Snap Shot

by A. J. Quinnell

  The others laughed again as he pulled the girl’s bottom up and wriggled between her legs and, with one brutal lunge, sodomised her. It was the first and only time she screamed: a thin shriek of agony - and it was then that Munger took his final snap. Her violator had grabbed her hair in his fist and pulled it back, trying to jerk deeper into her body. Her head came up, contorted with pain, and she was looking directly at Munger - directly into the lens.

  Into her eyes came the expression that was to fill his nightmares.

  She held the look and the Captain noticed it and followed it and saw Munger beside the bamboo hut, his camera at his eye. The Captain was loosely holding his sub-machine gun. In a second it swung up and a spray of bullets arced across, just over Munger’s head, chopping the bamboo and spraying it over him as he dropped to his belly.

  ‘Bastard!’ the Captain roared. ‘I told you - no photographs.’

  He ran towards Munger, who had twisted onto his side, his fingers working feverishly.

  ‘Give me that fucking thing!’

  The Captain stood over him and Munger looked up into the black muzzle of the gun and the furious eyes above. Very slowly, knowing he was an eye-blink from death, he raised the camera - offering it.

  With a grunt the Captain took it and Munger scrambled to his feet.

  Still holding his gun, the Captain tried to open the back of the camera, but it was difficult. He thrust it back at Munger and then pointed the gun at his chest.

  ‘Open it.’

  Munger opened it.

  Take out the film.’

  Munger ripped out the film.

  ‘Expose it.’

  Munger unrolled the film and let it dangle on its spool. With an angry obscenity the Captain swung the barrel of his gun, catching the film and slinging it yards away into the dust. He gave Munger a mean look.

  ‘One more time and you’ll end up like them.’

  The muzzle of the gun swung to encompass the score or so of dead bodies. Munger turned and walked away, clutching in his sweaty armpit the roll of film he had extracted and replaced seconds before. From behind him he heard two more single shots that signalled the death and release of the woman and the girl.

  Chapter 13

  Ruth made coffee. As soon as Munger had finished his story she got up and, without a word, went to the kitchen, ground some coffee - beans and filled the percolator with water. It was difficult because her fingers were shaking. As she waited for the water to boil she couldn’t decide what horrified her more: the story itself or the unemotional way that Munger had told it. Somehow that lack of emotion had made him a participant rather than an observer. There had been a question screaming in her head throughout his monologue. She had made the coffee to give herself time to formulate that question; to put it in precise terms so that he could give a precise answer.

  But as she carried the tray but to the patio and placed it on the table she still hadn’t found a way to ask it without disguising her disgust.

  She poured the coffee and pushed a cup across to him and the question came out in icy tones.

  ‘How, in the name of anything decent, could you stand by and take photographs and not do anything?’

  He leaned forward and spooned sugar into his cup and stirred it, then he glanced up at her face.

  ‘At the time it never occurred to me,’ he said flatly; and she erupted.

  For five minutes she poured scorn on him. Piled it like a mountain over him. Questioned his courage and manhood, even his intelligence. ‘Only a moron,’ she stated caustically, ‘could be so unfeeling.’

  He sat back in his chair and imperturbably let the tirade wash over him. When she finished he smiled. A self-mocking smile; and for a blinding moment she wanted to leap across the table and attack him physically. She fought to control herself and then stood up and stiffly suggested that he should leave. Then, for the first time, she felt the full weight of his personality. He also stood and faced her across the table. His blue eyes were narrow and dark and his words lanced across and into her.

  ‘You’re a stupid bitch. I came here and talked to you because I thought you could understand. Could look at it, and me, without emotion. Examine and analyse. Offer help and advice. Instead you react like a maudlin poodle. You’re supposed to have a trained mind, but at the first exposure to horror it collapses. I told you the story exactly as it happened, and my own reactions. If I tried to embellish it with supposed heroics, how could you hope to understand what followed?’

  They stood glaring at each other, but his words had been well aimed and she realised that her first reaction had been simply as one woman identifying with the tragedy of another.

  She drew a deep breath and gestured at his chair and they both sat down again. He poured more coffee and then started talking again.

  ‘You’ve read that professor’s file on me. So have I. It was largely accurate. I’d managed to create a shell around myself that was impenetrable. At least I thought it was. There are other things you must know. When you spend ten years at this business your brain builds up a defence mechanism. All right, on that patrol I saw people tortured and raped and killed. Yes, it horrified me; it would horrify anyone except a certified sadist, but because of my nature and my experience I was able to block it off. Put my mind into neutral. I don’t make any excuses. Of course, if I’d tried to stop them they would have killed me. Of course, I could claim to have been a crusader - that my snaps were taken to bring them to book: to achieve justice. I make no such claims. I never thought about it. I was doing what I’d always done: taking snaps of one set of human beings abusing another.’

  There was a tremor of emotion now in his voice; but she couldn’t judge whether it was anger or compassion.

