“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.