people are spurred on by this misplaced evangelical sermon or just plain confused. Todd claps his hands together and raises his arms over his head like some uncoordinated boxer. Sylvia looks around to see if anyone else is finding this pretty bizarre entertainment for a museum reception sponsored by a WASP law firm.

“Without any further delay,” Todd bellows, “I give you the national coordinating director of Families United for Decency, Reverend Garland Boetell.”

The gallery floods with applause and whistles and hidden speakers somewhere play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Sylvia changes her position to get a look at Reverend Boetell as he walks in under an exhibit banner that reads Goya: Moralist Amid Chaos. He’s a little battleship of a character, a short, pink bull, all permanently rouged cheeks and a spray-cemented cover of silky, golden-white hair. He’s got on a navy blue double-breasted suit that clamps in his girth and he takes the lectern holding a leathery, bendable Bible that he uses to wave to the crowd. On his heels is a small, reed-thin Hispanic kid of about eighteen years, dressed in a plain white robe and hemp belt, leather sandals on his feet, stooped forward and looking extremely uncomfortable.

The applause seems excessive, verging on the raspy kind of hum you’d get at a small rock concert. Perry leans into Ratzinger and whispers something in his ear. Ratzinger continues clapping his hands together, but turns his head and whispers back and they both give guilty smiles.

Sylvia puts her hand on Perry’s back and he looks at her and shakes his head, rolls his eyes and says, “The crowd up front, they’re all shills. The radio guy, Todd, he brought them with him.”

Sylvia nods, but somehow this information isn’t as funny to her. She wants to ask Perry when they can leave, but Reverend Boetell raises his hands up like an Olympic high-diver and the crowd starts to quiet down.

“My good people,” the Reverend says. “My good northern neighbors. What a genuine thrill it is to be here with you tonight in the splendid museum here. What a wonderful honor to be asked to break bread with my new friends.”

“Amen,” someone down front barks out.

“Amen is right. And bless his holy name. I am the Reverend Garland Boetell. And I know you are all familiar with my trusted assistant Fernando, saved as a child from the horrors of São Paulo on our very first Brazilian mission. Praise the Almighty.”

Boetell pulls the young man in the robe forward, this walking prop of redemption, and pats his shoulder as more whistles and cheering erupt. It’s like a high-fever dream — the staid Quinsigamond art museum transformed before everyone’s eyes into a tent revival. Sylvia looks around at the tapestries and the Rodin sculpture, a little fearful they’re suddenly going to transform themselves into something else. Hay bales. Burning crosses.

“Now I want to start off by thanking the esteemed legal firm of Walpole & Lewis for throwing this beautiful reception and helping us inaugurate the campaign they are going to remember. Praise Jesus, they will not forget this night, my friends. Years from now, when our coming battles are righteous memories, when you sit with your children and try to tell them how the ways of justice and virtue finally triumphed in our land, you will begin with this very night. You will recall these moments in this great hall, as the start of the new crusade.”

The gallery explodes with Amens and Sylvia suddenly starts to feel hot and squeamish. She looks around, trying to see if anyone else knows what the hell this man is talking about.

“It is no secret, ladies and gentlemen, that there is blight on this country. That our very nation, selected by the Lord above himself, has fallen under the wheels of a most heinous corruption. We have lost the way. We have lost our vision. We have sacrificed our divine birthright, people, handed it over like change at the tollbooth. When Mr. Todd speaks to you of pessimism, I know from whence he comes. I know how sick and lost a soul can feel when it looks out upon this sprawling land, this once pure paradise, this once chosen Judeo-Christian Eden, and sees how terribly far we have fallen. I, too, lived through that very dark, very long night of the soul’s despair. I, too, my people, have felt the fires of the evil victor’s breath on my weakened shoulders.”

A big, sudden yell now, “I have seen doom on America’s horizon and I have shuddered in the abandonment of the e-tern-al savior.”

The crowd is silent, transfixed. Boetell’s got it. He makes Raymond Todd look like an amateur. The Reverend cannot be ignored.

The voice backing down now. “Some say, my friends, I will have to pay for my lapse in faith. Like Moses himself, my people, I will have to own up to my failing on that horrible night. I can’t escape my actions any more than any of you can. But I woke from my nightmare with a vision. A vision the good Lord has asked me to pass on to you. There is a time for every purpose, my friends. There is a time to eat and a time to refrain from eating. There is a time for sorrow and a time for joy. And make no mistake about this, ladies and gentlemen, at your very peril, make no mistake,” the voice building again, “there is a time for peace. And there is absolutely a time for war. And this hour, this very moment is the moment we declare the war. We delcare war on the forces of darkness that have taken our land.”

His last words are half-drowned by the crowd as if someone was working a neon applause sign. Sylvia touches Perry’s arm. He turns to her and shakes his head, leans his mouth to her ear and says, “Is this bizarre or what?”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she says, but he motions toward Ratzinger and gives a guilty shrug.

Boetell calms the faithful, takes in some air and begins again. “Now I don’t need to stand here tonight and tell you who the enemy is. You people know who the enemy is. You have eyes. You can see its presence in every city in this country. But there is surely strength in numbers, friends. And one look into the bosom of this crowd tonight and my heart just surges. Because I know with support like this, we will triumph. You are a prayed-up people. You know the path. You are willing to make the sacrifices. You simply need direction.”

A pause and then a big smile.

“And friends, that is where I come in.”

The shills go crazy. Sylvia closes her eyes and runs a hand over her forehead. She tries to remember if she’s got any Tylenol left in her purse.

“Now back where I come from, Families United for Decency has been growing by leaps and bounds for over a year now. We’ve had our share of skirmishes already. And you people can learn by our mistakes. Our funding has been growing steadily and of late we’ve managed to bring on board what you might call some heavy hitters from the corporate sector. We’ve now got close to a dozen Crusade Buses out on the road at all times. One dozen, my friends. We are out on the road. Now our coordinating committee has determined that we need a high-exposure skirmish. We need to get our story out on those airwaves. We need to dispense the truth to the good people of this nation, to tell the story in big, colorful pictures. And friends,”

Another perfectly timed pause, another broad smile.

“That is where you come in. We have done just a slew of field studies. We have gone from Atlantic to Pacific. From the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico. But it wasn’t until I received those heartbreaking letters from your own Mr. Raymond Todd that I knew, that I positively believed, that we had our theatre, that we had our perfect battleground, that we had been given the site where the real war begins. And my friends, that site is the sad and fallen city of,” a pause, “Quinsigamond itself.”

It’s the big finale. The gallery fills up with all kinds of excited noise and it can’t be coming from Todd’s shills. The real guests, the people Walpole & Lewis invited, they must be caught up in it. And Sylvia has no idea what the Reverend is talking about.

“And so, let the war begin,” he bellows and Ray Todd jumps up to the lectern and the two men start to embrace as a rain of red, white and blue balloons is released from some netting up near the ceiling and the speakers start to play some kind of generic march music.

Sylvia starts to get small, stabbing pains in her abdomen, as if the music had triggered them. She grabs Perry’s arm at the elbow and pulls him back to her and says, “Please, let’s leave. Now.”

He gives her a strange look, comes to her ear and says, “Are you okay? You look really pale.”

“I’m not feeling well,” she says.

He gives a concerned-looking nod and says, “Okay, let’s get you home.”

He claps a hand on Ratzinger’s back and tries to tell him they’re leaving but the room is so loud he has to shout to make himself understood. Ratzinger steps over to Sylvia and says, “Sorry you’re feeling ill,” and she nods and closes her eyes, thinking she’s about to faint. Her knees buckle, but Perry moves fast and catches her and she leans against him as they move for an exit.

“You going to be sick?” he asks, a little panicky as they move out into a hallway.

“Just get me home,” she says, suddenly short of breath.

He steers them toward the garage exit.

“It’s probably the champagne,” he says. “You didn’t eat any dinner, did you?”

She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants to be home. Out of these clothes. Away from this noise and the balloons and the awful music. Away from the sound of Reverend Boetell’s voice. Her head is throbbing and all she can hear is this drawl of an echo saying, That is where you come in.”

7

Sylvia changes out of her dress as she watches Perry hang up his rented tux. He’s fastidious, making sure the creases of the pants’ legs are lined up, untucking the flaps of the jacket pockets. He talks over his shoulder as he brushes down the lapels with these snapping, karate-like moves of his hand, as if he was attacking something unseen, some microscopic parasite that lived on the surface of the dinner jacket.

“I’m saying you don’t take care of yourself. I’m concerned about your health.”

Sylvia digs a pair of her mother’s old slippers out from under the bed and says, “Perry, you’re concerned about my health? Then please, don’t ever take me to another one of these hell-nights, okay? Please?”

“So the Reverend was a little over the top—”

“Over the top? Perry, we just spent three hours in the goddamn Twilight Zone. What the hell was that all about?”

“Sylvia,” he says in this weary adult tone, as if having to explain this to her is an enormous sap on his energy. “It was a reception for a big new client. That’s all it was. Yes, these people are a bit zealous. Agreed. And yes, maybe the museum was a poor choice for a meeting place. But you know, I didn’t see anyone else reacting quite so strongly.”

“Your friend Candice didn’t seem too happy with the Reverend and his gang.”

“Candice was playing the politicized animal. Candice wants to position herself as the conscience of the firm. She’s expected to spout the opposition view. The big thing about Candice is she knows she can get away with it. She knows Ratzinger gets a little buzz from their skirmishes. It adds to his day. She can’t lose. But I don’t think there’s much behind it. Candice is great at polemic. She should write speeches for a living.”

She sits down on the edge of the bed, pulls a sweatshirt out from underneath the pillow.

“Let me get this straight. Nothing that guy said tonight bothered you? Nothing at all?”

He zips the tux inside the plastic carrying bag, hangs it on the back of the closet door and says, “You know, in the long run it’s going to be cheaper for me to buy one of these.”

And it’s a second before Sylvia realizes he means a tuxedo. That he should buy a tuxedo. That he expects to be going to enough black-tie affairs that it would be cost-effective to make the purchase.

“Perry,” she says.

He comes over and sits down next to her.

“Syl,” he says, “I don’t take it that seriously. Political crap like that just bounces right off me. Goes right over my head. It’s just crap. It’s like it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s like he’s using words I don’t understand. So let him. Doesn’t affect me. You should do what I do.”

“Which is?”

He smiled, shifts his position, puts his hands on her shoulders and starts to massage her. “Which is ignore it. Just tune it out. Let the guy babble. I’m standing there tonight thinking how much of the raise I’m going to take home, you know? I’m thinking interest rates and how much we can afford to put down on a house. Speaking of which—”

She cuts him off by rolling her head back on top of his hands and moaning. “Oh no, Perry, c’mon.”

He gets defensive immediately. “What? I didn’t say a word here.”

“I’m just tired and you know I’m not feeling well.”

“Sylvia, I didn’t say a word. What did I say?”

“It’s just late for this discussion—”

“What discussion?”

“What discussion? The ‘it’s time to plunge ourselves into debt and leave this great apartment’ discussion. Please. C’mon. I’m really not feeling well.”

He gets up and goes to his bureau, takes off his watch and ring. His voice goes edgy and tight. “Yeah, well maybe if you’d gotten home in time to have a little dinner, the champagne wouldn’t have hit you quite so hard.”

She honestly doesn’t want this to escalate into a fight. She lies back on the bed and looks up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I lost track of time. I got caught up with the camera and everything. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”

But they’re already over the line and Perry doesn’t want an apology. “It’s okay,” he says with that sarcastic edge. “I guess eating dinner together these days is just a little too bourgeois for you, right?”

She lets it go for about five seconds and then says, as evenly as she can, “What’s that supposed to mean, Perry?”

He turns around, leans his behind against the bureau. “It means,” he says, the words singsong and drawn out, “How come you’re so concerned about debt when it comes to buying us a home, but not when it comes to buying another goddamn camera.”

She stands up. “I thought the goddamn camera was supposed to be a gift.”

“And I thought we were supposed to be having dinner together at five-thirty. That’s what families do, you know Sylvia. They eat together. They talk to each other.”

“Thanks for the tip. Did Reverend Boetell tell you that?”

She walks out of the bedroom into the kitchen, goes to the fridge and pours herself a glass of Pinot Grigio. He stands in the doorway fuming and says, “I thought you were sick.”

She says, “I am,” and goes out the back door and down to the basement.

The darkroom is at the rear of the cellar. Sylvia moves past the two huge, ancient furnaces and opens a padlock on this rickety chicken-wire door, steps into a little compartment room filled with all the forgotten junk that a hundred years’ worth of owners and tenants have left behind. She pulls on a string and lights the room with a bare forty-watt bulb. She looks down on steamer trunks filled with heavy, rusted old tools, defunct magazines, rough pieces of scrap wood. In one corner sits an antique child’s bicycle without any wheels. In another there’s a silver industrial hair dryer, this big helmet-like unit mounted on a heavy pole. It looks like a prop from some campy old science fiction movie — a brain scrambler or a time machine. She’s always wanted to bring the thing upstairs, clean it up, maybe turn it into a lamp or something. And she realizes now that the reason she never has is because Perry would hate it, would say something like, You’re kidding, right, this old piece of junk …

There’s a small door next to the hair dryer. She keeps it secured with her combination lock from high school. Inside used to be a small closet of some kind, sort of a storage bin, just 5 x 7, but nice and dry. Last year Sylvia asked Mrs. Acker if she could make it into a darkroom and Mrs. A was all excited by the idea. Sylvia spent two weekends cleaning the place out, then nailed some brackets to the plywood walls and hung some shelves. She managed to wedge in two small tables for counter space and ran an extension cord off the light fixture in the outer room. For water she hooked a garden hose up to the spigot near the furnaces.

She bought all her equipment secondhand, got some good deals by watching the classified ads in the Spy. She picked up a nice Durst enlarger at a yard sale over on Mann and got all her pans and tongs, her safelight and a good LePrince timer from a woman who was moving to Europe — Germany, she thinks — and just said, “Make me an offer.” Mrs. Acker donated a padded step stool that Sylvia uses as a chair.

There are no windows in the darkroom. She keeps her mother’s pocket radio on one of the shelves and there are nights when she finishes up her work and tunes in some no-talk jazz station, something from down the Zone with a lot of P.H. Cunningham rotation or maybe some Imogen Wedgewood. And she just sits there in the absolute darkness, can’t see her wineglass in front of her, and she kind of just perches on Mrs. Acker’s stool with the stuffing pushing through the red plastic covering, just swirling the wine around in her mouth, just feeling the soft roll of the horns on the radio, smelling the chemicals drying on the prints that she’s clothespinned to a wire strung between walls. She just sits there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, feeling not exactly happy, more like contented and secure and relaxed, the muscles of her neck and shoulders finally getting loose.

She’s locked the Aquinas in the darkroom. She keeps all her cameras down here, though Perry says they’d be safer up in the apartment. She’s not so sure about that. And she likes seeing them all together on a worktable. It’s like pretending she has a studio or something. She remembers back in high school, the first time she saw Antonioni’s Blow Up on TV late one night. David Hemmings as the perfect mod fashion photographer, living in London, driving around in a Rolls convertible. He had that big, funky studio that he lived and worked in. He’d set models up under the lights, those ninety-pound girls dressed in those horrible, glittery smocks. And when everything was set, the man just turned into this whirlwind, just fired off shot after shot and you could hear that great shutter-click sound over and over. He had something like half a dozen cameras spread out on the floor and hanging around his neck and he’d be jumping from one to another, you know, grab a Nikon and click off ten shots, then pick up a Minolta and click off a dozen more, all the time yelling at the girls, the models, wooing them one second and insulting them the next. Sylvia thought Hemming’s character was a jerk, but she never got over all the cameras.

She turns on the safelight, pulls the stool up to the table, sits down and opens the Aquinas case. She takes out the camera and puts it on the table. She picks it up, plants her elbows on the table and brings her eye to the viewer. She’s still got the lens cap on and the dark-slide in. She just wants to feel the thing. She just wants to get used to the weight and the design.

It’s a fairly heavy piece of equipment. Probably around four pounds. Once Sylvia met a wedding photographer who said he’d only work with an Aquinas. He said, “You use the Aquinas, you look at the prints, you can count the circles of lace on the bride’s gown.” The downside was he had to go to a chiropracter once a month from lugging the thing around. “But it’s worth it,” he swore. “That’s the price you pay.”

She pulls out the instruction booklet, adjusts the safe-light and opens to the parts illustration. There are two mechanical drawings of the camera, one illustrating from a front perspective and one from the rear. They’re line drawings, really detailed with the camera taken apart so that every component is visible. There are lines extending from each piece to a number. Below the drawings is an index showing the official name of each numbered piece. There are forty-three separate pieces to know about, things like depth of field preview buttons and winding crank bayonet and exposure value indicator.

She turns from the booklet to the camera itself. She takes off the magazine, the smaller box on the back of the camera that holds the film. She looks at the status indicator, sees the tiny red letters that read LOADED.

She opens the magazine. There’s a roll of half-exposed film inside — old Lumière stock, a pricey import they don’t make anymore. She puts the magazine down and picks up her wineglass, stares at the camera for a minute and tries to think. Is it possible that someone, no, not just someone, a professional, would offer their camera up for sale and not realize they’d left half a dozen pictures inside?

She takes another sip of wine. She reaches up to the shelf and turns on the radio at a low volume. The darkroom fills up with a too-sad piano-and-sax piece. And the next thing she knows, she grabbing the film tank and loading the Lumière.

She moves quickly, trying to keep her mind off what she’s doing beyond the basic step-by-step process of development. She knows she’s got no business, no right, to print up these shots. They don’t belong to her. It’s an accident that they’re in her possession. And processing them is an invasion. But she can’t stop herself. Clearly, the owner has forgotten about the photos. It’s possible the film is blank, just some kind of mistake that happened in the midst of the photographer’s upheaval.

In an hour she’s got a dried strip of negatives suspended between plastic tongs and held up to the safelight. There are seven squares filled with images. The rest of the strip is black. She gets a pair of scissors from the worktable and cuts away the useless end of the strip.

Then she goes to work at the enlarger. She doesn’t have the patience to print a test strip. She simply throws a single-weight 8 x 10 sheet under the easel and instinctively exposes it. She doesn’t bother with the timer. She just hits the switch and stares at the reversed image and when it feels right she shuts the enlarger off and carries the sheet to the pans.

She watches the image start to form under the bath of developer. She takes her tongs and moves the paper around a bit underneath the fluid. Gradually, definition seeps through, shades of black and white arrange themselves, but she still can’t make out the specific image. It’s a dark shot, very shadowy. She looks at her watch. She leans her head down closer to the pan. She jostles the print a bit with the tongs, impatient. She tries to concentrate on the music, checks the watch again, then removes the print and slides it down into the stop bath. There’s no use straining her eyes. She’s going to need full light to make sense of the image.

She moves the print to the fixer, agitates it, then for the next fifteen minutes she paces around the darkroom with the Aquinas in her arms, stopping every now and then to bring it to her eye, look through the lens into the red-darkness of the room.

When the radio finishes playing a scratchy rendition of Disderi’s “Sucker for a Good Joke,” Sylvia goes back to the print, removes it from the pan, grabs a squeegee and runs off all the excess liquid, then pins the print to the drying line. She goes back to the enlarger and starts the whole process again on the next shot.

