Blind Side

by William Bayer

  'Meantime, here I am, in 'paradise'-remember how we called it that? And being here, at 'the end of the line,' alone, without you, I think of all our happy times. There's a memory around every corner. The walks we,took. The swims. The fishing and all the lying around. Especially that! The smell of Key West aloe on your skin. Remember the Southernmost Tip? Reeling by it at midnight on that crazy motorcycle, then circling back and kissing, then making love on the rocks below. And Mrs. Chang-I looked for her. Seems she moved to Tampa. Just going by her place reminded me of us and all our vows. Well, that's about it for now. I'll call you Sunday night. Take care of yourself. I love you. Always. Your loving loving K. "

  She'd drawn three X's and a little smile beside her name. I put down the still-wet prints, and then I began to shake.

  She knew about Rakoubian! "Adam's a skunk," she'd written. And who the hell was "D," whom she'd so badly underestimated? What had she been up to, and why had she confided everything to Grace? I had been her most recent lover. Why hadn't she written to me?

  The answer, of course, was obvious: she and I had had a liaison; she and Grace shared a permanent tattoo. All that lovey-dovey stuff about making love on the rocks in Key West-that tortured me, made me furious and even more determined to track her down.

  At 10: 15 I called Rakoubian again. The phone message started, then he broke in live.

  "Yes-?" There was a high-pitched whine from the machine.

  "Mr. Rakoubian."

  "Let me turn this off." The whining stopped.

  "Still there?"

  "Still here, Mr. Rakoubian. I have your name from Sid Walzer. My name's Jim Lynch. I've seen your work in several collections, and I was wondering if I might see you about buying some prints."

  "You're a collector?"

  "That's right. The thing is, I'm just passing through town. Leaving very early in the morning. I was hoping we could meet tonight."

  "It's pretty late. . . ."

  "I know. Sorry about that. I've been tied up in meetings all day."

  "Tonight, huh? Well, since you know Sid…. Look, if you're serious-"

  "I'm serious, Mr. Rakoubian. Very serious."

  There was a pause.

  "Okay. Come over." He gave me the address.

  "And in case you see something interesting, my suggestion-"

  "I know, Mr. Rakoubian. I'll bring my checkbook. Wasn't that what you were going to say?"

  It was a typical photo district building, formerly industrial, now converted into studio apartments. You buzzed your way in through the front door, then took a freight elevator up. When you reached your floor, the elevator door slid open, but you still needed a key to unlock the second door that opened onto the corridor.

  The normal procedure, when someone knew you were coming, was to unlock that outside elevator door for you, then wait for you in his apartment. I figured Rakoubian would do just that, but in case he didn't I got ready for him on my way up. I had brought along my oldest Nikon body, an original F model I'd used in Vietnam. It was battered, the brass showed through at the edges, but it could still take a picture. In the elevator I carefully wrapped the strap around my hand. That camera had seen quite a few battles. It was about to see another. When the elevator stopped I stepped out. As I'd anticipated, Rakoubian had already unlocked the outer door, and he'd done even better than that: he'd left his own loft door ajar.

  Normally I would have knocked before entering. This time I walked straight in. He was sitting on an overstuffed Chesterfield couch, a pudgy man, maybe ten years older than I, shorter but about the same weight, with thick gray hair and unshaven jaws. As I moved toward him, he started to rise. I could tell by the way his eyes enlarged that he knew who I was, and that he was afraid.

  I reached him before he could stand. Then I pushed him back into his seat.

  "Dirty Adam's what they call you. Also shithag, scumbag, creep.

  Sweat broke out on his upper lip. He stared at me, then opened his mouth to protest. I could smell the fear coming off him, and then I recognized him, knew where I'd seen him before. At that crazy restaurant in Tribeca, the one with the souvenir-shop junk mounted on the pedestals, the place Shadow had taken us-Kim had spoken to him at the bar. I got mad just remembering the way she'd laughed when I'd asked her afterwards who he was.

  "Just one of your own, Geoffrey. Another photographer."

