"I suppose we could take their money, then turn the pictures over to him anyway."
"Totally impractical. We'd have to give the money back." She crawled onto me and began to lay a line of passionate kisses across my stomach.
"But , God, Geof frey, I love you just for thinking of a thing like that!"
"Is the money really so important?" I asked her, as we dressed to go out to eat.
"It's the idea of making them hurt that's best. But the money helps, doesn't it? I mean it kind of softens the thing. It's like, I don't know'@she put her arms around me-"like getting a reward."
We spoke about it as we took a shower crowded together in my tiny motel shower stall. She was slowly soaping my back.
"If we do blackmail them, and they do pay us, and we get away with it-then what do we do?"
"My goodness, Geoffrey, what do you think?" She stopped soaping me, "We live high off the hog, on easy street….
"How dangerous is Mrs. Z compared to Darling?" I asked her. It was early in the morning. We were jogging along Roosevelt, on the northern curve where the houseboats are tied up.
She squinted. Her T-shirt was soaked through. Her forehead was flushed.
"She may be even more dangerous," she said.
"Why?" I was panting,
"Because it's new to her. Because she's just discovering it. Because it's not clear yet just how far she'll go."
"She's already been party to two murders. How much further can she go?"
"I'm not sure, but I think there's always another level. The pit's always bottomless, don't you think?" She ran ahead.
"Race you to the end," she yelled. I chased after her, but failed to catch up.
Perhaps she, was right, the pit is bottomless, for I was then in a kind of pit myself. Art photographer turning blackmailer: that was the route I was on.
And, strangely, it seemed appropriate, as if photography, this fine and moral art I practiced, somehow led naturally to blackmail. There was a tradition to it-perhaps a thousand stories had been written in which people who possessed incriminating or disgracing photographs demanded payment from those who could be incriminated or disgraced. Blackmail, it seemed, had been an ignoble offshoot of the trade, ever since the invention of the camera.
That night, after dinner, as Kimberly and I walked through the quiet sweet-smelling streets of Old Town, I told her I'd come to a decision. "Yes, Geoffrey?" I could feel her tension as she took my arm.
"I want to bring in my friend Frank Cordero, the one who lives in New Mexico."
I felt her grip tighten.
"Tell me why."
"I don't think we can do this without him."
"Tell me about him. How did you meet?"
"We met in Vietnam," I said.
"He was a lieutenant, Special Forces A-team commander. One night, when I was staying at his camp, we got to talking about photography. He was an amateur, modest about his work, but serious-he even had a darkroom set up out there in the bush. After we talked awhile he asked if I'd critique his pictures. I said Sure, thinking that was the least I could do. So then he brings out the most extraordinary stuffpictures so sensitive that at first I didn't believe he'd shot them. But he had. This commando type, who killed and laid booby traps and ambushed enemy patrols, spent his spare time taking sympathetic pictures of Vietnamese kids.
"We became friends. He taught me about war, and I taught him about photography. He was with me when I shot my Piet@.
"Since he lives out West we don't get much chance to see each other. But the friendship's very close. He's become a professional photographer, he's married to a Vietnamese girl and he's got a houseful of terrific kids. I want to go out there now and see him. He's the only person I know who can tell me whether this thing can work. If he thinks it can, I'd like him to participate. Of course I need your permission for that."
She didn't say anything for a while. Then she asked me how good he was.
"The best," I said.
"Straight. Fearless. First-class strategic mind. If he joined us he'd be like a hired gun,
which, considering Darling's resources, is something I think we need."
"What would we give him?"
"A full third share-. I can't see offering him less."
"A third-that's a lot of money." She hesitated, "On the other hand, a hundred percent of zero is zero, isn't it?"
"What do you think?" I asked. ,I think you should go see him, the sooner the better." She stopped walking.
"Hold me, Geoffrey." I held her.
"Now kiss me the way you did that time at the cemetery."
I kissed her.
"Harder, Geoffrey. Please, as hard as you can."
I kissed her hard.
"Bite me."