In all, she comes up with seven photos. When the last print is dripping on the line, she secures everything, turns off the safelight and flips on the fluorescent desk lamp on the worktable. She bends its gooseneck up like a spotlight, shines it at the line of drying prints.

First she stands back at the opposite end of the darkroom and looks at the whole line. Her first impression is that these photos form a series, that these shots are intended to be looked at together, to be displayed in unison, a family of similar visions, variations on a single strain.

There’s a woman. Shot from seven different angles and ranging from a maximum distance of, she’d guess, maybe twenty, twenty-five feet, down to a slightly overhead, rear field shot, all silhouette, looking down over the left shoulder, shadow everywhere. The only unifying factor in all seven photographs is that in every single shot the woman’s face is somehow obscured, either cloaked in shadow or turned away from the camera. The woman is draped in a kind of flowing cape or shawl, some sort of serape-style throw. The shawl covers the woman’s right shoulder, but then trails off the left, as if it had fallen away, and in the closer shots, in a soft, almost misty focus, her left breast is exposed and an infant is seen suckling.

And given this subject matter, maybe it’s the setting that makes the shot so intriguing and disturbing. The woman is perched on what looks like a chunk of stone, possibly marble, in the center of an eerie and cavernous hall of some sort. It’s strewn with rock and rubble, a museum to decay. Some sort of lighting, sun or maybe full moon, makes it through the unseen ceiling and juts down on the woman in well-defined rays, like a storybook depiction of heaven or the voice of God. But the interior of this hall looks bombed out, ripped apart and forgotten. There’s almost a postwar feel to the room, like those stark shots of Berlin and Dresden after the bombing, maybe a bit gentler than that, more like an old church or monastery that’s been abandoned for generations and has started to fall back into the earth. What can be seen of the ground looks like a bed of dark stones and cinder. An occasional larger boulder and pieces of what appear to be scrap wood can be made out in the longer shots. The walls of the hall seem distant and huge. Cathedral walls. And in the longest shot of all Sylvia can make out what looks like the beginnings of a stairway in the far left-hand corner.

But clearly it isn’t this hall or cathedral or museum that the photographer wants us to concentrate on. The setting is intense and completely effective. But it’s subliminal, it’s background, like a sound track used to evoke or underscore a mood. The photographer’s subject is the Madonna and child. The photographer’s whole world is the woman and the infant.

Sylvia is tempted to go farther for some reason. To focus in, hard and adamant. She’s tempted to say the photographer’s only concern is the woman and the child. Is the skin of the woman and the child. The woman’s bare shoulder, her flowing hair and exposed, succulent neck. Her nursing breast. And the baby’s bare skull, closed eyes and extended tiny hand.

In front of Sylvia are seven photographs, suspended by spring clothespins from an arcing silver wire. She’s spent the last dozen years of her life — since her mother gave her that first Instamatic — attempting, almost obsessively, to make her images do this.

She’s never succeeded. She’s taken shots that please her. And though she’d never said this to anyone, Perry included, she’s taken half a dozen that might possibly step beyond the competent and into that vague and personal definition of feeling and judgment called Art.

Possibly.

But she’s never come close to this. And until these photos, she’s never known exactly what she’s been looking for. Sylvia has spent over a decade trying to learn, spent countless hours in libraries looking over fat volumes of all the masters since Niepce and Daguerre invented the camera. She’s read technical manuals and dense texts full of theory. Then she’s always gone out into the world with her equipment and tried to apply what she’s learned. But she came to feel that no matter how much she learned, making image into art would always be a hit-or-miss proposition. At least for her. Technically, barring accidents, she can always nail down the image. She can reproduce anything on film. But technical consistency is never going to be enough. And after a time it can become even depressing.

Mastering the technical never showed Sylvia how to take shots like the ones hanging in front of her. And after she’d nailed the technical she didn’t know where else to go. The past few years have brought that kind of funk where she’s started to think you’re either born with that other kind of knowledge or you’re not. You either know how to make shots like these seven before her. Or you don’t.

And when that thought proved too depressing, she decided that maybe it isn’t the photographer at all. That maybe it’s always just the coincidence of image and time and lighting and motion and a hundred other things coming together at exactly the right moment. And it’s luck that determines who’s in the right place at the right time. Holding a camera.

So, she’s operated on a shaky faith, assumed that if she spent enough hours walking around with a loaded camera, waiting, prepared, maybe sooner or later she’d be on the scene when all the elements came together. She’d be the one to lock them up in the frozen instant. She’d be the receptacle for the image, the conductor between the image and every pair of eyes that it might ever grace.

Whoever this photographer is, he found his moment here. He stood focused at the correct place and instant. He opened his shutter seven times, let in the light, introduced the image to the film, to the play of chemicals.

Sylvia gets an almost tactile sense while looking at the shots. She can almost feel how smooth and cool the woman’s shoulder is. She can almost feel the grit of ash and stone under the woman’s feet. She can practically flinch at the shower of dust, barely visible in the cones of light rays, falling on the head of the infant.

She spends another two hours in the darkroom. She gets out her magnifying glass and peers over every inch of each photo. She rearranges the order in which they hang on the dry line. She sits on the step stool and attempts to imitate the woman’s posture, the arch of her back, the tilt of her shoulder and head. At one point she even takes off her sweatshirt, drapes it over her right shoulder and back, and cradles a jug of stop bath to her chest.

That’s when it occurs to her. Sitting there half-naked at three A.M., shivering with the touch of a cold glass bottle. She’ll go see the photographer. She’ll go back to Jack Derry’s and explain what she’s found. She’ll get the photographer’s address. She’ll go to his home. She’ll present the seven photos.

And she’ll ask him what it was like.

8

Mr. Quevedo is used to spending large amounts of time in silence. But the silence of the Hotel St.Vitus is unlike any other he has ever known. There’s a deeper meaning to this kind of quiet, a sense of something lurking in the absence of noise.

Still, anything to please a customer. So he sits in the dimness of the top floor chapel-cum-office, a room made even more dim by his advancing cataracts, until Hermann Kinsky enters carrying a serving tray filled with a teapot, cups, saucers, milk, sugar, a plate of Oreos and a bulging envelope. Kinsky places the tray on the altar and sits down next to Quevedo.

“The housekeeper’s day off,” he says. “I hope you’ll forgive the tea. I’m not very talented in the domestic arts.”

“I’m sure everything is just fine,” Quevedo says, though he’s neither hungry nor thirsty.

“There was a type of cookie,” Hermann says, “in the old country. During Hanukkah, the women of the hills would bring them to my orphanage. A very thin crust. It was said they were made with a touch of arsenic, but I never knew any of the children to die. I cannot find them here.”

Quevedo nods his sympathies. “I have the same problem. So many things from my youth, I can no longer locate.”

He looks to the tray, but Kinsky makes no move to pour the tea.

“This surprises me,” Hermann says. “I would have thought a man in your position could manage to locate anything he desired.”

Quevedo holds his palms out. “You tell me, my friend. Where am I to get the banana water? The dulce de leche? Where do I go for a true dish of Bikaner stew? We gain by coming here, but we lose also. You would agree?”

“Perhaps,” Kinsky says, a smile spreading, enjoying his contrariness, “some things are best left behind.”

“Change,” Quevedo says, “can be as kind as it is cruel.”

“Is this an Argentine saying?”

“I think,” Quevedo says, “it is a universal truth.”

Hermann shakes his head. “No such thing.”

Quevedo shrugs, nods, smiles.

“I’m moving to a new home,” Kinsky blurts, the sudden volume of his voice making his guest flinch.

“So soon?”

“We’ve outgrown the house. It served us well for a time.”

Quevedo motions loosely to the icons and crucifixes hanging around the room. “If you need help disposing—”

“Rest assured, my friend, when the time of the move comes, you will be called.”

“Anything I can do to help.”

“Yes, yes,” Hermann says, getting up and moving to the window, his back now to Quevedo. “And would you be able to help me today, Luis?”

Quevedo knew this was coming, but he still dreads it. There’s no reasoning with a man like Hermann. Customers of this nature should be avoided, no matter how profitable. In the end, the aggravation can be deadly.

“As I tried to tell you on the phone, Hermann,” Quevedo says patiently, “these types of transactions take time. There is progress. We are still working.”

“It has been months, my friend,” my friend not at all what he means.

“To be a successful collector requires a great deal of endurance. An ability to wait for the right moment. To sometimes wait years. You know, Hermann, in trying to hurry your acquisition, you may well have brought this delay on yourself.”

Kinsky’s anger is starting to simmer, but he can only afford to give the dealer so much guff. Judgment is everything.

“Your friend’s sudden departure had nothing to do with me.”

Quevedo can barely absorb this kind of insult to his intelligence. But he sucks it up for the promise of a record-breaking commission.

“As you say. We were dealing with an unstable man. I’ve known Jack for some time. I’ve expected this type of vanishing act. It is not the surprise to me that it is to others.”

“Exactly,” Hermann says. “He was nothing to me but a tenant. I never even visited the property. All the collections were handled by my nephew and his people.”

Quevedo almost chokes on the phrase his people. He finds the gangboys — the Grey Roaches — to be “people” in only the most generous sense of the word. He’s all too familiar with their monthly visits and he promises himself that if this deal becomes a reality, an exemption from the standard protection fee will be part of the closing costs. Quevedo will hand nothing over until he’s assured he’ll never have to look at Felix’s brutal face again.

“Tell me, Hermann, can I control mental illness? Please, tell me, how am I to knit a man’s mind back to normal? Jack was diagnosed with the schizophrenia long ago. He spent years at the Glaspoint Clinic in Algeria. He’s been an outpatient at Toth Care Facility since he arrived in the city. Treated by Dr. Raglan himself. The medication fails from time to time.”

“This is an answer to me?” Kinsky says quietly. “The medication fails from time to time. This should satisfy me?”

Quevedo’s been in the business long enough to know that he can’t win. He’s here to be chastised and prodded. The sooner he concedes to that, the sooner he can leave and get back to work.

“You’ve been exceedingly tolerant, Hermann,” he says. “Your waiting will be rewarded, I assure you. I have things in motion as we sit here. The machine is turned on, so to speak. I am expecting results any day now.”

Kinsky’s eyes turn not-so-subtly to the envelope on the tea tray.

“Is there a money problem, Luis? Do we need to purchase additional grease for the wheels of your machine?”

“Grease is good,” Quevedo says. “More grease is always a good thing.”

Kinsky nods and pushes the envelope just a few inches toward his guest. Normally, Quevedo would ignore the envelope until he was leaving, but he knows Kinsky wants him to take it right now, to put it in his pocket and acknowledge the gesture and its attached obligations. Quevedo lifts the envelope off the tray and actually makes a strained face to mime the heaviness of the package. Another customer might take this as a sign of parody and disrespect. Hermann Kinsky merely nods his agreement.

“Would you forgive me,” Quevedo says, “if I ask a somewhat personal question?”

“I’m sure,” Hermann says, “that would depend on the question.”

Quevedo runs a hand over his face. Now he’d like a cup of the tea, no matter how bitter.

“I know the mores of my profession,” he says. “Better than most. I’ve been in the field for so long. There are ways that things are done. Established modes of behavior. For the good of all parties involved — the buyer, the seller, and the broker. Usually, the less said, the better is the guiding principle.

“But,” Quevedo continues, “I can’t help violating the customs in this instance. It’s just so odd, really. So out of my experience, which, as I say, has been considerable—”

“Please, Luis, just ask your question.”

Quevedo pauses, leans back in his chair until he’s partially lost among the shadows.

“Everything here,” and Hermann can just see the broker spread his arms, indicating the whole of the chapel, “belonged to the missing nuns?”

“The room is as we found it, yes.”

“You brought nothing with you?”

“We fled Maisel in quite a hurry,” a stiff, wary tone to the voice. “And we have never been people to attach a great sentiment to inanimate clutter.”

In the dark, Quevedo snaps his fingers. “Exactly,” he says, “my point.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You don’t fit the profile, Hermann. You don’t strike me as a collector. You don’t strike me as an art lover. As someone concerned with the elemental images.”

“Perhaps,” Kinsky says, a sudden, murky pitch to the voice, “you believe you know me better than you do, Mr. Quevedo.”

Quevedo realizes that he’s misspoken in such a large way that he’s no longer sure of the deal. And when Kinsky takes a step in his direction, he’s not at all convinced he’ll be leaving the St. Vitus in the same manner he came in.

“Perhaps,” Kinsky’s voice now barely audible, his bulk slowly moving toward Quevedo, “you do not know me at all.”

“I meant no disrespect,” Quevedo says, wetting his lips, shifting in his seat.

Kinsky comes to a stop behind his guest, the scar tissue above Hermann’s left eye pulsing. He puts a hand on Quevedo’s shoulder, reaches into his suitcoat pocket and pulls out a small crucifix. He brings the cross to Quevedo’s neck, runs an edge of it across the Adam’s apple until he feels the broker’s throat engorge and release. Then he drops the icon into Quevedo’s lap and walks back to the stained-glass.

Quevedo picks it up and moves it around in his hands, turns it over several times. It’s intricately carved, forged from both wood and metal and he judges it to be Baroque Gothic, dating from the early seventeen hundreds, all horror-show details graphically depicting broken bones, torn flesh, flowing streams of blood.

“Are you a religious man, Luis?” Kinsky asks, his voice fallen back to the conversational, his finger tracing the lead borders of the window.

“I am a student of the Kabala,” Quevedo answers, relieved and trying to sound serious.

“The cross you hold,” Kinsky says, “is, as you say, an elemental image for millions of people all over the world, yes?”

Quevedo stays quiet.

“They worship before it, wear it on their persons. They bow down before it. It is a symbol of their faith. It is a sign of something beyond themselves. Beyond this brutal world. I don’t understand people who believe in signs and symbols, Luis. But I would like to. I would give more than you can imagine to feel what they feel.”

Quevedo looks down at his hands, tries to estimate the weight of the crucifix.

“I find Quinsigamond,” Kinsky says, “much like old Maisel. Both are built on seven hills. Both serve as home for many tribes. People brushing up against each other. Each night exploding with transactions of every variety. Everyone trying to summon up one demon and strike down another.

“I will die a committed atheist, Luis. But I was born a Jew. I can no longer believe in a God, but I made sure I sent the boys to the Talmud schools. Why do you think that is, Luis?”

Quevedo knows better than to try and answer.

“There is no one left from before. Most of my people perished in Lidice. The rest were taken more recently in the July Sweep. My wife, Julia, she died giving birth to my son, Jakob. Now, there is only myself, and Jakob, and my nephew Felix.”

Kinsky moves back to the altar and finally begins to pour tea that, Quevedo knows, neither of them will drink.

“Genocide,” Hermann says, “is a stunning concept. We see it over and over again. Never too much time in between. But we cannot seem to get our minds around it.”

He strolls back to Quevedo, takes the crucifix from him.

“When my mother was horsewhipped to death on the hottest day of the summer, in a two-day pogrom that still has no name, I lost, forever, my past. When my Julia convulsed giving life to Jakob, I lost my present. And when my son finally turns on me, I will have lost my future. There is no way to harm me. There is nothing that can be taken from me. I live for momentum and acquisition. This is neither good nor bad. It is simply the truth.”

Kinsky repockets the cross, stares into Quevedo’s creamy eyes.

“When people like yourself, like my son Jakob, when they attempt to tell me that images can change something, can change their minds, perhaps their lives, I think those people are lying to me. But I would give almost anything to be sure.”

He takes a deep breath. The sound of his lungs expanding and retracting fills the small space between the two men. Hermann puts his hand gently on Quevedo’s throat.

“I have no reason to tell you these things, Mr.Quevedo. You are a broker. A facilitator. You take my money and you do a job for me. I am a man with only a certain amount of patience. I ask you to do what is necessary to obtain what I want. Can you do this, Mr. Quevedo?”

Quevedo swallows, breathes in the stale air of the chapel, and says, “I will get you the pictures, Mr. Kinsky.”

9

Sylvia has no idea what time she finally went to bed. Her eyes were bleary by the time she locked up the darkroom and came back upstairs. Perry’s gone when she wakes up and there’s no note on the kitchen table. She’ll have to make some kind of peace tonight, maybe cook him some red meat. Bring home a cop video and some German beer. She should make a list.

But first she’ll call in sick to the Snapshot Shack. Cora, the manager from hell who always leaves the booth stinking of cigar, tells her this is her last sick day, one more call and she’ll lose the job. Cora’s been crazy since she met the new regional director of the Shack, a creepy thug named Felix who dresses like something out of the old Shaft movies. Sylvia says she’s on penicillin, for God’s sake. She’s got a temp of a hundred and two. They’re putting cold compresses on her forehead. Cora says she’s been warned and slams down the phone.

Sylvia debates taking the photos with her as she dresses. She thinks about printing up a second set for safekeeping, but she knows if she goes down in the cellar it’ll be afternoon before she gets down to the Canal Zone. She leaves the shots in the darkroom. She takes her Canon and on the bus down to the Zone she loads a fresh roll of film and day-dreams titles for the Aquinas series.

Skin & Stone, #s 1–7.

Last Inhabitants of the Cathedral.

Madonna and Child, Forgotten, Post-Apocalypse.

Everything sounds too gallery-hip to her. It’s more likely the series has no name, that if the artist couldn’t bring himself to finish the work, he probably didn’t even consider titling it. She keeps coming back to the question of what was going through the photographer’s mind each time he pressed the shutter button. She’s not sure why this is so important to her. It’s probably another conceit, another hope for a dream methodology, a system for turning yourself into a real artist, injecting yourself with instinct and vision. What if the photographer could, in fact, tell her exactly what he was thinking when he captured those seven pictures? What if he could convey the exact experience, nail down for her the feel of the moment, the aura that came from his subjects, the surety of his focus and timing and overall judgment? What would it get her? Would she walk away from this stranger any closer to finding and nailing her own moment, to freezing her own seven pieces of vision?

She gets off the bus on West Street, walks around the corner onto Waldstein and down a block to Jack Derry’s. She pulls open the door and steps into the shop and stares at a completely empty shell. She moves inside, stands in the center of the room and turns full around. The entire store has been stripped. The piles upon piles of unsorted equipment have vanished. The plywood counter is completely cleared. The antique cash register is missing. Even the curtain that hid the back storeroom is gone.

This is impossible. She was here twenty hours ago. The more she looks around, the more she starts to notice small things. Weird, quirky, little things. The store has been more than stripped. It’s been gutted. The face plates are missing from the electrical outlets. A full section of paneling has been torn off a side wall exposing the gouged plaster underneath. And behind the counter what might have been a phone jack has been ripped out, leaving a half-inch of multicolored wires hanging in the air. There isn’t a single camera or lens or flash to be found. Not a filter or canister of film. If you didn’t look at the sign outside, you’d never know what had once been sold in here.

She walks into the storeroom and it’s the same story. There’s a wall of metal cabinets, the doors wide open and not a thing inside. The walls of shelving are all completely bare. There isn’t a bag of rubbish nor a basket of trash. Not a carton of useless junk left behind for the next tenant to deal with. There’s not a scrap of physical evidence that yesterday at this time, this store housed a used-camera business that had been in operation, according to the sign out front, since 1965.

She’s still standing in the storeroom in shock, staring at the empty storage shelves, when she hears the voice.

“You’re looking for Derry?”

Her heart punches in her chest and she spins around, off-balance, to see a tall, elderly man standing in the front entrance. She takes a breath and a swallow and says,” Excuse me?” even though she heard his question.

