Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  “You’re right,” I said. “Where the hell would they have met each other?”

  “The old lecher has interests in one of Berlusconi’s television stations. Besides, he’s rolling in it. He’ll have seen her in a newspaper and sent his private plane to pick her up. Lovely girl. She’ll be even more famous now. It won’t do him any good, but her stock will rise once Lime’s photographs clear the front pages in Italy and Spain. Who do you think should have exclusive rights to break it first?”

  “Do you want a beer or a coffee?” I said.

  “Cola.”

  I fetched two colas from the fridge and put them on the table. Oscar looked at me.

  “What’s on your mind, Peter?”

  “Maybe we should forget about it?”

  “Could be a million or more. Undoubtedly more. You must have a pressing reason.”

  “I have.”

  I told him the story. He listened carefully. Oscar could flit about, be garrulous, superficially cheerful, but it was a façade he wore for the outside world. He was a sober businessman through and through, and he knew me well enough to respect that if I had misgivings there would be good reason. I had taken thousands of photographs in my life, and hundreds of photographs that people would prefer I hadn’t, so Oscar was well aware that it wouldn’t be moral scruples that led me to have misgivings.

  “We’ll bring Gloria in on this one,” he said. “But I can’t see a problem. It’s a non-starter. It can’t be substantiated. You haven’t done anything wrong. They were in a public place. Your name won’t be mentioned. It’s always like that. And anyway, anyone who knows anything knows that often when OSPE runs really revealing photographs they’ve got the Lime signature, right?”

  It was true, so I nodded.

  “It’s just a hunch,” I said.

  “I respect that. Gloria can snoop around a bit.”

  “OK,” I said, but I had the feeling that we should leave it alone, although I had complete confidence in Gloria’s and Oscar’s ability to assess the situation. They knew all about the minefield, the borderline between the legal and the possible. They knew how to make the most of people’s instinct for gossip, but they also knew that if we broke the law our profits would soon be eaten up by lawyers’ fees. That’s simple arithmetic, as Gloria was wont to say.

  “We’ll give it a couple of days,” said Oscar, and got up to use the telephone.

  He rang Gloria. I heard him putting her in the picture. He was standing next to my desk and I saw him pick up the black and white photograph that had turned up from out of the past. He glanced at it and put it down again. We had known one another for so long that he wouldn’t think he was poking his nose in my business. Then he picked up the photograph again and stood holding it as, suddenly preoccupied, he responded to Gloria in his slow, heavily accented, but correct Spanish.

  “Four o’clock?” he said at the end of their conversation.

  I shook my head. I had an appointment with the Japanese. I needed it. I had that strange uneasiness in my body, tingling fingers, shivers down my spine, churning stomach, dry mouth. All the danger signs. I needed to get physically tired, and maybe I should think about going to a meeting again soon. I had hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary any longer.

  “Peter can’t,” said Oscar. “What about now?” he suggested.

  I shook my head again. Oscar was holding the photograph in both his hands, the receiver clamped under his chin. I had a sitting in half an hour, with a 56-year-old diva from the Royal Spanish Theatre who had decided to give her latest lover a portrait, which I had promised would make her look as enigmatically beautiful as the Mona Lisa.

  “Six?” said Oscar. He looked at the back of the print before putting it on the desk again. I nodded and he blew kisses down the telephone. They were a couple, those two. Either in love or living separate lives. He turned round so that his backside was resting on the table, and lit a cigarette.

  “Who’s the mystery woman?” he said, pointing at the photograph.

  “I’m not entirely sure.” Actually I was, but I couldn’t be bothered to explain. I wasn’t surprised that he asked. Oscar had been born nosy, which was one of the many reasons that he was so good at his job.

  “What’s it doing here?”

  I told him about the woman from the National Security Service in Copenhagen.

  “Have you got the negatives then?” he asked.

  “Why are you so interested in an old photograph? Do you know her?”

  “No. But she’s beautiful. In an enigmatic, mysterious sort of way. As if she’s saying ‘I have many secrets. Only a strong man will be able to find the key to them. It’s difficult to unlock me, but if you do the reward will be considerable.’”

