Over Exposure Part 1

Over Exposure.

And six other stories.

By James W. Hall.

"Crack," Murder and Obsession, Otto Penzler, editor (Dell).

"Ride Along," Miami Noir, Les Standiford, editor (Akas.h.i.+c Books).

"Bells," On a Raven's Wing, New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Kaminsky, editor (Harper Paperbacks).

"The Catch," Greatest Hits: Original Stories of Hitmen, Hired Guns, and Private Eyes, Robert J. Randisi, editor (Carroll and Graf, 2006).

"Tight Lines," Hook, Line and Sinister, (Countryman Press, 2010).

"Six Love," Murder Is My Racquet: Fourteen Original Tales of Love, Death, and Tennis by Today's Great Writers (Mysterious Press).

"Over Exposure," Florida Heat Wave, Michael Lister, editor (Tyrus Books, 2010).

CRACK.

When I first saw the slit of light coming through the wall, I halted abruptly on the stairway, and instantly my heart began to thrash with a giddy blend of dread and craving.

At the time, I was living in Spain, a section named Puerto Viejo, or the Old Port, in the small village of Algorta just outside the industrial city of Bilbao. It was a filthy town, a dirty region, with a taste in the air of old pennies and a patina of grime dulling every bright surface. The sunlight strained through perpetual clouds that had the density and monotonous l.u.s.ter of lead. It was to have been my year of flamenco y sol, but instead I was picked to be the Fulbright fellow of a dour Jesuit university in Bilbao on the northern coast where the umbrellas were pocked by ceaseless acid rain and the customary dress was blacka"shawls, dresses, berets, raincoats, s.h.i.+rts and trousers. It was as if the entire Basque nation was in perpetual mourning.

The night I first saw the light I was drunk. All afternoon I had been swilling Rioja on the balcony overlooking the harbor, celebrating the first sunny day in a month. It was October and despite the brightness and clarity of the light, my wife had been darkly unhappy all day, even unhappier than usual. At nine o'clock she was already in bed paging aimlessly through month old magazines and sipping her sherry. I finished with the dishes and double-checked all the locks and began to stumble up the stairs of our two hundred and fifty year old stone house that only a few weeks before our arrival in Spain had been subdivided into three apartments.

I was midway up the stairs to the second floor, when I saw the slim line of light s.h.i.+ning through a c.h.i.n.k in the new mortar. There was no debate, not even a millisecond of equivocation about the propriety of my actions. In most matters I considered myself a scrupulously moral man. I had always been one who could be trusted with other people's money or their most d.a.m.ning secrets. But like so many of my fellow Puritans I long ago had discovered that when it came to certain libidinous temptations I was all too easily swept off my safe moorings into the raging currents of erotic gluttony.

I immediately pressed my eye to the crack.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to find the focus. And when I did, my knees softened and my breath deserted me. The view was beyond anything I might have hoped for. The small slit provided a full panorama of my neighbors' second story. At knee-high level I could see their master bathroom and a few feet to the left their king sized bra.s.s bed.

That first night the young daughter was in the bathroom with the door swung open. If the lights had been off in their apartment or the bathroom door had been closed I might never have given the peephole another look. But that girl was standing before the full length mirror and she was lifting her fifteen year old b.r.e.a.s.t.s that had already developed quite satisfactorily, lifting them both at once and reshaping them with her hands to meet some standard that only she could see. After a while she released them from her grip, then lifted them on her flat palms as though offering them to her image in the mirror. They were beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s with small nipples that protruded nearly an inch from the aureole, and she handled them beautifully, in a fas.h.i.+on that was far more mature and knowing than one would expect from any ordinary fifteen year old.

I did not know her name. I still don't, though certainly she is the most important female who ever crossed my path. Far more crucial in my life's trajectory than my mother or either of my wives. Yet, it seems appropriate that I should remain unaware of her name. That I should not personalize her in any way. That she should remain simply an abstractiona"simply the girl who destroyed me.

In the vernacular of that year in Spain, she was known as a nina pera, or pear girl. One of hundreds of shapely and succulent creatures who cruised about the narrow, serpentine roads of Algorta and Bilbao on loud mopeds, their hair streaming in their wake. She was as juicy as any of them. More succulent than most as I had already noticed from several brief encounters as we exited from adjacent doors onto the narrow alley-streets of the Old Port. On these two or three occasions, I remember fumbling through my Spanish greetings and taking a stab at small talk while she, with a patient but faintly disdainful smile, suffered my clumsy attempts at courtesy. Although she wore the white blouse and green plaid skirts of all the other Catholic schoolgirls, such prosaic dress failed to disguise her pearness. She was achingly succulent, blindingly juicy. At the time I was twice her age. Double the fool and half the man I believed I was.

