Trick of Light

by Hunt-David

  This doesn't sound like the Maddy I knew at the end of her life, the patient, probing teacher who guided and counseled me. More like the young aggressive Maddy, the girl who took a camera off to war and, against all odds, brought back the goods.

  "I think sooner or later she would have nailed him too," Bee says. "She had me convinced. She was going to stick it to Ram Carson if it was the last thing she did." Bee shrugs. "Then, one night... well, you know what happened—"

  Bee starts to sob. I put my arm around her. I'm amazed it's taken this long for her to break. For it seems to me that the story she's been telling is really the story of her own life. Or, perhaps, the entwined lives of three people who came together by chance when they were young.

  "I amazes me how the three of you ended up living so close to one another," I tell her. "You meet up years ago when you're kids, then, in old age, meet again, still trying to work out your passions."

  Bee nods. "We didn't work them out, Kay. It was over when Maddy was killed. As far as I know, Ram never found out she lived in San Francisco. He certainly never knew she was stalking him. I've thought about telling him. Maybe if he understood, he'd feel some remorse. But I doubt it. I think he's grown so hard and heartless nothing can reach him anymore. And frankly, I've no desire to see him again."

  She wipes her eyes, blinks to clear them.

  "I told you about our fling, how we were lovers for several weeks before Maddy joined Great Western. I don't like telling you this, but it's part of the story too. You see, I was crazy about Ram back then, thought he was the cat's whiskers. He was the handsomest lover I ever had. Yes, he was selfish, but he knew how to make a girl feel good. I was jealous when he started going out with Maddy. Of course I kept this to myself. Her friendship was too important to me. I didn't want to lose it." Bee pauses. "I fibbed when I told you how he came to me for help and I told him his cause was hopeless. I'm afraid the truth's not quite so pretty."

  I squeeze her shoulder. "It's okay, Bee. You don't have to tell us if you don't want to."

  She shakes her head. "No, I must. What happened was I played the part of confidante, pretending I'd help him out. I told him she was just flirting with Tommy to make him jealous, and that if he wanted to win her he should write her a letter expressing his love, that if he did that she'd be moved."

  Bee exhales. "I knew Maddy and Tommy were in love. But I wanted to hurt Ram and I knew a stupid letter would be his undoing. So you see, Ram had it right. I was the Svengali. It was me who encouraged Maddy to follow Annie Oakley's lead, nail his letter to the corral post and shoot it to shreds. It was me who put everything in motion, started the chain that led to all the tragedy. Today, telling the tale, I realized I must take responsibility." She hangs her head. "In some awful way, you see, I believe that in the end everything that happened has been my fault."

  * * * * *

  Sasha and I drive back to the city in darkness, along the lonely deserted roads of West Marin. After Bolinas, we turn toward Olema, epicenter of the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco and started the great fire that burned the city down. From there we follow a road named for Sir Francis Drake, who in the sixteenth century visited this coast, but failed to discover San Francisco Bay. This road takes us back to civilization. An hour later we reach the Golden Gate Bridge.

  "It wasn't Bee's fault," I tell Sasha. "But believing it is, she carries around a huge load of guilt."

  Truth is I don't think anyone's guilty. But I do think Carson is totally evil. What seems especially awful is that he could have changed — served his prison sentence, come out a better person, then worked hard, made something of himself, found redemption, all the things he pretends he's done. But it didn't work out that way. Instead he got worse. The orgies with the guns. The safaris at the club. Shooting down his friend and benefactor in a duel.

  It's as if he feels he's above the customs and laws governing the rest of us, that no rules apply to his pursuit of pleasure no matter how cruel or spiteful it may be. He needs those pleasures. Without them he feels empty. Yet his pursuit has made him totally hollow. Such evil, I believe, must be destroyed.

  Driving up Lombard toward Russian Hill, Sasha turns to me.

  "Now that you know what Maddy was up to, what are you going to do?" he asks.

  I look at him. I don't respond, but I think he knows the answer.