I bit her.
"Oh, that's good," she said, "very good. Now take me back to your room and screw my brains out."
4
It had been two years since i'd last seen, Frank Cordero. He'd come up to New York with his portfolio of photographs looking for a gallery. He'd crashed in my loft, then made the rounds in his worn old boots and coWhoy hat. People gushed over his work, oohed and ahed, told him his pictures were "fascinating." But in the end no gallery would take him on.
The night before he flew back to New Mexico we went out together and got quietly drunk. He wasn't mad or bitter, held no rancor for the New York dealers, and had no intention of changing his course.
"they don't think they can sell me here-fine, they ought to know. Meantime I'll keep on working, and sell what I can in Santa Fe."
Though he'd been badly disappointed, he showed more concern for my problem than for his own: "What are we going to do about this block of yours, Geof? How're we going to get you back on the track?"
He was the most loyal friend I ever had. And so, when I saw him smiling at me in the Albuquerque airport, tanned and lean, his short black beard beginning to gray, the crow's-feet around his eyes etched a little deeper than I remembered, I was moved to feel that at last I was with the one person on this earth I could truly trust. And that was a relief after the weird scenes I'd been through in the weeks since I'd met Kimberly Yates.
He embraced me, grabbed my camera bag, hustled me out of the airport. A few minutes later we were in his battered Land Rover heading east on the Interstate, the raised road that slices through the center of Albuquerque.
The city flew by below, a grid of endless commercial strips, while the sky arched above like a giant hemisphere of deep blue silk stretched taut.
It was a Big Sky-as they say out West.
We left the city, curled around the back of Sandia Mountain and there confronted an amazing pile of clouds, soft white bulbous billowy things, pouring into the valley.
"Good formation," Frank said. He glanced at me.
"Red filter?"
We laughed remembering the days in 'Nam when I'd taught him how a red filter can turn a blue sky black, making a dramatic background for scenes of war.
He glanced at me again.
"It's serious, what's brought you out?"
"Pretty serious," I agreed.
"We'll give you a day to get used to the altitude. Then we'll talk about it," he said.
It felt good to be in the West. I could get high on the pure rarefied air, so much dryer than the tropical haze that clung to the Florida coast. And the dusty esert tones were a fine relief from the hot saturated colors of the Keys. Perhaps best of all the faces of the people looked real. they were in touch with the Ian . For a while, driving in silence with Frank, I wondered whether I'd been corrupted by the hothouse atmosphere of Key West. Blackmail photographs of a sexual voyeur-suddenly all that seemed far away.
Past Sandia we turned north, past dry fenced fields crisscrossed by guileys and sparsely covered with desert grass. Then we drove through the old gold-rush town of Golden, where piles of stones, ruins of buildings, were spread about on either side of the road.
We stopped in Madrid for a beer in the local saloon. Ten
years before, when Frank had first brought me there, Madrid had been a ghost town. Now it was a thriving village. But still there were haunting visions: rotted-out old houses strangely illuminated by the dying sun, and the hulks of forsaken automobiles with cryptic slogans emphatically scribbled on their sides.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached Galisteo. Mai must have seen us coming. She emerged from the house when we drove up, wearing a faded work shirt, jeans and hand-tooled boots. She smiled at me, the same marvelous smile that had driven me to distraction in Saigon.
"Howdy, stranger," she said.
I rushed to her, grasped her up, whirled her around in my arms.
"Geof-Frey, Geof-Frey!"
Then a bunch of handsome Eurasian kids crowded around.
