Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“That’s what I thought. I don’t know if I’d want to get into all that.”

“But that’s the whole thing, Roger. You don’t have to. Look, I don’t know what your first hunting experience was like, but I remember mine. I was fourteen years old and I was out in a field down near the railroad tracks with an old rimfire twenty-two rifle, and I shot a squirrel out of an oak tree. Just a poor raggedy squirrel that I plinked with a broken-down rifle, and that’s as big a hunting thrill as I guess I ever had. Now I’d guess your first experience wasn’t a hell of a lot different.”

“Not a whole hell of a lot, no.”

“Well, when I put down the gun and took up the camera, the camera I took up was a little Instamatic that cost under twenty dollars. And I’ll tell you a thing. The picture I took with that little camera was at least as much of a thrill as I get with my Japanese job.”

“You can get decent pictures that way?”

“You can get perfect pictures that way,” Dandridge said. “If I had any sense I’d still use the Instamatic, but as you go along you want to try getting fancy. And anyway, it hardly matters how good the pictures are. You don’t want to sell ’em to Field and Stream, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Hell, no. You want to find out if you can go on having the sheer joy and excitement of hunting without having the guilt and sorrow of killing. That’s it in a nutshell, right?”

“That’s it.”

“So pick up a cheap camera and find out.”

“By God,” said Roger Krull, “that’s just what I’ll do. There’s a drugstore in town that’ll have cameras. I’ll go there first thing in the morning.”

“Do it, Roger.”

“Homer, I intend to. Oh, I’m a little dubious about it. I’ve got to admit as much. But what have I got to lose?”

“That calls for a drink,” said Homer Dandridge.

Dandridge was outin the woods early the next morning. His head was clear and his hand steady, as was always the case on hunting trips. In the city he drank moderately, and his rare overindulgences were followed by mind-shattering hangovers. On hunting trips he drank heavily every evening and never had the whisper of a hangover. The fresh air, he thought, probably had something to do with it, and so too did the way the excitement of the chase sent the blood singing in his veins.

He had another good day, shooting several rolls of film, and by the time he returned to the lodge he was ready for that first double shot of sour mash whiskey, and ready too for the good company of Roger Krull. Dandridge was not by nature a proselytizer, and in casual conversations with other hunters he rarely let on that he employed a camera instead of a gun. But Krull had been an obvious candidate for conversation, and now Dandridge was excited at the thought that he had been instrumental in leading another man from bang-bang, as it were, to click-click.

Again he stowed his cap and gear and hurried to the taproom. But this time Krull was not there waiting for him, and Dandridge was disappointed. He drowned his disappointment with a drink, his usual straight double, and then he settled down and sipped a second drink on the rocks with a splash of soda. He had almost finished the drink when Roger Krull made his appearance.

“Well, Roger!” he said. “How did it go?”

“Spent the whole day at it.”

“And?”

Roger Krull shrugged. “Hate to say it,” he said. He took a roll of film from his jacket pocket, weighed it in his hand. “Didn’t work for me,” he said.

“Oh,” Dandridge said.

“I envy you, Homer. I had my doubts last night and I had them this morning, but I went out and got myself a camera and gave it a try. I honestly thought it might be exciting after all. The pursuit and everything, and no death at the end of it.”

“And it didn’t work.”

“No, it didn’t. I’ll tell you something. I’d like myself better if it had. But for one reason or another it isn’t hunting for me without the bang-bang part. Just squeezing the shutter on a camera isn’t the same as squeezing a trigger. Some primitive streak, I suppose. I stopped enjoying killing a while ago but it’s just not hunting without it.”

“Hell,” Dandridge said. “I don’t know what to say.”

And that was true for both of them. They suddenly found themselves with nothing at all to say and the silence was awkward. “Well, I’m damned glad I tried it all the same,” Krull said. “I really enjoyed talking with you last night. You’re a hell of a guy, Homer.”

“You’re all right yourself, Roger.”

“Take care of yourself, you hear?”

“You too,” Dandridge said. “Say, don’t you want this?” He indicated the roll of film, which Krull had left on top of the bar.

“What for?”

“Might get it developed, see how your pictures turned out.”

“I don’t really care how they turned out, Homer.”

“Well—”

“Keep it,” Krull said.

Dandridge picked up the film, looked at it for a moment, then dropped it in his pocket. He wondered if Roger Krull had even bothered to purchase a camera at all. Men sometimes came to momentous decisions under the heady influence of alcohol and changed their minds the following morning. Krull might have decided that hunting with a camera made as much sense as taking portrait photographs with a shotgun, and then might have gone through the charade with the film to keep up appearances. Not that Krull had seemed like the sort to go through that kind of nonsense, but people did strange things sometimes.

Psychology was another hobby of Homer Dandridge’s.

Well, it was easy enough to find out, he decided. All he had to do was include Krull’s film with his own when he sent it off to be developed. It would be interesting to see if there were any pictures on it, and if so it would be even more interesting to see what animals Krull had snapped and how well he had done.

When the pictures came back Homer Dandridge was very confused indeed.

Oh, there were pictures, all right. An even dozen of them, and they had all come out successfully. They did not have the contrast and brightness of the pictures Dandridge took with his expensive Japanese camera, but they were certainly clear enough, and they revealed that Roger Krull had a good intuitive sense of composition.

But they had not been taken in the woods. They had been taken in a city, and their subjects were not animals or birds at all.

They were people. Ten men and two women, captured in various candid poses as they went about their business in a city.

It took Dandridge a moment. Then his jaw fell and a chill raced through him.

God!

He examined the pictures again, thinking that there ought to be something he should do, deciding that there was not. The name Roger Krull was almost certainly an alias. And even if it was not, what could he say? What could he do?

He wasn’t even certain in what city the twelve pictures had been taken. And he didn’t recognize any of the men or women in them.

Not then. A week later, when they started turning up in the newspaper, then he recognized them.

On an otherwiseunremarkable October afternoon, Florence Ackerman’s doorbell sounded. Miss Ackerman, who had been watching a game show on television and clucking at the mental lethargy of the panelists, walked over to the intercom control and demanded to know who was there.

“Western Union,” a male voice announced.

Miss Ackerman repeated the clucking sound she had most recently aimed at Charles Nelson Reilly. She clucked this time at people who lost their keys and rang other tenants’ bells in order to gain admittance to the building. She clucked at would-be muggers and rapists who might pass themselves off as messengers or deliverymen for an opportunity to lurk in the hallways and stairwell. In years past this building had had a doorman, but the new landlord had curtailed services, aiming to reduce his overhead and antagonize long-standing tenants at the same time.