“Yes,” John said. “Grace is my daughter.”
Sift, Almost Invisible, Through by Jeffrey Somers
I
“What am I looking at?”
The little man, Richard Harrows, pushed his thin wire glasses up the bridge of his nose and leaned forward a little. Philip K. Marks looked up at him and kept his face blank.
“A photo, Mr. Marks.”
“Did you take it?”
“No. This was last year, on vacation. I’d asked someone to take my picture.”
Marks hoped the little man wouldn’t launch into a description of the trip. “Okay. Why am I looking at it?”
“Because of him.”
Harrows reached over the desk to point a nail-bitten, shaking finger at the photo. Marks followed it to where a thin man had been caught by the camera, leaning against a railing. Marks glanced up.
“So?”
Richard Harrows was a balding, short man with a precise and nervous air. Marks had seen plenty of people in his time, and his professional opinion of Richard Harrows was that the man was the sort of honest-by-default person you could trust but never rely on.
“Look closer, Mr. Marks.”
Marks sighed and returned his attention to the photograph. The man was tall, and wearing a dark suit and white shirt. He was off to the left side of the framed area, behind Harrows’ shoulder, leaning casually against the railing, one hand in a pocket. Marks studied his blurry form and blinked, looking up at Harrows.
“You know this guy?”
Harrows laughed nervously. “I’ve never seen him. Not in the flesh.”
“Because I would swear he’s looking at you. Or at the camera.” Marks shook his head. It was an odd impression, the more so because the focus of the camera was obviously nowhere near the man.
“Ah, yes,” Harrows said with another little laugh, “you see, Mr. Marks, that was the beginning of the problem. He wasn’t there. He’s never actually been anywhere, but he’s showing up in pictures of me, as if he were.”
Marks glanced up sharply. “Excuse me?”
“Look.” Harrows produced a small stack of photos. “Here are samples from the past year. The one you have is the first, and it is from almost a year ago exactly. Here are others.”
Marks took the stack and examined them in turn. In each photo of Harrows, obviously taken at different times, during different seasons, in different places, the thin man appeared, in the same dark suit, looking directly at the camera, always just off from the actual focus of the picture.
“You’re sure you’ve never met him? That you don’t know him?”
Harrows shook his head. “Mr. Marks, I would swear that he was never there. I would have a photo taken of me somewhere, anywhere-I like to travel, you see-and be sure he wasn’t there. This is more recently, when I became aware of him, you see. Then, I’d develop the film, and there he’d be.”
Marks shook his head. “It is odd how he seems to be following you, and how he seems to know you’re posing for photos, but I still don’t see-”
“Mr. Marks, I came to you because of your reputation-”
“For being someone who believes every line of bullshit that comes through my office,” Marks finished. “I’m well aware of my reputation, Mr. Harrows. I’d like to think I also have a reputation for getting paid to look into things.”
“Mr. Marks,” Harrows said slowly, “I think you will be interested in my story, because if you look at the photos again-they are arranged in chronological order-you will note that he appears to be getting closer.”
Marks looked through the photos again and felt a chill go through him. He could see, over the course of the fifteen or twenty photos, that the thin man was slightly closer to the camera each time.
Marks looked up. “All right, Mr. Harrows-”
Harrows held up a hand. “Finally, Mr. Marks, there is this.” He pulled another photo from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to the reporter. “Taken just two days ago, at my father’s house. Family reunion, of sorts.”
Marks looked at the photo. He picked out Harrows, two men who appeared to be his brothers or close cousins, and an older man unmistakably his father, mixed in with about ten or fifteen men and women. They stood in an attractive and comfortable-looking living room, sporting two large bay windows. Marks almost jumped when he noticed the thin man standing, partially obscured by a drape, outside one of the windows. He appeared to be bending down slightly to see around the fabric.
“Damn near shit myself,” Harrows said.
“I’ll bet.” Marks considered. “May I keep these?”
Harrows smiled. “You’ll look into it?”
Marks smiled and raised his eyebrows. “You’ll pay me?”
II
Phillip K. Marks was a man in his late thirties, a slight dusting of beard on his face, and a sloppy suit of brown clothes on his broad, tall frame. He smoked cigarettes in a never-ending chain and had a half-full bottle of cheap bourbon in one desk drawer that would be empty within a month. He made a small living doing whatever people wanted to pay him for, relying on word of mouth for advertising. A man lacking any remarkable skills at all, he was proud of himself for having found a niche, even one whose only requirement was a tolerance for pain, humiliation, and dogged relentlessness.
After Harrows had left his small, rented office, Marks pulled out the bottle and poured himself two fingers of liquor, lit a new cigarette off the coal of the old one, and sat back in his chair contemplating the photographs for some time. Without taking his eyes from the newest one, he reached for the phone, dialed by feel, and waited a moment.
“Ralph Tomlin, please.”
He turned the family reunion upside down thoughtfully.
“Hey, Ralph, Phil Marks. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Listen, you think you could squeeze in a favor? Sure, it’s right up your alley. Some photos. Well, I just want to see if they’ve been faked or altered in some way. Ah, peace of mind, you know. You’re handed something and told, hey look at this, you want to be sure you know what you’re looking at. A bunch of photographs-maybe fifteen. You got time?”
He sat up and fished an envelope from his desk. “Great-thanks. I’ll stop by, then. You’re a gem, Ralph. And I don’t forget that I owe you a few drinks-we could meet for dinner tonight, you hand over your findings, I’ll buy, what do you say? Okay, see you then.”
He hung up the phone, slid the photos into the envelope, and stood up.
“Christ,” he muttered, “if I’d known, I would have stayed in school, become an engineer.”
“THEY’RE real, Phil.”
Marks took the crumpled envelope and squinted at it. “You’re sure?”
Ralph Tomlin nodded, eating dried noodles one at a time from his hand. “As far as I can tell, Phil. I did the standard tests-searched for standard stock overlays, pixel differentials, inverted shadings. That’s not 100 percent definitive, but you only gave me a few hours. Give me a week, I’ll take it apart dot by dot. But based on what I did today, it would require serious expertise to have faked those. So they’re either real or absolutely amazing, one-of-a-kind fakes.”
Marks nodded. “Okay. I doubt I need to look that hard at these.” He glanced up at Tomlin, who was a round man, jowly, red-faced, cheerful-seeming. “What did you think of them?”
Tomlin chewed and shrugged, swallowed. “Look like vacation shots to me. Amateur, not particularly inspired-the kind of pictures you get when you hand a cheap camera to random strangers and ask them to take your picture. Sentimental value only, I’d imagine.” He cleared his throat. “Although since you gave them to me, I can only imagine that there’s something not obvious about them.”
Marks held up one at random. “Did you notice the man in the dark suit?”