He steps into the store and says, “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He’s got some sort of accent that Sylvia can’t place and as he steps closer she sees he’s carrying one of those retractable white canes and she looks up to his face and sees that his eyes are completely whited out, glazed over with such severe cataracts that the pupils are no longer even visible. The glazing of the eyes gives him the look of a malignant librarian. He’s got huge ears. His hair is thin and wispy and white and combed back over the crown of his head, but his eyebrows are as thick as caterpillars. The top half of his face is gaunt, the bottom almost jowly. His skin is the color of faded newspaper.

She comes out of the storeroom as far as the front counter.

“No, that’s all right. No problem. I just … I was in here yesterday. What happened? Where’d he go?”

The old man sighs and shuffles forward until his right hand touches the countertop. He’s dressed in a kind of old-fashioned three-piece suit that’s gone seedy and permanently rumpled. But there’s something about the way he carries himself. Kind of formal and dignified. Really sort of archaic. Like Sylvia’s idea of old-time European. Like the way she’d expect some early-century count or duke to hold himself.

“I was hoping,” he says, “you might tell me.”

She shrugs and then realizes he probably can’t see her and says, “I’m just a customer. Was a customer. I picked up a camera here yesterday. I haven’t even paid for it yet. I needed to talk to—”

“Derry,” he interrupts.

“Yeah,” she says, “Mr. Derry. About the camera. I need to pay him.”

“I’m afraid,” he says, “I have just the opposite problem. Derry owes me a good deal of money. I was worried something like this might happen.”

He tilts his head back until his face is aimed at the ceiling. It makes her uncomfortable and she says, “This is crazy. He can’t just pack up and disappear overnight. That doesn’t happen.”

He brings his head back down. “It appears that is exactly what has happened.”

“I can’t believe this.”

The man folds his hands together and rests them on the counter. “You are not one of Derry’s regular customers?” he says.

She looks at his face, then looks past him to the front door and it suddenly strikes her how out of place he appears. The old suit and the formal manner. They’re in the Canal Zone, for God’s sake.

“Do you work here?” she asks.

He gives a brief smile and shakes his head. “Forgive me, again. Derry’s departure is no excuse for my rudeness.” He actually bows slightly and says, “I am Luis Quevedo. I am the manager next door. Derry was my neighbor, you see.”

“Sylvia Krafft,” she says and puts out her hand to shake, but he takes it and brings it up to his lips and kisses it.

She gets a little flustered and amused and blurts out, “Next door?” then immediately regrets it. But Mr. Quevedo just smiles and nods, takes a business card from his pocket and extends it toward her. She looks at it and reads

Brody’s Adult Books

purveyors of fine erotica

custom tailored to your individual needs

L. Quevedo, manager

“You manage the place next door?” she says.

“For over twenty years now,” he says. “It was the first job I found after I emigrated. It has supported me well all these years.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to sound so surprised. You just don’t look … I mean, you just didn’t seem—”

“Have you ever visited my store?” he asks.

“No,” she says, biting off a laugh. “No, I don’t believe I’ve ever visited.”

His shoulders sag a bit and he nods and says, “Would you like to visit now?”

“Oh,” she says, caught off guard. “Well, I don’t think so. Thank you for the offer and all. But I should really get going. I should really—”

“It’s very slow in the morning,” he says. “I could make us some tea. We could discuss our mutual problem.”

“Problem?”

“How to find Derry? You still wish to find Derry, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yes, but—”

“Please, Sylvia, you have nothing to fear from an old man. You can see that, can’t you?”

“It’s not that. I—”

“I could tell you some things that might help you locate him. After twenty years, a man comes to know some things about his neighbor.”

“What things?” she says.

“Come next door,” he says, extending his arm like some elderly groom. “Come now. I will give you a tour of my shop. Aren’t you the least bit curious? I find most people are.”

“What things do you know about Mr. Derry?” she asks.

“Let us have some tea, Sylvia,” he says, gesturing toward the door with his head. “We can relax. I’ll tell you everything.”

She moves around the counter, all set to walk past him and head home. But she surprises herself by stopping at the door and turning back and saying, “After you.”

“Wonderful,” he says and gives a snap of his wrist to assemble his cane. She’s a little startled by the vigor of his movement. He comes up next to her and again extends his arm and not knowing what else to do, she takes it, as if he were some bizarre and long-lost grandfather, and they step out onto the sidewalk.

“The weather people,” Mr. Quevedo says, “they are predicting a particularly cold winter.”

They step over to the adjoining storefront and he pulls a set of keys from his suitcoat pocket. Sylvia watches his hands tremble a bit as he tries to fit the correct key into the slot. Like Jack Derry’s the front of the building is red brick with two inset plate glass windows on either side of the doorway. There’s no neon above the entrance, however, just a handpainted sign, slightly faded, with calligraphied lettering that reads Brody’s Adult Books on what looks like a steel-plated door. The front windows of the shop have some kind of smoked glaze over them that makes it almost impossible to see inside.

“I hate the winter myself,” Mr. Quevedo says, pushing the door open and stepping aside so she can enter. It’s dark inside until he throws a wall switch and the room fills with an old-fashioned kind of yellowish glow from stencilled globe lamps mounted high up on the walls.

“May I take your coat?” he asks, but she shakes him off.

“No thanks,” she says, folding her arms. “I can only stay a few minutes.”

Somewhere in the rear of the store a phone starts to ring.

“That’s unusual,” he says, seemingly to himself. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in just a moment.” He disappears down a tall aisle of bookcases and after a second the ringing stops.

The shop is nothing like Sylvia would have expected. She’s never been in one of these places before, but she’s got to imagine Brody’s is the exception and not the rule. If it weren’t for the sign on the door, she’d mistake it for a cozy, secondhand book den, the kind of place you’d stumble upon in one of those semi-sleepy Berkshire towns. The only thing it shares with Derry’s location. She expected a kind of sleazy, shabby dump, sort of a gritty, stale shack with dirty linoleum on the floor and peeling paint and steaming radiators and lines of these hard-up raincoat perverts drooling over crumpled magazines.

Brody’s is as neat as some tony doctor’s office, but a lot warmer. There are beautiful Persian rugs on the floor and the walls are covered with what look like mahogany bookshelves. There are a few prints hanging on an open wall, all framed in antique gilt. She’s struck immediately by the one she recognizes — Jean Fouquet’s Madonna and Child, a painting that’s always bothered her a little, probably due to all those wooden-faced angels surrounding the mother and infant. Today, it’s like some eerie warning sign of coincidence.

There are two brocade-covered settees facing each other and separated by a low, wide, heavy-looking coffee table covered with oversized art books. It’s only when you start to settle in and look closer that the true nature of the shop becomes recognizable. The porcelain figurines displayed here and there on shelves are locked into various stages of lewd behavior. The leather-bound coffee table books sport titles like Beyond the Kama Sutra and A Manual for Extended Ecstasy. Even the coat rack in the corner seems to have a slightly phallic design to it.

She starts to walk toward a glass cabinet with a sign above it that reads First Editions — Please ask the manager for help, when Mr. Quevedo returns to the front of the store. His white cane is gone and he has no difficulty in making his way to the couch.

“Excuse the interruption,” he says and gestures that she should take a seat opposite him. “A customer calling from Brazil with an order.”

She sits on the edge of the settee. “You have a customer from Brazil?”

“I have several,” he says. “The majority of our business has always been mail order. We send out catalogues quarterly. We tend to service what is called the plush end of the customer base. Cosmopolitan. Educated and urbane. Old family money.”

“I had no idea. I mean, this isn’t what I expected to find in here.”

“You’ve passed by our store before?”

“A’ few times,” she says. “I’m not from this part of the city.”

“You’re a native?” he asks and seems surprised.

“Whole life. I went away to college but that’s it. You’re not from here, are you? I hear an accent.”

A teakettle begins to whistle and he smiles, mouths the words excuse me and moves again to the back of the store. She hears a moment of muffled clatter like dishes clinking together, then the whistle sound dies away and it’s silent in the store and suddenly she starts to think she should get up and leave before the old man comes back.

Instead, she opens one of the art books on the coffee table and finds herself looking at a full-page artist’s rendering of some obscure and acrobatic coitus. The style is clear and detailed, close to photo-real. There’s a man and woman, fully naked, sprawled on a stark white background and depicted from above. And she can’t take her eyes off them until she hears Mr. Quevedo clear his throat and turns to see him standing behind the settee carrying a small silver tray that holds a teapot and two cups.

She closes the book immediately and shifts her position. She’s both embarrassed and nervous, as if her mother had caught her disobeying some strict commandment. But then it occurs to her—the man’s blind, right? He can’t see what I’m doing, can he?

Whatever Mr. Quevedo can or cannot see, he makes no mention of the book. He places the tray down on the table and fills her teacup with a steaming, rose-colored liquid.

“I was born,” he says, picking up the conversation, “in Buenos Aires. A small suburban district called, if you will believe it, Palermo. But I spent a good deal of my formative years traveling the continent. Actually, I’ve resided here in Quinsigamond longer than anywhere else. It took me years to find a city that fit my needs. I have no intention of moving again.”

Sylvia takes a sip of the tea. It has an overly perfumed smell, but it tastes delicious. “And how did you come to live here?”

“That,” he says, “is a long and very tedious story.”

He pours himself a cup, sticks his little finger into the tea, waits a beat, then uncaps the pot and pours his cup back inside. He brings his hand up to his mouth and dabs at his lips with the little finger.

She looks away, takes another sip of her tea. She says, “You mentioned that you might know how I could find Mr. Derry.”

“Possibly,” he says and she can’t help but stare at his eyes. They’re like those cloudy marbles you used to see in the candy store as a kid. They’re like sockets of watery milk. They’re off-putting and they almost make her cringe, but she can’t stop focusing in on them.

“Is there a reason that Mr. Derry would have stripped the shop and disappeared like this overnight?”

He gives her an indulgent smile.

“The problem, my dear, is that there are many reasons.” He pauses, changes the tone of his voice and asks, “You purchased a camera from him recently?”

“A used Aquinas. A real find. It’s twenty years old, but it’s in great shape. The thing is, Derry told me to take it home and try it out. I haven’t paid for it yet.”

“Forgive me,” he says, pours another cup of tea and goes through the same routine with his little finger. This time, however, he leaves the tea in his cup. “Most people would not deem this a problem. I think most people would consider this a great stroke of fortune.”

“You’re saying I should just keep the camera.”

He sips at the tea and shrugs. “You came today to pay the man. Your intentions were honorable. You are not the one who disappeared, are you?”

“Well, no,” she says, “but—”

He leans forward a bit. “There is another problem?”

“It’s not a problem, really, I just wanted …”

“You had questions about the camera?”

Sylvia feels like he’s pressuring her, leaning in toward her. She feels like she doesn’t want to tell him about the photographs. And yet he may know something about how to find Derry. So she says, “There was some film left in the camera. I assume it belonged to the previous owner. I was hoping Mr. Deny could help me return it.”

“Return the film?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“Couldn’t the previous owner simply purchase new film? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

She can feel the manipulation. The old guy wants the whole story. And it’s clear he’s not going to come up with any help until he gets some explanation.

She puts down her teacup. “I guess I haven’t made myself clear. You see, the film had been exposed. The previous owner had already taken some pictures. I wanted to return the pictures.”

He sits back, makes a big effort at crossing his legs, exerts a lot of energy. Then he folds his hands together and rests them on his belly. He stares at her, suddenly no longer grandfatherly but more like some weary grade-school principal who’s too long in his job and too far from retirement. Sylvia’s uncomfortable with his look and she wants to leave, maybe drive out to the Snapshot Shack and relieve Cora, sit in the booth alone for the rest of the day listening to AM radio and looking over people’s vacation pictures.

“You developed the photographs,” Mr. Quevedo says quietly.

“I have a darkroom,” she says, “In my cellar. I’m a photographer.”

He waits for a minute staring at her the whole time, then says, “Would I be familiar with your work?”

Now she’s embarrassed.

“It’s not like that,” she says. “I don’t make my living at it. I just take a lot of pictures. I go out and shoot a lot of film.”

“A hobby then?”

She hates the word.

“Not, not at all. Not a hobby.”

She’s fumbling. She can’t seem to order her thoughts.

“I’m just starting out,” she says. “I’ve had some problems. Some …”

“Complications,” he finishes for her.

“There was a family illness. My mother passed away.”

He nods, concerned. Patriarchal.

“I’m very sorry,” he says.

“I just got off track for a while,” she says. “I lost my focus.”

More solemn nodding. He pulls at the stiff cuffs of his shirt and they sit in silence. Sylvia tries to concentrate on the tea, looks down and pretends to study the swirling patterns of the carpet.

“These photographs you developed,” he says, “the ones from the camera. What did you find?”

Her eyes come up to his face and she says, “They were stunning.”

“Nature scenes?” he asks.

“No. Nothing like that. There were seven shots. All of the same subjects. A woman and her child. An infant. Inside an old building of some sort. Incredible use of shadow. The gradations were—”

“Masterful?” he says.

She’s getting annoyed with his interruptions.

“The best thing I can say is they were genuine. They hit me like a bullet. They hung on. It’s difficult to explain.”

“Believe me, Sylvia,” he says, “twenty years in this business, you come to understand the importance of the elemental image.”

She looks past him at the Fouquet.

“I guess that would be true,” she says, then adds, “I like that phrase. Elemental image.”

But he’s moved on. He’s tapping his chin and mouth with his long index finger.

“You know,” he says, “the work sounds very much like Propp.”

She waits for him to go on and when he doesn’t she says, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand,” he says. “I’m saying it’s most likely a talented imitator. Perhaps a student studying the technique of the master.”

“Propp?”

“You disagree?” he says. “Well, of course, you’ve seen the work. And your description was very generic. You have to understand my specialty is more literary. And classical rather than contemporary. As you can imagine, I’m not very well versed in photography. Always a step removed, so to speak. A passing familiarity with the basics. When I hear shadowy Madonna and child, naturally I think of Propp.”

“Naturally,” she says.

“Are you one of the fans or one of the detractors?” he asks. “It has been my experience that there is no fence-sitting when it comes to Propp.”

She takes a deep breath. If she tries to act like she knows what he’s talking about she’ll only look more foolish in the end. So she exposes her ignorance, her glaring un-hipness. She asks, “Who is Propp?”

Mr. Quevedo is taken aback. He straightens up and uncrosses his legs, leans forward toward her. He’s no longer the school principal, but the understanding priest of Sylvia’s childhood dreams.

He clears his throat, lowers his voice and says, “Forgive me again, Sylvia. I’ve been quite impolite all morning. I forget that simply because someone is legend in the Canal Zone it does not necessarily mean they are a household word beyond our borders. You are not familiar with Terrence Propp?”

“I assume he’s a photographer?”

He nods. “I’m really not an authority. I’m an old man who takes his supper in the cafés. I’ve heard the stories and rumors for so long now that I assume the rest of the world is just as soaked in the myth.”

“The myth?”

“I can give you the names of some who can help you. Very likely, they can look at the photographs and tell you who took them. Propp is their obsession, not mine.”

“You’re using words like myth and obsession. I can’t believe I haven’t heard of this guy.”

He shrugs, gives a smile that’s not quite sheepish. He blinks a few times and says, “Is is so surprising really? There is no single pool anymore. There hasn’t been for some time. Everything has fragmented. Why should culture follow a different road? Propp is a single particle, floating in a narrow vein. Though I warn you, Sylvia, the faithful will tell you otherwise. And quite emphatically.”

“It’s just a little strange,” she says. “I mean, I go to the galleries regularly. I hang around the art sections at all the bookstores. I would think I would have—”

“I once heard it said that Propp is only stumbled upon by those he wishes to have stumble upon him.”

She thinks for a second and says, “I don’t follow you.”

He waves a hand at her.

“It was said by a fanatic. So much cryptic babble. You know the young ones down here, they think their art is some mystery religion. That’s the problem with cultists. They always lose their capacity for humor. Of course I believe in commitment to the work. And yes, Sylvia, there can be fun in the hoax. In gamesmanship. I’m no stranger to the allure. The stunts we used to dream up back at the Tronador. I could go on all day. But there is a difference between walking the dog and being on the wrong end of the leash. Between using the mystery and having it use you.”

Sylvia doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

“Is there any chance,” she asks, “you could tell me where I could find Mr. Propp himself?”

He erupts with laughter. His knee hits the coffee table and tea sloshes out of his cup. Then just as quickly he brings himself under control, seemingly embarrassed by the outburst. He closes his eyes and works his mouth to calm himself, then he says, “I don’t know what has gotten into me today. I’ve been terribly rude to a lovely guest. My mother, she would spin in her grave if she could see.”

Sylvia sits silently and waits for the explanation and when Quevedo realizes that she’s not going to speak, he goes through another small session of throat clearing, then says, “The truth is, Sylvia, there is no chance I could possibly direct you to Terrence Propp.”

“Is he dead?” she asks.

“I have no idea.”

There’s another round of silence until she says, “Maybe I should go,” and this prompts the old man to stand up with a little difficulty.

“Please, I realize this is frustrating, but it’s simply because you’re not familiar with the history. I truly do not know whether Terrence Propp is among the living or the dead. And believe me, no matter what the zealots say to you, they don’t know either. Don’t be taken in, Sylvia.”

He tilts forward a bit, reaches around to his back pants pocket, pulls out a linen handkerchief and begins to mop up the spilt tea.

“Maybe you could give me the name of one of those people,” Sylvia says. “Someone who could tell me more about Mr. Propp.”

All Mr. Quevedo’s attention seems to be taken up with drying the table.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Sylvia?” He sounds distracted, almost cranky. She wants to say Hey, Mister, you’re the one who dragged me into this store and started the conversation.

“Perhaps,” he says, “you should sleep on it. You could call me tomorrow.”

She says, “You could be with Mr. Derry tomorrow.”

“I’m not going anywhere, my dear. I’m here for the duration.”

“How about that name, Mr. Quevedo?”

He stands there, blank faced, seeming to stare at her with those gauzy, creamy eyes. Then he does a little, stiff march to the front door and opens it, indicating that she should go. She follows him to the door, stops in the entryway and says, “Well, anyway, thank you for the tea.”

He nods, clicks his heels together and says, “Rory Gaston. You can find him at Der Geheime Garten. A little café just a few blocks from here. Der Garten, to the regulars.”

Then he leans forward and plants a dry, withered-feeling kiss on her right cheek, takes her elbow and ushers her out onto the sidewalk. Sylvia turns to thank him, but he’s already closed the door.

10

Sylvia looks up and down Waldstein, then walks back down to Jack Derry’s and stares in the window. She doesn’t know what she expects to see. It’s still deserted and there’s still no trace that yesterday she stood at the plywood counter, surrounded by hundreds of dusty piles of hocked and traded camera equipment, and talked with Mr. Derry and walked back out again with her dreamed-about Aquinas. There’s no sign that the store was ever anything but deserted. That it didn’t fall to vacancy ten years ago rather than last night.

She glances to her left and sees a greasy-looking guy in army fatigues leaning against the stop sign and staring at her, making noises with his mouth that she can’t hear. As soon as their eyes meet, he starts making these horrible, exaggerated kissing sounds and he jams his hands into his coat pockets and goes into a bizarre Elvis impersonation, swinging his hips in a slow circle as if trying to keep a Hula Hoop aloft.

