The Camera

I followed the sound of my mother's heels.

They were not heels, really. They were the toes of her shoes, dragging, scraping, dragging again, a slow slovenly track through the black water that told me everything I needed to know. She was still alive. She could not walk. And the man who was hauling her was in no hurry at all.

I went along the wall, the iron clip held out in front of me like a pointer. The water was so cold my feet had stopped hurting and begun to ache. Every twenty yards a bare bulb in a wire cage hung dead from the ceiling, and a sign on the wall said NO SMOKING and, under it in an angry later hand, NO NOTHING. Behind me the sounds of the shop had thinned to a single thump and a dog.

And then, ahead of me, a light.

…

It was red.

It was a small red square at the end of the tunnel, hanging at head height, like a bad eye. As I drew nearer it grew into a door. A heavy iron one, painted dull green, standing a hand's width open with the dark inside it. The red glow leaked through the crack and lay in a long bloody bar across the water. Voices came from within. One I did not know. The other I would have known if I'd gone deaf.

I put my eye to the gap.

It was a room. A long, low, arched chamber, the width of a bus, with a damp black ceiling and walls lined to the shoulder with small metal doors. Rows of them. Hundreds. Little brass-fronted doors, each the size of a hardback book, each with a number, a keyhole and a tarnished dial. I had seen them in old post offices. They were mailboxes. They had been put here, I suppose, for the use of citizens huddled in a siren-filled night, and they'd stood empty since the day the war ended.

In the middle of the room, under a red bulb on a wire, stood a rusted iron pipe, as thick as a man's thigh, rising from the floor to the ceiling.

My mother was tied to it.

They had bound her wrists around the back of it, with her arms stretched. She stood with her head up and her hair in her eyes and her mouth, thank God, free; the tape was gone. Her coat hung open. Her blouse was wet through. She was pale as paper and she was shivering, her whole body shaking in long slow shudders, and she was looking at Voss with a face I did not know. It was contempt. It was a great, plain, weary contempt, as of a woman looking at a stain.

"Your pockets," said Voss.

…

He was going through her pockets. He did it coldly, one by one, the left, the right, the lining, and dropped a handful of lint and tissues in the water.

"It isn't there," said my mother.

"I can see that."

"I never had it."

"I thought you did." His voice was almost regretful. "In the cemetery. I saw you pick it up. A flat piece of iron with a word on it. I thought, there's a clever woman. She'll keep it in her glove."

"I put it down."

"Where?"

"On the grass. Where you found me." Her lip curled. "Where do you think the police are, Mr. Voss? In the café? They've had it since nine. The girl's got a copy. She's not a fool. Neither am I."

He stopped.

He stood a long moment with his hand flat on her belt. And I saw his face, in profile, in the red, change from gray to something worse. It did not rage. It did not lunge. It simply emptied, as a room empties, leaving the plaster and the chairs.

"I see," said Voss.

He took his hand away. He wiped it down his coat.

"Then I have no use for you," he said.

…

I should have moved. But I saw his hand go behind his back and come out with another knife, a long dull hunting blade with an oily shine, and I did nothing at all for the space of a breath.

And my eyes, which were looking for a door out of the room, found something else.

It was in the wall to my left. It was very small. It was a mailbox. It was one among hundreds, and one among a hundred identical others, with its brass number and its dial and its little keyhole, but it had a difference. All the others were dull. Gray with dust, green with verdigris, furred like moss. This one shone.

Someone had polished it.

I stared. I didn't breathe. It was in the third row, level with my hip, and a long clean streak ran down from its handle where a thumb had worn the grime away, again and again, year after year. And the number on its front, small and square and bright, was 13.

Of course it is, I thought.

Thirteen.

"Mr. Voss," I said.

…

I stepped into the room.

I stood in the doorway with the water around my ankles and the film clip in my fist, a small wet child in a man's coat, and said it loud, so it rang off the arch.

"Mr. Voss. Over here."

He turned. I walked past the knife, past the pipe, and put my hand out to the shining box.

"That one," I said. "Number thirteen. It's the only one she touched."

