57

Zach

The four images Zach printed this morning hang from clothespins suspended on the line above the tub. He walks back and forth in front of the pictures and confirms his suspicion that none of them will work. Damn. Serge’s unruly organizational skills are making it extremely difficult to find the interior Metropolis photographs Nathaniel asked for.

To make matters worse, it appears from the various subjects, locations, and weather conditions that Serge took his photographs in spurts, shooting two or three rolls at the same time, and then, days or weeks or even months later, turning to a completely different place and focus. It also seems that he developed and printed the pictures in the same way. That this is who the man is: two settings, on and off.

Zach is starting to develop, pun intended, an image of Serge Laurent, the man. Granted, it’s just a fantasy he’s spinning, but it cheers him to conjure Serge, to give him form. He’s tall and lanky, probably middle-age, and something bad must have happened to him: a screwed-up family, extreme poverty, sexual abuse, the battlefield, some other traumatic event. He’s troubled, possibly seriously. Maybe he has PTSD or he’s bipolar.

A lonely genius using his camera in an effort to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense to him. Zach hasn’t personally experienced war or tragedy—his own measly difficulties pale in comparison—and he feels for Serge, who clearly didn’t enjoy these advantages. He wishes he could meet him, help him get back on his feet. Maybe when he has enough photos for the show, he’ll try to find him again.

Zach has printed all the shots from the rolls he developed, and there are only a few that might work for Nickerson & Hagan. One of a wine cellar with built-in shelving, another of rows upon rows of Princess Diana dolls, and one of a unit that looks like a store, with women’s clothes neatly hanging on long racks, most with their original tags still attached.

He’s pleased with his handiwork but needs far more than these three photographs. So it’s back to developing the rest of the rolls Serge shot and left in their canisters, which, of course, lack any kind of identification. The only way to determine what’s on each one is to blindly pick one and go through the whole pouring-and-shaking routine. He’d much rather be printing.

By late afternoon, he’s developed five rolls, and none of them contain anything he can use. Zach threads another into the tank, figuring it’s time for his luck to change. And it does, for when he gets to the final rinse and holds the strip of negatives up to the light, he lets out a whoop. Twelve inside shots.

He quickly prints a contact sheet and inspects the photographs with his jeweler’s loupe. Two are of the janitor he saw earlier, but in these the janitor is emptying trash instead of mopping floors. Seven are of Rose, sitting at her desk. Serge shot the photos through the window in the office door, warping the image while also, in some indeterminable way, clarifying it. A woman at work, tired but focused on her task, a sense of purpose tinged with despair. A sad, overburdened everywoman.

One of Serge’s gifts is his ability to send the viewer on a journey in his subject’s footsteps, transferring his own empathy for the subject to the viewer. In this case, the journey punches Zach in the gut, and he’s forced to admit that he’s probably been too hard on Rose. It’s not as if he’s never made a mistake. Although in this case, she made more than one.

There are also three photos of that workman in a Red Sox shirt, who Zach recognizes from a previous roll. In all three, the guy is standing toward the top of his ladder, fiddling with something on the side of an elevator door. He appears to be in his twenties, white, with a dark beard and a shaved head. Not a big man, but strong and wiry, and clearly agile, from his obvious comfort with his precarious perch.

Zach does a quick print of the three workman photographs—he’ll do more iterations if, on closer inspection, they turn out to be as good as he thinks—and hangs them on the line. In one, a stream of light emphasizes a battered work belt filled with tools and reflects off the wrench he’s using to pull something from the top of the elevator door. Zach wonders if it’s the one Haines fell through and looks more closely. He can just make out the faded image of the number 4 above the buttons. The sound of rushing blood fills his ears.

Could the man be messing with the elevator doors? Could this be related to the accident? For that to be possible, the photo would have had to have been taken in early January of this year, right before Haines fell, as there were no reports of any problems before that night. Zach checks the contact sheet with the loupe. Rose is wearing a sweater, and the janitor is in long sleeves, which would point to winter, but which winter? Rose didn’t say anything about elevator repairs at the deposition, so this photo couldn’t have been taken this year. Unless . . .

His mind starts diving in multiple directions. What if it was this winter, and Rose lied about not hiring the workman because the two of them were up to something nefarious? But that doesn’t make any sense—what could they possibly have been doing? It’s more likely that she didn’t mention the workman because she didn’t know about him. And if this is so, then maybe the elevator was purposely tampered with and the accident wasn’t an accident at all.

Whoa. If he could prove this, it would clear him of wrongdoing. Then he would get Metropolis back, he wouldn’t be broke, and he wouldn’t have to involve the IRS in any of the particulars of the purchase or sale. His world would return to its normal axis.

There are cartons of Rose’s office materials, including her computer, piled in the third bedroom, along with the rest of the castoffs Zach brought from Metropolis. He leaves the bathroom and grabs her laptop. It’s dead, and he roots around in the cartons before he finds the power cord. As it boots up, he sits on the floor and balances the laptop on his knees.

Zach goes to her calendar, enters “elevator” into the search bar, winces when a pane appears on the right side of the screen listing ten years’ worth of “elevator” entries. Almost all reference inspections or reminders to set up inspections. There are a number of entries that mention appointments for repairs, and he enters “elevator repair” into the search bar. There are seven, but none later than 2016.

He returns to the bathroom and pores over the prints. He hadn’t noticed that the back of the workman’s shirt says devers 11, and this makes him smile. Rafael Devers, the promising Red Sox third baseman, is one of his favorite new players. The kid had a bang-up rookie year, but he came up in the middle of last summer, halfway through the season, so his numbers weren’t good enough for a Rookie of the Year candidacy, which Zach believes he deserved.

Devers was smacking game-winning home runs and initiated a triple play during the regular season, but it was his playoff feats that made him a household name in Red Sox Nation. And those feats didn’t happen until the end of the season. The 2017 season. Holy shit.

A Devers shirt wouldn’t have been on sale until after last year’s playoffs, late October. This means the photo was taken between then and the night Haines fell. There are no entries on Rose’s calendar for elevator repairs during that time.

Zach has an ex-girlfriend who’s a lawyer at a big firm in Boston, and he phones her. After they exchange pleasantries, Naomi says, “I’m guessing you’re not calling me at the office because you’ve repented your evil ways and want to get back together.”

“True that,” Zach confirms. Naomi is only vaguely aware of the whole Metropolis calamity, as he never gave her more than the cursory details, but he does now. He also tells her what he found. She listens carefully, asks a few questions, reminds him that she’s a trust attorney, with no expertise in this area, but promises to get back to him after she talks to one of her partners, who does handle this type of case.

An hour later, Naomi calls. “If these pictures are what you think they are, Brad says they might be enough evidence to countersue Haines. Maybe even get your building back. But it’s not going to be easy, and you need lots more to back the photos up. As Brad put it, you’ve got ‘miles to go before you sleep.’”

“Tell me what to do.”

“First, he says you have to make sure your assistant didn’t hire him. Second, talk to someone at the company that made the elevator and find out exactly what happened that night and why. Third, if you can, find more photos of the workman and the elevator, preferably doing something more directly incriminating. And those are the easy parts.”

“Can’t wait to hear the hard parts.”

“After you’ve done all that, someone has to figure out who he is. He could be an unsavory type, dangerous even, so you can’t do it yourself. You’re going to have to either hire a detective or convince the police a crime has been committed. Then they, or your detective, have to find your Red Sox guy, confront him, and get him to corroborate your suspicions.”