That first night, after a long, hungering look, I pulled away from the crack of light and with equal measures of reluctance and urgency, I marched back down the stairs, and went immediately to the kitchen and found the longest and flattest knife in the drawer and brought it back to the stairway and with surgical precision I inserted the blade into the soft mortar and as my pulse throbbed, I painstakingly doubled the size of my peephole.

When I withdrew the blade and applied my eye again to the slit, I now could see my nina pera from her thick black waist-length hair to her bright pink toenails. While at the same time I calculated that if my neighbors ever detected the lighted slit from their side and dared to press an eye to the breach, they would be rewarded with nothing more than a static view of the two hundred and fifty year old stones of my rented stairwell.

I knew little about my neighbors except that the father of my pear girl was a Vice Consul for that South American country whose major role in international affairs seemed to be to supply America with her daily dose of granulated ecstasy.

He didn't look like a gangster. He was tall and elegant with wavy black hair that touched his shoulders and an exquisitely precise beard. He might have been a maestro of a European symphony or a painter of romantic landscapes. And his young wife could easily have been a slightly older sister to my succulent one. She was in her middle thirties and had the wide and graceful hips, the bold, uplifting b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the gypsy features and black unfathomable eyes that seemed to spring directly from the archetypal pool of my carnality. In the Jungian parlance of my age, the wife was my Anima, while the daughter was the Anima of my adolescent self. They were perfect echoes of the dark secret female who glowed like uranium in the bowels of my psyche.

That first night when the bedsprings squeaked behind me, and my wife padded across the bedroom floor for her final visit to the bathroom, I allowed myself one last draught of the amazing sight before me. The nina was now stooped forward, and was holding a small hand mirror to her thicket of pubic hair, poking and searching with her free hand through the dense snarl as if she were seeking that tender part of herself she had discovered by touch but not yet by sight.

Trembling and breathless, I pressed my two hands flat against the stone wall and shoved myself away and with my heart in utter disarray, I carried my lechery up the stairs to bed.

The next day I set about learning my neighbors' schedule and altering mine accordingly. My wife had taken a job as an English teacher in a nearby inst.i.tuto and was occupied every afternoon and through the early evening. My duties at the university occupied me Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I was expected to offer office hours before and after my cla.s.ses on those days. However, I immediately began to curtail these sessions because I discovered that my nina pera returned from school around three o'clock, and on many days she showered and changed into casual clothes, leaving her school garb in a heap on the bathroom floor as she fled the apartment for an afternoon of boy watching in the Algorta pubs.

To my department chairman's dismay, I began to absent myself from the university hallways immediately after my last cla.s.s of the day, hurrying with my umbrella along the five blocks to the train station so I could be home by 2:55. In the silence of my apartment, hunched breathless at my hole, I watched her undress. I watched the steam rise from her shower, and I watched her towel herself dry. I watched her on the toilet and I watched her using the sanitary products she preferred. I watched her touch the flawless skin of her face with her fingertips, applying makeup or wiping it away. On many afternoons I watched her examine herself in the full length mirror. Running her hands over that seamless flesh, trying out various seductive poses while an expression played on her face that was equal parts exultation and shamea"that peculiar adolescent emotion I so vividly recalled.

These were the times when I would have touched myself were I going to do so. But these moments at the peephole, while they were intensely s.e.xual, were not the least masturbatory. Instead, they had an almost spiritual component. As though I were wors.h.i.+pping at the shrine of hidden mysteries, allowed by divine privilege to see beyond the walls of my own paltry life. In exchange for this gift I was cursed to suffer a brand of reverential horniness I had not imagined possible. I l.u.s.ted for a vision that was forever intangible, a girl I could not touch, nor smell, nor taste. A girl who was no more than a scattering of light across my retina.

Although I never managed to establish a definite pattern to her mother's schedule, I did my best to watch her as well. At odd unpredictable hours, she appeared in my viewfinder and I watched the elder nina pera bathe in a tub of bubbles, and even when her house was empty, I watched her chastely close the bathroom door whenever she performed her toilette. I watched her nap on the large bra.s.s bed. And three times that fall in the late afternoons, I watched her slide her hand inside her green silk robe and touch herself between the legs, hardly moving the hand at all, giving herself the subtlest of touches until she rocked her head back into the pillow and wept.

