Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  “Like I told you already, there’s more than one kind of dog. I took a lot of pictures in eighteen years as a government photographer. Maybe I took some pictures of dogs that they might be interested in having. Maybe they’re worried I’d be more interested in a business deal than in a phony part-time assistant job.”

  “Let’s stop there, Jack. That’s starting to sound like blackmail. Whether or not it is, it sounds like something you aren’t explaining to me. I’m not going to represent a client who’s playing games I don’t understand.”

  Ostroski had been looking at him the same way since he’d walked into the shop, head straight up, eyebrows held with a hint of a quizzical arch, mouth verging toward a wry smile. Now the amusement flattened into an unblinking gaze—take it or leave it.

  “I don’t care who calls it what. I have some pictures they may want. It’s not a renegotiation of an old purchase. I’m willing to do a new deal. They can have these other pictures that I have stored away. In exchange, I get to go through the collection in private—no one looking over my shoulder. Then I tell them what can be made public and what can’t. And if they want to buy some more of my prints and negatives, that’s on the table. I’m not making any threats, just offering a solid business proposition. They already bought some old photos from me. No reason they wouldn’t be interested in buying more. But this time at a fair price.”

  “I don’t like this, Jack. Pictures of what?”

  “Told you. Dog photos. You can tell them I have pictures of an old hound and his doghouse. With poodles and German shepherds coming over to visit. Becker will be interested. He likes dogs.”

  “I don’t care what he likes. We’re talking about what I like and don’t. I don’t like the sound of this and I don’t like representing someone in a situation I don’t understand.”

  “It’s real simple. I’d take this deal to them myself except that Becker would probably go off the deep end if he had to deal with me directly. The other thing is they can’t screw me around if my lawyer is doing the negotiating and keeping proper records. They won’t be able to say afterward that I misunderstood something. As for your thinking it might be blackmail, see how they react. I think you’ll see they take it as a straight-up business proposition. Nothing to get upset about. Hell, I wouldn’t do anything that would cause so much trouble that it might end up with me shutting this place down. Adela needs the work.”

  Rabani didn’t let the reference to Adela slow down his response. He knew Ostroski well enough now to assume that bringing her into the conversation was a test.

  “Are you a social worker?” he asked. “Is that why you hired her?” He cut himself off before he could add that he’d assumed Ostroski had hired her because she was easy to look at.

  “She earns her salary, which isn’t much, minimum wage in fact.”

  “Jack, you told me once that Becker had it in for you for some reason. I think you must know the reason. Or at least have a good idea.”

  Ostroski measured him. He was still looking eye to eye but Rabani had the sensation of someone looking him up and down. Neither one spoke. Hissing from the tires on a couple of passing cars intruded into the silence. Rabani took in the shop with his peripheral vision and noted that everything was in its own place, despite a surface appearance of clutter. Ostroski considered for several seconds and decided to answer.

  “He used to be the industry minister. He was always a politician. Always on the lookout for information of any sort about anyone. Someone gave him the idea that I knew too many people inside the government after nearly fifteen years as a government photographer. Maybe that I knew too many things, some of them maybe embarrassing if they ever got out.”

  “Like a photo of a poodle or a German shepherd.”

  Ostroski smiled. “That’s all you get, lawyer. For your own protection. Besides, you sound like you’re really considerate about them, understanding about their position. You are working with only me in mind, right?”

  Rabani considered his client for several seconds. He nodded without changing his expression and walked out without looking back. He walked down the street, in the litter-strewn and dusty breeze, with the fall light taking on a filtered quality and throwing long shadows. The sun was tracking now through a low arc. He felt he should drop the case. And he knew he would not. It had too much danger for him to back out, too much promise of exposure of human deceit and frailty and oddness. He walked down the street, northwest wind pressing on his pant legs and jacket, sun forcing him to tilt his gaze down, and wished he were a drunk or a smoker. It would have been easier for him to say no to a drink or a cigarette than to a new view of human imagination and folly.