  ‘Thirty or forty people died on that patrol. Died badly. But I tell you they were, for me, a drop of water in a bloody great ocean. I’ve seen legions of people die. Most of them badly. I’ve seen thousands of children, with limbs like sticks and bellies like balloons, die of starvation. I’ve seen them die screaming with their bodies burning from napalm - hundreds of them - whole villages. I’ve seen them thrown live out of helicopters, and machine-gunned in scores like a row of scythed flowers. I’ve seen bits of them scattered over ten acres by thousand-pound bombs.’

  He bent forward now and his whole body was shaking and she saw that his eyes were wet.

  ‘I’ve walked through the Valley of Death. Walked through it, camped in it, lived in it, eaten from its fields, drunk from its streams, slept under its trees. It was my home - do you understand!’

  Now his cheeks were wet and he could hardly get the words out.

  ‘Finally something snapped. Something broke the shell. I couldn’t cope with that. You know what I’m trying to tell you?’ He was shouting, it turned me into a human being and I can’t handle it. I’ve been trying for ten years and I can’t handle it. I can’t handle it.’

  The words petered out and he slumped in his chair, his whole body racked with sobs. She came out of her chair and moved around the table and knelt down beside him. She put her arms around him and pulled his head against her breast and her own tears fell down and mingled with his.

  She thought of Stavros. She had sent him off a few hours ago to a new life. The man she was holding now was, in a way, younger than Stavros. He was a child who had finally been born and couldn’t face the world or the memories of the black womb from which he had come.

  After a few minutes he got himself under control. She released him and went back to her own chair. He was embarrassed now, after his breakdown, and found it difficult to look her in the face.

  In her eyes he was now a totally different man. From her knowledge of psychology she well understood the immense effort he had made to unlock his mind and to share with her the horrors inside it. His tears had been as much from relief as from sorrow. He was now no longer alone, there was a link between them forged in the hottest fire. It was a link which for her carried responsibility. She had been the cataly
st. The surgeon probing with a scalpel into his brain. So be it. She would take it to a conclusion.

  ‘So tell me the rest,’ she said softly.

  He took a deep breath and plunged back into his story. He had returned to Saigon in the afternoon and the first thing he did was develop his films and blow up a dozen of the prints into 8” x 10” enlargements. He pinned them onto the wall and turned a spotlight on them and looked again at the horror of the patrol. At first he tried to decide which newspaper or magazine could best use them. He had to be careful because once they came out he faced two dangers: one from the Captain and one from the American High Command. They would want to know all about them and how he had connived to get himself on a forbidden assignment. The risk was that he could lose his accreditation, which meant he would never work again in Vietnam. So the snaps had to be printed and published in such a way that only the faces of the victims could be clearly discerned. He studied them carefully, deciding how he would cut and enlarge. When he came to the last one it needed no alteration. It was a close-up of the girl’s face at the moment she was being sodomised. At the top of the print was a hand gripping her bunched-up hair, pulling her face up. Munger decided that it was one of the most dramatic snaps he had ever taken. Then he studied her eyes and, like a bolt of lightning, their message stabbed out and into his brain.

  He had backed away in confusion. It was, after all, just a square of treated paper. A photograph in monochrome. The pain, despair and contempt that flowed from it was a mere trick of shade and light. He moved forward again, looking closer, and the eyes looked back and burned into his head.

  He had gone down to the bar, merely disconcerted. When he came back after midnight and slightly drunk, the spotlight was still on and when he opened the door the first thing he saw was the eyes. He was standing off at an angle and yet they were watching him. When he moved across the room they followed. When he went into the bathroom he could feel them, boring through the closed door and into the back of his head.

  As soon as he returned to the bedroom he switched off the spotlight, got into bed and quickly fell asleep. Then he had his first nightmare. Its effect was all the more profound for he was a man who hardly ever dreamed. In spite of all the things he had seen in his young life, he had never found difficulty in sleeping soundly. It was an indication of the thickness of the wall he had built around his psyche.

  Three times he woke up that night, all within an hour. After that he didn’t try for sleep. He got up and went out to the all-night bar and drank till dawn. Maybe in the light of day the eyes would disappear. Back at the hotel he ate a large breakfast, went up to his room, took the snaps off the wall, put them into a box and then the box into a drawer. He did this while keeping his eyes averted from the one of the girl.

  Again he tried to sleep but without success, so he decided literally to face the problem and work it out. He pinned the photograph back on the wall, by itself. He brought the spotlight close, and a chair.

  For an hour he sat looking at it. The message was clear. The accusation stark. The eyes were humanity being raped. He was the personification of indifference. In itself it made him more guilty than the rapists. A stiletto had pierced his wall.

  He had burned the photograph and the others and all the negatives. It was a futile effort to expunge the image in his brain.

  Then after the futile session with Janine Lesage, he had left for Hong Kong. He gave his equipment to Chang and caught the first plane out of Asia.