I kept my eye to the wall during the hours when I should have been preparing for my cla.s.ses and grading my students' papers and writing up their weekly exams. Instead, I stationed myself at the peephole, propping myself up with pillows, finding the best alignment for nose and cheek against the rough cool rock. I breathed in the sweet grit of mortar, trained my good right eye on the bathroom door and the bed, scanning the floor for shadows, primed for any flick of movement, always dreadfully alert for the sound of my wife's key in the front door.

After careful study, I had memorized her homecoming ritual. Whenever she entered our apartment, it took her two steps to reach the foyer and put down her bag. She could then choose to turn right into the kitchen or take another step toward the stairway. If she chose the later, almost instantly, she would be able to witness me perched at the peephole and my clandestine life would be exposed. In my leisure, I clocked a normal entry and found that on average I had almost a full twenty seconds from the moment her key turned the tumblers till she reached the bottom of the stairs, twenty seconds to toss the pillows back into the bedroom and absent myself from the hole.

I briefly toyed with the idea of revealing the peephole to her. But I knew her sense of the perverse was far short of my own. She was const.i.tutionally gloomy, probably a clinical depressive. Certainly a pa.s.sive aggressive, who reveled in bitter non-response, bland affect, withdrawing into maddening hours of silence whenever I blundered across another invisible foul line she had drawn.

I watched the father too, the Vice Consul. On many occasions I saw him strip off his underwear and climb into the shower and I saw him dry himself and urinate and brush his teeth. Once I saw him reach down and retrieve a pair of discarded briefs and bring the crotch to his nose before deciding they were indeed fresh enough to wear again. He had the slender and muscular build of a long distance runner. Even in its slackened state his p.e.n.i.s was formidable.

On one particular Sunday morning, I watched with grim fascination as he worked his organ to an erection, all the while gazing at the reflection of his face. And a few moments later as the spasms of his pleasure shook him and he was bending forward to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e into the sink, the nina pera appeared at the doorway of the bathroom. She paused briefly to watch the Vice Consul's last strokes, then pa.s.sed behind him and stepped into the shower with a nonchalance that I found more shocking than anything I had witnessed to that point.

Late in November, the chairman of my department called me into his office and asked me if I was happy in Spain, and I a.s.sured him that I most certainly was. He smiled uncomfortably and offered me a gla.s.s of Scotch and as we sipped, he told me that the students had been complaining that I was not making myself sufficiently available to them. I feigned shock, but he simply shook his head and waved off my pretense. Not only had I taken to missing office hours, I had failed to return a single set of papers or tests. The students were directionless and confused and in a unified uproar. And because of their protests, much to his regret, the chairman was going to have to insist that I begin holding my regular office hours immediately. If I failed to comply, he would have no choice but to act in his students' best interest by calling the Fulbright offices in Madrid and having my visiting professors.h.i.+p withdrawn for the second semester. I would be s.h.i.+pped home in disgrace.

I a.s.sured him that I would not disappoint him again.

Two days later after my last cla.s.s of the day as I walked back to my office, all I could think of was my nina pera stripping away her Catholic uniform and stepping into the shower, then stepping out again wet and naked and perfectly succulent. I turned from my office door and the five scowling students waiting there, and hurried out of the building. I caught the train just in time and was home only seconds before she arrived.

And this was the day it happened.

Breathless from my jog from the train station, I clambered up the stairs and quickly a.s.sumed my position at the slit, but was startled to see that it was not my nina pera beyond the wall, but her father, the diplomat in his dark suit, home at that unaccustomed hour. He was pacing back and forth in front of the bathroom where a much shorter and much less elegant man was holding the head of a teenage boy over the open toilet bowl. The young man had long stringy hair and was dressed in a black T-s.h.i.+rt and blue jeans. The thug who was gripping him by the ears above the bowl was also dressed in black, a bulky black sweats.h.i.+rt with the sleeves torn away, and dark jeans and a black Basque beret. His arms were as gnarled as oak limbs and the boy he held was unable to manage even a squirm.