  About half an hour later, just before the shop closed for the day, Roberto Morales walked in. Ostroski looked at Morales’s clean sweatshirt and jeans and knew he hadn’t been working that day.

  “Roberto. Haven’t seen you in a while. How’re things?”

  “You know, they could be better. Not so much construction work these days. When there are no cranes in the sky, there is no money for labourers. It is good they have that food bank. Otherwise I could not even afford a beer.”

  “I know the feeling. When you get to my age you learn to make compromises. I drink a little more coffee now. It’s cheaper.”

  “Yes. Many people do. Maybe I should go back to Nicaragua and find a job on a plantation.”

  “Don’t do that. Someday people will wake up and find it costs them more to fill their gas tanks all of a sudden. Then construction will come back here.”

  “I found other ways to bring in some cash, Jack. But Adela, she does not want to hear about them. Big sister still worries about me. I am tired of being her little brother. I was enough of a man to carry a gun and shoot it. I want to be a man now, not a little brother. I worry about her. This trouble you have been in, will it put her job here in jeopardy?”

  “I think everything will work out. Why do you ask?”

  “If there is anything I can do to help.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. I have a lawyer working on it. He’s going to negotiate for me and I think I’m in a pretty good position. Those guys in the government want to run everything, but when you show them they can’t, they’re realists. Most of the time. Sounds like you’re running some risks yourself. You aren’t going to get into more trouble than me, are you?”

  Roberto grinned, the same easy smile that Ostroski saw on Adela on the rare occasions when she could be persuaded that not everything was serious. “Life is trouble as well as pleasure. Anyway, I have seen real trouble. People here worry about small things.”

  “Cops and lawyers have a way of making small things suddenly look large.”

  “Then I will stay out of their way. Have a good one, Jack. Gracias for everything.”

  Ostroski watched him leave, saw the head up and legs taking long strides. His mind drifted back to when he was about that age. He remembered cockiness, fear, and disgust. Then he snapped back to the present.

  6.

  RABANI SPENT MOST OF HIS LIFE INDOORS. HE THOUGHT that was strange. A life enclosed by walls and focused on papers sitting on a desk was part of the deal for lawyers. He nevertheless felt he should spend more time outdoors.

  The river valley running through the middle of the city was full of walking trails. It seemed there were more every year. Ravines with stub trails ran up from the valley. Outside the city boundaries there was still plenty of farmland. Most of it was in crops, but an hour’s drive north took a person to the fringe of the boreal forest, the great green hinterland of the settled part of North America. Out there you could often see the northern lights.

  Everything about this environment called him outside. Yet he spent most of his life inside, looking at paper and walls. During some of that time he arranged real estate deals that would produce high-rise offices or condominiums—all of them promising money but also an obliteration of the past as well as of part of the na
tural environment. The past belonged to hick towns, to glitter-eyed dreamers who thought they could build a small, contained world free of banks and debt and disappointment.

  The future? That had yet to be built. It was constantly under construction. The future belonged to anyone who wanted something more. It was a land where people could tell themselves they were as smart and rich as anyone from anywhere.

  He could understand the reaching for more. He belonged to the first generation of his family to go to university and become a professional. He wanted enough money never to be in debt like his parents had been all their lives. He also thought he would like a certain amount of status; his parents had never seemed to think about such things. Yet he was not sure he understood others’ need to strive for a never-ending more—more money, more status, more pouring of concrete and asphalt over some of the best farmland in the country, more of not just escape from the past but obliteration of it.

  If you wipe out the past, he thought, can you really have a present? But can you have a future if you don’t let the past go? Those were things he thought about some days, less and less as time went by. His work had him dealing with real people in real situations rather than with abstract notions. He was a lawyer, not an academic. On this day, he was not thinking such thoughts at all. He was concentrating on the counter-offer that had surprised him when he took Ostroski’s pitch to Becker’s deputy minister, Frank Jeffries.

