Trick of Light

by Bayer-William

  Ram laughed.

  "Why not? I was pretty then."

  "Yes, Bee . . . I remember."

  "He had bad breath and stupid patter. I made it clear I couldn't stand him . . . which excited him no end. My father knew that once you delivered goods to him you'd never see a cent, so he insisted on full payment in advance and got it. We decided to engrave the guns as magnificently as we could, in the vain hope we might improve His Majesty's atrocious taste."

  Ram's eyes sparkled as she spoke. He couldn't get enough of her gossip. Soon the center table was covered with erotic guns, Bee spellbinding him with anecdotes about this gun and that, the infatuations of one collector, the foibles of another.

  A large amount of cognac was imbibed. There finally came a point when Bee felt the time was right to broach her concerns about "The Goddess."

  "I've heard stories about how you use it," she told him. "It would be good to know the truth."

  Ram smiled at her. "Private club business," he said, making a zipping motion across his mouth. Then, narrowing his eyes: "But remembering how you were in the old days, Bee, I doubt you'd disapprove."

  "And those faces you had me put on the animals—they're the faces of club members?"

  "Of course. Did you recognize me as the leopard?"

  Since she hadn't at the time, she shook her head. "Bunch of voyeurs, aren't you?" she asked gaily.

  "Some of us like to watch, others to partake. Think of it this way, Bee—a bunch of horny guys getting our rocks off after a hard day trekking through the woods."

  Horny guys getting our rocks off! This was the first real vulgarity to escape his lips that night, the first phrase he'd used that didn't jibe with the image of the polished gentleman. The expression infuriated her, but she concealed her anger. She had to probe further, confirm the rumors about "The Goddess" or assure herself that they were false.

  "Orgies can be enjoyable," she said, smiling. "So long as everyone's in on the game."

  "True . . . though sometimes a little resistance adds to the fun."

  "I can imagine The Goddess racked nicely on the wall presiding over your revelries."

  "Sometimes we bring it down," he said. "Lots of ways to use a gun."

  "The Parker Invincible's a great gun, Ram. I bet you've fired it."

  He smiled. "Used it in many different ways. 'The Goddess'"—he modulated to a thick German accent—"can be a vikid little inztrument."

  He tittered then, and she felt sick, since he'd as much as owned up to the rumors.

  "I want it back, Ram."

  He stared at her, waiting for the punch line.

  "I mean it. I'll pay you for it, of course."

  He stood, wobbled a bit, then regained his balance. Though he'd been drinking steadily since she arrived, he seemed a man well used to alcohol. She knew the type. The more they drank, the cooler, smoother, slicker they became.

  He stared at her again, smirk growing on his face. "You think because you engraved some figures you have some claim to ownership?"

  "I made 'The Goddess.'"

  "Wrong!" He shook his head, angry. "We made 'The Goddess.' You were just our decorator."

  "I think I'd better go, Ram."

  "As you like. But before you do, there're a couple other items I want you to see."

  He turned, unlocked another cabinet, pulled open the glass doors with a flourish.

  "Remember this?" he asked, holding out a battered old Winchester pump.

  She stared at it, confused, since it was not of a piece with the rest of his collection.

  "You don't recognize it?"

  "Should I?" she asked.

  He smiled again. "Turn it over."

  Reluctantly she took hold of the gun. On the obverse side she found a pedestrian engraving of a girl firing a rifle from a horse, an engraving she'd made more than forty years before for Maddy. This, she recognized, was the gun Maddy had used to shoot the X in Ram's note.

  "Where'd you get this?"

  "Mandy left it behind. A friend kept it for me till I got out of prison."

  He returned the Winchester to its rack, pulled out another gun, a battered small-gauge revolver.

  "Recognize this one, Bee?"

  She stared at it, knew immediately what it was. The thought made her want to vomit. She turned away.

  "Yep, my old trusty, the one I used to kill Dunphy. Humble though it is, it's precious to me. I like to use it when I party too. This gun"—he kissed the barrel—"has seen lots of passion."

  Raising her eyes from the revolver, she stared into his face, saw how now the Janus mask had cracked, the slick front slipping off even as she gazed, oozing off like melting wax. In its place she saw a countenance filled with malice, eyes dancing with gloat. Ram, she realized, had neither mellowed nor matured. The strutting bully had become a monster.

  She didn't wait for him to call a cab, instead ran from the gun room down the stairs, then out into the night. In the courtyard she could still hear his laughter echoing from within the house.

