Mark Mills - Amagansett

The man whom he’d immortalized for the home-front readership had played no part in the fighting they’d just come through, the hell that was the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. He was from a relief unit sent in at the end, 33,000 men having already died or been incapacitated in a few brief months, swallowed up in five hundred acres of densely wooded real estate of little or no tactical value.

Some weeks after that first dinner, Abel dug out and showed Hollis a folder of shots he had taken in Hürtgen Forest, photos he’d held back for himself rather than consign them to the nearcertain oblivion of the photographic pool.

The forest itself was the stuff of fairy tales, those of the more nightmarish kind—a dark, dense underworld, the dwelling place of witches and wolves. Towering pine trees, tight-packed so that their branches interlaced, formed a gloomy canopy through which stray shafts of sunlight barely penetrated to the forest floor. What the photos didn’t show were the German anti-personnel mines lurking beneath the spongy carpet of pine needles, or the trip wires rigged to the assault course of fallen wood that anyone passing through the forest was obliged to negotiate. The greatest danger, Abel explained, came from above, from the deadly hail of wood unleashed by artillery tree-bursts. In one of the shots a soldier was literally hugging a tree, while all around him death whirled like a blizzard. It was an image that brought to mind a terrified child clutching at his mother’s thigh.

Most of the photos, though, were of GIs at rest, stuffed into slit-trenches and foxholes, tending to their feet or their weapons, seeking comfort in the little routines of life. One GI was even plucking at his nose hairs, using the inside of a tobacco tin as a mirror.

By the time Hollis had worked his way through to the end of the batch, the forest was all but gone, the noble pines reduced to matchwood, their shattered trunks poking through the surrounding debris. Light flooded the photos, the roll of the land was revealed. The final shot was of three tall pines outlined on a bald crest, beheaded and stripped of all but their lower branches. There was no mistaking the parallel with the three crosses of Calvary.

Abel had been right. The photo selected for the front cover of Life magazine was inert and empty when set alongside those other images. But he was wrong if he thought he had yet to prove himself as a photographer.

‘It’s a poor excuse,’ said Hollis.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your work. For not getting married.’

‘Right now it’s the best I can come up with.’

‘What if she leaves you?’

‘That’s her choice.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘You fancy a shot at her yourself?’

‘Then you’ll know what a damn fool you’ve been.’

‘You’re not her type, Tom.’

‘Will you just listen to me for a moment.’

Abel spread his hands: fire away.

‘Too late,’ said Hollis. ‘She’s coming.’

Abel stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said.

Hollis groped for the alarm and shut it off. Three aspirin and a cup of reheated coffee later, the little man jackhammering at the base of his skull downed tools.

Abel was to blame. If he hadn’t taken Hollis to task over the amount he was drinking, then he wouldn’t have got angry, and he wouldn’t have reached for the bottle of brandy when he got home. He guessed there was a hollow logic to this thinking, so he tried not to dwell on it too much.

He tracked down the binoculars eventually, though how they’d found their way to the back of the airing cupboard he couldn’t rightly say.

He had been up at this hour many times before, the duty rota demanded it, but he’d never found himself down on the ocean beach just after sun-up.

The fishermen, he knew, rose early. One time he had attended the scene of a bar brawl on Montauk. By the time the matter had been resolved, the participants in the fracas agreeing to split the costs of the damage, there were already dim little figures creeping from their shacks around Fort Pond Bay, rowing out to where their boats were moored, lanterns like fireflies in the fading night.

From the top of the frontal dune at the Atlantic Avenue beach landing, Hollis could make out two crews of fishermen working the shoreline to the east. The Basque’s Model A was not among the vehicles gathered on the beach.

It lay to the west, a mile or so away.

Hollis lowered the binoculars. Better to drive round to Indian Wells landing and walk from there.

They were emptying their net, dragging fish up the beach by the gills, big fish, their tails trailing in the sand. If the Basque was surprised to see him, he didn’t show it.

‘Morning,’ he said, tossing two fish into the back of the truck. Hollis waited and watched while they went about their business. When the net was empty, the Basque turned to the Kemp boy.

‘Rollo, you want to go get that other seine from the barn?’

‘Sure.’

Hollis took this as a sign that the Basque wished to be alone with him, but as the truck pulled away along the beach he wandered down to the water’s edge. Hollis followed. He hadn’t noticed before, but there was a shark wrapped in the sodden net.

The Basque picked up a baseball bat lying nearby and rinsed the bloodied end in the wash. ‘Thresher,’ he said. ‘Chewed up the seine some bad. Mostly they go right through. This one got snagged.’

‘They come in so close?’

‘How many people would go swimming if they knew, right?’

The Basque seized a hold of one end of the net.

‘You mind?’ he asked.

This was not how Hollis had imagined the encounter going: helping the Basque to drag a dead shark up the beach.

When they were done, the Basque set about rolling a cigarette.

‘You asked to see the autopsy on Lillian Wallace.’

The Basque didn’t react, didn’t even look at him.

‘Why?’ asked Hollis.

‘Curiosity.’

‘Curiosity?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re going to have to do better than that.’

Now the Basque looked up. ‘’Cos you’re a cop?’ For a brief instant Hollis was scared by what he saw behind the gray eyes, or rather the lack of it, of anything, the emptiness. ‘I don’t owe you nothing,’ said the Basque. ‘It’s best you understand that now.’

‘Now’ was the word that leapt out. It suggested that this was the start of something. But what exactly?

‘I’ve seen the autopsy report,’ said Hollis. ‘She died from drowning.’

‘I’m not saying she didn’t.’

‘So what’s your interest in it?’

‘Could be they missed something.’

‘What if I told you they didn’t?’

‘I’d say, “What are you doing here?”’

Hollis pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. The aspirins were wearing off; the little man was back at the rock face, hammering away.

‘Follow me,’ said the Basque.

The boat sat at the water’s edge a little way along the beach. The Basque seized the bow and swung it around in the sand.

‘Best take those fine leather shoes off,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘And the jacket.’

‘I’m not going out there.’

The Basque ignored him, tugging the boat into the wash.

‘I can’t swim,’ said Hollis.

‘You’d be surprised how many fishermen can’t.’

‘That’s supposed to make me feel better?’

The Basque smiled. ‘Nothing’s going to happen, not with the surf all flattened off.’

It was true—the waves weren’t at their most menacing—though ‘flattened off’ was hardly the phrase Hollis would have used.

The Basque was waist-high in the water now, waiting.

Hollis heaved a sigh, shrugged off his jacket, kicked off his shoes and waded in.