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  Nasja really had nothing to complain about. She had gotten a green card and citizenship out of her deal with Clavius; she would rebound from the divorce and no doubt become some kind of grande dame of fashion opinion.

  But back there in my narcotic-festooned bathroom, before the sex, during the shoot, I couldn’t kick the thought that I needed something different. I needed a clean breath. I needed out. Maybe I just needed a break from serving the Master, and an opportunity had presented itself earlier the same day.

  A movie pal of mine named Tripp Bergin had called to suggest I might experiment with broadening my retinue by taking on a unit photography job on a film that was to start shooting in New York and Arizona in less than a month. The designated picture-taker had been benched, or gotten a better offer. Tripp was what they called the UPM, or unit production manager, one of those guys still waiting for his first chance at directing, which never seemed to come because he was such a good UPM. Bills arrive regularly whether you get paid or not. Tripp advised that there might be a delay, or more dramatically, a push forward for “commencement of principal,” which is movie-speak for when they actually begin filming.

  I had about forty seconds to mull this over before the shoot with Nasja absorbed the rest of my day. I backfiled it, weighing the flavors of such a new and different assignment. Whether I could be beckoned.

  After that, I think you’re caught up on what happened next.

  * * *

  I shot eight rolls of Cognac having simulated sex with the late Dominic Sharps. The Professor, who seemed to be some kind of defrocked mortician, applied makeup cagey enough to satisfy the camera. The bullyboys twisted and turned Dominic into various positions, mostly female-superior in deference to the dependent lividity. Dominic was starting to get stiff, you should pardon the expression. And ripe.

  “Good?” asked Gun Guy.

  Cognac dismounted and hit the bathroom briskly. The Professor lined up his bottles and jars in a carrycase designed like a box for fishing tackle; it was fussy enough to suggest a professional kit. The two enforcers, whom I had named in my mind as Rondo and Mongo, dumped the naked corpse back into the body bag.

  The gunman seemed relieved, as though he had beaten a ticking clock. “Take him to the Kitty,” he told Mongo. To Rondo, he said, “Give the Professor a lift home.” When Cognac reemerged, having added a jacket to her original ensemble, he asked, “You good?”

  “Lobby, cab, Hilton, 3500, wait for further instructions,” she said. Her coming and going would not be remarked in a place like this.

  “Don’t forget to douche,” Gun Guy said as she wisped out the door.

  I was the only asset of this fireteam that did not know the protocol. I had been denied a membership card and knowledge of the secret handshake.

  “I’ll take care of Elias here,” said Gun Guy. It sounded more ominous than his actual intent. He could grab my film rolls and decamp, but I remembered he had mentioned something about being around for the actual processing of the film … which would bite major ween, if Char had returned in my absence.

  All his obvious bad guy skills aside, my abductor was an excellent time manager. We were in and out of the realm of corpses in under two hours, including the coffee he more or less forced on me to keep me awake.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said when we were back in the car. “You ever get tired of shooting all those gorgeous women?” He looked over at me quizzically. “You can talk. I’m not mad. I was just a bit irritated about our time frame.”

  “Did you kill that man back there?” I blurted.

  His lips went tight and flat. “No. You haven’t answered my question, and I asked first.”

  Did I—? If there’s a dumb question I’ve been asked more since meeting Clavius, I couldn’t think of what it was. It was a tourist question. Probably best not to spotlight that, for my keeper.

  “It’s a job,” I said. “Technical job.”

  “Blow job, more like. You get paid a lot of money for this technical job?”

  “Sometimes it’s good. Not ten grand good for a loan out, but healthy.” It was deceptively easy to slide down into shoptalk.

  “Those lofts aren’t cheap,” he said with a glimmer of his previous contempt.

  “I do a lot of work for another artist—print jobs, model wrangling.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who?” He wanted celebrity. He wanted to know which stars I knew.

  “Clavius? He’s kind of world famous.”

  He snorted. “Never heard of him. He ever shoot for 2 Young 2 Date? Now that’s some fucked-up photography.”

