Hard Light (7 page)

“Cass.” He stared at me pointedly, taking in the scar beside my eye and the gash below it, and I added, “Neary.”

“Delighted to meet you, Cass.” His strong hand tightened over mine. I tried not to wince. “You find a drink? Something to eat?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I cocked a thumb at the picture of the druid. “Where'd you get this?”

“That?” He rubbed his chin. “An old friend gave me that painting, must be forty years now. Bit over the top, innit?”

“It's not a painting. It's a photo, by a guy named William Mortensen. I've never seen this one before—who'd you say gave it to you?”

“I didn't.” Mallo smiled, but his gray eyes were cold. “Is it worth something?”

“If it's a one-off, yeah—might be worth a lot. Even if it's not, it's pretty rare.” I pointed to a neat, controlled signature at the bottom of the photo. “See that? He even signed it. All this—” I held my finger a fraction of an inch above the matte print, traced the outline of the standing stones in the air. “He'd set up the shot with lights, models, sets—this would all have been done in a studio, probably early 1930s. His favorite models were his wife and a guy named George Dunham. Mortensen dressed him up like Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli, Paganini—”

“And a druid.”

“Right: a druid. Mortensen loved the occult—he was working on a photographic encyclopedia of demonology, but no one's ever found it. He posed photos of the witches' sabbath, Black Mass, demons—all kinds of weird shit. He had a little bondage thing going on, too, sort of pre–Betty Page stuff. Women tied to the stake, Andromeda chained to the rocks. The gorier the better—there's a nice one illustrating ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.' You know who Anton LaVey is?”

Mall scrunched up his face. “Name's familiar.”

“Another brilliant wacko. Well, more like a really successful con man. He read one of Mortensen's books in the 1960s and founded the Church of Satan.”

“You having me on?”

I shook my head. “Who could make this up? A first edition of Mortensen's books go for big bucks.
The Command to Look
—that's the one LaVey read.”

Mallo shot me an amused glance. “How the hell do you know all this?”

“I'm a photographer. Was, anyway.”

“Yeah? More like a fortuneteller.” He laughed, crossed his arms, and stared appraisingly at the photo. “What else?”

I tapped a corner of the frame. “He would have spent hours of post-production work on this. Darkroom stuff, projecting images on top of this one—see that face in the sky?”

Mallo peered at the photo, looked at me in surprise. “There's a face there. I never noticed it.”

“That's all post-production. He'd have to process the neg first then make a composite print. Wash the paper, dry and flatten it, print it—probably a lot of spot dodging—then mess with the emulsion. Paint over it with oils, scrape stuff off with a razor blade. He'd have to make a super-hard emulsion so the paper wouldn't tear.

“Then, you know, all kinds of retouching—carbon pencil, pumice stone, powder tone, gum eraser, ink, sable brush. I mean, look at this shit…”

I indicated the darkest part of the sky. “That's Chinese black—Sumi ink pigment. They'd burn black walnuts and mix the soot with animal glue. Mortensen would grind up the ink and make his own powder tone from crayons scraped across fine sandpaper.”

Mallo snorted. “He sounds like a nutter.”

“Definitely an obsessive. But he was a visionary, you know? You can do this kind of thing today with a fucking smartphone in ten seconds. He'd spend
days
on it. This is what Mortensen was famous for—manipulating images, almost proto-CGI. And he was vilified for it. Ansel Adams called him the Antichrist, but Mortensen's like the patron saint of Photoshop and Instagram.”

“Very impressive. How much did you say this was worth?”

“If it's a monoprint, it could go for five, ten grand.”

Mallo's mobile phone pinged. He glanced at it and made a face. “Well, thank you for the photography lesson. Morven will be pleased to know that picture's worth something—she's always hated it.”

With a nod, he turned and walked back toward the living room.

I continued to peruse the druid photo. Mortensen's work had always made me slightly queasy: as though all the elements that comprised one of his images, ink and charcoal pencil, acetate and toner and silver salts, mutated into some kind of virus that attacked my optic nerve. After a few minutes, I shouldered my bag and hurried on, turning a corner into an empty hallway.