  Now there was an odd duck. If it weren’t for the bright, brassy rims of his glasses he would be all grey, the caricature of a lifelong civil servant. Odd duck didn’t quite cover it, though. Rabani detected patronizing in the deputy minister’s smile and in his apparent certainty that anyone would agree with his point of view. His chilly charm covered a hard base of contempt, Rabani suspected. More than that. Contempt linked to connections and power and years of getting what he wanted suggested danger.

  The government people still wanted to catalogue the collection quickly. That meant they were looking for something and didn’t know where it was among the thousands of prints and negatives they had bought. They possibly did not even know what it was. But they had shown clear interest in something hidden in the jumble of images. They apparently had made whatever it was a priority. Offering Ostroski a chance to sort through the collection was a concession. But it was only a means to whatever end they had in mind. It was also obvious that Ostroski did not want anyone in the government to see something in the collection. Ostroski knew what that was. Becker probably knew, but might not. Rabani certainly did not know what any of the others were after; he didn’t like knowing less than either of the two men he was dealing with. He disliked even more the possibility that Jeffries might have a separate interest.

  The offer to sell the government other photos not in the collection had sparked only mild interest from Jeffries and vague talk of perhaps a few thousand dollars. Rabani was calculating what that meant. Ostroski clearly thought he had material for which the government would pay a fair chunk of money. That meant it was probably embarrassing to the government or to someone in the government.

  Frank Jeffries was known to be a cool character. His pasty face and thinning hair of pale, uncertain colour could have been intended to blend in with any background in the manner of an octopus. His eyes were shiny and soulless behind the metal-rimmed glasses. His habit of talking in cultivated bureaucratese served as a bland front. Rabani had been in the party’s university club and had heard small stories and rumours about Jeffries’ sly machinations even then. Jeffries had juggled budgets and staff positions for years to keep his operation in the Culture Department going. He had found ways to bring in revenue. He had created virtual staff positions during the last spending cut by sending departmental staff to non-governmental organizations where they ended up doing much the same jobs as before, nominally off the civil service payroll but still at public expense because the NGOs operated on government grants.

  It was one thing for Jeffries not to act worried. It was another for him to hint at a roundabout method of paying Ostroski. He could be stalling for time. Or he, or maybe Becker, wasn’t sure that Ostroski had anything really damaging. Or they thought there might be other ways to handle the situation.

  The fourth possible explanation, the one that was actually the case, didn’t occur to Rabani.

  Jeffries didn’t much care about Becker or Becker’s problems. Whatever the other photos showed did not concern Jeffries or the Culture Department. If they put the minister in some jeopardy, well, ministers came and went. He had no strong incentive to protect Becker, whom he considered arrogant and basically a philistine. Becker had given him authority to negotiate as he thought best. And he thought it best not to waste any more of the department’s skimpy budget than necessary on something he did not see as important. The main Ostroski collection was safe. That was what drew Jeffries’ attention. He wanted to bring something under control that he saw as far more dangerous than a potential passing scandal involving a former cabinet minister. A small number of additional photos that his minister might be interested in were irrelevant.

  He would sit tight and see what happened. He reported to Becker what he’d been told about the other photos Ostroski was offering now. The description sounded like some sort of code because it involved dogs; Jeffries had searched through his mental file and thought he understood what that meant. He also reported that Ostroski and his lawyer were playing hardball. They wanted a lot of money. And they wanted complete control of the review of the main collection. They threatened a lengthy legal action on the grounds that the original sale agreement did not mention anything about digitizing photos. Becker’s reaction had told him little. A more or less frozen face, but a barely noticeable brightening of complexion. Something important was at stake. Important to his minister or to others higher up in the great chain of status and authority. And important enough not to trust Jeffries with a full explanation, which was another reason that Jeffries was not eager to help Becker out of whatever hole he was in.

