by Mark Lisac
He had arranged to go with Adela to a movie. She said she had not been to see one for months. He picked her up from in front of her apartment building and they went to see a Shakespeare adaptation. Afterward they went for coffee, which both of them liked more than alcohol. They talked about their jobs and about Shakespeare’s plays and the film they had just seen.
“I liked the naturalness of the speech,” she said. “People forget that Shakespeare does not have to be presented reverently, as if it is on a higher plane than the audience. I still remember the time I went with a few friends to a repertory theatre in New York and saw the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Watching those Hollywood stars treating a comedy like it really was a comedy was eye-opening.”
“I’ve never seen that one,” he said.
“No? It’s been around all your lifetime and more.”
“I’ve spent too much of my life reading law books, I guess. But your description makes it sound like it’s worth catching. I’ll watch for it on television. Did you see many movies when you were growing up?”
“Not so many, and mostly in Spanish. Sometimes English with subtitles. That was a good way to help learn the language.”
They were at a quiet table where no one could overhear them if they kept their voices down. He decided the setting would allow questions that had been on his mind.
“It must be a lonely experience moving to a different country where you don’t really know anybody,” he said.
“You mean, how lonely am I? Do I have a boyfriend?”
“That too.” He was learning to take her directness and perceptive leaps in stride.
“No, I don’t. Nor is there anyone back home or in New York, although I did have a boyfriend in each place.”
“Do you ever want to go back? To either?”
“The boyfriends or the places?”
“The places.”
“No. Life in Nicaragua became difficult. New York is exciting but too big for me. As for the other, one learns to live looking forward. You have no woman in your life?”
“No. There was one in university. She wanted to be a marine biologist. She is now, which means she will always live near an ocean. I’m a prairie boy. I like to see the green fields in summer and the geese migrating every spring and fall. I even like the brilliant sunshine on the snow and the quietness of winter here.”
“Poetic,” she said. “I did not expect that from a lawyer.”
“I don’t read much poetry. Nature provides enough that I don’t have to get it in words. You didn’t leave the two men behind with any bitterness.”
“No,” she said. “There was no occasion for bitterness. When you have to leave your home you begin to accept that life will bring more changes than you thought it would.”
“It took me a few months to get over the biologist,” he said. “Well, maybe a couple of years. Some things are harder to get over than others.”
“Yes,” she said. “One remembers many things in life. Some are consequential. Others are silly. I remember a mahogany table in my grandmother’s dining room, my mother’s mother. I have a clearer mental image of it than of anything else in her house. It’s probably because we had family dinners there and I always felt it was the warm centre of the world.”
“Love can make you feel that way.”
“Love between two people is less stable than love in a big family. It depends on only one other person. It is there or not.”
“Is that why you were able to leave the two men behind?”
“It is a matter of expectations.”
“You would never expect love to last?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It may or may not last. Other things may affect you more. Excuse me, I did not word that the right way. Love may affect you to the same degree as other emotions, but you will remember love and other emotions differently.”
“In what way?”
She needed a moment to invent a description that he might understand. She looked at him while she considered the words and then spoke to him.
“Love leaves a song. Injustice leaves a scar.”
He had a sensation of coming to the edge of a cliff or a high balcony and looking down a long way. They talked some more about other things. He came back from thinking about high places to absorbing the warmth of her colours and the quickness of the smile in her rounded face.
They put on their jackets and walked out onto the deserted sidewalk, where the light from the café and the street lamps barely held up against the darkness. It isn’t so much the weakness of the light that makes the night look dark, Rabani thought. It’s the silence of a litter-strewn street nearly empty of people. He looked at Adela and wondered how she measured loneliness.
12.
THE NEXT DAY PASSED LIKE A NORMAL MONDAY. RABANI worked nine hours in the office, went around the corner for dinner at a Vietnamese place a few blocks away, came back to work at his desk until eight, and then drove to his apartment with a few more papers in his briefcase.
Tuesday morning brought confusion and anger. Julia told him a Mr. Ostroski was on the telephone demanding to speak about an urgent matter. He put aside the contract he was working on and picked up his phone.
“They broke into my shop last night.”
“They?”
“It sure wasn’t thieves. Nothing was stolen that I can see. But the drawers were all opened in front and in back. Things were left reasonably neat but I can see the difference. Someone was in here looking for something. You and I both know there’s only one person who would do that, and there’s only one thing he would have had people looking for. The son of a bitch is going to pay for this.”
“Have you called the police?”
“No. What am I going to tell them? Somebody hired by someone in the government broke in here and moved around some paper and chemical stock? It’s got nothing to do with the police. I’ll handle this myself. I’m letting you know because you should know all the negotiations are off.”
“That makes no sense, Jack. The deal was coming together in a way that should have made everyone reasonably happy. Everyone was going to get what they wanted.”