She turns away from Jack Derry’s and starts to head for Voegelin Avenue. A pack of five or six Zone kids run past her in full bohemian colore — leather trench coats, bandanna’d skulls, earrings that hang to the neck. They’re all carrying something in their arms and Sylvia can’t see what it is until one of them trips and sprawls into the middle of the road and gets to his knees, his chest covered with running, yellow yolk, and he starts yelling, “My fucking eggs.” He gets up, starts to wipe at his chest with his hands, gives up the effort as futile and continues on after his friends.

Sylvia comes around the corner of Voegelin and onto Watson and immediately sees where the artists were headed. She’s stopped by a huge crowd that’s taken over the entire street. Traffic can’t pass and a line of cars is starting to form and lean on their horns. The noise of the crowd seems to increase as she starts to wade through it and then there’s an awful squeal, that piercing high-pitched whine of feedback that a radio or amplifier will sometimes make. The crowd flinches in unison as the whine dies and then a rolling, familiar voice shouts, “I’m sorry, people. Very sorry. Is it working, Raymond? Can they hear me?”

She’s half a block away from the heart of the action but she can see the crowd’s center is in front of Herzog’s Erotic Palace, known locally as the Skin Palace, a baroque and expansive X-rated movie house that’s also the oldest theater in Quinsigamond. More an architectural miracle than a building, it’s a five-story Moderne temple and just the sight of it makes all the shoebox mall cineplexes even more heinous.

Sylvia squeezes through bodies until she’s directly opposite Herzog’s. She spots a mailbox and hoists herself up on it in time to see Reverend Garland Boetell being elevated onto the roof of an old white Cadillac that has the words Chariot of Virtue emblazoned on its side in glitter paint. Boetell’s got a microphone of some kind gripped in both his hands and as he blows across its head, the street fills with the sound of a moist wind. The Chariot of Virtue has been pulled up onto the sidewalk and it’s surrounded by what must be the Reverend’s inner core, about a dozen men and women led by the Brazilian teen aide-de-camp Fernando, all of them dressed in what look like heavy robes, kind of like monk’s robes, with cowl hoods hanging down the back and loose, rope-like belts. This crew is walking in slow circles around the car, carrying placards with messages like Whores of Babylon, Your Time Has Come and Save the Children From This Filth and Carnal Sinners Reside Within.

In front of the entrance to Herzog’s is a line of the Palace’s resident muscle, beefy steroid cases all decked out in logo’d spandex jackets and cowboy boots. They’ve formed a well-pumped barricade in front of the door by standing shoulder to shoulder. They’ve got their folded hands clasped in front of their groins, secret-service style. And they’re looking none too happy. It’s clear they’d like to put a quick and definitive stop to this spectacle, but they must have orders from the boss to simply hold the front line until the lawyers decide how to play things.

Boetell seems thrilled by the presence of the bouncers. He’s a pro at this kind of media event and it’s always more effective to rail against human flesh, no matter how restrained, than inanimate brick and mortar.

“Look at them before us,” the Reverend bellows into the microphone, “guarding the gates to hell itself. Boys,” he addresses the bouncers directly, “when you stand before the Almighty on your personal judgment day and the Lord asks you how you spent your days on the earth, what, in the name of mercy, are you going to tell him? What kind of answer will you give to the face of your one and only savior? Will you say, Sweet Jesus, I served in the legion of the antichrist? Will you say, Dear Lord A’mighty, I ushered the misguided into the cushioned seats of damnation? Fall on your knees here and now, sinners, and offer up prayer with Reverend Boetell that we might buy back your immortal souls from the demon.”

But the bouncers aren’t having any of it. They keep their rigid stances behind their bushy mustaches until one guy at the end gives in to the temptation and flashes Boetell a defiant middle finger.

The Reverend wheels to the crowd and barks, “Then we must pray for them, my friends. It is our mission on this rock. Let us now raise our voices so that the strength of the Archangel might descend upon us and we prove worthy to fight the final battle at the time of Millennium. Sing now with me, people. Sing loud and send your voices soaring to heaven that he might bring the rain of fire down upon this bastion of carnal hideousness. That he might smite this wicked temple as he did Sodom and Gomorrah.”

As if on cue the gang in the robes circling the Caddy breaks into “Nearer My God To Thee.” The first few yards of people beyond them join in the singing. But after that the street is clogged with packs of Canalites and furious motorists and they start in with catcalls and heckling. Boetell yells above the voices of his choir, “Your taunting will only make us stronger. You are advised, one and all, that the decent people of Quinsigamond are taking back their city. They will not tolerate abominations such as this one,” a wildly dramatic gesture toward the Skin Palace. “They are linking arms with brethren from the East Coast to the West. The day of the Lord is upon us, heathens. Get thee behind me. The family of God will trample you under its heel.”

It’s on this last line that the egg throwing starts. Boetell catches one right on the jaw. The splatter covers his whole face, but he looks more thrilled than shocked, as if this were the perfect turn of events, the next exact step in a scripted pageant. He makes a show of mopping his face with the sleeve of his white suitcoat, but it’s really just a brush to a single cheek and the bulk of the yolk still shows like a runny scar.

A kid with a mohawk haircut charges the Caddy with a full, open carton of fresh grade-As, hoping to give the Reverend a complete pelting, but one of the singing disciples suddenly drops into a defensive stance, takes his 2 Thessalonians 1:8, 9 placard from his shoulder and starts swinging it like a battle-ax. On his third swing he nails mohawk in the stomach and the kid crumbles to the pavement.

The crowd starts to go crazy, pushing and shoving and screaming. The bouncers look at each other, starting to get edgy, unsure of what to do next. Boetell closes his eyes and turns his head to the heavens. He brings the mike to his lips and yells, “Send us help in our hour of need, Sweet Jesus. Send us a phalanx of reinforcements to battle those who would blaspheme the flesh and defile the soul. On your command let an army of righteous warriors join our holy platoon and war on this lascivious enemy of unbridled lust and perversion.”

And the Reverend gets his wish. A column of marching women breaks out of an alley next to the Palace and, with an almost military precision, starts to move in the direction of the Chariot of Virtue. The crowd seems so stunned by their appearance that it parts like a biblical sea and the unit raises its clenched fists in an up-and-down power salute and comes to a stop at the hood of the Caddy.

Boetell falls to his knees, careful not to dent the roof, and says, “You have rewarded our faith. You have sent the enemies of our enemies to help us beat the writhing beast into submission. Let us say Amen.”

An amen chorus sweeps through the faithful, followed by a lot of Praising the Lord. The new arrivals, however, seem less than enthusiastic about the revival rhetoric. The women are all dressed in black-and-white striped, smock-like tunics and matching pants. They’ve got large blocklike numbers stenciled in black on their backs. It’s like a costume party where everyone decided to show up as old-time prisoners, like inmates in some ancient jailbreak movie. And they’ve all got silver tape over their mouths. One woman steps up onto the Caddy’s bumper, then up to the hood, holds her hands up over her head to get the crowd’s attention, waits a beat, then gives a signal to her people and in unison they all make an exaggerated display of ripping the tape from their faces and hurling it to the ground. The leader then jumps up next to Boetell and grabs the microphone from him.

“We are the Women’s American Resistance,” and she wheels and faces the Palace bouncers, stretches her arm out and points at them and starts to yell, “Murderers, Murderers, Murderers,” in the chanting manner of a basketball cheer, but with a lifetime’s worth of hate and contempt behind every syllable. Her crew on the street joins in and goes to work unrolling a banner that comes to read Pornography Is Genocide.

The crowd seems to split into choruses of both cheers and boos and turns in on itself. Little donnybrooks erupt everywhere. One of the bouncers whispers into the ear of another, then unlocks a door behind him and runs inside. Sylvia hears police sirens in the distance as she watches Boetell trying to take the microphone back from his new partner and a fresh firestorm of eggs starts to rain down on everyone within splattering distance of the Cadillac. To the left, a gridlocked produce trucker is standing red-faced at the rear of his rig handing shallow wooden crates of tomatoes to brother truckers who look drunk with the prospects before them. A guy dressed in milkman’s overalls starts speedballing the tomatoes at the Caddy, but his first assault goes wide and hammers one of the bouncers. Palace security now goes into a crouch position and they all take some kind of black leather saps from the backs of their pants and hold them up chest-level, ready to break some bones.

The zebra-women continue flying their Genocide flag, but they’ve all pulled what looks like tubes of mace from somewhere in their costumes. A burly, bald-headed guy in an old-time baseball jacket makes the stupid mistake of choosing this moment to attempt a solo charge to rip down the women’s banner and takes a chemical blast to the face. He goes down like a rock, screaming, hands to his eyes.

And that’s when the police horses come in like a threeman cavalry, but almost immediately they’re engulfed and the surge of the crowd panics the animals and the horses start to rear up. Before Sylvia turns away, she sees a young kid knocked to the ground by a flying hoof and a panicking cop trying to maneuver his reins with one hand and yell into a walkie-talkie with the other.

Within minutes a riot squad arrives and breaks through to the meat of the upheaval. And it’s only when Sylvia sees the bobbing rows of their white helmets cutting through the plain of bodies, making a wedge and checking their way toward the Palace, that she thinks to bring her camera up to her eye.

She starts firing immeditely, the first shots reflexive and unfocused, and then she gets her bearings and the shock and fear turn into this adrenal blast and she jumps down from the mailbox and starts moving like this ghost, this bodiless form injected into the melee not just to record, not only to freeze and seal these horrible moments, but to do something else with them. To make them into something more.

She takes steps, locks in place, pivots side to side, scans the mob and instantly picks out her image. She shoots an enraged face, a cocked baseball bat, a body being pushed to the ground. She shoots Boetell with his mouth gaping and flat-palmed hand in the air, trying to trace the sign of the cross. She shoots four Teamsters holding a terrified Canal freak up above their heads, ready to launch him into the sky. She shoots an Intercourse Is Abuse placard, liberated from its owner and being used to smash in the windows of a discount appliance store. She shoots a wave of charging looters hauling stereos, televisions, microwave ovens from the store window. She shoots the arrival of the first of the Bangkok Park gangs — the Grey Roaches — jogging in to see what can be scored and picked out of this explosion of unexpected opportunity.

And then she’s knocked to the street. She doesn’t even see her attacker. She instinctively cradles the camera into her chest as she goes down full on the knees. Before she can get up, someone behind her starts screaming, “Cops,” and she pivots on her behind and brings the camera back to her eye in time to see a line of police racing the Roaches to the already ravaged appliance store. She shoots a bunch of frames of the charge. She freezes a gangboy swinging a fungo bat at a masked cop. She nails the cop knocking the bat from the kid’s hands with an arcing swing of his night-stick across the gangboy’s arms. She captures the breaking of the kid’s elbow, the free-fall to the street.

Suddenly, she’s making little movies, cinema reduced to its minimal essence, series of shots, four and five frames to a complete sequence. And all of it pure violence. Everyone is fighting everyone else and there’s very little sense of allegiances, of side against side. What appears to have started out as a classic protest event — amplified speeches setting cause against cause — has almost instantly degenerated into a fine definition of anarchy. Every man for himself and God against all. There’s blood everywhere and the Roaches have managed to set fire to the appliance mart.

Sylvia finds a pocket of clearing and runs across the street, gets her back against the wall of Herzog’s and starts focusing in on the flames. From the glass-shattered entryway of the mart, a cop and a Roach come rolling into the street, locked in a full-body clench, the cop trying to secure a hold around the Roach’s neck, the Roach squirming low, grabbing the cop waist-level and throwing short jabs to the groin. They spin out into the street, the cop rolling at the right moment to settle into an upright position on the Roach’s chest. And then he starts in with a cut-down billy club, first battering the kid’s head until the body goes prone and then grabbing the club with a hand at either end and coming down on the windpipe. Sylvia should be screaming and running into the street. But she’s just keeping her right index finger on the shutter release. Cementing the image. Exposing this suffocation to chemical-treated paper. Freezing the horrible instant.

Until the scene through the viewfinder goes black and the camera gets smashed back into her face and she’s back down on the sidewalk and now she’s screaming and looking up at another, younger cop, his face both terrified and furious. He’s hovering over her like he’s not sure what to do for a second, then he reaches down and grabs the camera, but Sylvia doesn’t let go, she’s got both hands on the shoulder strap and it’s five seconds of a pathetic and absurd tug of war and she doesn’t know why he hasn’t just let loose with his club again, but before the idea can occur, one of the Palace bouncers tackles the cop and before Sylvia can stand back up, someone has her under the arms and pulls her hard, backwards, her legs dragging across the sidewalk, back through a doorway and inside to the lobby of Herzog’s.

Then she’s released and she stays on the ground but rolls over onto her knees. She looks up to see a large man with an enormous bald head which he bows toward her as he extends a hand to help her to her feet. She gets up on her own, dazed and just starting to feel the pain in her right eye.

“I’m afraid,” the man says, “you are going to have what they once called a shiner.”

Sylvia brings a hand up to her eye, tries to touch it gingerly, then she brings the hand down to her chest and says, “My camera.”

The bald man nods and says, “My people will try to retrieve it. We’ll see what we can do. Are you from the Spy?”

She looks up at him, suddenly feeling shaky and nauseated.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asks.

She tries to say no, but all she can do is take halting breaths.

“Come,” he says. “It’s all right. You are safe now. Come to my office. You’ll be fine. We’ll wait out this incident upstairs.”

He takes her by the arm and she lets him guide her through the center of a wide lobby and up a curving staircase that opens to a balcony. They break left down a corridor and finally turn through a set of double doors and into a large, airy, brick-walled room where he deposits her on a black leather couch.

She leans forward, tilts her head down near her knees, focuses on her feet. She tries to ignore the growing pain in her eye and concentrate on her breathing. After a minute she’s able to look up and ask, “Is there a phone?”

The man is at the front window, hands clasped behind him. Without looking back he says, “The phones are out of service,” and for the first time Sylvia realizes there’s an accent, possibly German.

She puts her head in her hands and says, “I should have listened to Perry.”

With this the bald man turns to face her.

“Your husband? He warned you against traveling to the Canal Zone? Yes?”

“Not my husband. But yes, he warned me.”

He walks to the couch. “And you argued that it was part of your job. That you owed the risk to your paper.”

“My paper?”

“Who will be more angry? he asks. “The boyfriend or the editor?”

“I don’t work for the newspaper,” Sylvia says.

He sits down on the couch next to her.

“You’re not the photographer for the Spy?”

She shakes her head no and the nausea surges. She lowers her head again. The man gets up without a word and walks back to the window.

“The foolish bastards,” he says, rubbing a large hand over the crest of his skull. “I called them a half hour ago.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she says. “But thank you for pulling me out of there.”

He turns and stares at her, his face expressionless. Then he crosses the room again and says, “Trust me, Miss. You are far from disappointing.”

He bows modestly and adds. “I am Hugo Schick. Welcome to me theatre.”

“You own this place?”

“For quite some time now. Have you ever been inside before?” he leans down toward her and squints his eyes a bit. “Feel free to lie.”

It’s a second before she realizes he’s joking.

“Just once,” she says. “About two years ago. My boyfriend and I came. You know, just to see what it was like.”

He straightens up and frowns. “And you didn’t care for it? You didn’t like the film?”

“No, it was fine,” she says, too defensively. “It’s just, you know, you see one of those … I mean, it was funny. It was all right.”

He stares at her and then shrugs and starts to walk back to the window, saying over his shoulder, “I think we may be stranded here for some time. The police are having quite a time restoring order down there.”

He moves to a cabinet behind his desk and Sylvia hears a clink of glass. He returns to the couch and hands her a miniature crystal champagne glass filled with a green-colored liquid.

“Absinthe,” he says softly. “I get it from some dear friends in New Orleans. They keep a close eye on the wormwood content. Drink. It will calm you.”

She swallows it down and for the first time sits back on the couch and breathes normally. He sits down in a matching chair and crosses his legs.

“I’ll do everything in my power,” he says, “to retrieve your camera.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Schick.”

“Please, Hugo. And I can call you?”

“Sylvia,” she says, somehow embarrassed by the sound of her own name. “Sylvia Krafft.”

“A wonderful name. A very dramatic name. Yes. I will say it suits you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“As it was intended,” he says. “Now tell me, Sylvia. If you are not from the paper, what are you doing down here, pointing a camera around in the middle of this tumult? Is this a hobby for you, finding war zones and recording them?”

“I was just walking through here,” she says. “I was just heading home after an errand. This thing just broke out around me. I stopped for a second to hear Boetell speak—”

“Boetell?” he asks, straightening in his seat.

“The preacher. The guy on top of the Cadillac with the microphone.”

“Of course,” he says. “Of course. Go on.”

“That was it. I stopped for a second and all hell broke loose. It was like someone put a match to a gas tank. One minute the crowd is all mumbles and sneers, the next they’re tearing each other apart. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He looks at her doubtfully. “Please, Sylvia. Who is so innocent today?”

“I mean up close,” she says. “It’s different than TV. It’s different from seeing pictures in the paper. I mean, to feel it on your body. It’s a completely different thing.”

He nods agreement. “But the camera—”

“I usually have a camera on me.”

“So you are a photographer?” he says, slightly excited.

She takes another sip of absinthe, finishes the glass. “That depends,” she says, “on who you ask. Do I take a lot of pictures? Yes. Do I make a living at it? Absolutely not.”

“Do you wish to make a living at it?”

The question hits her, but somewhat differently than when Perry asks it. “I really don’t know. It’s a strange thing. I feel kind of like once you start doing it for money … Jesus, listen to what this sounds like.”

“Yes?” he says, barely repressing a smile.

“It’s just … It’s a little hard to explain. I feel a little like if I started to sell my pictures, I’d start taking different pictures. Like I couldn’t help it, you know? Like it would happen subconsciouly. I don’t know. It’s difficult to explain. It sounds so …”

“Mystical?” he offers.

She laughs. “I was going to say pretentious.”

He dismisses the word. “Not at all. I have to tell you, I have a very clear idea of what you’re saying here. I’ve struggled with this myself. The prostituting of the muse. The schizophrenia of commerce and art.”

“Well, that’s not exactly—” she starts, but he continues.

“It’s the nature of the time and the place we work in. The breach is symptomatic of something much darker. I know exactly what you are saying here, Sylvia.”

She doesn’t say anything. She wishes he’d offer another drink.

“I think,” he says, “that it’s fortuitous we met today. In the way we did. I promise you neither of us will forget it, yes?”

“You really saved me out there,” she nods. “I owe you one.”

“Think nothing of it,” he says, a hand flat on his chest. “All things in good time.”

He reaches over and takes the glass from her hand, gets up and moves to the window. “They’re turning fire hoses on the crowd,” he says.

Sylvia gets up from the couch to look, then decides she doesn’t want to. Instead, she glances around the office. On the wall behind Schick’s desk are seven framed movie posters. They look like every other movie poster except that all of them show semi-naked people wrapped into various lewd poses. The titles are El Jefe & the Whip, Night of the Amateur, Wynona’s Tree Duck, My Solitary Diamond, Flo’s Happy Ending, The Wolf Inside Sharon and Don Juan Triumphant.

“I’ve made hundreds of films,” Hugo says, now sitting on the window ledge and watching her study the posters, “but these are the ones which will last. These are the works I will be remembered by.”

He seems lost in thought for a second, then walks over and says, “It occurs to me, Sylvia, while you’re here waiting, perhaps, if you’re feeling up to it, of course …”

“Yes,” she says, trying to prompt him.