  I pulled back my hand and, with the back of my Nikon, hit him hard across the side of his face. He moaned and fell back. Then he tried to smile; he twisted his mouth into this weird kind of grin as if he expected to be hit again.

  I looked down at him. I was shocked at what I'd done. His nose was bleeding, the side of his face was cut, and there was blood oozing from his ear. For a moment I was frightened. Had I really done this to another person? But then some new kind of energy had boiled out of me-I was thrilled. The violence, erupting from deep inside, made me feel good about myself, and clean.

  Rakoubian was still groggy but he was trying to smile, as if to show me he'd been hit before and the blow I'd just dealt him hadn't been so bad. So, since he wasn't suffering very much, I hit him again, this time harder than before. His head snapped back, he tried to smile but couldn't. For a moment he sat there immobilized. Then he slowly crumpled and fell onto his side.

  I had a quick look around the loft. It wasn't at all like mine. It looked like a movie set Sydney Greenstreet could have inhabited while playing one of his pasha roles, filled with heavy carved furniture, chairs and tables with paws for feet, a lot of brass knickknacks, including a water pipe, and overlapping Oriental rugs.

  I opened the front hall closet, found a wire coat hanger, which I straightened and used to bind Rakoubian's ankles, making sure to twist the wire tight.

  At one end of the loft there was a section set up for photography. This, I presumed, was where he made dogmeat of the girls. Here I found a roll of gaffer tape, the shiny metallic stuff photographers use to hold up lights. I used this to bind Rakoubian's wrists behind his back, wrapping the tape around them again and again. Then, after checking that I hadn't broken his nose, I siapped a piece of tape across his'mouth to keep him quiet while I made a thorough search.

  It wasn't like the search I'd made that morning in Cleveland. At Grace's I'd been careful to leave no trace. This was different. I wanted to disturb Rakoubian, wanted him to be afraid of me. So I set to work methodically to tear his place apart.

  I started with his closet, ripping up his clothing, at the same time getting a sense of who he was. His clothes disgusted me-shiny dark sweat-stained suits, heavy soiled ties, textured white-on-white shirts, blark lizard shoes with gold metal clasps.

  I found a heavy brocaded maroon silk robe hanging from the back of the bathroom door. It had padded lapels and a tasseled sash and smelled as if a dry cleaning job would do it good.

  His medicine cabinet betrayed the same lush sense of self. An entire shelf was loaded with men's colognes. But when I went back to the couch to check on him, I noticed his poor personal hygiene. He was a man who tried to make himself presentable by wearing fancy clothing and slathering on perfume, when all he had to do was take a daily shower, shave and clean the black crescents from his nails.

  He was conscious now; his eyes followed me as I walked from his bathroom to his desk. I made a big point of pulling out his desk drawers and turning them onto the floor, then prowling through his papers as if they were garbage-which, to me, of course, they were.

  He began struggling, trying to attract my attention, when I started in on his negative files. I found drawer after drawer of Kodachrome slides. I put some on his light table and examined them. they were just as Aaron had described, sleazy soft-focus nudie-cutie stuff and the kind of hardcore beaver material they publish in Hustler magazine.

  I turned to him.

  "Where are the pictures?" He moaned and shook his head.

  "The ones you took of me. Tell me, shitface." He rolled his wounded eyes, then hung his head.

  Ev
ery commercial photographer I know has his private stash, the personal obsessional photographs he takes for himself. Sometimes the pictures are violent, sometimes they're sexual and sometimes they bear a passing resemblance to art. The big compensation for being an art photographer is that though you make a lot less money than the commercial guys, you're free to work out your obsessions, because your obsessions are your work.

  I didn't have time to search for Rakoubian's stash, so I thought I'd expedite the process by putting on a little stress. I emptied out several of his slide trays on the floor, then went into his darkroom, found a bottle of undiluted glacial acetic acid, brought it out and sprinkled half of it on top of the slides. I used a broom to stir around the mess. Foul-smelling fumes began to rise as the acid ate away at the chromes. Then I went back to Rakoubian and grabbed hold of his hair.

