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  Satisfied with this instrument’s formation, Board returned it to its tank, watching its shadowy form descend and disappear into the liquid void.

  Now it was time to check on how the latest batch of photographs was coming along.

  A dozen photographs were clothes-pinned to a line strung across the end of the narrow room so that the light through the one bare window could tease the images out of their chemically coated surfaces. There had been twenty frames on the roll, but typically almost half of them hadn’t been properly exposed. That was why Board always made sure to overshoot any given subject, taking repeated shots from each angle.

  All of these photos illustrated the same crime scene, from two different angles and in a spectrum of grays ranging from nearly white to nearly black. The crime, as it turned out, had been committed by the victim himself. A man sat at a heavy, battered table, remarkably erect in posture despite having no head. What was left of it hung down in flaps about his shoulders like the half-peeled skin of a banana, the upper part of his shirt soaked black with the cascade of his blood. One hand had fallen to the tabletop, palm up like a dead spider with its legs curled, and the other had fallen limply down his side. The shotgun he had fired into his mouth—a 1903 John Browning auto-5—was also still erect, its butt having hit the floor and the barrel propped against one thigh. After taking the pictures, Board had looked over the policemen’s shoulders as they examined the weapon. The victim, a Joseph Cup, had sawed off part of the barrel so as to make it easier to reach the trigger with his thumb. But, running his own thumb over the end, one cop noted that Cup had filed the abbreviated muzzle smooth, so no burs would painfully scrape his inner mouth as he blew his brains across the ceiling and walls in a widely distributed pattern that in the photos almost looked like a wallpaper design.

  Again, after he’d shot the photos, Board had watched as an officer used two pencils to lift up Cup’s face. It was fairly normal looking, if somewhat slack and rubbery, like a boneless mask. Until the officer had done this, it had appeared as if the head were entirely decimated, when in fact the blast had obliterated most of the interior but left the torn leaves of outer skin to flop down inside out. The cop removed the pencils to let the face slither back onto Cup’s chest.

  Board had already taken in all this at the scene, but now as he unclipped and studied the photos, he found himself focusing on the surroundings, the background details, rendered in ghostly ash tones by the orb of his camera.

  The kitchen the man sat in was small, with a cast iron stove up against the wall behind him. The walls were somberly dark, with only a few faded lithographs hanging in frames, the barrenness accentuated by the high ceiling. Despite the spare orderliness, the floor looked dusty, gritty. Very subtly, each photo Board had taken was more uniformly bright in its center before shading out in a circular shape toward the darker edges, as if a softly glowing spotlight had illuminated the scene, though this was purely an effect of his camera’s vision.

  There were no close-ups of the victim, with or without his face held up for view. Another photographer, in the police mortuary, would take a few of those downtown with his own unblinking camera. Board did the crime scenes only, established the environment, the setting. His relationship with the dead ended there.

  These prints had come from his first roll of film; the second must be ready to develop by now. Picking up a pair of forceps, he moved to the mature camera he had used yesterday to record this murder/suicide. It was still attached to its collapsible, telescoping tripod, which stood in the corner. Long bolts affixed the creature’s shell on either side to the platform atop the tripod. When he swiveled the platform around to get at the rear of the camera, its legs—splayed out atop the platform like a decorative trim—wavered slightly. The one eye turned somewhat in its bony socket as if it were trying to look over a shoulder it didn’t have, as he applied the forceps to the puckery orifice at its other end. He had to insert the instrument partway to catch hold of the second film cartridge, which he extracted slowly, drooling a few strands of mucus. An ever present fishy, somewhat diarrheic smell in the room intensified, but he was accustomed to it; he knew it even permeated his clothing. Board wiped the cartridge with a rag, pried off its lid and removed the rolled up negative strip, then turned to unfurl it in the light through his window.

  Again, only about half of the twenty frames looked usable, the others either entirely clouded white or at least too vague to be worth viewing. This series, though shot second, had been devoted to the first of the two to die—Cup’s wife, Josephine. She lay back on their small bed with its huge metal headboard and slightly smaller footboard like the barred walls of a cage. Her bare feet hung off one side almost to touch the dull planks of the floor, and she was in her nightgown. The wall behind her, also somberly dark with a repeating pattern of flowers in an ornate vase, was flecked generously with blood, and the sheets under her were a black tar pit that threatened to swallow her up eventually. Her husband had shot her in the chest. Her eyes were half-lidded as if frozen in a blink, and her lips parted in the subtlest of empty smiles. But all this Board remembered more so than discerned clearly now, since the negative images were so small, and reversed so that her face seemed prematurely black with rot and her pupils glowed uncannily white.

