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.
Every 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