  I laughed. It was typical of Oscar. That’s how he viewed women. He conquered them, discovered their secrets, and as soon as he thought he knew their bodies and souls, they began to bore him. Only the unpredictable, astute, sexy Gloria had held onto him long enough for a separation to be too inconvenient. Besides, he loved her in his own peculiar way, and periodically he would be madly in love with her, as if they had only just met and there were still secrets to be revealed. That usually happened when he had been away on business for a while.

  “Have you?” he repeated.

  I pointed at the fireproof steel cabinets along one wall.

  “You know I never throw a negative out. They’ll be here somewhere or other. The photograph doesn’t ring any bells, but I dare say it’s around. Maybe up in the attic.”

  “So you’re going to dig it out?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not at the top of my list,” I said.

  “It’s a real Lime photograph,” he said. “It’s got everything: proportion, tension, mystery, disquiet, danger, joy. You were good right from the start.”

  “Goodbye, Oscar,” I said.

  He gathered up the photographs of the Minister and the Italian actress and put them in an envelope, patted my cheek and left.

  I switched on my mobile phone. When I wasn’t out on an assignment I often let its answering machine act as my secretary. There was a message from Clara Hoffmann asking if I would ring her. I decided I wouldn’t just then. Instead I walked over to the steel cabinets and opened the first one. It contained a huge part of my life in small squares packed in grey, soft negative paper. The negatives were arranged by year. I had written the date and subject of the shots on each roll. There were thousands. I had travelled around a lot during my life, but had always been systematic about organising my photographs. Even during the most chaotic periods, when I had teetered on the brink of an abyss, I had kept my negatives in good order. It was as if I knew that once my pictures got into a mess there would be no going back and I would be dragged down into a pit, which would be impossible to climb out of. In the first few years, when I didn’t really have a permanent address, they were stored in cardboard boxes in the basement of my parents’ house. Later, when I moved into my first little flat, which was now the kitchen and family room of our large flat, the boxes came with me. The images which froze time in a thousandth of a second were now to be found in the steel cabinets, beautifully organised.

  But not all the negatives.

  This particular one might be in my secret archive, which even Oscar didn’t know about. I had not only always taken great care of my negatives, I had also considered the best and most controversial ones to be both a life insurance and a pension, plus creating a portrait of my life. I had been in the habit, since I was young, of posting these special images to my parents. I would put the negative inside a letter addressed to myself, which I then put in an envelope and sent. They knew that they just had to look after the letter until I came home. When I dropped in during one of my irregular visits to Denmark, I opened the letters to myself and put the contents in a suitcase. There had been various suitcases over the years, increasing in size, and now my archive was a big, white, steel Samsonite case with a combination lock. Only one suitca
se was allowed. That was part of the ritual. Of the myth of my own making which involved a good deal of superstition. I put the negatives in order, filed them and listed the subject matter in a black notebook. It may have been an eccentricity, but I didn’t trust centralised archives and I didn’t trust computers. I didn’t store just negatives of my famous photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy sunbathing naked and other images that had earned me a fortune. There was also a landscape that meant a lot to me, or had done once. There were the first photographs I had taken with my first Leica, or with my first camera. There was a really rather banal tourist shot from the Red Square in Moscow in 1980 alongside a little portrait of my first girlfriend taken with my old Kodak box camera. The first photographs I had developed and printed myself were in my suitcase. There were negatives from Iran, from Denmark, from my childhood and adolescence, of half-forgotten lovers and girlfriends, from my lifelong project of taking photographs in all of Hemingway’s drinking-holes, and then there were the million-dollar-negatives like the one of the “Minister and his Mistress”. There were the first photographs of Amelia and Maria Luisa just after her birth. But there were also love letters from a long life, letters from my father and mother, my first letter to them written when I had been away on a summer holiday, a couple of school reports, a couple of essays and my clumsy attempts at writing poetry, sketches and hastily scrawled diary entries and thoughts. The odd newspaper cutting, but only a few and all from my childhood and early teens – the Kennedy killings, first John F. and later Robert; the first man on the moon. The photograph I took of the Vopo laughing on the crumbling Berlin Wall. It was more than just a suitcase. It was a safe place for nostalgia, in which I had recorded my life’s adventures, for my eyes only. My will stated that after my death the suitcase should be taken, unopened, to the public incinerator and burnt. Throughout my unsettled existence, the suitcase, which I used like a diary, had been a secure berth, somewhere in which I could store my life’s secrets and innermost thoughts. After my parents died, I had a solicitor store it and receive my post for a while, but for the past five years it had been looked after by Amelia’s father. Being a former intelligence officer, he could keep a secret and, even though we saw things very differently, I knew that he trusted me and respected me, yes, was fond of me because he could see how unconditionally I loved his only daughter and grandchild.