  "Get the point? I'm just beginning. Now, before I make a bonfire of everything you ever shot, I'm going to break a few of your tools." I got up, went to his equipment shelf, took a look at his cameras. I saw his 6 x 7 Pentax and two snazzy Hasselblads, a 50OC/M and a 500ELX.

  I scooped up the Pentax, all his Takumar lenses and also a toolbox I found. I hauled all this stuff back to the couch. Then I set to work.

  I opened up the back of the Pentax, smashed it against the floor, then dug around inside it with a screwdriver, doing as much damage as I could. Then I took his seven Takumars, lined them up on the floor and attacked each one, front and back, with a hammer. Then I looked at him and grinned like a demon. Tears were gushing from his eyes.

  ",Going to talk now? Or do I start on the other two?" I grabbed hold of the piece of gaffer tape, and viciously ripped it off his mouth. He shrieked with pain, then moaned, then struggled to catch his breath. Then he begged me to spare his Hasselblads.

  "No bargains," I said.

  "Where are the pictures?"

  He was ready to talk. The pictures, he blubbered, were hidden in the wastebasket under his desk.

  "The wastebasket! Don't lie to me!"

  "It's true," he screamed.

  "They're safe there. Last place anyone would look."

  "Oh, you're precious, Rakoubian!"

  He started to blubber again, begging me to please not kill him, promising he wasn't responsible, that it had all been Kimberly's idea. I taped his mouth again, to shut him up, then went to the desk, upended the wastebasket and searched around through the mess. Beneath a layer of old newspapers, I found a yellow Kodak polycontrast box. There were photographs inside, negatives and prints.

  I spent a good twenty minutes studying them. In a way it was like finding the missing pieces of a puzzle. Here were the pictures Rakoubian had taken of me while I'd been shooting Kim. Several matched the pictures I had taken of her, in which Rakoubian had appeared in the background, Pentax to his eye.

  There were other pictures of us too, covertly taken through the window of my loft with a telephoto lens. One, taken at night, showed Kim and me about to embrace, silhouettes behind one of the Japanese rice-paper shades I sometimes pull across my windows instead of lowering the blinds.

  The problem was I didn't know what the puzzle meant, because I didn't understand the purpose behind Rakoubian's photographic stalking. And I couldn't put together his shots of Kim and me with the other photographs that were also in the box.

  Among these were several I can only describe as deeply disturbing. they showed a person with an old man's body fondling himself through his underpants while sitting on what looked to be a throne. The subject's face could not be seen, for he wore a fencing mask. The huge masked head on the wrinkled hairless body suggested something decadent and evil.

  There was another set of shots, taken from directly overhead, that showed this man in the process of remov ing his mask. In the final shot in this series, which I assumed was taken with a hidden camera, his face was fully revealed.

  And finally there were shots of this same man, in normal street clothes, entering and exiting various buildings, getting in and out of limousines and walking rapidly on the street. These also seemed to be candid, and taken on the run.

  The subject of all this surreptitious photography looked vaguely familiar. He had thick close-cropped white hair, thin tight lips, an arrogant chin and sharp penetrating eyes. Although I was certain I'd never met him, I had definitely seen his face, perhaps in another photograph.

  So, there were two sets of pictures in the box: pictures of me with Kim, and pictures that identified this familiar looking man as the decadent naked person who wore the mask. But what I couldn't understand was how the two sets were connected.

  I went back to Rakoubian and studied him awhile. I wanted to give him the impression I was determining his fate. When I thought I had him fairly well unnerved, I whispered in his oily ear.

  "I'm going to take the tape off your mouth, carefully this time, so it doesn't hurt. Then you're going to answer all my questions. You're not going to plead, or blubber, or lie, because if you do I'm going to throw you out the window."

  He blinked.