  He had just named one of the skin rags I used to pump out at New World Inkworks. Prepubescent-looking teases with ancient eyes. I released a long, slow breath. “Smaller world than you think,” I said. “I used to help publish that magazine.”

  “No shit? For real? Man, you know any of those models?”

  Zeus, I thought, please don’t let him ask for my autograph.

  “No, I just ran the printing press. One was pretty much like another. That was a long time ago.”

  “Kinda makes you a pornographer, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Well, maybe in the eyes of some froth-at-the-mouth kids advocate, but I just ran the presses and cashed Boss’s paychecks. I eagle-eyed the layouts for reproduction quality, not subject matter, and could honestly not remember whether the barely legals had fallen to this season’s socially correct side of the fence. The American national hysteria over pedophilia mandated that documents galore be kept on file—such as the infamous “2257,” short for U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2257, one of the many uproarious results of Traci Lords lying about her age during the last gasp of videotaped porn. In many other places in the world, this outcry was no big deal, which was why that famous writer guy had moved to Bangkok, because he got sick of being thought of as a criminal. But I wasn’t invested in the sociology of it; I wasn’t a dad and never planned to be, and I moved in a world where most of the players did not have the encumbrance of children.

  “Pornography is in the eye of the beholder,” I said.

  “So is necrophilia,” said my keeper. “You’d better hope those pictures come out kissing fresh.”

  “What happened to “—I choked on Dominic Sharps’s name—“the body? Can I ask that?”

  His gaze went pewter. “No.”

  “No chance I could get you to wait till tomorrow for me to develop the photos?”

  The gun was back in his grasp like magic. “Listen, dickhead: I am not your buddy, your collaborator, or your fucking customer. For the last time: you do what I say or I’ll kill you. Otherwise, you go back into shut-up mode. Mister Kimber here insists.”

  I guess he was talking about the pistol. All I could tell you was that it was massive, squared-off, and black as death.

  I didn’t want to see Mister Kimber upset. Because then Mister Kimber might speak.

  * * *

  I was terrified that Char might have returned to the loft during my witching hour absence, which meant she would be brought into the crosshairs of my one-night-only puppeteer, the man with the scary matte black gun.

  The last time I had seen her, we had both been tightrope-walking around the renewed argument about who was fucking whom, and why. Swigging from a oversized mug of herbal tea with ginseng, she was drifting through the studio with her kimono open, aware of the control that gave her.

  Char was one of those blond women with brown eyes so dark they seemed almost Hispanic. She often joked about her gene mix as what happens when a nobleman rapes a peasant girl. She had a big round ass like an inverted heart shape. Long slender legs that elevated her rear end in a Bantu aspect, uncompensated by nearly perfect martini-glass breasts that were mostly nipple. No implants for her, no Botox, no laser vaginal tightening, or tummy tuck. No rips to iron out the smile crinkles at the corners of her luminous eyes. At least she’s real, I used to think. In the time it took “smile crinkles” to become “crow’s feet” in her estimation, sh
e began to talk about working behind the scenes instead of in front of the lens, leading naturally to her current aspiration to become one of the arbiters of perceived style. Her self-evaluation was almost cruel.

  I had a lot of mirrors in the loft, and any one of them could trigger the Fat Discourse, most of which consisted of rote repetition, kind of like when you learn soliloquies from Shakespeare in school and can’t get them out of your head for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s why she was cruising around my rooms with her kimono dangling. I thought it was casually sexy; she was looking to score more points in today’s round of the Discourse.

  “Jesus … I am getting so fat; how can you stand to be around me?”

  Cunning, that—framing her fear as a begged question.

  A word of advice to all you heterosexual males out there: Don’t ever get sucked into the Fat Discourse. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing you can say or do that will improve your situation. Even running away is a tacit agreement that your ladylove is, in fact, fat-fat-fat. Never mind that Char was a tight 110 pounds for her height. Never mind that she could turn heads on a water weight day. Do not agree. Do not disagree. And worst of all, don’t try to be understanding or honest, because by lip-wiggling in this mode you will condemn yourself to slow death by compromise.

  Yes, honey, you are packing on a lot of lard. That one’s a no-brainer.