“Well, I wonder if possibly you might enjoy a tour of the theater.”

She’s not sure how to answer so she says, “Thank you, Mr. Schick, really, that’s—”

“Hugo, please.”

“Thank you, Hugo, that’s kind of you, but I should probably just wait here until—”

“You do know the history of this building, don’t you? It’s the oldest functioning theater in the city.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that, but—”

“Built by Hans Herzog in 1935. At a cost of the entire family fortune. Do you know the Herzog tragedy? Are you familiar with the story?”

“I may have read—”

“Acht, read,” he says, disgusted, it seems, with the printed word. “Come. Up now. Come with me, Sylvia. Allow me to give you the tour. I’ll show you things that will make the incident outside a vague memory.”

It’s clear he won’t hear no, and she does owe him for pulling her to safety, so she gets up from the couch and follows him to the doorway. He gestures her into the corridor and closes the door behind them and asks, “Where are you from originally, Sylvia?”

“I was born right here in Quinsigamond,” she says as they start down the hall.

This seems to surprise him. He looks at her for a second as he continues to walk, then says, “Is that right? Most of my people, the people I work with, they come from somewhere else. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who was originally born here.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Our line of work,” he says. “We are a mobile people.”

They come to a stop back at the balcony area that looks down on the lobby. It’s an impressive sight. The ceiling rises up about twenty feet and the floor runs about forty or fifty feet long. The walls are curved so dramatically that when viewed from above like this, the foyer has the feel of a huge bowl. Everywhere there are mirrors and gold leaf, marble and bronze edging. It’s genuinely one of the most beautiful buildings Sylvia has ever been in.

“God,” she says, staring at the patterns in the tile floor, “you would never know—” and then she stops herself.

But Hugo tilts his head and smiles and finishes for her. “That they showed dirty movies inside, yes?”

“No, I just meant—”

“That’s exactly what you meant, Sylvia,” he says, but he doesn’t seem upset.

“It’s just,” she tries, “I mean, I knew, I’ve read, that it was a significant building, you know, historically—”

“I thought you visited,” he says. “With the boyfriend.”

“I did, but, I don’t know. We were self-conscious. We just bought our tickets and ran inside. I didn’t look around.”

He nods, maybe a little patronizing. “I’ve been attempting to restore it. Very gradually. One project at a time. As the money becomes available.”

She looks back down on the lobby. “You should get the historical society down here. You should get some grant money.”

He barks a laugh that fills the whole gulf before them. “The city fathers,” he says, “will tolerate me as long as I stay fairly quiet and remember them at fund-raising time with an anonymous donation. I’m afraid, my dear, the care of this marvel has been left to Schick alone.”

He puts his hand on the brass railing and takes a tight grip. “She is sixty years old. Designed for a year by a protégé of Donald Deskey himself. Young man named Rejlander. He used all the new materials — aluminum and Bakelite. Spent over three million dollars. This when money had a value that we can no longer comprehend in our shabby age.”

He takes her by the arm and steers through a set of huge double doors into the theatre proper and Sylvia looks up to see enormous naked people coupling on the screen.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Hugo whispers in her ear. “The customers were already in the house when the rioting broke out. We’re rerunning the feature until it’s safe for them to leave.”

“It’s all right,” she whispers back, but she’s completely unprepared for this display.

She stares at the acrobatics while Hugo continues to whisper. “One thousand floor seats of symmetric Moderne perfection. Another two hundred up here in the balcony. And nine private owner’s boxes running above us.”

He leads her to the balcony railing. She looks down from the screen to the floor and is shocked to see the theater half-filled in the middle of the day.

“The stars that have played in this room,” he says. “W. C. Fields on opening night. Mr. Ray Bolger. The Flying Wallendas. Chaplin was here. Never performed, but he was in the audience. A personal favor to Herzog himself. The next day a peasant from the Spy had the gall to call this treasure, this Xanadu, a vulgar curiosity. Can you imagine, Sylvia? It was too much for the arbiters of taste to comprehend. Vulgar curiosity. They say those two words broke Herzog’s heart. That he never got over the affront. The moment he read that review was the beginning of his decline.”

Sylvia listens to his words, but she’s watching a woman having sex with three men simultaneously. It’s broad daylight and she’s standing in what must be the most luxurious pornographic theatre in America being lectured by a bald Viennese man as she watches graphic sex acts on a three-story screen.

“I would put my Palace,” Hugo says, “up against any of them. The Pantages. The Avalon in Chicago. The Fox in Atlanta. Even S. Charles Lee and his Los Angeles. They may be larger, perhaps more ornate. But there is a feel here. An aura and an atmosphere that is unsurpassed.”

He lowers his voice and adds, “Of course, I am a bit prejudiced.”

“It’s a stunning building,” Sylvia says.

His eyes turn to the screen. “I hope you’re not offended by our feature.”

For some reason she wants to laugh. “This isn’t exactly how I planned the day.”

“Surprise,” Hugo says, “is the essence of life, Sylvia. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

“I thought that was variety.”

Before he can respond a voice behind them says, “You want to keep it down,” and Sylvia flinches. They look up to the last row to see the only person in the balcony, sitting up directly under the beam of the projection light.

Hugo puts his hands on his hips and says out of the corner of his mouth, “Speaking of variety,” and then, “Come with me, Sylvia. You’ll love this.”

She follows him up the steep stairs to the second to last row where they slide in to face this audience of one. It’s a woman, about Sylvia’s age, dressed in a silk, rose-colored bathrobe, but she’s got her feet resting on the chair in front of her and her robe breaks away to reveal her bare legs up to her thighs. She’s got blonde hair and even in this light Sylvia can tell she’s got killer skin. There’s a bucket of popcorn in her lap and as Hugo comes to a stop in front of her, blocking her view of the screen, she throws a kernel at him.

“Ever the narcissist,” Hugo whispers, brushing at his jacket.

“Learned from the best, Schickster.”

Hugo angles awkwardly in the aisle and says, “Sylvia Krafft, I would like you to meet Leni Pauline.”

Sylvia reaches over and shakes Leni’s hand, brings her own back wet with butter.

Leni ignores her and says to Hugo, “That’s it boss, keep recruiting the amateurs. God, you couldn’t do a cost analysis if your life depended on it.” Then she tilts her body to the side to try to see around Hugo and says, “Honey, don’t you sign a thing until you and I have a long talk.”

“Once again,” Hugo says, “your instincts couldn’t be more wrong.”

Leni throws another kernel of corn and says, “We’ll see.” She looks at Sylvia and says. “So are you a fan? How do you like my work?”

“Your work?” Sylvia repeats and Leni gives a huge smile and points to the screen.

Sylvia turns and looks and realizes that the woman up on the screen, the naked woman enlarged to three stories high and currently having a jar of honey dripped on her by a very tall man, also naked except for a chef’s toque on his head, that woman is this woman. That woman on the screen writhing under the coating of golden liquid is Leni Pauline.

“You’re very …” Sylvia starts and when nothing comes to her, she says, “you have beautiful skin.”

Leni looks from Sylvia to Hugo and says, “What is she, a cosmetologist?”

Sylvia doesn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed, but it’s Hugo that responds.

“In fact,” he says, his accent seeming to get thicker, “Sylvia is an artist.”

Leni tosses a kernel above her head and makes a production of catching it in her mouth.

“That right?” she says.

Sylvia starts to say no, but Leni continues. “I’m an artist too.” She juts her jaw out and says defiantly. “Can you do that?”

They all pivot and look at the screen in time to see Leni writhing on a flour-covered tabletop in the midst of what looks like a large restaurant kitchen as she’s doused with olive oil by a swarthy young chef.

“My God,” Sylvia hears herself whisper and then hears Leni behind her say, “You still think you’re an artist, sister?”

Hugo leans to Sylvia’s ear and says conspiratorially, “Leni is our current starlet and raging prima donna.”

Leni hits him with another popcorn kernel and mimics his voice, “And Hugo is our current washed-up, never-made-it, almost-broke, can’t-get-it-up porno king.”

Hugo keeps his composure and says, “Your gratitude is humbling, my child.”

“My gratitude,” Leni laughs and looks to Sylvia. “What do you think, honey, should I be grateful here for the chance to hump the sandwich boy in this scene?”

Sylvia glances over her shoulder and there’s Leni, spread out on a long table surrounded by luncheon meats and a roasted turkey, piles of sliced tomato and bulkie rolls, loaves of rye bread and croissants and French sticks, dishes of mustard and mayonnaise.

Leni mutters, “I was picking parsley out of my hair for a week.”

Sylvia turns to Hugo and hesitantly asks, “You made this movie?”

He smiles, closes his eyes and bows his head.

“I thought you owned the theater?”

“Hugo,” Leni says, “is a man of many talents.”

Another piece of popcorn bounces off the huge skull and leaves a shine in the blue light from the movie. Hugo ignores it, folds his arms, stares at the screen and whispers, “Glutton for Ravishment II was something of an indulgence for me. I’ll concede that to the critics. But I simply felt there was more to be said after the first film. I just wasn’t done with these characters. They hadn’t released me yet. And though I quake at the thought of further expanding her swelled head, Leni is genuinely breathtaking here. Truly astounding. I took us both to the brink and tore that performance out of her. But, as you can see, it was worth it.”

On the screen, Leni is using a plastic spatula to smear mayonnaise on the chests of two over-endowed waiters.

Hugo puts his mouth next to Sylvia’s ear and says, “You’d be amazed how little editing was required. She can be miraculous when handled properly.”

Sylvia feels a second set of lips at her other ear and she flinches and turns to see Leni up out of her seat and leaning across the chair that separates them.

“Tell me you’re not a bored little rich girl from Windsor Hills,” she says. “Tell me you weren’t jogging past Casa Schick when the bald one offered to teach you about art. Please, Sylvia, tell me.”

Her tone annoys Sylvia. They shift so they’re eye to eye and Sylvia says, “I work for a living.”

Leni doesn’t get angry. Her voice stays even and she looks to the screen and says, “You don’t think that’s work, sister?”

No one answers and she goes on, maybe a little conciliatory.

“I was just trying to warn you. Hugo’s been known to go into anyone’s wallet for financing. We’ve emptied out more than one trust fund to sustain his career.”

She says the last word like it was obscene.

A beam of light hits Sylvia in the eyes and then moves on to Leni and Hugo. They all squint to see one of the bouncers from outside.

“Turn that off,” Hugo hisses and the bouncer complies, slides into the aisle below and whispers to Hugo that things have calmed down out in the street.

Hugo nods and takes a deep breath.

“All right. Go tell June to get the lawyers and Counselor Frye on the phone. Set up a conference call. Then have Ricco get down to the Spy and find out exactly what happened. Have him tell Starkey I’m very disappointed.”

The bouncer trots off and Hugo turns his attention to Sylvia. He takes her right hand and holds it up in front of him.

“It looks like you can venture home now, my dear. The rabble has been dispersed.”

“Tremendous,” Leni says, sliding out of her row. “I’m late at the masseuse.” She stops in the aisle and says, “Always a pleasure meeting my public.”

They all nod agreement and watch her run down the balcony stairs.

“I guess I can go,” Sylvia says to Hugo, suddenly feeling awkward and frightened.

He squeezes her hand, gives a tight-lipped smile and a nod.

“Schick,” he says, releasing the hand and fishing in his coat pocket, “is a true believer in the strange ways of fate.”

He pulls out a business card and extends it toward her. She takes it and says, “I want to thank you again. If you hadn’t pulled me inside, I don’t know what—”

He cuts her off with a wave of his hand.

“We were meant to be brought together, Sylvia. The method is always inconsequential. I feel a genuine connection here. I feel a kindred outlook, a mutual way of seeing things.”

Sylvia laughs and brings a hand over her mouth. Someone from down below in the audience shouts, “Shut the hell up.”

Hugo shakes his head and whispers, “We must walk amongst the ignorant. That is one of the costs of our art, yes?”

She shrugs and says, “Honestly, thanks again. You saved me.”

He smiles a long minute, then says, “I’m throwing a party, Sylvia. Really, a working party. After seven years of toil, we are filming the finale of my great albatross—Don Juan Triumphant. I would love for you to attend. We are filming this Wednesday night. I think you’d find it fascinating. You’d get a chance to see the final flourishes in the creation of a masterpiece. And you could bring a camera.”

He’s caught her off guard. She stammers, “Oh, I don’t—”

“Wednesday night,” he says. “Give it some thought. As they say, sleep on it.”

She simply nods and whispers, “Thanks again.”

She makes her way out of the seats into the aisle and follows Leni’s course out of the balcony without waiting for Hugo. When she gets to the corridor she looks back and when Schick doesn’t appear she guesses that he’s stayed to watch the rest of the movie.

She comes to the end of the corridor, to the huge stairway down into the lobby and as she’s about to turn the corner onto the stairs, something catches her eye. Just an instant, just a momentary flash of image. She stops and stares at a print that’s framed and mounted on the wall. She steps back to get her focus. It’s a black-and-white shot. Stark. A little frightening. A Madonna and Child shot. A decaying landscape hosting the mother and infant.

It’s a Terrence Propp.

11

Sylvia can remember, with an almost visceral, at times uncomfortable clarity, this late-fall afternoon, a Friday and a day just like today when she was walking home from Ste. Jeanne d’Arc and all the old men down Duffault Ave were out in the gutters with their ancient wooden rakes pushing leaves into piles and lighting them on fire, back when it was legal, and the wind was picking up and just engulfing her in the smell of leaf-smoke. And it was after three o’clock and there was about an hour of sunlight left to the day. The sky was already this same slate color, this exact ghostly feel to it, low clouds but a kind of brittle clarity to the air. And after Elsie Beckmann turned off at Jannings Hill, Sylvia was walking alone and she knows, she’s certain, she was daydreaming, completely into some imagined world, though she no longer had any remembrance of what it was. She does remember being brought back to Duffault Ave, though, by the awful weight of her schoolbooks and by the coating of sweat that had broken out under her uniform. She can remember thinking how strange it was, perspiring in the middle of this October wind.

By the time she made it up the driveway to her back door, all her strength was gone and she sat down on the back stoop and just put her head down on her knees. She has no idea how long she sat there before her mother lifted her and carried her up the rear stairway to the apartment and put her on the couch.

For the next forty-eight hours, Sylvia sweated out the worst flu and fever of her life to date. She mumbled and cried every time the cold washcloth on her forehead was changed. Sylvia has no recollection of those nightmares. She doesn’t even have much of a picture of her recovery beyond eating Campbell’s chicken noodle soup off a tray in bed, while watching some old forties movies on the little black and white TV that Ma propped up on the dresser. Sylvia was well again by Monday and back at school on Tuesday.

And now, for whatever reason, that Friday afternoon, walking home from school, after the first symptoms of fever came over her but before she collapsed on the back stairs, those moments comprise the most haunting memories of her childhood. She has no idea why, but the feeling of light-headedness, the smell of the leaves being burned, the unnatural clarity of the darkening sky, the warmth building up under her arms, the heaviness of her feet inside her shoes — all of these sensations continue to be as real and strong to her as the day they first happened.

And it’s how she feels now, at this exact moment, walking down Verlin Avenue, as if locked in slow motion in comparison to the people passing by. She’s a block from the Skin Palace. When she came down to the lobby, another bouncer directed her down a long, dim corridor toward a red exit sign and she emerged out the rear of the building. When the sun and air hit her, she lurched into that same light-headed, slowed-down state as that Friday afternoon fifteen years ago.

It’s not exactly an unpleasant feeling, though there’s almost a latent fear that sickness will come. It’s more this otherworldy pocket, this dreamy, growing warmth that’s threatening to go out of control from the start. There’s a tightness to the joints, but at the same time an almost loose feeling to the skin, to the whole head. She knows that she needs to be hailing a taxi or calling Perry. But it’s as if her knowledge of this has little or no connection with her inability to make her body comply, as if the center of her intellect has shifted and is now located in her legs and feet. They’re pulling her along Verlin, keeping her in motion, though she doesn’t know where it is she’s heading. This isn’t the way out of the Canal Zone. It isn’t the way back to the apartment.

She walks another half-block. The feeling seems to begin to dissipate one second and reassert itself the next. She suddenly wonders if maybe she was hurt worse than she thought in the skirmish. Maybe she’s got a slight concussion. She forces herself to stop walking and leans up against a lightpost. She takes some deep breaths and closes her eyes. She stands completely still for a few minutes and starts to feel better, then puts her hand up to her cheeks and forehead and they feel normal to her. It’s probably just the shock of the past hour, she decides.

She stands up from the lightpost, gets her balance, and glances across the street to see Der Geheime Garten. The café Mr. Quevedo mentioned. The place where she can find the story of Terrence Propp.

And then she’s moving across the street and in the front door. The café is narrow but deep. The ceilings are ridiculously low as if the restaurant had been contract-built for the sole enjoyment of dwarfs. The lighting is dim and the deep red walls don’t help. Against the far wall is a short marble bar backed by a mirror that has naked, Reubenslike women painted on it. There are maybe a dozen or so tables, only one of which is currently occupied, by a gangly, pale, anemic-looking boy with large ears that wing out from his head. He doesn’t seem to notice her standing in the entryway. There’s a fat paperback titled Zoopraxography spread open on his table, but he’s engrossed in a spiral notebook, chewing on a blue pencil.

A small man with jet black, slicked-back hair and what looks like a greasepaint mustache, just this tiny dark line above his lip, comes out of a back room carrying a tray, sees Sylvia, smiles and moves toward her. He’s dressed in a suede-looking dinner jacket that matches the color of the walls. He’s wearing a silver earring in the shape of an American Beauty rose.

“A table?” he asks and she nods.

He looks back over his shoulder at the almost-empty room and says, “And will there be anyone joining you?”

She doesn’t like the remark, though she thinks it was fairly innocent. And she’s hoping the guy can lead her to Rory Gaston. So she says, “No thank you,” and he grabs a single menu from the top of the maître d’s station and says, “This way, please.”

He seats her in a rear corner of the place. He places the menu over a chipped-up china setting, a kind of antique ink-blue plate trimmed with tea roses around the edge.

“Could I get you something to drink while you study the selections?” he asks.

She’s about to shake him off when her mouth opens and she hears herself order a Pernod.

“Very good,” he says, his spirits seemingly brightened by her choice, and he marches off to the bar.

Sylvia sits still for a long minute and collects herself. She runs her hands through her hair a few times. She looks around the walls for a pay phone to call Perry but doesn’t see one. And then she realizes that she doesn’t want to call Perry. Because she knows he’ll be crazy when he hears about what’s happened. It would be an appropriate reaction. She leaves the house. She walks down to the border of the worst part of the city. She sits down and drinks tea in an erotic bookstore with an elderly, blind Latino that she’d never laid eyes on before. She walks into the middle of a goddamn riot and wrestles with a cop, for God sake. She loses a camera. And she waits out the balance of the storm in the most beautiful pornographic movie theatre in America watching scenes from Glutton For Ravishment II with the director and starlet. How would she end that phone call—Be home soon, Perry. Just having a cocktail in the Whorehouse Café …

The waiter returns with the drink and puts it down on the table. “Does anything appeal to you?” he asks and when he sees her confusion he eye-motions to the menu.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I haven’t had a chance to look.”

He nods and goes to turn away and she says, “Hold on,” and picks up the menu, thinking maybe she should put something in her stomach, maybe it would settle her down and help her think.