  Because of the tiny area of the bedroom, dominated by the bed as if the room had in fact been built around it, Board had had to elevate his tripod to take in the whole of the scene as best he could, shooting directly down from above. The three long crutch-like tripod legs had been fully extended, one on one side of the bed and two on the other, then he had swiveled the platform vertically to tilt the camera’s orb downward. As in all the photos Board shot in this manner, the tripod legs were clearly in the shot, foreshortened so that they looked huge, like columns supporting the ceiling of the room. It was an unavoidable intrusion in the composition, as if the tripod legs were his own (and wasn’t he merely a kind of subordinate tripod for his living camera, anyway?), but he had grown used to it. It was the only element of himself in these pictures, which were otherwise such intimate portraits—still lifes—of the interior of houses, the interior of lives, the interior of brains both figuratively and literally. The framing tripod legs, distorted and tapering with false perspective, were like an unintentional artistic signature where he intended no artistry at all. A dispassionate device, a mere practicality, that was all his tripod and himself were meant to be.

  Less dispassionate, however, the camera began making a chittering sound behind him. Glancing around, Board realized it was looking at the negatives over his shoulder. Its legs were fluctuating in an increased rhythm. Feeling a lurch of disgust, Board set down the roll and swiveled the camera around to face into the corner again. It was a fairly bold thing to do, denying it its mindless pleasure, but he had done his job yesterday recording these nakedly intimate scenes onto film and now he was inside his own intimate space, and he didn’t feel like giving the thing an opportunity to relive that apartment’s contents within the walls of his own.

  -2-

  “Well hello, chum,” said Detective Robert Shoe of the Metacarpus Police Force, Precinct 3, looking up as Board entered his office. Board held his straw hat in one hand and an oversized envelope in the other. He watched as Shoe continued searching the stations on a radio at the end of his desk. He did this by positioning a heavy magnetic block like a paperweight on different spots atop a flat creature like a huge pill bug. There was a classical music station, but he bypassed that, sliding the magnet to another area of the segmented shell until he found a station tinnily playing “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine,” by Campbell and Burr. He then fine-tuned the station by adjusting the angle of the eyeless, albino creature’s two forward antennae. In between the various stations, there had been a hissing static filled with cicada-like trilling. This was all the various creatures throughout the city of Metacarpus, communicating with one another. Board had once owned a radio, but had given it away because it chattered back a
nd forth with his cameras all night, to the point where he couldn’t find a clear station on it at all.

  Finished, the jowly Shoe looked up at his guest and smiled. “Whew, my boy, you smell like a diseased whore. No wonder you don’t have yourself a wife!”

  “Thanks,” Board said dryly, tossing the envelope onto the man’s blotter.

  Shoe slipped out two complete sets of photos of the murdered wife and suicidal husband, the Cups. He wrinkled his nose at the husband, but Board didn’t know if that were the stink of the glossy prints or their subject matter. When he appraised the wife, he commented, “Pretty legs.” Dropping the photos back to the blotter, he smiled up at Board again. “You ever touch any of these women, Johnny? When no one’s looking? Feel a leg here, a posterior there? A nice soft titty before it gets too cold?”

  “No, Bob, I don’t. I’ve never frenched a woman with her face shot off, either, oddly enough.”

  “A lot of them are nude when you find them, aren’t they? Even with blood on ‘em, they still have nice figures sometimes, huh? Kind of a strange feeling, lookin’ at that combination of ugly and nice…smooth and torn…isn’t it? Be honest. I’ve seen enough dead women myself to know.”

  “Maybe that’s what you look at, Bob, but I’m just there to take my pictures and go have a bourbon at the closest saloon.”

  “Ah, Johnny, you’ve got quite the moral character, don’t you?” Shoe rose and stretched, wandered out from behind a desk as ponderous as his body. “Well, this is a closed case. Straight to the files. I’m still looking for the Assassin who knifed that whore down on Patella Ave, that you covered last Monday. Probably the same guy who cut that Italian girl on Femur Road two weeks before.”

  “I remember. I don’t know, though. That girl was mutilated…her face cut up. The one last week was just stabbed. A different feel to them.”

