"Tell him anything you want."
"I suppose we could take their money, then turn the pictures over to him anyway."
"Totally impractical. We'd have to give the money back." She crawled onto me and began to lay a line of passionate kisses across my stomach.
"But, God, Geof frey, I love you just for thinking of a thing like that!"
"Is the money really so important?" I asked her, as we dressed to go out to eat.
"It's the idea of making them hurt that's best. But the money helps, doesn't it? I mean it kind of softens the thing. It's like, I don't know'@she put her arms around me-"like getting a reward."
We spoke about it as we took a shower crowded together in my tiny motel shower stall. She was slowly soaping my back.
"If we do blackmail them, and they do pay us, and we get away with it-then what do we do?"
"My goodness, Geoffrey, what do you think?" She stopped soaping me, "We live high off the hog, on easy street…
"How dangerous is Mrs. Z compared to Darling?" I asked her. It was early in the morning. We were jogging along Roosevelt, on the northern curve where the houseboats are tied up.
She squinted. Her T-shirt was soaked through. Her forehead was flushed.
"She may be even more dangerous," she said.
"Why?" I was panting,
"Because it's new to her. Because she's just discovering it. Because it's not clear yet just how far she'll go."
"She's already been party to two murders. How much further can she go?"
"I'm not sure, but I think there's always another level. The pit's always bottomless, don't you think?" She ran ahead.
"Race you to the end," she yelled. I chased after her, but failed to catch up.
Perhaps she, was right, the pit is bottomless, for I was then in a kind of pit myself. Art photographer turning blackmailer: that was the route I was on.
And, strangely, it seemed appropriate, as if photography, this fine and moral art I practiced, somehow led naturally to blackmail. There was a tradition to it-perhaps a thousand stories had been written in which people who possessed incriminating or disgracing photographs demanded payment from those who could be incriminated or disgraced. Blackmail, it seemed, had been an ignoble offshoot of the trade, ever since the invention of the camera.
That night, after dinner, as Kimberly and I walked through the quiet sweet-smelling streets of Old Town, I told her I'd come to a decision.
"Yes, Geoffrey?" I could feel her tension as she took my arm.
"I want to bring in my friend Frank Cordero, the one who lives in New Mexico."
I felt her grip tighten.
"Tell me why."
"I don't think we can do this without him."
"Tell me about him. How did you meet?"
"We met in Vietnam," I said.
"He was a lieutenant, Special Forces A-team commander. One night, when I was staying at his camp, we got to talking about photography. He was an amateur, modest about his work, but serious-he even had a darkroom set up out there in the bush. After we talked awhile he asked if I'd critique his pictures. I said Sure, thinking that was the least I could do. So then he brings out the most extraordinary stuffpictures so sensitive that at first I didn't believe he'd shot them. But he had.
This commando type, who killed and laid booby traps and ambushed enemy patrols, spent his spare time taking sympathetic pictures of Vietnamese kids.
"We became friends. He taught me about war, and I taught him about photography. He was with me when I shot my Piet@.
"Since he lives out West we don't get much chance to see each other. But the friendship's very close. He's become a professional photographer, he's married to a Vietnamese girl and he's got a houseful of terrific kids. I want to go out there now and see him. He's the only person I know who can tell me whether this thing can work. If he thinks it can, I'd like him to participate. Of course I need your permission for that."
She didn't say anything for a while. Then she asked me how good he was.
"The best," I said.
"Straight. Fearless. First-class strategic mind. If he joined us he'd be like a hired gun, which, considering Darling's resources, is something I think we need."
"What would we give him?"
"A full third share-. I can't see offering him less."
"A third-that's a lot of money." She hesitated, "On the other hand, a hundred percent of zero is zero, isn't it?"
"What do you think?" I asked.,I think you should go see him, the sooner the better." She stopped walking.
"Hold me, Geoffrey." I held her.
"Now kiss me the way you did that time at the cemetery."
I kissed her.
"Harder, Geoffrey. Please, as hard as you can."
I kissed her hard.
"Bite me."
I bit her.
"Oh, that's good," she said, "very good. Now take me back to your room and screw my brains out."
As we started back to the Spanish Moss the palms swayed wildly in the wind.
3
Is it not the task of the photographer…. to reveal guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures?
It had been two years since I'd last seen, Frank Cordero. He'd come up to New York with his portfolio of photographs looking for a gallery.
He'd crashed in my loft, then made the rounds in his worn old boots and coWhoy hat. People gushed over his work, oohed and ahed, told him his pictures were "fascinating." But in the end no gallery would take him on.
The night before he flew back to New Mexico we went out together and got quietly drunk. He wasn't mad or bitter, held no rancor for the New York dealers, and had no intention of changing his course.
"they don't think they can sell me here-fine, they ought to know.
Meantime I'll keep on working, and sell what I can in Santa Fe."
Though he'd been badly disappointed, he showed more concern for my problem than for his own: "What are we going to do about this block of yours, Geof? How're we going to get you back on the track?"
He was the most loyal friend I ever had. And so, when I saw him smiling at me in the Albuquerque airport, tanned and lean, his short black beard beginning to gray, the crow's-feet around his eyes etched a little deeper than I remembered, I was moved to feel that at last I was with the one person on this earth I could truly trust. And that was a relief after the weird scenes I'd been through in the weeks since I'd met Kimberly Yates.
He embraced me, grabbed my camera bag, hustled me out of the airport. A few minutes later we were in his battered Land Rover heading east on the Interstate, the raised road that slices through the center of Albuquerque.
The city flew by below, a grid of endless commercial strips, while the sky arched above like a giant hemisphere of deep blue silk stretched taut.
It was a Big Sky-as they say out West.
We left the city, curled around the back of Sandia Mountain and there confronted an amazing pile of clouds, soft white bulbous billowy things, pouring into the valley.
"Good formation," Frank said. He glanced at me.
"Red filter?"
We laughed remembering the days in 'Nam when I'd taught him how a red filter can turn a blue sky black, making a dramatic background for scenes of war.
He glanced at me again.
"It's serious, what's brought you out?"
"Pretty serious," I agreed.
"We'll give you a day to get used to the altitude. Then we'll talk about it," he said.
It felt good to be in the West. I could get high on the pure rarefied air, so much dryer than the tropical haze that clung to the Florida coast. And the dusty esert tones were a fine relief from the hot saturated colors of the Keys. Perhaps best of all the faces of the people looked real. they were in touch with the Ian. For a while, driving in silence with Frank, I wondered whether I'd been corrupted by the hothouse atmosphere of Key West. Blackmail photographs of a sexual voyeur-suddenly all that seemed far away.