  "I'll do that, you see, because now that I've got the photographs, I don't care whether you live or die. You're wondering: What if I tell him everything, and he kills me anyway-what guarantees do I have? You have no guar antees. You only have my word. Can you trust me? Let's put it this way: if you don't talk straight when I untape your mouth, you're going down to the street headfirst. Understood?"

  When he nodded I took hold of the tape and carefully pulled it from his lips. It hurt him, but not nearly so much as when I'd ripped it off.

  After he recovered from his pain, he looked at me as if I were some kind of maniac. And as this was just the impression I wished to encourage, and in fact was how I was feeling, I stared at him maniacally until he spoke.

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Everything."

  "How much do you know already?"

  "Assume I know nothing and take it from there." He looked confused.

  "Where do I begin?"'

  "Begin at the beginning," I suggested not unkindly.

  He glanced at me, nodded, and then stared out across the damaged room. The shards of his lenses were scattered all around. Perhaps it was the sight of them that finally inspired him to talk.

  "It was all Kimberly'S idea…… he began.

  Once he got going it wasn't easy to stop him. Even with his bloodied face and bound ankles and wrists, he behaved as if he were some kind of star. I didn't bother to disabuse him. I let him digress, elaborate, puff himself up with words, because always, in the background, was his knowledge that I was dangerous. Only a totally crazed photographer would deliberately destroy a fine set of lenses the way I had.

  "Kimberly and Shadow-they were part of Mrs. Zeller's group.

  "That's 'Mrs. Z'?"

  He nodded.

  "The kids all call her that. She encourages it, no doubt because it makes her sound like a fascinating character. If you knew her, you'd probably agree she is. She's a powerful woman. Extraordinary."

  "Way I heard it, she runs an escort service, which makes her just another bordello madam to me."

  "She does not run an escort service." He was offended.

  "She's an acting coach, an extremely gifted one. She also offers unique performances for individuals and private groups."

  "So it's not 'escorts'-it's 'performances' we're talking about?"

  He nodded.

  "But what performances! They've been compared to Oh! Calcutta!-but they go much further and they're customized."

  He began to tell me, then, about Mrs. Z. He wanted to make sure I understood just how classy a woman she was. I let him talk, meantime trying to cope with the notion of Kim not as call girl but as actress in bizarre little plays.

  … it began with private parties. Mrs. Z had this group of young people. Kimberly, Shadow, Sonya, a few more, and an equal number of talented males. they were all studying with her, they were young, attractive, they needed money, and they were uninhibited exhi
bitionists. So, the way it started, she'd get them to work up these sexual vignettes for private dinner groups. Very discreet. to be invited you had to be introduced. Then, after word got around and people began offering her large sums if she'd only include their particular fetish or fantasy, she fixed up the top floor of the building she owns, making it a private little stage. She writes the scripts, rehearses the players, provides costumes and direction. Some of her clients are pretty famous. People you may have heard of. I won't mention any names."

  "How do the names Harold and Amanda Duquayne grab you?"

  He glanced at me, surprised. Then his eyes turned canny: he would have to be careful; I knew more than I'd been letting on.

  "Yes, I've heard talk about them," he said.

  "That they're very much into that kind of thing. And other downtown people too. to them it's a species of-'performance art."

  " He laughed.

  "That's what they call it. Of course it's only sex. But to justify it, they have to give it a fancy name."

  "Anyway?" I said.

  "Yeah, anyway……… He seemed surprised at how bored I was. "Kimberly and Shadow were members of the group. And they were good friends too, with Sonya. Do you know about her?" I shook my head. "She was the girl who died."

  So two girls were dead.

  "Died or was killed?" He shrugged. "It was, as they say . . . 'unfortunate." According to Mrs. Z, there was some kind of accident, the poor young thing died, nothing could bring her back, and nothing could be gained by pointing fingers or assigning blame. That's what Mrs. Z said. But when Kimberly and Shadow came to me, they said something else.

  He paused to blow his nose, which he then wiped on his sleeve. That gesture and the smell of his sweat and the awful jaundiced folds around his eyes made me want to turn away. But I continued to stare at him to keep the pressure on.