  “Ohhh…hey…maybe I should hire you, huh, chum? Maybe you can solve all my open cases for me! Catch every Assassin in town so the Bugsies will have to recruit a whole new team, huh?”

  Board bit back his anger, knowing that the seemingly jovial Shoe had a mean temper. “I can’t help but get a feel for things in my line of work, Bob. Sometimes I get a sense of what’s going on in the killer’s mind. I can’t help it.”

  “Well, that doesn’t really concern you, though, does it?”

  “It does, if I want to make sure I don’t leave out an important clue in my shots.”

  “Evidence is one thing. Motive is my field—right, my boy?” He tugged up his drooping trousers with an indulgent grunt. Despite his taunting of Board, his office was ever permeated with flatulence. “Anyway, Johnny, yeah…a sick case might not vary his technique very much…but an Assassin might use a knife this time, a razor the next, a hatchet after that…just to keep the Bugsies entertained. Am I right?”

  “Sure,” Board conceded, sorry he’d ever given his opinion. “Well, there you go, anyway. Guess I’ll be off for some lunch.”

  “I’d join you, but I have a meeting with Captain Soup about those Italian kiddies killed over in the Phalanges slums. Getting a lot of bad press; we need to find that one. Hey, what do you think, Inspector Board? Help me figure this one out. Sick case or Assassin?”

  “Not my part of town. Didn’t Tom Brick take those shots?”

  “Don’t know. All I know is they want my precinct to help find the killer so those fuckin’ guineas will stop their noise.”

  A new song started on the radio. It was Arthur Fields’ jaunty war ditty “You Keep Sending ’em Over, and We’ll Keep Knocking ’em Down.” Shoe pretended to march in place, grotesquely, and sang, “‘We’ll drive ’em under the clover, six feet underground…’” He laughed. “You ever think of taking up a gun and making a few corpses of your own overseas, Johnny?”

  “No,” he answered, putting his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll stick to being a hyena. Always makes me wonder, though…the war…”

  “Wonder what?”

  “With all that going on, why the Bugs still want us to play this game.”

  “Well…maybe ‘cause the war is anonymous. All these men piled up in fields. Maybe they like it cozier, one on one. But for all we know they watch the war, too…I’ve heard rumors. Cameras in balloons, in airplanes. Anyway, I just think they can’t get enough, my boy. Just can’t get enough.”

  “I’ve heard rumors, too. That they even started the war…”

  Detective Shoe put a finger to his lips, and glanced over at the radio meaningfully. Its antennae flicked subtly, but it went on playing a fresh war song, “I Wish I Had Someone to Say Goodbye To” by Henry Burr. Changing the subject, Shoe joked, “Here’s your song, laddie.”

  Board let himself out. “Till We Meet Again,” he said to Soup laconically, quoting another Campbell and Burr tune.

  As he descended to the dusty street, where his two year old 1916 Dodge waited for him, Board idly mused that Shoe would probably attend that meeting he’d mentioned before he fed one of the two complete sets of new photos into the computer on the opposite end of the desk from his radio—this computer being a large, white, almost spherical creature like an engorged tick with pulsing gills and a slit incised in its exoskeleton wide enough to accept each photo and document it was fed. Once these were absorbed into its memory, they could be accessed by the Bugs from their homeland at any time. The now unneeded prints and accompanying police reports themselves would be digested and excreted, via a black rubber tube inserted into a rear orifice, into a bottle on Shoe’s floor—a black sludge which he poured out daily.

  -3-

  On his way to Scapula Street, a poor Italian section, John Board watched Metacarpus pass by along either side of him, like a gray river flowing around a rock on which he stood in its very center. Seemingly unbroken trains of row houses, compressed together like frayed books in an overstuffed shelf. Flat-roofed tenements. Small brick warehouses and mills and factories. None of these buildings were more than a few stories high. Wives on the charred skeletons of fire escapes, hanging out laundry as bleached as their skin. Dirt lots walled in by high plank fences and filled with decades’ worth of debris thrown out the tenement windows and layered like geological strata. The city would suddenly open up, part like moth-eaten curtains to lay bare broad spaces where railroad tracks ran across the uniform flatness of the land in sutures (telegraph poles like rows of crucifixes from which the bodies had long rotted), before the squat buildings swallowed up these bleak voids again, to smother them. In the distance now, in the vicinity of Scapula Street as if to guide him, Board saw a looming black water tower on a tripod of scaffolding, pointing at the sky like a rocket that might have brought the Bugs here, except that the Bugs were not here, could not get themselves here; could only manage to seed their living instruments here like remote extensions of themselves. The water tower reared like a fat prison guard over the tenements that cowered around its legs, faceless but all the more stern for that.