"Don't," said my mother.

"It's all right, Mom."

I opened it.

It wasn't locked. It swung out with a soft oiled click, and inside it, lying in a bed of gray flannel, was a tube of stiff brown paper, the length of my forearm, tied round with a string. A label was pinned to the lid with a brass tack. It was typed. It was old.

WALTER O.

My fingers went numb.

…

I knew what it was before I read it. A short man's name, the one in the photograph with the pencil behind his ear. He kept the books.

Voss's breath hissed through his teeth.

"Ah," he said. "There you are."

He took one stride. The knife flashed. And he did not come at me, as I had feared; he turned instead, in a single slick movement, and laid the edge of the blade flat against my mother's throat, just under the jaw, where the pulse beat.

"Give it to me," he said.

I stood very still, with the tube in my hands.

"Give it to me, June. Slowly. Hold it out."

"Don't, honey," said my mother. "Don't."

"Hold it out."

And someone behind me, in the doorway, clapped their hands.

…

It was a slow, dry clap, three times. The sound filled the arch. The three claps echoed, thinned, and died, and a voice came after them, an unhurried baritone, cultured and rather tired.

"Desmond," it said. "All these years. And still picking on kids."

Voss did not turn his head. But the muscles in his arm went hard.

I looked over my shoulder.

A man stood in the doorway. He was perhaps thirty-four, tall, lean, and soaking wet, in a long coat the color of mud with the collar turned up. His hair was brown and thick and plastered to his forehead. He had a long, tired, intelligent face with deep lines at the mouth, and gray eyes that held mine for one unwavering second before they moved to Voss. In his arms, held against his chest, he carried a box.

It was rusted. It was old. It was iron.

"Merritt," said Voss.

"Hello, Desmond."

"You're supposed to be dead."

"I was." The man smiled, a crooked, humorless smile. "A few times." He stepped into the red, water sloshing around his boots, and set the box down on the bench. "I'm not here to die. I'm here to testify."

Merritt, I thought.

Ansel Merritt.

The sleeve was warm against my ribs. I felt it there, inside my coat, a flat slick shape of plastic. MERRITT, ANSEL. Thirteen.

"Kid," said Ansel, without looking at me. His voice was quite gentle. "Don't give him the tube."

"He'll kill her."

"He won't." The gray eyes never wavered. "It isn't what he's afraid of. It isn't what he wants. That's a map to a dead man. He's wanted it for twenty years, but he's never feared it. He fears one thing only." A pause. "Look at him. What's he holding?"

I looked.

…

I had looked at him so many times, in that alley and that shop and that tunnel. I had looked at the knife and the face and the hand. I had never looked at his chest.

The camera hung there.

It hung from a strap round his neck, as it had hung since the beginning, squat and black and heavy, with its brass lens and its leather bellows folded flat. A press camera, I thought, the kind newspapermen used in old films. It had flashed in my face. It had been aimed at me from the end of an alley. It rode on his belly like a baby in a sling. And I remembered, suddenly and without warning, a shop, a counter, a man who smelled of peppermint, and a hook on the wall behind him. A brass one. An empty one.

The usual, the man had said.

The usual.

I had been seven. I'd sat on a stool, and he had swung the camera out from the wall, and Grandma had stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder. Sit up straight, June. He put a black cloth over his head. There was a flash. I blinked. When I opened my eyes my grandmother was holding the camera in both hands, turning it over, looking at the bottom of it, the way a farmer turns an egg. Checking.

She had done it every time. Every summer, every visit, whether or not there was anything to photograph. She touched the camera. She checked the bottom. She nodded, and handed it back.

It was the thing she touched most in the whole shop.

He took it, I thought. Yesterday. From the front room. He carried it away because it was there, because it was old, because it was a pretty prop. He thinks it's his toy.

He's wearing it.

My mouth fell open.

"Oh," I said.

…

"June," said my mother, in a strange high voice. "June, what is it?"

"He's got it on."

"What?"

"He's got it on." My voice cracked. I could hear the tears in it, and the laughter. "It's the camera. It's the camera, Mom. It's been the camera all along."

