get their combat shots. I didn’t care much for them.”
“That still happens in some places.”
“I’ve seen your name under some pretty rough pictures. Are you a lot like your father?”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. All I know is what people have told me about him. Guys who worked with him in the field. I think we’re different as photographers.”
“How so?”
“Wars attract different kinds. There are the hotel guys you talked about, who don’t even count. There are the Hemingway wanna-bes, out there to test themselves. Then you have the ones who get off on the danger, who live for the rush. They’re the crazy ones, like Sean Flynn, riding hell-for-leather through firefights on a motorcycle, with a camera in his hand. And then there are the good ones. The ones who do it because they feel it’s the right thing to do. They know the danger, they’re scared shitless, but they do it anyway. They crawl right into the middle of it, where the mortar rounds are dropping and the machine guns are churning up the mud.”
“That’s the kind of courage I respected over there,” Kaiser says quietly. “I knew some soldiers like that.”
His face is lined with silent grief; I wonder if he knows it. “Something tells me you were a soldier like that.”
He doesn’t respond.
“That’s the kind of courage my father had,” I tell him. “He wasn’t that gifted a photographer, when you get down to it. His composition was never that great. But he would get so close to the elephant that the crazies wouldn’t even go there. And when you’re that close, composition doesn’t matter. Just the shot. And that made his pictures unique. He went into Laos and Cambodia. He spent twelve days underground at Khe Sanh, during the worst of the siege. I have a photo a marine shot of him peeing in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
Kaiser’s eyes flick toward me at last. “Who told you that? About the elephant?”
“My dad. When I was a kid, I asked him why he did such a dangerous job, and he tried to make out like it wasn’t dangerous at all. He said the soldiers called combat ‘seeing the elephant,’ that it was like a big circus.”
“It was, in a lot of ways.”
“Later, when I got a taste of it myself, I understood better.”
“If you’re not like him, what kind of photographer are you? Why do you do it?”
“Because I have to. I don’t even remember making a conscious choice.”
“Are you trying to change the world?”
I laugh again. “In the beginning I was. I’m not that naive now.”
“You’ve probably changed it more than most people ever will. You change people’s minds, make them see things in a new way. That’s the hardest thing to do in this world, if you ask me.”
“Will you marry me?”
He laughs and hits me on the shoulder. “Are you that starved for affirmation?”
“This past year has really sucked.”
“The past two have sucked for me. Welcome to the club.”
Kaiser’s cell phone rings again. He ignores it, but this time it does not relent, and he finally picks it up and looks at the LCD. “That’s Baxter at Quantico.” He presses Send.
“Kaiser.” His face grows tight as he listens. “Okay, I will.” He hangs up and gathers the leftovers into the bags.
“What happened?”
“Baxter wants me back at the field office.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but he said to bring you with me. They’re setting up a video link to Quantico, and he wants you there.”
My heart stutters. “Oh, God. Do you think they’ve found out something about Jane?”
“No point in guessing.” He tosses the bags one after another at a metal trash can ten feet away. They bang in without touching the rim. “Baxter’s voice was on edge, though. Something’s popped somewhere.”
7
The FBI field office is run from the fourth floor, which was designed so that you see nothing but hallways and doors unless you walk through one of the doors. A few of the doors are open, and as I walk past them, I sense people watching me. At a door marked “Patrick Bowles, Special Agent in Charge,” Kaiser gives me a look of encouragement.
“Don’t be shy. Just say what you think.”
“I usually do.”
He nods and ushers me into a large L-shaped room with a broad window overlooking Lake Pontchartrain. There’s a desk in the dogleg of the L, and sitting behind it is a florid man with quick green eyes and silver hair. On the way over, Kaiser told me that SAC Bowles is the senior FBI official in the state of Louisiana, in charge of 150 field agents and 100 support personnel. Trained as an attorney, Bowles has served in six other field offices and has supervised several major investigations. Fashion-wise, the SAC is the antithesis of John Kaiser: he’s wearing a three-piece suit that never hung on any department store rack, silver links on his French cuffs, and a silk tie. When he gets up to greet me, I see that his shoes are Johnston amp; Murphy, at the least.
“Ms. Glass?” he says, offering his hand. “Patrick Bowles.”
A little Irish in his voice. It makes me think of the Irish Channel, but of course the Channel is now home to black and Cuban families, not Irish immigrants. To avoid awkwardness I shake his hand and give him a guarded smile.
“Take a seat here,” he says, motioning toward a leather chair in a group.
Glancing to my left, I see Arthur Lenz on a sofa in a private seating area in the deep leg of the L. The good doctor doesn’t look happy, but he stands and walks over to us. He and Kaiser do not exchange greetings. Kaiser sits in a chair opposite mine, and Lenz claims the sofa against the wall to my right. SAC Bowles retakes his place behind his desk. He looks like a no-nonsense kind of guy, which is fine with me.
“Have you learned something about my sister?” I ask.
“You’ve met Daniel Baxter?” asks the SAC, ignoring my question. “Of the Investigative Support Unit?”
“You know I have.”
He glances at his watch. “Mr. Baxter wants to discuss something with the four of us. We’ll have a satellite video link in about thirty seconds.”
Bowles pushes a button on his desk, and a three-foot section of wall above Dr. Lenz slides back, revealing a large flat-panel LCD screen.
“Just like James Bond,” I say softly.
Lenz gets up with an irritated sigh and leans against the long window to the right of Bowles’s desk. I glance over at Kaiser, who gives no indication of his feelings. I guess there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in the FBI. There’s a lot of it in photojournalism, too. After a moment, the LCD screen goes blue and numbers begin flickering in the bottom right corner.
“There’s a camera above the screen,” says Bowles. “Baxter can see us all in a wide-angle shot.”
Suddenly, Daniel Baxter’s face fills the screen, and his voice emanates from hidden speakers.
“Hello, Patrick. Hello, Ms. Glass. John. Arthur.”
The video feed isn’t jerky like some home-computer hookup. It has the seamless resolution of corporate America’s tete-a-tetes. The ISU chief looks directly at me as he speaks, which gives me the feeling that he’s actually standing in the room.
“Ms. Glass, from the moment you called me from your return flight from Hong Kong, we’ve been using the combined weight of the Departments of Justice and State to gather the Sleeping Women paintings for forensic analysis. Negotiations like these usually take weeks, but the exigencies of this situation allowed us to apply unprecedented pressure. We now have six paintings in our possession. We’ve already begun our analysis, using both our own technicians and outside consultants. The bad news is, we’ve found no fingerprints preserved in the paint.”
