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The executive looked at the profile of the man sitting in front of him. The sharp silhouette was leonine and strikingly distinguished, though the details of his features were cast into darkness by the glare coming from the casement windows. The executive could see that the man’s hair, combed back in long thick waves from his hand some forehead, was beginning to take on the contours of a widow’s peak. He knew the hair was trimmed immaculately around neck and ears. He looked at the straight bridge of the nose, the ridge of the small mustache, the rounded curve of the dimpled chin. He also knew that the man’s firm jaw, which grew a heavy black beard that was shaved twice a day by a barber, bore a perpetual charcoal cast.
Neither of the men had spoken for several minutes, and the capacious room where the man at the desk spent his oddly disciplined days was as silent as a casket. The executive moved around in front of the desk to get away from the brilliant light of the window, one of four on the long wall that provided the only illumination in the room. The wall spaces between the windows were covered with photographs, both black-and-white and color.
Now the executive was directly in front of the other man and could see clearly one half of the other man’s face as he studied something in front of him. The other half remained in the dark.
“Do you want me to warn the others?” the executive asked finally. “They should be told something. What if—”
“T-t . . . t-t . . . t-t . . . “ The other man looked up, smiling; the soft sound trailed off.
When he didn’t go on, the executive continued. “There were five of us that night. Shouldn’t I-”
“T-t . . . t-t . . . t-t . . . “
The executive stopped, inwardly frustrated, even angry, but outwardly calm.
The other man continued to smile with disarming frankness, not taking advantage of the interruption he had created to speak himself. The attitude of his expression and the anticipatory angle of his head made him seem to beckon the executive to continue, even though he had just intervened. The executive examined the half of the man’s face that was in good light and saw the strong white teeth behind the smile. He also saw one eye, the iris of which was so dark it was indistinguishable from the pupil, so that the man looked at him from a black hole that robbed the eye of any personality or feeling of communication. His smiling mouth opened slightly more, his handsome head tilted slightly farther back, his eyebrows jerked higher, inviting the executive to speak.
The executive didn’t.
It was a familiar if perplexing exchange. He had experienced it many times, had witnessed it with other executives who had access to this man. The noble head would tilt back and the soft “t-t, t-t,” would begin, almost inaudibly at first so that the speaker ignored it. When it persisted, growing in volume, the executive would assume he was being politely interrupted and stop. So would the soft fricative sounds. Silence. Puzzled, the executive would try to sort out what was happening. When the silence continued, he would assume the interruption was not going to be followed up and he would begin again, only to be once more interrupted by the soft fricatives, the tilted head, the smile that made the executive wonder if he was being ridiculed. Another silence, which, this time, the executive would not break.
Eventually, the man himself would begin to speak in a voice so subtle that the executive prayed that some slight noise, a closing door, a cough, would not obscure a word or phrase. The strain of concentrating on every word, of even trying to read his lips, added to the tension of the meetings. The speech pattern was erratic: phrases followed by ellipses, the fricatives, the smiles. The executive would be forced to follow a good deal of the conversation by inference. No one ever attracted attention to the fact that they had difficulty hearing him.
Now, as he waited and looked into the void of the black eye, the executive didn’t understand this odd method of communication any better than he had the first time he witnessed it. Still, he had survived dozens of these encounters. But now he was tired. Impatience was playing an increasingly larger part in the range of emotions that affected him when he was summoned to this moody estate hidden deep within a wooded section of the city.
He waited, his hands clasped behind his back. He tensed his arms and pulled his muscles against the vertebrae in his lower back as he met the stare of the man across sloppy stacks of papers that slid into one another and formed an unstable mound of debris that rambled from one end of the crescent shaped desk to the other. Paper clips on the edges of pages snagged other pages in the shuffle and dragged them out of the piles to contribute to the slide. A China cup and saucer were half hidden by the ever-spreading paper floe, and the derrick of a miniature copper oil rig, the kind found at arts and crafts fairs, was almost totally sub merged. In among the white documents the executive saw pale green and blue slips that he knew to be undeposited checks. Sometimes they stayed on the desk for months until their writers issued new ones, which also disappeared into the white refuse. The persons who sent these checks were uninitiated and naive.
“The footage is the problem,” the man said softly. The executive moved forward. “I know that I’ll—”
The man smiled and patted the reel cans stacked on one end of his desk.
“I meant these. I wanted to show you these . . . but Bechtel didn’t get them out of the vault in time and, uh, I’ve got to put them back into the air lock to warm up. We’ll see them tomorrow.” He laughed a little. “They’re fascinating. From, uh, Sri Lanka. The first from there. A Sinhalese cameraman tried to sell them to, uh, a network reporter. They wouldn’t touch it. T-t, t-t . . . Bechtel bought them on his last trip to Paris.”
The man was toying with him, of course. He had been referring to the other footage, then pretended not to be.
“But we’ll see something else this afternoon,” the man said.