  Part Five

  The Gun

  14

  Returning to San Francisco, I find a message from Hank Evans. I immediately call him back.

  "Quite a night," Hank tells me casually. "Paid a little unexpected visit on the cousins."

  I tense.

  "I'm sending you a tape of what they said. Their apology and all. You'll hear a little kickin' and screamin' at the start. Never mind. Just filter it out or fast-forward to the end." Hank pauses. "I believe now they're truly sorry they messed with you, Kay. Ha! Sorry they ever met you."

  I put down the phone. Jesus! What did he do to them? Of course, the truth is I don't want to know. I decide that when the tape comes, I'll run it down to the end, listen to the apology, then throw the damn thing away along with my awful memories of the gun room.

  * * * * *

  I'm attending aikido class every day now, working hard, practicing all the requirements for my black belt exam.

  Today, to get me ready, Rita puts me through a truly frightening drill. She blindfolds me, then sets attackers against me in pairs. At first I perform poorly, stumbling and losing my sense of direction. After each encounter, Rita places her hands on my shoulders, calms me, sets me facing the kamiza, then leaves me to deal with the next pair.

  After four clumsy bouts, I start to find the flow. By the time the seventh pair comes at me, I'm feeling really good.

  "I like training blindfolded," I tell her at the end. "I want to practice like this every day."

  She shakes her head. "Once a week's enough." She wants me to concentrate on defending against wooden sword attacks, on switching techniques when called on to do so and, most important, on freestyle defense against four attackers at once.

  Handling multiple attacks will be the culmination of the exam, the last thing the examiners will see me do. There's no way I can fake it, and there'll be plenty of eager attackers. At other people's exams, I've jostled for the chance to take part in these cluster assaults. It's great sport, an opportunity to go at someone while helping him prove his mettle. Whenever I attack I feel relaxed, knowing I'm going to be thrown. This time the pressure will be on me to properly apply the throws.

  * * * * *

  Midnight: Joel and I have been waiting for nearly an hour to reach this place at the southern tip of San Francisco Bay. Now, a little north of Milpitas, we approach a network of salt ponds, part of the vast San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

  We're on a street lined with sleek low-rise office buildings, overflow from Silicon Valley on the other side of Dumbarton Bridge. There's not a car or person in sight, and the only illumination, besides a few security lights, is moonlight reflected off dark glass façades.

  We pass slickly designed company signs: Netmatics, SysCascade, DataTrans. Then we dead-end at an empty overgrown field smelling of salt weed. It's as if we've arrived abruptly at the edge of civilization — behind us, soulless, glossy, futuristic buildings; ahead nothing but marsh and emptiness.

  Joel pulls over, cuts the ignition.

  "Ever been down here?"

  I shake my head. "I remember hearing about some sort of island community, but I never knew where it was."

  We get out of the car. Joel checks his watch: 12:10. "We're nearly an hour early," he says.

  "Do you care?"

  He shakes his head. "Let's try and get it."

  His source called him two hours ago, told him to come here at one a.m., then hung up, leaving Joel no time to "have it out with him."

  "It's been so long since he called I decided to do what he said. After all," Joel tells me, "the guy hasn't failed us yet.
"

  He hands me a flashlight, locks his car; then we walk through, shut it behind us, then start down a narrow path.

  I can smell the salt strongly now. The moonlight illuminates an occasional power cable girder-tower. The salt pond ahead is crossed by walkways constructed of wood planks elevated several feet above the wild grass.

  "A salt company works these ponds," Joel tells me. "They dike off the sloughs, cutting off the flow. The sun evaporates what's left of the water, then they come in with machines and harvest."

  We walk about a mile before we reach a second gate, this one padlocked, but with an easy way around for people on foot. We continue down the road, heavily rutted now. Every so often Joel stumbles, then grabs my arm.

  "Glad you can see in the dark, Kay. Tonight you're my Seeing Eye pooch."