  No, honey, you look just fine. Liar, she’ll say.

  It makes you curvy; I like it. Forget “curvy.” Anything you say—soft, voluptuous, shapely, contoured—will only be perceived as a cheating deceitful euphemism for the worst of the world’s f-words. If you use words like “Titianesque” or “fulsome,” I pity you. If you have had occasion to make comment about her “backyard” or “junk in the trunk,” you’re probably dead already.

  And if you say nothing, you’re doomed anyway. If the bout ends in a draw, the tiebreaker will be the sighting of a hitherto unnoticed varicose vein on the back of a knee … and the incoming artillery will begin pounding again.

  If a varicose vein or stretch mark could send me over the edge, I never would have lasted long enough to tell this story. I would have been history years ago. We were both cowards, Char and I, using easy, flammable deprecations to palliate our own deeper fears. The way Char kept rechecking herself in my many mirrors, seeking outward evidence of her betrayal, basically told me what I wanted to know. I tried to force her into saying it anyway.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she said, firing off the other f-word to shorthand the sentiment that I should grow up and get real. “I’m just working an angle with C. You know exactly how he is. Worse, you know exactly how this fucking business operates and you don’t need me to educate you. God!”

  Since I hit her in the face with it, she hit back. I can’t fault her.

  “Besides, what was up with you and little Mizz Soviestski Nasja? Every time she sees you she practically leaps in the air and kisses you with her big flapping baloney cunt. No wonder they call her Nasty.”

  Was it Whistler or Wilde who said we’re all whores, and the only difference is haggling over price?

  If Char stays over, we won’t have sex. Again.

  Char doesn’t stay over.

  Now, when Gun Guy and I reentered my loft, I saw Char’s clothing dropped in an errant trail from the doorway to the bathroom. Her bare feet were sticking out of the fresh Egyptian cotton sheets on the foot-thick futon I had custom-built.

  “Oh, christ,” muttered Gun Guy under his breath. “Don’t go all watery on me, Elias. Don’t you ever work late into the night? Is that the bitch from before?”

  “No.”

  “Then hop-to, and let’s try not to wake her up. You don’t want her to wind up in a can of cat food like your buddy Dominic Sharps … do you?”

  Take him to the Kitty, he had said back at the hotel. My stomach bounced. Dominic Sharps was being ground up into kibble, probably this very moment.

  My L-shaped darkroom has a revolving airlock-style plastic doorway like a tube within a tube. It’s about the size of a phone booth—a cramped phone booth. Gun Guy would not allow me to go through alone. Buster Keaton would have loved our tight little rhumba.

  I’ve got filtered safelights on rheostats preset to different light grades. The tanks and trays, rubber and plastic, are ganged in the center of the room, the same place you’d find the main butcher’s block in a decent kitchen. The smell of chemicals—Tetinal mixes, from Europe, plus the acetic acid odor of stopbath—and the background metronome of constantly running clean water on a drip-tap are omnipresent and more than a little bit comforting.

  This room was my alembic, my alchemist’s furnace.

  “How long does this shit take?” My keeper was not being properly reverential.

  “Develop, stop, fix, wash, dry,” I said. “I used faster film to compensate for your lighting; I’ll have to push it a couple of stops in the bath.”

  He grimaced as though from a gas pain. “Whatever; never mind. Just get on with it.”

  Joey, fine yeoman that he is, had ghosted in and out of the darkroom to make sure my workaday tasks were relatively painless. Some of the earlier Nasja shots were corrupted by what seemed to be a mysterious light leak—one of my stationary cameras needed a new body. Most likely it was the old Nikon F2, which has a senile hinge cover, requiring me to tape up the seams. I couldn’t bear to part with it. That camera had been with me a long time.

  As had Joey. While Joey was an ambient presence in my life, I couldn’t recall the last time I actually looked at him or took note of his passage. He was like those PAs on a movie set—interchangeable warm bodies on call to execute pestersome little missions, up for almost anything because that’s their job. I assumed Joey may have desired to surf my wave the way I rode the breaker provided by Clavius—but he had never articulated that to me. He did aspire to direct fetish videos, which was his idea of a dream job. He was spunky and devil-may-care, yes, but also vital in that he provided major support for my disassociative runaround. He was the opposite of the proverbial squeaky wheel; he was the part of my whole machine that worked diligently and did its tasks silently and efficiently, to the point where I rarely noticed him.

