William Bayer: Blind Side

He was so ecstatic when I told him I'd go, he invited me to lunch.

I flew out to the Middle East two weeks later, took a lot of pictures, and, strangely enough, had a fairly pleasant time. There were bodies around most everywhere, and, when I happened to be near when a big car bomb exploded, I was able to get to the site and shoot three rolls before they picked up the dismembered limbs.

Bloody stuff, brutal stuff-but I'd seen it all before. And thanks to the reflex viewin2 svstem of my Leica I was able to cast a cool eye. F@a@kly, I don't think I caught much that was new, but Jim was thrilled when he saw my proofs.

"Just like old times," he said.

"You want the goods, you send Barnett." I started taking portraits for magazines again, serious portraits of athletes, actors, people in the arts. The editors who hired me liked what I gave them, said my stuff had an intensity, a penetration, that they hadn't seen in my earlier work.

"It's like now you pin your subjects right to the wall," one guy told me. I shrugged, but he was right.

Last month Vani Fair offered me a contract, and ty then so did Rolling Stone. So far I've opted to stay free-lance. I've got a cover idea I want to talk over with Elle.

Late this past winter, after I got my career securely back on track, I had a new piece of molded plastic made to fit the lens shaft of my gun-camera. I cleaned out the barrel of the Beretta inside, stashed the device and a box of ammo in a corner of my check-through luggage, and flew out to Cleveland under the name of Frank Cordero.

At the airport I rented a gray Buick with the kind of heavily tinted windows that appear opaque Ahen the sun shines hard. Then, just for old times' sake, I checked into the Devora.

The following morning, I trailed Grace from her house to the shopping mall where she did her Nautilus routine. I watched her enter the gym, then parked beside her c@ir, with my Buick facing in the opposite direction.

I opened the back of the camera, loaded two bullets into the Beretta, then munched on potato chips while I waited for her to come out.

When she came, hair wet from her postworkout shower, I cocked my weapon and held it ready. When she opened her car door, I suddenly opened mine, creating a little pen that w ' ould keep her from getting away.

"Grace?" I said. She turned.

"Remember me?"

She stared hard at me, frowned.

"What the hell do you want?"

"Came to take your picture, Grace."

She looked at me curiously. I shot her twice, fast and neat in the chest.

She died, I think, almost instantly. After she fell, I picked her up, placed her in her car, and locked her inside. I looked around. No one was near and no one, as far as I could tell, had seen. I was lucky. I'd killed her cleanly. Afterwards I just drove away.

I didn't kill her because I thought she might come after me. I killed her because of Frank. If it had been me who'd been killed out in New Mexico, he wouldn't have rested until he'd tracked my killer down. He would have called what I'd done "a pure justifiable act of revenge," and I think he would have appreciated the fact that I committed it with the special weapon he'd made, the disguised gun he'd created to accommodate my refusal to carry anything but a camera into war.

I learned something firsthand too from that little escapade, something Frank had told me once: though it's fairly hard to kill the first time around, it is a lot easier the second.

As for Kim, the memory's still vivid, but in time, I know, it will fade. I took so many shots of her over the weeks of our acquaintanceship, they all seem to run together now. At each stage I saw her the way I wanted to, and when we finally got to the end I saw her dead.

Every once in a while I look at my last picture of her-the one I took just after I shot her. I looked at it again last night. I must have studied it for at least an hour. Like every other picture I ever took of her, it tells me nothing about her, nothing at all. But it does tell me something about Geoffrey Barnett. It fixes the moment he knew he could be merciless.

Which, I've begun to think, is the case with almost every kind of photograph. A photograph, you see, may or may not tell you much about its subject. But if you look at it closely, and you were the photographer, it can tell you a great deal about yourself.