“You’re talking about what reasonable people would want,” Ostroski said. “Becker is as far from reasonable as a snake. He’s doing this because he can’t help it.”
“Can you just hold on? Let me come to the shop and see for myself. Please, just wait the fifteen minutes it will take for me to get there before you do anything.”
Rabani hurried down to his car and drove the several blocks to 108th Street swearing at the new frustration. He arrived at the shop breathing fast because he had almost run from the parking spot he’d found down the street. As he recovered, he worked at keeping the situation under control, speaking slowly and in an ordinary tone of voice.
When Ostroski spoke in the same unconcerned manner he began to worry even more. He would have preferred to see some of the emotion he had heard on the phone—anger, outrage, incredulity—anything but the wearily amused expression that told him Ostroski had already decided what to do and was not in a mood to be dissuaded. He played for time by asking to see what had been disturbed. There was nothing to tell any outsider that the shop had been quietly ransacked. Ostroski had to explain what he had noticed out of place.
A man in a navy overcoat came in and asked for two rolls of Kodachrome. Ostroski served him patiently and turned back to Rabani as the wave of cold air from the door dissipated.
“This is about some pictures of dogs?” Rabani said. “They’re important enough for someone to arrange a break-in? It’s time to tell me what’s going on.”
It took only a couple of seconds to start getting what he wanted. He listened to the story of Roussel’s house and the well-dressed visitors who came and went on irregular occasions.
“Hell, I never took that many shots of the place,” Ostroski said. “I can’t even tell you for sure why I did. Probably it was just to study their faces, see how casua
l they could look. And because it was about the only interesting thing to shoot that I could find at the time. All those years I spent taking pictures of handshakes and ribbon cuttings and meetings.
“I thought from time to time about throwing all that stuff away. I guess I didn’t because I took those pictures on my own time. They weren’t something the government paid for. I never planned to use them as some kind of lever for anything.”
“You never planned to use them but they were special enough that you didn’t keep them with all the rest of your photos.”
“I said I never planned to use them. Never said I didn’t know they could be useful someday.”
“And whoever came in here didn’t find them?”
“Nope.”
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you keep them somewhere sensible and safe.”
“Safe enough that they weren’t found. Sensible enough for me. The negatives are all in an envelope underneath the linoleum in back. I don’t have any prints.”
Rabani spared himself the effort of complaining that his client had in effect made him party to blackmail. He knew that would get him only a couple of raised eyebrows and a small smile. Instead he asked, “What now? Are you looking for revenge? Or are you willing to settle for immediate access to your collection and the right to take out anything you want from it?”
“That’s all I wanted—a few pictures from the collection.”
“Let’s see the ones you’re willing to sell.”
Ostroski walked to the door and turned the “Open” sign around so that it read “Closed.” He led Rabani into the back and moved a small filing cabinet. Using a metal ruler, he lifted the aged and dingy linoleum from a corner of the floor. Then he lifted a short section of old wooden board that had been part of the original floor, and pulled up a small envelope. It held negatives, images of a far different and far less dangerous subject than the ones he had hidden in the border of the Ansel landscape—Roussel’s party house for visiting foreign officials.
He took the envelope to a work table, switched on a light, pulled out the negatives and gave Rabani a loupe for viewing the images in magnified form. There were eight short strips of film, one with three frames and seven with four each. Rabani looked into the lens and at the negatives. He saw an old house from a neighbourhood he recognized as having been the upscale part of the city several decades earlier. There were also images of men entering the building. One short strip of negatives showed an interior room. In one of those images the room was empty. The other showed a smiling woman with a partially open robe sitting on a chair with one knee drawn up.
“That pose looks like something I’ve seen before,” Rabani said. “Maybe back in university. Like in some book on art history.”
“I told the hooker I wanted to recreate a famous painting. She went along out of vanity.”
“No prints? For sure?” Rabani asked.
“The hooker got one of her in the chair. I cropped it so that there would be nothing more than an unrecognizable blank wall behind her. I never made prints of the others. Figured they’d be too much trouble to look after.”
Rabani looked at him questioningly.
“I don’t have money to spend on safe deposit boxes,” Ostroski said. “Keeping just the negatives means I don’t have to worry about protecting anything else. These are enough as long as the place doesn’t burn down. If that happens I’ll probably have bigger things to worry about. I don’t carry insurance.”
Rabani was long past being surprised by anything Ostroski said. He was also past feeling there was any point in offering advice he hadn’t been asked for.
“Becker was willing to trade the negatives for access to the photo collection. I don’t see why a double-cross would have looked like a better option to him.... Let me try to arrange a meeting to settle things.”
Ostroski thought a few seconds but eventually said, “The original deal was all I wanted.”
Setting up the meeting was easy in one way, difficult in another. Rabani got through to Waschuk by phone that afternoon. He was told that a meeting with the premier was out of the question. But Waschuk could see him the next morning. He settled for that, reasoning that he would be close enough to the centre of authority.