  “No trust,” he told himself. “After all these years of keeping cabinet ministers looking capable and keeping them away from dangers they were too dim to spot, no trust. Not appreciated.” Especially not appreciated by John Becker—an immigrant no matter how long he had been here or whom he had married, an economist more interested in the departmental budget than in nurturing the province’s culture, a minister who sent his executive assistant snooping around talking to managers in the department when he should have been satisfied with reports from his deputy, a man too close a match for himself in brains and tactical sense.

  He looked down at the sleeves of his ash-coloured pinstripe jacket. The pinstripe was a classic, unobtrusive width. The impeccable white cuffs of his shirt extending a half-inch past the jacket fabric—he declined to think in centimetres unless necessary. The silver cufflinks making a subtle statement of enduring taste in an era when most men had accepted buttons. The ash-coloured vest was hiding as usual half the understated lilac tie, hiding what he was sure most men subconsciously thought of as their symbol of virility.

  No. No need for primitive display. No need for obvious concealment either. Simply a statement of good taste and manners; a reassurance of life lived according to accepted principles; an expression of probity and self-confidence. His clothes spoke for him. Nothing to display except good taste, and nothing to hide. And the province would have nothing to hide, either. He would see to that. Nothing to taint its reputation. He looked at the print of the neatly built homestead on his office wall, an ideal and reassuring image of beginnings. He felt the sudden prick of memory of the real-life farmhouse where he had grown up in the 1930s—washed-out paint on the outside walls, cracks in the interior plaster, stains on the wallpaper that made a sad attempt at gentility in the room where neighbours and the minister sometimes visited, an outdoor privy, weeds in the yard, no art except for two photographs of grandparents, no books except a Bible and his mother’s treasured copy of A Christmas Carol and
her Blue Ribbon Cookbook and the handful of magazines passed around by her equally hard pressed handful of friends. The family had had to heat up bath water and share it, for God’s sake, taking turns from the cleanest to the dirtiest. He had been flooded with relief when he heard the place had been torn down. He never talked about his faraway past with anyone—a life suppressed, obliterated like the old house.

  He looked at the oak cabinet off to his side and thought it was late enough in the afternoon for a treat of his single-malt scotch. First a sniff and then the peaty burning in his throat, and then the oblivious warmth radiating inside him. He poured two fingers’ worth into a plain crystal glass and was surprised to see his hand shaking slightly as he carefully tilted the bottle.

  He thought about what could happen if the wrong photographs became public: “All these years of building and protecting how we are perceived in the world. All the effort unappreciated. All the anguish endured at the thought people might misunderstand. It won’t be wrecked. I will not let it be wrecked.”

  He felt the whisky burning in his throat, almost bringing tears to his eyes, and warmth rising in his chest. Visceral refinement. A promise to himself that he had the skill and the determination not to let meaningless indiscretions ruin his life’s work, not to let them ruin his life really. There was no one else who might understand. And he had little time left before they would force him to retire. Whatever help his current minister needed was of no significance in comparison. He thought of one of his favourite images from literature—a reference to “the kings and the unhomed angels.” It was the only image in which he could see his own face. The political masters were the kings; he was an unhomed angel, a lonely guardian, sword in hand, aging, yet enduring and implacable. No, the needs of his current minister were not significant, not when compared to his moral duty, which was to say his road home.

  John Becker rarely thought of himself as needing help. He coped with situations. He had been coping with situations ever since finding easy ways to stay away from Vietnam. His skill in navigating life was a big reason that he had got into cabinet at a young age under Manchester and was still in cabinet with Morehead in charge. But he did have to do some managing here. He called Waschuk and arranged a time to meet. This wasn’t something to trust to a telephone conversation. Then he called in Ginny Radescu. She came into the office wearing her professional cheerfulness. The face of a loyal, willing worker, and a discreet one.