  I couldn’t tell you, for example, how many facial piercings Joey had. A lot. How many tattoos. A shitload, mostly of monsters from classic creature features of the 1930s through 1950s, interspersed with some Celtic and Maori jazz. He shaved his head, perhaps to outfox an already apparent pattern baldness in the making. I did remark once that aliens could use his skull for a landing site. I tried to conjure his face and realized I’d never taken a picture of him. He’d gotten a labret. A stud in the middle of his tongue. Ornaments straight through the hard cartilage parts of his ears. Bars rowed through his brows and one perfectly centered in the squeezy piece of skin right between his eyes, like a bracket on which to mount spectacles.

  One of my enlargers was a Kaiser I’d upgraded for halogen lights. Its lens carrier was matte black aluminum and when it pivoted out, a little indicator light came on. For some reason, Joey had unplugged the enlarger, perhaps for some extracurricular work on the sly. No sweat; my lab was his when I didn’t need it. I swung the lens carrier out of our traffic zone. Usually it was not in the way unless more than one person was toiling in here.

  “What’s all this about?” I said as I worked. “I mean, you can’t really blackmail a dead guy with racy photos, so they must be for someone else.”

  “Hey!” It came out like a bark. “You don’t rate that information, Sherlock, so shut the fuck up and do what you do best, all right?” He tried to find a safe place to lean, and rummaged out a cigarette.

  “Not a great idea to smoke in here.”

  “Really?” He made an obstreperous show of flinking his Zippo lighter. “Ask me if I give a rat fuck.” He drew slow sustenance from the tobacco while the smoke curled silver against the red worklight now engaged. “God, where do you get off being so precious?”

  “Just another ri
ch dick, I guess,” I said. His earlier outburst had gouged deeply, because all the time I had to deny being a rich dick—subphylum rich horse cock, as he had said—I wondered whether I was devolving into that very organism.

  “I’ve met a hundred guys like you,” he said, “and they all whine about wanting to know what’s really going on, as if that matters. Serfs, fretting about shit that’s beyond them. Who the hell cares who gets elected, or who gets bribed, or who shuffles where? You are a component of an operation. The big picture of that operation is none of your goddamned business. The bag is none of your business.”

  “The bag?”

  “The bag of money,” he said, enjoying another deep drag. “In hard-boiled stories it’s always about a bag of money. Who has it, who takes it, who’s got it, and why. It’s a MacGuffin, like Hitchcock said. It doesn’t matter. It is ambiguous. It used to be called the weenie. It’s the stolen jewels or the missing papers. It doesn’t matter.”

  Obviously this man I was prepared to dismiss as a mere thug had an opinion about this topic, and he wanted to hammer me with it. It was weird enough that this criminal was citing Alfred Hitchcock.

  “The bag. The MacGuffin. The weenie. Not your concern. Your concern is surviving this transaction, period. Then your role is played. Done. You win by me not killing you. Or your girlfriend out there. Did you get all that?”

  “Got it,” I said. “It’s a good speech. Who’d you learn it from?”

  “Oh, fuck you.” He butted his smoke in the runoff from the sink and looked around for a trash can that I pointed out in the semi-gloom. He pitched the butt and rubbed his fingers together.

  He seemed mildly interested in the workings of the enlarger, but did not ask parvenu questions while I worked up glossies. There’s a stack of file trays taller than I am and each slot contains different paper. He saw my hand hesitate from one slot to the next.

  “What.”

  “It’s just…” My excuse died in my throat. I had just had a flash thought, a microscopic, potential gesture of rebellion over my enslavement. An assertion that I could possibly have more grit than some quaking tool about to fill his own diaper with terror. This hesitation would betray me; this man would notice apprehension, even if it was only imaginary. I had to cover what I wanted to do with what I was doing anyway.