  She had a job those winter days that brought her into the city, an advanced cancer patient, Marguerite Desaulniers, who was suffering incredible pain. The woman's husband, a homeopathic Haitian physician named Paul Desaulniers, had tried everything: hypnosis, acupuncture, even Demerol, to no avail. Reluctant to give her morphine for fear she would thereby recognize she was terminal, he turned to a colleague, who recommended Bee as an expert, highly empathetic apitherapist.

  Bee took the bus into the city three times a week, box of bees in hand, to administer sting venom to Madame Desaulniers. There quickly grew a bond between them. Bee would place the bees, induce them to sting, then stay with Marguerite until her pain subsided.

  They talked a lot during these sessions. Bee was naturally effusive and believed conversation was a good way to distract a patient.

  Marguerite, it turned out, loved to talk about sex, so the two spent hours sharing confidences. From these exchanges Bee learned about the prowess and proclivities of Paul Desaulniers. She also found she could make Marguerite giggle by describing the erotic guns she'd engraved.

  One afternoon, after one of these exchanges, Bee told Marguerite the story of Ram Carson and revealed her concerns about the misuse of "The Goddess."

  At their next session, Marguerite told Bee that when she passed on Bee's tale to her husband, he'd grown thoughtful, then recounted a story about a patient, a Chinatown prostitute who called herself Georgette, who turned up one night badly injured at the Desaulniers clinic, telling a strange story of being hired to entertain a group of white men who then sodomized her with the barrel of a loaded gun.

  At the end of the apitherapy session, Bee, as usual, went downstairs to brief Dr. Desaulniers on his wife's condition. After giving her report, she asked him about Georgette. Dr. Desaulniers filled in a few details.

  Georgette was a petite Chinese girl whose presenting symptoms were serious rectal and vaginal tears.

  "She told me she was an illegal immigrant," Desaulniers told Bee, "working to pay off her debt to the Chinatown gang that had smuggled her in. That night she was sent by her pimp to take part in some sort of hunting-gun consecration ritual. Though she received nothing for this service, her pimp, she believed, was paid very well. She told me that other girls in her predicament had suffered the same fate, receiving injuries that ended their pleasure-girl careers, forcing them to labor in sweatshops to work off their indentureships."

  Bee was extremely agitated that night when she left Desaulniers's office. The tale of a gun-sex ritual was too great a coincidence. Was it possible, she asked herself, that there were two groups of men, members of the Goddess Gun Club and the group who'd hired Georgette, who indulged in this strange mode of play?

  On her way to her bus stop, Bee decided not to go straight home to Bolinas. Instead she stopped at a pay phone, called Maddy, told her she had something important to confide, then took a city bus to Maddy's apartment.

  Maddy listened, incredulous, a
s Bee described the stories she'd heard about Carson, and then her meeting with him two months before.

  Even before she finished, Maddy expressed great distress over the fact that Bee had kept the encounter secret.

  "He has my old gun! My God, Bee! Why on earth didn't you tell me?"

  Then, when Bee told her about the other gun, the pistol with which Ram had killed Tommy, Maddy exploded in anger.

  "You're right, he is a monster! To think I spent all these years trying to forgive the bastard. Now this!" Maddy's eyes glowed with fury and pain.

  It's twilight now. A breeze wafts to us from off Bolinas Lagoon. Bee, I can tell, is nearing the end of her tale.

  "You remember how she was last winter, Kay, how difficult it was for her to get around. Still, she was determined to do something about Ram. 'We can't leave it like this,' she said. Right away, that very night, she made up her mind. There was unfinished business. An old wound had been reopened. The time had come to close it for good. 'I want that gun,' she said. And I knew she didn't mean the Winchester or 'The Goddess,' but the revolver Ram had used to kill Tommy."

  Maddy had a plan. She had no intention of going after Ram with a gun. She had finished with firearms years before. She had another weapon now, her camera. They must find this Georgette, she said, interview her, discover everything she knew. Then they'd have a starting point. If they could get incriminating pictures, document what Carson and his pals were doing, they'd have the leverage they needed to get all three guns back, and maybe put the Goddess Gun Club out of business.

  "This was the old Maddy speaking," Bee tells us, "the girl I'd known in Great Western days. And though one part of me found her plan farfetched, another was just as angry and just as determined to quash the evil Ram Carson was still inflicting upon the world.