  I picked out the negative of one of the more pornographic shots and put it in an envelope, along with a note of the time and place, and addressed the envelope to myself before putting it into a larger envelope with a short message to Amelia’s father. The photograph of the mystery woman could quite easily be in the white suitcase in Don Alfonzo’s pleasant house near Madrid.

  I checked my emails and replied to a couple of letters. They were mainly from sources telling me about possible hits. Rumours and hearsay about where the famous were planning to go on holiday or were holidaying already. They didn’t have to be sensational photographs. Every picture of someone well-known in a private, informal situation where his or her vulnerability was on display was worth a fortune. I decided I wouldn’t follow up any of the tips, but I thanked my sources and transferred the $1,000 that I thought one of the informants had earned. I emailed a tip to a young photographer who worked for us as a freelancer in London and who deserved a break. I had been there too once, jostling for position in the heaving crowd of photographers waiting outside a restaurant in Kensington, because word was that a royal was having lunch there. Hours of waiting for that thousandth of a second. The photographer’s lot: hurry up and wait!

  The diva arrived with her dresser, and I spent an enjoyable hour while the old poseur sat for me in my studio, chatting about men past and present and affectionately telling indiscreet tales from behind the scenes. She was from a bygone era, but she had a marvellous face and, being the great actress that she was, she knew how to employ every one of her hundreds of face muscles. I tried various kinds of lighting. She wanted to look mysterious and enigmatic. She also wanted to appear 20 years younger. If the photograph was good enough, she would insist that the theatre used it for their publicity. I also had a number of authors on my client list. It had got to the point where the photograph on the back cover was more important for sales than the content of the novel. We lived in a media-driven age where image was everything and substance nothing. Everyone in the spotlight wanted to play the role they had chosen. They would claim that they were just being themselves, but I knew better than anyone that they really wanted to play a role, and that they were miserable if they weren’t able to perform it through to the finale. Even the tragic, beautiful Princess Diana was both actor and victim. She hated us when we lay in wait, but loved us when we could be used in her power struggle with husband and Palace. She couldn’t live without the media, and she ended up being devoured by it. She thought she could choose, but once you’ve invited the media in, the guests won’t leave until they’re ready. If you live by the media, you die by the media. Either abruptly, or that slow, painful death when no one points the viewfinder at you any more. When you’re no longer a story, just a memory. When emptiness strikes and the flashbulbs go out. Fame can be both a drug and an aphrodisiac. I made my living from today’s narcissism and insatiable appetite for gossip. I was the man sitting in the middle of the global village square, passing on gossip about the famous. By making visible their sorrows and joys, infidelities and loneliness when they were abandoned, I both mythologised and humanised them at one and the same time. But I needed something more. So I took portraits, because in a photograph of a face I could, if I was lucky and skilful, lay bare the individual’s soul in all its fragile nakedness as I peeled away their chosen persona without their realising what I was doing. They couldn’t hide from me in a portrait. I revealed the depths of their being.