The Vice Consul stopped his pacing and spat out a quick indecent bit of Spanish . Even though the wall m.u.f.fled most conversation, I heard and recognized the phrase. While my conversational skills were limited, I had mastered a dozen or so of the more useful and colorful Spanish curses. The Vice Consul had chosen to brand the boy as a pig's b.a.s.t.a.r.d child. Furthermore, a pig covered in its own excrement.

Though my disappointment at missing my daily appointment with the nina pera deflated my spirits, witnessing such violence and drama was almost fair compensation. My a.s.sumption was that my neighbor was disciplining the young man for some botched a.s.signmenta"the most natural guess being that he was a courier who transported certain highly valued pharmaceutical products that happened also to be the leading export of the Vice Consul's country. The other possibility, of course, and one that gave me a particularly nasty thrill was that the boy was guilty of some impropriety with the diplomat's daughter, my own nina pera, and now was suffering the dire consequences of his effrontery.

I watched as the Vice Consul came close to the boy and bent to whisper something to him, then tipped his head up by the chin, and gave some command to the thug. The squat man let go of the boy's right ear and with a gesture so quick I only caught the end of it, he produced a knife and slashed the boy's right ear away from his head.

I reeled back from the slit in the wall and pressed my back against the banister and tried to force the air into my lungs.

At that moment I should have rushed downstairs, gotten on the phone and called the militia to report the outrage beyond my wall. And I honestly considered doing so. For surely it would have been the moral, virtuous path. But I could not move. And as I considered my paralysis, the utter selfishness of my inaction filled me with acid self-contempt. I reviled myself even as I kept my place. I could not call for help because I did not dare to upset the delicate equipoise of my neighbors' lives. The thought of losing my nina pera to the judicial process, or even worse to extradition, left me lifeless on the stairway. Almost as terrifying was the possibility that if I called for the militia, a further investigation would expose the slit in the wall and I would be hauled out into the streets for a public thras.h.i.+ng.

For a very long while I did not move.

Finally when I found the courage to bring my eye back to the crack in the wall, I saw that the thug had lifted the boy to a standing position before the toilet and the Vice Council had unzipped him and was gripping the tip of his p.e.n.i.s, holding it out above the b.l.o.o.d.y porcelain bowl, a long steak knife poised a few inches above the pale finger of flesh.

The Vice Council's arm quivered and began its downward slash.

"No!" I cried out, then louder, "No!"

My neighbor aborted his savage swipe and spun around. I watched him take a hesitant step my way, then another. His patent leather shoes glowed in the eerie light beyond the wall. Then in an unerring path he marched directly to the wall where I was perched.

I pulled away, scooted backwards up the stairs, and held my breath.

I waited.

I heard nothing but the distant siren wail of another supertanker coming into port.

I was just turning to tiptoe up to the bedroom when the blade appeared. It slid through the wall and glittered in the late afternoon light, protruding a full five inches into my apartment. He slipped it back and forth as if he too were trying to widen the viewing hole, then drew it slowly out of sight. For a second I was in real danger of toppling forward down the flight of stairs, but I found a grip on the hand rail and restrained myself on the precarious landing.

Though it was no longer visible, the knife blade continued to vibrate in my inner sight. I realized it was not a steak knife at all, but a very long filet knife with a venomous tapered blade that shone with the brilliance of a surgical tool. I had seen similar knives many times along the Algorta docks, for this was the sort of cutlery that saw service gutting the abundant local cod.

And while I held my place on the stairs, the point of the knife shot through the wall again and remained there, very still, as eloquent and vile a threat as I had ever experienced. And a moment later in the Vice Consul's apartment I heard a wet piercing noise followed by a heavy thunk as if a sack of cement had been broken open with the point of a shovel.

A second later my wife's key turned in the front door lock and she entered the apartment, shook her umbrella and stripped off her rain gear and took her standard fifteen seconds to reach the bottom of the stairs. She gazed up and saw me frozen on the landing and the knife blade still s.h.i.+mmering through the wall of this house she had come to despise. For it was there in those four walls that I had fatally withdrawn from her as well as my students, where I had begun to match her obdurate silences with my own. In these last few months I had become so devoted to my nina pera that I had established a bond with this unknown juvenile beyond the wall that was more committed and pa.s.sionate than any feelings I had ever shown my wife.

And when she saw the knife blade protruding from the wall, she knew all this and more. More than I could have told her if I had fallen to my knees and wallowed in confession. Everything was explained to her, my vast guilt, my repellant preoccupation, the death of our life together. Our eyes interlocked and whatever final molecules of adhesion still existed between us dissolved in those silent seconds.