  I peer around. In the distance Mission Peak and the Valpey Ridge appear as dark forms against the night sky. Lights twinkle in the Mission Hills. Far in the distance I can hear the sound of a receding train.

  Joel points at the trestle ahead. "Only way in is to walk the tracks."

  These are, he tells me, the old tracks of the South Pacific Coast Railroad, now used by Amtrak and CalTrain. Once on them I'm better able to see where we are. With moonlight shining, everything's as clear to me as it would be to a vision-normal at midday. I make out the remnants of ruined duck blinds in the salt marshes, and the outlines of our destination, the ghost town know as Drawbridge, once a refuge for gamblers and prostitutes at its northern end, respectable families who built vacation shacks at the southern. Drawbridge, Joel tells me, was a paradise for fishermen and duck hunters. They came out here to shoot ducks by the thousands, many later served up at San Francisco's finer restaurants.

  "It's one of the weirder places on the Bay," Joel says, stumbling across the ties that hold the tracks.

  We're on the trestle. There's water on either side. I smell the powerful aroma of wetlands — pickleweed, marsh grass, mollusks and slime.

  Joel points out how Drawbridge is situated on an island. He says no one's lived there in years.

  "You're not supposed to come out here without a guide. The refuge runs a few small tours in summer. Of course people are fascinated, so kids sneak in, druggies too looking for a place to party. There's been a lot of arson over the years. Many of the old shacks are burned out."

  I look where he points at ruined buildings standing like empty husks — pilings collapsing, roofs broken by years of weather, walls bashed in by intruders.

  "You can still find faded lettering on the structures. Over there's the Sprung Hotel, where the roulette wheel was supposedly etched with the names of the good-time girls upstairs. The building beside it was a gun club."

  My ears perk up at that.

  He's still talking when I hear an approaching train. Turning, I see it, bearing down on us fast. It's a passenger train, and it's coming at sixty miles an hour. We jump off the tracks, then lie beside them and hug the earth lest the suction draw us in. As soon as the train passes, I hear what sounds like a series of small explosions. I stand, see flashes of light amidst the ruins of Drawbridge, then hear the roar of an outboard as a speedboat pulls out, then takes off heading north across the Bay.

  "Something just happened down there," I tell Joel.

  He gapes at the ghost town. We step back onto the track, then jog till we're off the trestle.

  Decomposing structures are visible now on either side, decaying boardwalks too.

  "Oh, Jesus!" Joel moans, stumbling toward the prone figure of a man lying facedown in a patch of weeds.

  I move forward cautiously, camera in my hands. Joel speaks to the man, but he doesn't move. I notice dark stains on his clothes. I crouch down, touch him warily. He's still warm, but dead I think. Carefully I turn him over while Joel shines his flashlight on his face. He's Asian, young, late teens or early twenties, and he is dead, head and body torn up by bullets.

  "This just happened. The guys who did it sped away."

  "There's another one over here." Joel points at a body fifteen feet away. "There's another too."

  I recoil, frightened now, understanding we're squatting at the center of a scene of slaughter.

  It takes us but a few minutes to find six more dead youths. And for all we know, there're others. Joel's worried there may be survivors who'll take us for the killers. He hustles me down a boardwalk into a ruined shack that smells of dry rot and salt, pulls out his cell phone, dials 911, reports in a whisper where we are and what we've found, then suddenly drops his phone.

  "What, Joel?"

  He points across the room. Through a broken doorway I spot a male figure propped against a wall, legs spread, arms at his sides, gazing straight at us, pistol lying in his lap.

  "He's dead too," Joel says.

  We both start to shake.

  "Let's get out of here," Joel whispers. Outside the shack he checks his watch, looks at me, shivers. For the first time since I've known him, he looks truly scared.

  "We got here early. We weren't supposed to see the shooting. He wanted us to trip over the bodies, freak out, whatever. But we saw more than we were supposed to. Least you did, Kay."

  I nod. "I saw the boat."

  "Recognize it if you saw it again?"

  "Maybe. I caught a good look at the stern and some of the letters and numbers on the prow."