They met in Waschuk’s office over a breakfast brought up from the cafeteria.
“There’s a trust issue now,” Rabani said. “He thought he had a deal. Then Becker stalled. My client is willing to turn over half the negatives in advance. The rest he wants to keep until the review of the collection is finished.”
“We don’t have a lot of reason to trust him either,” Waschuk said.
He put more ketchup on his fried eggs and said, “His behaviour has been unpredictable and we have no way of knowing whether he’ll give us everything he has.”
“It’s been unpredictable but not erratic,” Rabani countered. “He’s had a single focus and he’s pursued it. As for whether he’ll give you everything, what reason would he have for holding out once he has what he wants? He’s a realist. He knows better than to escalate the situation into something he can’t control. And there’s nothing else he would want from you.”
Rabani was enjoying his fried eggs and bacon. More than that, he felt he was on solid ground talking to Waschuk. He thought of words like direct and decisive. Rabani had seen Waschuk at party conventions and had heard him described as solid. He was confident that a deal could be reached and relied upon. The forced quality in Waschuk’s voice didn’t count; people couldn’t help how they sounded, only how they chose their words.
“Half the negatives in advance, then. And we give him a room where he can start looking through the pictures. But he can’t do it alone. It’s public property.”
“He won’t like someone standing over his shoulder. I don’t think that will work.”
“It doesn’t have to be someone standing over his shoulder. But someone has to be in the same room, looking at all the prints and negatives at the same time he does. That way we have some assurance that he’s not pulling out huge numbers of pictures at random, or high-grading the most historically important pictures for sale later.”
“He’s made it plain there are only about fifty or a little more that he wants. A hundred at most. Out of more than thirty thousand.’
Waschuk bit into a slice of toast thickly spread with grape jelly and answered matter of factly while asking himself what Becker had been up to: “In that case I don’t see the problem. Whoever is with him will probably be some secretary. We can’t have a manager sitting there just watching for two weeks or however long it takes. Whoever we get won’t have a clue who most of the people in the pictures are. Most of the newer staff probably wouldn’t even recognize Manchester or any of the old cabinet ministers.”
“I can see what he says. But the review has to start tomorrow. He’s sure that Becker already has someone combing through the collection. He’s not happy. And the whole collection has to be in the room so that he knows there isn’t a review going on one step ahead of him.”
“That’s reasonable,” Waschuk said. “If we have a deal I’ll make it clear to Becker that any work going on has to stop and the whole collection has to be moved into a locked room with no one in it until we let your client in. We can’t write him a cheque for fifteen thousand for a few weeks but we can write a purchase order for an initial five thousand, no problem.”
An hour and a half later, Rabani telephoned him from the camera shop to say Ostroski had accepted the deal. Rabani would deliver half the negatives of photos at the Roussel house that afternoon. Ostroski would be ready to start reviewing the other collection the next morning. After he made the phone call, Rabani turned to Ostroski and asked whether the shop would have to be shut down for several days.
“I don’t like doing that,” Ostroski said. “I haven’t taken a vacation in years. People are used to the shop being open. I can probably get Adela to work longer hours. I guess that way she gets a cut of the fifteen thousan
d. She may as well have it. She needs the money more than I do. I don’t have needy relatives waiting for an inheritance anyway.”
Rabani looked at his client’s neutral expression. The pale blue eyes looked steadily back at him. But the usual amused crinkle around them was missing. There was also none of the relief or elation that would normally light up the face of a client who had won. But he was sure something important had just happened.
He stared a little longer, got no response, and finally said, “What was all this about, Jack?”
“What you heard: keeping someone’s image private.”
“Since when does a Hollywood starlet, or potential starlet, worry about keeping pictures of herself out of public circulation? Even the skin shots probably wouldn’t bother her, unless she’s taken up religion in a serious way. And the government wouldn’t likely be making any of those public.”
“No, they probably wouldn’t. All the shots were fairly tame anyway. Most were standard portraits. Maybe three or four had a bit more showing.”
“Then what’s going on? Why was protecting her worth threatening to throw a dog off the bridge? Was there something else?”
“Yeah, there was something else. Someone else.”
Rabani waited.
“You can’t repeat any of this to anyone. Not Adela, not anyone in your office, not your diary if you have one, not in any memoirs you may write if you get rich and famous, not any girlfriend you’re trying to entertain.”
“If it’s that important, why tell me at all?”
“I guess you earned it. I can’t pay you enough money to cover what it’s worth to me. Or maybe because I never told anyone about it but sometimes it feels like I have to tell someone sometime, or it will all be like it never happened. Like a moment that passed in front of a camera without someone tripping the shutter.”
“All right, you have my word.”
Ostroski waited. He looked as if he were still making up his mind. But they both knew he would begin to talk once he started finding the words.