  "We went to Chinatown together on several nights. We must have looked pretty peculiar—two elderly women, one with a camera and blazing eyes, the other, me, more timid but taking courage from Maddy's grit, prowling the alleys off Grant and Stockton, trying to engage with prostitutes, persuade them to help us find Georgette.

  "We never did find her. But we found others who told similar tales—about a group of cruel men who kept what the girls called a 'fuckhouse' in an apartment in the Mission. Tales of nice-looking, well-dressed, well-spoken Anglo men who liked to play kinky party games which ended in a penetration ritual with loaded guns. These parties were terrifying, they told us, especially if you were afraid of guns. To make an example of them, the pimps would send girls who needed disciplining for withholding money or failing to meet their nightly quotas. And since several girls had come back badly injured, just the threat of being sent was enough to drive some to try and return to China.

  "One girl described what she called 'the play' in great detail. Even I, who over the course of my career had engraved a good fifty erotic guns, was shocked. Maybe it's because I have a special feeling for guns, an appreciation and respect for their beauty and power. Of course firearms are deadly. But they can also be works of art. Decorating them with erotic motifs—well, perhaps that's just a step away from using them as instruments of erotic cruelty. But however short the step, for me it was enormous. I'm no prude, Kay, but still . . ." Bee shakes her head. "I just didn't get it."

  It's dark now, and getting cold. Sasha and I help Bee carry the tea paraphernalia into her trailer. I rinse the pot and cups in her kitchenette; then the three of us sit together on the semicircular couch in the rear of her tiny trailer living room.

  "There isn't that much more to tell," Bee informs us.

  She's calmer now, her gestures less emphatic. The nervous bounciness of the afternoon is gone.

  "Maddy was finally able to persuade one of the girls to show us the location of the 'fuckhouse.' Sorry to use such a vulgar word, but that's what they all called it. She showed us the building, pointed out the apartment windows. We found a name on the building register, but it didn't mean anything to us. Anyway, following up on a name wasn't what Maddy had in mind.

  "She was looking for a vantage point from which she could stake out the apartment and take pictures. There was this odd-looking wood structure in the alley that ran behind. We went back there and she studied the situation, decided there was a window on the third floor that would give her a decent view.

  "She was really incredible. I don't know where she got the energy. It was as if she were on a mission. She told me that this was life-or-death for her, that she couldn't rest till it was resolved. And that if she couldn't take the kind of photographs she needed, she'd try something else, such as confronting Ram Carson on the street. 'I'll photograph the hell out of him, hose him, strobe him till he's blind,' she said. She meant it too. She had fantastic energy. Though it was clear to me she was very ill, she never once complained.

  "I offered her apitherapy. She turned me down. She wasn't in pain, she told me, just fatigued. But you'd never know it the way she moved. Over and over she repeated the same thing, almost like a mantra: 'What he's doing, Bee—it can't be allowed to go on.'"

  THE GUN / FIND THE GUN / WHERE'S THE GUN?

  Maddy's words, boldly written and underlined in her notebook, now finally make sense. But I don't think it was her own old Winchester she wanted, or "The Goddess," or even, particularly, the murder gun. The "gun," I believe, was just the pretext. What she wanted was to shut down the G.G.C., forever stop their cruel exploitation, their terrible terrifying games of sexual power.

  "She rented the attic room, then spent nights there waiting."

  Sasha looks at me. I know what he's thinking: that in a sense it's turning into my story now.

  "I spent many nights there with her. We'd stand watches, one of us sleeping, the other looking out. It was weeks before we saw anything. Finally one night we did."

  Bee shakes her head. "We saw little corners of things, flashes. They were suggestive, but didn't tell us much. Whatever we were seeing certainly wasn't any kind of evidence. Maddy was frustrated. I'd never seen her in such a state. 'Bee, I've lost it,' she told me. 'I don't know how to photograph this stuff. I can't see a damn thing.'

  "One night when I started to clean the window, she stopped me. 'They'll see us,' she said. 'One inkling they're being watched and the game's up. They'll pull the blinds, then we'll never catch them.'

  "She brought in another camera, a big one. But even then she had problems. 'The view angle's too narrow,' she said. 'The focal plane's too critical.' She told me this wasn't the kind of photography she was used to. It required a highly technical approach, and she'd never been much of a technician. 'I'm just an old gal with a good eye,' she said. Still, she was determined to make it work. She vowed to stay at her post till she got explicit pictures. 'Sooner or later I'm going to nail the bastard,' she'd tell me. 'Then we'll have the leverage we need.'"

  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.

  "It 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 d
oubt 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 all 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."