The executive’s heart sank. He was hoping that just this once he wouldn’t have to watch a film. He didn’t want to see it, whatever horror it was. Today, especially, he wanted to be spared the besotting violence.
The man stood and gathered up the canisters of film. The executive watched him come around the desk and start across the long room. Over the last two years he had grown accustomed to the man’s appearance, almost forgetting to notice its unusualness. But today, he saw him again as if for the first time and was stricken by the incongruity: the noble, masculine head so dramatically larger than the slight, preadolescent body upon which it seemed precariously balanced.
The man’s entire frame appeared to have stopped growing at prepubescence, before the changes of adolescence stirred and injected its cells with the hormones necessary for masculine development. His shoulders lacked squareness, and his torso did not carry the settled weight of adulthood. His hands were devoid of delineating tendons and veins, pudgy in the palms, with little fingers that tapered toward the ends. And yet his body was not ill-proportioned or effeminate; it was simply puerile, lacking any sign of strength or maturity. Conversely, his head was everything his body was not. The physical disharmony of the whole was startling.
The executive followed him, feeling absurd as he lumbered behind this little boy/man who habitually wore tiny black patent leather evening slippers, tuxedo pants with satin stripe, wing collared tuxedo shirt with knife pleating, no tie, and suspenders. They were the only clothes he ever wore when he was at home, and they were always soiled. The shirtfront was dingy with old, laundered stains, and the pants, slightly dusty at the sagging knees, were wrinkled to a permanent pucker at the crotch.
The man opened a wooden door in the middle of the room on the wall opposite the windows. There was an adjoining metal door on the other side of the jamb. This he opened also and entered a smaller room with wall shelving holding dozens of canisters of movie reels. The temperature in this room was 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The man laid the canisters from his desk on one of the shelves and took a heavy coat from a hanger on the wall and put it on. He opened a second door and entered another vault. The executive followed, not bothering to take one of several similar coats of a larger size, making sure the air lock was closed behind them.
The vault beyond the air lock was nearly four times larger, with hundreds of feet of open shelving stacked with film cans, some aluminum, some plastic, depending on the age and type of film they contained. The temperature here was 40 degrees Fahrenheit, with 30 percent relative humidity. The archive shelving was arranged by year, with subcategories of geographical location in alphabetical order. Each canister was labeled with date, cameraman (if known), source, location, context, and brief description of the film’s subject.
The man quickly disappeared around the corner of one row of shelving. The executive stayed near the door with his hands thrust down into his pockets, waiting. He could hear the man pulling cans from shelves, putting them back, killing time. In a few minutes, the man appeared around the end of another row of shelves twenty feet away and stopped in the aisle, looking at the executive. The room held the same close silence of a meat locker.
“T-t . . . t-t . . . you suppose Toy has the rest of it?” he asked. His breath hung in front of him like a puff of smoke.
The executive looked down the aisle at him. “Of course he does.”
The man thought a moment. His slight frame was bolstered by the bulky coat, and its fur collar, turned up, hid his childish neck
“Do you suppose he got all of our faces?”
“It wouldn’t make much sense if he hadn’t.”
“I suppose he’ll make a lot of duplicates,” he mused softly. “I’m sure of it,” the executive said. He was tired.
“Do you think he will approach each of us? Or just me?”
“Maybe everyone. I don’t know.”
“I suppose he’ll want a lot of money.” The black eyes looked somewhere past the executive’s shoulder.
The executive didn’t answer. He didn’t want to get into that. He just wanted to know what he was supposed to do.
“How much would you say the footage was worth?” The man crossed his tiny slippered feet at the ankles and leaned against the shelving, his small hands in the big square pockets of the coat.
The executive was getting cold now and couldn’t help hunching his shoulders. The damn film was priceless, and the man knew it. He was asking a silly question.
“What would you pay for it?” the man said to the executive. He was smiling. “T-t . . . t-t . . . “
“Whatever it took”
“But there’s a point beyond which you would not be willing to pay.”
“I’m sure. I don’t know. I’d have to hear what he wanted.”
The man shrugged somewhere underneath the coat. “I guess we’ll just have to wait until he contacts us.”
Again the executive said nothing. He had long found these oblique remarks maddening. The man knew damn well he was already taking care of it, had been working on it since Thursday morning.
The man’s lower face was blue with beard and the cold, and a bright red blotch had appeared on each cheek He seemed so frail the executive supposed it wouldn’t take much for him to freeze to death.
“Toy was a superb cameraman,” the man said.
The executive agreed. He felt his jaw jump with cold as he looked at the man to see if he could read anything into the black spots he used for eyes. There was nothing there, of course, nothing that helped the executive understand whether the man had used the past tense deliberately or accidentally. Who knew what Byzantine arrangements he had made elsewhere? His life was so compartmentalized the executive marveled that he was not impossibly lost in the maze of his own plotting. But that was the way he maintained the necessary distance. The man’s hands were always clean because his executives were his surrogate hands and the surrogate hands obeyed the mind, insofar as they could read the mind. And if they happened to misread it or became overzealous in their wish to accommodate him? What could he do? Certainly he personally could not be blamed for the misjudgments of others.