Frank introduced them, three girls, Ali, Jessie and Meg, and the smallest, a boy, Jude, who gazed at me shyly while clinging to his mother's waist. Ali, the oldest, h@d-Mai's willowy Vietnamese figure and the swelling breasts of an American teenage girl. She stood against Frank, who placed his hands protectively on her shoulders, while I distributed the funky Key West T-shirts I'd brought them all as gifts. When the kids had gone to their rooms to start their homework, Frank showed me the improvements he'd made in the house. It was an old adobe set in a two-acre field, a ruin when held found it and bought it cheap. He'd rebuilt slowly, adding rooms as the family grew. In the years since I'd seen it, he'd added one for Jude and enlarged the back building, Mai's studio and foundry. His own studio and darkroom were in Santa Fe, twenty miles to the north.
dinner: a rich beef
Mai had prepared a Vietnamese broth called phu, crisp spring-rolls, cha-gio, and thin slices of barbecued pork served with mint, lettuce leaves and delicate rice-flour cakes. The accompanying nuocmam sauce perfumed the dining room and brought back memories of warm mellow evenings in Saigon.
"Mom usually cooks Mexican. Makes a mean chili," Ali said.
"But tonight, in your honor, (ieof-" Frank gestured at the array of food. ed to their After the girls had cleared the table and retir rooms, the three of us sat out on deck chairs in front of the house sipping beers and watching the sun sink behind the old Spanish cemetery on the hill.
"The girls are great. Beauties too," I said.
"Yes, they're great kids, Geof-Frey."
Mai had always divided my name into syllables. She'd been in the States for fifteen years, but she still spoke with the singsong accent she'd used when she was an art student in Saigon, She'd met Frank at the VietnameseAmerican Association when she'd enrolled in his Englishlanguage class. We'd both fallen in love with her, but Frank had won her heart. I'd always envied him his marriage. That night, looking at her, I could feel a little of that envy still.
Several of her metal sculptures were set out on the field in front, angular black forms made of old iron Frank had stripped off a ruined steam locomotive he'd found in Gallop, then hauled piece by piece to Galisteo. In the fading light her sticklike constructions began to resemble the skeletons of dinosaurs.
"You guys have it made out here. Hope you know that," I said.
"I think so," Mai said.
"But sometimes Frank doesn't." She turned to him, shook her head.
"Sometimes I wonder if we aren't playing in the bush leagues," he said.
I reminded him of the dreary hassles of the city, the meretricious charms of the big-league Art Scene in New York, and how fortunate he and Mai were that they didn't have to compete with superficially talented hustlers like Harold Duquayne.
"Sure," he said.
"But there've been some times lately when I've wondered when the struggle's going to end."
"It will, Frank." Mai rose, kissed me on the cheek, then stood behind Frank's chair, leaned down, thrust her fingers into his beard and kissed the top of his head.
"It's a good struggle. I think so, Geof-Frey." She looked at me, kissed Frank's head again, then slipped inside the house.
Frank and I remained out long after the sky turned black, catching up on everything, his kids, Mai's sculptures, his and my ambitions in photography.
"Fame, success-I know better than to care about that," he said.
"But I'd like just once to experience it, to know firsthand how it feels. I think then I'd have an easier time living out here renouncing it."
"The only trouble with that," I said, "you might find out that you like it."
"Yeah, Geof." He laughed.
"Well, isn't that the risk you take?"
The terrible splendor of the sunrise: In northern New Mexico it comes out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, comes fiercely, firing up the cold dry shrublands, reddening the salthush and the scrub. The yuccas, chollas and grasses begin to glow. The gullies, called arroyos, create the shadows, black slashes across the plain. Then, as the sun rises, you feel the first intimations of the heat.
By 6:30 the kitchen was busy, Mai presiding over the stove, supervising the frying of sausages, the turning of flapjacks by Jessie and Meg. When we all were fed, Frank piled me and the girls into the Land Rover and took off down a dirt road that followed the dry gulch called Galisteo Creek. He dropped the girls at the school bus stop near lose Cerrillos, then turned north toward Santa Fe.
His studio was situated on an upper floor of a restored warehouse on Guadalupe Street. Not the choicest area in that city of galleries, but, still, within walking distance of the Plaza. A sign on the door said: FRANK CORDERO, PHOTOGRAPHS. There was a big room, lit by track lights, where he exhibited his prints, a darkroom where he did black-and-white printing for two famous Santa Fe photographers, Leo DeSalle and Nelly Steele, and a small workshop where he kept the old cameras he found, rebuilt, then sold to collectors.