  When he parked his Dodge, Board put his hand on the camera that rested on the seat beside him. Though it did not move at this contact, he sometimes thought he felt an imperceptible vibration of life through its inscrutable chitin. He never, ever touched the single eye purposely, except to wipe it occasionally with a soft rag.

  In the street, he screwed the camera’s mounting platform onto his telescoped tripod. Then, with this under his arm, he walked toward the house to which he’d been summoned by the police. It was more of a shack than a house, really. One story. Flat tar-papered roof. A scrap of dirt for a yard, and dubious looking alleys formed by the identical buildings that flanked it. A baby cried in one of those buildings, and a block or two away a dog was barking. The sky overhead was gray as ash, as if the air had long ago caught fire, and that fire had long ago burned itself cold. It was neither cool nor warm out today, but a breeze stirred the grit of the yard around Board’s legs. Board nodded at the cop who loitered outside the shanty’s crude plank door smoking a cigarette. They went in together.

 
“Wife killing seems to be the national pastime, Board,” said Crate, the patrolman. “Well, I guess it’s something to do. But if we got all these wife killers together and sent them overseas, we’d win this war in no time.”

  Board gave an obligatory grunt meant as a chuckle.

  “Hope you haven’t eaten,” said Crate, squeezing into a room where the rusty smell of blood stung the sinuses. As he stepped to one side to make way, he asked, “Doesn’t this ever bother you?”

  Board said nothing as he set up his camera for the first shot. Crate’s partner, Mattock, snorted and joked, “Board loves this stuff. He’s a ghoul.”

  The walls were bare wood, with no insulation, no plaster. Folded newspapers had been wedged into gaps through which the wind might gain entry. In lieu of curtains, an old baby blanket and a half of a bed sheet were nailed up over the two windows. A cast iron stove rested on tottering stacks of bricks, its pipe skewered up through the low ceiling. A few pictures from newspapers were stuck to the walls by way of decoration. Board thought that if this were only a hunting cabin, it might be cozy. Beyond the taint of blood, the room stank of a long unbathed dog that there was no sign of, of grease, of foot odor, of dust; an embarrassingly intimate combination that this woman must have been fully accustomed to, the atmosphere of her days.

  “Anything in the bedroom I need to shoot?” asked Board as he made his adjustments. The cops replied in the negative.

  “The husband swears he didn’t do this,” Mattock told him idly, “says he came home and found her like this, but he was drunk as a skunk and had her blood on his hands.”

  “He seemed really shaken up,” Crate added, “but that’s probably just because he’s starting to realize what he did.”

  The victim lay on the floor, half under a bench that was pushed up against one wall to serve as a table. She was nude except for her socks, her legs looking forced apart, one knee cocked. Her face, broad and drably pretty, with a slight frown of disapproval, was turned to one side. Her throat had been cut with apparently one smooth incision, whereas Board often saw numerous, frenzied slashes. The woundings to her body he had witnessed many times. Her nipples had been excised, and she had been opened up from the slit of her vagina to just below her sternum. A soaked dark rag of something hung out of her like a huge tongue (the wet, apparent chaos of the human interior contrasted so disturbingly with the smooth order of its exterior). The killer was definitely a man; the hatred directed at her gender, at the specific icons of her sex. The orifice spitefully and mockingly enlarged, so that it dominated her, as it no doubt dominated the killer’s view of women. Yes, Board had seen these same mutilations perpetrated by a forgotten string of husbands, boyfriends, and strangers, far too many times. And yet, as he stepped back from his camera and pushed his thumb on the cable’s plunger—the other end of which he had plugged into a hole drilled in its shell just behind the eye—the wounds that weren’t present glared just as distinctly. Usually, in his experience, there was some battering or disfiguring of the face. Blows from a fist or heavy object. There were often numerous stab wounds in addition to the slashing, these parted into ellipsoids as the tight surrounding skin drew open their lips. Often there were defensive wounds on the hands; he’d seen fingers half hanging off backwards from trying to catch hold of a blade. But this woman seemed only to have suffered these few neat, precise strokes. And this from a passionately enraged, blurrily drunken husband?