Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

Jennifer was saying, “I’d tell Miss Kim or anybody else, that I don’t know anything about your business. What else would I say? That I like Houston and London and some of those old tapes by Duke Ellington? Or that at Olivet I prefer to sun myself and walk by the river and...”

Correll watched rain slanting under a heavy sky... “I gave your mother conditional absolution after the rosary last night,” the bishop had told him. “She had difficulty breathing. I took the liberty of telling her you’d be coming soon. That brought a light to her eyes. There’s a precious bond between the souls of a mother and son. We needn’t look beyond Calvary and the Pietas of Michelangelo...”

A knock sounded and after a moment Marvin Quade admitted himself and told Correll that General Taggart was ready now with the Summitt City film.

“You go along with Quade, Jennifer,” Correll told her. “I’ll join you at the theater in a few minutes.”

“Simon, do I have to? I’m very tired.”

“I’m sorry, but yes. It’s a short film, twenty or twenty-five minutes. It was shot the day after you left Summitt City and there’s something in it I particularly want you to see.”

When Jennifer and Quade went out, Correll poured himself a brandy. A moment later General Taggart knocked on the open door and came in.

“Well, everything’s going fine, I’d say.” The general put out his big, knuckled hands to the fire. “It’s damned strange how hooked people are by the Apocalyptic vision. The real banality of evil is that it’s always such a letdown. Why’d you want that little lady of yours to see the film? She won’t like it, you know.”

“I need her, General. I want her to be just as involved as I am.”

“Well, she sure as hell will be. You have any additional poop on what that Lester’s up to?”

“I don’t think he’s a problem. If it weren’t for the diversion of someone named Harry Selby, and possibly Ferdinand Bittermank, I’d be very optimistic. But that can’t be helped. I want you to be prepared to neutralize Summitt City if it turns out we have to.”

“Whatever you say, sir. But we still need that input.”

“Summitt may be compromised. We’d better be prepared for that. It’s time for Phase Two. We can profit from our blueprint here and activate another on-line unit. But where they least expect it, where the logical connections make it unlikely. The obvious is always the best camouflage.”

“But I’d suggest,” General Taggart said, “that we utilize overseas personnel now.”

“I’ll leave that to you. Van Pelt tells me he has a cadre he’s satisfied with.”

“For that matter,” Taggart said, “so has Mies Kraager. We discussed it in Cape Town only a week ago. Security, lab people, administrators, the lot.”

“If you prefer Kraager’s team, fine.” Correll looked at his watch and put his glass aside. “I think we’d better go in. Frankly, I hope this is the last time I have to sit through this thing.”

J. D. Parks’s darkroom was a converted closet in the rear of his office suite. It smelled of acid and was eerily illuminated by a green “safe” light.

Harry Selby stood in that cramped space with Parks, watching pictures forming on sheets immersed in shallow developing pans.

They had been at this for several hours, since Parks returned that afternoon from an assignment in Marcus Hook, struggling from the elevator with a pipe in his mouth, a yellow scarf about his neck, burdened down with two leather sacks of gear and a tripod, and full of apologies for having kept Selby waiting. “Don’t worry,” he said, unlocking his office. “I got most of the stuff on the Brandywine Lakes job enlarged, must be a ton of it. I think what you want is buried in there someplace. You’re a big fella, Selby. Want a beer or anything?”

Much of the film, even those shots featuring cars, Selby had been able to dismiss with a glance; aerial views of Brandywine Lakes homes and fairways, the cemetery near the development, a drive-in theater and high school stadium, rows of houses with lighted windows.

They stopped at last for beers and sandwiches, which Parks brought out from a refrigerator which doubled as a support for developing frame racks.

“I was using Tri-X film that night, f-14 at 60,” Parks told him, as he unwrapped a pastrami on rye. “Shooting with a Hasselblad, a Graflex, a Kodak Extarlens. Pretty sensitive stuff. But maybe we didn’t fly close enough to the place you’re looking for.”

Selby doubled the beer can with a snap of his fingers before tossing it into a wastebasket.

Parks went on. “We might have turned back to Brandywine Lakes before we got to Vinegar Hill.” In the same tone, he added, “I saw you play once. It was back in Philadelphia. I remember, I guess, because you got hurt. It was third down, and it looked like a pass play coming up. That’s when you got that scar on your cheek. You could hear it clear up in the press box when the helmet bar broke. But it was a long time ago. You might not remember.”

“I remember it pretty well,” Selby said.

“I’ll bet.” Parks wrapped the crusts of their sandwiches in a waxed bag and stowed that behind a window plant. “For the birds in the morning,” he explained. “The super tells me it attracts ants, but everybody’s got to live. I got a kind of Buddhist slant on things in ’Nam. Let’s get back to work, okay?”

They found what they were looking for about a half hour later, the images swirling in the suffused light, Vinegar Hill’s short driveway leading away to the house and garage. When Selby leaned forward, straining to see through the trembling emulsion, he could make out the silhouette of an automobile.

“That’s it. There it is,” he said, surprised that the tension building in him didn’t sound in his voice. “How much closer can you get?”

“More details? Let’s see. This is as much enlargement as I can get with any real clarity from the four by fours. I’ll have to cut the negatives into thirty-five-millimeter frames and change the lens in the enlarger. That’ll take time.”

Selby used Parks’s phone and called Shana. “I should be home in an hour or so,” he told her. “But don’t you and Davey wait dinner. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, everything’s fine. We’re all right.” Her impersonal tone, the one he was accustomed to, changed slightly. “But Miss Brett, she called a few minutes ago. She’s with that sergeant. They wanted to talk to me. I said okay.”

“You’re sure you feel up to it?”

“I told you, daddy, I’m fine.”

“Did she — did Miss Brett say what she wanted to talk to you about?”

“No, she didn’t.”

Parks glanced at Selby, held up a strip of film and pointed to the darkroom. Selby nodded and said to Shana, “Okay, honey. I’ll see you at home.”

Parks took the new enlargement sheets from the developing pans, washed them and clipped the wet proofs to the frames above the refrigerator. After inspecting them, he said, “Take a look,” and handed Selby a magnifying glass.

The postage-stamp-sized pictures expanded magically under Selby’s artificially strengthened vision; through a tangle of trees flecked with streaks of moonlight, he saw the metallic glint of a bumper, and the oblong shape of the license plate. He couldn’t make out the letters or numbers; they reproduced only as separate black squares.

“We could try a reducer,” Parks suggested. “The film is blocking up now, it’s too thick to let the light through. There’s a computer process, electronic gadgets that could do this faster, but I can try for a finer gradation and see if that helps.”

He worked on sheet after sheet, experimenting with reducing mixtures and attenuating the emulsion’s density, talking to himself while he studied the results, in arcane references to exposure lines, light values, Farmer’s Reducer, ASA ratings...