All that duplicity hid behind the murky wells of his eyes. He couldn’t be blamed for anything with eyes like that.
“We should have had him tape those things from the beginning,” the man said. “That would have preempted this sort of thing, and we could have controlled the circumstances. And he wouldn’t have filmed the people he shouldn’t have filmed,” he added with a wry smile.
They stood looking at each other. The man pursed his lips and blew out a jet of foggy breath as if he were exhaling the smoke of a cigarette. “Well,” he said, and looked aimlessly around the vault at the shelves stacked with film, millions of feet of carnage. It seemed as if he were halfheartedly trying to decide what it was he wanted to do next.
Finally he stirred himself and walked past the executive, who was shivering uncontrollably now, and went into the air lock. The executive followed him and closed the vault door behind them. They stopped at the shelves in the air lock, and the man looked over the stacks of cans that had been in the room for twenty-four hours or longer. They had to warm to the room’s temperature slowly to avoid minuscule amounts of moisture forming on the film as a result of condensation.
“We’ve got some Lahore footage from the sixties,” the man said. ‘There’s some Idi Amin interrogations, some Argentine interrogations in La Tablada army installation in 1977 . . . this one has bestiality in it, naked girls and trick rats.” He grinned at the joke and then returned to his recitation. “We have a Ku Klux Klan lynching, some Beirut things . . .” He was trying to decide, standing with his arms folded, still wearing the heavy coat. Finally he reached out and slipped one can out from under several others. “We’ve been talking about Mr. Toy. Let’s watch some of his Guatemalan stories. Huehuetenango. There are interesting things in this one too.”
The man handed the executive the reel, hung his coat on the rack, and preceded him into the big room. The executive closed the doors behind them and went to a projector permanently installed in a cabinet in the center of the room. The man crawled onto one of the several sofas arranged in a semicircle in front of the projector and facing the far end of the room. The executive flipped a switch, and the movie screen descended from the ceiling with a soft electrical whirr. It took up the entire far end of the room.
The executive threaded the film and then pushed a button on the cabinet that caused the enormous drapes over the windows to close slowly. He flipped on the projector, and the film began to run.
The opening shot is an aerial view of jungle, the horizon tilting slightly first one way and then another as the aircraft banks. Then the camera pans forward, taking in a string of four blue and white Jet Ranger helicopters trailing down toward the jungle in a wide swinging arc. The camera is apparently in the last ship. The picture vibrates slightly from the pounding rotors. It is a good shot, watching the sinister machines dropping down into a valley, over a river, and between jungle covered hillsides. Then there are puffs of smoke coming from the open doors of the first Ranger, and then from the others, until the film shudders heavily and the camera swings around to film the door gunner a few feet away raking the trees.
Suddenly the camera records chaos as the ships land with unexpected speed, disgorging soldiers. There is a shot of sky, then grass, then legs, and finally ground level footage of Guatemalan soldiers running into tall highland grass and emerging into a village firing their recoilless rifles. The camera catches soldiers screaming at one another, pointing, running. A shot shows the Rangers lifting off in a hurricane of dust. A helmet sails across the screen, and the choppers are gone. The film jars to a blur and then, incredibly, there is a close-up of an old Indian man trying to pick up his arm, blood ejaculating from the ganglia at his shoulder. He can’t do it, and he turns helplessly to the camera, crying open-mouthed like a child.
Then an old woman, wearing a torn dress, runs up and gets it for him and they run off together for a few yards until she is suddenly picked up and propelled forward with her feet off the ground to fall in a heap with the arm. The old man does a hysterical hopping dance over her crumpled body and then bends over and takes his arm by the fingers, but he can’t lift it and he trails it along behind him on the ground as he runs again until his legs go rubbery, and he plows into the dirt. The camera fast pans and stops on two Indian men kneeling with their hands tied behind them. They seem young, more like boys. A soldier comes up and begins sawing at the throat of one of them with a knife. He hits the jugular vein and the blood shoots out onto him. He jumps back and kicks at the boy, who is pitching and bucking wildly as if to get away from his own death.
The second prisoner inexplicably falls over, and another soldier runs up and begins stomping his head as if it were a beer can and continues until it is misshapen and red and bears no resemblance to a head at all. In the background people run back and forth in smoke and fire. The camera jogs to one side and follows two soldiers dragging a naked Indian woman along the ground by her feet. Her face wears the passive serenity of shock as she calmly tries to sit up and keep her entrails from getting into the dirt.
The executive turned away from the rest of it. A tiny, brilliant sliver of light came through one of the windows where the curtains did not quite meet near the top. He fixed his eyes on this shard of light and concentrated on it. He clung to it with his heart as well as his eyes, as if it were the only thing in the world that could save him.