  "Not good," Joel says. "When the cops get here keep it vague and don't tell them about any numbers. I have a pretty good idea a certain former cop I've been investigating is behind all this. So be real careful, understand?"

  * * * * *

  I set to work with my Contax documenting the scene, using my strobe to blitz the fallen bodies against the ruins of Drawbridge and the night. I strive to create raw, stark, flattened images of carnage through extreme contrasts of light and dark, to covey the brutality of the slaughter, the butchery of it, the way the old-time tabloid photographers did when they covered gangland slayings with Speed Graphic cameras and synchronized flash.

  Laboring, I quickly work up a sweat. Meantime Joel sits on the ground, one arm wrapped about a knee, the other clutching his cell phone to his ear, dictating his story to his editor. Since the Bay Area News is a weekly, he'd normally have plenty of time to write, but tonight, by coincidence, the News goes to press. Realizing he has a chance to scoop the dailies, Joel is reporting the Drawbridge Ghost Town massacre as spot news.

  I catch several of his phrases as I work: "... Asian street

  gang members... Wo Hop To triad... bloodbath... culminating event... battle for control of the San Francisco waterfront..."

  Although we were a good hundred yards away when the shooting occurred, heard the shots but saw nothing but flashes from guns and the escaping boat, Joel is so skilled he can re-create the scene, describing "twisted bodies of Asian youths," "cold salt marsh grasses flecked with blood," "what looked to be a devastating ambush in this remote ghost town at the bottom of San Francisco Bay."

  Like me, I realize, he is plunging into work to distance himself from the surrounding horror. Maddy told me she did the same in Vietnam: "I set myself the task of creating powerful images. It was the only way to keep my sanity."

  * * * * *

  The cops come in like an invading force, Feds along with Coast Guard, harbor patrol, county and municipal law enforcement, arriving by chopper, squad car and boat. Within minutes, fifty or sixty uniforms converge.

  We're herded aside, questioned, swiftly conducted out of the area, driven to the Hayward police station. Here we're separated, then questioned by a succession of investigators from different agencies. Again and again I'm asked to describe what I saw. Following Joel's advice, I give a vague description of the boat. When a detective asks me why I didn't photograph it, I explain: "It was middle of the night. I didn't want to get shot. I was a hundred yards away, too far to strobe, and I don't work with a telephoto lens."

  "Then how come you saw it at all?"

  "I have good night vision."
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  He shakes his head. "Yeah, sure..."

  * * * * *

  They release us at dawn, escort us back to Joel's car. It's been ticketed. Seems we parked in a no-night-parking zone.

  "We're getting near the endgame," Joel tells me as we drive back toward Oakland.

  I think: I'm near my own endgame too.

  "What's the name of this game anyway?" I ask.

  Joel shrugs. "Those kids were ambushed. They must have been lured there for some sort of illegal exchange. Money for drugs, guns, whatever. An exchange is always the most dangerous part of a deal between crooks. At first I thought this was a game about takeover and power, since the purpose of every tip seemed to place me as a witness when a criminal act was being sabotaged. Then things changed. We got the tip to go to the garage where we found the body. Tonight was the same thing on a bigger scale — go out to Drawbridge and find a bunch of Wo Hop To boys who got massacred."

  Joel pauses. The sun's rising behind us, casting long shadows, painting the hills ahead with morning light.

  "I don't think it's just a takeover attempt," he says. "It's a war of extermination. Whoever's behind this doesn't just want to put these guys out of business. He wants them all stone-cold dead so he can take control and never look back."

  That makes me shiver. "Back at Drawbridge you said you had a pretty good idea who's behind this."

  Joel nods. "Give me the numbers you saw on that boat, kiddo. If I can track the boat back to him, we'll be ready to play the endgame our way."

  * * * * *

  Back home, exhausted, I find a small package in my mailbox. I open it in the elevator, inside find an audiotape cassette with "INTERROGATION" written in block letters on the label.