  Afterwards, I spent a few hours in the darkroom with the diva’s portrait, but I still didn’t think we had hit exactly the right expression, so I decided I would have her to sit again. I was happy in the darkroom. The outside world disappeared. The darkroom was soundproof, and light-proof so nothing disturbed me as I created my own world and saw my art emerge under the red light. The chemical processes were simple, but it was my precise attention to detail and my ability to combine them in the right order with the right timing that made the result uniquely mine. I said goodbye to the young woman who looked after Maria Luisa during the midday break, ate a quick sandwich and went out into the afternoon summer heat, round the corner to the Japanese karate institute. They were old friends and had been my trainers for 20 years. When the institute had first opened, I had done the publicity shots and helped them through the tortuous Spanish red tape. They didn’t have any money, so they had paid me with lessons. Now they had loads of money, as did I for that matter, but I still regularly took photographs for them and they let me train at the institute when my body needed the restlessness knocked out of it. Karate training kept me fit, and I enjoyed talking with the old trainer, Suzuki, who had the ability to look at life from a distance and put it into a perspective, which reached beyond the everyday. Talking with him was a bit like talking to the priest I could never believe.

  Oscar had thrown himself into golf with the passion which only middle-aged men are able to invest in a new vice. He was far too tall to be particularly good, but he worked at it as if it was a matter of life and death. He had taken me out on the course a couple of times, but it didn’t really appeal, even though I suspected that I might have been better suited to it than he was. Oscar had more than enough money, so he invested in expensive coaching and he had improved a lot over the last couple of years, but I stuck to karate and the discipline it demanded. That self-control which Suzuki drilled into me on the mat and in our conversations afterwards.

  The Madrid heat hit me in the face as I stepped out of the door and was instantly enveloped in the smells and sounds of the city. The boisterous song of the streets. The smell of freshly boiled squid emanating from a big bluish-red creature hanging over a ste
aming copper pan in a restaurant window. The blind lottery ticket seller’s keening chant as he promised to plead to the goddess of fortune in the next big Los Onces draw. The clattering rattle of a three-wheeled delivery scooter and the quiet hum of a Jaguar. Madrid’s and Spain’s ceaseless and conspicuous cacophony of contrasts, of old and new.

  I walked past the Viva Madrid café and a few metres on to Calle Echégaray, one of the oldest streets in Madrid. I posted my letters and walked on feeling quite content. Bars and little boarding houses sit side by side. The pavement is narrow, so you have to press yourself against the buildings when the cars clatter past. In my young days I had lived at Pension las Once, halfway down the street opposite the Hotel Inglés and the Japanese karate institute. They had opened the year that I had moved in, renting a small room on the fourth floor from señor Alberto and his señora. Their Galician domestic help, Rosa, was 30, maybe a virgin, illiterate and so sharp-tongued that I told her she could marry only a member of the Guardia Civil. Rosa couldn’t be called beautiful. She had regular but coarse features and a clumsy, round body. She looked like what she was: the daughter of a poor day labourer and a mother who was worn out because, like so many other poor Spaniards in those days, she had to grind and toil to keep the home together. Rosa always wore a pink overall when she cleaned and cooked with the señora. She came from a small village far away in green and hilly Galicia, born into a large family of poor farm workers. Her father had lined up every morning along with the other men on the village square, in the hope that the landowner’s foreman would give them a day’s work. Poverty was widespread, exploitation gross and the class barriers high. Rosa had been in service since she was seven, but I never discovered how she had ended up in Pension las Once in Madrid. In the evenings, the señora would sit with the ABC newspaper and try to teach her to read. It was a red-letter day when Rosa finally managed to read the headlines by herself. Old señor Alberto had fetched a bottle of special sherry which he had been keeping for 25 years, and we ceremoniously raised our glasses to Rosa who’d solved the mystery of how random letters put together in a particular order make words, which make ideas, which in turn shape dreams. It was easy to be a socialist in Spain in those days. The exploitation and oppression under Franco’s dictatorship were plain to see. The wealth created along the coast by the tourist industry benefited only a few. There is no reason to romanticise the past, so why do we do it all the time? Spain had come a long way and, whereas a generation ago there had been lots of Rosas, now there were only a few who didn’t go to school and learn the basic requirement to be a member of society – to read and write.