The entire menu is just one printed page and as she scans it she realizes every offering is some variation on oysters. And she’s never heard of one. They feature names like Oysters Delluc Piquate and Oysters L’Herbier in the Half-shell, Cavalcanti’s Oyster Bisque and Feyder’s Saucy Oyster Canapés and Fried Oyster Epstein.

She looks up at the waiter and says, “Your specialty?”

He gives a little pleased-with-himself smile and says quietly, “Food of the gods.”

She smiles back. “And the goddesses, I hope.”

“Of course.”

“Why don’t you surprise me,” she says.

He takes the menu and moves off before she can broach the subject of Mr. Gaston. And then as she watches the waiter disappear into what she assumes is the kitchen, an awful thought occurs to her — what if there isn’t any Mr. Gaston? What if Mr. Quevedo was putting her on or just being cruel? She has no reason to think this is the case. But then she had no reason to think that Jack Derry’s Camera Exchange would vanish overnight. She had no reason to think that a walk to the edge of the Canal Zone would degenerate into a riot. And she had no reason whatsoever to think that she’d spend part of today watching hard-core porn on a thirty-foot screen.

The images come back now. The woman, Leni, on her back on that long wooden table. The young guy, wearing only a white apron around his waist and then not even that. The older Asian man, the dishwasher, approaching the two of them, bouncing from a badly feigned shock to full participation in about ten seconds. Bulkie rolls, sliced tomatoes, a jar of olives all falling to the floor as the three-some’s convulsions escalated. Leni, grabbing a handful of the dishwasher’s hair with one hand, a load of rye bread with the other. And her face as she looked into the camera, looked out of the screen and at Sylvia, closed, then opened, then closed those beautiful eyes and bit down on her bottom lip.

Sylvia takes along sip of her drink and it occurs to her how curious she is about Leni Pauline. Even in the dim light of the balcony, dressed in a bathrobe and her hair hanging, munching popcorn for God’s sake, the woman was gorgeous. And Sylvia realizes this contradicts everything she’s always assumed about porn stars. She doesn’t know where the assumption came from, but she’s always thought the women in those movies looked like retired strippers gone to seed. The image doesn’t even add up since she knows, has read, all about the teen runaways who end up before the camera, the sixteen-year-olds who use fake IDs to get the job.

Leni didn’t fall anywhere near either of those categories. She’s got to be twenty-five or so. And she’s got the look of some hip, urban model. Nothing retro or cheap. Sylvia thinks of her image there, in person, in the flesh, not the woman on the screen. She thinks of her in the balcony, without makeup or camera filters or kind angles. Leni looked like she could be the choice paralegal down at Walpole & Lewis. She looked like she could be the manager of some Newbury Street boutique in Boston, some place where Sylvia would have to get the nerve up just to go inside and browse. And Leni was quick with a line. The woman could more than hold her own against a personality like Hugo Schick’s.

Though Sylvia hates thinking in terms like this, she can’t get around the reality of the fact that from day one, a woman with a face and body and nerve like Leni Pauline starts off about five steps ahead of everyone else. So how did Leni end up on that screen? What series of events could have brought this woman in front of Schick’s camera? Sylvia has no idea why it intriques her so much, but she genuinely wants to know Leni’s story. And it annoys her that she probably never will.

She fingers the glass. She brings it up to her mouth and holds it there a second, taking in the smell. Then she takes another sip. It goes down warm and makes itself known all the way to the stomach. Then it settles in and radiates. It’s doing its job. She feels much better already.

The waiter returns, puts a steaming plate before her, and asks if she needs anything else. Sylvia tells him no, then grabs his arm before he can leave and asks, “Maybe a glass of wine? What would you recommend?”

He brings a hand over his jaw and stares at the plate. “For this particular delicacy?” he says. “I would probably suggest a Benoit-Levy Chardonnay.”

“Sounds perfect,” she says and he disappears again. She looks down at what he’s presented — a wheel of fat, beige spokes of oyster drizzled with a heavy-looking, rust-colored sauce.

She spears one of the oysters with the fork and puts it in her mouth. She tastes the garlic and the lemon and the Worcestershire, lets the oyster rest on her tongue and its juices run down and into the well of her mouth. It’s fantastic. She’s not even this big oyster fan, but this is tremendous, the kind of food that justifies words that normally seem pretentious or clichéd when you read them in magazines—succulent, savory, delectable. She can’t believe the Spy has never done a write-up on this place.

The waiter brings the wine in a flamboyant glass, shaped, of course, like a rose in full bloom. She takes a sip, lets it pool around her tongue for a while before swallowing. She’s immediately overwhelmed by taste, by shadings and gradations she didn’t think she had the capacity for, and she wants to laugh. She’s feeling giddy. She’s thinking, not really seriously, that the blow to the head has transformed her, thrown switches that have been shut down since childhood. It’s like some archtypal comic book story, the eternally boring and noble scientist caught in the lab explosion, knocked to the gleaming floor underneath the shards of her equipment, broken test tubes and splintered Pyrex beakers, green smoke rising up to the ceiling, the whole room bathed in an ultraviolet glow. And then she emerges from the rubble, larger than before, her muscles forcing the seams of her lab coat to burst, her eyes now bulging just a bit from the sockets. And a slightly mad smirk across her lips.

Sylvia closes her eyes and fixes her mouth around another oyster. She sucks on it, refuses to swallow right away, puts all her concentration into discovering flavor. And then she senses someone standing next to her and gets embarrassed, as if she’s been moaning over the food. She opens her eyes and swallows and says, “Absolutely wonderful.”

But it’s not the waiter. It’s the kid with the big ears who was reading the notebook when she came in. He just stands there, awkward and hesitant, smiling, nodding his head.

“Oh, God,” she says, “I thought you were the waiter,” then adds, “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m glad you like the food,” he says and she picks up an accent she can’t place. “Papa will be happy to hear.”

She’s annoyed. It’s not often you get the kind of enjoyment she was pulling out of this lunch and this kid has just stepped on it. It simply isn’t going to be her day. She stares at him and waits for his pitch.

“Marcel’s in the kitchen,” he says.

Sylvia looked at him like she doesn’t understand.

He flinches just a bit and says, “Marcel,” and jerks his thumb toward the kitchen door. “The waiter.”

“You must be a regular,” she says and then she could shoot herself for extending the conversation.

“It’s a quiet place to come,” he says. “A good place to work. Undisturbed.”

“That’s good to know,” she says, resigned to the interruption now. “I take it you’re a student?”

He shakes his head no, seemingly embarrassed, starts to fish around in every pocket of his suit. “I just wanted to give you … I seem to have left my cards … forgive me, I’m not very good at this. I’m a filmmaker.”

Sylvia’s stomach churns with the last word, but she steadies herself.

“I’m glad for you,” she says, picking up the wineglass. A beat goes by. The boy looks from her face to the kitchen, but he doesn’t seem to know what to say.

“Well it was nice meeting you,” Sylvia tries, but he ignores the words and bulls ahead.

“You like film?” he asks.

She doesn’t want to prolong the interruption but she can’t help asking. “What’s your name?”

“Jakob.”

“Jakob,” she says, “have you ever met anyone who didn’t like film?”

He doesn’t seem to understand the question and when he pulls out the opposite chair and sits down she realizes she’s made a big mistake.

“My father,” he says, challenging, “he hates the cinema. I doubt he’s ever been to a movie in his life.”

“He’s indifferent,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s indifferent. It’s not that he actively dislikes movies. Film just isn’t a big part of his life. He’s indifferent to it.”

“No,” he says. “This is not the case. Not in this instance. I have to disagree.”

She sighs and says, “Well, I guess you know your old man.”

Either the kid is genuinely lame or he’s playing the part to avoid leaving the table. He smiles and shakes his head as if she’s putting him on and they both instinctively know it.

“What about yourself?” he says. “Are you an enthusiast?”

She thinks about just ignoring him, but decides that’s actually more work than giving in and talking.

“I don’t get out as much as I used to,” she says. “But I used to go a lot when I was younger.”

“I knew it,” he says. “What are some of your favorites? Who would be your favorite director?”

“Fritz Lang,” she says, spearing an oyster and remembering Dr. Jessner from German Giants class in college.

It’s a mistake. Her answer sends Jakob into something approaching a spasm.

“Lang,” he says, voice too high. “Really, Lang. You’re a Lang devotee, yes? I knew it. I knew this. How many people even know Lang today? Unbelievable. I saw you walk in, I said, film woman, yes, I knew it.”

“Film woman?”

“Who else? Please. Who really does it to you?”

It’s strange. Having someone ask her opinion.

“Murnau,” she says, “Dupont—”

“A weakness for the Germans—”

“—Herk Harvey, Browning, Dovzhenko—”

“A buff,” he says. “You’re what they call a buff.”

“Oh, c’mon,” she laughs, protesting like some easy prom date. But suddenly she doesn’t mind him sitting at the table.

“I bet you don’t mind going to the films alone. Correct? Yes? They say a real buff never minds going alone.”

“That’s in the book,” she says. “That’s one of the definitions.”

“How about Schick?” he says. “Do you know any Schick?”

It stops her cold. She puts down her wineglass and stares at him.

“What is the matter?” he says, sticking his neck out.

Sylvia doesn’t know what to say. She feels like she should be angry, but she’s mostly confused. Did Schick send this kid down here as some kind of joke? But Jakob was here before her. He was sitting in here reading when she came in the door. Schick couldn’t have known she’d be coming here because she didn’t know she was coming here. Maybe the kid saw her come out of Herzog’s. Maybe he saw her leave the Skin Palace and ran to get here first. But again, how could he have known she’d come in here?

She knows she should just get up now and leave. Put some money on the table and get the hell out. There’s no need for her to be here. She shouldn’t be drawn here in the Zone in the first place. What’s happened today just proves that.

She throws down the rest of the wine in one huge gulp and starts to push away from the table.

“What’s wrong?” Jakob says, sitting back.

“I’ve got to go,” she says and stands up.

He gets close to panicky. “Forgive me, please. What did I say?”

Sylvia nods goodbye and moves around the table, but Jakob stands up, mortified by some unfathomable social mistake, and starts to follow her to the door. She reaches for the doorknob and he puts a hand on her shoulder and says, “Hold on, please. What is the matter?”

She doesn’t turn around. She twists the knob and in as even a voice as she can manage she says, “Get your hand off me now or I’ll scream.”

He removes his hand from her shoulder and grabs her at the elbow. She tries to yank the door open but it won’t budge. Her heart and her breath go crazy and she wheels around to push him, but someone’s beaten her to it. A bearded man has Jakob by the shoulder and is yanking the kid backwards. Jakob lets go of Sylvia’s arm and his eyes go huge and he starts to stammer, “I did not do anything. I did not do a thing. We were just talking. Please, madam, tell him, please.”

The man looks to Sylvia for an explanation and she in turn stares at the fear and confusion on Jakob’s face and says, “It’s all right, you can let him go. It was just a misunderstanding. I’m not feeling well. I’ve really got to leave.”

She turns and tries the door again and realizes it’s locked.

The man looks her up and down, then lets go of Jakob and steps forward to turn the deadbolt and open the door.

Jakob says, “We were talking. She looked perfect for the part of the waitress. We were just talking.” Then his voice dissolves into a gasped breath and he runs out of the café and disappears down Verlin.

“Are you all right?” the bearded man asks. “Did he hurt you at all?”

“No,” she says, suddenly feeling flushed from the wine and the upsetting. “No, it was a misunderstanding. He didn’t … I should really just get going. It’s been an awful day.”

“Would you like me to call you a cab?” he asks. He’s got a very soft voice and he’s dressed in kind of old-fashioned lounging pajamas, that same deep rose color as the walls and the waiter’s jacket. They look as if they’re made of silk. Sylvia looks down to see he’s got slippers on his feet and she’d think that he recently rolled out of bed if it weren’t for the fact that his hair looks just washed and combed.

She thinks about walking out of the Zone or waiting for a bus and she surprises herself by saying, “Could you? I’d really appreciate that.”

“Of course,” he says, looking like a concerned doctor, gently taking her arm and leading her back to her seat.

“Why don’t you just sit down and relax for a second. I’ll be right back. There’s a phone in the office.”

Sylvia watches him walk away and though it’s probably a stupid thing to do, she takes a long drink of Pernod. She’d not tell Perry anything about today. She’s going to chalk the whole thing up to some bad misjudgment and let it go. She doesn’t know what she was thinking of, coming down here, alone, following Quevedo into his store, walking into the middle of the crowd outside Herzog’s. As soon as the cab drops her home she’s going to shower and change and cook dinner. Something nice and warm. Something Perry likes. Maybe some meatloaf and baked potatoes. Something kind of hearty that her mother would cook. She’ll tell Perry she’s changed her mind about the camera. That she doesn’t need the money. That they can buy something else. Or they can bank it. They can start the house fund like he wants. Maybe they’ll talk houses over dinner. Where they want to live, what style of house they agree on. Features they want. She hopes the cab comes quickly. She just wants to be back in the apartment, to lock the door and take a steaming shower, put on some tea and listen to some music. Maybe she’ll call Perry at work, ask him to come home a little early. Ask him to pick up one of those real estate magazines at the supermarket. Tell him she’s sorry about last night. That she just hasn’t been feeling well. That she misses him.

The man comes back to her table and says, “They’ll be a few minutes.” He gestures to a chair and says, “May I?”

She nods, sips the last of the Pernod.

“Jakob gave you a little scare? I apologize. The boy has no sense of social grace. The owner’s son. He comes here to read and scribble in notebooks. I’m sure he intended no harm.”

“You’re not the owner?” she asks.

He looks surprised. “I’m sorry. My God, I’ve been contaminated by Jakob. My manners appear in remission.” He extends a hand and says, “Rory Gaston. And I’m the manager.”

She shakes his hand. “Sylvia Krafft.”

“I’ve never seen you in here before, Sylvia.”

“First-time customer.”

“Well, I hope this little incident won’t discourage you from coming back. And as an incentive, allow me to pick up the check.”

“No, really—” she starts to protest, but he won’t hear any arguments.

“Too late, Sylvia. Fait accompli, as they say. Please, I’ll sleep much better tonight.”

They stare at each other for a moment and then, without any preamble, she hears herself say, “So what can you tell me about Terrence Propp?”

She’s jolted him. He literally pulls back in his seat and swallows and seems to consider his words until finally, in a hushed voice, he says, “Who sent you?”

Sylvia’s got a small buzz going from the wine and the liqueur and maybe that’s what makes her want to start laughing. He sounds like he’s delivering a line from any number of campy B-movies. But he’s serious. He suddenly looks nervous and distracted, as if she’s just accused him of something.

“Quevedo,” she says.

“Quevedo?” he repeats.

She nods and lets the silence build.

“Who’s that?” he says and starts to crack his knuckles.

“You don’t know Mr. Quevedo?” she says, letting her suspicion show.

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, he knows you. He sent me to this place. Told me to ask for Rory Gaston. That is your name, right?”

“Look, Ms. Krafft, I’m telling you I don’t know a Mr. Quevedo—”

She cuts him off and asks, “Well, why would he send me here and mention your name?”

He turns in his seat and looks at the front door, then turns back and says, “I’m sure I have no idea.”

They stare at each other until she says, “Could you just give me Propp’s number? I’d rather set something up directly with him.”

Gaston laughs out loud, immediately sucks his cheeks in and says, “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

A horn sounds and they both look to see a red cab has pulled up out front.

“Your ride,” he says, folding his arms across his chest.

She stands up and takes a step toward the door, stops next to Gaston and says, “I might have something that belongs to Mr. Propp. If he’s interested in getting it back, have him call me. Tell him I’m in the book.”

She heads for the door and as she pulls it open, Gaston says, “Tell the cab to go and give me fifteen minutes.”

“You’ll put me in touch with Propp?”

“Fifteen minutes,” he repeats.

She debates it for a second, then yells to the cabbie that he can leave. He stares with his head cocked, then gives her his middle finger and pulls away from the curb.

She turns back to Gaston and says, “You’ve got fifteen,” but he doesn’t seem consoled by her decision.

He moves to the door and relocks the bolt, pulls down a floor-length shade. Without a word he turns and walks to the bar, grabs the bottle of Benoit-Levy from an ice bucket and returns to Sylvia’s table.

She moves back to her seat and Gaston refills her glass.

“We’re in an awkward situation,” he says.

“How’s that?”

He takes a drink from the mouth of the wine bottle, then raises it in toast, shrugs his shoulders and says, “I take it you want entrance?”

Sylvia stares at him.

“To the group,” he adds.

“That depends—”

“No,” he barks, adamant, suddenly annoyed. “We’ll have no fence-sitting. You give yourself over or you don’t. You’ve heard the call or you haven’t. There’s no inbetween.”

She picks up her wineglass, stares into it. She swallows, tries to stay calm and says, “I didn’t mean to offend—”

“And I didn’t mean to be rude,” Gaston says, lowering his voice. “It’s just … this is such a crucial time for the Proppists. There’s so much infighting lately. And so many rumors. Finding the right direction, staying on the right path, keeping the eyes open and clear. The stress is increasing daily.”

Sylvia looks up at the ceiling and stares at an intricate mural of a Renaissance-style bedroom scene where a ghostly young virgin is preparing to surrender her maidenhood to what looks like a hulking incarnation of Pan.

She looks back down at Gaston and thinks, this guy has seen too many Sydney Greenstreet movies. “I think I’ve heard the call, but I’m ignorant. I have no idea where to go from here. I need some information and I was told you could give it to me.”

Gaston rocks his chair back on its rear legs as if the process will help him think. A smile comes over his face and he says, “You’re toying with me, aren’t you? Did Camille put you up to this?”

“I don’t know a Camille,” Sylvia says, “just like you don’t know a Quevedo. That makes us even. So why don’t we do each other a favor and stop trying to outmaneuver one another and just tell the truth.”

It’s a pushy move, but it’s all she has left.

“What if you don’t like the truth?” Gaston asks.

“I’m an adult,” Sylvia says. “I’ll survive.”

He nods, seems pleased, takes another hit of wine and says, “Okay, Sylvia. The truth is I have no idea who Terrence Propp is. None of the Proppists do. I have no idea what the man even looks like. I’d walk right by him if I passed him on the street.”

Now Sylvia’s on the verge of furious. “So this is all a huge joke,” she says. “I’ve wasted my entire day down here so someone could have fun at my expense. You—”

He cuts her off. “Calm down. Please. Believe me, we were once as anxious to know as you. We’ve all tried to follow the man’s trail. None of us has ever been successful. I can give you a kind of sketchy history. But eventually it dissolves into vapor. The one thing we can be completely certain of is that Mr. Propp takes his privacy extremely seriously. If we were forced to speculate on the causes for this I suspect we’d regress into endless debate. There are some known facts. At some point, though we can’t completely confirm the years, Terrence Propp certainly lived here in Quinsigamond. We’ve narrowed down his residence to three or four likely addresses. All of them walk-ups here in the Canal Zone. And though dozens of the local raconteurs claim to have known Propp, the only person we give credence to is Elmore Orsi over at the Rib Room diner.”

The Rib Room diner.

Where Sylvia found the ad for the Aquinas.

“And these days, Orsi’s started to recant,” Gaston says. “He now claims he’s never met Propp. That it was all a stunt. He thought it would help his restaurant business. In any event, here’s what we know for certain.”

