“What for?”
“Might get it developed, see how your pictures turned out.”
“I don’t really care how they turned out, Homer.”
“Well—”
“Keep it,” Krull said.
Dandridge picked up the film, looked at it for a moment, then dropped it in his pocket. He wondered if Roger Krull had even bothered to purchase a camera at all. Men sometimes came to momentous decisions under the heady influence of alcohol and changed their minds the following morning. Krull might have decided that hunting with a camera made as much sense as taking portrait photographs with a shotgun, and then might have gone through the charade with the film to keep up appearances. Not that Krull had seemed like the sort to go through that kind of nonsense, but people did strange things sometimes.
Psychology was another hobby of Homer Dandridge’s.
Well, it was easy enough to find out, he decided. All he had to do was include Krull’s film with his own when he sent it off to be developed. It would be interesting to see if there were any pictures on it, and if so it would be even more interesting to see what animals Krull had snapped and how well he had done.
When the pictures came back Homer Dandridge was very confused indeed.
Oh, there were pictures, all right. An even dozen of them, and they had all come out successfully. They did not have the contrast and brightness of the pictures Dandridge took with his expensive Japanese camera, but they were certainly clear enough, and they revealed that Roger Krull had a good intuitive sense of composition.
But they had not been taken in the woods. They had been taken in a city, and their subjects were not animals or birds at all.
They were people. Ten men and two women, captured in various candid poses as they went about their business in a city.
It took Dandridge a moment. Then his jaw fell and a chill raced through him.
God!
He examined the pictures again, thinking that there ought to be something he should do, deciding that there was not. The name Roger Krull was almost certainly an alias. And even if it was not, what could he say? What could he do?
He wasn’t even certain in what city the twelve pictures had been taken. And he didn’t recognize any of the men or women in them.
Not then. A week later, when they started turning up in the newspaper, then he recognized them.
Collecting Ackermans
On an otherwise unremarkable October afternoon, Florence Ackerman’s doorbell sounded. Miss Ackerman, who had been watching a game show on television and clucking at the mental lethargy of the panelists, walked over to the intercom control and demanded to know who was there.
“Western Union,” a male voice announced.
Miss Ackerman repeated the clucking sound she had most recently aimed at Charles Nelson Reilly. She clucked this time at people who lost their keys and rang other tenants’ bells in order to gain admittance to the building. She clucked at would-be muggers and rapists who might pass themselves off as messengers or deliverymen for an opportunity to lurk in the hallways and stairwell. In years past this building had had a doorman, but the new landlord had curtailed services, aiming to reduce his overhead and antagonize long-standing tenants at the same time.
“Telegram for Miz Ackerman,” the voice added.
And was it indeed a telegram? It was possible, Miss Ackerman acknowledged. People were forever dying and other people were apt to communicate such data by means of a telegram. It was easier to buzz whoever it was inside than to brood about it. The door to her own apartment would remain locked, needless to say, and the other tenants could look out for themselves. Florence Ackerman had been looking out for her own self for her whole life and the rest of the planet could go and do the same.
She pressed the buzzer, then went to the door and put her eye to the peephole. She was a small birdlike woman and she had to come up onto her toes to see through the peephole, but she stayed on her toes until her caller came into view. He was a youngish man and he wore a large pair of mirrored sunglasses. Besides obscuring much of his face, the sunglasses kept Miss Ackerman from noticing much about the rest of his appearance. Her attention was inescapably drawn to the twin images of her own peephole reflected in the lenses.
The young man, unaware that he was being watched, rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Telegram,” he said.
“Slide it under the door.”
“You have to sign for it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Miss Ackerman said. “One never has to sign for a telegram. As a matter of fact they’re generally phoned in nowadays.”
“This one you got to sign for.”
Miss Ackerman’s face, by no means dull to begin with, sharpened. She who had been the scourge of several generations of fourth-grade pupils was not to be intimidated by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “Slide it under the door,” she demanded. “Then I’ll open the door and sign your book.” If there was indeed anything to be slid beneath the door, she thought, and she rather doubted that there was.
“I can’t.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a singin’ telegram. Singin’ telegram for Miz Ackerman, what it says here.”
“And you’re to sing it to me?”
“Yeah.”
“Then sing it.”
“Lady, are you kiddin’? I’m gonna sing a telegram through a closed door? Like forget it.”
Miss Ackerman made the clucking noise again. “I don’t believe you have a telegram for me,” she said. “Western Union suspended their singing telegram service some time ago. I remember reading an article to that effect in the Times.” She did not bother to add that the likelihood of anyone’s ever sending a singing telegram to her was several degrees short of infinitesimal.
“All I know is I’m supposed to sing this, but if you don’t want to open the door—”
“I wouldn’t dream of opening my door.”
“—then the hell with you, Miz Ackerman. No disrespect intended, but I’ll just tell ’em I sang it to you and who cares what you say.”
“You’re not even a good liar, young man. I’m calling the police now. I advise you to be well out of the neighborhood by the time they arrive.”
“You know what you can do,” the young man said, but in apparent contradiction to his words he went on to tell Miss Ackerman what she could do. While we needn’t concern ourselves with his suggestion, let it be noted that Miss Ackerman could not possibly have followed it, nor, given her character and temperament, would she have been likely at all to make the attempt.
Neither did she call the police. People who say “I am calling the police now” hardly ever do. Miss Ackerman did think of calling her local precinct but decided it would be a waste of time. In all likelihood the young man, whatever his game, was already on his way, never to return. And Miss Ackerman recalled a time two years previously, just a few months after her retirement, when she returned from an afternoon chamber music concert to find her apartment burglarized and several hundred dollars’ worth of articles missing. She had called the police, naively assuming there was a point to such a course of action, and she’d only managed to spend several hours of her time making out reports and listing serial numbers, and a sympathetic detective had as much as told her nothing would come of the effort.
Actually, calling the police wouldn’t really have done her any good this time, either.
Miss Ackerman returned to her chair and, without too much difficulty, picked up the threads of the game show. She did not for a moment wonder who might have sent her a singing telegram, knowing with cool certainty that no one had done so, that there had been no telegram, that the young man had intended rape or robbery or some other unpleasantness that would have made her life substantially worse than it already was. That robbers and rapists and such abounded was no news to Miss Ackerman. She had lived all her life in New York and took in her stride the possibility of such mistreatment, even as residents of California take in their stride the possibility of an earthquake, even as farmers on the Vesuvian slopes acknowledge that it is in the nature of volcanoes periodically to erupt. Miss Ackerman sat in her chair, leaving it to make a cup of tea, returning to it teacup in hand, and concentrated on her television program.