I rapidly opened doors—storage closets; a compact washer/dryer unit; a wall of circuitry that appeared to be a security system. I thought of the omnipresent CCTV signs in the streets, looked around for a camera. I didn't see one, but I bet Mallo could afford technology that would fit on the head of a pin. If anyone questioned me, I'd say I was looking for a bathroom. Which, of course, I was.

At the end of the corridor a door was cracked open. Inside was a large bedroom. More windows; polished floor covered by white Flokati rugs; king bed heaped with nubby silk pillows. A glass vase of red tulips on a nightstand, with a framed color photo on the wall above it: Morven Dunfries, maybe fourteen. Long blond hair veiled her face and blinding sunlight streamed through an open window behind her, so that her breasts could be clearly seen through a sheer white slipdress.

I leaned over the nightstand to examine the picture more closely. It had been taken in hard light, with a Big Shot camera—Andy Warhol's favorite, the one he used for all those close-up photos you used to see on the cover of
Interview Magazine.
Manufactured for only two years in the early seventies, the Big Shot was designed for indoor flash portraits, with a fixed-focus viewfinder set for thirty-nine inches from the subject. The photographer had to move around her subject until she got it in range, a bizarre little dance known as the Big Shot Shuffle. This photo had been shot indoors, but even with all that sun flooding though the window, the photographer had used a flash. Morven's pupils glowed eerily red, and I'd bet that the Big Shot's flash diffuser had been removed.

Hard light was a strange choice for a photo of a beautiful young girl. It gives a sharp edge to everything, throws it all into harsh relief, with no subtlety as it transitions from dark to light. It's what you get with a flash or other single light source, like the sun on a cloudless day. Ugly light.

And even if there was no sign of the ocean, I recognized the reflected glitter of sea and mica in the sun flooding that open window as Atlantic light. You get a more compressed light if you shoot by the Atlantic Ocean, in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway. The water's darker, and the composition of the sand's different—if you have sand, rather than rocky crags and gravel beach.

Pacific light is like you tossed handfuls of pearl dust into the air, milliseconds before you pressed the shutter release. The sand there is formed by eons of shells being ground into the shoreline and ocean floor, shells you don't find in the western Atlantic—abalone, tritons, Pandora clams. If you're a great photographer, or just a lucky one, you can catch a flicker of that lost iridescence in the light reflected from Pacific waves crashing on a beach.

Atlantic light is less forgiving. But whoever had taken this photo had captured it, to a degree that made it almost painful to look at, like squinting into the sun. I could see it in the girl's eyes, coruscating crimson within those turquoise irises, and in the nuclear-bomb glow of her bare arms and throat. Mostly I saw it in the dance of sun and skin and silk around her breasts, where her slip shimmered like a net filled with bioluminescence. You can't get that effect with digital—it's dependent on the granularity of film, the physical interaction of light with ferrous salts and gold chloride and glass or paper.

The image was disturbing. Morven seemed barely past puberty. It reminded me of the notorious original cover art for the
Blind Faith
album—a nude shot of a very young teenage girl, heavy-lidded and with Pre-Raphaelite curls, holding a model airplane against a backdrop of blue sky and unnaturally green grass. A totally in-your-face photo. Polydor pulled it from the LP's U.S. release in 1969. This Polaroid would have been taken just a few years later.

I looked around and saw another photo propped on a shelf above the bed. Same vintage, same camera, same harsh sunlight: three young teenage girls with their arms around each other. One was Morven, dressed as in the other photo. The second had dark curly hair that obscured her face, so all I could see was a full-lipped grin. The third was tall, auburn-haired, her head turned as though someone had called to her from just outside the frame. The nagging sense of some lost, long-ago memory tugged at me, but I pushed it aside.

I stepped away from the nightstand—Mallo's side of the bed, to judge from the reading glasses set atop a copy of the
Financial Times
—and crossed to where the wall held three recessed doors. The first two opened onto his-and-hers walk-in closets. Despite his predilection for going barefoot, Mallo had twice as many shoes as his wife, most of them riffs on biker boots.