He was getting tired, he told me, of making more money from the cameras than from selling his own photographs.
"Sometimes I'm here the whole day, and no one comes in', not a single person. No need for anyone to buy anything@enough for me if they just come in and look."
He put a CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign on the door, then we got back into his car.
"Where're we going?"
"Old road to Taos," he said. "'We'll talk as we drive."
I told him the story, all of it, every detail from my first meeting with Kim on Desbrosses Street, to her seeing me off for Miami the morning before. He nodded as I spoke,
occasionally asked a question to clarify the sequence of events. Other than that, his only interruptions were the stops he made to show me the sites of famous photographs.
I welcomed these respites. It was stressful to tell my tale, and listening to myself recount it, I began to wonder about my role. Did I come off as hero or antihero, lover or fool? Frank didn't let on what he thought. But I could tell by his smile that he liked the way I'd handled Rakoubian. And I knew, despite his silence, that he was taking in everything I said.
Meantime I was thrilled to see the places where the legends of our profession had planted their tripods and created immortal images. We stopped before the old wooden cross that Eliot Porter had photographed on the outskirts of Truchas, and then the small grave marker Beaumont Newhall had found in the cemetery at Las Trampas. We visited the church in San Lorenzo Pueblo photographed so brilliantly by Laura Gilpin, and the Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos (perhaps the most photographed site in the American West) where Paul Strand had so gravely shot the buttresses.
In Taos we ate burritos, and all the while I continued to talk. Then Frank drove me around Mount Wheeler, past the D. H. Lawrence shrine, on to the ruins of "E-town," where Edward Weston had taken his famous series.
"Funny about these places," I said. "The spot where I took the PietA-1 doubt I'd recognize it today."
"Because that picture wasn't about a place. It was about people." He paused.
"I'll say one thing for this Kimberly of yours-she's got you shooting people again."
He pointed out something else to me too-that I'd returned to the Leica, the camera of my youth.
"It's like you went i
nto this slow phase for a while, Geof, when you needed to use a view camera. But now your life has speeded up and you have to react more quickly. Maybe Jim Lynch was right-maybe you still are a photojournalist. Maybe the quick incisive look is your thing, not the slow examining gaze."
There was something special Frank wanted to show me, more important to him and more vivid than the subjects of other photographer's famous images. It lay just a few miles south of Eagle Nest.
He didn't say much as we approached, but I could tell by the way he was handling the wheel that a special emotion was brewing inside. Then, when I caught sight of the place, a soaring modern structure that seemed to grow out o the earth, I recognized it as a building I'd seen in several of the photographs on the walls of his gallery in Santa Fe.
As we turned up the drive he told me what it was, a Vietnam Veterans; Chapel built by the father of a marine killed in the war. It had since been taken over by the Disabled American Veterans, who now maintained it as a permanent memorial. There was only one other car in the parking lot, and th sat down not a single person inside the chapel. We bo on a semicircular bench that faced the tall narrow window at the high end. Then we stared at the only visible artifact, a tall cross bearing an eternal flame.
I was impressed by the purity of the interior, the opposite of the heavily decorated mission churches we'd been looking at. But what really moved me was Frank's reaction. He focused on the cross with enormous concentration, then his shoulders began to shake. After a time I decided to leave him alone. Later, when he rejoined me, his eyes were red.
"Gets to me," he said. "Don't know why. Feel it every time I come. it could be the design, the site. Maybe just the idea that a kid got killed and -his dad wanted to make a chapel to remember him, and when it was built it became a place to remember all the kids who died. How many years has it been, Geof? Twenty since we met? Fifteen since I finished my final tour'? And it still hurts, you know. Maybe because I got a Vietnamese wife, half-Vietnamese' kids, it's with me all the time. Maybe too because I don't want to forget it, not a single brutal moment…… around the exterior, he told He was calmer as, walking me how much he wanted to take a picture that would all he felt about the place. But he found the
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