She turned and strode to the foyer. As I came quickly down the stairs, she picked up her raincoat and umbrella and opened the heavy door of our apartment and stepped out into the narrow alley street of the Old Port. I hurried after her, calling out her name, pleading with her, but she shut the door behind her with brutal finality.

As I rushed to catch her, pus.h.i.+ng open the door, I nearly collided with my succulent young neighbor coming home late from school. She graced me with a two second smile and entered her door and I stood on the stoop for a moment looking down the winding, rain-slicked street after my wife. Wretched and elated, I swung around and shut myself in once more with my utter depravity.

I mounted the stairs.

There was nothing in my heart, nothing in my head. Simply the raging current of blood that powered my flesh. I kneeled at the wall and felt the magnetic throb of an act committed a thousand times and rewarded almost as often, the Pavlovian allure, a need beyond need, a death-hungering wish to see, to know, to live among that nefarious family who resided only a knife blade away.

I pressed my eye to the hole and she was there, framed in the bathroom doorway wearing her white blouse, her green plaid skirt. Behind her I could see that the toilet bowl had been wiped clean of blood. My nina pera's hands hung uneasily at her side and she was staring across the room at the wall we shared, her head canted to the side, her eyes focused on the exact spot where I pressed my face into the stone and drank her in. My pear girl, my succulent child, daughter of the devil.

And though I was certain that the glimmer of my eye was plainly visible to her and anyone else who stood on that side of the wall, I could not pull myself from the crack, for my nina pera had begun to lift her skirt, inch by excruciating inch, exposing those immaculate white thighs. And though there was no doubt she was performing under duress and on instructions from her father, I pressed my face still harder against the wall and drank deep of the vision before me.

Even when my succulent one cringed and averted her face, giving me a second or two of ample warning of what her father was about to do, I could not draw my eye away from the lush expanse of her thighs.

A half second later her body disappeared and a wondrous flash of darkness swelled inside me and exploded. I was launched into utter blankness, riding swiftly out beyond the edges of the visible world, flying headlong into a bright galaxy of pain.

And yet, if I had not pa.s.sed out on the stairway, bleeding profusely from my ruined eye, if somehow I had managed to stay conscious for only a few seconds more, I am absolutely certain that after I suffered the loss of sight in my right eye, I would have used the last strength I had to reposition myself on the stairway and resume my vigil with my left.

In the following months of recuperation and repair, I came to discover that a man can subsist with one eye as readily as with one hand or leg. For apparently nature antic.i.p.ated that some of us would commit acts of such extreme folly and self-destructiveness that we would require such anatomical redundancy if we were to survive. And in her wisdom, she created us to be two halves co-joined. So that even with one eye, a man can still see, just as with only a single hand he may still reach out and beckon for his needs. And yes, even half-heartedly, he may once again know love.

RIDE ALONG.

Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, "Nothing weird this time. Promise me."

Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

"Define weird."

He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, four A.M., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams and coconut palms. The haves nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Ford with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn't Guy's idea of good business practice.

"The soul train must have a station around here," Jumpy said.

"You're jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it's over, I walk."

"I don't like dreadlocks," Jumpy said.

"It's a hairstyle is all," Guy told him. "A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you."

"I never did like dreadlocks. It's a gut reaction."

"Okay, so you don't like dreadlocks. But a little fas.h.i.+on incompatibility, that isn't going to keep us from doing our business, right?"

"It looks dirty," Jumpy said. "Unkempt."

"Yeah, well, then let's forget it. Start the car, get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?"

"Nothing weird, okay? That's all I'm asking."

Jumpy was six-four, skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam's apples. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he'd s.h.i.+pped out as marine for two hitches, then a lone wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable s.h.i.+t he'd been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn't ask, Jumpy didn't say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.

Jumpy didn't pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound body builders who only wore loose clothes. Tight s.h.i.+rts were for s...o...b..at a.s.sholes.

Jumpy didn't have to flaunt. There was a halo around him n.o.body could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a bar room edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out in a spew of sawdust.

Trouble was, in Jumpy's line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy's throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He'd written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh and blood action, no, that wasn't his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.

"So we cool on this?" Guy said. "Do your deal and walk. No crazy a.s.s banter, no stare downs. Right?"

Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.

"I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough."

Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was all Guy was getting.