He gets up and walks to the bar, reaches underneath and returns to the table with a small pamphlet or magazine which he rolls up and hands to Sylvia without any explanation.

“First,” he says, “there are currently forty-nine known Terrence Propp prints in existence. Second, most of the known prints were taken in or around Quinsigamond. And third, exposure to and study of these works leads the viewer to a deeper, fuller understanding of their own sensual potential.”

Sylvia stares at him for a second, then shakes her head and says, “You talk about this individual as if he’s not only a first-rate artist, okay, but as if he’d moved beyond that status. Like he’s some kind of visionary. You might disagree with my phrasing, but your whole group here feels a little cultish. I don’t mean to be insulting. I’m just asking why, until very recently, I’d never even heard of Terrence Propp? Never seen any of his work. I’ve never read an article about him. Never heard him mentioned anywhere in the media. And I’m not exactly an uninformed person.”

Gaston keeps a poker face and says, “We each come to Propp when we’re ready. That’s the beauty of the whole phenomenon.”

“That’s an answer?”

“I don’t expect you to understand yet,” he says. “And I may have made a very large mistake bringing you in ahead of time—”

“I don’t want in.”

“But in fact, you made a statement earlier—”

“A statement?”

He looks at her oddly, squinting his eyes.

“You said you had something that belongs to Propp.”

Did she say that? Sylvia can’t even remember now, but she must have. She doesn’t want to mention the Aquinas prints, so she shakes her head and says, “I thought that would get me a name, you know. I thought it might buy me a connection. I lied. And it worked.”

It’s clear Rory Gaston doesn’t like this answer.

“I’ve just seen a few things,” Sylvia says. “I’ve just discovered a few pieces. Yesterday. For the first time.”

“And where,” Gaston says, “was your first exposure?”

Sylvia hesitates, then says, “Excuse me?”

She feels him tensing up.

“You just said you’d never seen any of Propp’s work until yesterday,” Gaston says.

Sylvia nods.

Gaston’s hands come out into the air, questioning. “Where did you see Propp’s work? Where were you?”

She meets his stare and says, “The Skin Palace.”

He looks confused. This wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

“Herzog’s,” she says. “The movie theatre.”

“You saw a Terrence Propp in Herzog’s?”

Sylvia nods.

Gaston starts to shake his head and says, seemingly to himself, “I’ve made a huge mistake here.”

He walks to the door and unlocks the bolt, pulls the door open, turns and stares at Sylvia.

“What’s the problem?” she says.

He doesn’t say a word, just stands next to the door waiting for her to leave.

And the light-headedness returns, as if carried in on a draft of air from outside.

She gets up, a little wobbly, moves across the room and says, “Look, I’m sorry if I—”

“Just get out,” Gaston whispers, “before someone sees you in here.”

12

The back door is open. Sylvia comes into the kitchen and sees the bottle of Dewar’s, uncapped, sitting on the counter. She can hear the TV from the living room but she can’t make out the words. She takes off her coat and hangs it over the back of a chair, walks down the hall and finds Perry sitting on the edge of the old leather hassock that had been her mother’s. His suitcoat is tossed on the couch. He’s leaned forward staring at the screen, a fogged-up water glass between his hands. His hair is a mess and his shirt is half-untucked. He’s squinting at the TV screen, looking like he’s trying to decode hieroglyphics.

He’s so intent, she feels like she shouldn’t interrupt him, like he’s in a state of frantic prayer. She’s never seen him looking this way in front of the television. Usually he’s just the opposite, close to narcoleptic, one eye on a game that he lost interest in a half hour ago.

“Perry,” she says from the doorway.

“Jesus,” he flinches and rears back, tossing some of his drink into his lap.

“Shit,” he yells, standing up, trying to get his balance, pulling at his pants with his hand.

Sylvia starts to go to him but then she gets a look at his face and stops. He’s furious. His head is bobbing in that way that she knows means trouble, means he’s beyond annoyed and deep into a full-blown temper tantrum. They could have some wall punching any minute.

“What,” she says like a scared kid, like she’s broken curfew for what will absolutely be the last time.

He’s sputtering, he’s so mad. He starts biting in on his top lip and his arm comes up and starts pointing at the screen. She steps to the side a bit and looks to see this morning’s riot outside Herzog’s.

“What the hell happened?” he snaps, but instead of answering, Sylvia just stares at the screen. It’s an unsettling experience. She’s seeing everything she just lived through about five hours ago, but she’s seeing it from another perspective. The riot’s been filmed with a hand-held camera and the picture has that feeling of ongoing immediacy, that voyeuristic aura that’s spliced with both attraction and repulsion, as if anything is not only possible but probable. And as if you’re in the eye of a maelstrom, adjacent to disaster but chronically protected. She’s seeing all kinds of things that she missed the first time around. She’s seeing more small pockets of skirmishing, more people trading punches and losing blood. And she’s hearing noises that she never picked up. Dozens of screamed exchanges studded with a censor’s bleep, voices at differing distances from the microphone creating a cacophony that tells more than any narration could.

Perry plants his now-empty glass down on the floor and picks up the remote control. He hits a button and the images on the screen start to race by, obscured into a hyperriot, bodies now flying at speeds more laughable than tragic.

“You taped this?” is all she can think to say.

He doesn’t respond, but squints down at the screen and then at some right moment, he thumbs down on another button with such emotion and emphasis you’d think he was launching warheads from hidden silos. The picture calms back to normal speed and clarity and there’s Sylvia, wrestling with the cop over the camera.

“Oh, God,” she mumbles.

“That’s it,” he says, head still wobbling over his neck, face flushed to a murky red, “Oh, God, huh?”

She looks from his face back to her own image on the screen and in the most sarcastic voice she can summon, she says, “Sylvia, are you all right? Were you hurt? Is there anything I can do?”

His arm shoots up and a finger is pointed out at her. “Don’t do that,” he says, trying and failing to get a grip. “Don’t turn this around. Don’t try and put this on me. You didn’t even call me. It’s been hours, for Christ sake. I called the hospitals. I had Ratzinger phone the police station. You didn’t even call me, Sylvia.”

“How was I supposed to know I’d be on TV?” she says but it’s weak and they both know it.

“I’ve been pulling my hair out of my goddamn head—”

“You’re right,” she says, suddenly feeling guilty and wishing they could end the argument immediately. “I should’ve called.”

“Should’ve called,” he roars and she knows they’ve got some bad hours to go through. Maybe some bad days.

“What the hell happened, Sylvia?” he says, wiping his face with his hand and trying to calm down.

Sylvia extends her arms toward the TV.

“You saw what happened, Perry. I went down there to pay for the camera and the next thing I know I turn a corner and the street is filled with all these people—”

“You’re fighting with a cop, Sylvia. Look at yourself there. For God’s sake, you’re fighting a cop.”

She looks at the screen. He backs up the picture and they watch it again. The cop grabbing the camera. Sylvia grabbing back. The picture cuts away to another brawl before she’s pulled inside the Skin Palace.

She looks at him. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to say anything. She wants to take a bath and throw down a drink and go to bed for the next two days.

“What were you doing home?” she finally says and knows it’s a mistake as the words leave her mouth.

“That’s not an answer,” he yells, then continues, “I wasn’t home. I was in my office with the FUD people having a planning session when Ratzinger buzzes me to come upstairs. He’s sitting on the edge of his desk playing this as I walk in. He was watching the local news at noon. When he saw the fighting, he popped a tape in for our personal-injury people. Then he spotted a familiar face. He gave me the goddamn tape, Sylvia. Ratzinger taped the thing.”

“I’m sorry, Perry,” she begins, feeling like she’s going to start crying which is the last thing she wants to do right now.

“Are you hurt?” he finally asks. “Did you get hurt at all? Did you break anything?”

“Not a scratch,” she says, too low.

“You’re sure?” he demands, and before she can reanswer he says, “Were you arrested? Did they arrest you?”

“I wasn’t arrested,” she says. “They had their hands full.”

“I can see that,” he says and they both stare at the screen as he plays it all over again, her now famous dance, her ten seconds of fame. He mutes out the sound and the silence almost makes her sick.

After a minute, he sits back down on the hassock and looks up and simply says, “How, Sylvia?”

She swallows and says, “Does it look like I planned this, Perry? Do you think I woke up today and said I think I’ll cause some civil unrest down in the Zone?”

“How many times,” he says, showing his strained patience, his heroic restraint, “have we talked about you going down there? How many discussions have we had about that part of town, Sylvia?”

“I’m an adult, Perry.”

“Yeah,” he says, “that’s what this looks like. You being an adult.”

Her nerves are shot. The toll of the entire day is shorting her out and all her hurt is starting to mutate into anger. “Thanks for the concern,” she manages to say.

He bolts to his feet and screams, “I sat here for hours not knowing whether you were dead or alive. You didn’t even call me—”

She screams back, “You’re pissed off that I looked bad in front of your goddamn boss. That’s the extent of your goddamn concern, you bastard.”

He rears back and heaves the remote control at the television. It misses the set and sails into the wall, explodes into a rain of black plastic and batteries.

“Your aim is off,” she says. “I’m over here.”

He stands fuming, hands on his hips, his chest pushing out.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he says, then he adds, “I’m going out,” and moves past her, down the hall and out the back door with a slam.

And now the tears come and she folds down on herself, slides her back down the wall and sits on her feet and just lets it happen. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her either. She doesn’t know why she didn’t call him. She doesn’t know what she was thinking of, following Mr. Quevedo, hiding out in the Skin Palace, walking into Der Garten. She honestly doesn’t know how today happened. She feels as controlled as the TV set, as if someone she can’t see is holding another kind of black box, that they’re thumbing down buttons that make her move in ways she can’t understand.

She looks up at the TV and into the eye of the Skin Palace riot, finally advanced past the point of her walk-on, her public insult to Perry’s career. She watches the jumpy, off-balance shots of chaos, the bouncing pan of frenzied upheaval. It’s as if the TV is plugged into her head instead of the VCR, as if the images ricocheting across the glass are a reading of her brain, an X ray of the inside of her skull. And she’s watching it through the blur of her water-logged eyes so everything’s obscured just that much more.

She pulls herself up from the wall and goes into the bathroom. She turns on the water and cups her hands under the faucet, lets her palms fill up with a pool, leans down and soaks her face. She repeats this several times, then she opens the medicine cabinet, takes down her mother’s old Valium prescription, ignores the expiration date and swallows a couple.

She towels her face dry and moves out into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and grabs a half-full bottle of white Burgundy, pulls out the cork and takes a long draw from the mouth of the bottle.

She walks out the back door and leaves it open. She walks down the stairs to the cellar and locks herself in the darkroom.

She turns on the safelight and the room goes red. She sits down on the step stool and just closes her eyes and takes another sip off the bottle. She takes some deep breaths and tries to calm down, but she starts to get dizzy so she opens her eyes and puts the wine bottle down on the ground. It dawns on her how much she’s had to drink today — the absinthe in Schick’s office, a Pernod, then a glass of wine at Der Geheime Garten, and now the Burgundy. She never drinks this much, especially not during the day. She realizes she has no idea what time it is. And that she doesn’t really want to know. She doesn’t want to do anything right now except sit here in this darkroom and be alone.

Of course, finally, she looks up at the pictures. She lets herself stare ahead, at the drying line, at the photos still hanging there in front of her. The Madonna and the child in the ruins. She looks at the whole run of photos, takes them in together, as a whole, a set, a series of connected images. She wonders if she laid them on top of each other and then fanned them fast with her thumb would she detect any movement of the figures? Would she get any sense of motion, something minute, a barely shifted arm or leg? And if she did, what more would this tell her?

She stops looking at them as a series and focuses individually, left to right, down the line. And in this way they remind her a little of the Stations of the Cross, of going to the Stations with her mother when she was maybe seven or eight years old. How many Stations were there? More than seven. There was all that singing, that chant-like song. Kind of a dirge, really, Stabat Mater. How did that translate? She can still hear it, the mournfulness of it. The sadness inherent in that sound.

What are these photos? The Stations of what? What did Terrence Propp want me to see when I stare at them like this? Or am I an idiot thinking he had that much of a plan, that extensive a design? Maybe it was just instinct. Classic artistic inspiration. Maybe Propp just let the mood of the day hit him, move him. Maybe he simply set the mother and child up in this awful, broken-down setting and started shooting film. Maybe he wasn’t thinking beyond the next exposure, beyond the click of the shutter. Beyond the image at that instant.

Maybe Terrence Propp wasn’t thinking about me at all.

She gets up off the stool and moves over to the dry line. She stands with her face about a foot away from her first photograph. She brings her hand up to touch it, but stops herself. She wants to make up her mind — what’s the first thing that strikes her about the picture? What’s the premier image? What is it that first draws and holds the eye?

She wants to say the Madonna’s shoulder, the smoothness of its slope, the tone of the skin, so white. Or maybe it’s the relationship of the shoulder to the neck, the sleekness and the perfectness of the bend. Whatever the dynamics of the attraction, it’s the Madonna’s shoulder.

But then there’s the infant’s hand, so small and yet so absolutely detailed by the focus. It reminds her a little of pictures she’s seen in magazines and on billboards — hyperclear shots of a fetus inside an amniotic sac, parts of the body still vague and unformed, the eye looking a bit fish-like, but other parts, like the hand, the fingers, the fingers specifically, so absolutely developed, the fingernails already visible. The infant’s hand in Propp’s shots reminds her of those fetus shots, it’s so stark somehow, so intricately delineated, out there in the air as if it were waving to her, as if it were signaling the viewer, look closely, take notice.

She takes a step to the side and stands in front of the second photo and now it isn’t the shoulder or the hand, but the rubble of the floor in the background. It’s the lack of focus here that does it, makes for a maddening obscurity, makes her wish she could change the focus of the photo herself, at this late date, bring the emphasis off the humans and onto the inanimate clutter of the ground. She wants to sweep the earth for clues as to exactly where the photograph was shot. She wants to zoom in until she can see recognizable evidence, signs of a time period and a location. She wants to turn the dim glint in the far right corner into a Kennedy half-dollar that dropped from Propp’s pants pocket as he scouted the setting. She wants to be able to follow the old support columns up to the roof and nail them as Doric or Ionic. She wants to know why here, why this field of disintegration.

And as she studies the third photo, she focuses on the lighting itself, the way it descends from the top of the shot, the way it shines in beam-like shafts and catches faint storms of dust without eclipsing the sharpness of the mother and infant.

She gives up. She walks back to the step stool and remounts it. She wishes that she could have been there the day Propp did this shoot, that she could have just stood to the side, maybe even out of sight, behind one of the columns, just watching and listening. She’d love to know what he said to his subjects, what directions he gave. Did he tell the mother to drop her shoulder a quarter inch, to loosen her shawl and expose more skin, to pull the infant closer and let it suckle? What was his voice like, low and encouraging or bossy and bullying, intimidating the Madonna into the perfect position?

Or maybe he didn’t use his voice at all. Maybe it was all gesture and signals. She can imagine that. She can accept how perfect the silence of this setting would be, Propp’s decision not to violate it, the only noise being the murmur of the infant and the ongoing click of the shutter invading the cool, decayed silence of the hall.

And maybe gesture wasn’t even necessary. Maybe Propp and the mother knew each other in a way that precluded the need for instruction, the way longtime band members intuit each other’s musical changes. Some photographers work with the same models for years. This could be one of those arrangements, artist and subject drawn into an instinctual sense of one another’s needs and wants, something like telepathy constantly in the air around them.

Sylvia has never known anyone in that complete a way. Except maybe her mother. And she’s more than a little doubtful that Perry and she will ever get in sync. She thinks about his face at the moment that he threw the remote and the tears well up again and she puts her hands in her jacket pocket and touches the magazines that Gaston gave her.

She pulls it out and holds it in both hands. It’s a small journal, about six by eight inches, but pretty slick, center stapled, with good quality paper and professional typesetting. She thumbs through it to the end. There are only a dozen pages, but all of them crammed with two columns of small print. She turns back to the cover. The letterhead reads

Underexposed

A Journal of Terrence Propp Studies

Published bi-yearly by Propp-Aganda Ltd

and underneath it there’s a line drawing of what looks like an old Brownie camera. She opens to the table of contents and reads a few article titles. Trajectories of Longing in the Bleicherode Exhibit. The Zurau Flea Market Find: Trickery of Treasure. Of Curves and Slopes: The Physics of the Early Nudes. The last item listed on the contents page is Through My Viewfinder: a Column by Rory Gaston.

She turns to the last page of the magazine and there’s a small photo of Gaston in the upper right corner. It’s a close-up head shot and he looks more professional than sensual. Under his byline, in italics, are the words an ongoing explication of what we know so far. She starts in:

This week’s mailbag brought yet another attempt at subterfuge by one more dim-bulbed prankster with too much time on his or her hands and access to a camera. I’m forced once again to beseech and admonish the faithful regarding the lending of Underexposed. Clearly, back issues have fallen into the hands of some barbarians who have no hope for conversion. I can’t waste my time worrying about their loss of primal sensuality. I’m neck deep in the evolution of my own carnal sensibilities. So I ask you once again to guard the magazine and when you’re done reading, either destroy it or keep it under lock and key.

I don’t want to have to spend another morning like last Thursday when someone other than my letter carrier deposited a plain brown manila mailer through my door slot. There were no markings on the packet and though I attempted to prevent myself from feeling that rush of dizziness at even the remotest chance that contact had been made, my heart surged with both longing and fear as I ran my letter opener along the seal and extracted the contents: a single Polaroid photograph, taken, I’m quite sure, by a Spectra model.

I stared at the image until my eyes went weak. A very simple composition. A portrait. An upper-body shot of an individual posed before the brick wall background. The sex of the subject is undeterminable. S/he is dressed in what appears to be a medieval jester’s costume. The head is encased in a shiny silver fright wig. The face is decorated with oversized red wax lips with two enormous faux buckteeth extending down toward the chin. The eyes and nose are covered with a brand of “Groucho Marx” eyeglasses and mustache. The cheeks are rouged into a clown’s apple-red caricature. A white-gloved hand is in the forefront of the shot, held up and partially obscuring the chestal area. The hand is bent into an obscene salute, the middle finger thrust skyward and directed, unmistakably, at the viewer. Some miniature graffiti was noticeable but unintelligible on the brick background until Wilhelm and the boys down at Duyfhuizen Labs blew me up an 11 × 14 study shot which allowed me to decode the doggerel

I’m an absentee artist

which fills you with strife

but you’ll never possess me

so go get a life

Charming. I’m not sure of the prankster’s intention this time around. Did S/he expect me to swoon and blow the trumpet, announce to my people that Propp has touched down, has deemed to send us a communiqué no matter how seemingly cruel, has consented to show his face, no matter how grotesquely distorted? I have no way of deciphering the buffoon’s designs. But let the hoaxster know this if they happen to appropriate yet another issue of Underexposed: I’ve spent a good bit of this lifetime studying the work of a singular genius named Terrence Propp. I have spent the majority of my waking hours immersing myself in study of the master since that first day when, at age thirty-three, I chanced to view Infant & Mother: Deep Sleep & Dark Shadow hanging in the men’s room of Orsi’s Rib Room. I have been a devout apostle. I have honed my skills. I have tracked every lead, however ephemeral, catalogued every confirmed and unconfirmed piece of work, and assembled the first group on the planet to zealously pursue the ways and means of Proppiana. And so know, without doubt, that it is a waste of both time and effort to attempt to make a fool out of me. If and when Terry Propp chooses to return home, I will know with an unflinching certainty that will confirm the worth of my faith that he has breached the silence, that he has reached out finally and definitively.