Door number three opened on a bathroom that must have cost as much as a Tracey Emin nude. Heated terra-cotta tile floor. Gilt-framed mirrors on the wall. The twin sinks were Edwardian antiques retrofitted with nickel faucets. There were separate alcoves for toilet and bidet, and a celadon-tiled rain shower behind a glass wall. Bottles of Jo Malone bath scent, Orange Blossom and Pomegranate Noir.

None of this interested me. I was looking for a medicine cabinet.

There didn't seem to be one. Glass shelves held towels and apothecary jars of soaps and toiletries, but I saw no cabinets. Maybe they kept medication in the bedroom?

I wasn't above rifling a gangster's boudoir, but I wasn't that desperate. Yet.

I dumped my camera bag and returned to the wall beside one sink. I ran my hand across the wall, closing my eyes so I could focus on what was beneath my fingertips.

About four inches from the backsplash, a vertical seam extended from the ceiling to the sink counter. I opened my eyes, splayed my hand across the wall, and pushed.

A panel rotated outward, displaying an array of glass shelves, handily lit so I could see rows of prescription pill bottles and tubes of ointment. I picked up one bottle, turned to read the label, and in the mirror above the sink glimpsed a face. Not my own.

 

10

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

Mallo Dunfries's soft voice might almost have been amused, but his face was bright pink, his bloodshot eyes icy gray. He strode across the room, grabbing my satchel in one hand and my throat in the other. The pill bottle clattered to the floor as he shoved me against the wall, pinning me there as he dug into my bag. Terror flooded me as I thought of the U.S. passport hidden in my boot.

Mallo pulled the Swedish passport from my satchel, opened it, and stared at the photo. “Dagney Ahlstrand. You said you were Cass somebody.”

“I am,” I choked. “That's—”

“Shut up.”

He rummaged in the bag until he found my wallet and driver's license. “Cassandra F. Neary, New York, New York.” He looked at me. “I assume the
F
stands for
fucked.
Because you are.”

His fingers dug into my windpipe, his frozen gaze never wavering from mine.

“How'd you get in?” His hand dropped from my throat. “Who sent you here? Gligor?”

“Adrian invited me,” I gasped. “I only got here yesterday—check the passport. I was looking for speed.”

I hate resorting to the truth, but sometimes it's the only way.

Mallo scowled. He checked the Swedish passport again, held it beside my driver's license, comparing the photos, and set the passport on the sink counter. He dropped the wallet back into the satchel and rifled through my few items of clothing until he found my camera. He examined it carefully, popping the lens cap and scrutinizing the shutter release, exposure settings, viewfinder.

“This a digital camera?”

“No. DSLR. I shoot on film. Black and white.”

He opened the back of the camera, exposing the film, and I groaned.

“My Tri-X.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “That's nearly all that's left.”

“Yeah?” He yanked out the ribbon of film and tossed it on the floor. “Now there's none. Where's your mobile?”

I fought the urge to grab the camera and smash it in his face. “I don't have one.”

Mallo looked at me in disbelief. “You don't have a smartphone? iPhone, anything like that?”

“No.”

“You're telling me you're a photographer and you don't own a phone or digital camera?”

I nodded. His brow furrowed. After a few moments, he replaced the lens cap, closed the back of the camera, and tossed it into my bag on the floor. Then he pulled out a mobile, picked up the Swedish passport, and handed it to me.

“Hold that next to your face—open it, so I can see her photo. Dagney whoever the fuck she is.”

I did as he ordered. Novae burst as the flash went off and bounced across the mirrors behind me. Mallo cursed and took another picture, this time without the flash. He eyeballed the photo on the mobile's screen, looked at me, and shook his head.

“You must be fucking out of your mind,” he said. “Only a fucking idiot would come here and break into my things.”

“I didn't break in. The cupboard was open. I told you, I was—”

“Looking for speed, right.” He gave his mobile a cursory swipe. “Fucking drug addict. I should just call the cops. But it's Morven's birthday, and I don't really like cops. Care to tell me why you're here on a stolen passport?”

I stayed mum, and he shrugged. “No skin off my tits. May I have that?”