Yablonski’s office was a clutter of photographic equipment, report forms, pictures tacked to walls, half-empty coffee cups. “Hey, Dick,” the little man said when he looked up. “What brings you down here?”
“Your beautiful face. I need some night photography equipment.”
“Yeah? You got infrared uptown. If you need a photographer forget it until next week, my guys are—”
“Hooked up. No, we don’t need a photographer.”
“You guys take up time. I can’t spare men to spend days and days sitting in cars doing what any moron—”
“Like me can do.”
“Yeah. So why don’t you just use your own infrared equipment and let me the fuck alone.”
“Because I don’t need infrared. I need high power and long range. You know infrared’s no good over fifty yards.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Hell, Dick, it’s my business, don’t take that tone with me.”
Neff closed his eyes. What made this little fart so Goddamn difficult to deal with? He always talked in arguments. “I need the Starlight camera.”
“Like hell.”
“For one night.”
“I repeat: like hell. That camera doesn’t leave this Bureau without a trained operator, meaning me. And I’m not takin’ it out without a signed letter from somebody I can’t turn down.”
“Come on now, don’t get crazy. I only need it for one night. Think if you don’t give it to me and I lose an important collar as a result. Think how that’ll look.”
“It won’t look like nothin’. Officially you don’t even know that camera exists.”
“Oh, cut the crap. We got an eyes only on it in 1975. That thing’s been goin’ in and out of Narcotics ever since.”
“Well, I didn’t know that.” Yablonski glowered, pugnacious, aware that Dick was somehow edging him into a corner.
“How’s the wife?”
“What’s she got to do with it? She the suspect?”
“Just trying to be friendly. Look, I’ll level with you. I got a big collar coming up but we need evidence. We got to have pictures.”
“Big deal. Use fast film. There’s plenty of light in the streets.”
Dick sighed, pretended to give up on something. “I guess I gotta tell you more than you need to know. We got a big pass comin’ up. We just can’t risk missin’ it. We gotta have that camera.”
Yablonski glared at him. He did not like to let his precious Starlight camera out of his personal control. On the other hand he had no intention of spending the night on some dangerous narcotics stakeout. He stood up, brought out his keys and went to a bank of lockers that covered one wall of the office.
“I’m gonna be a sucker,” he said, “let you take this thing out and get it smashed. You know how much this thing cost the City of New York?”
“Nothin.”
“About a hundred grand. Hardly nothing.”
“It’s CIA surplus circa Vietnam. You know damn well we got it for nothing.”
“Well, I’m not sure we’d get another if we lost or busted this one.” He removed a metal case from the locker and placed it gently on his desk. “You used this before?”
“You know I have.”
“Well I’m gonna go through the drill anyway!” He opened the case and pulled out a boxy object made of gray, burnished metal. It was about the size and shape of a two-pound can of coffee with binocular eyepieces on one end and a large, gleaming fisheye of a lens on the other. The body of the thing was entirely featureless, except for a barely visible indentation obviously intended for a thumb.
“You open the control panel like this,” Yablonski said, pressing on the indentation. A three-inch square of surface metal slid back to reveal a panel containing two black knobs and a small slit. “You slide in the film.” He pushed a small black rectangle into the opening. “That gives you two hundred shots. That’s the bottom number in the readout you’ll see in the lower right quadrant of the frame when you look through the camera. Above that’s the ambient light reading. You set the top knob so that it reads the same value. Here—” He held the camera out. Dick took it, put it up to his eyes. The image was blurred but the three numbers were clear. “Read off from the bottom up.”
“The bottom number says two hundred. The middle one sixty-six, the top point-oh-six.”
“Meaning you’ve got two hundred shots left, the ambient light level is sixty-six and you are pointing the camera at an object point-oh-six meters away. Now gimme.” He took it back. “You set the top knob at sixty-six and the bottom one at point-oh-six. Now look.”
“What the hell is it?”
“The top corner of the locker, dummy. It’s magnified so much you can’t tell what you’re seeing that close. Point the camera out the window.” Dick swung the camera around. The top two readings flickered and changed as he moved it, then the limbs of a tree down near street level leaped into view. He could see where ice adhered to the twigs and where the sun had made it drop away. Yablonski guided his hand to the thumb indentation. “Pull back on it.” There was a click. The little door had closed on the side of the camera and a red light had gone on above the three green numbers of the readout. “You get a light?”