Until that day comes, I will happily endure the nonsense of overindulged children who are somehow aroused by adolescent pranksterism. Take off your clown suit, Imposter. No one is buying. And let me use this incident to remind my colleagues that our only assurance of purity in ferreting out all things Proppian is evidence from the official record: that which can be confirmed with physical documentation and counterchecked by secondary material. And so, as the title of my column says, let us review what we know so far.

Terrence Propp was born either in Mollusk Cove, New York, or Quinsigamond, Massachusetts, in either 1937 or 1929. It is almost certain that he derives from some arm of the fairly prominent Propp family who had arrived in America at least by 1694, settling in and around the area of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Mount Greylock, though there is a dissenting opinion that Propp’s ancestors moved south almost immediately after their arrival in the New World and began a pattern of nomadism that eventually brought them to Mexico by the early 1800s, where they established either a string of homeopathic hospitals or a museum to catalog and house native Mexican artwork. I, personally, find this school of thought quite unlikely, based for the most part on far-flung conjecture and self-styled theory.

As a side note, I will mention that we are fairly certain that Propp’s maternal great-great-granduncle was one Balthus Nixford, a once notorious and now, sadly, forgotten painter who in 1837 was charged, according to documents kept in Quinsigamond’s own Center for Historical Bibliography, with “the creation and dissemination of lewd, obscene, indecent, and un-Christian pictures designed to incite wicked and lacivious yearnings into the minds of the populace.” All of Nixford’s work was burned in the “October Bonfire of ’38” and the artist was driven from the city and banished “for the duration of his natural life.” And so we see, apostles, history, that relentless nightmare, repeats itself with a tasteless vengeance. And now, all these years later, we have been given a new artist to drive underground with the abundance of our ignorance and intolerance.

The source of Terrence Propp’s primary education is lost to us, but we believe his undergraduate years were spent, at least partially, either locally here at the College of St. Ignatius, or at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. There is one recently bandied theory that he pursued a now-defunct correspondence school whose application materials were once offered on the flaps of matchbooks dispensed at Orsi’s Rib Room Diner. Transcripts at both St. Ignatius and Cornell are either sealed or missing.

There is conjecture, sponsored by the presence of a series of five Southern Pacific landscape pieces, that Propp served in the navy as a signalman shortly before or after his undergraduate education. I should point out that there is also a small pocket of vehement protest that the “Melmoth Island Shots,” as they have come to be known, are talented forgeries. Propp finished his formal education sometime in the late 1950s and either remained in (or came to settle in) Quinsigamond. It is possible, some would say likely, that for a time during this period he supported himself by selling balloons to children in Salisbury Park.

Certainly, it is during this time, in the early sixties, when his work began appearing in local galleries such as f.46 and the Riis. Before his death, gallery owner Nigel “Naggy” Moholy, in an interview, recounted that he never actually met Propp face-to-face and that the artist insisted on an elaborate scheme for the delivery of his work. Moholy said he would receive a phone call, at times in the middle of the night, and the caller would simply declare, “Say Cheese!”, and Moholy would then have to hurry down to Gompers Train Station, walk to a specific trash can and reach inside where he would find Propp’s latest offerings wrapped in “a kind of white wax paper, like the kind they use in the butcher shops for wrapping meat and fish.”

As the years went on, however, the late-night phone calls grew less and less frequent and, ironically, as Propp’s work began to receive more, and more acclaim and attention, his output, or, we should say, his publicly presented output, became minimal in number if not quality. There has been no confirmed sighting of work by Terrence Propp for over a decade now. There has been no confirmed sighting of or communication with the man himself in at least that long.

Rumors, of course, proliferate in the absence of concrete fact. And we here at Underexposed are committed to quashing rumor and proliferating truth. And all for one simple reason that is, ultimately, our credo: Terrence Propp’s work is the most perfect key we have found yet to unlock the primal, sensual, carnal heart of humankind, to halt and reverse the devotion taking place in each of us. Godspeed.

13

Even on Musuraca Avenue they’re a strange sight: Jakob and Felix Kinsky leading a single-file parade of Grey Roaches. The Roaches are all dressed in requisite gang colors, a loose facsimile of the standard uniform from a century ago in the Talmud schools of Old Bohemia — black-on-black wool suits, white cotton shirts, the thin black ties that Felix has had customized with a print design of tiny grey cockroaches. Jakob is dressed similarly, and he’s got his ever present Seitz 16 mm up on his shoulder. Felix can’t stand the old style of dress. We live in this country now, he thinks, we should act like the natives.

“Are you nervous?” Felix asks, feeling smug and a little wired.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Jakob said, “but there’s always the chance he got the money together.”

Felix gives a barking laugh. “I can see why your father has left collections to me. He won’t have the money, Jakob. It’s not going to happen that way. You better prepare yourself. You’re going to have to use the Roaches tonight. You better be ready to give the word. Or find someplace else to sleep tonight.”

Jakob stops at the corner, looks at his cousin through the Seitz, shoots a few seconds of film.

“Don’t worry about me, cuz,” he says. “I always do what I have to do.”

They cross the street onto Ruttenberg, the Roaches staying in an ordered line like some sacred and retro fire drill. They’re the oddest muscle in Bangkok Park these days, but they’re proving themselves as disciplined and dangerous as any of their rivals. They’re more quiet than the Granada Street Popes. More stable than the Tonton Loas. Free from the internal strife that seems to constantly grip the Castlebar Road Boys.

The Roaches are led by Ivan “Huck” Hrabal, a sixteen-year-old refugee out of Poric just before the plague and the blockades. Huck lived for a month in the hull of a freighter, subsisting on tins of bootleg caviar and a found sack of half-rotten oranges. He’s a confirmed knife man, could give the city’s chief pathologist a pang of professional envy. His only weakness is his barely concealed passion for his second in command, Vera Gottwald. No one seems to know a thing about Vera G’s past. She simply showed up at the St. Vitus one night; Papa Hermann gave her a meal of beetroot soup and smoked curd cheese and turned her over to Felix.

Huck and Vera supervise a flock of eighteen sanctioned meatboys, grooming them into a cadre of warrior monks for the day when, as Felix promises, the city will exist solely for the benefit of the Family Kinsky. For now, the Roaches keep busy with a routine of standard gang-biz: extortion, black marketeering, pharmaceuticals, and the usual hit-and-run work necessary for making and occasionally expanding the Kinsky territory.

“Jakob, admit to me that you don’t have a clue,” Felix says, goading his cousin, aching for him to reject tonight’s errand. “You’ve never done this before.”

Jakob mocks himself and says, “I’ve seen movies.”

“You and your goddamn movies,” Felix yells and grabs his cousin’s arm, jerking them both to a stop. He spits on the ground, stares at the Roaches as they go rigid and look to their feet.

“This isn’t some movie, you little putz. You’re going to have to draw some blood tonight. Look at you. You brought your goddamn movie camera. What the hell are you thinking, Jakob? What is wrong with you? Your father is offering you everything. A year from now we could be ready to knock over the Iguarans. What is your goddamn problem?”

Jakob stays silent for a second, staring at Felix’s face, then he starts to nod, and, without any trace of anger or humor, says, “You would make a tremendous character actor, Felix. Honestly. The loose cannon. The simmering pot. The audience watches, knowing from the start he’ll explode. The cog the script could always pivot on. You know the type I mean? A James Caan, perhaps. If Caan were born in Maisel. And dressed badly.”

Vera can’t help but laugh, a throaty squeal that erupts and vanishes in a single breath. And though Felix doesn’t turn around to glare at her, Huck knows she’s made a terrible mistake. Because though what Jakob has said is funny, it’s also true. And at some later point, when this tiny incident has been forgotten by all, Felix’s button will get pushed. And then he’ll decide to act on Vera’s disrespect.

Felix stares at Jakob and says,” Do you want me to hold your camera?”

Jakob smiles and says, “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

They walk a final block to their destination. Felix motions Bidlo and Krofta around to the rear of the storefront. Huck and Vera separate and move to opposite corners of the street to watch for the unlikely arrival of any independent muscle. Jakob takes a moment to focus the Seitz on the gorgeous neon marquee hanging out above the sidewalk:

Citizen Jane’s Underground Videos

The Best in Noir Entertainment

Tonight’s Discount: “Gun Crazy” (1950)

Then he moves his focus to the door of the shop, which has been entirely papered with hand-out flyers asking for any information concerning the disappearance of the little girl named Jenny Ellis.

Felix taps him on the shoulder.

“The owner is ‘Sweet Jane’ Firbank. He’s a real head case. Dresses in the women’s clothing. He’s a month late in collections. Papa said he clears his account tonight or we let the Roaches loose. You understand that, Jakob? You think you can follow this?”

“Felix,” Jakob says, “there’s a point you honestly shouldn’t push me past. You don’t know me anymore.”

“I know all about you, Jakob. You wouldn’t know real life if it bit into your skinny little ass.”

Jakob rests the Seitz back on his shoulder, then slowly, gently, he touches his cousin’s face, brushes a thumb against Felix’s cheek as if dusting something away.

“Maybe,” Jakob says, “you’re more Elisha Cook Jr. Especially around the eyes.”

He turns and enters the video store, leaving a confused Felix saying, “Who are you calling Junior?”

Jakob stands inside and lets himself be shocked by the detail and imagination that’s gone into the store’s decor. The small rental shop perfectly mimics its product. It’s as if the best noir set designers of the forties had gathered and pooled their talents to make a shrine to their chosen genre. The lighting is stolen straight from German Expressionism — artificial, harsh, and capable of throwing monstrous shadows. There’s a row of metal, conical fluorescents suspended from the ceiling, perfect interrogation beams, looking like they’d been stolen from the most brutal police sweatbox in history. Like they came with a gross of rubber hoses. The fat Venetian blinds hung in front of the windows are somehow backlit, so that even at night they toss a grid of sliced illumination across any inhabitant’s face. The black cast-iron shelving that serves as display racks for the videos gives the feel of prison-issue furniture. The floor is a cold, urban red-brick. There are neon signs, electric blue-white numbers, mounted and glowing at the top of each display case to show the films are grouped chronologically. Jakob walks to the first shelf and picks up the display box for the 1927 release Underworld. He closes his eyes and tests himself — directed by von Sternberg, lensed by Bert Glennon — opens his eyes and looks on the back of the video box to prove himself right. He walks to the opposite wall and picks up the most recent release in the store, Castle Oswald, but before he can close his eyes, a voice sounds.

“Trust me, darling. You don’t want that self-indulgent pap.”

He turns to the sales counter, where a huge man dressed in elaborate drag is leaning on the cash register staring out at him.

“All style and no story. Rain and smoke and urban squalor. Just gorgeous. But what about character? What about conflict?”

The guy has to be close to six six, with sunken eyes and a yellow complexion that he’s rouged up. He’s got on a blond, wavy wig with bangs in the front, red lipstick, a pair of old sunglasses. He’s wearing white silk lounging pajamas with flounced sleeves and a pair of classic, kitschy mules on his feet.

He comes out from behind the counter and approaches Jakob, saying, “You’re new.”

“I just found out about this place.”

He puts his hands on his hips, looks Jakob up and down and says, “Are you passionate or just a dabbler?”

Jakob stares at him.

“About the genre, honey. About the medium.”

“Oh, of course. I’m passionate. I’m a real zealot.”

“That’s what they all say. Let’s try you out,” and he begins to turn in a circle, saying, “Who am I tonight?”

Jakob watches this private fashion show and cringes a little at the thought of Felix and the Roaches walking in. The drag queen comes to a stop and raises his eyebrows.

Jakob starts to shake his head and the guy gives a disappointed sigh and says, “I’m Phyllis Dietrichson, for God’s sake.”

The name clicks.

“Of course,” Jakob says, “you got it. You have really nailed it. Barbara Stanwyck.”

The original noir woman.”

“Double Indemnity,” Jakob says, trying to redeem himself, “Nineteen Forty-four.”

“Directed by?”

“Billy Wilder.”

“Produced by?”

“Joseph Sistrom.”

Phyllis/Barbara leans forward and crosses his arms over his chest, lowers his voice and says, “Art Director?”

Jakob takes a breath, lets a smug grin come over his face and says, “Hal Pereira.”

The man is delighted, grabs Jakob’s hand and starts to pump it, saying, “You pass. I’m Jane Firbank, the owner of Citizen Jane’s.”

“I’m Jakob,” dropping the last name.

“That,” Jane says, indicating the Seitz, “looks like a classic.”

Jakob hands it to him. “It’s an antique,” he says, “they didn’t make too many. If I told you who it originally belonged to, you wouldn’t believe me.”

Jane lets out a laugh-cum-growl.

“Take a look at me. I’ll believe almost anything.”

Jakob nods. “Well, you picked a real winner to model yourself on.”

“Oh, I’m only doing Stanwyck tonight. I have a growing repertory. You should see my Veronica Lake.”

Jakob gestures to the display shelves.

“Do you do the ordering?”

“I couldn’t trust it to anyone else.”

“How loose do you play with the semiotics?”

“Oh, Christ,” Jane says, face falling as he hands back the Seitz, “You’re not an academic, are you?”

“Hack filmmaker,” Jakob reassures and as if to prove his claim, he pulls a business card out of his pocket and hands it to Jane who reads

Amerikan Pictures

hyperreal noir for our entropic world

a division of Hungry Artists Group

Jane’s smile returns and he says, “Well, I’m not a purist if that’s what you mean. I’ll stock non-American. I’ll go for a good genre-blend. I can tolerate some of the neo-stuff. I’m simple. Give me some crime, cynicism, claustrophobia, a little innocence betrayed.”

“And visually?”

“The starker the better. Disorientation. City grime. As much shadow as you can manage without going muddy. I’ll take some angles, some mirrors, maybe some silhouettes. But what about you? What do you need?”

“He needs nine thousand bucks.”

Felix’s voice.

They turn around to see him directing the Roaches inside. His red leather suit looks vinyl under the shop’s harsh lighting.

“We got bored,” Felix says to Jakob.

“I can handle this,” Jakob tries, but Felix makes a face that cuts off debate.

“Oh no,” Sweet Jane says. “Don’t tell me you’re with these animals.”

Felix walks up to Jakob, puts a hand on his chest and softly pushes him backward.

“Film this, cousin,” he says. “You might find a way to use it one of these days.”

Then he wheels around and backhands Jane across the face, breaking skin to the corner of the mouth and initiating a trickle of blood that clashes with the Barbara Stanwyck lipstick. He pulls the shop owner into himself by the lapels and says, “We’ve been letting you slide, queenie. Now where’s my goddamn money?”

Jane looks at Jakob, more disappointed than terrified, as if he’s been through this drill before. Jakob wants to tell him Felix is serious this time, to just hand over the payment and get the Roaches out of his life.

“Turn the goddamn camera on, cuz,” Felix yells. “I’ll show you how to make Papa proud.”

He drives a knee into Jane’s groin and the shopkeeper drops to the bricks, sucking air.

Felix points to the door and Vera turns the deadbolt. The Roaches start to circulate, knocking over shelves, smashing neon with broomsticks. Emil Krofta takes out an Urquell Malt bottle and heaves it against the wall, where it shatters and fills the store with the smell of gasoline.

“You know why he needs the money, Jakob?” Felix asks, driving a boot into Jane’s side. “He wants to get himself castrated. Honest to God. He’s saving for some operation.”

“Sidney Lumet,” Jakob mutters, “Nineteen Seventy-five.”

“What?” Felix says, staring down at the bleeding lump of Jane.

Jakob puts the Seitz on the floor and watches the Roaches destroy the place, tear posters from the walls—I Wake Up Screaming, Scarlet Street, Fear in the Night. He watches them rip the tape from videocassettes—The Naked City, Street of Chance, The Big Gamble—making a growing pile of curling, twisting lace on the bricks.

He steps back to Felix, puts his hands on his cousin’s chest and mimics the original push, adding just a fraction more of force. Felix is shocked and then amused.

“What do you think you’re doing, Jakob?”

Jakob gets ready to grab for the Seitz and swing at his cousin’s head. But from foot-level, Jane croaks, “I’ve got the money. Stop it, please,” and they both look down as the drag queen attempts to stand.

Jakob reaches down and grabs an arm, tries to haul Jane up.

Felix continues to stare at his cousin, the smile all gone, but he says, “Go get it,” and the Roaches halt their rampage for a moment.

Jakob holds the stare and says to the room, “I’m Hermann Kinsky’s son. We are done here. All of you get outside.”

The Roaches don’t know what to do.

“You don’t move,” Felix yells.

Jakob turns to Huck, “Hrabal, take them out of here. Or I’ll tell my father to cut you loose.”

“No one moves,” Felix screams, top of his lungs.

And then a shotgun blast blows a crater in the ceiling and comes close to shattering every eardrum in the small shop. Half the Roaches hit the floor and cover their heads. Jakob and Felix turn, both crouched to see Sweet Jane Firbank positioned behind the sales counter, leveling a 12-gauge pump at them.

“You’ve got five seconds,” Jane says, “to get the fuck out of here.”

“Go,” Jakob yells at the Roaches.

Felix stares from the gun barrel to his cousin’s eyes, takes a single brush at his jacket and says, “Okay, kids, let’s kill the freak.”

He stands up slowly and the Roaches mimic his movement.

“I swear to God,” Sweet Jane screams.

Emil Krofta and Little Jiri Fric are the first to pull their pieces from their suitcoats.

Sweet Jane settles on Fric, pulls the trigger and lets the recoil carry him backwards to the ground.

Little Jiri takes the load midsection, goes to the floor the worst way, gut-shot, torn open in the belly and fully aware of what’s happened.

Emil Krofta extends his arms over the counter and unloads his Butterbaum automatic, putting nine lead-tipped rounds into Sweet Jane’s head and chest before the shop owner can manage to repump. Sweet Jane is already dead by the time Huck Hrabal and Vera Gottwald line up next to Krofta and turn the transvestite’s body into the most prestigious target in this surreal shooting gallery. When the trio’s magazines are emptied, Jane Firbank is an unrecognizable mess of shredded flesh and bone wrapped in the remnants of Barbara Stanwyck’s pajamas.

Jakob’s ears are locked in a loop of ringing vibration and his lungs are caving in to panic, gunpowder, and the asbestos fragments that drift down from the hole in the ceiling. But he manages to crawl to Jiri Fric and pull the smallest Roach into his lap.

“Call Doctor Seifert,” he yells to Felix.

But his cousin ignores him and instead yells for his gangsters to evacuate the scene.

“Hrabal,” Jakob pleads, “help me carry him out.”

Huck takes a step in Jakob’s direction, but Felix screams, “Leave him. He’s a casualty.”

Hrabal turns from Kiri to Felix, watches as Felix motions to the door with his pistol.

“Outside,” Felix snaps. “Right now.”

“Go ahead,” Jakob says and after a second, Hrabal runs out of the store.

Jakob sits on the floor, his pants and shirt already saturated with Jiri Fric’s blood. He stares at his cousin, struggles for some air.

“This,” Felix says, “is all your fault.”

“You,” Jakob says, “are a dead man.”

Felix holsters his gun, steps into Ruttenberg Road, and takes off after the Roaches in the general direction of the Bohemian wing.