Voss looked down.

He looked at his own chest, slowly, with an expression of faint bewilderment, as a man looks who has been told there is a spider on his sleeve. The big pale fingers rose and closed over the black leather. They held on to it. They held on, I saw, as if it were burning him, as if it were the one thing that could not be allowed to move, and they would not let go.

His mouth worked.

The light came on.

…

It came on in two beams, two long blazing white swords, swinging down the tunnel from the stairs and across the water, slashing the arch, setting every brass door in the wall afire. A voice roared. Boots splashed. A gun cocked, a dozen guns, a thunder of bodies. I heard Devon shout my name, high and cracked, and the deep bellow of Frank Dunleavy booming off the vault.

"Voss! Drop it! Drop the knife!"

Voss pulled my mother in front of him.

He did it as if she weighed nothing. He tore her from the pipe, the rope parting like thread, and swung her in against his chest, one arm around her throat, the knife at her ear. She cried out. Her feet left the floor. He backed up against the wall of little doors, a big wet shape in a ring of white, and his face above her head was a mask, calm, blank, sleek, but the eyes were wild.

"One step," he said. "One."

"Easy," said Dunleavy. "Easy, now."

I do not remember deciding.

Ansel moved. He flung the iron box down into the water, and the lid burst open. Out of it scattered a clatter of old black machinery, rusted reflectors, a tangle of cords, and a square of dull silver on a handle with a glass bulb the size of a fist set in the center.

A flash gun.

I caught it before it hit the water.

…

I didn't think. I couldn't have. It was in my hand, and the wire led to a battery pack, and a thumb-switch on the handle was stuck half down with grease. I pushed it. A tiny red lamp lit. I raised the thing to the level of my eyes, and I pointed it, with both hands, at the white and terrified face of Desmond Voss.

"Look at me," I said.

He looked.

I pressed.

The world went white. It exploded. It was the light of a hundred cameras, the light of a small sun, a silent blinding detonation in a stone room, and I heard the man scream, a short high animal scream, and the knife fall in the water. I could not see. I stumbled back. I felt the flash gun drop from my fingers. And through the roar in my ears, through the green blot in my eyes, I heard a rush of footsteps and a crash of bodies, and a voice yell, Get her! Get her out!

Something struck the pipe.

I opened my eyes.

…

My mother was on her knees in the water, and Dunleavy had her. He had her round the shoulders with a great bearlike arm, and he was hauling her backward out of the red, shouting something, and she was crying.

Ansel had Voss by the waist. He'd come in low, like a man tackling in a football game. They hit the pipe together with a boom that rang down the tunnel, and Voss, blind and bellowing, got one hand free. Something small and black and sharp flashed in it.

"Knife!" I screamed.

Dunleavy was there.

I never saw him move. He was a big man and he came across the room like a freight train, throwing off the men on either side, and he caught that swinging wrist in his two hands and twisted it. Hard. I heard the bone. I heard Voss's voice rise, shrill and hoarse and appalled. And then it was over; two policemen had him by the arms; a third had a boot on the knife; Ansel slid down the wall and sat in the water with his hand to his bleeding mouth, laughing.

Dunleavy stood over them, panting.

He bent. He took hold of the camera, the black one, the one the man had held against his chest through everything, and he drew its strap over Voss's head with a deliberate, almost tender gesture. Voss said nothing. He only stared at it. A stare of utter, naked, terrified longing, like a drowning man who sees the shore.

"Let me see," said Dunleavy.

He turned it over in his big hands. He found the catch on the base, a little brass tab, so worn and so smooth that it had been invisible. He pressed. The bottom plate popped open on a hinge.

Inside was a cartridge.

It was small. It was silver. It was no larger than a cigarette lighter. A single roll of film, wound tight, ready to be developed.

Dunleavy looked at it. He looked at me. He did not say a word. He held it out in his open palm, and I took it from him with both my hands, and I felt the weight of it go through my arms and my chest like a stone dropped down a well.

It was heavier than anything I had ever held.

Thirteen lives, I thought. Thirteen names. All of them on one little roll of film.