  The change of scene did not help. He had gone to South Africa and taken a series of manual jobs. He worked in factories and as a truck driver. He didn’t need the money-he had plenty saved up and well invested. It was simply to keep himself occupied. To try to adjust. At times he thought he was succeeding but then the night-, mare would come again, and with it the guilt. It was a guilt which built up inexorably and encompassed all the horror he had ever seen.

  ‘Why didn’t you get help?’ Ruth asked. ‘You must have known that only a psychiatrist could help you.’

  He shook his head vigorously. ‘I thought if anyone - anyone at all - started to probe into my brain, I would go completely mad. I knew I had a shred of sanity. I tried to build on it. I began to think of expiating the guilt. I began to think of the men on that patrol.’

  She leaned forward. ‘That bothered me. I mean that they got away with it - escaped all justice.’

  Again he shook his head. ‘They didn’t. I killed them.’

  ‘You what!’

  He wiped a palm over his forehead. The night was cool but the effort of telling his story had raised a sheen of sweat on his face.

  ‘I killed them, Ruth. The more the guilt built up and the more I thought about them it seemed the only way to blot out those eyes. At least in the nightmare I would have a reply.’

  She slumped back in her chair, stunned by this fresh revelation. In a small voice she asked:

  ‘All of them? You killed them all?’

  ‘No. Three were dead already. It had been two years since that patrol. Two had been killed in action and the third in a bar fight.’

  ‘How?’ she asked. ‘How and where did you kill them?’

  He gestured negatively, it doesn’t matter. It took me two years to track them down. They’d left Vietnam when it became obvious that the Vietcong would win. I had to travel to Europe and the States and Panama. But I found them all and they died knowing why. It was strange: it gave me a purpose for two years. It gave me hope that when it was over I could find my head again. I didn’t, of course. The nightmare stayed. I came to Cyprus then and, in a way, came to terms with it. Even, after a long while, tried to lead some kind of a life. Then Walter Blum came along with his sledge hammer and demolished what was left of my wall.’ He laughed shortly at the memory.

  ‘In his inimitable way he gave me a real chance. So did you. I’ve got things barely under control now. And I’ve got a purpose. It’s something.’

  She got up and went inside and brewed more coffee. It was almost midnight but she had no thought of sleep. She had watched and listened as a man opened himself up for the first time in his life. It was an experience that would stay with her forever. It was frightening but it was stimulating. She came back onto the patio, poured the coffee and asked:

  ‘What now? You said that only I can help.’

  He reached for his cup and sipped appreciatively and then smiled. It was his first natural smile and it took away the tension in his face and in the air.

  ‘You may be able to help, Ruth, by doing what Walter asked you to.’

  At first she did not comprehend: just looked at him blankly. Then, as light dawned, she burst out laughing.

  ‘You want me to seduce you?’

  He smiled again but it was tentative.

  ‘Seduction is hardly the word. I need my manhood back. Something tells me you’re the only woman who can give it to me.’

  She started shaking her head in amazement and he held up a hand to stop her speaking.

  ‘Wait. Listen. I’ve tried over the past few months . . . half a dozen times. It doesn’t work. Every time I’m with a woman, every time I get close, I see those eyes again - feel the guilt. It kills it. You stopped the nightmares. Maybe - just maybe - you can do this too. I know, it’s a hell of a thing to ask any woman . . . I’ve no right, but I believe that if it happens just once it will be enough. It’s vital to me.

  It’s entirely mental, I’m sure. It’s just a block. Once it’s cleared I’ll be all right.’

  He was pleading with her now and she felt close to hysteria. She stood and walked to the edge of the patio, trying desperately to establish reality. She heard his chair scrape and the scuff of his shoe and she felt his presence behind her and then his breath on her neck and then his lips. The contact sent currents through her body. She drew in her breath sharply,

  ‘Stop, David!’

  She turned and faced him and, in a few blunt sentences, told him about Gideon Galili. Told him of her impending m
arriage. Told him that Duff and Gideon were the only two men she had ever made love to. Told him she was sorry, she couldn’t help him.

  He backed away, nodding in understanding, blurting out words of apology. He had not known, not realised.

  They moved back to the table and sat down and an embarrassed silence developed. On his face was a look of infinite sadness. She had no words to offer him, no solace. Yet she felt responsible. It was ridiculous. He had barged into her life, tormented her emotions, destroyed her equilibrium - and she felt responsible. She started to fight a battle with herself. Was he asking so much? Of course he was. And yet in a way it was so little to give and its effect on his life could be profound. Could she be clinical about it? View it merely as a form of therapy? He was a sick, tormented man. She looked again at his downcast face and felt a surge of pity.

  He reached for his cup and her hand stretched out to touch his arm in a gesture of sympathy. He turned his wrist and caught her fingers and held onto them tightly. She looked down and saw his brown fingers twisted into hers. Saw them as though they were gripping the edge of a cliff. Slipping from it. She heard her voice saying words that were coming from someone else’s mouth. Saying that she would try. Just this one night. But in his turn he must be careful with her, for in matters of sex she too was enveloped in uncertainty.